At ten o’clock, I pat my son on the shoulder, tell him good night, and head to the bedroom. Within minutes, I drift to sleep.
I wake to the sound of my cell phone ringing. I reach to the nightstand, unfasten it from the charger, put it to my ear. “Yes?” I say.
“Kip, it’s me.” Jessica Smith.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She stops, pauses. “Well, something. I need to talk to you.”
I look at the clock. Eleven-thirty. “Can’t it wait? It’s late. Tomorrow’s a big day.”
“It’s important.”
I rub my eyes, sit up in the bed. “All right. I’ll come to your place.” She gives me the address. In minutes, I skulk out of the apartment without waking my son, and start driving forty minutes north on 280.
She lives in Noe Valley, in a two-family Victorian in which she has the back entrance. It’s about ten degrees cooler here than in the city, and the night is wet with fog. I knock gently on the glass in her door. She opens it within seconds, as if she has been sitting behind the door all this time, anxiously waiting.
“Thanks for coming,” she says. She refastens the chain on the door and leads me up a narrow flight of stairs, into a sitting room. The floor is unvarnished pine, the walls painted yellow, with built-in bookshelves loaded with expensive glossy art books and hardcover novels. I don’t know what I was expecting—maybe piles of porno tapes from Aria Video, or contact sheets with thumbnails of naked women, or dildos rolling around the floor. But certainly not this. Past a half-wall, I see her kitchen. On the counter: a Mr. Juiceman electric juicer, a toaster, and a well-thumbed two-pound cookbook called How to Cook Everything.
On this countertop, I see into the intimate corners of her life—the quiet domesticity: juice in the morning, two slices of toast, a nice home-cooked meal at the end of the day. All that is missing, alas, is me. I think again about that marriage proposal, which I delivered to her just two months ago in her office, and which she studiously ignored. Once again, it seems appealing. Would it be strange to marry your fellow con artist? I’ve known her since she was nineteen. Half a lifetime. Maybe that’s the best kind of love: dull familiarity, boring sameness. Maybe it’s the search for novelty and excitement that ruins us. By definition, novelty disappears the moment you find it. Familiarity can only grow richer.
She leads me to the couch. I sit.
“You want a drink?” she says.
“No thanks.”
She sits beside me. “We need to talk.”
“I’m here. Talk away.”
She says: “I’m upset.”
She waits for me to say something. I try: “Upset?”
“You don’t trust me.”
Her accusation catches me off guard. I was expecting warm intimacy, maybe even some making out on the couch. Now I understand: I’ve been called here for a fight.
“Of course I do,” I say.
She launches her indictment. She’s been preparing for this, rehearsing. It sounds like a prosecuting attorney’s summation. “You came to me, Kip. You needed my help. I agreed. You asked me to put aside my own business for a few months; I put it aside. You asked me to sleep with Ed Napier; I slept with Ed Napier.” She reaches across the couch, touches my forearm. “I’ve done everything you’ve asked.”
“You have.”
“Then why do I feel like I’m always three steps behind you? Why won’t you tell me the con?”
“I have told you—”
“You knew Ed Napier would discover who you really are. You wanted him to. But you didn’t tell me that was the plan. And the FBI agents you hired—why didn’t you tell me about them? And Peter—getting upset, disappearing? That’s part of your con, too, isn’t it?”
“What’s the difference?”
“How would you feel, if I didn’t trust you?”
“Hurt. But I would understand.”
“How does the con end, Kip?”
“I told you—”
“I know,” she says. “You can’t tell me. For my own protection.”
“Right.”
“You know what I think? You never trusted me. Not since the beginning.”
“That’s not true,” I say.
But she’s right. I haven’t trusted her since that night, two months ago, that she called me on the telephone. It was too convenient, calling suddenly—out of the blue—after not speaking to me for years. Calling at the exact moment I was formulating my plan. Things like that just don’t happen. Not in my world.
