The California Roll: A Novel Read online

  We also worked out a verbal code, in case we happened to need to communicate meaningfully with each other in front of others. This entailed embedding some no-means-yes switches in our speech, so that we could stay on the same page no matter how convoluted our explanations or prevarications became. In addition, we compared our respective cryptolects, the natural dialect that develops among thieves, grifters, or any underground affinity group. Here in America, grifter slang is much the bastard child of carny talk, while in Australia it has many roots: Gypsy jargon, rhyming slang, convict cant. For example, my word for an easy mark was mook, while Billy’s was gudgeon, a type of fish. Slang provides an organic sort of code, but it would take some doing to harmonize ours.

  Of rather more pressing urgency was the need to burn down the house for Hines. The safe move, of course, was simply to do it and be done with it, let Hines have his own little offshore 401(k). Yet it kind of offended my sensibilities to just hand over the spoils of my grift. After all, what had Hines done apart from providing a list of qualified leads? And while we’re on that subject, how did a bent fibbie gain access to so juicy a pool of mooks? Was there a master government list of major fraud victims somewhere? Every grifter knows that chronic dupes make the best customers; presumably the feds know this, too. Still the problem remained, how could I balk burning down the house without—possibly homicidally—pissing him off?

  The answer lay in Billy’s ambition to rob China. An operation like that needs seed money. What better source of funds than a simple rollover of the Merlin Game? Hines wouldn’t like it but perhaps could be made to like it if he saw it as an investment in an even bigger payout. In a sense, I’d be holding his money hostage to his greater greed. This appealed to me, for it kept the cash in my pocket, and rather kept Hines there too. He might be a fibbie, but he was also a mark, and the classic strategy for holding the mark is equal parts promise and threat. As long as I had the money, Hines had to fear that he might not get it. But the promise of a mind-numbingly huge payday … yeah, that felt like a carrot I could dangle.

  I went home and crashed for a few hours, then woke up and started pushing the many buttons to close out the Merlin Game. My ripe targets got urgent instructions to act now or risk missing out on “the biggest score in the history of ever.” I knew they wouldn’t all come across—marks get cold feet—but statistic history taught that enough of them would jump in to make the play pay. I told them where to wire their instruments of deposit, and it was not to Hines’s little Liechtenstein S&L. I launched everything from my laptop, which I still assumed was gaffed, but now that was okay. Let Hines discover for himself that his money had gone walkabout, and let him stew in his own self-righteous juices till his anger boiled over. It was all part of the plan.

  Not part of the plan was the predawn instant message I got from Allie. How did she know my IM handle? I didn’t even bother to ask. By now she probably knew my shoe size.

  My computer booped its signal for incoming traffic, and a message popped up in a box.

  Hola paco. Que tal?

  I checked for the sender’s name, and typed back,

  Miss Terious? Is that the best you can do?

  – Wanted u to know it was me. What r u doing?

  – Playing cribbage.

  – Who with?

  – No one.

  – Solo cribbage? Sounds dull.

  – Gets me through the night.

  – Well, then, “fifteen two and the rest won’t do.”

  – u play cribbage?

  – strip cribbage. Great game.

  It went on like that for a while. Then the subject of pancakes came up, one thing led to another, and we ended up meeting at Rudi’s Eatateria, the place we’d first gone to parse the engagement of Allie Quinn and Ryan Paradox Reed. That seemed long ago now.

  I got to the restaurant first and waited outside, watching the passing industrious dawn patrol: fruit and vegetable trucks, delivery vans, and workers of all color of collar getting a jump on their long morning drives. God, I’d hate to be a citizen. The commute alone would kill me.

  When Allie walked up, I looked past her for signs of company known or unknown.

  “There’s no one with me, Radar,” she said—wearily, I thought. “We don’t work like that.” I shrugged and opened the door for her.

  Allie didn’t look great. Maybe it was the waxy light of Rudi’s washing her face gray, but I swear she looked like she’d aged. I took this on board. She was showing signs of stress, and stress is pretty hard to fake. You might grimace instead of grin, but how do you forge the furrow of a brow?

