Con Ed

by Matthew Klein

  “Good enough,” she says. She walks to the door, opens it. “I gotta get this facial done. You wanna stick around?”

  “Not really.”

  “I don’t blame you,” she says. She gives me a peck on the cheek and disappears onto the movie set.

  You probably wonder if I’ve ever had a romantic relationship with Brittany Diamond, or with Jessica Smith. There was one evening, in Santa Barbara, thirteen years ago. The victim of our Honey Trap—the owner of a grocery chain in Nevada—lost his nerve and failed to show up for his romantic rendezvous with a “woman seeking an unencumbered relationship.” Alone in the hotel, suddenly unencumbered ourselves, with a warm breeze rustling the palm fronds outside our window, we made love in the cool sheets and fell asleep in each other’s arms. In the morning, I woke with a dull sadness in the pit of my stomach, and I knew that I had made a terrible mistake—that I had ruined everything, by treating the most important woman in my life like a one-night stand. She must have felt the same way. For, even though we never discussed what happened that night—never spoke a word about it—we never had sex again. It must have been a mutual decision.

  Now that is the sign of an enduring, deep love—don’t you think? To both have exactly the same thought, and to act upon it, without exchanging a single word? What else, besides love, can you call it?

  But of course you have to wonder about the phone call.

  You haven’t heard from a woman in four years, and then suddenly, when you’re planning a con, she calls to say hello. What are the chances of that?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I’ve tried to radically change my life three times, and have failed three times, and so maybe it’s time to stop trying.

  First try: When I was twenty, I told my father that I would no longer follow his path; that I was tired of cheating and swindling, of looking over my shoulder, afraid of being caught. So I enrolled in City University of New York, Queens College, to become a lawyer, because it seemed like the people who were hounding me were having a lot more fun than the person being hounded.

  My father reacted with quiet fury, as if I had insulted everything he had ever achieved, and in a way he was right. He stopped speaking to me, but he still had the last word: He started to die, as if to spite me. Sallow, smelly, bedridden, he lay in his apartment for the last nine months of his life, leaving my mother to find a way to pay the debts he had racked up—the hopeless bills owed to dangerous men. Eventually I withdrew from college and went back to the streets: Pigeon Drops, Change Games, Honey Traps—until I finally paid what my mother and father owed. Within six months, they were both dead, and by then it was too late: I never went back to school, never tried again. My father won, smiling from the grave.

  Second try: When I was forty-five, and finally self-confident—twenty years too late. I looked around at the successful men I knew—straight men, who never broke the law, who never feared the flash of red and blue lights in their rearview mirror—and I realized that I was smarter than every one of them. I decided I could have what they had: dull lives, suburban tracts in West L.A., pools in the backyard, two cars in the garage. If those men—plodding and unambitious—could succeed at business—legitimate business—then so, too, could I.

  So I sat down, and I tried to think of the perfect business for an honest man: something that allowed me to profit from other people’s imperfections—their laziness, their vanity, their lack of self-control.

  The Diet Deck was born.

  Imagine being paid $49.95 for a deck of playing cards that costs eighty-nine cents to buy from Shunxin Trading Company, Taipei, Taiwan! Then imagine being able to sell one of these decks to every American that is overweight, but too lazy, or too dumb, to do the obvious: eat less, exercise more.

  That was the Diet Deck. In my first three months, I sold twelve thousand decks, which netted a profit of nearly $480,000. I never looked back.

  Soon the pool came, and the suburban house, and the two cars in the garage. I could send Toby to a private day school in Los Angeles. My marriage with Celia grew stronger. My life, finally, was right.

  So how did I blow it? This is the hardest thing to explain to people: that I never meant to cheat; that I wanted, more than anything, to succeed legitimately—but in the end, I was betrayed by a powerful and unrelenting force: my own nature.

