The California Roll: A Novel

by John Vorhaus

  “Half a million?”

  “Yeah, we did a little better than expected.” Hines looked pleased at this. In his mind, his runaway retirement just got a little more comfy. Maybe … comfy enough for two?

  A chill ran down my spine I don’t know how I knew, I just knew. Maybe the faraway look in his eye suggested a picture where he wasn’t alone. Or maybe it was just the final cylinder of a complex lock clicking into place in my head. Whatever. In that instant, I flashed on all the times I’d seen Hines with Allie, how he’d deferred to her. I’d thought it was part of their snuke, but suddenly I knew different. He had a crush on her, and his endgame for all this involved Allie running away with him, if not for affection then as a lesser-of-evils alternative to prison. Or death.

  A whole different kind of chill ran down my spine. Man, I wanted to run just then. Just … drop everything, grab Allie, and run. But I knew that was a fool’s paradigm. Hines, I now saw, was the whole lethal package: a bent cop trying to shade and fade; plus a vengeful fuck who wanted to put the hurt on poor Radar; plus, worst, a middle-aged horndog. He wouldn’t let go. He’d scorch the earth before he let go. No, the only way out of this thing for me was through it. Spang-blam straight through the middle.

  I have to admit that at that moment my confidence wobbled. Since meeting Billy, I had allowed myself to believe that with the prospect of robbing China I could easily lead Hines around by the greed-shaped ring in his nose. Now I wasn’t sure. Suppose he just wasn’t interested. After all, half a million should be enough to meet any crooked Jake’s needs, right? Suppose he gave me forty-eight hours to get my so-called language waiver and then after that, called in his markers? If I gave him the money, he’d kill me to keep me quiet. If I didn’t give him the money, he’d just kill me for spite. In his panic, he’d probably kill Allie, too, and anyone else he could think of. I couldn’t have that. It was too messy an endgame. Plus too lethal.

  So, okay, that meant I had to chum the waters and hope he liked the taste. Really, what else could I do? Time to put Chad Thurston to rest and reveal the formidable tag-team alliance of Billy Yuan and Radar Hoverlander.

  “Listen,” I said, “there’s something else I want to talk to you about.”

  I slid the grilled cheese sandwich onto a plate and handed it to Hines.

  After a moment, he took it.

  24.

  moiré or less

  S omewhere in the bowels of the information technology department of the People’s Bank of China, IT manager Zhao Guixian had just received an e-mail. The wording and syntax, plus some esoteric insider’s slang, would seek to convince Zhao that the e-mail came from his opposite number in Taiwan’s Central Bank of China. In fact, it came from my laptop, but a powerful address emulator (Chuck was right—the Hackmaster did tricks!) said otherwise. The e-mail took pains to couch its intent in circumlocution, but the gist was this: that certain code cowboys in the Central Bank’s IT section had written some skim software, “just for fun.” Now they were thinking about moving it out of the fun stage and into implementation, but the regulatory atmosphere in Taipei was not conducive (i.e., too nosy), and would Mr. Zhao be interested in speaking to the regulatory atmosphere in Beijing?

  Billy and I had worked on the pitch day and night for a week. That is, I had worked on the pitch while Billy backstopped my language choices (it turned out that, yes, he was fluent in Mandarin) and also refined the relevant software, which intended to exploit certain bookkeeping lags and inefficiencies—friction, if you will—to grift the smallest fraction from any transaction. Though the amount of each skim was negligible, when you multiplied it by billions of transactions, the sum of the get would be exactly, uhm … a buttload. I, meanwhile, built a moiré effect into my pitch. In graphic design, a moiré effect is created by two sets of lines or dots imperfectly aligned so that other patterns emerge. Such patterns can be beguiling or distressing, but mostly what they do is occlude: They make things fuzzy. In the grift, a moiré effect is a sorting device that presents a pitch to prospective marks in terms that can be interpreted as an offer or a threat, depending on the mark’s proclivities and point of view. It’s self-selecting in the sense that those who consider it an offer come after it, and those who see it as a threat (those cowering cowards we don’t want anyhow) just blow it off. Naturally, I wasn’t putting all my eggs in one Zhao-shaped basket. Like every other grift, you separate the qualified leads from the chaff—but you don’t want the chaff going around making noise. The moiré effect, with its veiled you might be blamed for this warning, assures that relevant whistles go unblown.

