by Rick Dakan
"That's when I decided theater was my new obsession. I've always been an obsession prone kinda girl. Not so much about guys or bands or any of that bullshit, but more about hobbies. Before theater it had been rock climbing and before that it had been rollerblading and before that it had been gymnastics. Always something.
And I wouldn't just do whatever it was; I'd also learn everything there was to know about it. I'd read every book the library and the local bookstores had about mountain climbing. I'd planned out all these elaborate trips I was going to take some summer - all this even though I'd never climbed a rock outside of a climbing wall in a gym."
"But the theater thing was different. My high school had something approaching a decent drama club, and I joined the day after we got back from the play. There weren't a ton of us in the club, so everyone got to do a little bit of everything. I acted some, made costumes, learned to run the lame ass lighting system we had. And by lighting system I mean a couple spots and not much else. But mostly I was all about working on the sets. I read everything I could find and talked my way back stage and into the prop shops of every major and minor theater company here in the Bay Area. Our little school plays got to lookin' pretty damn cool by the end of my run in high school."
"In college I was still all about the theater. I thought maybe I'd get into making sets for movies or something like that, so I stuck with it. I never did finish that degree - I ended up getting distracted. This was back in the early nineties you know? And the Internet was just coming on strong. BBS's and newsgroups were the shit back then, and there were even a couple devoted to theater and prop making and stuff like that. I was so hungry for any little piece of knowledge I was posting on all of these all the time. I became addicted."
"Then came that fateful day. Some guy posted a thing on a theater BBS about trying to duplicate a fancy corporate office. He said it was for a movie or a documentary or something like that that he was making and that he needed it to be exactly like the real thing, but he only had a limited budget - like maybe a thousand bucks. The real tough part was that he wanted to recreate the view out the window of this office, which was twenty stories high and in Manhattan somewhere. I had some ideas on the problem and we got to going back and forth online and through e-mail about it."
"He was real cagey about who he was and what this movie was about, but he seemed pretty smart. We even talked on the phone a couple of times. Finally he invited me to come on down to LA (it turned out he was in LA, not New York at all as he'd said in his posts) and help him build the thing. I was a nineteen year old college girl whose parents paid for her gas. Of course I went."
"Without going into details that, while I'm sure you'd love to hear them, I'm not ready to tell you, the whole thing was a con. Luckily, I wasn't the one being conned. But I could also tell fairly quickly that these clowns weren't making any movie or anything like that. They were actually working out of a rundown warehouse that they were squatting in. I only ever met them there. Each night they disappeared to wherever their homes were and I sure as hell wasn't invited to come along. I ended up sleeping in my car. But they never would've pulled it off without my help, I can guarantee you that. They had pictures from a magazine and from some shitty Chapter 10
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videotape that they'd shot in the office (which turned out to be in LA, too, not New York). They'd scored some professional grade lighting and shit, but the hardest part was getting that backdrop to look real. We finally figured it out, though."
"One of them went away for a day and then came back. He had us make a bunch of different small changes to the office set up we'd built. We changed the calendar on the desk and added a new set of pens that he'd bought somewhere. Small shit like that. They were going to cut me loose then and promised to send me my money in a week (they'd promised me a couple hundred bucks). I was like, 'Fuck the money, I wanna help on the shoot.'
This didn't go over real well at first, but I held my ground. I hinted that I knew they were up to something hinky here and I wanted to be in on it. That went over even less well."
"Now Paul, here's a little tip for you. What I did back then was wicked fucking stupid. I mean, just dumb, dumb, dumb. First of all, the golden rule - never let 'em know what you know. Second, I didn't know these guys. In retrospect they were pretty tight but kinda taking a risk bringing me in on the set-up. A good risk, as odds are I was gonna be some ditsy theater chick. Turned out they were wrong. If they'd been a different, harder core crew, they probably would've disappeared me right then and there. I could tell one of them was maybe thinking that very thought. But I was lucky. They let me stay and help with the shoot before sending me on my merry way. They even let me do the make-up. Although, for the record, I never did get my money, the fuckers."
"This other guy came in. Someone I'd never met before. He didn't seem at all curious to see me - treated me like a flunky on a film set. To this day I'm pretty sure he was some wanna-be actor that they'd conned into thinking he was playing a part in an indie movie. Hell, they might've even paid him. I did his make-up for him and then we lit the set and put him to work. He was wearing some kind of little domino mask and a suit. He looked like the Green Hornet or the Spirit or one of those old pulp heroes. It was kind of silly I thought."
"They shot the thing on SVHS and had a boom mic on the guy to pick up every word. He gave this weird speech about how he'd obviously compromised their state of the art security system and could do so at any time. Then he said that whoever was going to see this tape should give in to his demands or face serious, serious consequences. Next time they wouldn't be shooting a videotape. Next time they'd be planting a bomb.
The actor guy actually sold it pretty well. I felt chills going up my spine. I knew then for sure that I'd been right, and that these fuckers were up to no good."
