Con Ed

by Matthew Klein

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I just need some advice. That’s all. Maybe you can point me in the right direction. About technical stuff.”

  As I expected, the hint that I am planning something illegal titillates Peter. He has spent his entire life in front of a computer screen, writing code. The most illegal thing he ever did was a bong the size of a saxophone. I am his single tenuous link to a dark and exciting world. I suspect he brings up my name every opportunity he has to impress a woman. “You know that dude from the Diet Deck?” he says to his quarries at those depressing bars he frequents. “The one who went to prison? I worked for him for a couple of years. We were practically partners.”

  “We can meet,” Peter says to me, a bit too excited.

  “You sure?” I say. “I know you started another gig . . .”

  “Well it’s just a meeting, right? You’re just looking for some advice.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How about Zott’s,” Peter says, “in about an hour?”

  Zott’s is a bar that lies between Palo Alto and nowhere. That’s a literal fact. At the edge of the city is a band of unincorporated land, neither Palo Alto nor nearby Portola Valley. It’s a strip of grassland that runs along the foothills, an area quilted with state-mandated open-space preserves. Building anything, even a trail or a fence, is prohibited. The few structures that exist were grandfathered in when the fanatical green laws arrived from Sacramento twenty years ago. There is no building other than Zott’s for hundreds of yards in any direction.

  Zott’s was originally a stable, where horses slept and crapped. During Prohibition, it was bought by the Zoteratelli family, and it became a saloon that served Stanford students. In an age when new Italian immigrants were considered dirty and dangerous, their language hopelessly exotic, the white-bread sons of the railroad barons who attended Stanford shortened the name of their new refuge to Zott’s. For generations the name has remained, and so, too, has the bar, almost exactly the way it was in the 1880s. There’s still a trough and hitches for your horse near the entrance. Inside, the concrete floor is covered with leaves and twigs and mud.

  Tonight the bar is filled with Stanford types, packed into the booths, watching a Giants baseball game on the television behind the bar. I see Peter Room in the corner, waiting for me. He has long red hair, past the middle of his back, gathered in a loose ponytail. He has freckles, big white buck teeth like a rabbit. He wears a black T-shirt that says, “Code Warrior.” The moment I see him, I think he is perfect for the part. You can’t make guys like him up.

  He sees me and waves. I sit down in the booth across from him. We knock knees.

  “Kip, man,” he says. I see he already has a beer.

  “Can I get you a beer?” I ask anyway, secretly relieved that I may be able to get through this meeting buying only one drink. I have fifteen dollars in my wallet, which needs to last until I can get the new bank account set up and funded with Sustevich’s start-up capital.

  “Nah, got one.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Hang on.”

  I leave the table, go to the bar. At Zott’s, the bartender is also a short-order cook. There are beer taps on one side of him, a griddle with hamburgers frying on the other. He’s a middle-aged man who wears a grease-stained apron over a fat belly. The stains on the apron are in the shape of swiped fingers. I have a suspicion that the apron is not removed during trips to the bathroom.

  Nevertheless suddenly I’m starving. I haven’t eaten since this morning. And now that I don’t have to buy Peter anything, I feel flush. So I order a cheeseburger and an Anchor Steam.

  “You want fries with that?” the bartender asks.

  “They cost extra?”

  “Fifty cents.”

  “No thanks.”

  I return to Peter with my beer and a tab of paper that serves as a claim for my burger. I see him eyeing the paper. “Did you want a burger?” I ask.

  “I guess not.”

  “Anyway,” I say, changing the subject, “thanks for meeting me.”

  “Sure. What’s going on? How’ve you been? Since . . . you know.”

  Peter means prison.

  “Hanging in there.”

  “How’s Mr.Vitamin? I love that idea.”

  “It’s good,” I say. I think about it. “Well, not as good as I hoped.”

  “You selling anything?”

  “A couple bottles a day.”

  “That’s a start,” Peter offers.