“Tell me how it ends, Kip. After tomorrow, you’re going to get on an airplane and go somewhere far away. Who’s coming with you?”
“Whoever wants to.”
“Can I come?”
“I would love that,” I say. Which is true. I would love to marry you, Jessica Smith. I would love to get on the plane with you, and sit down beside you, and travel somewhere far away, and start a new life together.
If only I could be sure that you are not the one who is going to betray me.
“Then tell me,” she says. “Be honest with me. Tell me how the con ends. Show me you trust me. Start now. So that we have no more secrets.”
“We’ll always have secrets.”
She smiles. In an instant, her face changes; her eyes glaze like a shower door sliding closed. Now she looks past me, to a future where I play no part. She says: “I think you should leave now.”
“Jess.” I try to think of something to say. But I can’t. So I rise from the couch.
She leads me back down the staircase, to the door of her apartment.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says. Her voice is cold, emotionless, professional. Before I can answer, the door closes behind me.
You may wonder why, if I didn’t trust her, I asked her to be part of the con in the first place. I will tell you. It’s true that I did not trust her. But having an enemy inside your camp is the most certain way to control them. It’s like a piece of string that runs directly from you to your foe. The question is: Who is doing the pulling, and who is being pulled?
And finally, there is always the chance, however slight, that she really did call me out of the blue. Things like that happen, right? So, just in case, it’s nice to have her around. Later, when this is all over, maybe I’ll try that marriage proposal one more time.
As I drive home, I think about the three women currently in my life: Celia, Jessica, and Lauren Napier.
Each of them makes me unhappy in a different way. And yet, on a night like this, driving through the fog on 280, back to my apartment, I wouldn’t mind sharing a warm bed with any one of them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
At seven o’clock in the morning, Toby and I are both awakened by the garbage cans rattling outside our window—Thursday is garbage pickup day in Palo Alto.
Our simultaneous waking means we compete for the bathroom. It’s true that Toby is hobbled by a leg cast and crutches, but what he lacks in speed he makes up for in wiles. He meets me in the hall near the bathroom door. “Your apartment. You get it first,” he says, waving his hand magnanimously. “Let me just grab my toothbrush . . .”
He walks in, shuts the door. I hear the lock click.
“Hey,” I say.
“You snooze, you lose, Old Man,” he calls through the door.
I shake my head, walk away. I have to piss. My son does not understand male biology. I look forward to the day he is as old as I am, and his prostate has grown to the size of an avocado pit, and he wakes in the morning with a submarine ballast full of brine.
I head to the living room. The phone rings. I go to the kitchen, pick up the handset.
“Hello?” I say.
“Mr. Largo?” I know the voice. Russian. Cultured. Effete. The Professor.
“Yes.”
“You know who this is?”
“Of course.”
“Do you know what tomorrow is?”
“Friday?”
“Yes,” Sustevich says. “And
it is also three days before you need to repay your debt to me. Do you remember how much you owe?”
“Let me see,” I say. I pretend to pause, think about it. “Hmm. Good thing I wrote it down on the back of a 7-Eleven receipt. I must have it here somewhere. Hang on . . .”
“Twelve million dollars.”
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll take your word for it.”
“You will be able to repay it?”
“I gave my word.”
“Yes, I appreciate that,” Sustevich says. “But you must understand, in my line of work, sometimes a man’s word is not his bond.”
“I understand. But don’t sweat it. I’ll have it.”
“I hope so. For your sake, and for your son’s.”
“You know,” I say, “I’m having second thoughts about my son. You can have him. You need a house boy? Someone to keep you company in that big old mansion of yours? How many bathrooms do you have?”
“Mr. Largo? Have you been outside yet? Have you checked your garbage cans?”
I feel the room grow cold. “Check them . . . for what?”
“There’s a message there. A warning. Shall I stay on the line while you go look?”
