For a man who makes his living ripping people off, I am a surprisingly easy mark. Unfortunately, I have the blood of a gambler—always doubling down when the odds are against me, never content to hold. I realize, too late, that I enjoy too much the rush I get when I peek at a fresh card. Each hit is enticing, full of delicious possibility.
Now I’m staring at a nine and a five in my own hand. The dealer is showing a six. The odds call for me to stand pat, but I can’t resist. I flick my finger on the green felt and ask for another card. The dealer, a middle-aged Malay woman, slips me a nine. Ouch. Twenty-three. I bust.
The dealer takes my chips. I look at my remaining pile, a sad forty bucks. An old man in a ten-gallon hat sits next to me. He’s smoking a big cigar. He says in a Texas twang, “Should stand on fourteen.”
“Twenty-twenty hindsight,” I say.
I ante two more red chips and play another hand. Now I’m looking at a five and a seven. The dealer shows a red jack. I vaguely recall I ought to hit whenever I have twelve, no matter what the dealer shows. Or is that a false memory? Am I just desperate for the rush I’ll feel when I turn over another card? I feel lost, unsure of everything.
I gesture to stand pat.
The dealer flips a card from the shoe and gives the old cowboy sitting next to me an eight. He has twenty. She deals herself a nine. Cowboy wins; I lose.
The cowboy says, “Should hit when you get twelve.”
“Really,” I say. “Maybe I just want to give Ed Napier more of my money.”
The cowboy rests his cigar on the edge of an ashtray. The mouth end is wet like a lollipop. “Lord knows he could use it.”
“That right?” I ante two more red chips. The dealer flips me a king and a seven. Seventeen is a pretty good hand, isn’t it? Especially when the dealer is showing a lousy five? But now I’m not so sure. Everything is hazy. Ever since I watched Jess descend in the elevator with Napier, to go on a private tour, I can’t focus on the cards right in front of my face.
“From what I hear,” the cowboy says. “Rumor is that building this place nearly sank him. Two billion dollars, all debt. My friend on the Gaming Commission says he doesn’t even have cash for the Tracadero.”
I look around the casino, at the thousands of people gathered around the slot machines, feeding quarters; at the crowds along the blackjack tables, two deep. “It doesn’t look like he’s hurting,” I say.
“This here is an illusion,” the cowboy says, simply.
Back to my hand. I’m staring at a seventeen. The dealer shows a losing five. The odds tell me I ought to stand pat. But fuck the odds. I flick my finger. The dealer hits me.
“Son,” the cowboy says, “you have got to be the worst gambler I ever did run across.”
The dealer flips me a four. She gives herself a ten and then another five. So there: My twenty-one beats her twenty.
The cowboy shakes his head. “Even crazy people get lucky,” he explains.
My winning streak at the blackjack table lasts exactly one hand. Does that, somewhere, qualify as a streak? When my chips disappear, I leave the table and wander through the casino. I glance at my watch. I’m amazed that it is already six o’clock in the evening. Have I been playing for four hours? It seems impossible.
Across the hall I see a bar, raised above the casino floor on a platform. I decide to get hammered. I walk toward the bar until, at twenty yards, I stop in my tracks. I am frozen by what I see. It is Toby, sitting on a bar stool, his crutches balanced rakishly beside him. He is leaning forward, talking casually—perhaps even intimately—with Lauren Napier.
My first thought is that my son is purposely trying to wreck this con, perhaps out of childish rebelliousness. Could he possibly be that selfish, that foolish, to jeopardize everything I am doing . . . for him?
I make a beeline for the bar and climb the stairs. I head for Toby and Lauren Napier. When I’m standing directly over them, they finally look up at me. I ignore her, and drill my gaze into Toby.
“What are you doing?”
He smiles. “Nothing. Just talking.” He says it dreamily, as if he’s telling his Pops to relax; he’s just having a conversation with his high school sweetheart under the bleachers.
