The California Roll: A Novel Read online

  “You remember that?”

  “I told you, man, I have a pornographic memory.”

  “I wonder if we can track her down.” I grabbed my laptop and popped it open—then popped it right back closed. As it had been in fibbie hands, I had no reason to believe it wasn’t completely compromised, with a buried keystroke worm to track every move I made. “We need a public terminal,” I said. “What’s open this time of night?”

  Half an hour later, we were in a cyber café called Sunset Jackson, where, amid the Second Lifers, overseas Skypers and intellectual homeless, we searched for Kyoko Kaneko. The usual channels bore no fruit, nor did some of my more esoteric approaches—though I was reluctant to track too close to certain government databases for fear that Hines had stationed lookout bots, which I know sounds pretty farfetched, but by this point I was putting nothing past anyone. After endless permutations, combinations, alternate spellings, and grabass guesses, I asked Vic if he was sure he had the name right. You’d think I had called his mother ugly or something. The offended dignity of a Mirplo notwithstanding, I was starting to think I was digging a hole in the wrong place, when suddenly I had a thought.

  “Vic,” I asked, “do you suppose this chick’s an FOB?”

  “FOB?”

  “Fresh off the boat. First-generation American.”

  “Could be,” said Vic. “Her English wasn’t too good.”

  “As evidenced by the fact that she suffered a conversation with you.” Weirdly, this insult pleased Vic. He seemed to take it as a measure of apology accepted, and I honestly couldn’t say he was wrong. It’s hard to stay mad at a Mirplo. “Okay, let’s try a different approach.”

  I pried open an INS database and got a hit on the first try: There was a Kyoko Kaneko with a student visa that let her attend film school at UCLA, and an address in an area that the real estate agents like to call “Beverly Hills adjacent,” but really it’s just L.A. I jotted down the address on the back of Hines’s bank routing slip, the irony of which was not lost on me.

  We still had a few minutes’ credit left, and Vic wanted to surf porn. I looked over my shoulder, where an African woman with toddler in arms was on a headset talking to, I guess, her husband back home. “Yeah, let’s not,” I said. Before Vic could protest, I had cleared my cache, closed the browser and logged off. Actually, the woman put me in mind of a phrase I’d heard long ago: luxury crisis. So much of what we go through around here, so many of the things that make us feel sorry for ourselves, are the artifacts of prosperity—say your BMW breaks down. Almost every mess you find yourself in would be an enviable mess to, say, the twelve-year-old stitcher of your Honduran camisa. It was something to think about—but later. Right now, my mess was my mess, and I’d do well to stick to the matter at hand.

  Vic and I walked outside and stood together on the street. “Vic,” I said, “you know I can’t give you that gun back.”

  He nodded, and said solemnly, “Trust can’t be granted. Earned it must be.”

  “What are you, now, fucking Yoda?”

  We shared a laugh, and something lifted off me. Every since Allie Quinn had come into my life, I’d felt like a resistance fighter stranded alone behind enemy lines. Now at least I wasn’t alone. A Mirplo’s not much of an ally, but he’s better than a sharp stick in the eye, which is a useful way to measure many things.

  “I’m supposed to see Hines in the morning,” said Vic. “What’ll I tell him?”

  “Tell him you lost it.”

  Vic pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Yeah,” he said, “that sounds like something I’d do.”

  He started away. “Vic,” I said, and he turned back. “I don’t need to tell you what’s at stake here.”

  “Nah, the gun sort of spelled that out.”

  “We’re in this together now. If either of us fucks up, we’re both going down.”

  He mused for a moment. “Then try not to fuck up,” he said, and sloped off into the night.

  19.

  don’t be cool

  I went home and went to bed. Later, I had a dream. I was driving a 1959 Cadillac convertible across the Mojave Desert. Elvis Presley sat in the passenger seat, singing incorrect lyrics to his own songs. “Don’t be cool,” he crooned softly, “to a heartless Jew.”

  The car was gorgeous, the color of smoke, with fins that stretched to the heavens. The air suspension made the ride so smooth I thought I was flying. Then I glanced down (through, oddly, glass bottom floorboards) and realized that I was flying, flashing along a hundred feet off the desert floor. The King reached over and gave me a reassuring pat on the knee. “The rules don’t confine,” he growled gently, “they define. True genius works within form.”

