States. In dat role I be keepin de books and lookin after de accounts and swattin de flies and watchin de servants so dey don’t go widdlin in de Bram Flakes dat he be needin every morning for keepin de Presidential bowels in workin order. Den dere’s the prunes. You not watchin em every minute, dey slippin cat turds in among de prunes. It be a security nightmare.
But enough about me.
Let me fillin you in on a few ob de details.
Anybody who has ever been offered Nigerian opportunities to rake in millions and wished they had the resources to take advantage of them, or who has in fact raked in millions and is expecting the Lagos African Continental Bank draft to arrive any day now, because God knows, the money order their new Nigerian friend had asked them to send as an article of good faith and to cover shipping expenses was cashed months ago — anybody in a situation like those will understand how, looking at it from the other side of the Atlantic, it made perfect sense that the First Lady’s brother would get hired to do some urgent renovations to Fort Knox. Fort Knox is where the U.S. government keeps all its gold, and it wasn’t just run down, it was going to fall down unless something was done quickly. Putting that much gold in even a top-secret storage facility while the work was underway was obviously a huge problem. It was almost impossible to even keep track of how much there was. Just moving it to some other location would require seven or eight hundred railway cars.
Understandably, none of this could be done through regular channels. Security reasons alone made it impossible. Therefore outside, preferably offshore, assistance was necessary. So if Dr. Chief Gdabamdosi — in this particular case — could come forward temporarily with three hundred thousand dollars, the financial status of the U.S. would be protected. In return, a number of railway cars filled with gold ingots would be shunted off on a sidetrack of Dr. Chief Gdabamdosi’s choosing, which he could then collect at his convenience. How did six of them sound? Each car loaded with two billion dollars worth of gold. For a grand total of twelve billion dollars, give or take.
And they all ended:
I be attachin a name and address which, considerin de situation, ain’t my real name and address for fear ob gettin into de Wall Street Junnel and causin a run on de banks or similar panic. But if you makin out de certified cheque or equivalent fiduciary instrument to my non-official name as shown, it gonna work out just fine. You doesn’t have to worry about dat, dat’s for sure. De FBI have ways ob gettin it cashed for me.
And if you evah in de neighbourhood, you just come by de White House and say Hello. We givin you a nice meal and lettin you sit in de Kennedy rockerin chair wid a big glass ob gin while de President hisself be regalin you wid stories about life at de top.
Lookin forward to your soonest reply.
Krystal’s email went out to a nice, round one hundred recipients.
Twelve
Chunk. Chunk. Chunk. Chunk, chunk. Chunk.
Nina opened her eyes.
Chunkchunkchunk. Chunk. Clang.
“ Clang? ”
Sometimes you wake up because you hear something, and it turns out that nothing is there. It was a noise in a dream. This wasn’t like that. Each chunk made the mattress shake. It rattled the window.
This was definitely there.
She scuffled into the hall and put her ear against the cellar door.
Chreech, chreech — some kind of scraping. Chunk, chunk. Clank.
Really, really there.
She crept back and shook D.S. He farted. The mattress shook. The window rattled.
“Somebody’s in the basement,” she whispered. It was a waste of time. When she looked back on it, that was a good thing. Rousing D.S. would have caused such a racket that whoever was in the basement would have rushed upstairs and murdered and raped them all.
When they looked back on it, at least three of the individuals who would have been murdered and raped couldn’t remember the
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