Con Ed

by Matthew Klein

  Bad news, when you start talking to yourself. A warning sign.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Instead of going to the office, Toby and I drive into the city. We head downtown, to Montgomery Street, an impossibly narrow road that serves as both the eastern border of Chinatown, and the main artery of the financial district. It’s studded with dim sum shops and orange traffic cones. Steam rises from the manholes. Cars double- and triple-park, sometimes up on the sidewalk, sometimes in the middle of the road. The street is both impassable and unavoidable. To get anywhere downtown, you need to drive it, but you do so at your peril, and curse yourself for trying.

  I honk and weave, take Montgomery to Sansome. Our destination is the Transamerica Pyramid, the iconic triangle at the center of the San Francisco skyline. We park underground, sign in at the security desk, and are handed paper visitor’s badges we must pin to our shirts. We go to the eighteenth floor, to the office of Rifkind, Stuart, Kellogg, a law firm I have selected on the advice of Elihu Katz.

  In the Rifkind Stuart waiting room, Jessica is already there, waiting for us. “I gave our name,” she says. “Peter’s not here yet.”

  “No,” I say. “Peter’s not coming.”

  She nods, as if she expected this answer. I go to the reception desk, speak to the hot brunette who looks like she just stepped out of a Playboy shoot. Lawyers always have the best-looking receptionists. Never got any growing up, during the long dry years of high school, college, then law school. Finally, twenty years after starting, they make partner and it all pays off. In the form of a raven-haired girl with collagen lips and nice breasts. “I’m Kip Largo,” I say, “and this is Toby. My party is here now.”

  The brunette presses a button on her PBX. “Harris, Mr. Largo’s party is here.”

  She removes her earpiece, stands. “This way, please.”

  She leads us down a short hall. I see Toby ogling her ass as she walks. She takes us to a conference room, all windows, with spectacular views of the Bay eighteen floors below.

  “Can I get you some water?” she says.

  I decline quickly on behalf of my team. What I want to avoid is Toby flirting stupidly, embarrassing me.

  “Mr. Stuart will be right with you,” she says. She leaves.

  “Hot,” Toby says, after she goes.

  “Sit down,” I say to Toby.

  Harris Stuart shows up two minutes later. Despite his grand and WASP name, he’s short and bald, Slavic-looking, shaped like a Russian Matryoshka doll—big round bottom leading up to a glossy tapered head.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Largo,” he says. He shakes my hand. “Elihu Katz is a good friend of this firm.”

  Maybe that’s code for something, maybe not. Elihu Katz has been around a long time. In his years running his own big store, conning both men of great repute and complete unknowns, he has used lawyers for all sorts of things: both to make trouble and to get out from under it. What I know about Rifkind, Stuart, Kellogg is what Elihu told me: that they will be very agreeable about whatever I request, no matter how unusual it seems.

  We sit down at the table: me, Toby, and Jess on one side, Mr. Harris Stuart on the other.

  “I know your time is valuable,” Stuart says, “so I won’t waste it. I’ve looked into your request. There is a shell company available, and it’s pretty clean. The owner is amenable. We could do the deal quickly—two hundred and fifty thousand, plus legal. I’d say less than three hundred thousand, all in.”

  “That sounds fine. What is it?”

  “It’s a company called Halifax Protein Products.”

  “Protein products?”

  “They made fish oil,” Stuart explains. “They used to harvest cod liver oil, fatty acids from fresh innards, that kind of thing.”

  “Can you make a living doing that?”

  “Apparently not,” Stuart says. “They’ve been defunct for three years. No operations since ninety-six. But they’ve kept their filings in order, and they’re still listed on the Nasdaq OTC. No trading volume to speak of.”

  “Sounds perfect. Can you get it done today?”

  “Before lunch.”

  “What a country,” I say, half-joking.

  But Harris Stuart nods seriously. “Yes,” he says. “It really is.”

  In twenty-four hours, I will be the majority owner of a company called Halifax Protein Products, which trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol HPPR. Later today, when I sign a few papers and have Rifkind, Stuart, Kellogg file them with the State of Delaware secretary of state and with Nasdaq, we will issue ten million new shares of stock.

  The value of each share of stock ought to be approximately zero dollars, since HPPR no longer engages in any kind of business and serves no customers. The cod liver oil business never panned out the way the company founders (company flounders?) expected.

  Halifax Protein Products is what is known as a shell company—a paper entity that does nothing, except exist. It has value only because the previous owners of the company continued to file the necessary paperwork to keep their company listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

  You may ask why anyone would want to buy stock in a company that used to harvest cod liver oil, but which now does nothing. Surely this would be a foolish investment, ranking up there with investments in Internet companies that lose one dollar for every fifty cents’ worth of sales, or companies that give away services for free in the hope of making money sometime in the distant future. And indeed it would be a foolish investment. Unless, of course, you knew that HPPR was about to rise from ten cents per share to ten dollars per share.

  If you knew that was about to happen, then you’d want to own a lot of shares of HPPR. You’d try to buy as many as you could. As many as you could afford.

