by Simon Rich
The next morning, when Mr. Douglas read out his questions during history class, Lance wrote down Elliot’s answers, wholly convinced of their accuracy.
“He was like a man accidentally signing his own death warrant,” he told me, “or mistakenly digging his own grave.”
“So you put in wrong answers?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” Elliot said. “Even if Lance had gotten a zero on the test, he wouldn’t have received any disciplinary action. He could’ve just claimed not to have studied. Everyone is entitled to an off day, even proven scholars like Lance.”
“So what did you do? How did you get him in trouble for cheating?”
“I didn’t,” Elliot said, handing me his modified exam. “I got him in trouble for something far worse.”
1) Which fearsome terrorist organization sprung up in the South during the 1860s?
The Underground Railroad
2) Who commanded this group of terrorists?
Harriet Tubman
3) Which 1863 decree is commonly referred to as “our country’s finest law”?
The Poll Tax
4) Which series of laws have since been debunked as an unjust perversion of democracy?
The Emancipation Proclamation
On and on it went, each answer more damning than the last.
“Lance wasn’t punished for cheating,” Elliot explained. “He was punished for his hateful belief system.”
I pictured Lance, sitting with his parents in the principal’s office, weighing his nightmarish options. He was either a thieving plagiarist or a horrible racist. Either way, his presidential campaign was over.
Elliot snatched the fake exam out of my hands, held it out the window, and ignited it with a cigar lighter.
“One down,” he said. “One to go.”
James opened the sunroof and the smoke filtered out of the limo. He was talking on his cell phone, but the soundproof window was closed and I couldn’t hear what he was saying.
“Where did your father find James?” I asked.
“It’s a long story,” he said. “One that you’ll enjoy immensely.”
He was about to launch into it when the limo pulled up to the curb in front of a nondescript granite building.
“What’s this place?” I asked.
Elliot sighed.
“My father’s club.”
Terry staggered down the stone steps and shuffled over to the car, his face unusually red. James hopped out of the limo and opened the door for him, discreetly holding his elbow to keep him from falling.
“Seymour!” he said. “It’s always a thrill to see you. How is everything?”
“Great, Mr. Allagash,” I said. “Elliot’s about to tell me a story, about how you found James?”
“How I found James? Please! I don’t have the energy or patience to find anyone. James found me!”
Elliot finished his drink and turned his gaze toward the window.
“I’ll tell you the whole business,” Terry told me. “We wouldn’t want this one to butcher it. I’ll give it to you in the study—but no interruptions!”
• • •
“Fifteen years ago, I was sifting through my mail at this very desk when I came across an unusual postcard. The glossy side featured a terrifying painting of a skull. The other, a short handwritten message.
“‘The Giants will win Game One.’
“I threw the postcard into a special drawer my lawyers make me keep for death threats and forgot about it, until the following week, when another morbid postcard landed on my desk. This one featured two dancing skeletons—and predicted another victory for the Giants. I ignored this card, too—and the next one, and the next one. But after seven weeks of receiving these mysterious cards, with their morbid illustrations and scribbled football predictions, I started to pay them some mind. You see, every single one of them had come true.
“When I received the eighth postcard—which predicted the Giants would lose to the subpar Eagles—I decided to take the anonymous kook at his word. I called up a friend from my club and placed a bet on Philadelphia. The postcard was correct, as usual, and I won a sizable sum. I continued to take my personal prophet’s advice, betting more money each week as my confidence in his accuracy grew. By week twelve, I had made an amount of money so obscene that it was difficult to collect it without laughing.
“Who was sending the postcards? How did he track me down? Why was he giving me football predictions? What the hell was in it for him? I found out when the thirteenth postcard arrived in the mail.
“‘The trial period is over,’ it said. ‘Now that you’ve seen what I can do, why not subscribe to my service?’ All I had to do was mail a thousand dollars to a PO box in Poughkeepsie, it promised, and a thirteenth prediction would arrive in the mail, ‘by rush delivery,’ just in time for Sunday’s matchup against the Redskins.
“I called Duffy, an old Harvard friend who gambles full-time in Monte Carlo, and told him the entire story. At this point, my theory was that my prophet was an NFL coach or referee, someone with inside information who couldn’t risk placing the bets himself. Duffy nixed that hypothesis in a hurry.
“‘He’d get in just as much hot water for mailing the postcards,’ he said. ‘Giving information to gamblers is as illegal as gambling itself. And besides, no ref would risk his job for a measly thousand dollars.’
“‘What if he’s someone lower down,’ I asked, ‘who’s too poor to make any real bets himself? Like a locker-room janitor? He knows some inside information, perhaps, but he doesn’t have a thousand dollars on hand. So he buys a ten-cent postcard, sells his info to a billionaire and turns a profit without investing any capital?’
“‘That’s not a bad theory,’ Duffy said. ‘Except for one thing: Inside information is never that good.’
“‘What if the games are being fixed?’