  Before I could huh a huh, I was back in my bedroom, buried nose-down in a pillow that still smelled like Allie, which was strange, because I’d for certain changed the sheets. Then I realized that the thing that smelled like Allie was Allie, lying beside me in bed, propped up on one elbow, and watching me with eyes as big as a Walter Keane kitten’s.

  “How’d you get in?” I asked. “I know I locked the door.”

  “Silly,” she said. “I told you, I teleport.”

  “What else do you do?”

  “Thought you’d never ask.” She yanked back the covers and dove on my gear like a diabetic diving on a Dove bar.

  This, alas, was a dream as well.

  When I woke for real, I got my day moving fast. I wanted to be out of the house ahead of any unwelcome visitors. Climbing behind the wheel of my vintage Volvo, I headed west on Beverly Boulevard, and within half an hour was in Kyoko Kaneka’s neighborhood. I parked down the street from her red adobe four-plex. Outfitting myself with some props from my trunk, including a clipboard, tie and jacket, zero-lens glasses, and sundry identifying documents, I walked to her address and rapped on the door.

  A shadow passed over the peep hole, and I knew she was checking me out. “Who is it?” a lilting voice asked.

  “My name is Taft Hartley, ma’am” I said, in a civil servant’s neutral tones. “I’m with the county health department.”

  “The landlord handles the—”

  “Ma’am, it’s not that kind of issue. I’m looking for …” I flipped through some blank pages on the clipboard, then made eye contact with the peep hole. “… an Allison Quinn.”

  “You mean Allie?”

  “I suppose so, ma’am. It’s very important that I talk to her. Her health may be at risk.”

  “Why are you looking here? She doesn’t live here.” Interesting: I could almost hear an anymore in her voice.

  “I see.” I sounded weary, disappointed. “Ma’am, could I come in, please? I need to ask you some questions.”

  “Can I see some ID?” I held up my credentials. Why people think a piece of paper makes you something you aren’t, I’ll never understand. After a moment, the door opened, and a barefoot Japanese girl let me into her immaculate apartment. I didn’t really recognize her from the car show, and assumed that she wouldn’t remember me, either. Apart from the getup I wore, just think of the thousands of people you meet whose faces never register. Unless you’re a freak like Mirplo.

  She told me her name. I repeated it, stumbling expressively over the pronunciation. Then I said, “Allison Quinn, ma’am—”

  “Would you stop calling me ma’am, please? I’m no older than you.” Her English wasn’t as bad as Mirplo’s pornographic memory made it out to be, but it sounded studied, like she’d been working hard to Americanize her persona. I’m just wondering: Is there not a little grifter in all of us?

  “Sorry,” I said with a shrug. “It’s how they train us.” Once again I referred to my phantom notes. “Anyway, she listed you as a character reference on an application to teach in the L.A. schools.” At that, Kyoko broke into a high giggle, her eyes shining. “Is something funny?” I asked.

  “Allie teaching school. Tell the children to guard their lunch money.”

  I looked at her blankly, the
n pushed on. “She took a tuberculosis test. It’s just routine, part of the application process, but it came back positive. We need to retest her, treat her if necessary, see if we can figure out where she got it. Do you know if she’s been out of the country recently? Say in the past year or so?”

  “She was always coming and going somewhere. She said she had international business. Truthfully, I think she was a hooker.”

  “Do you know if she went any place tropical? Africa, say, or South America.”

  “No. Australia, I think. Didn’t even bring me back a boomerang.”

  “If I may say, ma—” I caught myself, “miss, it doesn’t seem as though there’s much love lost between you two.”

  “Allie Quinn is a liar and a cheat. She lived here for six months and never paid a cent of rent. It was always, ‘The money’s coming in,’ or she had an emergency or something.” Kyoko made a moue. “She said she could get my screenplay produced, but that was bullshit, too.”

  There it is, I thought. Hell hath no fury like a writer scorned.

