
   
      
         Easy Money
         by Bill Glover
         Charles Acres called me on a Thursday afternoon, just like that. I hadn't seen him since high-school, maybe twenty years before, and we were never buddies in the first place. He said he had a "business proposition" for me. So I'm thinking "Amway," and I said so. He sounded surprised and said no, he needed me to help him get rid of "a large quantity of gold." I told him I'd meet him for coffee at the diner down the street at seven. I was there early.
         "Thank you for coming, Ed." he was already there, sitting in a booth, warming his hands on a cup of coffee. He looked like jerked meat on the bone. He was wearing a new jacket and snow boots, but he had on a Hawaiian shirt underneath and khaki shorts of all things. His tan was obviously deep and old, but it looked like a work tan, not the kind you get at the beach. His hands were thin and huge knuckled with obvious callouses.
         "So, the mining business is treating you pretty good, huh Charles?" he wasn't the sort you'd call "Chuck."
         "I'm a linguistics researcher, Ed." He took a sip and closed his eyes like the cheap cup of coffee was really something special. "Well I was a researcher, and I taught a little at a community college." He set the cup down and looked straight at me for the first time. "How's your um... business?"
         "Fine." I waived down a waitress and ordered a cup of decaf and a slice of pie. I didn't like his tone much. "So you sure you're not a cop, Charles?" I stared him down until he flinched. As I did, I noticed just how tired he looked around the eyes. Charlie Boy had been working hard lately, I figured. I knew every cop in Fairport and quite a few of the state police in Iowa, and I couldn't see them bringing old Charles in as a ringer.
         "I'm not a cop." He sighed and went on in softer, sadder voice, "I guess I'm a thief now."
         "Hold it." I looked around. Charles might be for real, but he was still going to get me in deep trouble. "Let's make real clear right now that you were joking, buddy. Otherwise this conversation is over. I've got a parole officer to explain things to, and he wouldn't like that kinda talk."
         "Right. Right. Sorry." Charles looked out the window at the passing traffic push through dirty slush for awhile. "Like I was saying. I'm a researcher, I've come into some valuable material that I would like to find a buyer for, and I don't want to have to explain myself to anyone."
         The pie came and I waited until the waitress was gone, before going on, "Why me?"
         "You always seemed to have 'connections' in school," he shrugged. "You were the first person who came to mind."
         First person? Twenty years out of high school? If he pulled my leg any harder it was coming off. "How much of this 'valuable material' are we talking about?"
         "Four Hundred ounces for a start."
         "Four Hundred." I pulled out my palm phone and looked up a number. "That's alot."
         "It's a very small part of what I have to sell." He drained the last of his cup and tossed some bills on the table. "I'm staying in town. Let me show you something."
         I thought about it and made a quick call, just telling a buddy that I was "postponing our meeting," for a couple of hours, meaning he should come looking for me if I didn't show up. Charles might not look like much, but I hadn't made it through my life taking that kind of chance. I put away the cell and used the motion to cover checking the knife in my sleeve and used one leg to check the other in my sock. I had been an amateur magician for years. One of my best tricks was pulling a knife out of thin air. It never failed to amaze. "Sure. Let's go," I said.
         We took his rental car back to the motel where he was staying. The little desk was covered with large books filled with sticky notes, a pile of folders and papers and a laptop computer plugged into the phone line. There was only one chair, so I sat on the edge of the bed as he handed me a book open to a picture of some sort of stone tablet.
         "Rapa Nui," he said, "Easter Island. This codex is one of the few remaining examples of a form of writing known as 'rongorongo.' For a long time no one was able to decipher it, although by deduction, Steven Fischer deciphered some of it in nineteen ninety four. He mostly read creation stories off objects like the 'Santiago Staff' which said things like, 'All the birds copulated with fish: There issued forth the sun.'But he ignored the inscriptions on skulls and the 'Birdman' statuette. It was those clues that started all of this." My small expectations shrank as he spoke. I didn't see much money in hieroglyphic porn. He talked on about people with long ears who built the big statues, the "moai" and people with short ears who conquered the people with long ears and ate them and how the short eared people didn't really know the secrets of the long ears and had pulled down all the moai statues and destroyed some of the tablets. And how the missionaries came and the converted natives had destroyed more. He flipped pages to another image, "But notice something here in the arrangement of the moai. See here how they form a pattern, very similar to this?" He pulled out a small leather diary and opened it to a yellowed page marked with yet another small sticky note. There was an ink drawing and writing in a tiny neat hand that I couldn't read from where I sat. I didn't see much resemblance except maybe there were about the same number of points in the cat's cradle thing in the diary and the number of dots on the map showing places where statues stood in a thin line around the coast of the island. "This is the diary of a mysterious explorer named Samuel Curlew who investigated a Mound Builder site in this area in the early eighteen hundreds." He closed the little book and just about hugged it with satisfaction. "I want to show you that mound. You know it was these very mounds that originally sparked my interest in history, archeology and then linguistics."
