by Tim Wirkus
“‘Yeah,’ said Marco.
“I said, ‘But this has to be a con, remember. You can’t tell someone that they’re going to hand over their prize racehorse and then, I don’t know, you kidnap their daughter and trade her for the horse.’
“‘Right,’ said Marco.”
“‘Because that’s extortion,’ I said, ‘not a con. You have to trick them, not pressure them.’
“‘I know,’ said Marco.
“‘Also,’ I said, ‘you couldn’t sneak in and steal it. It can’t be a heist, either.’
“‘I know,’ said Marco. ‘I know the rules.’
“I said, ‘So let me get this straight. You approach the mark, you introduce yourself, and you tell him you will con him out of his prize racehorse. And then with the mark fully aware of what you’re up to, you somehow trick him—not force him, extort him, bribe him, or blackmail him, but trick him—into giving you his racehorse.’
“Marco said, ‘That’s right.’
“I said, ‘Assuming the mark is an even marginally intelligent human being, how does that work?’
“Marco said, ‘I don’t know. I haven’t worked out the details yet.’
“I said, ‘But even broadly, can you explain to me what that might look like?’
“Marco said, ‘Not yet—that’s why it’s my Ultimate Con.’
“At that point, I gave up on the conversation. I’m too much of a pragmatist to waste my time with stuff like that. Like I said, you have to know what drives the people you work with. I do, at least. Marco and I went our separate ways a year or two later—philosophical differences, I suppose. Still, you’re not going to find someone in the business more talented than Marco.”
Cabral picked up his tumbler and took a swallow of whiskey.
“You seem awfully nostalgic,” said Elder Toronto. “Like maybe you know you’re never going to see Marco Aurélio again.”
“You’re persistent,” said Cabral. “I’ll give you that.”
“I intend to find Marco Aurélio,” said Elder Toronto. “What can you tell us that would help me do that?”
With one of his thick, stubby fingers, Cabral tapped himself on the chest.
“Contrary to popular belief,” he said, “I do have a heart inside here. That’s why I hired Galvão, and that’s why I’m talking to you. I care about Marco, and I want to find out what happened to him as much as you do.”
“Great,” said Elder Toronto. “Let’s talk, then.”
Cabral folded his hands and rested them on the gleaming surface of his desk.
“I have a heart,” he said, “but I’m not stupid. Information has power, and I’m not going to give it to you for free.”
“We’re willing to tell you everything we know,” said Elder Toronto. “We can exchange.”
Cabral chuckled and shook his head.
“I already know everything that you know,” he said. “I know that Galvão is dead, I know that the police don’t care, I know that you’ve spoken with Sílvia. I know all of it.”
“Are you sure about that?” said Elder Toronto.
“Yes,” said Cabral with a broad smile. “I am. You can’t bluff someone who was in the business as long as I was. However, I am willing to set up an exchange. I have some information that I’m sure would be of interest to you.”
“What do you want for it?” said Elder Toronto.
“I hired Ulisses Galvão,” said Cabral, “to find something out for me. He failed to do so.”
“What was he looking for?” said Elder Toronto.
“Not so fast,” said Cabral. “Here’s my proposal: If the two of you can find out what Galvão couldn’t, I will tell you what I know. However, I’d like a handshake agreement on that before I tell you what he was looking for.”
Elder Toronto looked at his junior companion. Elder Schwartz wanted nothing more to do with Junior Cabral, but he figured that the sooner they made this deal with him, the sooner they could leave. So he nodded. Elder Toronto reached across the desk and shook Cabral’s thick hand.
“You’ve got a deal,” he said.
“Good,” said Cabral. “Now. You’ve heard of the Argentine?”
“Of course,” said Elder Toronto.
“The general store, the tunnels, the secret library?”
“Yeah,” said Elder Toronto. “I said I’d heard of him.”
“Good,” said Cabral. “As you can probably guess, most of that is nonsense. Nearly all of it, in fact. But the Argentine does exist. That much is true. And he is a very powerful man, even to this day. If you assume otherwise, you do so at your own peril. Are you with me so far?”