  We talked awhile longer. Kyoko was generous with information, the way people will be when they feel needed or important. From what she said, I was able to construct a picture of Allie as a transplant from somewhere, working solo grifts and just trying to get by. Though Kyoko occasionally joined Allie on bizarre adventures, like her masquerade at the car show, they never were close. They started to fall out over rent, but before that could come to a head, Allie simply disappeared. “I think she got in trouble,” said Kyoko. “Some men came and took all her things away.”

  “Men?”

  “Policemen.”

  “And when was that?”

  “Summer sometime. Before Labor Day.”

  “I see.” I tucked my clipboard under my arm. “Well, if you see her, please tell her to contact County Health immediately.” I handed Kyoko a bogus business card. “And if I were you, I would avoid close contact.”

  “Trust me,” she said, “I won’t be kissing her anytime soon.”

  I cleared out. When I got back to my car, the Chad Thurston phone was ringing. I let it go to voice mail. I wasn’t ready to talk to Yuan yet. I had some new information to process.

  So Allie came and went. In the country, out of the country, with no real job and not a lot of cash. Thanks to Kyoko, I could reasonably place her in Australia, and though I couldn’t place her exactly next to Billy Yuan, it didn’t seem that far a fetch. But what was she doing down under? Sightseeing? Or setting something up? Suppose Hines had caught her with her fingers in the honeypot and flipped her like he flipped Mirplo. Unlike Mirplo, she’d be light enough on her feet to feed Hines a consistent false narrative. Maybe that narrative was one of feminine weakness—unlikely, given Allie, but still—and inability to help Hines catch Yuan without outside agency, said agency being moi. She’d met Mirplo and me last year at the car show. Let’s say she’d intuited (or researched—I wouldn’t put anything past her) that I was a good enough grifter to be represented as world class. Then she led Hines to Mirplo, and through him to me. In that case, I wasn’t the source of some extravagant, sought-after skill package, but just an elaborate stall.

  That explained a lot, but it didn’t explain everything.

  Like: why did she sleep with me?

  I drove around for a while, mulling my hypothesis, testing it from different angles, seeing how other pieces fit. Could Scovil have picked up Allie’s scent in Australia, either before or after Scovil made Hines for bent? Was Allie secretly (or additionally) working for Scovil? Did Hines thus feel a certain noose tightening around his neck? He wanted me to button up the Merlin Game, with himself as offshore beneficiary. Was that money intended to grease his getaway? If so, when was getaway day?

  Once again, I had too many questions and not enough answers, which was really starting to get on my nerves.

  Or was it?

  I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror. If I didn’t know me better, I’d say I looked happy. This puzzle was proving satisfyingly difficult to solve. I felt alive in my mind. Apart from the risk of getting dead in my body, I was having a high old time.

  But that risk of getting dead was not negligible. I couldn’t overlook it.

  Now my own phone rang. I ignored it, but a moment later pulled into the parking lot of a mini-mart to check both phones and play back my messages.

  Mirplo had called. “Hey, Blue Leader,” he chirped, in what I suppose he supposed to be code, “Big Bird is getting testy. Wants to know if you’ve forgotten about the thing with the thing. I played dumb.” (A Mirplovian gift, that.) “But you’d better do the thing with the thing today, or Big Bird’s gonna shit on you.” Threats aside, the thing with the thing—the Merlin Game—needed triggering soon, or it would lose the heat of its momentum and fall apart. This thought filled me with a strange indifference, and it felt weird to think of a $300,000 snadoodle as a distracting aside, but that’s what it had become. I sent Mirplo a text telling him to assure Hines it would be done today.

  Not, perhaps, the way he anticipated, but hell, you can’t have everything.

  I played back the message on the other phone. “Hey, Chad,” Billy Yuan began, “how’s that ol’ universe treating you?” Man, you didn’t need a subtext detector to hear the busted! in Billy’s voice. He was on to me, and letting me know it. “Listen, mate,” he continued, “two questions for you: Why did Willy Sutton rob banks? And where is the money now? Call me when you know. I fancy we can do business.”