  It started simply enough. I discovered that I could sell Diet Decks by advertising through late-night television infomercials. I began to buy half-hour blocks of time in local UHF graveyards: 3:00 A.M. to 3:30 A.M. in Muncie, Indiana; 2:45 A.M. to 3:15 A.M. in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It was like magic. I had never before experienced the Euclidian perfection of capitalism, where every one dollar I spent advertising on late-night TV yielded exactly four dollars of profit. The math was unerring, the logic impeccable: Of course, I had to advertise more! And faster! Each block of television time meant another car, or a new addition to my house, or another year for Toby at St. Alban’s Prep.

  But I soon discovered there was a flaw in my perfect logic. I had to lay out money before I saw any profit. Television stations wanted cash, up front, three months before they would let me broadcast my advertisements. Mr. Jun Lee An from Shunxin Trading Company also wanted my cash two months before he agreed to stamp out ten thousand packs of playing cards with photographs of steaks and carrots.

  It was a dilemma: Every block of television time I purchased meant fifteen thousand dollars of profit, but I needed to lay out thirty thousand dollars—at least temporarily—before I could claim it. That’s when I hit upon my most brilliant idea yet: I would allow other enterprising businessmen to invest in my venture, alongside me.

  So I began to solicit investments from neighbors and friends. They could come in as “partners”—investing twenty thousand dollars to buy a block of advertising time. In return, they would receive a percentage of every Diet Deck sold during their advertisement. It was good deal for everyone: the bald accountant who lived next door to me could earn six thousand dollars on a twenty-thousand-dollar investment, in just over three months time. In the meantime, freed from my cash flow problems, I could buy hundreds of hours of television time around the country, and then manufacture tens of thousands of decks of cards. The money kept rolling in.

  In fact, the business of selling television advertising partnerships to wealthy partners soon superseded my business of selling playing cards to fatties. And what a business it was: The economics were so appealing that everyone wanted to invest, and soon I was receiving ten checks per month from eager partners—each check for twenty thousand dollars or more.

  And of course I wanted to deliver on the promises I had made to my partners. That was the only decent thing to do. So the checks I received in March helped me repay the partners who invested in February. And the checks I received in February helped me repay the partners who invested in January.

  Which meant: The problems began in June. Soon it was hard to find enough new investors to pay back the old ones. And the business of selling playing cards to fatties had plateaued. For some reason, the fatties never could keep the weight off, even if they dealt themselves a full house of three carrots and two broccolis.

  You have to understand: I never tried to rip off anyone. If anything, I risked everything in order to deliver on my promises. But soon I began to delay paying back my investors. To save cash, I stopped shipping Diet Decks to fatties. From that point, it was only a matter of time. I was arrested on my way home from the Marina Del Rey Mercedes dealership. I had wanted to buy Toby a present for his eighteenth birthday—something sporty, to make him understand that I loved him. Instead, I went to prison, and he and Celia celebrated alone.

  The third time I tried to change my life: when I took the job at Economy Cleaners, and tried again to go legit, for ten dollars an hour, plus tips.

  It hasn’t worked out so well. Not yet, anyway.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  On Thursday I drive north forty miles into Napa Valley. It’s ten degrees warm
er here than the Peninsula, so on this June day I roll my windows down and open the first two buttons of my golf shirt. Route 29 empties into the city of Napa, which—despite the romance of its name and association with Wine Country—is an ugly blue-collar town with three trailer parks stacked high with shiny aluminum Algonquins. Half–labor pool, half–trucking terminus, the city of Napa sits at the mouth of the valley that bears its name; it’s a place where truckers on their way south pull over to have lunch, their rigs loaded with live chickens from Petaluma.

  Napa is home to the people who power the wine industry—those who do the actual work: the agricultural laborers, the vintners, the pool-cleaners, the waiters. A few miles further up the road, in the valley itself, you find the estates and wineries, where rich cardiologists and computer executives retire when they decide they’ve had enough of cruel city life and can instead find happiness by bottling wine with their family’s newly designed crest upon it.