“‘NFL games can’t be fixed,’ Duffy said. ‘Believe me, I’ve tried. There are just too many variables. There are seven referees, a dozen coaches, over a hundred players. It’s not like paying a boxer to take a dive. I mean, sure, you can get the quarterback to throw some interceptions. But even that only gets you so far.’
“‘What if the whole team is conspiring together?’
“‘Nobody’s pulled off a team-wide conspiracy since the Black Sox. And besides, your prophet picks the Giants to win sometimes. Are the Giants’ opponents throwing games, too? There’s no way someone bought the entire league. I would have heard about it.’
“‘All right,’ I said. ‘Maybe he’s not affiliated with the league. Maybe he’s just a gambling expert who’s really talented at making picks.’
“‘I’m a gambling expert who’s really talented at making picks. I’ve never cracked eighty percent, ever. If I hit sixty-five percent it’s a great year.’
“‘So what are you telling me? Is he an actual prophet?’
“‘Maybe he’s the Devil,’ Duffy said. ‘Who cares? Just give me that thirteenth pick!’
“At this point, the prophet had earned me so much money that I almost felt as if I owed him something. So, with low expectations, I mailed the money to the PO box. His pick arrived the next day, as promised, and lo and behold, it was a good one. I collected a staggering amount of money from my clubmates. I would have won more, but most of them were no longer willing to bet against me on the Giants.
“The prophet’s next postcard asked for fifty thousand dollars.
“‘You’ve got to pay!’ Duffy shouted, over and over again, for a solid hour. I hung up on him, eventually, and mulled over the situation in this study. I still didn’t know who my prophet was or how he knew so much about football. But I knew this: He had no reason to give me bad information. After all, if he picked a loser, I might stop paying for picks. It was in his best interest to keep feeding me winners.
“Eventually, I decided to choose the most rational course: I sold the pick to Duffy for sixty thousand dollars. He wired me the cash immediately, and I
sent fifty of it to Poughkeepsie. The postcard arrived within forty-eight hours. It depicted some kind of altar made out of bones and foretold a Giants victory. I went down to the club on Sunday morning, but I couldn’t convince anyone to bet against me. I was pretty frustrated, until the unthinkable happened: The Giants lost. I waited for another postcard, but it never arrived.
“At this point, my curiosity had grown so extreme that it was interfering with my day-to-day life. I thought about the prophet constantly: who he was, how he operated, that sort of thing. So I dispatched one of my personal investigators to Poughkeepsie to stake out that post office and find him. It wasn’t easy. Nobody touched the box for days. Or at least, no customer touched the box. We eventually learned that my prophet had somehow gotten himself employed at the post office as a janitor. He was the only one with access to the boxes from one to nine A.M.—and that’s when he collected his mail. In the end, I had no choice but to call in a favor from a friend at the Federal Reserve. We sent the prophet a bushel of marked bills (with a request for more picks), tracked their distribution, and traced them back to his parents’ house in the suburbs. When the surveillance photos arrived, I thought there had been some kind of mistake. My prophet was a scrawny seventeen-year-old with long hair and acne. Some kid named James.
“He was relatively easy to abduct, once we knew his identity, and my people managed to extract a full confession without excessive violence. It was an amazing thing to listen to.
“The boy’s father sold high-end diamond-and-silver cuff links, and my name and address were listed in his Rolodex. That’s where the boy found all his addresses. You see, I wasn’t the only one receiving postcards! At the start of the football season, the boy had sent out predictions to all twenty thousand of his father’s contacts. He told ten thousand people that their home team would lose and ten thousand people that their home team would win. The following week, he determined which people had received accurate predictions and sent them each a follow-up postcard. Again, he told half of them that their home team would win and half that their home team would lose. He continued to whittle down his list in this fashion, week after week, until Game Thirteen arrived. At that point, only twenty-two names remained. Twenty of them were sufficiently impressed to ‘subscribe’ to his service. And the following week, of the twelve gullible millionaires that remained, six agreed to pay him fifty grand for his take on Game Fifteen. He lost me that week, along with three others. But two names remained, and both agreed to pay a hundred thousand dollars for James’s Game Sixteen ‘prediction.’ One of those predictions proved accurate. And so there was still one man left, some steel tycoon in Pittsburgh, whose faith remained intact. He’d already sent James a million dollars for the inside dirt on the Super Bowl.
“By the time I caught up with James, he had netted a fortune from his football scam. It was an expensive undertaking—all those stamps and letters—but he was able to fund it with the profits from other scams. He’d completed hundreds by that age, each one more daring than the last.
“‘Are you going to kill me?’ he asked when I introduced myself at the end of his four-hour interrogation.
“‘Good heavens, no!’ I said. ‘I’m going to offer you a job!’”
• • •
I found Elliot just outside the study, reading a thick, old military book.
“Why’d you leave in the middle of the story?” I asked.
“I’ve heard it before,” he said.
“It’s pretty amazing that your dad hired that guy.”
Elliot waved his hand dismissively.
“My family has always employed at least one full-time con man. Terry wasn’t the first Allagash to think of it.”
“Isn’t it risky to hire criminals?”
