by Simon Rich
A quick interview under the awning of the Winchester confirmed that the man was in fact the same Dan Lubecki who was released from prison on Wednesday. When politely pressed for proof, he happily displayed several forms of identification, including his prison release papers, which he proudly carries in his jacket pocket. He had been invited to dinner by the maître d’ himself, he said, just hours after vacating his cell.
“That Winchester place isn’t bad,” he said. “They sure know how to make a guy feel at home.”
When I finally looked up from the paper, Elliot was sipping champagne from a tall glass.
“Would you like a drink?” he asked.
“No thanks,” I said. “I have math homework.”
Elliot drained the last of his champagne and immediately refilled his glass.
“Did you…do this?” I asked, gesturing vaguely at the newspaper.
Elliot closed his eyes and held the warm newspaper to his face, like it was a beloved puppy or kitten.
“Elliot, it really wasn’t that big a deal! I mean, you didn’t have to—”
He raised his index finger to silence me.
“Elliot?” I asked. “How did you do this?”
He pressed a button and the sunroof retracted, enveloping us in warm light.
“Have you ever heard of Alston Bertels?” he asked.
“No, who’s he?”
Elliot sighed.
“I’ll take it from the top,” he said. “No interruptions.”
• • •
I had never heard of Alston Bertels, but apparently most New Yorkers had. He was the reigning food critic for The New York Times and had been for more than thirty years. In eight hundred words Bertels could transform an obscure noodle house with empty tables and faded menus into the most coveted reservation in the city, with celebrity clients and lines around the block. And he routinely closed down restaurants with a single, cutting review. He always ate under an assumed name, to avoid preferential treatment. And in recent years he had begun to wear a disguise, just in case a clever maître d’ kept his photograph on hand.
On Tuesday, three days after Elliot’s expulsion from the Winchester, he had James call the restaurant. Speaking in a whisper, James told the maître d’ that he was an intern at The New York Times and that Alston Bertels would be coming to the Winchester in the near future. He had reviewed it favorably thirty years ago, James told the spellbound maître d’, and he wanted to see if its quality had remained consistent. In exchange for a complimentary meal, James said, he would tell the maître d’ which assumed name Bertels planned to use and the disguise he planned to wear. The maître d’ promptly agreed to the proposal.
“He’s coming on the twenty-second,” James whispered. “He’ll be wearing a full beard. And he’ll make the reservation under the name Dan Lubecki.”
The maître d’ hesitated.
“Like…the Nazi? Who’s getting out of prison?”
“Yes,” James said. “Alston has an unusual sense of humor.”
The maître d’ asked James to repeat the information to make sure he had heard it all correctly. Then he asked him for his name so he could arrange his complimentary meal.
“I can’t tell you that,” James said. “If anyone finds out I leaked this, I’ll get fired.”
“Well, I’ll need to put something in the reservations book.”
“I understand,” James said, reading the final line of Elliot’s script. “Just call me ‘Hal Sagal.’”
• • •
“Hal Sagal? Who’s that?”
Elliot wrote it down on a cocktail napkin, with large spaces between the letters. It took me a while, but eventually I was able to rearrange them.
“Oh,” I said. “Allagash!”
“I know, I know,” he said. “Anagrams are trite. But you want to know something? You have to know your audience. I swear to God—anything more subtle would have been lost on him.”
• • •
James, posing as a disgruntled Winchester waiter, called every gossip columnist in town. He told them that his bosses were Nazis, and that they had invited Dan Lubecki to spend his first night of freedom in twenty years at their restaurant. Most of the columnists were unable to get reservations in time to witness the event, but a few of the more prominent ones were able to finagle tables. After the columnists had been contacted, the only person left to call was Lubecki himself. The Nazi was skeptical at first, but by speaking in an Alsatian accent and quoting Hitler several times, James was able to convince Lubecki that he was in fact the maître d’ of the Winchester and he did in fact want him as his guest. Unsurprisingly, Lubecki had no other social plans for the evening and happily agreed to attend.
James called the Winchester once more time, using a British accent this time, to make a reservation on behalf of a “Mr. Lubecki.” The maître d’ did his best to act natural, but his excitement was obvious. He sounded, James reported, like a first-time gambler calling a large bet with aces in his hand.
• • •
“We’ll hit the Daily News next,” Elliot said, “then the Observer, the Post, and the Times.”
We made the rounds in silence. I was too shocked too speak, and Elliot was too exhausted from his efforts. Every few minutes, James stopped the car, fetched a tabloid, and laid it on top of the stack that was rapidly accumulating in the backseat. But Elliot didn’t bother to read them. He only moved once on the ride home: to take out his black book and silver pen and make a little check mark with his tiny, pale hand.
• • •
As far as I knew, the ninth-grade class president didn’t have any official duties beyond posing for a picture in the yearbook. But it was a prestigious position, something colleges “looked at,” and several weeks at the end of eighth grade were devoted to campaigning.
For the past three years, class president had been a two-person race between Lance and a girl named Ashley. It was usually pretty lopsided. Ashley always won the support of the math club, and one year she had convinced the foreign-exchange student to campaign for her, but everyone else tended to pull for Lance.
