The Last Con

by Zachary Bartels

  Alessandro Cagliostro.

  CHAPTER 37

  How much money do you think your dad owes these guys?” Courtney asked.

  They were lying on a rug in the middle of a bare room. The walls were white and unadorned, save for the old tube TV hanging in the corner. They’d been blindfolded before leaving the truck and led into what seemed to be an abandoned office building. The girls had needed to use the bathroom twenty minutes earlier and were again blindfolded before the man with the scar paraded them down a hall and into a dank men’s room. He’d given them two minutes and then banged on the door and demanded they come out.

  “I don’t know,” Ivy said. “We don’t have any money, though. I hear my parents talking about it all the time. Fighting about it.”

  “At least you have both your parents,” Courtney said. She was changing channels with the remote, but the TV was muted and she was going too fast for the shows to even register. “I’d give anything to have my mom back. I’d love to hear them fighting.”

  Ivy patted her arm. “I’m sorry,” she said. They were both quiet for a couple minutes, Courtney flipping the channels and Ivy studying the exposed ductwork of the ceiling.

  “They weren’t supposed to have any kids,” Courtney said abruptly. “That’s why my dad is so much older than yours. And I think it’s why he’s so protective. The doctor said they were infertile, so they gave up on the idea. Then I showed up.” She stopped clicking the button. “I bet he wishes he could trade me for her.”

  “Your dad loves you,” Ivy said. She pinched her lips together in thought, as if internally fact-checking the statement, and then gave a deliberate nod of confirmation.

  “Not like he loved her. When she died, he didn’t leave the house for, like, six weeks, because everything reminded him of Mom. Our church, the grocery store, even our house. That’s why we moved to Harbor Beach.”

  Ivy closed her eyes. “You didn’t have a mom, and I didn’t have a dad. I feel bad about it now, but when my father was in prison I kind of wished your dad and my mom would get together. Then I’d have a dad and a sister.”

  Courtney squeezed her hand. Then the door swung open, and the man with the scar took three quick steps into the room and yanked Courtney to her feet by her wrist. She yelped in protest, then shrieked as he pulled a bag over her head and dragged her from the room.

  Ivy heard the door slam shut, then the lock slide into place.

  “Who’s it addressed to?” Fletcher asked.

  “Someone named Fonseca. So is the next one.” Meg saw Fletcher and Andrew gaping back at her. “Do you know who that is?”

  “He was the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta,” Fletcher answered.

  “Knights?” Dante asked. “The 1700s seems a little late for knights.”

  “What’s the first letter about?” Andrew asked, ignoring the comment.

  “It’s some plan that they’re hatching together—Alessandro and Fonseca. Here: ‘Today I saw children playing dominoes, lining them up and toppling them as children do, and I thought to myself how marvelous our plan is. We continue to hone our grand design, biding our time for the moment to topple them.’ It goes on like that for a couple more paragraphs, pretty vague.”

  “There’s no date?” Fletcher asked.

  “Nope.”

  “What about the next one?”

  She picked up the second letter, reading in little bursts as she translated a phrase at a time. “ ‘It was the Great Architect who revealed to me the Elixir of Life and the secrets of . . .’ ummm . . . ‘alchimie’? I don’t know that word.”

  “Alchemy, right?” Dante said. “Like your boss, the Alchemist.”

  “Who’s that?” Meg asked.

  “The guy on the phone.”

  “Oh.” She was quiet for a moment, reminded of her daughter’s captivity, then snapped to. “Whoever this Great Architect guy is—”

  “That’s how they talk about God,” Fletcher said.

  “I see. Well, apparently God has shown him, ‘the means of achieving our goals in the person of a rotten little vicar here in Vienna. He flaunts his women and his sin and makes a game of offending the empress. And yet he wants more than anything to rise in status and power. Despite his wicked life, he is almost sure to become the bishop of Strasbourg because of his position in the most prominent family of Brittany. He will be the first domino we tip. I need only to nudge him into position.

