by John Varley
"How about it, Toby?" I asked him. "Can you count to one hundred?" He barked once, which I'm sure everyone in the class remembers meant "Yes!" Well, of course he could. Toby can count one of anything, including hundreds.
I lit the candle and was about to offer him a piece, but he scratched at the lock and looked inquiringly at me.
Ah, Toby, what am I going to do with you? For the last week he'd been going out at night, after I was asleep. I suspected he had a girlfriend out there somewhere. That, or he was getting together with one of the packs of wild dogs rumored to live in the service corridors. Probably peeing on everything in sight. Toby is quite the ladies' man. I'd seen him, with more optimism than common sense, mooning over a Great Dane bitch he'd need a stepladder just to sniff. Sure, you can write that off to high hopes. But the amazing thing was, the bitch was looking really interested.
"Oh, sure, party time again," I said. "And may I ask you, young man, when you're going to settle down and make something of yourself?" He waited patiently. He knows that when I get in certain moods I'm apt to toy with him, take unfair advantage of the fact I know a few more words than he does. "Go, then, and be quick about it," I said. "But so help me, if you come back smelling of strong drink..." He was already out the door.
So I blew out the candle, ate the cake, and pulled the covers up around my neck. I left a small night light on for Toby... and because I had trouble sleeping in complete darkness.
How about you, boys and girls? Can you count to one hundred?
* * *
"I still feel so foolish, Detective Friday," said the lovely Miranda Mayard-Tate as she rose from her genuine Earth-crafted Louis Quinze settee, a piece of furniture equivalent in price to the Gross Planetary Product of some smaller Uranian moons.
"Don't worry about it, ma'am," I said, in Friday's flat, affectless voice, giving her his flat, unemotional-but-earnest stare, and thinking, Foolish? Any more foolish and respiration would be a big intellectual challenge, you pathetic screw. I trust that opinion never showed in my face, and I continued: "You weren't the only one taken in by this bunch. But don't worry. We'll get 'em." I sketched a flat, wry smile, the only sort Joe Friday was capable of. You know Joe, the taciturn, humorless homicide dick from that old warhorse, LA. Blues? I've played him in three different productions. ("Thursday. 8:03 P.M. Went to the Larson Theater, 5543 Main Street. Heard there was a 437 in progress. Acting without dramatic license. The sign said LA. Blues. Went in. Sat Down. Watched the show. Gathered enough evidence to convict four cast members of emoting, hamming it up, chewing the scenery, and felonious gesticulating. Figured out the plot during first act. Issued a warrant for the playwright. The charge: cliches in the first degree. Had to let Ken Valentine go. No basis to the charge of woodenness. Found him to be resolute, implacable, just after the facts."—Flip City Courier.) (There was similar schtick the other times I played Friday. Why do reviewers have to be so cute?) Dropping back into Friday for Miranda M-T's benefit was like putting my flat feet into a pair of comfortable old shoes.
"Goodness! I certainly hope so." What can I tell you? I'm not responsible for other people's lines. I merely report what I hear, even when it contains "goodness" as an exclamation.
A long, gloomy silence settled over the scene. As it threatened to become funereal, or possibly even permanent, I decided a prompt was in order. "Well," I said, "we can get started on it if you'll just get the money."
"Oh, certainly," she said, getting up and looking around vaguely. It was obvious she'd forgotten where she put it. The rich really are different. "I'll just go... are you sure you won't have a drink?"
"Not while I'm on duty, ma'am." There was a double meaning to that. Every line Friday uttered screeched teetotaler. He wouldn't drink, on or off duty, not so much because alcohol was evil, but because it would get in the way of his relentless pursuit of crime. You just knew his evenings at home were spent perusing his old notebooks, and his idea of a good time was oiling his gun. As he said in the last line of L.A. Blues; "Just the facts, ma'am." That's all he was interested in. Just the facts.
Me, I would have gladly joined Miranda in a glass of something, but when I'm "on duty," playing a role, I never step out of it.
As Mrs. Mayard-Tate fluttered away to unknown regions of her palatial warren, I stood and looked at her parlor closely for the first time. What had caught my eye was a wood and glass display case housing dozens of yellow-white carvings, none much larger than a golf ball. Of all the fabulous riches in that room, the loot of generations, these are what drew me.