         "And this mound is where you found gold?" I was confused enough I let the "G word" slip. Was this some crazy treasure hunt? Or maybe this guy was just a wacko who wanted to take me out on a dark road and kill me.
         "No, it's more complicated than that, but I need to show you the mound for you to understand." The drawings and the books seemed to wake him up. He was smiling now and his eyes weren't so tired.
         I was having serious cash flow issues back then and had payments to make, so I said, "yes," but my patience was running out.
         It was dark as we left. The drive was shorter than I expected. We pulled up to a little asphalt parking spot in front of a historical marker. When he killed the headlights there was no light but moonlight and stars on a light dusting of snow. A low, black hill blocked the sky right in front of us. "It's up here," he announced stepping over the cable fence and starting up the hill. We spent the next hour stomping around the hill while he said things like, "it was right here."
         My patience was long gone, and I was back in the car to warming up when Acres tapped on the window and told me he had found whatever he was looking for. We trudged back up the hill and he led me to little patch of ground with a stick poking up from it. It looked like a bamboo walking stick. "This is it," he leaned down and motioned for me to look at something on the ground. I casually slid a knife into my palm just in case. "See how the lines form the pattern in the journal, the same one as the moai."
         "So you drew this?" I asked vaguely, slow to catch on.
         He looked hurt and rapped on the ground with his finger. "It's stone. Ancient." He stood up using the stick to help. For the first time he looked cold and stiff in his tourist gear, making me glad I was in a suit. "Here stand beside me," he said. "I'm not sure if I can take you with me so I need to show you the device."
         "Device?" I expected him to pull out a gadget with blinking lights and was wondering which way to duck.
         "Trick, gesture. It's like sleight of hand." He wriggled his fingers and then blew on them. "OK, watch and remember this. I'm going to do it in two parts, last part first so it won't take effect. Remember to reverse the two parts when you actually do it." Stunned I watched as he made several ridiculous passes with his hands paused and nodded then did a sort of sign language stutter of some sort. "I learned this from a skull shard rongorongo, they aren't all writing language. Some are just a memory device."
         "Mnemonic." I muttered, which seemed to please him.
         "Yes. They help in remembering steps in a ritual or ceremonial gestures. There's a long history of Polynesian gesture and dance language. Now you do it." He smiled and I could see his teeth in the moonlight.
         I wanted to slug him, but he had the keys to the car back and I figured I'd humor him while I figured out how to get them without violating my parole. I didn't have much trouble duplicating his hand waving even though I hadn't paid much attention. I even swapped the two parts as he had asked. I thought he was surprised at my dexterity when his jaw dropped, but he shouted, "No!" just before everything changed.
         I was standing on a perfectly flat square of dark stone. For as far as I could see by a weak, gray light the stone stepped up and down making little hills and terraces and platforms. I seemed to be somewhere in the middle -- there was as much above as below. The sky was dull and featureless and overcast. The air smelled bad in some way I can't describe, and at my feet I could see the same design from the little journal and the mound carved into the rock. I was in shock. The blood pounded in my head, and I just stood there blinking and listening to a sort of ringing whine in my ears.
         The next moment, Acres was there. Hands up in the same way mine were frozen. We just looked at each other. I guess, thinking back, I might have expected him to gloat, but the view was the kind of thing that humbles you, shuts your mouth. We just stood looking at each other for a little while, I don't know how long.
         "What is it?" was all I could think to say.
         Acres just shrugged. "A place. I don't know. I think this whole thing," he waved his hand at the horizon, "is one big machine. And the markers were carved later, not be whoever built it. The markers are places where it's safe to come here and leave."