I glance up at the ceiling, at one of the dozens of black glass half-globes—eyes in the sky—staring down at us. “You are being watched,” I tell my idiot son.
Lauren smiles. She says softly, “Calm down. You’re making a scene.”
“Don’t you understand? If your husband sees us talking . . .”
Lauren says, “He told me to talk to you.”
“He did?”
“He told me to spend time with each of you. To learn everything I can.”
“Why?” I ask. “Is he suspicious?”
“He’s careful,” she says. For a moment, she sounds proud of him. “Anyway, I was just chatting with Toby, who is a delightful young man, by the way. I knew he was your son the moment I saw him. Very good-looking.”
Toby blushes. It’s unclear if the compliment was meant for me or for him. And perhaps that’s the idea.
Lauren says to me, “Have a seat and calm down. I’ll buy you a drink. Like old times.”
I grunt and pull up a stool. I try to wedge it between Toby and Lauren, but their seats are too close, so I move it back a bit. Lauren gets the bartender’s attention and orders me a beer. She turns to me. “That’s what you drink, right? Beer?”
“Fine.”
While she’s settling the tab with the bartender, I stare at her. She’s still dressed in the white three-piece suit from earlier this morning. She looks neat and crisp, like a stack of elegant linens. With her hair swept up in a bun, I can see the nape of her neck, the shallow soft indentation, the wisps of loose blond hair. I forgot how attractive she is. Now I recall that afternoon in the church, when I first spoke to her—how for the next few hours I couldn’t get her out of my head. I remember that tight yellow T-shirt she wore to church, those perfect breasts, and those white teeth and their wicked smile. Now I picture her naked, and for some reason I think of her toenails, painted red, and imagine what they will look like as she wraps her legs around my waist.
I’m starting to have a change of plans. Instead of getting hammered, I want to get laid.
My beer comes. She says, “I was telling Toby. Ed can’t stop talking about you. He says your company is the most amazing thing he’s ever seen.”
“That right?” I say.
“So tell me the plan.”
“It’s best if we don’t.”
“That’s what your son said.”
I feel a pang of remorse that I doubted Toby. Perhaps he is more reliable than I thought.
Lauren shrugs. “So don’t tell me. As long as you intend to honor our deal . . .”
“Of course.”
“Then do whatever you want.”
Out of the corner of my eye I see Toby staring at her. His intensity is unnerving.
She looks at her watch. “I wonder if my husband is finished upstairs.”
“Finished?” I say.
“Fucking your partner, Jessica.”
I must look surprised, because she says: “Of course I know. After all, he asked me to leave the room.” She pauses. She rubs her chin with theatrical pensiveness. “How ever can I get back at him?”
She lets the question hang like a piñata.
I feel the stir of an erection. But so, too, it seems, does Toby, who is staring at Lauren Napier like a dog staring at a piece of mutton.
“Toby,” I say quietly, “I have an idea.” I take out my wallet, hand him two one-hundred-dollar bills. “Here’s some cash. Why don’t you go play some slots?”
He looks at my proffered bills, but does not take them. He says, “I was kind of hoping to stick around here.”
Interesting feeling, wanting to kick your own son’s ass. I admit that, in the rich tapestry that is my life, this is a thread I have not yet run across.
I say gently, “Toby,
son. What did we talk about?”
He looks at me quizzically.
I continue, still in a quiet gentle tone: “How you’re welcome to come along, but that you need to follow my lead. How I’m in charge, since you’re just learning. Right?”
Toby stares at me. I can’t read his face. His lips are pressed into a slight smile, but he does not seem very mirthful.
He glances at Lauren Napier. Her face is emotionless, placid. This must happen to her all the time—being fought over by fathers and sons.
“Toby,” I say again, softly.
Finally, he nods. He takes the two hundreds from my hand. He hops onto his good foot, grabs his crutches. “I’m gonna check out the casino,” he says.