I was still studying them when Miranda returned carrying a small canvas bag emblazoned with the name and logo of the Bank of Hell. "You like them?" she asked, handing the bag to me.
"I was wondering what they were, ma'am," I said.
"They're called netsuke. I've never cared for them, myself. I keep wondering if I ought to sell them. I'm told they'd bring a good price."
She probably had no idea. Any pre-Invasion artifact is worth something, but there is earthcraft, and then there is Earthcraft! There are societies that collect mass-produced paper clips and pencils from the twentieth century. These people keep their treasures in glassine envelopes and handle them only with tongs, but they are not the same crowd that traffics in netsuke.
"I think they were some sort of hair clip," she was saying, shoving vaguely at her great mass of chocolate hair. "Kind of a barrette. I never could get any of them to work. There was probably some trick to it. I guess I'm missing something."
How about several billion brain cells, darling? Netsuke... hair clips? I was tempted to tell her the cunning little wooden-and-ivory objects had been used to suspend items from the ceremonial sashes, or obis, of the gentlemen of Japan, as depicted on many a vase and jar, many a screen and fan, three or four hundred years ago. But Friday wouldn't have known that. For that matter, Sparky Valentine wouldn't have known it but for the fact I'd worn one many years before during a production of the Noh opera Yurigi at the Straits of Awa ("...a not entirely successful attempt at mating Akira Kurosawa with Victor Herbert, enlivened considerably by the puckish performance of K. C. Valentine in the role of Yasuhiro."—Neptune Trident).
"You seem to be staring at that one."
"Was I? I hadn't realized." But it was obvious which one she was talking about. It was a frog, perched on a human skull. The skull had a thick brow ridge, and the long, bulb-tipped fingers of the frog wrapped around it and into the eye sockets. Somehow, the artist had portrayed a coiled power in the little beast, and had given it a predator's lazy eyes. They looked at you without fear or mercy, and you just knew you couldn't show them anything they hadn't seen many times already.
"Would you like a closer look?" Without waiting for a reply she reached behind the cabinet and produced an oddly shaped piece of metal—copper or brass, it looked like—which I soon realized was an antique key. She opened the case, took the frog and skull, and handed it to me.
It was cool at first, but quickly warmed, seemed almost to soften in my hand. My thumb automatically caressed the frog's back. I looked up at her and smiled.
"Maybe I will have that drink, ma'am," I said.
* * *
Elwood was waiting for me at the edge of the big park that marked the boundary of Miranda Mayard-Tate's upper-upper-class neighborhood. He was seated on a bench, his hands jammed into the pockets of his baggy trousers, his long legs stretched out before him, the gray fedora pushed forward to almost cover his eyes. Toby sat on the bench beside him. Behind them, people in red jackets and white riding breeches and black riding boots sat atop their magnificent steeds and cantered grandly back and forth in a ritual as old as money itself. And the funds of these equestrian dandies were ancient indeed, so old that their primordial corruption served as its own fertilizer, so old that the sweet whiff of its decay overpowered the honest stink of the piles of horseshit that was all most of these people ever produced. And true to the breeding habits of the very, very rich, some of these people mad
e my Sweet Miranda seem a mental giant.
Perhaps those thoughts seem unworthy. I knew where they came from: I was psyching myself up for Elwood, who didn't much approve of my recent activities.
Toby spotted me first, and came scampering in my direction. Elwood followed in his relaxed, shambling gait. "You get what you came for?" he asked.
"Don't I always?"
When Toby realized I was talking to Elwood and not to him, he started to growl and bark. You don't know what terror is until you've heard a Bichon growling. After you've heard it, you still don't have a clue. Back in the park, I'm sure all the squirrels in earshot were helpless with laughter.
