by Norman Green
“What’s he do for excitement?”
“He flies an ultralight, it’s like a hang glider with an engine. He goes parachuting, somewhere up in Connecticut. He says he used to be a mountain climber….” She looked over at Tuco, who had taken the book and was sitting down looking at it. “Gimme that,” she said. He got up, walked back over, handed her the book.
“What?” he said.
It was up near the front of the book, a two-page ad for an auction in Montreal. COLLECTIBLE CAR AUCTION, the banner read, but there was a picture of a motorcycle in one corner. “That’s his bike,” Marisa said, pointing at it. “You made me think of it when you asked what he did for excitement. I mean, he talked about all those other things, but the only thing I actually saw him do for fun is ride that thing.”
“Are you sure?” Tuco looked at the picture. “That’s pretty exotic. Not exactly a Harley-Davidson.”
“I’m positive,” she said. “I’ve never seen another one like it. He must have gotten it at this auction. Oh look, it says ‘call for provenance.’ That must mean they know the history of this thing, like where it came from and all that. The auction house has a Web site, let’s go look.” She looked at him. “I think we got him, Eddie.”
“You got him,” Tuco said. “I don’t know if the auction house will have the details on a sale from four years ago on their Web site.”
“Maybe not,” she said. “But the Internet is freak central, all we have to do is find somebody who’s nuts about that particular kind of bike. If we Google that bike, I promise you we’ll come up with six guys who know where they bought the screws when they built the thing, and if they don’t know about that exact auction, they’ll know how to find out about it. Ducati, right?”
Fat Tommy won the bet by thirty-seven minutes.
Harman’s phone warbled, he opened it and held it to his ear. “Wassup?” Tommy and Stoney came to point, listening to his end of the conversation. “Yeah, it’s me,” he said. “Yeah, I remember you.” His voice changed, and he didn’t sound like Jack Harman any more, he sounded like Martin from Brooklyn. “Okay. Yeah? Do I think he really wouldn’t talk to you for five million? Believe it or not, that’s not a fortune anymore, my friend. But I’ll see what I can do. Just, like, be ready to move, this guy doesn’t fuck around. Yeah, like a cashier’s check or something like that. You got to what? What?” He listened in silence for a minute. “No, wait,” he said. “No. Don’t do that. Yeah, I’m sure. Why? Because the bigger crook Ahn thinks you are, the more he’s gonna like you. You was an ax murderer who pried the gold out of dead people’s teeth, he’d love you. Gregory’s queer for that kinda shit. It’s a locker-room thing, you know what I’m saying? He thinks hanging around hard cases makes him some kinda player. Okay, listen, I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna run this past Gregory’s lawyer. No, forget it, don’t worry about that, the guy’s as big a crook as they come. Didn’t I say he was a lawyer? Anyhow, he’s better at manipulating Gregory than I am. He can probably get Greg all wound up about your story, Ahn will be so hot to meet you, he’ll be coming all over himself. No, there’s no commission, no, no, no, Jesus Christ, don’t even think about that, I ain’t taking nothing from you. Because I get mine from Gregory Ahn. You know what I’m saying? He believes I’m loyal to him, I get to ride this gravy train awhile longer. He thinks I’m working him to make a few extra bucks for myself, I’ll wind up sucking mud somewhere down in the bottom of the Meadowlands. Okay? So here’s what’s gonna happen: this guy is gonna call you, you meet with him, and he’ll tell you how he wants to approach it with Gregory. Yeah. This number you called me from, that where you’re gonna be at? Okay, good. No, figure tomorrow morning. All right. Yeah, ciao, baby.” He snapped the phone closed, ending the call.
“What happened?” Stoney said.
Harman’s smile and voice were back. “Diamonds. He was going to, how’d he put it? ‘Take some of my holdings over to Forty-seventh Street and get liquid enough to do this.’ He’s got his money in diamonds.”
“Oh, boy,” Tommy said, rubbing his hands together briskly. “Oh, boy.” He walked over to his house phone, picked it up, dialed a number. “Moses Wartensky,” he said. “Please. Tell him it’s his old friend Tommy.”