I want to say, “Thanks,” and pat his shoulder in a comforting man-to-man gesture, but he hobbles away on his crutches so quickly that I do not have time to act.
I follow Lauren Napier through the casino to the elevator. She presses the call button, and we wait in silence for the elevator to arrive. It comes, and we allow six Japanese businessmen to exit. They ogle Lauren as they pass—she is a foot taller than them, a Nordic gaijin. I imagine in their country, they are quiet and polite, engineers or executives, and they would never so obviously stare at a beautiful woman. But Las Vegas lubricates us, makes us slip the bonds of our inhibitions, so that we do things we ought not.
Like this, for instance: I enter the elevator with Lauren Napier, and know that I am about to have sex with her. She presses the button marked 33. “My husband and I each have a separate floor,” she explains.
“Convenient.”
“For both of us,” she says.
On the thirty-third floor, we walk down a short hall. She slips a card key into the door. The electronic lock tumbles, and she pushes the door open with one finger.
We enter a modest suite, decorated in a severe Asian style. The bed is a raised futon on a tatami mat. Near the bed is a lacquered Chinese cabinet, black with red trim. There’s a black bureau with a single orchid in a pot: The flower has white petals with red speckles, like splattered blood. A plasma television hangs on the wall.
She closes the door and, without a word, kisses me. I have not kissed a woman in six years—not since before I went to prison. It is a strange feeling, to have her tongue in my mouth, and I am surprised by her aggressiveness, the way she probes my mouth and grips firmly the back of my head.
She unbuttons my shirt and scratches her nails through my chest hair. She leads me to the bed. We undress each other. We make love.
I was right about her toenails. They are painted red, like the shiny Red Hots you buy at the movies.
An hour later, when we are finished with each other, and our curiosity and boredom have been sated, I leave the thirty-third floor, and head back, alone, to my own suite.
As the elevator ascends, I think about Jess and Napier, and wonder how many times they have made love, and whether Jess truly enjoyed it, or if she was just playing her part in the con, doing me a favor.
In my bedroom, I stare at myself in the mirror, and I think about Jess. I am comforted by the thought that, in a con, it is sometimes necessary to give the mark some pussy, to rattle his brain and keep him off balance.
The next morning, we are driven back to the airport in our prom limo by one of Napier’s goons. We board Napier’s Citation, and take off back to Palo Alto.
The same platinum blond stewardess who brought us here is serving us again, offering more champagne and wine. None of us—not even Toby, amazingly—accepts her offer.
It is a quiet plane ride. Toby does not speak to me. I do not speak to Jess. Peter does not speak to anyone. Each of us sits in our own private row, staring out the window. By the time we touch down, it is a relief to get away from my team, if only for an hour, because the quiet was painful.
This is the problem with a Big Con, if you must know. It requires months of preparation. A Big Con cannot be run alone, and so it requires that you build a team of capable people. It requires that you work together, know each member of your team intimately, that you are able to predict each other’s every move. It requires, in short, that you trust each other.
But what kind of people can you ask to run a con with you? Quite simply, dishonest people. Which is the problem. How can you trust someone to watch your back, when you’re secretly afraid of what they do behind it?
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
When I get back to my apartment, I have two messages on my answering machine from Celia. She left the first one at three o’clock yesterday afternoon. “Call me,” the message says. The second message was left an hour ago—at eleven o’clock in the morning. On this one she sounds more concerned. “Kip, where are you? It’s Celia. Please call me.”
I pick up the phone and dial her number. She answers first ring.
“It’s me,” I say, “Kip.”
“Where’ve you been?” It sounds like an accusation.
“We’re divorced, Celia,” I say. “Remember?”
“I was worried. Where’s Toby?”
When the limo dropped us off at the apartment, Toby decided not to get out of the car with me, but instead wanted to spend time alone in Palo Alto. He asked the driver to take him downtown. He did not tell me when he would return to my apartment. Or if.
I decide not to go into these details. I say, “He’s in town. Just hanging out.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Fine,” I say. “What’s wrong?”