  I take Route 29 past the city and leave the trailer parks behind. I pull my Honda off the asphalt onto a dirt road where few cardiologists venture. It takes me up into the mountains. I ascend Mount Vedeer along a dusty hairpin road. Big redwoods block the sun so that light is forced to poke through the canopy like insistent golden fingers.

  When I reach the plateau, the sun returns. It takes me a moment to realize that I am driving along the lip of an extinct volcano. The crater is filled with soil, on which grow hundreds of acres of grapes arranged in rows of neat white trellises.

  I pull up to an old stone farmhouse. A mangy dog lies in the dusty road, trying to squeeze his fat haunches into a circle of shade from an acacia tree. I get out of the car and close the door. The dog looks at me. After a moment he decides I can do nothing to solve his shade problem, so he lowers his head and closes his eyes.

  “Elihu?” I call out.

  From the farmhouse, footsteps. “Coming!” An old man appears in the doorway. He’s dressed in a linen shirt, unbuttoned to the navel, jeans, work boots. His has two gray tufts of hair, one on each side of his head, remnants of a comb-over, but now hanging limply—too long—like deflated peaks from a jester’s hat.

  “Kip?” he says. He opens his arms, walks toward me. We hug. He slaps my back. He smells of sweat, oak, and wine.

  He pulls back, looks at me. “My God,” he says. It’s unclear if this is an exclamation of thanks or sadness. “Look at you.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “I was just checking the barrels. Come in.”

  He leads me into the farmhouse. It’s cool and dark. The walls are lined with racks of oak barrels. The room has the telltale odor of maltic acid, sweet and rotten.

  “You want a taste?” he says. “I’m proud of this one.” He grabs a wine thief—a long hollow glass tube—from a rack on the wall, and plunges it into a hole at the crest of a barrel. He covers the top of the tube with his finger and withdraws it. It’s filled with ruby liquid. He holds the wine thief over a Dixie cup, releases his thumb. The wine pours into the cup. He hands it to me.

  “Bottoms up,” he says.

  I drink. It tastes like grape juice, with an acid kick.

  “What do you think?” he says.

  “Not bad,” I say.

  “Like grape juice, right?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Yeah,” he says, suddenly weary. “I’m not very good at this.”

  “It’s not bad,” I say again.

  “Maybe in a few years,” he says. “Age makes everything better.”

  I hand him my Dixie cup. He tosses it into a trash can. I have no desire to argue, even though there is much evidence to the contrary.

  We eat lunch outside, in the oppressive heat, on a picnic table beside the farmhouse. The dog finds his way over, and deposits himself with a grunt by our feet, under the table. Elihu serves: crusty French bread, soft Brie, olives, prosciutto, and a bottle of wine. He pours me a glass and raises his glass. “Cheers,” he says.

  “L’Chaim,” I say.

  I taste the wine. “Now, this is good,” I say, hoping to compliment him.

  “It’s from that motherfucker on the other side of the mountain. The computer guy.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “His wine’s good,” Elihu offers, finally. “Maybe someday.”

  “Something to aim for.”

  Elihu makes a pistol with his fingers. “Something to aim for, all right.”

  We eat in silence. Finally Elihu says, “So you’re a free man.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I would have visited you,” Elihu said. “But what a trip.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’m an old man now.” He means it as an apology, for not seeing me in Lompoc.

  I look into his rheumy eyes. “I know.”

  Elihu Katz was a friend of my father’s. After my father died, Elihu watched over me, helping me set up cons, guarding my back, imparting valuable lessons. Once, when I stupidly conned the wrong man—a heavyweight political contributor to the San Francisco DA—Elihu cashed in a chip he had been hoarding for himself—a set of photographs of the DA with a young boy. Elihu saved me from certain jail, and I owe him everything that I have. Which is now, admittedly, not much.