  “ ‘Now as to your illness, please remember’ . . . blah, blah, ‘Elixir of Life,’ blah, blah . . . okay, he goes on for a while about this Fonseca’s illness. ‘We will meet again, of that I am sure. Either in Malta or elsewhere. Your friend and physician, Alessandro.’ So this Alessandro is sort of a grifter?”

  “No,” Andrew said. “Not a grifter. The grifter. What Elvis is to rock ’n’ roll and Bob Ross is to happy trees, Cagliostro is to the grift.”

  “The memoir you had me read mentions that he used all of his friendships to his advantage,” Fletcher said, “but it doesn’t specify what he and Fonseca were up to.”

  “Wait,” Dante said. “You’ve both read this guy’s memoirs?”

  “So did I,” Happy said. “Andrew insisted. Only it’s more a textbook on grifting than an autobiography.”

  “And you don’t find it odd that the Alchemist now has you reading the guy’s mail? That would be one big coincidence.” He eyed Andrew.

  “My own mentor made me read it when I was coming up,” Andrew said. “There’s a whole school of grifting that looks to Cagliostro as the gold standard of long and short cons.”

  “It wasn’t even authentic,” Fletcher said. “Somebody just put together some lessons from Cagliostro’s life and slapped his name on it.”

  “How do you know?” Dante asked.

  “Well, unlike these letters, each entry is actually dated, and the last one is from 1798.”

  “So?”

  “Cagliostro died in prison in 1795.”

  Andrew shook his head. “That’s what he wanted the world to believe.”

  Dante was jotting down notes, trying to keep up with the back-and-forth. “So these guys were French?” he asked.

  “No,” Fletcher said. “Fonseca was Portuguese and Cagliostro was Sicilian.”

  “Then why are they writing to each other in French?”

  “Everyone did. That’s where we get the term lingua franca.”

  “But who were these knights?” Meg asked, cutting short the tangent.

  “The Knights of Malta,” Andrew answered. “Cagliostro showed up at their capital in 1765. He knew it was the best place for him to cut his teeth. Just like him, the Knights became whatever they needed to be in a given moment to stay on top.”

  “How so?” Dante asked.

  “Well, they started out as a little band of monks a thousand years ago, running hospitals and defending poor Christians on pilgrimage. Then they started battling Muslim forces in the Crusades. Five hundred years later they were hunting down pirates and amassing treasure. They morphed whenever they needed to, bounced from place to place just like Cagliostro, even changed their name like Cagliostro did. At first they were the Most Venerable Order of St. John of Jerusalem, then the Knights Hospitalers, then the Knights of Cyprus and Rhodes, and finally the Knights of Malta.”

  “More reinventions than Madonna,” Happy said.

  Dante flipped to a fresh page in his notebook. “The pilgrimage stuff reminds me of a documentary I saw on the Knights Templar. They started out the same way.”

  Andrew and Fletcher shared a knowing, unamused look.

  “I got this one,” Andrew said. “Write this down, Trick: The Templars were amateurs. They came on the scene after Fonseca’s predecessors and they barely lasted two hundred years before they disbanded. And when they ceased to exist, guess who got all their treasures and land and everything.”

  “Must have been satisfying,” Fletcher said. “The two groups went beyond friendly competition, even skirmished a few times. But in th
e end, the Knights of the Temple couldn’t adapt like the Knights of Malta.”

  Andrew nodded. “Maybe that’s why everyone’s so enamored with the Templars these days—they haven’t existed in seven hundred years, so they seem mysterious, magical, the stuff of legend. A few Renaissance Fair nerds meet together in lodges here and there, claiming some connection to them, but it’s just fantasy. Meanwhile, the Knights of Malta run fund-raisers and provide first aid at soccer games. Not very mysterious or romantic. They have a website, for crying out loud.”

  Happy scoffed. “The website sucks, though. Not even compatible with BlueScript 9.0.”

  “You’re serious?” Dante said. “They’re still around today?”

  “Yep,” Fletcher said. “They still exist, and membership is still closed to anyone who can’t trace a noble bloodline back a couple hundred years.”

  “I take it our boy Belltower is a member in good standing?” Happy asked.

