The California Roll: A Novel

by John Vorhaus

  Skeptics, huh? Honestly.

  I explained at painstaking length that there are two ways to bring cars into the United States without bothering with the niceties of smog, safety, and so forth. First, you can call them museum pieces, and show paperwork intending them for either private collection or public display. The other approach is to call them movie props. Thus they come into the country as art or tools, not cars, so you’re home free. Once the vehicles are on American soil, it’s no problem and (relatively) minimal cost to street-legal them through certain bureaucratic backdoors. Backdoors which, naturally, I knew how to pry open—else why would I offer such cars for sale in the first place? So I took some down payments, generated ironclad escrows, and told the buyers to see me next week in my Long Beach showroom. I “warned” them that the showroom was none too elegant—more like a warehouse, really—which seemed to feed both their something-for-nothing avarice and their vicarious sense of outlaw adventure. Arriving at the address in question, they would find only a Church’s Fried Chicken, but oh well. The wings there can be quite tasty.

  The thing is, did I not vaguely recall meeting some Shibuya cutie at my booth? Was she not tricked out in the latest Tokyo toygirl fashion: teeter-tower platform boots, pleated go-go skirt, virginal blouse in irony white, and, yes, a wig of orange plastic hair? Did she not question me at surprisingly knowledgeable length about the chances of acquiring a fully armored CLS55 AMG Mercedes for her (doubtlessly fictive) Yakuza benefactor, while her friend, another geisha bonbon, stood by, fending off Mirplovian advances? Could it really have been Allie in Ginza drag?

  Mirplo seemed to think so. “Trust me,” he said. “I have a pornographic memory.” To drive home the point, he called my attention to a dancer just coming onstage as the DJ said, “Let’s give a big hand for Chastity,” with all the enthusiasm of a grocery store clerk announcing, “Clean up on aisle four.”

  “Wait’ll she thongs down,” said Vic. “You’ll see: She’s got a tattoo of a Krugerrand on her left butt cheek. I guess she thinks her ass is gold.” He paused to chuckle in anticipation of his own lame joke. “And if gold is cellulite, I guess she’s right.”

  I realized I couldn’t blame Vic after all for giving me up to Allie. He probably thought she and I were old chums by now.

  As for Allie, this seemed to prove she was in the game, if not as a full-time player then at least a weekend warrior. But why was she subcontracting out such a cushy gig as this? Did she so not want to look fallen in Grandpa’s eyes? Why would he care? He was a Ready Teddy, too.

  Sometimes when there’s a problem I’m trying to solve, I find it helps to talk it through out loud. Mirplo’s not the best interlocutor for this because his observations are either off-point or just flat inane. But he had helped me put Allie in context, so I thought I owed him a glimpse of the big picture. Which I gave him. When I was done, all he said was, “Dude, you should beat cheeks.”

  “What?”

  “Get out of town. Dislocate. Go to Vegas. That town’s easy. I used to rip it up.”

  “Really?” I couldn’t help asking. “Then why are you here?”

  He didn’t miss a beat. “Sinusitis,” he said. “That desert air kills.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not blowing town. So far all I’ve got is an innocent offer to turn teacher. Why should I say no?”

  “Orange hair,” said Vic, simply.

  “What do you mean?”

  “A girl capable of orange plastic hair is capable of anything. Besides, you like her.”

  “Oh, bullshit.”

  “Then you just want to get your wick wet. Those are the only two choices.”

  “You’re nuts,” I said.

  But was he really? I couldn’t be sure. And the thing you have to remember in the grift is that money is money and sex is sex, and many a deal slides sideways when the line between the two gets blurred. Which gave me all the more reason to make the smart play and just disappear into the distance. It wouldn’t be that hard. I’m a master of the fast transition. In a week’s time, I could be Aghvan Aghajanian of Glendale, Arizona, unlicensed trader in desperation gold, priced low because bought from motivated sellers (and also because mostly tin).

  But damn if I’d give her the satisfaction! Here she’d been in my life less than a week and she already had me jumping through all sorts of unintended and unanticipated hoops. What did she have over me?