  Elihu retired fifteen years ago, retreating to the top of Mount Vedeer, to live off his earnings and to realize his dream of making wine. He told me then that times were changing, that the days of big cons were dwindling, that marks were getting too smart, police too aggressive, other criminals too dangerous. He wanted to quit while it was still his choice.

  But he has kept his fingers in several pies, staying close to the groups in San Jose and San Francisco, sharing information, acting as a dignified elder statesman and a clearinghouse for the world of confidence men.

  “So,” Elihu says, “what can I do for you?”

  “Toby’s in trouble,” I say.

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “He owes money. To the Russians. You know Sustevich? The Professor?”

  “A gonif,” Elihu says. He bites into his bread, tears off a piece.

  “So I’m taking a job.”

  “Who’s the mark?”

  “Edward Napier.”

  “From Vegas?”

  “He spends time here now.”

  “How much?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Sustevich is in on it?” he asks.

  I nod. “Something like that.”

  Elihu thinks about what I’ve told him. He leans over, takes a piece of prosciutto, piles it on a slice of bread. He takes a bite. “You know you’ll get caught,” he says, finally.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Too many sharks. Sustevich, Napier. Between them, too much juice. Why not rip off the president of the United States while you’re at it?”

  I act surprised, as if I hadn’t thought of that. “Wait,” I say, “is he in town?”

  “Even if you take the money, they’ll find you.”

  “I’ll use a button. Blow them off.”

  “They’re too smart.”

  “It can be done.”

  “Anything can be done,” Elihu admits. “The question is whether you want to be the one to do it.”

  “I don’t have a choice.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “Toby needs me.”

  “Toby is a grown man. He makes his own choices.”

  “I can’t let him get killed.”

  “Put him on a train. Have him disappear for a few months.”

  “You don’t know Toby,” I say.

  Elihu shrugs, as if to say that he has no desire to, either. “What do you want from me?”

  “Some names. Bit players. Guys for the button. They have to be convincing. FBI types.”

  Elihu says, “I can help, of course.” He spits an olive pit into his hand, tosses it under the picnic table. The dog opens his eyes, hopefully. When he sees it’s a pit, he shuts them.

  Elihu says, as if he’s continuing a conv
ersation we’ve been having for twenty minutes, “Napier’s been in the news a lot lately. That casino he’s trying to buy.”

  “The Tracadero,” I say.

  “It’s all people can talk about out there. ‘Will Napier buy it?’ ‘Does he have the cash?’” He imitates the voices of Mr. and Mrs. White Bread, from Lansing, Michigan. “‘Gee, I hope he wins the bidding war.’ ‘Gee, those Europeans are outbidding him by twenty-five percent!’ You know what I say? Who cares? Who cares if one rich guy owns a casino, or another rich guy owns it? You’re going to walk in and lose your money, no matter whose name is on the door.”

  “People love businessmen,” I say. “They’re the new celebrities.”

  “What happened to the old celebrities?”

  “They’re still around. They’re the new businessmen.”

  “You know what it sounds like to me? Napier’s overextended. He got himself into a bidding war, and he doesn’t have the cash. Probably needs to raise some, fast.” He gives me a sidelong glance. “But you figured that out already, didn’t you?”

  I shrug.

  “Always a step ahead.” He pauses. He spits an olive pit into his hand, tosses it. “So be it. I’ll get you some names, for your button.”

  “Thanks, Elihu,” I say. “And one more thing.”

  He stares at me.

  “When the time comes, I’ll need to borrow some money.”

  “How much?”

  “It’s only for five days. You’d be factoring. I’ll already have the money in hand, just not liquid.”

  “How much?”

  “Fifteen million. In diamonds.”

  “Jesus Christ, Kip, you’re killing me.”

  “You’d get the usual. Five percent per day.”

  “What the hell are you going to do with fifteen million dollars’ worth of diamonds?”

  “I’m going to repay the money I owe to the guy I’m stealing from.”

  He shakes his head. He thinks about it. “You know you’re going to get caught, don’t you?”