  If Zhao doesn’t respond, then, someone else will. Even a centralized system like a big bank has redundancies, and like every other part of China’s bloated bureaucracy, the People’s Bank IT department (in both the central branch and its many lucrative regional offices) was top-heavy with earnest wage earners desperate to stay ahead of the nation’s rapidly steepening prosperity curve. For some, this meant keeping up with the Jianses in the rush for more appliances, better mopeds, and—God love them that they dare to dream—two-bedroom apartments. For others, it was the pressure of grease from above. When every palm must be crossed with silver, lest hopes for advancement be dashed, silver is a never-ending need. Now here comes an offer to partake in the nation’s national pastime—corruption—cottage-industry style. Accept or decline the offer, that’s moiré or less up to you. But be sure that if you don’t, your brother will, and there’s no point in ratting him out because then you’ll just be passing the benefit up the food chain to someone who, let’s face it, is already sucking at the public tit too much as it is.

  Thus I put my prospectus out to every midlevel brain boy with access to the big bank’s mainframe. Given the size of my target market, I projected that we’d get dozens of positive responses. More than enough for our purpose.

  It was Sunday evening—Monday morning in Asia. We had just unleashed the pitch on China and were kicking back, congratulating ourselves on the completion of phase one. Allie had come over to my place, where, for convenience, Billy and I had set up shop. She’d brought Chinese food, which I thought was clichéd, but she offered it with ironic intent. Allie, Billy, and I had passed pretty quickly through the whole “I know you like me, but I’m dating him now” thing. To his credit, Billy had taken it in stride, and I thought I understood why, for there’s nothing like an involving snuke to take your mind off your thwarted heart.

  Mirplo was there, too, trying to interest everyone in a game of shenanigans, which is not the board game you may be thinking of, or the album by Green Day, but the grifters’ version, where a gang of you invade a public place and at the drop of the code word—“Shenanigans!”—all start acting in some chaotic, random fashion. This can be just for fun or to create a diversion for other endeavors, like shoplifting. Vic wanted to hit the Glendale Galleria, open late for holiday shopping, but I vetoed. Last thing we needed in the middle of a major grift was a misdemeanor theft arrest.

  I figured that Hines was watching the house, or having it watched, in which case he’d know that we four were hanging out. Was he cool with that? Hard to say. Having shed the Chad Thurston identity, I was now working in diligent open partnership with Yuan, and Hines wouldn’t mind that. But what about Allie? If he saw us together, would he assume she was still playing me, still easing me in? I decided not to give a rat’s ass. Allie was with me now for the duration—even if that duration turned out to be only the last ten minutes before police battering rams arrived.

  And Detective Constable Scovil? MIA. Completely. Which I found a tad distressing. In terms of personal appearances, this staunch Sheila was 0-for-December—odd for someone who’d previously come on so strong. What gave? Had she bought my mislead so completely that she’d had to bank her fires while confirming up her chain of command that she wasn’t inadvertently stepping on another undercover operative’s toes? Had she, in short, believed Vic? Impossible. Who believes a Mirplo? But if she’d doubted him, why had sh
e not confronted me? I was still her bitch, right? Or was I? Had she changed the parameters without telling me? While I would feel affronted by such duplicity (what, she didn’t trust her bitch to stay bitched?) I could certainly understand it. She’d want to keep me guessing.

  I asked Vic if she’d given him any hint about how she took his news. “She told me to go fuck myself,” he said, “if that’s any help.”

  It wasn’t, not really.

  She was a worry, though. All week long, she’d been like a seed stuck in my tooth. What was she up to? Was she really content to let me work without her supervision? Did she really trust me that much? Unlikely.

  So then, she was giving me leash, and a whole damn lot of it, too.