It was hard for Stoney to believe, but Tuco and Marisa sounded sure when they called him, so he borrowed Tommy’s car and drove out to meet them at a coffeehouse in one of the big malls on Route 4, not far from the George Washington Bridge. Go figure, he thought. After all this, the kids wind up nailing the son of a bitch.
“So who is he?”
“His real name is Wayne Plotnik,” Marisa said. She glanced from her father’s face to Tuco’s. “He was right in that old car catalog. I never would have seen it if it wasn’t for Eddie.”
Stoney looked at Tuco, who shook his head, denying his contribution. “Okay. Great job. So go ahead and gimme his story.”
“You tell him, Eddie,” she said. “You were the one who found him.” She sat there looking at Tuco. Stoney tried to read her expression and Tuco just tried to look blank. Jesus Christ, Stoney thought. What’s going on with these two? He’d never seen his daughter defer to anyone like that. Let it go, he told himself. You got no time for this now….
“All right,” Tuco said. “The guy was in the RCMP—”
“What? He was a fucking Mountie?”
He nodded. “Listen to the story. This guy isn’t some schlub in a red jacket riding through Central Park on a horse. Somewhere in the early nineties, okay, a special unit in the RCMP was absorbed into something called JTF-2. They’re Canadian special forces, and Wayne Plotnik was one of the first.”
“Never heard of ’em.”
“The Canadian government seems to like it that way. But just to give you an idea what these people are like, let me tell you one thing we found out. In Bosnia, the Serbs took some Canadian diplomats hostage. A JTF-2 team was sent in to get them back, and when the Serbs heard who was coming, they let the hostages go.”
“Holy shit.”
“That’s what I thought. There’s not a lot of hard information on what else JTF-2 has done, but they’re supposed to have been in places like Kosovo, Rwanda, Zaire, Haiti…All the garden spots. Most recently, some Canadian citizens were captured by a band of Peruvian guerrillas, and a JTF-2 team went in and got them out. Apparently not many of the guerrillas survived. So you know, okay? These guys don’t play.”
“I get it.”
“Wayne Plotnik was cashiered out of the service in ’96. We never found out why, but there was a story in a Toronto newspaper that if you had three captives who wouldn’t talk, you gave them to Plotnik, and a while later you would get two of them back, and they would be happy to answer all of your questions.”
Stoney rubbed his chin. He’d run into guys like that before, guys who liked turning the screws a little too much. Nobody trusted them, even in the underworld they wound up ostracized.
“Anyhow, after they threw him out, he went to work for a Belgian security company that, quote, provided arms and tactical training for suppression of insurrectionary forces, unquote.”
“Mercenary.”
“I thought those guys only existed in the movies. Anyway, he worked for the Belgians for two years. He was in Italy on vacation when two of the directors of something called Banco Calvino were taken hostage. After Plotnik sprang the directors, some bodies turned up in the Po River, no IDs, cause of death was massive trauma. So two and two add up to four, except if you’re in Italy and a large and powerful bank finds it in their heart to show gratitude, in which case nobody looks too close. After that, Plotnik went to work full-time for Banco Calvino. What he did for the bank, your guess is as good as mine, but they didn’t have any more problems with kidnappers. Anyhow, Banco Calvino was a very interesting enterprise. Even in a down market, they promised, and supposedly delivered, excellent returns for people and entities who had a relationship with them. Anybody who was anybody in Italy had money in Calvi
no, from the Sicilian mob all the way up to the Vatican.”
“Not a place where I could get a check cashed. And how did you find all of this out?”
“When the scandal hit, there were stories everywhere. We found them in a half-dozen newspaper archive sites.”
“We had to join up, here and there, you know, to access the stories,” Marisa said, grinning. “I used your American Express card. Hope you don’t mind.”
Stoney glanced at Tuco, who was working hard at keeping his face expressionless. Christ, Stoney thought. “We’ll talk about my credit card later. What scandal?”
“In ’99,” Tuco said, “Banco Calvino went under. The scandal was, what happened to all the money?”
“So? What happened to the money?”
