Con Ed

by Matthew Klein

  The bartender has a choice. Either he can reveal that he holds the business card of a stranger willing to pay two thousand dollars for the dog, or he can decide to keep that information secret. Most bartenders choose the second option.

  So the bartender agrees to pay a few hundred dollars for the dog, thinking he can call Daddy Warbucks and resell the dog for a couple grand within minutes.

  The transaction done, the dog owner leaves the bar.

  Alas, the bartender discovers, too late, that the phone number he has been given is defunct, and the dog he paid three hundred dollars for is a mutt that was picked up for free from the pound.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Now it is time to sell my own mutt for more than it is really worth.

  Napier shows up at nine o’clock. No goons this time, as we agreed.

  Walking down the hall, he rubs his hands with childlike glee. “All right, then,” he says. “Let’s make a hundred million dollars or so.”

  He marches into the conference room, looks around, sees Toby and Jess. “Who knows how to operate this thing?” he says.

  “I’ll do it,” I say. I walk to the front of the room, pull down the projection screen. I reach under the conference table, feel for the power switch, boot up the computer. Toby limps over, turns on the projector.

  “It’s going to be a little different today,” Napier announces. “You tell me which stock to buy, then I call my guy, who trades it for my own account. Not that I don’t trust you.”

  “That’s fine,” I say. “What about my cut?”

  “Your cut?” Napier says. He smiles. “Right, your cut. We’ll deal with that later.” My expression must indicate less than full confidence in this. He says, “Don’t worry, Kip. My reputation precedes me. I always follow through.”

  Napier’s reputation does indeed precede him, the way a hearse precedes a funeral procession. It is a reputation littered with grandiose promises and broken deals, hurried last-minute settlements before litigation, and—in the case of business associates who prove too stubborn—ominous and sudden disappearances. In other words, Napier is the kind of man from whom you want your cash up front, before services are rendered.

  But today apparently this will not be the case. Napier leans over the conference table, pulls the speakerphone toward him. He dials a number.

  “This is Derrick,” the voice on the phone says.

  “It’s me,” Napier says. “Are you ready?”

  “Locked and loaded.”

  Napier turns to me. “Let’s get started.” He shuts the door to the hallway.

  I walk to the computer keyboard, type the command that I’ve watched Peter type a half-dozen times before:

  > pythia -n=1

  A green stock chart appears on the screen: HPPR. The chart tells the strange story of a fish stock that, twenty-four hours ago, was trading at $0.03 per share, but which, since then, has risen steadily to $6.20. Above the current price and to the right, Pythia draws a red target circle at the $9.95 level.

  Napier looks at the screen, nods. “Okay,” he says. He calls into the speakerphone: “I want you to buy whatever quantity is available of symbol HPPR, limit price eight dollars, good till cancel.”

  From the speakerphone, “Derrick’s” disembodied voice repeats: “Mr. Napier, for your account ending 9612, we will be buying Harry Peter Peter Robert, limit price eight dollars. This is an iceberg order, displaying quantity bid equal to quantity asked, up to the limit of eight dollars, good till cancel.”

  “That’s right,” Napier says.

  “Your order is being relayed to the Nasdaq system now . . .”

  The speakerphone makes a loud static pop. The lights flicker, as if deciding whether or not to call it a day, and then, decision made, shut off. The Pythia screen goes black.

  “What the hell . . .” Napier says.

  He’s being backlit by the sun streaming through the windows behind him. With the shadows on his face, it’s hard to read his expression.

  Then: “Freeze! Freeze! Freeze!”—men’s voices, loud, maybe amplified.

  Everything happens at once. The door of the conference room bursts open, and two men tumble into the room wearing Navy flak jackets with a big yellow “FBI” embroidered on front and back. Each fans to an opposite side of the door, and falls to a crouch. They sweep their pistols back and forth, aiming from me to Napier, to Toby, to Jess.

  Now two more men appear in the room—calmly walking—it’s agents Crosby and Farrell. Crosby and Farrell keep their pistols up and pointing to the ceiling.

