Swindler & Son Read online

  The next morning, he was having breakfast on that same terrace when I sat down next to him.

  “So?” he asked. “Do I have to buy you off or scare you off?” He gave me a moment to answer and then went on when I didn’t. “I saw you following me yesterday so I knew we’d have a reckon at some point. You’re not a friend of Judy’s, you’re not a cop. What’s your game?”

  I already felt out of my depth but I held myself together and made my pitch.

  “I have a job for you,” I told him. “It’ll pay you lots more than Judy will.”

  He looked a bit cross-eyed for a moment. “What kind of job?”

  “US Government bureaucrat, ambitious, a prick and blinded by his own ambition. I want you to take him.”

  “Why don’t you take him?”

  “Because you know how. Besides, he knows me. We were friends once.” I watched him soak that up. “You take him and show me how. Because there’s a few more besides him that owe me bigtime.”

  “I’m sorry, dear boy. I don’t need a partner. I like to pick my own marks.”

  “I’ll be an apprentice, just till I know how, then I’ll go off on my own. I won’t encroach on your territory.”

  At this, Harry motioned for the waiter and ordered a glass of expensive wine, leaving no doubt he expected me to pay.

  “What do you think,” he said with a sigh, “I’m going to give you a course? Bunko 101? You don’t learn this sort of thing overnight and besides, you have to be the right sort of person, understand how things work.”

  “I am.”

  “Not blundering up to me like this. Besides, you don’t have the instincts. You’ve told me nothing of value about this fellow.”

  “I’ve told you that he’s greedy and impulsive; both of those will override his judgment. He’ll rush headlong if he’s tempted and then rush to cover his tracks after the fact. He won’t care about us, only about making sure no one finds out.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Alright, that’s useful—if it’s true. What else do you know?”

  “I know what he wants. What he really wants.” I dropped a handful of coins on the table. “That is your play,” I said, pointing at one of the coins.

  It was the first time I saw him peering at me over his glasses, like a hawk eyeing a mouse. He picked up the coin and turned it over in his hand.

  “I see— ‘Confederate States of America’, very nice. Why am I excited?”

  “You’re not but he will be. If that was real—”

  “Which, clearly, it’s not—”

  “—If it was real, it would be the fifth of its kind in existence, a Confederate half-dollar piece. Two of the others sold at auction recently for around $600,000 apiece. This is a restrike made in the 1870’s by a man who bought the only existing plates. It’s worth around $3,000.”

  “Broadmoor knows about the real ones?”

  “He does. I got this one from my ex-father-in-law, whose great-grandfather survived Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. Broadmoor pestered me to see it for months at one point.”

  “Are we depending on him not knowing a real one from a fake?”

  “Nope. There are only four real ones, very few photos even online, even the experts admit they’d need to examine the coins to tell the real ones from the restrikes. The only credibility issue is that the mint recorded only four coins being struck before they ran short of bullion.”

  Harry grimaced. “That is a problem. So why should he believe me when I tell him it’s incredibly valuable?”

  “Because you won’t. He eats lunch at Mimo’s clam bar every day—Mimo has a souvenir and jewelry shop with a big case of coins and trinkets from local shipwrecks. You’ll go in while Broadmoor’s having lunch and offer Mimo a bunch of coins you found on a dive a mile off Green Turtle Cay. You’ll point out the one that says ‘Confederate States’ on it. That’ll draw Broadmoor, I’ll guarantee you.”

  “And he’ll offer me big money just for that?”

  “No, what I’m thinking is, you’ll offer him all the coins for a couple hundred dollars.” Now Harry was intrigued—his eyes lit up like candles. “You’ll take his money and then say something like, ‘If I’d known they were worth this much, I’d have taken all the other ones.’”

  Harry’s smiling broadly at this point. He leaned back in his chair, relaxed and enjoying. “Go on,” he goaded.

  “In 1861, the USS San Jacinto seized the Confederate Ambassadors to Britain and France off a ship in Havana and took them to prison in the North. In 1865, the San Jacinto sank off Green Turtle Cay, disintegrating in rough water so that most of her onboard stores were scattered all over the ocean floor there.”

  Again, Harry’s eyes peering over the glasses, but this time with a conspiratorial twinkle. “And we’re meant to convince Mr. Broadmoor that a secret cache of Confederate coinage was seized with the Ambassadors by, shall we say, a corrupt captain or First Mate—a cache that went down with the ship?”

  “Actually, he already believes it. At least, he believes it’s possible. He told me the story as he was planning a vacation down here, just before he decided to crucify me instead.”

  Harry withdrew, considering, for a moment. “And why wouldn’t the mate have saved the coins when the ship sank?”

  “Because, in 1865, once the war ended, they were worthless.”

  Harry returned to considering. It was lovely to watch his wheels turn. He clearly enjoyed the pleasures of a good plot.

  “I will admit,” he said finally, “you know how to bait the hook. I’m still holding the line, however. Why should I take the risk?”