  I think that it is a start, all right, on the path back to Lompoc. “Yeah,” I say. “I guess.”

  “I admire what you’re doing. Starting over.”

  When I met Peter six years ago, he was a kid finishing his degree at Stanford, living in a dormitory with a paper globe over his light bulb, and I was a successful entrepreneur pulling in a million a month and living in a four-bedroom Tudor in Professorville. It was my job to encourage him. Now our roles have reversed. He can command a six-figure income any day he chooses to work. My life consists of trying to ignore BO when I am handed a well-worn suit.

  “It’s hard to start over,” I say. I want to make some kind of effort to explain why I’m about to launch another con. I want to explain how you can’t escape your fate, how your own nature is something you can’t choose, how your entire life is already laid out for you the day you appear on the earth. But the best I can muster is: “Everywhere you go, there you are.”

  It sounds like lame pot-inspired philosophy. Which is something Peter is familiar with. “Yeah,” he says, “tell me about it.”

  “Anyway, that’s why I want to talk. I need some advice.”

  “Sure.”

  “First, I need your word. That what we talk about here, stays here.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Peter tries to keep his face nonchalant, but he can’t help telegraphing his excitement: He leans forward in his seat; the skin around his eyes tightens.

  “I’m thinking of trying to get some money.”

  “Money’s good,” Peter says.

  “No, I mean, I’m going to take it. Take someone’s money.”

  “Is this legal?”

  I make a face at Peter. He quickly realizes the stupidity of his question. He asks: “Whose?”

  “A very bad man.”

  “Who?”

  I ignore his question. “So I’m trying to find some people who can help. I was thinking that, in your line of work, you probably know some guys, who know some guys.”

  “What kind of guys?”

  “Computer guys. People who can talk about security . . . issues.”

  “You mean hackers?”

  “Well, here’s the thing. They don’t actually have to hack. They don’t have to do anything illegal. They just need to pretend. They have to talk a good game. They have to act like hackers. It’s more of an acting role than anything else.”

  This is the critical part of my story: explaining to Peter that his piece of the job does not involve anything obviously illegal. Guys like Peter still talk to their parents once or twice a week. You need to reassure these men that they will never have to explain anything unsavory, like, for example, why they chose to join an illegal scheme that will send them to prison. So far, everything I have laid out to Peter can be explained away in one apologetic phone call to the folks. “Mom and Dad, he told me I wasn’t doing anything against the law. He said it was just an acting job.”

  Peter says, “What kind of thing are we talking about? Is this like the Diet Deck?”

  “Oh no,” I say quickly. I want to get the Diet Deck out of Peter’s mind. He associates it—quite rightly, unfortunately—with my five-year stint in Southern California. “It’s nothing like Diet Deck. Diet Deck was a horrible idea.”

  The funny thing about the Diet Deck is that I never meant for it to be a con. I was simply trying to run a legitimate business. It was my desire to succeed at a straight enterprise, no matter what, that caused my downfall. Running a con is m
uch easier—less risky. You go into a con with a plan—an exact and unchangeable strategy—and with an escape route. You stick to it. Doing things by the book is harder. There is always temptation: to do more, to pay less, to stretch the rules. Without a plan, human nature takes over.

  This is all too much to explain to Peter. I say instead, “The Diet Deck was a mistake, because it was an ongoing enterprise. This job I’m talking about is going to last for six weeks, tops. Then it’s done. It’ll disappear before anyone knows about it.”

  “I see,” Peter says. He thinks about it. “I guess I know some guys.”

  “They have to be good guys. Trustworthy. Of course the money will be good, so it’ll be worth their while.”

  “How much money?” Peter says, trying to sound uninterested.

  “For the computer guys? I don’t know. Maybe a million dollars.”

  “A million dollars?”

  I pretend to misunderstand—that he’s complaining about the small payoff. “Well it’s only for a month’s work.”

  “I see,” Peter says.