  Finally, another agent enters the room—older, with gray hair, wearing a tweed jacket and leather elbow patches, like an Ivy League English professor. He walks slowly, purposefully, as if he does this sort of thing—busting into start-up companies’ conference rooms—all the time.

  “Hands up!” Agent Crosby yells.

  I put up my hands. So do Toby, Jess, and Napier.

  “Kip Largo,” the gray-haired agent says, “you are under arrest.”

  “Under arrest?” I say. “For what?”

  “Wire fraud, securities fraud, racketeering, Section 2511 interception of electronic communication. You have a minute? Pull up a chair, I’ll read the list . . .”

  “Wait,” I say, “this is a big misunderstanding.”

  “Mr. Largo,” the gray-haired agent says, “anything you say can and will be used against you. You have the right to have an attorney present. If you can’t afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.”

  “Shit,” I say. The first two agents into the room now approach me. They handcuff my wrists behind my back. “Ouch,” I say.

  “Okay,” the gray-haired agent says. “Let’s get everyone downtown . . .”

  Napier says, “Gentlemen, please. Hold on a second. I have nothing to do with this.”

  The gray-haired agent turns to Napier. “Who’s he?”

  Agent Crosby says, “Ed Napier.”

  “Hello, Agent Crosby,” Napier says. He smiles warmly, as if he’s welcoming a guest to his hotel. “What’s going on here?”

  Agent Crosby shakes his head. “Your partner is involved in a criminal enterprise.”

  “Is he?” Napier says. “I had no idea. I’m just a venture capitalist, not a private investigator.”

  Agent Crosby turns to the gray-haired agent. “We don’t need him, do we?”

  “Is he on the list?”

  “No.”

  Gray Hair nods. “Cut him loose. You know where to reach him?”

  “Yeah,” Crosby says.

  “Okay,” Gray Hair says to Napier. “We’ll be in touch later. You’re not planning on going anywhere, are you?”

  “Maybe Las Vegas. I own a few hotels there . . .”

  “Right,” Gray Hair says. He’s not easily impressed. “I’m staying at the Comfort Inn up the street. Guess we have something in common, after all.” He turns to Crosby. “What about the others?”

  Crosby says: “Toby Largo, Jessica Smith . . .” He looks up at me. “Where’s Peter Room?”

  I shake my head. “Unavailable,” I say.

  “Okay, let’s go,” Crosby says. To Napier: “You better scram.”

  Napier looks at me, as if debating whether to say something—a threat, perhaps; or a request to talk later. But he decides, in the end, that discretion is best, and he says nothing. Threats, apparently, can wait. He nods and walks quickly from the room, before the FBI changes its mind.

  Meanwhile, as Napier exits down the hall, the show goes on. Gray Hair says loudly: “Read these two their rights.”

  Crosby begins to recite Miranda rights for Jess and Toby, while, at the far end of the hall, we hear the office door open and Napier scurry out, quiet and sheepish for the first time since we’ve met.

  When Napier’s cherry-red Mercedes pulls out of the parking lot, we continue the charade for another five minutes, in case Napier returns for forgotten keys, or in case he has instructed his men to watch us from afar.
I have heard stories: about con men too eager to call it a day, who break out in whoops and hollers, or even begin to divide their take into equal portions, while their victim is listening, just a few feet away. Seems hard to believe, that you could work so hard to rip someone off, and then blow it all in a fit of stupidity, greed, and laziness—but then again, isn’t this what the whole con business proves—that human nature is stupidity, greed, and laziness?

  And so: Toby and Jess are escorted out of the office, pale-faced and near tears, into the back seat of a waiting black sedan with tinted windows. I am escorted after them, into the back seat of a second dark sedan. As my car pulls out of the parking lot, I see two FBI agents wrapping our office door with yellow police tape that says “POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS” and setting orange traffic cones around the nearby parking spaces.

