Money for Nothing

Synopsis:

Every month a $1000 check came to Josh Redmont, as regular as clockwork. Somewhere along the line, Josh stopped wondering why an untraceable organization in Washington was sending him money. His career took off and his bank account swelled — he didn’t even need the money anymore. Then, one day on a ferry to Fire Island, a stranger approaches Josh with words that chill him to the spine: "You are now active." Josh has been paid for a job that he must do — a job that will turn out to be a growing horror for him, for his family, and possible for the whole country...

WHEN THE FIRST CHECK came in, Josh Redmont, who was then twenty-seven, had no idea what it was for. The issuer name printed on the check was United States Agent, with an address of K Street NE, Washington, DC 04040, and the account was with Inter-Merchant Bank, also of Washington. The amount of the check was one thousand dollars.

Why? Josh had done two years in the army after college, but this didn't seem to have anything to do with the army. He was listed with a temp agency on Pine Street in downtown Manhattan that year, and so he asked Fred Stern, the guy he dealt with there, if the check had anything to do with them, and Fred assured him it did not. "We don't give you money just for fun," he said, which was certainly true.

But somebody did. Like most temps, Josh was financially shaky in those days, so he deposited the check into his checking account, partly just to see if it would clear, and it did. So he had an extra thousand dollars. Found money.

A month later, it happened again. Another check, another thousand dollars, same payer, same bank, same lack of covering letter or any other kind of explanation.

This time, Josh studied the check a little more intently, and saw there was a phone number under United States Agent's address, with the 202 area code for Washington, DC. So he called it. The phone rang and rang; no answer.

The next day, he called the number again, with the same results. The day after that, he deposited the check in his checking account, and it cleared. And a month later another one arrived.

Who was giving him all this money? A thousand dollars a month, regular as clockwork, the checks dated the first of each month, arriving in his mailbox between the third and the fifth. No explanation, never an answer at that telephone number. He thought about writing them a letter, but then he realized the address on the checks was incomplete.
Where
on K Street? Without a house number, he couldn't hope to send them a letter.

The checks had first appeared in August. In January, it occurred to him that the puzzle would soon have to be resolved because the United States Agent, whoever they were, would have to send him a 1099 tax form. So he waited for it. He got the 1099 from the temp agency, and from two other very short-term employers, but nothing from United States Agent.

Would he get in trouble if he didn't declare the five thousand dollars? But how could he declare it without the 1099? And what would he declare it
as
? And was he rich enough to volunteer to pay extra tax if he didn't absolutely have to? He was not.

A year and a half later he moved, to a better apartment on the West Side, having graduated from the temp life to an actual job as an advertising salesman for a group of neighborhood newspapers in Manhattan and the Bronx. He was sorry the monthly thousand dollars would end. But he had no way to send them a forwarding address, did he? So that was that.

Except that, the third of the following month, the check came in just the same, addressed to him at his new apartment. How had they done that? How had they known he'd moved? It was more than a little creepy.

If he hadn't been spending the money all along, he might have tried sending it back at that point, except he couldn't. He couldn't send the money back any more than he could write United States Agent a letter, not without more of an address than K Street NE. He considered writing RETURN TO SENDER on the envelope, but the envelope, too, bore that same incomplete address printed on its upper left corner. In the end, though he felt somewhat spooked, he deposited the check.

In the third year of the mysterious checks, he went to work as an account rep at Sewell-McConnell Advertising on the Cloudbank toilet paper account, and the following year he married Eve, whom he'd been dating off and on for three years and living with for four months. He didn't mention the checks to her — which followed him to their new apartment — neither before nor after the wedding, and he realized this must mean that, at some level, he felt guilty about taking the money. He hadn't done anything for it, he didn't deserve it, the checks merely kept coming in. And in not telling her, he doubled his guilt, because now he also felt guilty that he was keeping this secret But he kept it anyway.

Which Eve made easier, it must be said, by having ceded to him exclusive control of their checking account, even though she'd lived and worked successfully on her own in New York City for five years before they'd gotten together.

Josh didn't need the thousand dollars a month by then, and had come to realize it wasn't very much money at all. Twelve thousand dollars a year; a nice supplement to his income, no more. And, of course, tax free.

The next year, when he and Eve had young Jeremy and she quit her clerical job with a cable network, planning to be a full-time mom until Jeremy entered nursery school at four, the annual twelve thousand became a bit more meaningful again, but by that time it was simply a part of his life, the check that came in every month, year after year, as natural as breathing. He had stopped telling himself he didn't deserve it, because if it came in so steadily, every single month, with no complaints, no demands made against him, maybe he
did
deserve it.

It was July fifteenth, a hot sunny Friday afternoon, and Josh was seated at the ferry terminal in Bay Shore, waiting for the ferry to take him over to Fire Island, where he and Eve had rented a small house for the month. She and Jeremy were out there full time, Josh spending long weekends. Jeremy was two, and on August first the checks would have been coming in for a full seven years, crossing with Josh into the new millennium.