  Why?

  Well, on one level you could say that while she didn’t trust me, she still might have confidence in me: confidence that, via either the Penny Skim or the Merlin Game, I’d reel in Hines, the fish she wanted to land. But wait a minute, whose word did I have that he was, really, her intended catch?

  Hers. Only hers.

  I cast my mind back to my first encounter with Scovil, how we’d instantly rubbed each other the wrong way. I hadn’t really disliked her, I recalled—just responded to the vibe she’d given off. But where did that vibe come from? Why did she loathe me so? She didn’t even know me.

  Did she?

  Well, did she?

  “Hey, Billy,” I asked. “How far back do you and Scovil go?”

  “Years, mate. She recruited me out of prison for her training program.”

  “Yeah, that’s what she told me,” I mused. “That was a rather profound act of trust.”

  “She said she had my measure. Knew my type. Said if I so much as thought an evil thought, she’d know it.”

  “Knew your type, huh? I wonder how.”

  “Ah, well, as to that, she’s had long experience with the art of the con.”

  “As a practitioner?”

  “Nah, mate. Victim.”

  My ears pricked up. “Go on,” I said.

  “Right, well,” said Billy, “you have to know she was drunk when she told me this, so it could either be true truth or only pub truth, yeh?”

  “Understood.”

  “It was the night my training program finished.”

  “You’d already figured out you were going after the Reserve Bank?”

  “Too right. You don’t want your training to go to waste.”

  “So much for having your measure,” said Allie.

  Billy smiled. “Anyway, that night there was a bit of a piss-up down the road. We shouted rounds back and forth till closing. At which time she confided in me that her parents had been ruined by a grifter. Picked clean. They lost their home, savings, everything. That’s what brought her into anti-fraud.”

  “Righteous indignation?” asked Allie.

  “Fuckin’ rage.”

  I rubbed the bridge of my nose with my thumb and forefinger. I had an awful premonition about what I’d hear next. “Did she say how they got snuked?”

  “Mortgage fraud. They thought they were leveraging their land to buy more land. Exotic shit, too.”

  “A tropical island?”

  Yuan’s eyes widened. “How did you—?” He bit off the end of the sentence. “Oh, no. Oh, mate, you didn’t.”

  “What?” asked Vic. “Didn’t what?”

  “I’m afraid I did.” (Through a dummy corporation called Vala Island Holdings. Look up the latitude and longitude and you’ll find it’s blue water.)

  “How?” asked Allie. “They were half a world away.”

  I shrugged. “The internet,” I said. “It extends your reach.”

  “Wow,” said Billy, reverently. “Well now, that’s a coincidence.”

  “What’s a coincidence?” asked Vic, still not catching on.

  “I don’t believe in coincidences,” I said, and with that began to ponder the possibility that I, not Hines, had been Scovil’s target all along. If so, I would now have to percolate everything through the filter of new information. Say Scovil was after me on a revenge tip and Hines was after me for pure go-to-hell. Were they after me together? Was their mutual enmity so much smoke? If yes, it meant they thought they could hustle a hustler. This outraged me some, as it showed disrespect. Then again, they had managed to get me up to my elbows in a big, muddy grift, the kind of grift that could put poor Radar in an orange jumpsuit for the rest of his natural borns.

  Somehow I didn’t think that was enough for them. Who goes to all the trouble—comes halfway around the world, in Scovil’s case—just to make life hell for one nonviolent perp? It’s not like busting me was going to bring world peace. Anyway, I knew what Hines’s play was: money. Maybe that was Scovil’s real play, too, and all her righteous spew was just another wheel within the endless wheels. Hmm. So now I had to ask myself whether Scovil was capable of thinking that many levels deep. Could I picture her in an Aussie public house planting the seeds of phony baloney on the outside chance of organizing a payback party for me at some point in the indeterminate future? Could she really be that devious?

  “Billy,” I asked, “apart from her ‘fuckin’ rage,’ do you think Scovil’s an honest cop?”

  “Oh, lilywhite, mate.”

