Swindler & Son

by Ted Krever

  “Booze,” Yusuf explains. “Women. They love we’ve got the cars, the watches, the computers and the jets. But somehow we’re supposed to sit home with the wife and six kids and pray five times a day.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?” Sara asks, returning with Amina from the end of the bar, where they have been conferring and sheltering themselves from the rabid boys.

  “Them!” he points, out the window and down, where presumably the little people are surviving the 114° sandblasting outside. “They know—we all know—what’s going on. But you don’t poke the bear, y’know? Where’s your friend?”

  Diamante checks his latest readings. “Not below us,” he says. “His signal’s coming from above.”

  “Isn’t this the top floor?”

  Diamante shrugs. “They’ve stuffed him in a crawl space? Or it’s a repeater and he’s back in Paris somewhere? All I know is, the signal’s up there.”

  The posse is rapidly getting trashed and pairings of both sexes are getting serious. Sara points out one boy-on-boy couple pulling the curtain on a private alcove.

  -This is not relevant or necessary.

  That’s what Sara said! “Isn’t that worth a beheading around here?” she asks cheerfully.

  “Not up here,” Amina says but everyone seems to want to bury the subject. Just like you.

  “Time to make progress, isn’t it?” says Yusuf and I’m pleased to hear it. Kidnappers have deadlines. We’ve waited too long for Harry’s safety as it is.

  Yusuf steps into the center of the room and Flunky appears instantly. Yusuf’s soft-spoken voice again registers as barely-repressed sadism.

  “Am I mistaken?” he asks. “Were we not told this is the top floor?”

  “It is the top r-re-regular floor!” Flunky answers, tripping over ‘regular’ in his desperate attempt to slide it past unnoticed.

  “So what’s above? Something irregular?”

  “The penthouse!” Flunky panics. “It’s occupied!”

  “Good. We will go there, with my friends.”

  “I—I have to get approval from the desk,” Flunky says, pulling his phone from his pocket. Yusuf grabs it calmly and smashes it on the floor.

  “Your phone isn’t working,” he smiles. “You can get approval later.” Flunky leads the way toward the elevator bank.

  Yusuf smiles at me. “Dog, it’s gotta be time to call Rahim, right? We know where your friend is, so now it’s the tactical squad.”

  “We don’t know,” I squirm. “Not for sure.”

  “Whoever heard of kidnappers taking the penthouse?” Sara asks. “It would look bad if the tactical squad burst in on honeymooners from Amsterdam, wouldn’t it?”

  “We’ll go up with the hotel guy,” I offer. “You can stay here—”

  “Oh hell no,” Yusuf chirps and didn’t I know that was coming. I can sense self-destructive pride at half a mile’s distance—it must feel familiar. “If there’s danger, I’m your man.” His bodyguard appears at his shoulder again—at least, he’ll be more protected than the rest of us.

  “I’m going too,” Amina says.

  “No, you should stay—” Yusuf makes the attempt, to no avail.

  “Brother, you may need me to explain this to Rahim,” she replies and Yusuf goes dead silent.

  I sigh. “Let’s scope the place out as quietly as we can.”

  We watch the elevator pod rising up the tube toward us. When it arrives, three waiters emerge, in smart white jackets pushing serving carts.

  “One moment, please,” I say. Yusuf smiles and they obey. A minute later, Diamante and Sara and I are wearing their jackets, more or less, pushing their carts and carrying unopened bottles of champagne as Flunky turns the key to get the lift up that one extra invisible floor.

  And then things start to happen way too fast.

  The doors open in a tiny landing. The penthouse door is modern, monolithic and rather threatening-looking. A small CCTV camera stares its red eye at us.

  Flunky is about to knock. That’s when I realize what a dangerous stupid situation I’ve put us all in.

  Harry could be tied to a chair, tied to a bomb, surrounded by men with automatic weapons. Held in peril by an angry corporation head we swindled or the very well-off husband of some poorly-judged victim. All the negative possibilities form an impressive stack in my mind.

  “You should stand behind your bodyguard,” I tell Yusuf.