I don’t answer. I drop the telephone receiver to the floor, where it thumps against the carpet and begins twirling—unwinding like a newborn infant hanging grotesquely from an umbilical cord.
I run from my apartment, past the row of rosebushes, to the front of the building. My penis flaps in my boxer shorts—I pass a neighbor walking her toy poodle, an old woman I’ve nodded and waved to for the past five years—and she turns away from me, mortified. I look down; the lips of my underwear are spread wide open; my graying pubic hair displayed like stylish fur trim. I pull my underwear fabric closed, keep going.
Around the side of the house: the three garbage cans. The old-fashioned kind—steel, dented, twenty years’ worth of bangs and kicks and drops.
I pull the top off the first can. The lid creates a vacuum as I lift—the side of the canister is sucked inward. Finally, it gives, and the top comes off. Inside I see one white trash bag. I smell old fish. I drop the lid to the ground. It clatters with a metallic racket.
I pull open the second lid. Inside: a black plastic garbage bag and a grease-stained pizza box, folded on the diagonal to fit in the trash can.
I push aside the second can, turn to the third. The lid is firmly planted on the canister. I pull. Another momentary vacuum—the lid refuses to give. Then it comes off, surprisingly fast, so that I have to take a step back to keep my balance.
The garbage can is stuffed with white plastic trash bags. On the top bag, I see the warning that Sustevich left me. It takes me a moment to figure out what it is. Then I realize: it is a long red ponytail, ending in a clump of bloody skin and gristle. Human hair and a human scalp, deposited on the trash bag like a cherry on a sundae.
The long red ponytail belonged to Peter Room.
Goddamn Peter Room. I told him to get out of town. He hung around a minute too long, never believed my warnings. It all seemed like a big game to him: pretending to predict the stock market, pretending to be scared of fake FBI agents, pretending to storm out of the office and quit . . .
He enjoyed the drama—the acting. He didn’t understand: In a Big Con, some people aren’t acting.
I run back to my apartment and go to the phone. Toby is leaving the bathroom as I enter. “Okay, I’m done now—” he starts to say. Then he sees the blood drained from my face, and the thing in my hand with the long red hair. He stops suddenly, takes a step back. “What the hell . . .”
I ignore him, bend down, pick up the telephone. “You son of a bitch,” I say.
“But I was doing you a favor,” Sustevich says. “No loose ends.”
“He wasn’t a loose end,” I say. “He was part of the con.”
“Well, how was I expected to know that?” Sustevich says. His tone is one of amusement, as if he’s talking about accidentally double-booking a luncheon date. “He stormed out of your office, didn’t he?”
“Where is he now?” I say.
“Oh,” Sustevich says, “long gone. We don’t want law enforcement officers to find his body. Not until you pay me back.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Consider it a warning, Mr. Largo. Now you see that this is not a game.”
“I never said it was a game.”
“Sunday, Mr. Largo. Twelve million dollars. Fish tacos, then.”
He hangs up.
I drop Peter’s scalp into a plastic Barnes & Noble shopping bag, and double-knot it like a bag of dog poop. Later, on the way to the office, Toby and I will stop at a Dumpster behind the old Intuit office park. There, among scrap-paper detritus and empty laser toner cartridges, Peter’s scalp will find its final Silicon Valley resting place.
CHAPTER FORTY
How did Sustevich know that Peter Room was a loose end? How did Sustevich know that Peter stormed from my office, quit my con?
Could someone have told him? Of course someone did.
But who?
In my heart I know, but before I act, I must be sure.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
After depositing Peter’s scalp in the Dumpster, we drive to the office. I say to Toby, “Don’t tell Jessica.”
“Don’t tell her what?”
He knows what I mean, but he wants me to say it out loud. “Don’t tell her about Peter.”
I don’t want her to know because I’m not sure how she will react. I can’t afford to have Jessica freak out, go ballistic. I can’t afford another loose end running around. For her sake and for mine.
“Dad,” Toby says, “I think you owe her the truth.”