  “Any chance you’re wrong?”

  This gave Billy pause. I saw his eyes go up and to the left, which is where the eyes go when the memory files open. I imagined he was reviewing every interaction he’d ever had with Scovil, measuring them against this new possibility. Like all great grifters, he would have the ability to recall those conversations not just word for word but nuance for nuance. He would now be rethinking those nuances, looking for the telltale “rift in the fabric of space” that augers a lie. “It’s possible,” he said at last.

  “Possible,” I repeated. Possible that for Scovil, revenge meant not just getting back at the bad guys but getting her taste, too. After all, the world hadn’t been fair to her family. Some people react to such circumstances by investing that much more heavily in fair. Others just say, “Screw fair.” Well, if Scovil was on the “screw fair” side of things, it meant not only that she could be bought but also that ultimately she would name her price.

  So: Was she giving me enough line to land a whale or enough rope to hang myself? Both, my gut told me. Really, she probably wanted both.

  The evening waned. Mirplo played heads-up poker with Yuan and ended up losing everything, even the pink slip to his shitbox Song Serenade, which Billy took one look at and immediately gave back. In gratitude, Vic invited Billy out to the Broadview. I hoped Billy had money, because going to strip clubs with Mirplo is like dating the homecoming queen: Mate, you’re gonna pay.

  Later, Allie and I were in bed together and the subject of money came up. “Radar,” she asked, “how much cash do you have?”

  I thought about the steel ammo box buried in the hillside below my flat. “Maybe ten grand,” I said. “It’s my dash cash.”

  “I have about the same.” She twirled an idle finger in my minimal chest hair. “You think we should?”

  “What? Dash?”

  “We have a bankroll. It’s not a lot, but enough to get started. We could rebuild.”

  “And Vic and Billy?”

  “They could come, too. We could be a road gang.”

  I had dismissed the thought of jetting before, but the metric had now shifted again, for if Scovil was as bent as Hines, then who in the picture would want to see us stand trial for our heinous crimes? The likeliest endgame any of us could anticipate involved guns and shallow graves.

  If we did dash, of course, we’d have to go off the grid, which meant cash cons only—old school stings like the Texas Twist, Candle Shop, and Block Hustle. This had a certain romantic appeal. We could be like those 1930s flim-flam men, selling personalized Bibles to loved ones of the newly departed. But when you start to examine it in the cold light of reality, it quickly loses its charm, for life on the cash con is a life of small towns, hick mar
ks, truck stops, fat cops, and grotty motels. Nor was I confident that there was any such place as “off the grid” in modern America. If we bailed on Hines, he wasn’t likely to forgive or forget, not unless we left the keys to the Penny Skim just lying on the table when we ran.

  And you know what? I wasn’t prepared to do that. I was kind of surprised that Allie was. So I asked her about it.

  “I don’t want to tell you,” she said in an oddly vulnerable voice. I didn’t force the issue. I figured she’d tell me or not tell me as she saw fit. We passed a quiet moment together, she still worrying my chest hairs and I happily tracing the line of her cheekbone with a fingernail. At last I heard a tiny intake of breath, the kind people make before they speak. Still the words didn’t come. Another moment passed. Then she murmured, “It’s you, you know.”

  “What’s me?”

  “Something I’ve never had before.” I could feel her heart beating. “Something to lose.”

  I blinked. “I’m something to lose?”

  She buried her head in my chest. “I can’t believe I said that out loud.”

  I stroked her cinnamon hair. “You’re something to lose, too.”

  Allie lifted her head and looked at me with wide eyes. “Am I? Am I really?”

  Listen, if you grift long enough, you’re going to work every game there is, and for me that had included enough sweetheart scams to know how to sell love. But I never uttered any “I love you” with anywhere near the honesty I invested just then in a single, silent nod. I thought Allie was going to cry. Or maybe that was me. “I’ll run if you want,” I said. “We can be like Bonnie and Clyde, only hopefully not getting ventilated in the last reel. But I refuse to believe we can’t outplay these mayonnaise motherfuckers.”