Swindlers

by Buffa, D. W.

  THE SWINDLERS

  D.W. Buffa

  SMASHWORDS EDITION

  * * * * *

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Blue Zephyr at Smashwords

  Copyright © 2010 D.W. Buffa

  www.dwbuffa.net

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  www.dwbuffa.net

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was our own Gilded Age, a time of excess and raw exuberance, in which the rich got richer and, instead of trying to hide the fact, did everything they could to make sure everyone knew just how much they had. The lavish display of wealth became an art form, a competition not so much over what things looked like than how much they cost. If there was a single winner, someone who defined the age, it was Nelson St. James, the man some considered a financial genius when he was making them staggering amounts of money, and something rather different when their profits began to turn into substantial losses. He had, when I first met him, houses everywhere, so many of them that it was hard to think he had a home. He visited them the way other people stayed a few days in a hotel. If he had a residence, a place he felt comfortable, a place he could lounge around in an old pair of sandals and a shirt bought somewhere off the rack, it was here, on his own private yacht that, as the rumor said, had cost as much as some countries spent on their navies. Blue Zephyr could sail in any ocean, go anywhere in the world, which meant that Nelson St. James never had to be in the same place twice, and, more importantly, never, even in his sleep, had to stop moving. It was that, and not any great love of the sea that made him spend so much of his time on the water; that, and perhaps the sense that out here he was more difficult to find.

  I had come aboard in San Francisco, invited for a weekend cruise down the California coast. Where Blue Zephyr was going after I left it in Los Angeles I had no idea, and I am not sure anyone else knew either. The last thing anyone on the yacht was interested in was their destination. There were more than a dozen guests, and all of them, or at least those I had met so far, were there for no other reason than because they had been invited. No one turned down an invitation from Nelson St. James. There was too much money involved for that.

  Standing at the starboard railing, I watched the evening sun turn a stunning reddish gold as it drifted down toward the sea and hesitated, hovering, as if just this once, playing havoc with human certainty, it might desert the western sky and go off in some new direction. Finally, as if instead of belonging to necessity the decision was now its own, it slowly melted along the line of the horizon and drowned in a shining flow of molten bronze. I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  “I’m Nelson St. James. I’m sorry it took me so long to get away.”

  The voice was different than I had expected, softer, less sure of itself, almost diffident, as if he had to make a conscious effort to approach someone he did not know. But when I turned around and we shook hands, that first impression quickly yielded to a second. His eyes, a steady grayish blue, were eager, alert, the eyes of a gambler quick to grasp the nature of the game, and quicker still to take advantage. His smile was full of mischief. That was what caught your attention, what gave him an interest, that look of keen anticipation, a sense of what might happen next, because otherwise he seemed fairly ordinary, no more remarkable than any other middle aged man you might pass on the street.

  He continued to make his apologies as he led me to the starboard side, explaining that he had been forced to spend all day in his cabin below, working on “some business thing I had.”

  I was still trying to fit the quiet, self-effacing voice of his with that bold and almost avaricious look he had. In some odd way he seemed aware of it, amused at the condition, as if his voice belonged to someone else, someone he used to know and whose sudden disappearance caused a puzzled smile to come to his lips. He spoke in fits and starts, the words never quite adequate to the thought he meant to convey; words being slow, heavy things compared to what, if the look in his eyes was any indication, was all the wing-footed calculation racing through his brain.

  “You’ve met…the others?” he asked with a vague half turn toward the small crowd gathered at the stern.

  I nodded, but made no other reply.

  “They’re not very interesting.” He said this as if the point were obvious, but obvious or not, he waited to see my reaction, and when I said nothing, he seemed to approve. “You’ve just met them; I’ve known most of them for years. Trust me,” he said, laughing under his breath, “dull as dust. All they know is money.” Pausing, he tapped his fingers on the brass railing. “Actually, they don’t know anything about that, either.”

  St. James, short and slight of build, gripped the railing with both hands and gazed at the coastline little more than a mile away. “There,” he said presently, pointing toward the red tile roofs and white stucco walls of a massive estate clustered at the top of the hills, bathed in the solemn twilight colors of the vanished sun. “That’s something worth seeing, not the way the tourists do who buy their tickets by the bus load and go gaping through it, but from out here, where it doesn’t look any different than when it was first built.”

  His eyes, filled with a strange, vicarious pleasure, moved in a steady arc until he was looking straight at me. It was as if he wanted me to guess what he was thinking, some secret he had not shared with anyone and was not yet certain he wanted to share with me. It was one thing if I could figure it out on my own; it was another thing if he had to tell me.

  “The Hearst Castle,” I said, returning his gaze. “The only castle in the world named for the man who could afford to build it.”

  “Exactly. Hearst was not like Getty or Howard Hughes, hiding from the world, afraid of what other people wanted. He wanted everyone to know what he had, all the things he had taken, taken from all over the world, to fill up that castle and, some might say, the empty corners of his life. And America is the only place he could have done it, built a castle like that, dedicated to his own importance; because we don’t worship royalty here, we worship money. We’re a nation of thieves, Mr. Morrison; it’s what we’ve always been. That’s what makes this country great.”