“Sure,” said Elder Toronto.
“About two weeks ago, I ran into an old business associate at a restaurant a few blocks from here. He told me that he heard from a friend that Marco’s trying to set up a meeting with the Argentine. This is no easy feat—the man is both powerful and reclusive, so, according to this friend, Marco was asking around, trying to find someone who knew someone who knew the Argentine.”
“Why would Marco Aurélio want to meet with the Argentine?” said Elder Toronto.
“If someone wants a meeting with the Argentine,” said Cabral, “it’s for one of two reasons—either money or protection. Now, like I said, you shouldn’t believe those stories you hear about the Argentine—the underground chambers of gold and whatnot. But the man does have very deep pockets, and he’s not averse to investing in local business ventures. Most people over in Vila Barbosa could never get a bank loan, but if the Argentine likes the sound of their plans, he might give them enough money to get started in exchange for a percentage of the profits.”
“You’re saying Marco Aurélio wanted to start a business?” said Elder Toronto.
“If you’ll let me finish,” said Cabral. “The other reason people meet with the Argentine is for protection. If a resident of Vila Barbosa is being bothered or threatened, especially by somebody from outside the neighborhood, the Argentine might be persuaded to use his considerable local muscle to make the problem go away.”
“And what does the Argentine get in return?” said Elder Toronto.
“Loyalty,” said Junior Cabral. “A chronically underrated commodity.”
“So did Marco Aurélio need money or protection?” said Elder Toronto.
“That’s what I hired Ulisses Galvão to find out,” said Cabral. “It could be that something or someone spooked Marco, that he ran into trouble with an old mark and needed a little extra muscle. Or he could be looking to start a business or a con or something that would require more seed money than he could rustle up on his own. Or it could be neither of the above. The thing is, though, you don’t make an appointment with the Argentine if everything in your life is hunky-dory. Marco’s an old friend and if he’s in trouble, I’d like to help him.”
Cabral lay his hands palms up on the surface of the desk.
“Really, I think we all want the same thing here,” he said.
“Maybe,” said Elder Toronto.
Cabral smiled back at him, hands raised beatifically.
“All right,” said Elder Toronto. “So you want us to find out if Marco Aurélio met with the Argentine?”
“Correct,” said Cabral. “And if so, what they discussed.”
Elder Toronto tented his hands and held them to his mouth. After a moment’s thought, he nodded.
“Sure,” he said. “We’ll see what we can do.”
They all shook hands again and the missionaries left Junior Cabral standing at his vast office window, where he’d opened the blinds to gaze out at a sweeping view of the city’s irregular skyline—skyscrapers scattered pell-mell among sprawling shopping malls, single-story restaurants, bustling plazas, mid-sized apartment buildings, and somewhere beyond all that, at the tobacco-colored skyline, the city’s tired, dusty slums.
CHAPTER 17
Inside the battered, unlicensed cab, no one spoke. Wanderley, the driver, held tightly to the steering whee
l, shaking his head from time to time in barely contained fury. The missionaries had found him waiting for them when they had emerged from Cabral’s building, but, by his own report, he had nearly left them there, going so far as to drive a few blocks away before changing his mind and turning back.
“You should have told me when you first called me that the police might be involved,” he said when the missionaries had entered his car. “That’s something I need to know about.”
“It’s fine,” Elder Toronto said, “We didn’t have to involve the police. And anyway,” he continued with a shrug, “you could have left if you were uncomfortable with our arrangement.”
Wanderley responded in a soft, measured tone, clearly holding back his anger.
“I had already told you that I would stay,” he said. “Plus, I’ve got a family to support.”
Elder Toronto looked at him, not responding for a moment, a brief hiccup in his usual social fluency.
“I’m sorry,” Elder Toronto finally replied, and Wanderley only shook his head.