“You think that, do you?” I say. “Good to know.”
At that he’s silent.
When we get to the office, Jess is already there. She doesn’t say hello. Still mad. “I wrote the press release,” she says, “just like you asked.” She hands me a piece of paper.
PALO ALTO, Aug. 28 PRNewswire—Halifax Protein Products today announced a corporate reorganization and shift in strategic focus. The company, which has been publicly traded for the past seven years and which has been a food-service vendor, announced that it will change its name to Zip Internet Marketing and will become a major e-commerce player and content aggregator. The company will create a vertical business-to-business portal focusing on community building and e-commerce technology enablement . . .
By the end of the first paragraph, my reading slows to the speed of a jeep in foot-deep mud. I can’t go on. I say, “That’s perfect. Put it on the wire.”
The press release is camouflage, a distraction. Later, people will ask questions. Why did the price of HPPR rise from three cents to ten dollars in only a few days?
Fortunately, anyone curious will be able to point to the news in the press release—that Halifax Protein has become Zip Internet Marketing, that a fish oil company has metamorphosed into a “business-to-business portal” and “content aggregator.” The skyrocketing stock price will be regarded as yet another example of Internet mania, and not evidence of a hundred-million-dollar con.
At eight-thirty, I’m seated at my desk, waiting for Napier to show up, and for the con finally to end. I sense Jessica standing behind me.
She says: “You know, it’s strange.”
“What?”
“Look at this.” She reaches over my shoulders to type into my keyboard. I feel her breasts lightly brush my back. I suspect she is being mean, doing this on purpose, to say, See what you never will have?
I close my eyes. For a moment, I try to imagine being in bed with her, after this is all over. But can it ever be over?
“See?” she says. I snap out of my reverie. She has brought up a stock chart on the screen—symbol HPPR, Halifax Protein.
“What?”
“The stock is already rising. It went from three cents to five dollars in the past twenty-four hours.”
“Your press relea
se. The whole business-to-business e-commerce thing.”
“It didn’t hit the wires yet. It doesn’t get published for another half-hour.”
“Strange,” I say.
“Who the hell would want to pay five dollars for a worthless fish oil stock?”
“Good question,” I say.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Do you know the con involving the priceless pooch?
Here’s how it goes. A guy walks into a bar. He brings a dog with him. He says to the bartender, “Hey Mack, can you do me a favor? I have a job interview across the street. Can you watch my dog for sixty minutes while I’m gone?”
The bartender says sure, what the hell, I’ll watch your dog.
“But listen,” the dog owner says, “he’s a prize-winning dog, so please keep an eye on him.” And with that, the dog owner leaves the bar.
A few minutes later, a well-dressed gentleman walks into the bar. He’s got a Rolex and a spiffy suit. Reeks of money. He takes one look at the dog tied to the bar stool and he says, “My God, that dog is beautiful. It looks exactly like Muffy, the dog I had as a child. I’d love that dog for my own son.” He approaches the bartender. “Listen, bartender, I’ll buy that dog from you. Name your price. A thousand dollars? No, wait. Make that two thousand dollars.”
The bartender says, “Sorry pal, can’t do it. It ain’t my dog. But the owner is coming back in about an hour.”
The rich guy looks at his Rolex. “An hour? I can’t wait that long. But maybe you can do me a favor all the same.” He hands the bartender his business card. “Here’s my card. Just give it to the dog’s owner and have him call me.”
“Sure thing,” the bartender says. And the rich man leaves.
An hour later, the dog’s owner returns to the bar. He’s in tears. “That’s it,” he says. “It’s over. Another job rejection. I can’t afford the rent anymore. It’s hopeless.” He looks down at his dog. “And I certainly can’t afford to take care of him anymore.” He looks at the bartender. “Listen, I know it’s a lot to ask. But the dog seems to like you, Mack. Why don’t you keep him? Buy him from me. A few hundred bucks. What do you say?”
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