  So I’d been made. Made by an arrogant prick who wouldn’t even let me play his reindeer games till I passed a little test first. It put me in mind of Allie and the whole Cinderfuckingella thing. Sometimes we grifters are too cute for our own good. Anyway, the first question was easy. Willie Sutton robbed banks because, as he famously (though apocryphally) put it, “That’s where the money is.” But where was the money now? Was Yuan referring to the Merlin Game, trying to get me to out myself about that? I didn’t think so. He might know about it, of course, from several different sources, but I didn’t think that was the money he was referring to. Why? Hard to say. A gut feeling. Something from his tone of voice that said the question was more about him than about me. Like an SAT analogy, almost: Willie Sutton is to banks as Billy Yuan is to what?

  Well, what?

  I cast my mind back to Willie Sutton’s days. The Great Depression. When what money there was was in banks and almost nowhere else. Okay, if Yuan was using analogy, maybe I could, too. Great Depression is to banks as today is to …

  Is to …

  Nothing. My gears ground on the question, and I got nowhere.

  Broaden the search, Radar, I thought. Forget about “where is money?” Think “what is money?” And what is money, really, but an assignment of value, a promise to pay? Wait, promise to pay. That tickled something in my brain. If you think of it, money stored in a bank, say, is just a representation of debt. Someone owes someone something, and the sum of that something is a bank’s bottom line.

  Okay, then. Who holds all the debt right now?

  Got it!

  I scrolled to Billy’s phone number and hit dial. After two rings, Billy answered, “G’day, Radar.”

  Not even any Chadouflage. I decided to go shields-down, too. “Hello, Billy,” I said. “I know where the money is.”

  “And that would be?”

  “China.”

  “Excellent,” said Yuan. “You got it in one.”

  “So I did,” I said. “So now what?”

  “Now we meet and discuss our plan.”

  “What plan is that?”

  “You already know it,” he said. “We’re going to rob China.”

  20.

  the california roll

  I t took us a little while to work out where to meet: someplace public but cloistered, where two grifters could size each other up with appropriate discretion and wary circumspection. We settled on the Brentwood Country Mart, an open-air warren of shops on the east
ern edge of Santa Monica. There was a fake-wood fire pit in the center of the mart, surrounded by fast-food joints, but originals, not franchise. It was the sort of place where people sat around tête-à-tête in conversations covering everything from real estate deals to demands for divorce. It met our needs; plus, if we got hungry, the chimichangas there were dandy.

  I arrived first, and killed some time studying the window display of a specialty food store where a pyramid of elegantly labeled wine bottles pronounced themselves AcquaViva, which as near as I could tell was not wine but a fortified fruit drink that retailed for an incredible fifty bucks a bottle. A shopgirl noticed me and came out to hand me a brochure. I read it with, I guess you’d say, professional interest, as it touted the benefits of AcquaViva’s “proprietary blend of 23 fruit juices and extracts, including the life-giving açaí berry, one of Mother Nature’s greatest gifts.”

  Really?

  Reading on, I learned that AcquaViva was a bona fide superfood, packed to the rafters with flavonoids, phytonutrients, antioxidants, esterified fatty acids, and just a splash, it would seem, of Ponce de León’s original fountain of youth. It promised to boost energy, reduce muscle fatigue, arm the immune system, and bind free radicals. While the studies that backed these claims were suspiciously vague in provenance and methodology, they did have impressive-sounding names, such as “Double Blind Matrix Match of Antioxidant Versus Placebo Benefit-Vectors.” Better still, for the professionally athletically inclined, AcquaViva had been certified by the Global Anti-Doping Association as 100 percent free of all banned substances—though in fairness, the same could be said of an empty bottle. More good news: Lucrative distributorships were available now. I marveled at the sheer chutzpah of selling, basically, grape juice at half a yard a pop. It tickled me to think that snake oil, yet another venerable and storied snuke, was still alive and well in this modern world. Truly, nothing beautiful dies.

  “Why didn’t we think of that, eh?” I turned to see Billy Yuan standing beside me. “Low overhead, high markup, sexy product.” He shot me a wink. “Bit too much like real work, though, yeh?” In the light of day, outside the smoky confines of the Blue Magoon, I was able to get a better look at him. He was rather shorter than me, with a thin, wiry frame that suggested agility. I put him on yoga, or perhaps qigong. His features were so purely Chinese that it kicked up puffs of cognitive dissonance every time he opened his mouth and that flat Aussie accent poured out. I’m sure it made him good in the grift, for he was a walking cloud of deception, just by being who he was.