  “I don’t have bodyguards,” he answers. He glances at the Muscle Beach refugee behind him. “That’s Cousin Mahmood,” he says. “He lifts.”

  “Stand behind him anyway,” I hiss and motion the same message to Sara and Amina. Amina complies. Sara, predictably, does not.

  “In your dreams,” Sara says, jostling her cart up even with mine.

  “Don’t knock—just unlock the door,” I tell Flunky while squeezing out a prayer to an unfamiliar God. Flunky glances at Yusuf, who nods from behind Cousin Mahmood, who doesn’t look thrilled about having suddenly become a human shield.

  Flunky pulls open the door with a sudden whoosh and blinding light—the setting sun skimming over the Gulf.

  “You have the honor—” he pronounces “—of a visitation—”

  “Room Service!” I call, shoving my cart and Sara’s in through the door. If there are guns inside, let’s give them a target.

  The carts clatter across the shiny floor and slam together at the edge of the sunken living room. One cart tips a wheel over the edge, teeters and finally commits, crashing down in a cacophony of shattered glasses and plates.

  Deep shadows move across a vista of white leather and Expressionist murals. Clouds track shadows across the waves below. Not a sound, so far, no reaction whatever.

  Flunky, protected by the weight of his self-importance, marches into the center of the firing range. “Congratulations! You are to receive a great honor, a visitation by the Prince—”

  Okay, no gunshots, no noise.

  Also, no food (other than our trays), no clothes, no magazines, no signs of habitation other than a few lights burning electricity.

  “Hello?” Flunky says, all uncertainty. “Hello?”

  “Harry?” Diamante calls. “Jevo?”

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Sara moans, motioning us toward the bedroom door. Toward the moving shadows under the door, to be specific.

  I grab a taper from the gas fireplace; cousin Mahmood pulls a cricket bat from a corner. We station ourselves silently on either side of the door. Yusuf and Amani duck behind the wet bar. Flunky remains frozen in place, as though he’s grown roots in the center of the suite.

  We hear rustling inside and then the door opens, revealing the quizzical figure of Harry Sandler, squinting into the light, in silk pajamas and fuzzy slippers.

  The Reveal

  Harry’s first move, emerging from his bedroom cocoon, is sheer instinct—he heard Diamante’s voice and responded. His second—taken by surprise, taking us, and the upended lunch carts, in all at once—is confusion.

  “Oh hello!” he says. “Did I order? What did I order, I suppose that’s the proper question, isn’t it?” He offers this with a brightness intended to obscure the fact that he’s got no idea who we are.

  He pulls a cloth napkin off the remaining upright cart and tucks it into the neck of his dressing gown but I can see the gears turning. He doesn’t remember ordering a meal and some part of him is wondering if several of us don’t look familiar.

  I tuck around him into the bedroom and then the bath. There has to be someone else here, surely—but there isn’t.

  He’s wandering the living room, pretending to search for something. He senses something’s off—there are too many of us for room service and don’t some of us ring a bell? Are the others—Yusuf, Flunky—familiar at all? He gives Amina a long appraising look. He’s trying to put solid ground under his feet but, so far, no luck.

  He lifts the lids on the trays, pointedly ignoring the mess of the upended cart. Did he or
der sandwiches and beer—for cronies and insiders—or champagne and duck pate—for potential clients? Does he even remember what he does for a living?

  “Harry? Harry?” Diamante comes to embrace him but Harry pulls back; he actually flinches at the approach. The pain is all over Diamante’s face, mingled with a new fear—he doesn’t know this man who agonizingly doesn’t know him. Harry peers at his face, acknowledging the voice calling his name—it’s something but not much. Diamante is shattered.

  “What are you doing here, Harry?” I ask.

  “Having a fine time, I must say. Finest weather in the world. Don’t you love it?” He knows he knows me, he’s trying to place me, the name is so close and if he gets one syllable, it’ll all come back. In the meantime, he’s hedging, accepting wobbly as the preferred alternative to complete collapse. “Coming from a rainy country, I crave the sunshine, automatically feels like a holiday.”

  “This is who we were looking for,” I turn to Yusuf, gesturing toward the elevators. “We’re great now, thanks.”