Now, Elder Toronto stared out the window, his body motionless, his breathing regular. Elder Schwartz, observing from the back seat, would have guessed that Elder Toronto was sleeping if it weren’t for the regular blink of his eyelids, a movement Elder Schwartz could just make out from his vantage point behind the driver’s seat. What he hoped would happen next was that Elder Toronto would ask Wanderley to turn right at the upcoming intersection, and then the battered cab would carry them home to their apartment where they could sleep for the rest of the day, and for the night, not venturing out again until the following morning. Elder Schwartz needed the sleep—his head was fuzzy, his eyes hurt, and he was inexplicably chilly in the heat of the day. He wondered how Elder Toronto was managing to remain, by all appearances, fully functional; if he had slept at all the past two nights, it couldn’t have been for more than a few minutes.
The cab approached the intersection.
“Left here,” said Elder Toronto, and then gave him directions to the street where Marco Aurélio lived. Then he twisted around to face Elder Schwartz, sitting alone in the back seat.
“Can I bounce an idea off you?” said Elder Toronto.
“Sure,” said Elder Schwartz.
Elder Toronto pushed the shoulder strap of his seatbelt out of the way, allowing him the full use of his arms as he spoke to his companion in the back seat.
“Okay,” said Elder Toronto. “It’s just that something feels off about all of this—I have this weird feeling I can’t shake.”
“It’s because you haven’t slept in days,” said Elder Schwartz. “We should be going home right now.”
“No, that’s not it,” said Elder Toronto. “And I have slept a little. No, this is something else. It’s like—have I ever told you about this? I don’t think I have. This was back in the CTM.”
He paused.
“Go ahead,” said Elder Schwartz.
“Okay,” said Elder Toronto. “Well, this happened in the CTM, and you know how everyone gets a little stir crazy in there after about a month? You know, you’ve got the same routine every day and you rarely leave the building and it just gets a little edgy—cabin fever–type stuff.”
He paused again, an unprecedented hesitancy manifesting itself.
Elder Schwartz thought back to his own time in the CTM, the training center where every English-speaking elder who came to this country spent the first eight weeks of their mission. He nodded in encouragement.
“Well,” said Elder Toronto, “I was ready to get out of there. Couldn’t stand being there anymore, you know? Classes were boring, food was boring, other missionaries were boring, at least after spending a month with them in close quarters. You can only have the same conversation so many times. So I decided I needed to do something to keep my mind occupied, or at least amuse myself.
“For the record, I’m not a big fan of pranks. I don’t think they’re funny. Usually they’re just stupid. But after being cooped up in the CTM for five weeks, I could start to see the appeal—they disrupt the routine, if nothing else. So anyway, I knew an elder who helped clean the copy room during his district’s service hour. His district and my district ate at adjoining tables during mealtimes, and we were both from Idaho, so we chatted from time to time. Come to find out, this elder was getting stir crazy as well, so he and I put together this plan in the cafeteria one morning of how we would forge a letter from the First Presidency and slip a copy into each district’s mailbox. This other elder handled the first part—he found an actual letter from the First Presidency and made a blank letterhead out of it, complete with signatures, in the copy room. It looked great, completely authentic. My part of the bargain was to come up with some content. We hadn’t actually figured out what we wanted the letter to say; it just seemed like a funny idea conceptually. So my job was to write the actual letter, print it out, and then get it back to this other elder so he could make copies for distribution. He gave me four or five of these letterhead templates in case I made a mistake or the printer ate one or something.
“I spent a good chunk of the next p-day drafting the letter by hand in a notebook. I don’t even remember what it said, exactly. Something patently ridiculous, like all missionaries would now ride horses from appointment to appointment, or would be required to tattoo Joseph Smith’s face on their neck, or something very silly like that. From there, the plan was that on the next p-day, I’d type up the bogus letter and print it off on the forged letterhead during our assigned e-mail time.
“Anyway, there I am. I have this notebook filled with drafts of fake letters from the Prophet, along with some suspicious, blank First Presidency letterhead, and I leave it just sitting in a manila folder on my desk when we all go down to the cafeteria for dinner that evening. Which was stupid of me, because when I get back from our evening class at nine-thirty, or whenever, the manila folder is gone.