Josh was secure enough in his job at the ad agency now to be able to take off Friday afternoons and Monday mornings, which meant he never had to ride the extremely crowded ferries packed with those whose weekends were shorter; the Daddy Boat on Friday evening, the Good-bye Daddy Boat on Sunday evening, or the so-called Death Boat at six-thirty Monday morning.

There were only thirty or forty people in the shade of the roofed dock, seated on the long benches waiting for the ferry, none of them anyone Josh knew. Then a man came over and sat down beside him and smiled and said, "Hello."

"Hi," Josh said, and looked away. Most people didn't speak to strangers out here, and Josh agreed with them.

The man kept smiling at Josh. He was about forty, olive-skinned, fleshy-faced but muscular, with thick curly black hair. He was in chinos and a polo shirt and sneakers, like everybody else. "I am from United States Agent," he said.

Josh looked at him. Sudden dread clenched his stomach. His mouth was dry. He tried to speak, but couldn't.

The man leaned closer. "You are now active," he said.

ACTIVE? JOSH DIDN'T FEEL ACTIVE, he felt paralyzed. He wanted to run screaming from the dock — but he didn't. He wanted to deny his identity, make up a name, give a friend's name — Matt Fairlough, not
that
good a friend — but he hadn't the strength for it. He wanted to promise to return the money — a thousand dollars a month for seven years,
eighty-four thousand dollars
! — but he couldn't do either of those, not say it and not repay it. He could only sit there, stunned, speechless, like the condemned man in the moments between the sedative and the axe.

Meanwhile, the man from United States Agent had hunched over a bit onto his right buttock so he could reach into his left hip pocket. Josh stared in horror, still frozen. What was going to come out of there? His imagination scattered, like raked leaves under a sudden gust, and the man brought out a small flat black book. It was almost square and very thin, and he couldn't think what it was going to be, and the man smiled and extended it toward him, saying, "But first, per our agreement. You'll find it's all in order."

No choice; Josh took the black book. Out there in the inlet, the white ferry slowly turned toward the dock. People stood, moved around, on this side of the barrier, and Josh lowered his bronze head on his oak neck to look at the book.

Silver letters curved above and below a swooshy sort of silver design, something familiar, simplified — windsurfing. A wind-surfing board, the sail arcing against a strong breeze, silver on black. Above
Cayman
, below
Key Bank
.

What? Josh opened the bankbook, saw what it was, saw his own name and address — and Social Security number — on the first page, and below that a jumble of capital letters and lower-case letters and digits on a line marked
Account Number
.

Suddenly arthritic fingers fumbled page one away, and page two began the entry of deposits and withdrawals. "All items in US dollars," read a legend across the top of the page, but so far there was only the one item: A deposit, dated July 14th, the previous day, of $40,000.00.

His vision was darkening. The white ferry approached, out there over the sparkling water, but a black iris spiraled in, shadowing and obscuring everything in his vision except that small white page with its neat black gridwork of lines and that appalling number.

"What," he whispered, not looking up from the little book, "do you want me to do?"

"At the moment," the man said, "only a safe house. While your family is still at the beach."

"A safe house?" Later he would remember the term
safe house
from a hundred spy movies, but at that moment, he couldn't think what a safe house might possibly be, except that he must be a million miles from one.

"The operation is beginning," the man explained. "We will be bringing people in, passing them into New York, traveling only on weekends because of course they are tourists."

Something jocular in the man's voice made Josh force his eyes upward from the bankbook to see that he believed he had made a joke — "tourists" — and was enjoying it. "Oh," Josh said.

"They will use your house only when you are out here on the island," the man assured him. "They will leave absolutely no sign, not even a fingerprint. We will merely move them through." His hand made a graceful sweeping-away gesture, like a ballerina swatting a fly.

"I see," Josh said, though he didn't, could barely see the man's smiling confident face.

The man gave him a sudden sharp look, as though realizing there was something a little off in Josh's reactions. But what should Josh's reactions be, to all this? He'd fake whatever the man wanted, he was willing to do that much, God knows, but what did the man
want
?

To move people through his apartment, on weekends, leaving no fingerprints.
Why
?

The man suddenly smiled and nodded and said, "Of course. I beg your pardon."

"Oh, sure," Josh said. He could say that much.

"You were expecting Mr. Nimrin," the man said. "It must have been very confusing to suddenly confront a stranger."

"Yes," Josh said, because that was something he could agree with, and then said, in a flat voice, because he didn't know how else to say it, "Mr. Nimrin."

"Mr. Nimrin is no longer with us," the man said. "Not for some time."

"I'm sorry," Josh said. It seemed the thing to say.

"Oh, he isn't dead," the man assured him. "Just… away. You could say, in retirement. But not to worry," he went on, "there was never a word out of him."