  It was important for Toby and Jess to be at the meeting with Harris Stuart. That, too, is part of the con. Part of what I’ve been planning since day one.

  I suppose I got the idea from the Dot Com Kid in the Blowfish bar. Back when this story started, what seems so long ago . . .

  The kid tried to con the Italian guy, the man with the meaty hands and the low-rent signet ring. Remember? He said to the man: Here’s a forty-dollar pot. How much will you bid to win the forty dollars?

  And the big dumb guy thought: Forty dollars? I’ll bid thirty dollars to win the forty-dollar pot!

  Same idea here. How much would you pay to own HPPR, if you knew HPPR would rise to ten dollars per share? Would you pay five dollars? Seven dollars? Hell, even nine dollars?

  I suppose that’s where I got the idea.

  But now, descending in the elevator from the office of Rifkind, Stuart, Kellogg, I realize something. That the Dot Com Kid tried to pull off a similar scam, but found himself pushed down on a bar top, having his neck squeezed and the air forced from his lungs. He was nearly killed. It was only my last-minute intervention that saved him.

  So yeah. You have to wonder. If I find myself pushed backward atop a bar, being choked to death, who the hell is going to come to my rescue?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Back in the office, Peter is missing.

  He failed to show up at our meeting downtown at the lawyer’s. He is not in our office. He doesn’t answer his home number or his cell phone. His cubicle has been cleaned, emptied of photos and music CDs, just a tangle of wires where his notebook computer used to sit.

  And now this: Jess walks up to me with a sealed envelope. On the front, in Peter’s handwriting, it says: “Kip Largo.”

  Jess hands it to me. “I found this in the conference room, on the foosball table.”

  Jess is looking at me with a strange expression. That she knows I’m setting her up, but feels obligated to go along. Her expression is somewhere between curiosity and resentment. Curious about where I’m taking her, resentful that I didn’t tell her beforehand. But—as I will try to explain to her later—it’s for her own good.

  I slide my finger under the lip of the envelope, and feel that the adhe
sive is still wet. Peter probably wrote and left the note while we were at the lawyer’s office. Within an hour, he’ll be on a plane, to somewhere far away.

  At least, I hope so. For Peter’s sake.

  I open the envelope, pull out a single sheet of paper. It’s a handwritten note on green graph paper, the software programmer’s stationery of choice. I silently read Peter’s letter.

  “Call Napier,” I say to Jess.

  “What does it say?”

  “Call Napier,” I say again. I fold the note and put it in my pocket.

  For the first time in the eighteen years that I have known Jessica Smith—née Brittany Diamond—she looks at me with something approximating hatred. Because now her suspicion has been confirmed: that I do not trust her.

  Her anger and hurt seem genuine. But I tell myself that she has been conning men for twenty years—of course her reaction seems genuine. She’s a professional. That’s her job.

  Napier shows up twenty minutes later with two slabs of muscle in tow. All the fake politeness of recent days—the strained deference to my team, the bright smile, the boyish enthusiasm for our scam—is gone. Now he’s the old Napier—the Napier who supervised my dental work in the concrete room of his house, the Napier who threatened to hunt each of us down and kill us if we betrayed him.

  “What’s this about?” he says, sweeping down the corridor. His two goons follow behind him like a cape.

  “Peter,” I say. Napier approaches me; I hand him Peter’s note.

  The note says:

  Sorry Kip—

  You need to stop. This is dangerous. The routers will be shut off soon. Sorry.

  —Peter

  P.S. I’m taking a long vacation. Please don’t bother trying to find me.

  Napier crumples the note, sticks it in his jacket pocket. We walk into the conference room and join Jess and Toby, who are sitting at the table, silent.

  Napier asks, “What does that mean? ‘The routers will be shut off’?”

  “It means: Game over.”

  Napier squints at me. He’s trying to figure it out.

  I explain: “The boxes that intercept the orders . . . the one I showed you in Manhattan? They’re programmed to check into our office every forty-eight hours. It’s a security feature. If they don’t receive the correct security code, they shut down, erase their own memory.”

  “Then make sure they receive the correct security code . . .”

  “It’s not that easy. Peter erased the program.”

  “He erased it?” Napier looks at me like I’m an idiot. “You let him erase it?”

  “I didn’t let him. He just did it.”

  “That little shit,” Napier says dreamily, but I can tell from his face: He’s not even thinking about Peter anymore. He’s on to other things—like trying to figure out how to salvage the scam.

  “How long do we have?” he asks, finally.

  Toby says, “The routers checked in last night. So Peter must have erased everything this morning.”

  Napier says, “So we have until tomorrow night.”

  “Until tomorrow night?” I say. “To do what?”

  Again, Napier gives me a look—half-hate, half-pity: How stupid can you be?

  “To make money,” he says.

  “You don’t understand,” I say. “It’s over. In two days, Pythia won’t work anymore. None of us are programmers. We can’t re-create it. We need Peter.”

  “We have until tomorrow night before the system shuts down, right?”

  “That’s true,” I say.

  Napier says, “Okay then. That’s all we need. One more day. Tomorrow we follow Pythia’s advice, make big trades. One more day. It’s all I need.”