  Why did I want more?

  In the end, then, the smart play and the play you make are not necessarily the same. Out of sheer cussed-mindedness, I decided to see the thing at least to the next level. After all, I’d told Hines that I’d cook up a con for him, and it’s a function of my restless mind that even while I was thinking of a dozen different reasons to pull the rip cord, I also happened to think of one cool way to work Milval’s former profession into a reasonably tasty snuke.

  I could, if I worked it right, even make a nice chunk of change.

  Maybe I’d take Allie to Cabo.

  8.

  the merlin game

  P icture this: You’ve got a shiny quarter in your hand, and 160 people are watching you flip it, via webcam. On the screens of half the 160, you flash a prediction: This coin will land heads. The other half gets the other prediction: This coin will land tails. If the coin lands heads, you disconnect the 80 people who saw you guess tails, and with the remaining 80 you run the same drill. Half see you call heads, half see you call tails. Once again, you boot the ones who see you guess wrong. The remaining 40, notice, have now seen you guess right twice in a row. No big deal, right? But then you do it again and again and again, culling the numbers as you go, from 40 down to 20 to 10 to 5. Now you have 5 people who have seen you make correct predictions not once or twice but five times in a row. Still not that impressive, right? After all, it’s only a coin flip, and the odds of nailing five straight coin flips are a mere 31 to 1 against. Hardly a number from the Nostradamosphere. So even if a guy has seen you guess right a few times in a row, he’s not a believer, and even if he’s a believer, with how much hard cash would he be likely to back his belief?

  Coin flips. It’s hard to get rich one quarter at a time. And let’s not forget that some people will consider that the quarter was gaffed all along, and, hey, they might not even be wrong.

  But what if instead of a hundred-and-a-half initial observers you had thousands? And what if instead of five trials you had a dozen? And instead of a cheesy (potentially two-headed) quarter, suppose you had something much, much harder to gaff, at least in most people’s minds. Let’s say your declared area of predictive expertise was the hoodoo voodoo of the stock market. Or not even the stock market. Maybe something more exotic. Derivatives. Hedges. Futures. Commodities. Exchange-traded funds. Mutual discount accruals. Or perhaps investment vehicles that no one’s ever heard of, for the simple reason that no one has crawled around inside the part of your brain where your lies are born. Suppose you found yourself trumpeting your knack at forecasting market movement in highly volatile CCAs (currency core aggregates) (the latest thing) (which you just made up). If you started with 200,000 onlookers, you’d have roughly 199,999 doubters (and one drunk). Enough correct predictions later, by the reverse mitosis of reducing the cell body by half, and half again, and again, you’d have only a couple dozen observers left, but each and every one would swear on a stack of prospectus disclosures that you, my friend, have the true gift for picking winners. Their pumps thus primed, they’re now ready to put their money where your mouth is. Pig widgets. Silicon communion wafers. Asteroid shields. And why not? If you can be religiously right in the notoriously fickle CCA market, whatever that is, you’re bound to bank big wherever you decide to invest next. And since you’re the kind of guy who likes to share the wealth, you invite those whose trust you’ve absolutely earned to come along for the ride. And who wants to be left off that gravy train? It’s leaving the station now, folks. All aboard. Woo-wooo!

  This scam has been known by many names in many times. Cho
ose Not to Lose. Magic Mirror. Orders of Magnitude. I call it the Merlin Game, since that legendary necromancer was said to have aged backward, and who couldn’t pick winners if all he had to do was watch them flash past in his rearview mirror?

  The Merlin Game’s limitation has always been just getting your initial guesses in front of enough eyes so that by the time you’ve sliced the sucker cake in halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, and thirty-seconds, a large enough pond of confidence remains to be profitably drained. Thanks to the internet, that problem has vanished: Leads abound.

  Qualified leads, though, those are another matter.