“One of the directors dropped out of sight, along with Plotnik and a couple zillion lira.”
“How much in real money?”
“Forty-two million, U.S. Four months later, the director was found hanging in a stairwell in a hotel in Amsterdam. When they cut him down, he had a fish in his mouth.”
“Which means,” Stoney said, “the Sicilians got him.”
“That’s what everybody thought. But nobody found any of the money, and Wayne Plotnik is still missing.”
“Ah.”
Marisa produced two sheets of paper, laid one of them on the table in front of Stoney. “This picture,” she said, “is from a story in one of the local Jersey papers about Charles David Prior when he bought the house in Alpine.” She laid the second next to it. “This one is from an Italian newspaper, right after the bank closed.”
Stoney picked up the two pictures. “Cheekbones are a little more prominent, and it looks like he got a chin implant, but it’s the same guy. Definitely. How’d you put all this together?”
“We traced his motorcycle,” she said.
“What?”
Tuco nodded. “He bought it at an auction. That old copy of Hemmings had an ad run by the auction house the month before the sale, and there was a picture of his bike in the ad. When we looked at the auctioneer’s Web site, they had all the stuff from their old sales posted. We had to pay to look at that, too. Anyhow, that’s where Prior got the bike. In Canada. The seller was a Canadian collector. The auctioneer thought it was one of a kind, historically significant, it ought to be in a museum, and on and on. You figure they were just trying to pimp the price, but anyhow, they gave a history of who rode it in such and such a race, who owned it, and from when to when. Like with a painting by Rembrandt or one of those guys, they tell you the whole history of the stupid thing to convince you it isn’t phony. Anyway, Prior bought it at auction, and he had to bid against some motorcycle museum on the West Coast. The guy who was trying to buy the bike for the museum wrote an article about it for some bike collectors’ magazine, that was online, too. But the guy who sold the bike to the Canadian collector, you’re gonna be so surprised, was a man named Wayne Plotnik. That happened about six months before Calvino went under.”
“He probably knew the shit was coming. He wanted to keep the bike, so he made a deal with the collector in Canada. ‘I sell this to you, you hang on to it until I’m ready to take it back.’” Stoney picked up the two pictures, folded them, and put them in his pocket. “You guys did a great job. Now what I want you to do is forget that you ever heard the name Plotnik, and I want you to stay out of sight. He’s still calling you, right?”
She glanced at Tuco, then looked down at the floor. “Yes.”
“You know what to do, right?”
“Yes, Daddy.” She looked almost angelic. Drop it, he told himself. Leave them alone.
“All right. Just a few more days, and this ought to be all over.”
“You never told me any of this,” Benny said.
“Yeah, well, that’s why I’m telling you now.” Benny and Stoney were sitting in Stoney’s Lexus in the parking lot of a church in Bronxville.
“This is supposed to be an honest program,” Benny said.
“I know, Benny,” Stoney said. “That’s why I’m telling you the truth.”
“Jesus Christ,” Benny said. “You’re telling me the truth about you being a crook.”
“Yeah,” Stoney said. “You told me once, back in the beginning, that if I was a horse thief, you guys would make me a better one. You remember that?”
“I said that?” Benny shook his head. “Sounds like something I’d say. So it’s as easy as that? This guy is just gonna walk up and hand you his money.”
“I said it was simple, Benny, I didn’t say it was easy.”
“Well, who dreamed this up, that’s what I wanna know.”
“It’s based on an old scam they used to call ‘the Wire.’ You ever see that movie, The Sting?”
“Robert Redford and Paul Newman,” Benny said. “And old-time music. That’s all I remember.”
“Oh. Well, they based the movie on the same scam. The way it worked, you had a phony betting parlor, like for sports and horse races and all that. They used to run them out of a regular storefront. In a town like Chicago, they were practically institutions, they’d run the same games in the same locations for years. Anyhow, you had a guy who would go find a mark, he was called ‘the runner.’ He would spot some rich guy who was a little bit crooked. Those were the only two qualifications necessary, money and greed. The runner would introduce his mark to a second guy, who was known as ‘the insider.’ The insider would be a guy pretending to be connected, right, he was posing as a guy whose job was to place bets for a syndicate that fixed horse races. The insider would tell the mark, ‘Oh, this horse, Rusty Nails, is gonna win this race,’ and he would place this big bet on Rusty Nails, and sure enough, Rusty would pay off.”