  He laughed, but he was serious. Everyone took what they could, he seemed to suggest; some were just better at it than others.

  “I’m glad you came.” He glanced over his shoulder at his other guests, talking loudly in the shadows at the other end. “Dull as dust,” he then muttered, shaking his head.

  “You’re the lawyer – right?” he asked with sudden interest, as if he had just remembered. “Morrison. You work with criminals. Some of them must be interesting. At least they’ve done something that isn’t just like everyone else.” He put his hand on my sleeve, and with a strange, almost malevolent sparkle in his eyes, studied me for a moment. “Or maybe they’re just as dull as the rest. Maybe the only different is that the rich are just criminals who haven’t been caught.”

  “In this nation of thieves you were talking about?” I ventured.

  “Exactly, Mr. Morrison; exactly right. A lot of people think that about me, you know. But they’re wrong.” The sparkle in his eyes grew brighter, became more intense. “I’ve never done a dull thing in my life.”

  He stayed there, talking, mainly about William Randolph Hearst and the way he had lived, for another twenty minutes or so, and he might have stayed there even longer, talking about the past, if his wife had not come on deck to remind him that he had to change for dinner.

  “Aren’t you going t
o introduce us?” she said as he started to leave. But she did not wait. “I’m Danielle,” she said as she offered her hand.

  It was painful, so painful that for a moment I did not think I could breathe. It was the story of Medusa, told the other way round, a face so lovely that, if you were not careful, you might lose all sanity. She was younger than her husband, though by exactly how much I could not say, but her intelligence was certainly as quick, and just as instinctive. Her eyes were full of laughter, and yet at the same time, just behind the laughter, there was a kind of sympathy, as if she had become used to the effect she had on men, the awkward stammering, the loss of all confidence, the sudden blank expression, and wanted to offer at least a word of two of kindness and encouragement.

  “You didn’t want to join the others?” she asked, tossing her head in the direction of the voices that, loud enough a moment earlier, now seemed muted, distant and irrelevant.

  My mind had gone missing. I felt a smile start to twist its way across my mouth. I tried to pull it back, but too late. She gave me a teasing glance, the way someone does who knows more about you than you do yourself.

  “Is it because you’re…shy?”

  “No, I was there.” I heard the words and only then realized they had come from me. “I had a drink…but then…” I kept looking away, and kept looking back, my eyes both sentry and traitor of what I felt. “And then the sun was going down, and I’d never been out here before, and I wanted to see it all – the way the light changed color, the way the sun….”

  I shook my head and laughed, held what was left of my drink in both hands and studied, though it was barely visible, the planking on the deck. I laughed some more, struck by my own sudden incapacity. There was nothing to do but shrug my shoulders and admit defeat. I looked at her again and this time did not look way.

  “And because after a few minutes, I didn’t have anything else to say to them.”

  “Anthony Morrison, the famous courtroom lawyer, didn’t have anything to say?” Her voice was warm and breathless, every word seeming a mystery with more meaning than anything it said. “But then I suppose it must be different, what you do in court, when you talk to juries and ask questions of witnesses sworn to tell the truth, and a normal conversation, like this one, in which two people who have never met before try to make themselves sound interesting by telling all the lies they can.”

  It was stunning how easily she made you want to believe her. Even when she told you that she was not telling the truth, you knew, or thought you knew, that she was telling you the truth about her. Taking my arm, she began to lead me toward the others. The sun had vanished completely, all that was left a few jagged streaks of deep purple in a scarlet colored sky. Across the water, on the distant shore, where Hearst had built his castle, lights began to appear.

  “Don’t worry,” whispered Danielle, her breath close against my face, her fingers pressed tighter round my arm. “I’ll take good care of you.”

  It had been difficult enough to keep my composure, difficult enough to think clearly, when she was moving among the shadows of early evening; it was next to impossible in the fevered atmosphere of wine and candles when we gathered for dinner and, protected by the anonymity of the crowd, I could watch her closely. Her high cheekbones and soft teasing mouth, her eyes that seemed to grow larger the longer they stayed fixed on you, her hair an auburn shade that rivaled dusk. But it was the small gestures, the subtle smile that added warm to what she said, the eyebrow lifted in delight or surprise at something someone else had said, that made her so fascinating to observe.

  She sat at the end of the long table, a table covered with crystal glasses and fine china, carrying on a conversation with one of those same men her husband had dismissed as uninteresting, drawing him out in a way that made him seem interesting at least to himself. It was a gift she had, an instinct for the vanity of men, making them believe by the questions she asked, the things she said, that there was no one with whom she would rather be, no one who could hold her interest in quite the same way.

  “So if I should decide to murder someone, you’re the one I should hire?”

  I was still watching Danielle. The conversation around the table came to a stop, and I became aware that suddenly everyone was watching me. I turned and found Nelson St. James, leaning back in his chair at the other end of the table, the crooked smile on his face growing broader as he waited for an answer.

