The 500: A Novel

by Matthew Quirk

  Back at the trailer, he walked me inside and handed over an envelope. There was a thousand dollars in it, some twenties and tens, but mostly ratty-looking fives and singles.

  “I’m going to make good,” he said. “On the debts, for Mom. I fucked up, bringing those Crenshaw sharks in. That should never have come down on you.”

  “Keep it,” I said, and held out the envelope. He didn’t take it. “It’s paid off.”

  “What?”

  “The debt.”

  “For how long?”

  “Forever. It’s paid off. All of it,” I said.

  “But what about school? You should take care of that first.”

  “Paid off. Save your money, Dad.” I put the envelope down on the peeling veneer of the countertop.

  I didn’t want to do this, to get angry, to deal with it all. I just wanted to put the past behind me. But the money, and hearing him talk about Mom being sick, and him thinking if he just repaid the debt, everything would be fine: it set me off.

  Because every time he mentioned Mom, I would remember her, and I would try to picture her the way I liked to: making the sly face she always had when she was about to crack a joke. I’d fight to keep that in my mind, but her cheeks always hollowed out, and then the color disappeared from her skin. And I ended up thinking about her at the end, with this chilling rattle in her chest and her face all waxy and her mind gone on morphine, calling me by my father’s name sometimes, and sometimes asking me who I was and what the hell I was doing in her room.

  And it’s poison, but you can’t help tasting it: What if I had somehow been able to get enough money to send her to a really good hospital? What if she’d had a decent husband and insurance? What if? Would she still be around?

  “You can’t make good on what happened,” I said.

  “Everything’s paid off?” he said, still puzzled. And then he straightened up to his full height and tried to act fatherly, like he was about to ask me if I used condoms or something.

  “Listen, George Cartwright told me you’d been asking about the trade.”

  Oh, fuck. Not this. Not now. George was a bit of an expert in B and E and could get you any tool you’d ever need. When I was at my dad’s first glad-you’re-out-of-prison party, I asked Cartwright if there was any way to crack the Sargent and Greenleaf padlock that Gould had on his locker at the Met Club. Just out of curiosity. And so apparently my dad thought I had paid off everything by robbing the fucking Pentagon or something and now he was going to play scared straight with me.

  “There’s no free lunch, Mike. What are you into?”

  “A good job. That I earned by being smart and busting my ass. Are you, you, going to tell me how to keep my nose clean?” I looked around the trailer, like it proved my point. “Unbelievable.”

  “I’m just saying, Mike. Don’t get caught up being somebody’s bagman. You try to play the game, run with the big-timers, you can get burned. You can only trust your own people.”

  “Dad, please.” I was trying to keep calm, to watch what I said. It would have been easy to kick the guy when he was down, to point out how pathetic he was. The truth was brutal enough. “Why don’t you knock off this bullshit honor-among-thieves thing. You think because you kept your mouth shut and did your time you’re some kind of fucking outlaw hero. You’re not—”

  “Mike, I couldn’t—”

  “Because you didn’t know how to play the game, Dad. You could have talked. You didn’t have to go in for twenty-four fucking years. To leave us high and dry. Who knows, maybe then Mom wouldn’t have—”

  I stopped. But the damage was done.

  He was just standing there, eyes shut and nodding his head like he was saying yes. I was waiting for him to snap, start sobbing or come after me, but he just stood with his eyes closed, breathing fast and short.

  “Maybe,” he said. He started rubbing his jaw. “I did the best I knew how.” I thought he was going to cry, but he choked it back.

  “I know I can’t make things right, but just don’t shut me out, okay?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Please, Mike.”

  I took a few deep breaths and steeled myself. “I’ve got to go,” I said.

  And that was it. I left.

  That little Hallmark moment between me and my father had to do with, as you might have guessed, the crime—a burglary—that sent him away when I was twelve. Nothing about it made sense.

