Free Henry of Atlantic City by Frederick Reuss Page A

would have been a little over three million?”
    “That’s correct,” Sy said.
    Germanus didn’t look satisfied with Sy’s answers and clasped his hands together with his fingers pointing up and put them to his lips like he was trying to wedge something between his front teeth.
    “That’s a nice little fee for taking a trip to the Bahamas,” Solomon said. Solomon had been Belisarius’s chief of staffin the Carthage expedition where the Arian Vandals were defeated and Gelimer, their king, was brought back to Byzantium in chains and made to walk in procession through the streets of the city. As he walked he looked around him and said, “O vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” and when he reached the imperial box in the Hippodrome he was forced to prostrate himself before Justinian and Theodora. Solomon was from Daras in Mesopotamia and had a high, squeaky voice because he was a eunuch. He said it had happened in battle but everybody else said it had happened in a brothel in Tyre when he was asleep. The woman who did it to him was angry because he refused to take her back to Byzantium with him. As punishment she had her breasts cut oft and the joke among the soldiers was a ball for a tit but anyone caught telling it had his head cut off, which gave rise to even more jokes.
    “What made you change your mind and bring us the money instead?” Solomon asked.
    “I didn’t change my mind,” Sy said. “I was told there was going to be a change of plan.”
    “Oh? You mean someone told you that you weren’t
really
going to steal three million dollars after all? Is that it?”
    “I wasn’t told anything. I was just doing what I was told.”
    “Did you have any ideas about what you were involved in?”
    “Yes.”
    “And what did you think it was?”
    “Embezzlement.”
    Germanus lifted his fingers away from his lips. “We understand that. The question is by whom.”
    “I didn’t want to know about it. I was just doing what I was told.”
    “You weren’t even curious?” Solomon asked.
    “No. I figured that kind of stuff was par for the course.”
    “Par for the course?” Solomon asked. “You telling me you think embezzlement is par for the course?”
    “Let’s just say that once I was asked, it never occurred to me to say no.”
    “Why not?” Germanus asked.
    “Because I figured once I was asked, no was not an option.” He smiled in a funny way, as if to say he’d made a joke. But nobody laughed. “It wasn’t until the airport when everything got explained to me that I realized I was in deep shit. And I then I
really
knew I didn’t have any options.”
    “Mind explaining that?”
    “Look, there I am waiting in the airport with a suitcase full of cash, okay? And suddenly here comes the chief of security and tells me I can cooperate with him or I can kiss my ass good-bye. Those were the exact words. I thought I was dead meat.”
    “So you went along with him?”
    “Of course I went along with him,” Sy said. “What else was I supposed to do?”
    John Troglita cleared his throat and spoke for the first time. “You say he caught up to you at the airport?”
    “Half an hour before my flight.”
    John Troglita was also called John the Troglite. He was famous for his bad temper and was a specialist in search-and-destroy missions and punitive expeditions. The emperor had sent him to Africa to clean up after Belisarius’s victory. He had carried out the emperor’s orders by depopulating the place. Some people said he was insane but everyone agreed he was a great military man and there was even a long poem about him written by a Carthaginian schoolmaster that nobody read anymore.
    “So at the airport you just decided to drop everything and follow this new plan. That was it?” John the Troglite asked.
    “That’s right.”
    “He told you that you were helping to lay a trap?”
    “Yes.”
    “Describe the trap.”
    “It seemed pretty straightforward. Instead of taking the money out of the