  “That’s what you do, isn’t it?” he asked with a friendly and, as it seemed, sympathetic glance. “Defend murderers, rapists, and thieves, and -”

  “Well, that depends on who you decide to murder,” I replied. I sat back and tossed my napkin on the table. The question had brought me back to myself, put me in a position in which I knew what I was talking about, put me in a position to say something which, let me be honest about it, might make Danielle St. James think I was something other than a tongue-tied fool. “I make a rule never to defend anyone who has killed a friend of mine.” I studied the glass I still held in my hand and smiled back at St. James. “A close friend, you understand.”

  Gathered around that table were some of the wealthiest people in the country. Like St. James, who grinned his approval at what I had said, they tended to forget how much their own success had depended on chance, and believed instead that it had all depended on them, their ability to see the world as it was, a place in which everyone who knew what he was doing always looked to his own advantage.

  “Yes, well, business is business,” said St. James, casting a knowing glance around the table. But then, as if to raise a doubt, question the validity of what they thought about themselves, he turned back to me and asked, “Does it ever bother you? I’m told you don’t lose very often – almost never.” He searched my eyes, trying before I made one to measure my response. “No, that’s a stupid question, asking if it bothers you to win a case you should have lost!” He shot a sharp, almost dismissive glance at a balding man with small, greedy eyes. “That’s like asking Darwin here whether it bothers him when some financial scheme of his puts a few thousand people out of work.”

  Richard Darwin had the habit, which must have started when he was a child, one of nearly a dozen children in his family, of eating with both hands, and talking while he did it. His hands, his mouth, were in constant motion, and there was no set pattern, no accustomed routine; it was purely a question of expedience. If he used his right hand to butter a piece of bread, he used his left to shove it into his mouth; if the salt was on his left, he used that hand to season his soup while he ate spoonful after spoonful with his right. When he bit down on something, it was the only mark of punctuation ever heard in one of his endless run on sentences. It was impossible to imagine him, even when he ate alone, ever being quiet. But St. James’ remark stopped him cold. His face turned red and he clenched his teeth so hard his head began to shudder. He jabbed a stubby finger in the air.

  “Some people may lose their jobs when I buy up a company; but more jobs are created. I make things more efficient,” he went on, his raspy voice rising with each angry word. “Creative destruction, that’s what capitalism is all about – the future is only possible when you get rid of the past!”

  Far from troubled, St. James seemed vastly amused.

  “Isn’t that what I just said?” he remarked quite calmly. “You don’t feel bad about it when you close something down.”

  This was too logical. It missed, for Darwin, the essential point.

  “I do feel bad about it,” he wheezed. “It’s hard to put people out of work, even when you know that, overall, it has to be done.”

  “I’m sure it’s difficult,” said St. James, dryly, and then turned again to me. “But as I was saying, the question doesn’t have relevance. Your job is to win. The real question is how you do it. What makes you better than the others? Why do you win cases they say almost anyone else would lose?”

  “Look at him!” cried Danielle, laughing at the blank expressions she saw all around h
er, laughing because none of the others had grasped what to her seemed so obvious. “Look at his face. Who would ever think he could lie? When he gets up to tell a jury – I’ve never been in court, so I’m just imagining – when he tells a jury that his client is innocent, don’t you think, if they have any doubt about it, that they’ll take his word for it and not what some grim-faced lawyer for the other side tries to tell them?” She turned to me and smiled. “If I were on a jury, I’d believe what he said.”

  St. James held up his empty wine glass, studied it with a pensive expression, and then signaled that he wanted more.

  “But beyond that honest face of yours, Mr. Morrison, don’t you have to have a ruthless ambition, a willingness to do anything to win?”

  I wondered if he meant it literally, or, like most of us, meant it only in the sense of doing everything you could within the rules. I had the feeling that he was more interested in discovering what I thought about it, whether I recognized any rules I would not break.

  “I learned a long time ago,” I explained, watching the way he was watching me, “that the only way to win is to know the case inside out, know it so well that you don’t make any mistakes of your own, know it so well that you’re ready to take advantage of any made by the other side.”

  This did not answer his question, but that fact, instead of bothering him, seemed to tell him what he needed. He bent forward, another question, or rather another observation, on his lips.

  “A lot of lawyers must go into court fully prepared, but they don’t all come out winners the way you do.”

  I could not resist a retort, not after watching Richard Darwin stuff his mouth while he talked about the hardships of forcing other people out of work.

  “A lot of people spend their lives working very hard, doing everything they can to get ahead, but more of them die poor than ever get rich. Sometimes, what happens is just a matter of luck.” Caught up in my own argument, I pressed the point. “Trials are sometimes won, or lost, by the smallest things: the way a witness shifts his eyes, or the sudden pause as if he has forgotten part of the well-rehearsed lie he had wanted to tell. I’ve seen trials decided because a witness for the other side wore a dress that was too revealing. Anything can change the outcome, and the great thing, if you happen to like this kind of work, is that you never know when a trial begins what it might be.”