  Most of his story I picked up from Cartwright and a few of my dad’s other buddies. If you caught them late on a Sunday afternoon at Ted’s Roadhouse, a windowless bar they inhabited, they’d be lubed up enough to tell the stories my father had kept from me. He’d turned to grifting young. For generations, his family had run an old foundry out near Falls Church. They’d made the stairs at the Smithsonian castle, the lamps on the Capitol grounds, and supposedly some of the twelve-pound cannons used at the Battle of Gettysburg. But manufacturing in America had long since crapped out by the time my father took over the business. His parents moved from Falls Church; he’d grown up in New Jersey, but he came back to Virginia in his early twenties to take over the business from his uncle. By then the ironworks was on hard times, reduced to a glorified machine shop. My dad didn’t know much about business, and he was desperate for orders. Some guy named Accurso conned my father with a no-brainer invoice scam. A hundred-and-fifty-year-old business was dead, and Dad was out of luck. For his first con, my father learned the tricks that had been used against him, tracked Accurso down, did a false stock swap, and took him for everything he was worth.

  As I understand it, my dad had done some petty crime growing up, but it was only after he started conning that he really flourished as a hustler. He was a natural, and he kept at it, trying as much as possible not to fuck over the little guys. It’s always tempting to romanticize con men, but at the end of the day, he was a criminal, and the job ultimately came down to abusing people’s trust. Still, he could sleep better at night than most of his peers.

  He kept that part of his life from me, though occasionally he couldn’t resist, and, broke and interested in showing his sons a good time, he would pull a cute street con, more for fun than anything else.

  There was the fiddle game, where he’d bring us into a decent restaurant, posing as a respectable business traveler and his family. When the bill came, he’d say he forgot his wallet and give the mark something to hold for collateral while he went to grab his cash. This was usually some antique he “couldn’t bear to part with” (in the classic version, it’s a fiddle) and that he’d say was worth a fortune. Next, he’d have a shill (an accomplice—it was Cartwright the time he did this with me) come by, see the antique, and offer to buy it for a small fortune. The shill would then leave, saying he would return shortly, and my dad would come back to pay the bill. The mark would offer to buy whatever it was from my dad for half a small fortune.

  My dad, acting torn, would reluctantly sell it. Cartwright, of course, never returned to pay the better price, and my dad made off with half a small fortune and left the mark with a worthless piece of junk. Like all good cons, it took the mark’s greed and willingness to screw someone and used those flaws to screw him first. That’s how he sank Accurso, actually. Cartwright told me years later: it was a scaled-up version of the fiddle game using company valuations (my father had always been handy with ledgers, which explained why accounting came so naturally to him in prison).

  He went to jail twice. The first time was a short sentence, when I was five or so, and the second was the twenty-four-year bid that started when I was twelve. That first time they caught him for bank and stock fraud. He was going after Accurso again, after he’d found Accurso working the same scam against other small businesses. Now, normally, whenever you lure a mark in, you use something illegal or embarrassing for bait, like a hot TV or a stuffed wallet with a name in it, so that if the mark gets scared or finally realizes he’s been ripped off, he’s shy about going to the cops. Accurso was so
angry with my father from the first con that once he got wind of who was playing him the second time, he called the cops in anyway (which wasn’t very sporting, I thought; at least he should have tried to turn the tables and re-scam my dad). They were both so dirty, though, the cops ended up hauling the pair of them in. I was so young I barely remember it. My dad was sent away for a year, and served six months. Accurso got two years.

  After my father served that short sentence, supposedly he went clean. The crew at Ted’s always talked about his retirement wistfully; they’d lost one of the best. He was working different legit jobs, or so I thought, at machine shops or whatever he could get, and my mom was working as a secretary. Then, when I was around twelve, things fell apart. One night, my dad said he was going to watch a minor league ball game—the Prince William Cannons—with some friends. I pulled on my jammies and hit the hay after Home Improvement, all pretty standard for a Tuesday night.