  Which brings us to Milval Hines and his preretirement career as an investment counselor. He probably knew thousands of people who had faith in him. These are what the straight world calls “clients.” * They didn’t trust him implicitly, mind you. They listened to what he had to say and then made their own judgments. He likely never represented himself to be anything other than someone who analyzed trends and passed along what he learned. He flimmed no flams, in other words, but simply did his homework and demonstrated through diligence that he could turn modest risk into reasonable gain.

  Now Hines has a problem. In the midst of his existential meltdown, he wants to start having fun, the kind of fun that violates federal law. But it’s not so easy. The inertia of his reputation holds him back. His former clients all know him to be a straight shooter with an adequate market sense and a respectable ROI, so how can he suddenly reinvent himself in their eyes as an investment savant who’s gone from pretty good trend spotter to lock-solid win picker? Can’t. Obviously. In the words of the grift (Texas branch), “That dog don’t hunt.”

  Bottom line, he couldn’t be a Merlin.

  But he might have just met one.

  This was the pitch I laid out for him a few days later in his Pasadena office-park office. The place was about what you’d expect for a semiretired investment counselor: a pretty-but-not-too-pretty receptionist, comfortable but not ostentatious leather couches, copies of Inc. and Forbes in the lobby. The mahogany walls of his inner sanctum, heavily punctuated with degrees and diplomas, had built-in shelves laden with what we call “appreciation hardware,” trophies for everything from serving as your organization’s treasurer to donating uniforms to the local Little League team. To me it all just looked like credit for time served and reminded me that if the one thing I had to do every day was the same thing every day, my career would likely be cut short by the precipitous slitting of my own wrists. But that’s just me. Some people crave boredom.

  Hines did not seem to be one of them just then. His eyes shone with delight when I walked in, and he welcomed me like a lodge brother. I half expected a secret grifters’ handshake, and if he had found one on the internet, I’m sure he would have laid it on me. As it was, he’d clearly been registering hits on websites like fraudreka.com and hoaxandjokes.org, for his mind was alive with the possibilities of the grift.

  “Wishing wells,” said Hines after we’d batted a few pleasantries back and forth like shuttlecocks. “Did you know you can invest in wishing wells? I’ve been in finance all my life and I’ve never even imagined such a thing!”

  Of course I knew all about wishing well franchises. They come in a spectrum of snadoodles, from relatively clean charity funnels to outright skim machines. After all, practically every shopping mall, amusement park, and roadside attraction in the land has some sort of standing body of water into which people feel a gut compulsion to throw their loose change. Who collects that coin?—some street bum scrounging for the price of paint thinner? Don’t kid yourself. Small change is big business, and if the shopping mall isn’t gleaning the take itself, it’s subcontracting the work to some brothers with an Italian (or in this modern world, Serbian) surname, who may hire the bum and equip him with hip waders but are definitely keeping the fat end for themselves.

  Well, with that much money in wishing wells, it wouldn’t take long for someone to rate it as an attractive investment vehicle, right? When I worked the gaff, I leaned heavily on the fact that there were many more wishing wells than could adequately be serviced without appropriate capitalization, and of course those who capitalize deserve to be compensated. This was nothing short of bald-faced bafflegab, but I succeeded well enough to actually list and trade a named security on a smallish regional exchange. To this day, thousands of investors, mostly in the mid-South, have extensive holdings in Wishing Best, Inc., along with lavishly printed stock certificates that show a barefoot, strawhatted Huck Finn casting a fishing line into a money pool. They’re worth the paper they’re printed on. Maybe more to collectors.

  Hines thought that coin harvesting was a play we should definitely investigate. He knew a lot of hard-core givers in the Prius-proud crowd who would happily dive into charity wishing wells. I asked him how he’d manage the situation if he wasn’t able to meet his projected and promised returns. He said he’d just use the money from those who came along later.

  “Congratulations, Milval,” I said, dryly. “You’ve just invented the Ponzi scheme.”

  He looked completely crestfallen. I guess his research had taken him far enough into the grift to realize that every Ponzi scheme contains the seeds of its own destruction. It’s worse than a castle built on sand. It’s a castle made of sand on sand on a beach in a sandstorm with the tide coming in. In the end, a Ponzi scheme has only two possible outcomes: you run; or you do time. Though I messed around with them in early youth, I quickly realized that to embark upon a Ponzi scheme is to plot your own demise. Not my cup of chai.