“I need to talk to you. Some men came by yesterday.”
“Men?”
“Two of them. They said they were police, and they flashed a badge, but now I’m not so sure.”
“What were their names?”
She hesitates. Then she admits: “I don’t remember.” She pauses. “I’m sorry, Kip.”
“It’s okay. What’d they want?”
“It was strange. They were asking about you. Lots of questions.”
I feel a chill. I try to keep my voice neutral. “What kind of questions?”
“Who you are, where you live, how you earn money. Very vague. That’s when I got suspicious.”
“So what’d you tell them?”
“Nothing. I swear. That we’re divorced. That I haven’t spoken to you in years. They didn’t seem to believe me.”
“That’s fine,” I say. “You did good. Thank you, Celia.”
“Kip, what’s going on? Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine.”
“Are you doing . . .” She stops, backs up. “Are you still working at the cleaners?”
“No,” I say.
“I see.” She sounds disappointed. “I thought you liked that kind of job.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I just needed to do something else. For a little while.”
“Is Toby involved?”
“No, of course not,” I lie.
“Kip,” she says, “be careful. Toby’s glad to have you back. He likes that you’re a regular guy again. So don’t . . . go anywhere.”
She means: Don’t get caught and get sent to Lompoc, idiot. I say, “I promise. Everything will be fine.”
“When he gets back, have him call.”
“I will,” I say.
We hang up.
I wander around my apartment, looking for signs that someone broke in and searched. Everything seems orderly, nothing out of place. I walk to the bedroom. I open a bureau drawer. My underwear sits in neat piles, undisturbed.
The apartment appears the way I left it. But searching an apartment without leaving a trace is not hard: most police—or criminals—know how to do it.
I wonder who visited Celia. The likely scenario is: Napier’s men. But it could also have been Sustevich, checking up on me. I have six million of his dollars, after all. Perhaps he saw me board a mysterious flight at the Palo Alto Airport and got nervous. Maybe his men have been watching me this whole time, keeping tabs on their investment like hawk-eyed venture capitalists. Maybe they’re wat
ching me right now.
I walk to the living room, wrench open my curtain. I look outside, past the rosebushes, and try to peer over the fence to the street. I see no cars idling, no stakeout teams hunched over their dashboard, no glint of binoculars from a nearby rooftop.
Maybe the people who questioned Celia really were police. Maybe they were checking up on me, because a little birdie told them that I am up to no good.
Which of course leads me to wonder: Who is the little birdie? And what is it singing?
It’s Wednesday, and time to let Ed Napier beat the stock market.
Toby came back last night, after vanishing for two days. He hobbled into my apartment at nine P.M., while I was trying to drink myself to sleep at the kitchen table, and he acted as if nothing had happened between us. “Hey, Dad,” he said. “Drinking alone is a warning sign.” He leaned his crutches on the wall and plopped down across from me. “So let me help you.” And so he did, and we polished off a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, another exemplary instance of father-son bonding. Who said I’m not a good dad?
When I asked Toby where he went for two days, he said vaguely, “The hotel, downtown. I just needed some time away.” I suppose I could have probed further, asking the name of the hotel so I could double-check his story, but what would be the point? What would I hope to discover? The main thing is that Toby is back, and he’s in good spirits, and whatever happened in Vegas is in the past, forgotten.
So he’s in the office this morning when Napier comes by. Napier arrives in his cherry-red Mercedes, maybe from a breakfast at Buck’s, or maybe having just rolled out of his goose-down- duvet-covered bed. He knocks on our glass door with unusual vigor.
When I answer, he says, “Good morning, Franklin. Ready to make some money?”
He’s in good spirits. Most people are, when they think they’re about to get something for nothing.
I lead him to the conference room. Jess has already set everything up: The screen is unfurled from the ceiling; the lights are dim; the projector on. The only thing Jess has not done is acknowledge me. We haven’t spoken since Vegas.
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