  Then I remember waking up to the sound of my mother making a fuss. It was after midnight. I came downstairs and saw her on the phone, biting her nails and crying silently. She’d sort of slumped down, squatting against the wall under the telephone.

  The police had caught my father breaking into a house in the Palisades, a wealthy enclave along the Potomac between DC and Bethesda.

  I’d never been able to make sense of that night. The house they caught him in was empty, some well-connected DC guy’s investment property. There was nothing to steal. My dad had never done any breaking and entering before. He liked the trust, the challenge, and the risk of the long con, the Robin Hood righteousness of fucking over people who deserved it. B and E—broken windows and snatched electronics—that was the sort of thing my idiot friends and I would get into later. A pro like my father would never go near it.

  No one knew why he did it. He kept his mouth shut. Not a single word in all these years. I’d always assumed somebody had put him up to it. It just wasn’t the kind of thing he’d put together himself. But he refused to cooperate with the DA, just faced him down in absolute silence, meeting after meeting. He never trusted anybody in power, anybody who even resembled a politician; he thought the whole justice system was just another type of con game, where he was the mark. I could understand why. The government had whittled his family business down to nothing through taxes, and as the foundry went under, the “respectable” businessmen swooped in on it like vultures on a carcass. Or maybe it was from all those years of cons, of his passing himself off as the most decent, upstanding community pillar, all the while knowing he was on the hustle. Maybe he started seeing deceit behind everything that looked respectable.

  Watching him refuse to make any sort of deal, and thinking about it all these years, I saw him as a small-minded neighborhood hustler. He didn’t understand how to help the prosecutors help him, the give-and-take of politics, everything we trafficked in at Davies Group. No. For him it was simple: Never talk. Protect your people. Do your time. That code—honor among thieves—tore our family apart. I could never forgive him for choosing it over us, for abandoning my mother, my brother, and me.

  I’ve spent half my life trying to figure out an answer to that question: Why rob an empty house? During the trial, through the thin wall between bedrooms, I’d overhear him and my mother crying and fighting, and I remember her begging him one night, “Just tell them what happened. Tell them everything.”

  I thought I’d learned from his mistakes, learned how to get with the program, how to play along with power. I sure showed him. Or so I thought, until my new job got me hauled off to the Montgomery County Jail in cuffs along with a crew of whores and meth addicts.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SO MY YEARS of effort to get as far away from jail as possible had landed me back in it. That, of course, raises the important philosophical question: If you use the center-stage toilet in the holding cell and there’s no one there to watch, is it still humiliating?

  Yes. And tough on the quadriceps.

  We were in a brand-new subprecinct near Poolesville, all primary colors and carpet. It looked more like an elementary school than a lockup. There weren’t even bars, just metal doors with reinforced-glass windows. I was aware that my life was going down the lidless toilet, but somehow the whole thing seemed a lot less scary than the first time I’d been in jail, when I was nineteen. It probably helped that my partner in crime this time was a U.S. representative and not my asshole brother.

  Back at the McMansion, they’d put Walker and the old guy and me in an unmarked Crown Victoria, instead of the usual caged backseat of a patrol car. Now we all had our own cells. It was the VIP package.

  After I’d been stewing for a couple hours, a deputy came down the hallway. “Let’s go,” he said, then walked me to an open office, a little maze of desks.

  “Can I make a couple calls?” I asked. “I’d like to have a lawyer present during any questioning.”

  “Well, you could, but—”

  “I have a right to counsel.”

  The deputy rolled his eyes and pushed the phone on his desk my way. I called Marcus first. That prick had gotten me into this mess, and he and Davies had damn sure better get me out. I wasn’t holding my breath, though. I thought of another classic DC adage as I listened to the phone ring: the only scandal you can’t recover from is getting caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy. I’d never thought I’d find myself with either party, but hey, crazy night.

  The phone rang three times, then I heard Marcus say hello.