“Not if you’re the only one who knows about their crimes. If James ever tried to hurt the family, we could reveal his offenses to the authorities. It keeps him in check.”
“Do you think he wants to hurt your family?”
“Probably not. We pay him an outrageous salary, plus expenses. And we give him one month’s vacation every year, so he can travel the world and visit all the foreign whores he keeps on retainer.”
He unscrewed his pen and began to underline a lengthy passage in his book.
“Elliot?” I asked. “Does your dad have any more stories like that?”
Elliot shut his book.
“Why don’t you knock on his study door and find out?” he snapped. “He’s probably waiting for you in the vestibule, cupping his ear to the door to hear your approach! Go ahead!”
He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and coughed into it violently, his tiny body shaking from the force. I considered patting him on the back, but eventually decided against it. After a while, his fit subsided and he leaned against the wall, exhausted.
“If you want to hear a good story,” he wheezed. “You should hear my scheme to eliminate Ashley.”
I felt a sudden pang of guilt. I didn’t mind when Elliot plotted against Lance or the Winchester. But Ashley was a really nice girl. She always volunteered to make decorations for class dances, even though she usually didn’t go to them. In seventh grade, Mr. Hendricks had paired us up for the annual gingerbread house art project, and we had spent a whole afternoon at her place, laughing at soap operas and eating our materials. We weren’t exactly friends, but she had never called me Chunk-Style, even at the height of the nickname’s popularity. One time, she caught me singing the song “Barbie Girl” on the way back to class from the water fountain. It was the verse that goes, I’m a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world, and I was pretty much singing it at full voice. She could have told someone about the incident, but she never did.
“You’re not going to do anything really bad to her, are you?”
Elliot didn’t seem to hear me. He dialed James.
“Maybe this isn’t a good idea,” I said, finally. “I mean, it’s just class president. I don’t really care that much if I win.”
Elliot slammed the phone down and stared at me.
“If you think this is about something as petty as class president, you’re an even greater fool than I imagined! This is just a stepping stone—a stepping stone to a stepping stone to a stepping stone to a—”
He stopped suddenly and forced an odd chuckle.
“Look,” he said. “I couldn’t care less what you do. This is just a game to me.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“You’re probably right. Who wants to be president? I mean honestly, who has the patience to pose for all those damn pictures?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Right?”
Elliot nodded.
“Right. And then there are all those stupid meetings with the student senate? And those ridiculous interviews with The Glendale Gazette!”
“Yeah…it’s all kind of silly.”
“It’s beyond silly! Everyone sucking up to you all the time to try to get this or that! And Jessica and her idiotic dance committee! Can you imagine going over to her house to plan one of those abominations?”
“Uh…”
“Besides,” he said, “your parents probably won’t care if you lose the election. In fact, they might even be expecting you to lose.”
He opened his book and continued to underline the passage from where he had left off.
“Of course,” he added softly, “it might be an interesting experience.”
I sat down next to him.
“What are you going to do to Ashley?”
Elliot shrugged.
“Something elegant.”
“Is it mean?”
Elliot laughed.
“Is it ‘mean’ to take a bishop with a rook? Is it ‘mean’ to sink a bank shot with a bridge? This is politics!”
“Maybe you’re right,” I said.
“Of course I’m right,” he said. “Now let’s shoot some pool.”
It didn’t occur to me until after the election that I hadn’t actually asked for any details
about his plan. Somehow, at the time, I was able to convince myself that this was an oversight, that I had remained ignorant of Elliot’s machinations simply by accident—that I didn’t know what I was getting into.
• • •
“You know we still haven’t met Elliot,” my father said. “Why don’t you invite him over for your birthday? His dad can come along too, if he’s not too busy.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Elliot’s kind of a picky eater.”
“We’ll figure something out,” he said. “I can always grill burgers. Everybody likes burgers, right? Pass the ketchup.”
I passed him the bottle and he squeezed it over his chicken. A trickle of red liquid sputtered out of the nozzle.
“Damn it,” he said.
He turned the bottle upside down and waited for the ketchup to ooze downward.
“Maybe we should go out to dinner.” my mom said. “We could go to the St. Regis, maybe, or Tavern on the Green? You know, someplace…”
My dad laughed.
“Someplace what?”
“Someplace…fun,” my mom said. “I mean, it’s a special occasion, right? Fourteen’s a big age!”
My dad nodded.
“Then we’ll bake a cake,” he said.
• • •
My dad was an assistant professor of economics at Fordham. He sometimes wrote articles in journals, long essays with footnotes and diagrams and graphs. He had also written a book, which an agent had recently submitted to publishers. I was really proud of the fact that my father had written an entire book, and it wasn’t until Elliot asked me to describe it that I realized I had no idea what it was about. “Something with Marx” was all I could manage.
“Oh,” Elliot said. “One of those.”
I winced. I didn’t know that other people had written about this Marx guy before. I hoped my dad knew.
My mom worked afternoons as a speech therapist, but on the night of the Allagash dinner, she called in sick to concentrate on cooking. When I got home from school, there were so many kitchen appliances running at once, we had to shout to hear each other.