“I ask the other guys in the room if they’ve seen it, playing it cool when I do, but none of them know what I’m talking about. So I start looking around, but I’m trying not to look like I’m looking for something, because I don’t want my roommates asking too many questions.
“The point is, I don’t find it, and I start to worry a little. I mean, this forged letter I’m working on is obviously a joke, but there are so many rules, and I’m sure it breaks plenty of them. Of course, I knew all that going into the project, but the whole plan was that we’d do it sneakily enough that we wouldn’t get caught. Clearly, though, I’ve blown it. At this point I’m pretty concerned.
“The next morning we’re all sitting in class learning how to teach about the Word of Wisdom when this elder I’ve never seen before pokes his head into the room and says that President DeWitt needs to see Elder Toronto, and it’s urgent. Was DeWitt still president when you were in the CTM?”
“Yeah,” said Elder Schwartz. “I was terrified of him.”
“Right,” said Elder Toronto. “Ex-military, I think.”
“Yeah,” said Elder Schwartz.
“Anyway,” said Elder Toronto. “I follow this elder to President DeWitt’s office and he tells me to go right in, the president is waiting for me. I knock anyway, and President DeWitt opens the door and invites me in. Thing is, he won’t look me in the eye, which worries me. He’s the kind of man who looks people in the eye, you know? So I’m pretty scared at this point. I figure someone found the folder on my desk, brought it to him, and now it’s going to be my head.
“But then he’s just standing there, with his crew cut and his perfect posture, not looking me in the eye. Finally, he shakes my hand, and opens his mouth to say something, but before he can get anything out, he starts crying. Which really freaks me out. At this point, I’m assuming that I’ll be on the next plane back to the States, dishonorably discharged. Then things get weirder. He hugs me. He hugs me, and he’s still crying, and he just holds me like that for a minute. Then he lets go of me and points to a chair and I sit down. He pulls over a ch
air so he’s sitting right across from me, no desk between us, and he kind of pulls himself together. He says, ‘Elder Toronto,’ and starts tearing up, so he tries again. He says, ‘Elder Toronto, I’m afraid that I have,’ and then he just loses it. I mean, maybe not audible sobs, but close. Now I really don’t know what’s going on—there’s this sixty-year-old man who wants to talk to me, but he’s too emotionally devastated to get a word out.
“All told, he’s probably crying like that for less than a minute, but it feels much longer. Then he pulls himself together and he apologizes. He says he’s received some very upsetting news from Idaho. He tells me there’s been a car accident, and my family’s been killed. All of them—my mom, my dad, my two younger sisters. And I’ll be honest with you here. My first reaction—and it only lasted a second or two—was relief that this wasn’t about that prank. I actually thought, Oh good, I’m not in trouble. My next reaction was that this must be a joke—you know, is this to teach me a lesson not to do pranks? And obviously it wasn’t. It was all true, and President DeWitt just kept talking to me and asking how I was feeling and telling me how sorry he was.”
Elder Toronto paused, his eyes down, his chin in his hands. The morning sunlight flickered against his face through the window of the moving car. He went on:
“The point is, I guess, I walked into that meeting asking the wrong questions. That’s why I bring all this up. I was so sure that President DeWitt was going to ask about that forged letter prank that I couldn’t process anything else he said. I feel like we might be making the same mistake here, like we’re asking the wrong questions. There was something off in that meeting with Cabral that I can’t quite put my finger on—it felt a little bit like that meeting I had with DeWitt. Do you know what I mean?”
The whole account had left Elder Schwartz feeling even more exhausted and fuzzy-headed than before. He strained for a coherent response.
“Do you think Cabral might be playing us?” said Elder Schwartz.
“What?” said Elder Toronto. He waved a hand dismissively. “Yes. Cabral is definitely playing us. That is eminently clear, Elder Schwartz. But there’s something else, don’t you think?”