  After Napier leaves, Toby says, “Now I understand. That’s how we steal his money without him knowing.”

  Jess says, “Well I don’t understand.” She’s still annoyed at me for keeping secrets.

  Toby smiles, starts explaining the con enthusiastically. This may be the first time in his academic life he’s had a natural affinity for a subject—he’s finally the smartest kid in the class. He says: “Tomorrow Pythia is going to tell Napier to buy a stock. And we all know which stock it’s going to recommend.”

  Now Jess understands. “Ah,” she says. “HPPR. Which Kip already owns . . .”

  “Dad paid three hundred grand for the whole company. Now he owns ten million shares of stock. How much are you going to sell it for, Dad?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know. How does ten dollars a share sound?”

  Toby smiles and nods. It’s official: I’m the Coolest Dad in the World. “So you sell ten million shares to Napier for ten dollars a share. You walk away with one hundred million of his dollars. He’s left holding worthless stock. And he never even knows you’re the one who took his money.”

  “I suppose he could try to investigate, go to the SEC,” I say. “But he’d have to explain why he was intercepting federal wire communications and manipulating stock prices. So I doubt he’ll make much of a fuss.”

  I can tell from Toby’s face he’s enthralled by the whole con. “How brilliant is this?” my son asks. “You pay three cents a share; you sell it for ten dollars a share.”

  “Yeah,” I say, quietly. “Irrational exuberance, I guess.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  A “cacklebladder” is con man’s lingo for a rubber bladder filled with warm chicken blood.

  A cacklebladder is yet another way to blow off a mark after he has been trimmed. During the last few moments of a con, a con man hides a cacklebladder in his mouth. At the moment that the mark loses everything, one con man lunges at the other, brandishing a pistol. “How could you bet on the wrong horse?” he screams. (Or “How could you buy the wrong stock?” Or “How could you place all your money on red? I said black!”)

  A shot goes off. The con man falls to the ground. The mark leans over to look at him. A stream of warm blood spurts from the con man’s mouth, splattering the mark. The other participants in the con rush into the melee, pull everyone apart. The “dead body” is removed. The mark is instructed to run—to get out of town—to speak not a word of what he has seen, lest he somehow get tangled up in what has proven to be not just a financial scam, but also a murder . . .

  Cacklebladders work well for everyday marks—greengrocers from Omaha, accountants from Poughkeepsie. But their effect is less certain when your mark is a criminal, someone accustomed to blood spurting from mouths, someone familiar with murderous violence. The point of the cacklebladder is to shock your mark into submission.

  But how do you shock someone for whom blood and pain are everyday occurrences, trifles distributed to business associates without thought, objects of whimsy?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  It is the night before the end.

  Tomorrow we will finish the con, and take tens of millions of dollars from our mark, and then I will board a plane. I will wait until it’s over to decide my final destination, and to decide whom I will bring along. Planning is helpful, when it comes to ripping people off, but dangerous when it comes to getting away. It’s risky to tip your hand. To let people know where to find you. And it’s even more risky to buy a second airline ticket—to trust someone before the game is done and the masks are removed.

  Toby and I watch TV. Too loud. Mental note to self: After this is over, buy a television with a working volume control.

  But now I have a sudden fear. Am I like one of those rednecks who—upon winning the lottery—decide to splurge . . . on a top-of-the-line double-wide?

  So maybe I should aim higher than a television.

  “Jesus Christ, Dad,” Toby yells. “When the hell are you going to fix this TV?”

  No. First things first. A decent television.

  Instead of wrestling, Toby and I watch CNBC. This is the cable television financial network, where stock prices scroll along the bottom of the screen, twenty-four hours each day. Compared to the gray and monotonous anchormen, t
he green and red scrolling text, slow as a train of ants across a picnic blanket, is weirdly compelling.

  Toby wants to watch wrestling. I tell him that he certainly can do so. When he lives in his own apartment.

  “Jeez, Dad,” he says, “I thought you wanted me to stay with you.”

  I don’t bother to salve his hurt feelings. On the television, the anchorman finally comes to the news story I’ve been waiting for. In the graphics box beside the anchor’s head appears a close-up of Ed Napier, smiling broadly as if—off-screen and cropped from the picture—a hooker is blowing him with great gusto.

  The anchor says: “In the continuing saga of the redevelopment of the Las Vegas Strip, today Ed Napier announced that he was increasing his bid for the Tracadero hotel. The new bid includes ninety million dollars of cash.”

  “Ninety million dollars,” Toby says. “I wonder where he’s planning to find that.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I wonder.”

  The anchor continues: “The Eurobet Group, a consortium of European and Japanese investors that is competing with Napier for control of the site, indicated that they would try to match Napier’s offer. Tracadero management could not be reached for comment.”

  Toby says: “You’d think he would wait to get the cash before he spends it.”

  “You’d think,” I say. “But that’s not how rich people think. They always assume they’re going to win. Maybe that’s why they’re rich.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Toby says. For about two seconds, he mulls over the wisdom I have shared with him. Then he says: “Come on. Turn on wrestling.”