  Hines, though, had a plan B, and this one at least showed some ginger. “Have you ever heard of rhodium?” he asked.

  “Of course,” I said. “Most expensive metal in the world. Trades for thousands an ounce.”

  “That’s right. How about palladium? Platinum?”

  “Both reasonably pricey. What’s your point?”

  “My point,” said Hines, with again that naughty schoolboy grin, “is that some metals are precious, but some just sound precious. Suppose we set up shop selling titanium or tungsten or something. We hire some salesmen, pay them on commission, and move a little metal. We can even provide what we promise—a ton of tungsten delivered straight to your door! It just so happens that what we promise isn’t worth exactly what they pay. Which, I don’t need to tell you, happens every day in the world of sales.” He spread his hands expressively. “Look, you’re the expert, not me, but frankly, I don’t see the downside.”

  “Neither did the Adelaide Street Boys,” I replied.

  “The who, now?”

  “Bunch of Canadians. Tried that trick with germanium.” I gave him a sly smile. “In fact, that’s where you got the idea, isn’t it?” I tapped the computer monitor on his desk. “Good ol’ internet.”

  “Well, look, if it worked for them –”

  “It didn’t work. Most everyone involved with the game is in jail.” I paused for effect. “The rest are dead.” I had no idea if this was true or not, but I’d already decided that if I was going to use Hines to help me unweave Allie’s web, I needed him to do things my way. Couldn’t have him thinking too freely on his own. That leads to improvising, and a mark’s improv impulses can be kryptonite to a con. So I had to put the fear on him. “Let me tell you a little something about victimless crime,” I said. “It pisses off the victims. Sometimes it pisses them all the way off. Which makes your choice of cons the second most important part of your play.”

  “What’s the first most?” he asked in a way I found syntactically charming.

  “Your exit strategy.” I fixed him with a meaningful stare. “This might not be so important to you, since you see all this as your last great adventure before you get your ticket punched. But I plan to live a long time, and dumping tons of tungsten on the lawns of irate customers is not a step in, you know, the right direction.”

  “But how do you ever cover your tracks?” he asked. “Isn’t it the nature of a sting to leave
someone feeling stung?”

  “Not necessarily. The true art of the con is to make a vigorous fuck feel like a gentle caress. And you don’t do that with a blunt instrument like a boiler room.”

  Hines’s look made it was clear that he didn’t know what I meant by boiler room, but didn’t want to admit his ignorance. In relieving him of the burden of asking, I was actually demonstrating the principle of the gentle caress: Don’t make people feel stupid unless you have to.

  “A boiler room,” I said, “as I’m sure you know,” though I was sure that he didn’t, but that was the gentle caress part, “is just a bunch of guys with a bank of phones working their asses off to sell nothing for something. They do it well enough, they make a bunch of money—and a bunch of enemies. Sooner or later, they have to close up shop and open again elsewhere. It’s like a mobile auto-detailing service, only instead of cleaning your car, they steal it.”

  “So their problem is the trail of irate customers they leave in their wake?”

  “Customers. Fraud squads. U.S. attorneys. Suits. Uniforms. Tar-and-feather gangs. But that’s only half the problem.”

  “What’s the other half.”

  “It’s damn hard work! Have you ever tried beating your head against a phone twelve hours a day selling something that only a total moron or a victim of senile dementia would buy? You know what it’s like? You know what it’s really, really like?”

  “What?”

  “A job. I was never a fan of those, and you’re obviously done with yours or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. So let’s play a different game, shall we?”

  Funny thing about honesty—sometimes it’s the biggest lie of all. By telling Milval the simple truth about himself and myself and the situation we were in, I actually won his trust. From that point forward, he allowed himself to be led, which was what I needed, because I knew that no matter how many contacts he’d accumulated over the years, it wouldn’t be nearly enough for our purposes. He was going to have to reach out across the length and breadth of the investment community. And he was going to have to be pretty damn devout when he did.