  “For sure,” Andrew said. “He has a plaque on the wall of his library. And as a millionaire, he fits right in. They’re not as prominent as they were, but they’re as powerful as ever. They’ve even got a special seat at the UN.”

  “So they’re a country?” Meg asked.

  “No, that’s the scary part. They’ve got independent sovereign status under international law, but we’re talking about ten thousand people spread throughout the world, mostly high up in industry and government—including ours. But their ultimate allegiance is to the Grand Master. He’s their head of state and a cardinal in the Catholic Church.”

  Dante gave up and tossed the notebook in frustration. “Why do you guys know all this?”

  Fletcher shrugged. “We’ve helped ourselves to a number of their artifacts over the years. In fact, the first job Andrew and I did together was Fonseca’s sword from the Metropolitan Museum.”

  “One of you is lying, then,” Dante said. He looked from Fletcher to Andrew to Happy. “I can buy one coincidence, but we’ve got a two-hundred-and-some-year-old letter from one dead guy I never heard of to another, and you three just happen to have a connection to both? That’s too much.”

  “Kind of what I was thinking,” Fletcher said, turning to Andrew.

  The four of them stared him down expectantly.

  “Okay. It’s not a coincidence,” Andrew finally said, taking a deep breath. “I had Fletcher read Cagliostro’s memoirs because my mentor made me read them.”

  “You already told us that,” Dante said.

  Fletcher’s eyes darkened. “But you never told us your mentor was the Alchemist.”

  CHAPTER 38

  Yeah, right.” Happy laughed. “Tell ’em that’s not true, Andrew . . . Andrew?”

  “This is what he told me,” Andrew said. “The Alchemist—or Charles Farrington, as I knew him—was a member of the Knights of Malta. He’d been part of some kind of internal dispute, going back centuries. His faction was trying to take over.”

  “For what?” Dante asked.

  “I guess it started with Fonseca. He brought in new ideas—heretical by popular opinion—and all sorts of forbidden occult practices.”

  Fletcher nodded. “Like kabbalah, necromancy, alchemy . . .”

  “Right. Fonseca wanted to change with the times, but the more conservative knights resisted, which makes sense when you consider that the order goes back a thousand years, riding the white martyrdom craze.”

  “The what now?” Happy asked.

  “The white martyrdom,” Fletcher said. “When Christianity was legalized in Rome, the faithful could no longer show their devotion by spilling their blood to the lions or the sword—what they called the red martyrdom. The white martyrdom meant giving up your life and fortune to go and join a monastery.

  “But the Crusades changed everything. The pope told nobles and knights that they could get the same sort of points for the afterlife without all that poverty and chastity stuff if they went off and fought for Christendom.”

  “That’s how the Knights of Malta got their start?” Meg asked. She was half listening while skimming through the last few letters.

  “Not exactly,” Andrew said. “And that’s the real source of the conflict. They started out as legitimate monks and priests during the First Crusade, traveling behind the Crusaders, caring for the wounded. When the fighting stopped for a time, they turned their attention to protecting groups of Christians on pilgrimage. Then they grew larger and more powerful. Their hospitals took up more and more land. Then came castles. Then the knights began to outnumber the priests, and they became a full-on military order, fighting for the Holy Land. Fast-forward a couple hundred years and they’re privateering, amassing wealth. At that point, it was no longer faith or principle fueling the movement, but ruthless entrepreneurship.”

  Dante shook his head. “Organized religion and organized crime—thin line. So I take it Fonseca brought the conflict to a head; like forcing the issue of ‘Who are we really? Are we monks or a world power?’ ”

  “And the power side has been gaining traction,” Andrew said. “You ever hear of the Rat Lines?”

  “The Nazi thing?” Meg asked.

  “Dozens of top-ranking Nazis disappeared all at once at the end of the war. And who issued the passports?”

  “No way,” Dante said.

  “A faction within the order got even richer off of that,” Andrew said. “That’s what’s at stake in this conflict.”

  “And I think we can agree which side the Alchemist is on,” Fletcher said. “So what are we supposed to steal to help further their evil plans?”