It made me sad. The fact is, Toby really can't stand Elwood. Elwood hadn't been around much since our arrival at Pluto. Now he was back, and Toby didn't like it a bit. I had to speak to him sharply, which made his head hang and his tail droop. He fell behind us and trudged along under a dark cloud of gloom, his every movement calculated to wring the last drop of guilt from his pitiless master. The awful thing was, it worked. But it wouldn't do to let Toby know that, so I shrugged my shoulders and tried to ignore him. "I just don't think that robbing from one of the most powerful families in Pluto is the smartest thing you ever did," Elwood went on.
"Godfrey Daniel!" I exploded. "Getting somebody to hand you money is not robbery. It's a short con. They're two different things. And the fact that the Mayard-Tates are rich and powerful isn't why you object; it's that you object to thieving of any kind, from anyone, including these rich old screwish families who wouldn't miss a billion if I lifted it from them, much less the paltry and entirely reasonable sum in question."
"That's your father talking," Elwood drawled. "The last of the Wobblies."
"Here's another line from my father, while we're at it," I said. " 'Never give a sucker an even break, nor smarten up a chump.' "
"That has a familiar ring. Could it be he stole it?"
"Of course he stole it! What do you think actors do?" "Always remember, son," he had told me many times. "Authors write. Producers produce. Directors interfere. Angels write checks. And it's all for us. We make the art, and if you need to borrow something to make it work, then borrow it!" Borrow was a euphemism my father used frequently, steal being a word he disliked. But he was an anarchist, didn't believe in property or laws.
That's how I was raised, and if it gives you a liberal comfort you can use that fact to explain or forgive my admittedly piratical attitude toward other people's possessions. Or you can think of me as a goddamn thief; I don't mind. I do believe in property, and in laws, though as few of them as needed to curb our animal tendencies. I own the things in my trunk, for instance, and would be peeved if they were taken from me. My father never owned anything he wouldn't have cheerfully given away if you asked him for it. Of course, he seldom owned anything worth giving away.
But take the screws. Does it make sense to you that they should have access to these almost infinite amounts of money simply because their grandparents excelled in brutality, bribery, chicanery, sadism, and the nearest thing to chattel slavery humanity has known since the American Civil War? Not far from where we were walking human beings had been traded on a computerized auction block—though they used the polite fiction that it was the prisoners' labor contracts that were being bought and sold. That's what the old fortunes on Pluto were founded on: cheap and plentiful labor.
My father was capable of going on for hours on the subject.
I myself don't hold to any doctrine concerning wealth, and the inheritance thereof. On the one hand, who has more right to the money one has amassed during one's lifetime? Some opportunistic layabout with nothing more to recommend him than his ease-softened, skeletal, extended hand? Or one's own children? The answer seems obvious. But maybe it should be neither. Well then, how about the state? Why not let the government take it all, and use it for the public good? Mainly because when it's been tried in the past, it merely financed more official thievery.
But it is equally obvious to me that something is badly wrong when one person has billions, and another has nothing.
Damn it all! Miranda would never miss what I had taken.
It's called the Bank Examiner, and some say it was first used by one Lucius the Louse in 113 B.C., when he persuaded an octogenarian widow named Octavia to withdraw thirty pieces of silver from her account at the First Imperial Bank of the Tiber, Circus Maximus Branch, and hand them over to him: i.e., Lucius. But it's said that Lucius learned it from Agamemnon "Aggie Pop" Popodopoulis, a Greek panderer, picaroon, and president of the Athenian Bar Association, who swore he happened upon it while reading a book of Chaldean pornography to pass the time while cooped up in a giant wooden horse during his involuntary hitch in the Greek army.
In a word, it was old. One of the oldest in the book. That it would still work at this late date was a tribute to another adage my father liked to quote: "There's a sucker born every minute, and two to take him." We like to think there's been progress in the human species since the days of Aggie Pop. We like to think we're somehow smarter than previous generations. Hell, we live in outer space, don't we? Don't we build fast spaceships that violate the virgin sky with impulses of villainous saltpeter? Can't we harness the power of the heart of the sun? Don't we know what E=mc2 means? (Well, I don't, but somebody does, okay?)
Yes, yes, yes, and yes. And if you think that makes us one bit smarter—where it really counts—than our ancestors, I'd like to drop in on you and discuss the purchase of a fine set of leather-bound Classics of Human Literature, only twenty dollars down, the rest when they arrive. Don't worry, I'll give you a receipt for the twenty.