  We slid into a booth. Not the same one where we’d concocted our faux romance; that would’ve been too much irony. But I could look across the diner and see the ghost of that earlier conversation. I wondered if Allie saw it too. I wondered if it sprayed her with the same wistful mist.

  We ordered pancake stacks and questionable coffee, and chitchatted while we waited to be served. For some reason, Allie insisted on deconstructing a movie she’d seen recently, a nitwit legal comedy called Trial by Jerry. It seemed like she was trying to establish her bona fides as a normal person. She must’ve caught my eyes glazing over, because she stopped herself in mid-review and said, “You don’t really give a rat’s ass, do you?”

  “I’m not much for movies,” I admitted. “Real life is strange enough.”

  “Yours is.”

  “Yours isn’t?”

  She chewed on her lower lip, lost in thought, as if the question had never crossed her mind. As the waitress delivered our order, I could see her looking at the pair of us, measuring us, fitting us into her pantheon of customers. Were we lovers, junkies, late-nighters or early risers? And how did any of that stack up against her own sense of self: hardworking, long-suffering eternal denizen of the graveyard shift? It reminded me once again that the view from inside our own skin is everybody’s baseline. It may never have occurred to Allie that her life was at all strange. Or maybe she was just setting me up for another misdirectomy At last she said, “Radar, can I tell you the truth?”

  “Would this be the true truth or just the current version?”

  “I understand that you can’t trust me. Maybe if you knew what I’d been through, you’d know why I’ve done what I’ve done.”

  “So tell me.” I took a sip of bad coffee. “I’m all ears.”

  Skeptical ears, but ears just the same.

  22.

  queen of the motel 6

  A llie Quinn was born during the trickle-down years of the Reagan presidency. Her father, an aging Vietnam vet with undiagnosed post-traumatic stress syndrome, aggressively self-medicated with alcohol. Her mother was a classic codependent who enabled daddy’s drinking through sunny denial and periodic off-label pharma binges of her own. As neither was terribly adept at getting or holding jobs, they turned to such career builders as shoplifting, check kiting, and serial bankruptcy. This led to short stints in jail or, more commonly, hasty midnight departures for parts unknown. As some children will in such circumstances, Allie became self-sufficient, tough, and capable, a parent to her increasingly disabled parents. Though she attended school only sporadically, she read like a mad fiend and trained herself up in matters both esoteric (planetary astronomy) and practical (how to drive a car when both parents are too fucked up to move). She became comfortable with the dysfunctional family’s nomadic ways and even crowned herself Queen of the Motel 6, complete with a self-mocking tiara made of aluminum foil and a robe stitched together from motel towels.

  The grim fairy-tale phase of her life ended on her tenth birthday when her dad got macho at a railroad crossing and discovered the hard way that trains don’t give a damn about macho. Mother and daughter soldiered bravely on for a short while until Mother, who felt lonely and edgy and itchy, made the spectacularly bad choice of hooking up with a cokehead in transition to crackhead and willingly went along for that ride. This left Allie navigating a whole new minefield of drug-fueled domestic violenc
e.

  On the upside, she had a nice trailer to live in.

  But that didn’t last long. Mommy’s boyfriend decided to branch out into the exciting new world of crystal meth production (because who wouldn’t naturally look to a cooked combination of ether, Dr?no, and battery acid for a terrific high?). This led to Allie coming home one day to find that home had been replaced by a smoking hole in the ground.

  Then began the foster-care parade, and preteen Allie learned that almost all foster dads (and not a few foster moms) considered groping their ersatz daughter to be one of the perks of the job. By the time she reached menarche, she’d been felt up so many times that it ceased to register as anything other than a natural part of the ritual of living with strangers. But when they started feeling her down …

  Allie hit the road. Her innate cleverness and resourcefulness kept her from the clutches of pimps, and the memory of her mother’s corkscrew descent steered her away from the insidious trap of drugs. By luck, or the affinitive attraction of like to like, Allie fell in with a reasonably competent grifter who taught her many useful short cons, the kind of street-level snukes that could keep a pretty, clever girl pretty well fed.

  But then he raped her, and that kind of put a damper on that.