"We did a few takes and then let the guy go. We broke down the whole set in less than an hour, piling everything into a couple of vans and combing the warehouse for any last piece of evidence that we'd ever been there. I was scared shitless by this point. I thought about making a run for it but I realized that one of the vans had blocked my car in. I'd never get away from them. As it turned out, once we'd finished cleaning up, they piled into their vehicles and took off. They said they'd call me in a week. I never heard from them again."
"I had to know what the fuck these guys had been up to. In fact - that became my new hobby obsession. I needed to find out what I'd been a part of. I knew a few things - that the office was in LA and even generally what part of town it was in (based on the backdrop we'd created. It could still be one of a dozen different buildings at least, and then any of hundreds of different offices. I also knew it had been photographed professionally for some magazine since they had cut out pictures to use as a model. I blew off school and spent the next week at the public library in LA, going through every damned home and garden and local magazine they had on file and pouring over the daily papers for any signs of some kind of story related to any of the businesses in any of the buildings I'd identified as possibles."
"Eventually, I did find the office. It had been featured in some local magazine like three years earlier. It was the offices of a pretty well known lawyer who specialized in medical malpractice cases. I looked him up and he actually had a pretty darn good record on such things - not the kind of guy who makes lots of baseless lawsuits or whatever. I couldn't find anything about him in the news. I even went down to the Clerk of Court Chapter 10
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and read the files on all his recent cases, but I didn't see any names I recognized or make any connections to any of the people I'd worked with. I eventually came back up here and somehow managed to pull out barely passing grades despite the three and a half weeks of school I'd missed. I used the old dead grandmother routine."
"I kept tabs on the lawyer as best I could, and I learned that about six months later he retired early at the tender age of forty-two. Said he wanted to get back in touch with his roots and th
at he was moving to Portugal of all places. I gotta think that had something to do with whatever con those guys were pulling, but of course I have no idea. They didn't leave a single trace that I could find."
"And so, just like that, conning people became my new obsession. Well, not just like that. I had a little guidance from an old friend, but that's another story," concluded Chloe.
Paul had listened with rapt attention as she spun this tale. It hadn't been what he expected.
"Is that really true?" he asked.
"Yep," she said. Then she winked at him. "As far as you know anyway."
"And how long ago was this? The early nineties right? How old are you anyway?"
"A lady never tells. Let's just say I look good for my age."
"I think you look good for any age."
"You charmer, you. I'm still not telling you how old I am." She started rooting through the camera bag she'd brought with her, and pulled out a very expensive looking digital camera. "Do you know how to use one of these?"
"Sure," said Paul. "I mean, I've never used one that nice before, but yeah, I know the gist of it. Why?"
"That's your job for the day - you're the photographer."
"And what are you?"
"I'm the reporter, silly! What else?" She pulled out a business card identifying her as Rachel Moore, a lifestyle reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. "We're on assignment."
The plan went delightfully well. Chloe and Paul went into every comic book store in the Bay Area over the next eight hours. She posed as a reporter doing a story about collecting comics. The new Spider-man movie was due out next month, and so the Chronicle was allegedly preparing to do a companion piece about comics.
In return for promising to mention the stores in the article, the owners were more than happy to let Paul snap away.
With the camera set at a resolution approaching that of 35mm film, Paul took careful pictures of every valuable comic he could find. Whenever possible he tried to convince the owners to let him take the books out of their plastic sleeves. This was impossible to do with those that had been graded and sealed, but he got some good shots of those as well. They'd all need some fairly substantial touching up in Photoshop before they'd be ready for "press" but the high-quality camera gave him a solid base from which to build their fakes.
Paul was constantly impressed by what a charmer Chloe could be. She had the owners eating out of her hand -
and not just because she was an attractive blonde (thanks to a wig) - but because she knew how to engage Chapter 10
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them on their level, whatever it was. For the guys who were real fans of the genre and comics in general she talked to them about their favorite characters and storylines. For the ones who were all about the bottom line she emphasized how the article could help bring in new business for them. And for those who just didn't care, she knew when to leave them alone.
By the day's end Paul had collected good shots of about a hundred likely suspects, both front and back covers.
He was already going over in his head what he'd have to do in Photoshop to make them picture perfect for their scam. It was going to be pretty simple, he thought, but he'd have to do some test runs to make sure it came out looking convincing enough. As long as they figured out how to fake the hard plastic case for the sealed and graded comics, he thought they had a pretty good chance of pulling this con off.
When they got back to Chloe's house, they found it crowded with about a half dozen Crew members. They'd set up the big bed sheet screen again and were all ready to run a little first person shooter tournament. Paul had played in plenty of such events while at the Fear and Loading, and in many ways coming home to something like this made it all seem a little more normal. Besides, he was eager to show off his skills while he wasn't drunk and high. He took a seat and dove right in, blasting away at his new friends for the next four or five hours until finally the Red Bull wore off and he crashed on the couch once again.