  But Yusuf’s not concerned with how we are. His eyes are wide, his expression alarming—a pot boiling over. And then he jumps at Harry.

  “You’re not Harry Sandler!” he growls, grabbing him by the collar and throwing him against the wall. Harry goes down like a plywood shed hit by a runaway train. “I don’t remember your real name but I know that face! Your picture’s been on our wall as long as I remember, so we never forget! Uncle Khalil and the Greek pots!”

  “Yusuf!” Amina yells. Harry’s got that pigeon-face I’ve seen so often recently, the one that vaguely recalls disaster but not exactly how he brought it on. Mahmood grabs Yusuf and pulls him to a safe distance.

  And now I’m defensively trying to reconstruct how I ended up in charge of all contact with the Wadiiran royal family. Did I take that initiative or did Harry ‘suggest’ it to me? I can’t remember but I could probably make a good guess.

  “Oh my goodness, yes, I’d forgotten. How is Khalil?” Harry asks as though discussing an old friend, because that’s how Harry regards people he’s swindled—they’ve done him, after all, a wonderful service.

  “He’s dead a long time,” Yusuf says, “but he can still be avenged.” If there was a sword nearby, Harry’s head would be rolling around the floor.

  “Yusuf, don’t be a fool,” Amina kicks him.

  “I’m so pleased everyone’s satisfied,” Flunky says, backing toward the elevator.

  “I’m calling the police,” Yusuf says, pulling his phone.

  “Give me the phone,” Diamante says, brandishing a dull-gray Glock in Yusuf’s face. “Yours, too,” he tells Flunky and cousin Mahmood, who hand them over. “Have a seat over there,” motioning them onto the couches along the windows.

  He sees my surprise. “It was a military transport. You didn’t think they had guns? You too,” he adds, to Amina, but Sara appears out of the bedroom and says, “She’s okay, I’ll be responsible for her.” Diamante shrugs and lets it go.

  “I suspect this is the laptop you wanted?” Sara says, handing it to me—and eyeing Diamante. “He’s holding a gun on a member of the royal family—tell me this is part of your plan.” Her forehead furrows in a way I find ludicrously attractive. “Tell me you have a plan.”

  “As soon as I do, I’ll let you know,” I answer and she sinks onto a chair next to Harry, groaning “God in heaven.” I didn’t know she was religious.

  The sun has sunk below the horizon now, lights flickering on along the coast, headlights along the highway. I return to the task of reviving Harry Sandler or whoever is inside his body at the moment.

  “Harry? Do you know who I am?”

  Harry’s eyeglasses perch on the bridge of his nose—he peers over them, quizzical.

  “You’re…” he starts, with a child’s tone of voice. Then he takes another look at Diamante and, in a moment, the mists part.

  “My love!” he exclaims and pivots back to Sara and me. “And you two! How disappointing! I pay Rene Baudelaire good money to keep you on ice and here you are anyway.”

  “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “Why did you have us kidnapped?” Sara asks and that, he hears immediately.

  “It’s part of my plan, dearest.”

  “He has a plan,” Sara mutters. I would kick her but she’d see it coming.

  “I set a dinner date with her,” Harry turns to me, “and texted you to come to my apartment, very important, so you’d be there for Rene.” A text I didn’t receive because my phone got stolen—but I showed up on time anyway. Perfect. “That’s my plan—Rene’s supposed to be keeping you busy.”

  “Forget Rene! What about the shipping certificate you signed my name to?”

  “I did?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Not at the moment.” He makes a show of peeking around the end of the bar. “Not yet,” he adds, as though it’s a joke.

  “We’re supposed to be shipping a full container; marked as ‘construction equipment’ but—”

  “But it’s a bomb!” His face lights up. It’s like turning on a radio—all of a sudden, he’s Harry again!

  The air goes out of me. It’s like being punched.

  “A big one!” he continues.

  I’d assumed this part was a lie, that Harry didn’t know, or at worst, that he’d been forced. I’d considered every possibility but this one.

  “I planned it myself,” he says, swelling with pride.

  “You smuggled a bomb into Paris—and hung it on me?”