  Allie skated America, favoring midsize cities like St. Louis, Youngstown, and New Orleans, places big enough to offer anonymity and soft targets, yet not so huge as to overwhelm a skinny, fragile thing who, despite a rapidly thickening shell, remained all brittle and broken inside. She developed the wariness of a feral cat and a jumpy instinct for self-preservation. Instinct, of course, is no match for a knife or a gun; she was assaulted and robbed more times than she could count.

  Libraries were her salvation. Not only did they provide safe haven—uninterrupted hours off the street—they also let her leave her life behind. Buried in a book, whether Treasure Island or Spanish for Beginners, she disappeared from the world and entered a place with no past, no future, only the perfect floating now. Books were her drug, a fortuitously positive addiction that gave her a broad understanding of the real tools of her trade: human psychology, the romantic tug of good fiction, and sufficient general knowledge to lie plausibly in most situations.

  Still, she made mistakes, bad ones, for a learning curve is yet a curve, no matter how steep. She built a fake escort ring that either ripped off the johns or blackmailed them and left her feeling as dirty as if she’d put actual dicks in her mouth. She drove a getaway car in a bank robbery in which a guard was almost killed. She had no notion of sin, for neither her parents nor the fabulous fosters had shed much spiritual light on her life, but a strong internal gyroscope told her she was spinning the wrong way.

  Allie went straight for a time, scoring well enough on her high school GED to get into a community college in Gainesville, Florida. There she shared a townhouse with girls from conventional backgrounds and absorbed their ways. She got a job, a boyfriend, a car, but never held any of these things at anything less than arm’s length. She seemed not to be living her life but just watching it, like a documentary on Polynesia in her Anthro 101 class.

  One night, working late as a hostess at the local TGI Friday’s, she fell into a lively conversation with a bright, handsome couple heading down to Miami to work a real estate scam in that city’s superheated housing market. Talking with them, listening and learning, Allie felt something awaken in her: the sense of stimulation that had lately fallen out of her life. She couldn’t know it, but she was hooked on that stimulation, and her cold-turkey college approach was simply not going to work. More than that, this couple infatuated her, for they were masters of infatuation, and though Allie fancied herself tough, she was yet nothing but a soft mark. Oh the promises they made! With their millennial perspective and off-the-cuff morality, they offered the best of both worlds: a life outside the square, yet squarely on the “victimless” side of crime. So Allie dropped everything—job, boyfriend, and college education—and went south with the couple to surf the land boom and make herself rich.

  They betrayed her, fleeced her, and left her for broke.

  After that, Allie gripped the grift with a vengeance and milked every new mark with the ferocious intensity of a woman trying to buy back a lifetime of tears and abuse one overwrought dollar at a time. She became a paragon of the con: cunning, cold, and utterly unsympathetic to the swath of destruction she left in her wake.

  It was the swath of destruction that brought her to the attention of the FBI, for Allie got involved in some pretty high-level stuff: securities fraud, tax shelters, and most particularly a bogus overseas charity that tracked close enough to a front for terrorist operations to bring down the full heat of the fraud task force to which a particular fibbie had lately been attached. This was no laughing matter. Though Allie considered herself “just an innocent grifter,” her enterprise fit the sort of profile that was sending people up on twenty-year bids. But Hines saw the canny ability in her and thought she’d be much more use to the cause of law enforcement as a sort of super-informant, free to use her talents as she chose, so long as Hines could pad his arrest record with her unwitting accomplices. Allie knew a deal with the devil when she saw it, but the prospect of prison left her little wiggle room.

  It quickly became clear to Allie that she had merely traded one form of prison for another. As Hines’s pet, she was a weird sort of kept woman, earning her keep not through sex but through the routine abuse of those who should have been her natural partners, colleagues, and peers. The real trouble was, she liked grifters. The more time she spent in their company, setting them up and selling them out, the more she came to feel she was working for the wrong guys. But Hines kept her on a short leash and made it clear that the second she crossed him, her official sanction would vanish and that would be the end of Allie on the street. Over time, Allie noticed, Hines managed to dip his beak in almost every bust, opportunistically diverting available cash and liquid securities from the evidence chain. He didn’t much mind that Allie knew; who cares what your pet sees? Lately, though, that had started to change. Hines was a jangle of nerves, constantly looking over his own shoulder and under his own bed. Allie felt that only the prospect of nabbing two major players like Radar and Billy now kept her in the game. With presumed powers-that-be closing in on Hines, would he come to contemplate putting his pet to sleep? Was she suddenly the woman who knew too much?