“Tell me more about your opponents,” Elliot demanded. “Who are their enemies? What are their weaknesses?”
I glanced across the cafeteria. Lance was leaning back in his chair, but he still towered over all the other boys at his table. He’d recently begun to gel up the front of his hair. It resembled a shark’s fin and made him look even taller than he was already. He was shouting out catchphrases from a movie he had seen recently and everyone around him was laughing hysterically.
“Well, Lance is pretty funny,” I said. “And he’s also really cool.”
I looked at Ashley. She was at the edge of the second table eating apple slices and studying for a French vocabulary test with color-coded flash cards. Whenever somebody made a joke, she looked up from her flash cards, and her halting, nervous laugh invariably silenced the table. People rarely made fun of Ashley, but they tried their best to ignore her. Whenever she said anything, her hands started shaking and her eyes grew wide with panic. It was stressful just to watch.
She wore her auburn hair in a single braid that was so painfully taut it resembled a length of rope. Lance occasionally yanked on it, causing her eyes to well up with tears. It was a doubly cruel gesture, since it also landed her in detention for “being involved in an altercation.” I always felt terrible when Ashley shuffled into Ms. Pearl’s classroom, her eyes downcast to avoid Lance’s smirk. My detentions never bothered me. Even if I wasn’t responsible for any of my fights, I was sure I had done something over the course of the week to merit punishment. Ashley was completely innocent, though, and her sentence was an outrage. I never told her I felt this way, but once I gave her half a Laffy Taffy, and I think she grasped the import of the gesture.
“Ashley’s not so popular,” I said. “But she’s probably the smartest girl in the grade. I thought she had a chance last year, because Lance didn’t put up any posters or write
a speech. But then at the last minute Lance promised a new scoreboard, with a Glendale lion on it, and everyone voted for him. He never got us one, but it was still an awesome idea. West Side Prep has one with a tiger on it and they’re always bragging about it at games.”
Elliot nodded.
“Do either of the candidates have any physical defects?” he asked. “That haven’t been publicly exposed?”
“Geez,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“What are their sexual histories? Have either of them been involved in any scandals?”
I shrugged.
“Don’t worry,” Elliot said. “James will dig up something.”
• • •
After school, Elliot led me into a room I had never seen before, on the fourth floor of his house. It was completely empty, except for a single couch. The walls were bare except for a framed note on the wall directly across from the couch:
Dear Mr. Allagash,
I apologize for my insensitive comments at the Derby. I did not mean to disparage your horse.
Sincerely,
John D. Rockefeller
“It’s one of my family’s most treasured possessions,” Elliot told me, with unusual reverence in his voice. “It was mailed to my grandfather in the twenties.”
I walked over to examine the note up close, but I couldn’t figure out why it was so valuable. I knew Rockefeller was a famous billionaire, but how much could his autograph be worth?
Elliot continued, clearly sensing my lack of enthusiasm.
“Do you know how many letters Rockefeller wrote in his lifetime?”
I shrugged.
“A hundred thousand,” he said. “At least. But do you know how many of those were apologies?”
I shrugged again.
“One,” Elliot said. “Just one.”
He sat down on the couch and stared at the letter for a while in silence.
“Hey, Elliot, do you think we should maybe get started on posters? Lance already put one up and it’s pretty funny. There’s a picture of Austin Powers, but it’s Lance’s head on the body. He’s saying, ‘Oh, behave!’”
Elliot did not respond.
“I’ve discovered some facts that I think you’ll agree are of interest,” he said. “Lance has a variety of reading-related learning disabilities. He’s barely passing most of his classes. And yet he’s managed to maintain an A-plus average in history, his most reading-intensive course. How does one account for the inconsistency?”
“Lance has learning disabilities? How’d you find that out?”
“I had James make me duplicates of everyone’s files,” he said, gesturing casually at a cardboard box behind the couch. “Students and teachers.”
“Oh my God,” I said.
“Congratulations on the French quiz, by the way, you scored a 91.”
“Really?” I said. “Wow. That’s awesome.”
Elliot took a couple manila folders out of the box and then closed it.
“Ashley is clean as a whistle,” he said, impatiently tossing her file aside. “But I’m pretty sure Lance has been cheating on his history tests.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because I’ve been cheating on the tests, too,” he said. “I went through everyone’s files. Nobody’s getting 100s, not even Ashley. And Lance is getting 110s! In every exam, Mr. Douglas includes two bonus questions about current events. I always skip them, to avoid suspicion. But Lance has been stupidly answering them, week after week. Last week, he answered a question about the Rwandan genocide. He’s clearly cheating.”
“How?”
“The same way I am,” Elliot said. “By breaking into Douglas’s desk each Tuesday night and copying down the answer key.”
Even though I had known Elliot for some time now, I was still surprised by how casually he had confessed to cheating.
“Maybe he’s just really good at history?” I said. “And, you know, follows the news about Rwanda?”
Elliot smiled.
“We’ll find out.”