  His face goes long and white, some sort of elongated pucker. “What are you talking about?” he says. “Paris? Why would I bomb Paris?”

  “You just said—”

  He stomps to the long northern wall of windows and sticks out a finger. “I’m smuggling a bomb into Ras Tanura! Right over there!”

  The room goes dead silent. I need more something but I’m not sure what. “Huh?” is all that comes out of my mouth.

  Sara’s says, “The pipeline, Harry? You mean the pipeline?”

  Harry’s smile goes ear to ear. He nods like a child offered ice cream.

  Sara’s voice plays an undertaker’s note. “The pipeline carries oil from all over the Arabian Peninsula to Ras Tanura, thirty miles north of here, where it’s pumped into ships for transport around the world.” Her face darkens. “What goes through there? Thirty million barrels a day?”

  “Fifty!” Harry says.

  I’m trying to make sense of this. “And you’re going to blow it up? Like that’d stop the oil for—what? A week? Two?”

  Harry rises in carnival dance, swaying to a tune I don’t hear. “Oh no, no no no,” he sings. “You’re missing the beauty of the thing. I have a nuke.”

  Sara and I gasp like twins at the circus. “A what?”

  “Remember the Armenian gentleman, Djermajian, last spring?”

  “Anatole Djermajian, nutty even by our standards,” I explain.

  “The one who wanted to buy the Mona Lisa?”

  “The one in the Louvre?” Sara snarks.

  “No, the real one.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911,” Harry rises, winding up his tongue and letting go, as usual. “Greatest art theft of the Twentieth Century. Vincenzo Peruggia, former Louvre employee, walks in one morning with the workers, wearing the uniform white smock, lifts the painting and walks out with it under the smock when the Louvre closes the next evening. Hangs it in his bedroom, same as Napoleon, for three years while the world goes crazy looking for it. Only gets caught because he’s patriotic and decides to return it to Italy—”

  “—who didn’t own it anyway,” I interject. “Djermajian, though, was convinced Peruggia made a copy and returned that one, while stashing the real Mona Lisa in some hillside village—”

  “Vietri Sul Mare.”

  “Right. And I told him that, if the real Mona Lisa was still out there, he couldn’t aff
ord it. So?”

  “Well, it turns out he could!” Harry yips. “In late October, I get a phone call from a storage facility in Basra. Djermajian died and left a locked storage shed. Double-and-triple locked. The only documentation they had was a recent, undated shipping contract with us. They offered me the contents of the locker for the two months arrears on the shed. I remembered him saying he wasn’t worried about the cost—”

  “You don’t hear that too often—”

  “I figured it was worth the two months arrears, surely, just to find out. I could have spent that amount on lottery tickets.”

  “I don’t remember you going to Basra.”

  “Absolutely not; it’s dangerous and bad coffee since the Americans came. I needed someone we could trust—someone who would recognize obscure and valuable objects and who wasn’t too far away, because I didn’t have major plane fare. So I called Stacia.”

  “Who’s Stacia?” I’m not surprised by the look on Sara’s face but even Amina, who seemed to be snoozing, is now wide-eyed curious.

  -So who is Stacia?

  Stacia Olyvegnaya was the worst office romance I ever had. Absolutely bewitching woman and brilliant. Exquisite taste, worked for us for five years so she knew the whole menagerie—cars, watches, bags, jewelry, fine art.

  -Ships passing in the night, as they say?

  Do they say that here?

  -I read it somewhere.

  Worse than that. We both wanted more. Funny thing about more—you can never actually have it. She eventually went home to Georgia.

  -Not Atlanta, I’m guessing.

  Tblisi.

  So Harry continues: “Stacia flies down, opens the shed, finds a machine shop and one crate. After uncrating, she emails me, instructing me to download several programs onto my computer. A messaging program where everything’s in code—

  “Encrypted—”

  “That’s it—and a few other things so I wasn’t going through the regular Internet. I had to pay Clarice’s nephew to do it but we got them running. Then she sent me photographs of the device Djermajian had left behind. Stupid looking thing, crude but a working nuclear device, built to be transported and set off remotely.”

  “Where the fuck did Djermajian get that?”