“How did he know which horse would win?”
“Stay with me, Benny, the gaming place is phony, they’re running everything on a tape delay. You got the guy calling the race and all that, but it really happened an hour or so previous. And if this is in New York City, you don’t use a race at Aqueduct, you use Churchill Downs or some shit. Some racetrack far enough away so that the results ain’t gonna be in the Post the next morning. ’Course, that was back before the Internet.”
“All right,” Benny said. “So after a while, your mark starts believing that this second guy really does know what horse is gonna win.”
“Right. And you do this two or three more times, and you let your mark have a little taste. You know what I mean? You let him win a few bucks. When the guy is ready, the insider tells the mark, ‘Hey, these people I work for treat me like shit. They watch me like a hawk. I’m making them all this money, but they’re not taking very good care of me. Next week, they got this horse going off at eleven or twelve to one, and I wanna make something for myself, but I don’t dare make the bet on my own, because if they find out I did it, they’ll kill me. Now, I can scrape together fifty grand. I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you the money, and you can have your friend make the bet for me. He’s known here, and they’ll take a big bet like that from him without questioning it.’ By friend, he means the runner, the guy who found the mark to begin with. And he says, ‘Hey, if you wanna put fifty of your own with mine, I don’t care.’ So now, if you played the guy right, he sees dollar bills dancing everywhere, and he goes off to dig up as much money as he can. So the day of the race, the runner, the insider, and the mark all show up at the phony storefront. The insider gives the mark the name of the horse, the mark tells the runner, and the runner places the bet just before the race goes off. Now, say the horse’s name is Quaker’s Dance. The runner fucks up, he puts the money on a horse called Baker’s Chance. The mark shows the tickets to the insider, the insider sees the mistake, he blows a cork. The two of them rush back to the window to change the bet, but it’s too late, the horses are already running. The insider pulls out a gun, got to be something big and impressive, right, something that looks like a fucking cannon, and he shoots the runner, bang, the runner’s dead. Now, naturally, the gun’s loaded wi
th blanks, and the runner is fitted up with a bladder full of pig’s blood, but it all looks real as hell. So now the insider pretends to panic, because the cops are coming and all that. Him and the mark take off running, the mark goes home minus his money, but he’s not thinking he’s been robbed, he’s thinking, ‘Goddam, I was this close!’ And if the guy was greedy enough, sometimes they’d work the same game on him all over again.”
“And this actually worked?”
“Are you kidding me? The Wire was found money. Sometimes they’d have two or three marks in and out of the same storefront on the same day. And it wouldn’t necessarily have to be fifty large, either. They were taking guys for that much all the way back in the thirties.”
“Jesus. And the con artists would take turns being the insider,” Benny said, shaking his head.
“No,” Stoney told him. “Usually guys would specialize. Like a doctor. You get all used to doing bunions, right, you don’t wanna have to carve up some guy’s hemorrhoids.”
“Whatever,” Benny said. “But that’s what you guys are going to do to Prior.”
“Kinda,” Stoney told him. “Variation on a theme.”
“I get it,” Benny said, a little agitated. “You don’t have to lay it all out, not that I’d expect you to. There’s no racetrack, no phony betting parlor, but you and your partner, you go find yourself some poor schlub, and you build him up until he’s ready to mortgage his house on your say-so, and then you take his goddam money.”
“First of all,” Stoney said, “if he’s really a poor schlub, he’s got nothing to worry about from me. You know what I’m saying? I don’t want the guy’s house. And if he’s the least bit honest, I can’t touch him anyhow.”
“Why not?”
“Because the game don’t work on a guy who’s not a thief himself. We don’t just go pick some guy out of the phone book, anyhow. You got to have the right guy. The way it works…” He thought about it for a minute. “It’s like jujitsu. You ever heard of it?”