• • •
I was always amazed by Elliot’s knowledge. Not just the things he knew, but the things he didn’t know. For instance: Elliot could recite the biography of every Roman emperor in history, from the number of palaces they built for themselves to the number of dwarfs they owned to the type of daggers they were murdered with. But he didn’t know anything about the New York Mets, not even which league they were in.
He could recite Shakespeare’s Othello from memory—or at least, all of Iago’s monologues. But whenever I quoted The Simpsons, he looked at me with confusion and disgust, like I had broken into some kind of animal language of grunts and squeaks.
He knew how to trade commodities on the Japanese stock market and detect Michelangelo forgeries. But he couldn’t make a paper airplane to save his life, and he had never even tried to toast a Pop-Tart.
He knew the functions of all of his father’s companies—which ones made weapons, which ones made chemicals, and which ones made both. He knew the addresses of all of his father’s homes and the number of servants assigned to each of them. He knew the thread count of his father’s suits and the metric dimensions of his indoor Jacuzzi. But he didn’t know his birthday.
And even though he knew my allergies, my shoe size, my locker combination, and God knows what else, he never seemed to know what I was thinking or feeling. Or why.
• • •
I was sitting next to Lance in science when Mr. Douglas marched into our class. He was one of our most laid-back teachers, a former Peace Corps member who played the same three Cat Stevens songs on guitar at every talent show. I had never seen him angry before, but now he looked furious. His face was flushed a fiery red and his ponytail had come unraveled. I wondered what a history teacher was doing in science class. He opened and closed his mouth a few times, but he was too angry to produce any sound.
“Lance,” he managed, finally.
Lance stood up and started to unbutton his lab coat, but Mr. Douglas flicked his wrist impatiently.
“Just come,” he said. “Now.”
I excused myself to go to the bathroom and quietly followed them down the hall, toward the school’s administrative wing.
The principal’s door was glass, and when I walked by it, I caught a glimpse of the havoc Elliot had wrought. Principal Higgins was reading Lance’s latest history exam and shaking his head in disgust. Lance’s parents had been called in for the meeting. They sat on either side of their son, staring at him in horrified amazement. Lance stared down at his lap, his face a mask of fear.
• • •
“What happened to Lance?” I asked, on the limo ride back to Elliot’s. “Did you tell on him?”
“Give me some credit,” Elliot said. “I’m not some tattling child.”
“If you didn’t tell, then how did he get caught?”
Elliot cracked each of his knuckles, one by one, basking in my curiosity.
“Anyone with good information can destroy an enemy,” he said, finally. “But it takes a subtle genius to get an enemy to destroy himself.”
He dropped some ice cubes into a glass and filled it to the brim with Scotch.
“No interruptions,” he said.
• • •
Mr. Douglas had several eccentricities, the most famous of which was his obsession with saving paper. Instead of printing out forty-one tests each week, he wrote out a single copy in longhand and read the questions out loud. We wrote our answers on scrap paper, which he scavenged from the other classrooms’ recycling bins.
Mr. Douglas always wrote out his tests on Wednesdays, while supervising study hall. They took him about fifteen minutes to write. When he was finished, he waved the test in the air, announced the topic, and deposited it into a locking desk drawer. If Lance was cheating—and Elliot was certain that he was—he had to be getting his answers from this drawer. No other copies of the test ever existed.
The lock was impregnable without to
ols, Elliot explained, but the desktop itself was light enough to pry open. All you had to do was ratchet it up with a strong ruler and the drawer’s contents would be exposed. Elliot usually broke into the desk at lunchtime, while the teachers and students were packed into the cafeteria. Elliot’s allergies required him to visit the nurse’s office every day at noon, to take an antihistamine. And Mr. Douglas’s classroom was conveniently located right next door.
“Do you actually have allergies?” I asked him.
“What do you think?” he said.
Elliot had assumed that Lance was stealing the test on Wednesday evenings. As captain of the basketball team, he was required to stay an extra fifteen minutes after practice to put away the cones and balls. By the time he left the gym each day, the halls would be deserted, giving him ample time to break into Douglas’s desk. Of course, by raiding the desk after Elliot had already had a chance to tamper with the test, he opened himself to sabotage.
“Did you take away the answer key? So he couldn’t cheat?”
Elliot shook his head.
“If I took away the answer key, Douglas would know someone had broken into his desk. I left an answer key, all right. Just not a particularly useful one.”
After copying Douglas’s test at lunchtime, Elliot went into the nurse’s office and faked a massive allergy attack. James arrived promptly and took him home, where the two of them constructed a counterfeit exam for Lance to copy a few hours hence. James took great pains to replicate Douglas’s looping cursive. They kept Mr. Douglas’s questions intact, but they replaced the answers. When they were finished with the forgery, James drove Elliot back to school so he could plant it in Douglas’s desk. While Lance practiced free throws in the gym, Elliot strolled through the empty halls and quietly sealed my political opponent’s fate.
Elliot staked out Mr. Douglas’s classroom for a while from the classroom across the hall. And sure enough, after about an hour, he saw Lance creep into the room and copy down the answers from Elliot’s phony exam. After Lance fled, Elliot took back his fake and returned Mr. Douglas’s original.