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Chapter 11
The next few days flew by for Paul. He enjoyed the hell out of his time in the house. It was not unlike being back in college - everyone around him was smart and ready to do something fun at a moment's notice. There was always plenty to drink and good pot to smoke if you wanted it. They all worked hard, Paul himself working more than he ever had at his own company, but computer game marathons and spontaneous parties frequently punctuated the work. Chloe was particularly fond of old school Street Fighter style fighting games, and she routinely challenged all comers to bouts on the Playstation. Paul took her on again and again, but never came close to beating her.
He spent most of the time in the Server Room, working in Photoshop on one of the computers. Kurt had finally shown up again, and he'd brought a professional quality color laser printer with him. Apparently he had a friend who had a friend in the printing business, or something like that. Kurt stayed only a single night, most of which he spent doing laundry and eating noodles in his room. Then he was gone again the next morning, leaving the printer still in its box for Paul to try and figure out how to set it up. Bee offered to help.
"What's the deal with Kurt?" asked Paul, as the two of them finagled the bulky printer from the Styrofoam padding.
"What do you mean?" she replied.
"He's not around much, huh?"
"No, not lately. Sometimes. It just depends."
"Depends on what?"
"What he's doing," said Bee. "This comic con isn't the only thing going on right now. Kurt's in charge of another whole deal that some of the guys are working on."
"I had no idea," said Paul. Except for the night of the first party he'd never seen the whole group together in one place. He'd just assumed they were off living their own lives or holding down jobs or something. There'd been no hint of another con going on.
"Well, why would you?" asked Bee with surprise. "You're not really involved in it. Well, come to think of, actually you are a little bit."
"Huh?" asked Paul, confused.
"Well not really involved, but you know, you saw the opening move," Bee said.
"When was this?"
"The day you met Chloe. In that Mexican restaurant where she was arranging for the little mariachi salt shakers to be put on the tables."
"Oh yeah..." Paul said. He'd forgotten about Chloe's original excuse for being in the restaurant. She'd claimed to be doing market research, but in retrospect that had to have been a lie. "What were those things anyway?"
"They were bugs," Bee said. "The target eats there all the time or something and Kurt wanted to listen in on his table talk. So we had to figure a way to bug every table. I made them myself."
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"Wow," said Paul, seeing new depths to this crew and the lengths to which they'd go. "Did you make the mariachi men too?"
Bee laughed, "No, Kurt found those. He's actually pretty amazing that way. It's kind of what he does."
"What do you mean?"
"Kurt's a scrounger, you know? His whole deal is he knows how to find stuff. But he keeps his methods to himself. It's always a friend of a friend or something like that, but we never know for certain. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if he's just stealing the stuff."
"Really?"
"It could be. I don't have any reason to believe it, but come on. A guy that quiet? He can't have THAT many friends! He can almost always find any piece of equipment we need and he rarely takes more than a few days to get it."
"Huh. Interesting." They started uncoiling wires and digging around behind one of the computers, trying to find the right port. "I'm surprised you didn't have a high quality printer like this before. Seems like it would come in handy."
"Not as much as you'd think," said Bee. "We don't do much that's on paper, you know? The more digital it is the better, as far as we're concerned. It's much easier to cover your tracks that way, assuming you know what you're doing. Paper can theoretically
be traced, or you might leave a fingerprint on it or whatever."
"Fingerprints. I hadn't even thought of that. We should probably wear gloves whenever we're handling these fake comics, huh?"
"That's a good point," agreed Bee. "I'm sure Chloe thought of that - she always thinks of everything, which is part of why she rocks. But make sure you mention it to her. At the very least it'll make you look smart." She gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder. "Chloe always falls for the smart guys."
"Thanks," said Paul, surprised but pleased with this piece of romantic advice. "I will."
After they spent a few hours trying to find the right drivers to install on the machine, they hooked the printer up and it worked like a dream. Paul made a few test runs and they came out great. It occurred to him then that they should have a burn bag for everything they didn't use or that was left over - shredded papers could still be reassembled. Not so much with ashes. He'd mention that to Chloe as well. He wanted to show her he could hold his own. After all, this whole thing was his idea.
All the Crewmembers working on this job met the next day, even the elusive Kurt, who was pulling double duty. Paul had his samples with him. They crammed into Chloe's living room once again, and she presided over the assembly wearing a tight-fitting Supergirl t-shirt in honor of the occasion.
"Ok, kids, the game's afoot. We're about to spring into action here and I want to make sure everyone knows what's what." She turned her attention to Paul for a moment. "Just so you know, Paul, we always try and keep everyone in the Crew in the loop as much as possible. While everyone might not have much of a role in this one, they're all part of the team so they all have a right to know." This insight drove home the fact for Paul that he wasn't really a part of the group, otherwise they'd have told him what Kurt was up to. At least for the moment, he was still an outsider.
"We're about ready to go green on this comic counterfeiting thing," Chloe continued. "But there are a few Chapter 11