There was another thing about the Bank Examiner, other than its age, and perhaps we've finally arrived at the source of Elwood's silent reproof and my own uneasiness. It has to do with yet a third adage my father was likely to quote when the vicissitudes of our profession forced us once again into a closer and more personal contact with the audience, and their pocketbooks. When it became necessary to take to the streets for a spot of improvisation. When, in short, it was time to run a short con.
"Dodger," he would say to me, "don't worry about it. You can't cheat an honest man." Well...
I'm not aware of any rules without exceptions, and the Bank Examiner was the exception to that one. With any other of the dodges we pulled, those golden words from Mr. Fields were pure gospel. The Spanish Lottery, the Jamaican Handkerchief, the Priceless Pooch, and Put and Take, the Gold Brick, the Pigeon Drop... all these swindles rely in large part on the avarice of the average man. (Did I say the Bank Examiner was old? On a wall of one of the Temples of Karnak there is a line of hieroglyphs showing a puzzled mark looking at the worthless wad of cut-up papyrus in his hand while two sharpies from Abyssinia skedaddle with the real loot he put up for "good faith." Welcome to the Pigeon Drop.)
The mark either sees an opportunity to make a quick profit with no risk, or is offered a foolproof way to steal money from someone else. His greed blinds him to the shenanigans going on right under his nose, and he's left holding the bag. (That's where that expression came from. Really!) The empty bag. Often he doesn't go to the cops, because to do so he'd have to explain how he planned to steal from the folks who stole from him. Most citizens could care less about the victims of these scams. The general consensus is, they got what they deserved.
Not so with the Bank Examiner. Here's how it works, reduced to its essentials:
You are approached in or near the financial institution where you keep your money. Someone working at this fine establishment has been pilfering, you are told. I, the Examiner/Policeman/Bank President/Security Officer (or almost any authority figure) am onto this miscreant, and I need your help to gather evidence against him. Would you be so kind as to withdraw X number of shekels from your account?
With the money in hand, I tell you I must take it away to... oh, photograph it, say. Just about any explanation will do, because if you have withdrawn the cash at all it is because
you have bought me as an authority figure. I'll be right back, I say. That's what Jesus said, too.
Now I can almost hear the creaking as your credulity is strained. Nobody would fall for that, you protest.
The fact is, they do. Year after year after year. I have no idea if the Egyptians really even had banks, but if they did, you can be sure somebody really did pull this one on the banks of the Nile. Because that's one of only two things you need to make the Bank Examiner work: a banking system.
The other thing, of course, is a mark who is (a) trusting, or (b) stupid. In my own thesaurus, those words are listed as synonyms.
It worked fine when banks wrote their accounts in huge ledgers with quill pens, and it works now when it's all electronic impulses in machines. If we ever go to a cashless society (and don't hold your breath), someone will find a way to make it work there, too. So as long as the human race keeps producing idiots, I'll never be broke.
But wait! There's more!
Technically what I had just educated Miranda Mayard-Tate in was not the Bank Examiner at all, but the second act sometimes known as the Copper Comeback. You see, some marks just exude a charming naivete that, to a veteran con, screams, "Take me! Take me again and again and again...!" It seems cruel to abandon these people to other con men who might be slipshod or clumsy, who might not consummate the affair with the proper aplomb. It was for people like these—and my darling Miranda could have been the very prototype—that the Comeback was developed.
The original hit on Miranda had taken place while I was still a month away from Pluto's frigid orb. When her money was not returned after a few days, and when no one called, she contacted the bank, who of course were quite familiar with this scam. The police were called in. The Mayard-Tates being the considerable cheeses they were, no expense or effort was spared by the boys and girls in blue to run frantically in circles, look under carpets and rocks and in toilet tanks, handcuff and question dozens of hapless citizens, shout "Stop, thief!" in a loud, firm constabulary voice, and generally create the impression that something was being done, and that a resolution of the case could be expected at any moment. Then all that wound down and the cops went away, and Miranda was left to realize that it was really all over. That no one was going to be charged with the crime. That, sometimes, money can't buy justice. Ain't it awful?