  As we start down Bayfront Expressway, past the stinking salt ponds, the man in the front passenger seat turns around to face me. It is Elihu Katz.

  “You still have the right to remain silent, you know.”

  “Elihu,” I say. “This is a pleasant surprise.”

  “I love the endings best. Always have. Nothing like seeing their face. How did it go?”

  “Not sure yet,” I say. “It’s not really the end.”

  “No?” He looks at me, probing for more. He wants me to explain, but I can’t. Not yet.

  Instead, I look around the sedan. Built into the rear console is a mini-bar, stocked with cans of Coke and a half-filled bottle of Stoli. “Cool car,” I say.

  Elihu nods. “Yeah. Got you a discount. Now that prom season is over, you can get these cheap.”

  “Nice work,” I say. “Looks very FBI.”

  “Ehh,” Elihu says, and shakes his hand back and forth, to say so-so. “I figured it was better than a white stretch. Could have gotten those even cheaper.”

  “Good call,” I say. “Don’t see many FBI guys in white stretch limos.”

  “Yeah,” Elihu says. He turns back around. He reaches to the floor, pulls up a black leather attaché case. He hands it to me over the seat. “Here you go,” he says. “Careful with this. Not insured.”

  I nod.

  We drive in silence.

  I check in at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, under the pseudonym Kyle Reilly. I pay cash for three nights in advance. I’ve instructed Toby and Jess to check in to separate hotels at opposite ends of the Peninsula. I explained that I will contact them in three days, after I’m certain that we’ve successfully blown off our mark.

  Upstairs in my room, I turn on the TV and head to the bathroom, where I take a long piss and a warm shower. At first, it’s a relief to be alone—not to have Toby around—and to be able to urinate when I want, to walk into the bathroom and not find my shower towel dropped into a wet pile on the floor.

  But then I decide to head down to the hotel restaurant and grab a beer and a burger, and I suddenly realize that it would be fun to have Toby along—to enjoy his cynical humor, to verbally spar with him, to roll my eyes at his relentless libido. For the past two months, he has been—for better or worse—my constant companion, my pal. I’m closer to him than I have ever been in my life. And I think it’s funny, and probably deep and meaningful in some metaphysical way that eludes me just now—that it took my committing a crime to bring me closer to my son, and that—despite my desire not to repeat my own father’s mistakes—here I am, aping my father’s actions twenty years after his death, unable to escape his clutches even now.

  On the TV, I’m watching the green and red stock ticker scroll across the screen, and the CNBC anchor says: “In news from the gaming industry, today the Eurobet Consortium announced that it would not match Ed Napier’s bid for the Tracadero hotel site on the Las Vegas Strip. The withdrawal of Eurobet from the bidding process now opens the way for Ed Napier to purchase the site and build on it the largest hotel in the United States.”

  You know what else I’m thinking, as I sit here alone, in the empty restaurant, eating my burger and drinking my beer? That a successful con is like a meal. It’s only fun when you have someone to share it with. What good is it if you’re alone in a hotel, without someone to talk to?

  Back in my room, I place the black attaché case that Elihu Katz gave me on the hotel bedspread. The duvet is orange and brown, with fabric as thick and crusty as day-old French bread, spread with dried seminal discharge from hundreds of guests, the bedspread’s floral pattern camouflaging tracks from dirty shoes and skid marks from luggage wheels that have rolled across the world’s filthiest tarmacs.

  I open the attaché and remove three brown paper bags, each the size of a baseball. The paper bags are crinkled and wrapped tight, like the remains of a half-eaten office lunch hastily tossed into the trash. Gently, I unwrap one of the bags, spread the paper at the aperture, and pour the contents into a neat pile on the bedspread. I stare at a small mound of loose diamonds, a mix of one and two carats, like a tiny sand castle. The diamonds sparkle even in the energy-efficient gloaming of the hotel bulb. There are five million dollars’ worth of gems in each bag.