  I look up and see the bartender with the greasy apron standing over our table. He’s holding a paper plate with a cheeseburger. “Here you go,” he says. He slides it onto the table.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  He gestures to Peter’s nearly empty beer glass. “You want another?”

  Peter is still thinking about the million dollars, and the chance to get involved in my exciting world—with little risk to himself. He’s slow to answer.

  I know I have another five dollars in my wallet; and that it’s looking increasingly likely that I’ll get Peter to bite. So I can afford to be generous. I say, “Yeah, bring him another. I’ll treat.”

  The bartender nods and leaves.

  “Anyway,” I say to Peter, “I don’t want to pressure you for any names or phone numbers right now. Maybe you can go home and think about it. Ask around. Try not to give too many details about the job, though.”

  “Okay.”

  He’s staring down at the surface of our table. He is wrestling with conflicting emotions. He’s hurt that I did not ask him personally to participate; he’s excited at the prospect of being part of my venture; he’s shy about volunteering; he’s frightened about the consequences.

  I pounce. “Too bad you can’t do it,” I say. I reach for my burger and take a bite. Through a mouthful I say, “You would have been perfect.”

  “Why can’t I do it?”

  “You have another gig. You just told me.”

  “Yeah, but,” he says. He thinks about it. “I’ve barely started there. I could leave.”

  “Besides, Peter, you don’t want to get involved in these kinds of things.” I gesture with my chin at his shirt. “You’re a code warrior.”

  “Yeah, but I can do it.”

  “The thing is,” I say, cruelly, “the job isn’t only acting. The person needs to write real code. I’ll need some pretty impressive software. It has to be built fast. We have to fool some smart people. It would require a combination of skills. Acting, coding, thinking on your feet.”

  “I can do that, Kip,” he says. “I really can.”

  “I don’t know, Peter. You weren’t exactly who I had in mind.”

  “I’ll do it,” he says, again.

  “You know, there’s a chance . . .” I say. I leave the sentence unfinished. But he knows what I mean.

  “That something goes wrong.” He nods. “I know.”

  “There is an element of danger.”

  A bone to my conscience. In my world, those six words qualify as Full Disclosure.

  “I know,” Peter says.

  “But it is a million-dollar payday for you,” I say. “Or whoever does it.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “Once you’re in, you’re in. If you back out, you’ll be hurting a lot of people. Including myself.”

  “I’m in.”

  “You understand what you’re signing up for?”

  For the first time he smiles. He’s relieved that I’m allowing him to participate. “Not really,” he admits.

  I admire his honesty. I’ll have to work on that—knock it out of him.

  “All right,” I say, “you’re in.”

  At that moment, his beer arrives, and my last five dollars leave my wallet.

  At ten o’clock I finally reach Toby and Celia. I’m in my apartment, watching an old Cheers rerun on TV, which—because of the missing Volume button on the remote control and my own laziness—is playing too loudly. I’ve been lying on the couch, dialing Celia’s number once every ten minutes, hanging up when I hear her announce that she and Carl are not home, so would I please leave a message.

  I’m perplexed about where they can be. If she is caring for Toby, who has a broken leg and ribs, she can’t be very far. And yet she hasn’t picked up the telephone for the past eight hours.

  Finally, on my tenth call, she answers. “Hello?” she says.

  “Hi, it’s me.” Suddenly I realize that the eight years since our marriage means further introduction is required. I add, “Kip.”

  “Have you been calling here?”

  “No.”

  “I’m looking at my Caller ID. You’ve called . . .” She pauses. I picture her leaning over, peering at the satanic Caller ID box. “Jesus, Kip. Nine times.”

  I damn modern technology, which—in its quest to perfect mankind—has eliminated cowardice and dissembly as viable strategies. I decide to go on the offensive. “Where have you been?”

  “Nowhere. Here. Resting.”

  “Is he there?”

  “Who?”

  When I asked, even I wasn’t sure who I meant: Toby or Carl. I say, “Toby?”

  “Of course. They have him on Percodan. He’s zonked.”