         "Safe?" I looked around. One thing this place didn't seem was safe.
         "Let me show you the rest." He started walking down the steps and around a corner. It would have taken plenty to surprise me after what I had already seen, but My jaw was banging against my shoelaces when I rounded that corner.
         I'm not sure how something so big could have been hidden by that little turn in landscape, but maybe perspective doesn't work quite the same there. Glaring down at me from no more than twenty feet away was a grimacing, thirty foot tall black face with staring, blue and white eyes and it wore a ridiculous little hat. For some reason I thought of a giant clown face from a carnival ride, but it scared the hell out me. Acres stood beside it and somehow using him as a yardstick for the scale of the thing made it easier to see. It was a moai. He had a serious, sincere look on his face and he was pointing to the ground. "This is what I wanted to show you."
         I looked down and saw he was pointing to another marker just slightly different from the one we had just left. I was pretty rattled, but things fell together for me looking at the big statue, the Hawaiian shirt and the mark on the ground. "Easter Island?"
         Acres nodded.
         It was all too much for me so I focused on the part I could handle. "So what does this have to do with gold?"
         "You could step on that marker and make the gestures, the 'device,' and it would be like pushing a button in a very complex machine. You would end up on a small hill on Rapa Nui. You could step three feet to the right and do the same thing, and you would end up buried alive in a nearby rock face. But I know how to make it take me anywhere." He pulled a sheet of folded paper from his pocket and handed it to me. It read, "Department of the Treasury, Financial Management Service, Status Report of U.S. Treasury-Owned Gold." He pointed to a row that read, "Deep Storage: Fort Knox, KY."
         I sucked in a whole lot of air. "Anywhere?"
         "Anywhere," he walked around the moai and came back wrestling with a big, heavy bar of gold. "They only check deep storage once a year. Otherwise the vault is sealed."
         "Does anyone else know about this? How much is that?"
         "No, they would have been on Rapa Nui if they knew, ready to stop me. This is the 400 ounces which I mentioned at the restaurant. About $150,000 dollars at this morning's rate."
         I looked at the sheet in my hand. "Deep Storage: Fort Knox, Ky." it read, "147,341,858.382 Fine Troy Ounces, Book Value: $6,221,097,412.78" I had to read it twice. I had never seen a dollar sign in front of that many number before. "I thought they didn't keep gold there anymore, just nerve gas."
         "The gold is still there. How much can we sell before someone becomes suspicious?" Charles put the bar down and slid a web pouch over it with shoulder straps like a small backpack.
         "None," I said and slipped the knife into his neck right at the base of his skull. Call me small minded, but you know "a bird in the hand." All that gold in Fort Knox was just too much for me to wrap my head around. But I could handle a hundred and fifty-K easy, say seventy-five-K from the fence. I slipped the little pouch over my back and wiped the knife on his jacket. Then I made my way back to the little marker where we came in. His mistake had been in telling me the same gesture opened the door the other way. I worried for just a moment when I started waving my hands. "What if it didn't work?" So the icy wind at the top of the mound and the bright moon came as a real relief.
         The gold was heavy on my back, and I was all the way to the car before I realized I had left the keys on Charles.
         The highway patrol was just bound to come by then. After that it was just connect the dots back to prison. The rental car records pointed to Acres, and there was enough blood on the knife to match DNA from Acres comb in the motel. They never bothered trying to explain how Acres made it into the country without a ticket on a plane or a boat. But they speculated all through the trial about where the gold came from, offered me deals. The prosecution liked the idea that Acres was my smuggler's mule. I was a one man gold cartel in the news.
         I'm just wondering what they'll think when they open that vault in Kentucky. And I still wonder why Charles picked me? Maybe he didn't know anybody else with "connections." But mostly, I'm wondering what will happen when I try to make those gestures, that "device" right here in my cell? Acres said it was dangerous, but maybe I could find my way back to the mound or Easter Island even. I figure it can't be worse than the lethal injection that's waiting for me at dawn. I don't really believe I'll make it or I wouldn't say a thing. But if I do make it, it won't matter what I tell you, because there won't be a jail that can hold me. I'm leaving this just to tell "whom it may concern" to kiss my ever-lovin' ass. Wish me luck. I out of here.
         
         