  “Listen. I got picked up. I—” I stopped. Something wasn’t right. Marcus’s voice was coming through the phone and—

  I turned around and there he was, smiling, cell pressed to his ear.

  “You mind?” Marcus said to the deputy. He left. Marcus took his seat.

  “What the fuck is going on, Marcus?” I asked.

  “Just take it easy.”

  “Have the newspapers gotten hold of this yet? Does Davies know?”

  “Mike, calm down.”

  “How’d you get here so fast? Did they call you?”

  “I told you, Mike,” Marcus said, “that we’d be watching out for you. How’s Tina doing, by the way?” He cracked a big smile.

  I shut my eyes, gritted my teeth, and counted backward from five. All the while I reminded myself that if I tried to strangle Marcus right there and then, he’d probably kill me first, and even if I succeeded, I was in a police station, probably not the best locale for a murder.

  “You knew what Walker was up to,” I said, finally. My gears turned for a minute. “Was it a setup? Did you call in the cops?”

  “No,” Marcus replied. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. We had a feeling, from watching Walker, that he might be getting himself into a prickly situation tonight. He’s had some recent…I guess you could call them stresses. We also happened to learn that the police might be taking some action against”—he snapped his fingers, trying to remember—“the big guy?”

  “Squeak.”

  “That’s it. So we kept our eyes open, called in a couple favors, and made sure that if something happened to Walker, God forbid, we were in a position to help him out. Good old-fashioned back-scratching.”

  “But why send me into that freak show? Why fuck me over? What happens now?”

  Marcus dusted his hands off. “It never happened. There’s no record. Don’t worry about Barney Fife.” He nodded toward the deputy. “We’ve taken care of the locals. Everyone’s free to go. You’re going to go tell Walker that you called up your boss, and he managed to help you both out of a jam.”

  Marcus smiled and shook his head. “And the older gentleman who was caught at your little orgy: he’s the head of the Family Values Coalition. A big fish. That’s just gravy. Pure luck. Right place at the right time.”

  “So now what?” I asked. “We tell Walker we want the loopholes and earmarks for your Serbian buddies or we take him public? I thought you said we avoided straight coercion, that it had a tendency to blow up in your fac
e.”

  “It does. So you’re going to go back to Walker and let him know that we did this little favor. And you know what you’re going to ask for?”

  “I give.”

  “A decent tee time at Congressional Country Club.”

  “What? You could have your assistant get that with a phone call.”

  “Exactly. Start by asking him for the easy favor, the friend favor, so he knows that you’re not trying to fuck him. You both got pinched, so you two are in this together. I’m sorry to have to put you through this, but that’s why you had to be in the house. He won’t suspect a thing. If we’d just shown up at the police station and offered him a deal, it’d be straight blackmail. If we tried to force anything out of him, it’d get antagonistic, and he’d turn around and bite us in the ass eventually.”

  “So we ask for nothing, and ultimately he gives us everything.”

  Marcus nodded. “Gold star for Mike. We just keep doing him favor after favor, and slowly he’ll start paying us back. He’ll probably even volunteer it. You ask for a little more each time, and eventually you own him. And here’s the best part: he doesn’t even know it. He doesn’t fight it. Because you never put the screws to him. You kill him with a thousand cuts. And once he crosses the line, even unwittingly, you own him. In the unlikely event he does try to squirm out, you point out that he sold his soul long ago, and you have the evidence to destroy him if he gets cagey. That’s the long game, Mike. The big leagues.”

  It’s the game my father played, but never taught me.

  “You could at least have given me a heads-up,” I said. “Sort of an asshole move.”

  “What’d I tell you about counterintelligence?”

  “For Christ’s sake, it’s four in the morning and I’ve had a pretty unusual night. Can you spare me the quiz?”

  He waited me out.

  “Constantly test the reliability of your agents?” I said.

  “Genius. We’re all going to be working for you someday.”