  I think that prescribing Percodan to Toby is like asking Willie Sutton to guard your safe-deposit key. A good idea on a conceptual level, bad in execution.

  On my television, Sam—the ex-alcoholic, sex-obsessed bartender—delivers a smarmy punch line. All of Middle America laughs knowingly.

  Celia says, annoyed, “What’s that noise? Is that your television?”

  “Volume button,” I explain. “Missing.”

  “It’s so loud.”

  “Yeah, I should fix it,” I say. I feel like adding, If only my wife hadn’t bankrupted me. Instead I say, “Pretty busy, I guess.”

  “What do you want, Kip?”

  “I just wanted to talk to Toby.”

  “He’s sleeping. Should I wake him?”

  “No. I guess not.” I think about it. “I’m calling to see if he wants to stay here. While he recovers.”

  “You want him?” She sounds surprised.

  “Sure I do,” I say. I think. Maybe. “I’ll sleep on the couch. He can have my bed.”

  Despite the opportunity, Celia does not volunteer information about the current sleeping arrangements in her stately San Jose McMansion. Does Toby have his own bedroom next door to his mother and Carl?

  “Well,” Celia says, “ask him yourself. He’ll call you when he gets up.”

  “Fine.”

  “I’m going to sleep now,” Celia says. She is not sharing intimacy. She is warning me not to wake her.

  “All right.”

  I think she is about to hang up. Then she says something unexpected. “It was good to see you yesterday. It’s been a while.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Too bad, the circumstances.”

  “But he’ll be okay.”

  I say, “Yeah.”

  A long silence as we both think about our son.

  “Good night, Kip,” Celia says.

  “Good night,” I say.

  When I hang up, I’m surprised that for a brief moment I miss her.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Now let me tell you how to finish your Bank Examiner Scam.

  If you’ve followed my instructions so far, you’ve cleared about ten Gs from an elderly victim, by calling him on the telepho
ne and asking his help in catching that crooked bank teller.

  Now you have the opportunity to fleece the victim one final time. Here’s how.

  First, wait a few months. This gives the victim time to mull over the crime. After the two bank examiners, Mr. Marley and Mr. Smith, vanish off the face of the earth, the victim will realize he has been conned. He may even go to the police, who will nod sympathetically while they take his statement, and then will bury the case in a dusty filing cabinet. (No violence + no hope of finding the crook = no investigation.)

  But chances are the victim won’t even report the crime. That’s a benefit of running cons. Victims seldom tell anyone that they’ve been ripped off. In your case, the victim feels ashamed. How many times has the old man heard from his children that he’s too trusting, that he’s no longer responsible with his money, that he’s an easy mark? This will only confirm his children’s fears. Perhaps, if the kids learn how the old man was fleeced, they will declare him incompetent, put him in a nursing home, and take away his financial independence.

  Whether he reports the crime or not, the old man will be miserable. How could he be so dumb? He’ll obsess about the scam. He’ll start dreaming about revenge. If only there’s some way I can get back at those bastards! he’ll think. If only the police would catch them . . .

  That’s when you come in. Best time: about two months after the initial con. Now you will run a Badge-Play Comeback. Here’s how it works.

  There’s a knock at the victim’s door. It’s a new face—someone he hasn’t seen before. He introduces himself as Detective Thomas. To prove he’s a policeman, he flashes a big shiny gold badge.

  He says he has great news for Mr. Jones; can he come in?

  Inside the apartment, he reveals the good news. “We caught the two men who scammed you. They’re in jail right now. Not only that, but they still have your money, so we’ll be returning it to you in a matter of days.”

  Your victim’s head spins. He can’t believe his good luck. He’s so happy, he barely even listens to what Detective Thomas says next.

  “There’s only one problem,” Detective Thomas says. “The money they took from you, and the money you withdrew from the bank, is counterfeit. Apparently this is a fairly sophisticated operation they’re running. But don’t worry. The bank has promised to make good on your loss, so there’s no problem.”