  I carefully scrape the diamonds into the first bag, picking up the stragglers one at a time, with my index and thumb. I twist the bag closed, replace it in the attaché. I open the second bag and pour the contents onto the bedspread. Another five-million-dollar sand castle. I return the contents to the bag, and then check the third.

  Diamonds are the currency of choice for men like me: small, fungible, anonymous. And they’re beautiful, too. But it’s important not to grow too attached. Soon they will be out of my hands, and I will give them to Andre Sustevich.

  Tomorrow I will give the diamonds to the Professor, and thereby settle my debt.

  It’s not every day that you steal money from a man, and then use it to repay him what you owe. You have to admit: That’s elegant. A piece of work of which I can justifiably be proud.

  On Monday, even though my business with Sustevich will be done, and my debt repaid, Sustevich will start to have a sinking feeling. It may mirror the sinking stock price of HPPR. When the market for HPPR disappears on Monday morning—when almost no rational investor is willing to buy the stock, and the situation returns to normal—the price of Halifax Protein will drop like a stone, back to where it started—to maybe three cents a share. Those eight million shares that Sustevich bought, for an average price of six dollars a share—in giddy anticipation of being able to resell them to Napier for ten dollars a share—will, like the priceless pedigreed pooch that turns out to be a mutt—prove worthless.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  At ten o’clock in the evening I rent a car at the San Jose airport and drive north to Woodside to meet with my accomplice.

  Cons are like marriage. Everyone believes in the romantic fairy tale, about how, if you look hard enough, you can find the perfect partner, someone who complements you and makes you magically complete. But the reality is more mundane. Usually you hook up with whoever is around at the time you need to get going.

  And so it was in my con. Desperation, and greed, make for strange bedfellows.

  I drive up to the gate of his mansion, stop at the security booth. It’s the same guard as last time, the middle-aged man who led me into the compound for one of my several rounds of dental work. “I’m here to see Mr. Napier,” I say.

  The guard nods. “Take the road up to the house, park in the circle.” He walks to the gate, pushes it open.

  The moon is three-quarters full—enough light to see. I drive slowly up the gravel road. Every ten yards foot lamps illuminate a small circle of ground. Over the crest of the hill I see the Spanish house, the limestone and red clay roof. It’s lit from below with bright spotlights. I pull into a parking circle twenty yards from the loggia. I’m greeted by a man in a suit. His face is familiar. He’s the bruiser that kicked out my front tooth. He looks at me in the moonlight.

  “Your teeth look good,” he says.

  “In a bright room, the color’s a little off,” I explain.
I feel compelled to say: “Thai dentist.”

  The bruiser probably hears: “Tie dentist”—as if I am requesting that he bind and gag Dr. Chatchadabenjakalani and beat him up. So I explain: “You know, Bangkok.”

  The bruiser nods and smiles lasciviously, as if I’ve said something dirty.

  “Forget it,” I say.

  He leads me up the flagstone path, into the arcade, past the rattan furniture and potted red bougainvillea plants, and into the sitting room. Napier is there, leaning over the billiards table. He’s wearing a cotton sweater and khaki slacks. This is the first time I’ve seen him without a suit.

  The bruiser backs out of the room without a word. Napier doesn’t look up at me. He pulls back his stick and snaps it into the cue. The white ball slams without spin into the four ball, which flies straight into the corner pocket. That’s Ed Napier summed up in one flick of the wrist: His shots are hard, brutal, direct. No soft banking rolls. No light touch.

  He starts lining up the next shot: the five into the middle pocket. Without looking up at me, he says, “And so, a job well done.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  Napier slaps the cue; the five ball whizzes across the felt and drops into the leather net of the pocket.

  Finally Napier looks up at me. He leans his stick upright against the side of the table. “You don’t sound happy for a man who’s just gotten away with twenty million dollars.”

  I shrug. I want to explain that this victory comes at a personal cost. My worst fears have been confirmed. But why bother? Napier’s not the kind of man who dwells on betrayal. He just deals with it. With a flick of the wrist. Hard, brutal, direct.