  Did I believe her?

  I did. I thought it added up. It was Occam’s razor again with this explanation the simplest one that fit the facts. In particular, it rationalized all of Allie’s moves against me, and made them make sense. She’d neither been testing me nor vetting me; she’d just been stringing Hines along.

  Now with this new player, Scovil, the string was running out.

  I’ve said it’s hard to forge stress. I think it’s also hard to fake fear. I decided to treat Allie’s as true. She was a spy coming in from the cold. Into the comforting arms of Uncle Radar. And how would Uncle Radar use this new scared and skittish ally? I hadn’t worked that part out yet, but I figured that comfort, at least, was called for.

  I dipped a fingertip in a puddle of maple syrup on my plate, reached across and pressed it to her forearm, then gently pulled it away. Held together by surface tension, a sugary string lifted some downy hairs. Then the surface tension broke and the hairs fell back, bedewed with syrup. I’m not sure what I expected to convey by this, but looking up I could see Allie’s features soften. She recognized the tenderness there, and it became clear that if I was prepared to buy Allie’s story, she was prepared to buy my acceptance. We had reached a rapprochement.

  So, for the second time in two days, I made Anschluss with another practitioner of my odd craft. Each partnership was unlikely in its way. With Billy, I didn’t have nearly enough history to make the judgment of trust, and with Allie, I already had way too much. But a grifter goes with his gut. If you can’t do that, you end up second-guessing yourself at critical times, and then you end up
dead or in jail. With Allie in particular, it was a huge relief to unload my doubt. I felt as though two irreconcilable pieces of me were suddenly in harmony. It’s not just that I wanted her again, or still (I did, of course). I just much preferred to think of her as indentured to Hines rather than working willingly for him. In other words, harlot no, helot yes.

  And the horrors of her past? What of them? So she was damaged goods. Who isn’t? Are you telling me you escaped your childhood unscathed? I think you’re forgetting your parents’ casual neglect, or the tyranny of your older siblings, or rough treatment by a teacher or bully. Teenage heartbreak. Something. Maybe just the burden of self-awareness at an age when self-awareness is a tool we can’t handle. Does it take a truly ruinous past to cast a grifter? Probably, but so what? Even if I think I’m normal, I don’t imagine I’m the norm. At that, I’m just trying to get from one end of my life to the other with a reasonable amount of sanity and happiness, just like everybody else. If someone like Allie comes along and we can make common cause, that’s great. If we can forge something more lasting, that’s a damn miracle.

  At that point, though, I wasn’t thinking much past the necessary moves for the day ahead. Among other things, Scovil would need a report. I’d tell her that Billy had made me, rated me, and welcomed me onto his team—I was still her bitch, though, and awaiting further instructions. That was a reasonably accurate version of things, all except the me-being-her-bitch part. Hines, meanwhile, would get a different tale. Since he believed that Billy bought me as a trust fund baby, I would now tell him that Billy had offered to deal Chad Thurston into a play that would sound to Hines’s jaundiced ears (though not to Thurston’s innocent ones) like the Penny Skim. Thurston, the putative guileless pup, would of course have signed on, but the price of admission was a rather large wad of cash, and since real-world Radar Hoverlander wasn’t well heeled like simulacrum Chad Thurston, the money would have to come from elsewhere. This would be the logic of using the take from the Merlin Game simultaneously as seed money for the Penny Skim and bait for Billy Yuan. I knew that both sides of that equation would appeal to Hines, and I would lead him to believe that he could have it both ways. He could bust Yuan and also dip his beak in an obscenely larger birdbath. That Hines knew about the Skim—had heard about it from Allie during her post-Australia debriefing—would only serve to harden the mortar around his assumptions.