  Meg finished skimming the last letter, then grabbed up the whole stack and began shuffling through them, a little more roughly than Fletcher would have liked.

  “Unless I missed something, the only mention of a treasure would be here in this last letter, and it’s vague.” She ran her finger down the margin. “This one’s written to ‘Your Eminent Highness, Grand Master de Rohan.’ The whole thing’s a lot more formal than the others. It says, ‘The priceless treasure to which I alluded in my former correspondence is now safely in my possession, hidden away where no man will find it. I am currently under much’ . . . um, scrutiny, I guess, ‘but anticipate that I will be bringing the item to you within a matter of months—to you, continued power, and to us both, a true elixir of life.’ ”

  Fletcher squinted in thought. “Aren’t there extant letters between Cagliostro and Emmanuel de Rohan? Happy, can you find scans of those?”

  “On it.” Happy said, pulling a laptop from his messenger bag.

  Fletcher snagged the letter from Meg and looked it over, unable to decipher more than a few words. “This is pretty thin,” he said. “Why would the Alchemist have us break into Belltower’s place, risk us getting caught, risk losing our help, tipping the wrong people off, for this?”

  Andrew stared at his shoes. “He was hoping this would be the big clue that led him to whatever he’s looking for. You’re not going to want to hear this, Fletcher, but almost every relic and artifact you and I stole together was supposed to be the Big Clue. You always wondered how I could move all those rare ecclesiastical antiquities when I hardly knew a thing about them? The Alchemist was my fence. I wriggled out from under his thumb, but we still did business.”

  Fletcher felt his head swim. “The sword from the museum?”

  “That was for him.”

  “And the monstrance?”

  Andrew nodded. “While you were in prison he tried to pursue it on his own, got mixed up with a few other disgruntled academics—but none of them had your encyclopedic knowledge and puzzle-solving skills. So as soon as you got out he was ready to pounce. Spent the last two years cooking up his end game.”

  “So it was a long con?” The rage was calcifying in Fletcher. “The whole thing?”

  “No, kid, it was business. We didn’t con you any more than the Alchemist conned me.”

  “And yet here we all are.”

  There was a moment of tense silence,
filled only with the sound of Happy tapping frantically on the keys of his laptop.

  “Okay,” Happy said. “The bad news is the letters aren’t digitized. The good news is that they’re nearby. The library of Castille College. What’s that, about a half-hour drive?”

  “Makes sense.” Fletcher thought of the leather-bound catalog of Maltese relics and the Holy Septangle. “Think about it—in the late 1700s, this city was a burgeoning French settlement. If someone in the Old World wanted to spirit away an item of tremendous value and importance, they’d bring it here, where they could blend right in. Besides, there’s a reason the Alchemist came here to begin with.”

  “It’s a promising basket,” Happy said, “but we’ve got five of us eggs here. Let’s diversify.”

  “Agreed,” Andrew said. “I’m going to check in on Belltower again. He’s cute and all, but he’s got to be mixed up in this. Why else would he have those letters locked away? We might want to work the inside with him.”

  “How?” Dante asked. “What if he’s discovered his empty safe?”

  Happy snickered. “Andrew left him a little present in there: a bank-grade explosive dye pack. Anyone who opens that safe will be red in the face.” He paused and looked around at his companions expectantly. “Eh? Caught red-handed . . . Seriously? Nothing? Hold on, I’ve got one more—”

  “Anyway, you can’t just wash that stuff off,” Andrew said. “One look and I’ll know if he’s on to us. And somebody can go get a look at those letters.”

  “Road trip,” Dante said. “Happy, you could pass for a student. Why don’t you go snap us some pictures?”

  “I already told you,” Andrew said, “we keep Happy away from the mark. Bad things happen when he’s off his leash.”

  Happy shrugged. “Andrew’s right. Anyway, it’s not going to be that easy. The catalog number has an RC at the front.”

  “What’s that mean?” Meg asked.

  “Reserve collection. You can’t just waltz in and look at these letters; you need academic credentials. Maybe it’s time to get some honest work out of that PhD, huh, Fletcher?”