  “Because he’s way richer than Judy and far less likely to do anything about it. He’ll never admit that he’s been taken, his pride is too strong. So it’s a better haul and a safer one. And—if this goes well and you’re interested—there are two more just like him that we can take later.”

  He stared at me for a long moment. “You’ll give me a day to check out this fellow?”

  “You could just take him yourself—once I give you his name, you don’t really need me, do you?”

  “I give you my word as a gentleman,” he said solemnly, extending his hand. Then he burst out laughing. “I suppose that’s a bit over the top, isn’t it? How about my word as a scoundrel?”

  We shook hands.

  The Protected

  And from then, my life changed.

  Harry gave me my life back. He gave me agency, the sense that I could do something, that I could stand up for something, even if all I stood up for was swindlery (is that a word? If not, I want credit for it! Who do I know on the Oxford committee?).

  “And then he taught you HARRY’S RULES,” Sara says.

  “Well, no,” I admit through gritted teeth. “There are no HARRY’S RULES, really. I made up HARRY’S RULES once we started working together.”

  This is a very sensitive moment. The first time I tried explaining HARRY’S RULES to Sara, it broke up our marriage. I thought I was filling in the details to something she already understood. I was very wrong about that and now I worry that, with this admission, I’m picking at the scab.

  “Like I said, Harry’s the swindler. He’s never had any rules—he’s always made it up on the fly, taken his chances and went to jail when things went bad. It’s all part of the game for him.”

  “But not for you?”

  “Not for me. I did the same thing with Harry that I did with you—I took a leap of faith, impulsively, and then spent every moment after trying to make it safe, buff away the risks, rationalize all the things that excited me in the first place. I saw something I wanted but never expected to actually get—when I did, it scared the shit out of me.”

  “You don’t trust the truth, why should you trust people?” she says and I feel myself redden.

  “I just always feel like I have to improve the odds.”

  “How’s that working out for you?” she asks and I have no answer. She holds up her phone. “I did a series on Qumrah
di when they unveiled the new downtown a few years ago. There’s a tiny ruling family who own everything, flaunt their wealth, their own people hate them but get paid heavily just for being citizens. There’s a huge population of foreign workers stranded there, sixty to a two-bedroom apartment, swindled into onerous contracts, unable to pay off their debts, one rather fictitious step above slaves. Every year, several die because they’d rather try walking away across the desert than live in those conditions. Nobody trusts anybody there. They’re not going to help us find Harry unless it serves somebody’s interests—somebody with pull.”

  Diamante returns to his seat, holding up the tracking map on his phone. “Harry’s right here,” he says, pointing out a building at the edge of a field of blue, the northern coast of Qumradhi.

  “Is it a big building? Where is he inside?”

  “It says it’s sixty stories—where is he? No idea. I have to scan more when we get there.”

  “That’s all that thing tells you?”

  “It’s just an app!” he protests and I realize how tired we all are. “I forgot I’d installed it until you reminded me. I’m surprised it works at all.”

  I nod, apologetic. “Okay, I hear you. We’ll figure it out when we get there.” The truth is, I’ve no idea how we’re going to do that. I’m still trying to get us past the airport.

  A moment later, a powerful-looking fellow in a flight suit climbs the stairs and prowls the aisle, eyeing the ID badges until he spots us. I read the glint of recognition in his eyes. He’s alone and unarmed, as far as I can tell, but that doesn’t stop every muscle in my body from tensing.

  “If anything comes up,” he says, “you’re with the 3077th Air Wing; here’s the contact.” He offers a stiff business card with 3077th Air Wing insignia, lots of military acronyms that mean nothing to me and a phone number and promptly disappears below.

  We exchange confused glances, trying not to be obvious.

  And failing. An overly-fit-looking gent across the aisle, who’s been pulling bottles of expensive wine from a case he’s laid onto the adjacent seats, sees our predicament and leans our way. “The 3077th are our boys in Wadiirah. Big base on the mainland. We’ve spread the word all over the area that American contractors and soldiers are governed by UCMJ—” he waits to see if this registers. It does not. “Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, you’re guilty until proven innocent—we make damn sure the locals understand that. So when they meet a nasty American, they’re happy to hand you over to the MP’s, assuming you’ll get your ass kicked.”

  “And what happens?”

  “Are you with the 3077?”

  “No.”

  “Then they’ve got no jurisdiction. They’ll just ship you home,” he says.

  “No matter what?” Thinking back, it’s a bad question, one that betrays my innocence (there’s that word again). But he isn’t thrown.

  “Well, if you kill somebody, they’ll be pissed, but—it’s a loophole. Every system’s got one, right? So that’s us—we’re the loophole.” He winks at me, just like Harry would and goes back to watching the Kardashians on his iPad.

  At first, the line just washes over, like a good punchline should. And then, as I sink into my seat and take in the cabin, the whole scene transforms before my eyes, like petrol dissolving on a road washed with rain.

  You’d know, if you woke up on this deck without explanation, that it isn’t an airliner. There’s no movie, though everyone seems to have brought iPads and headphones. The seats are too wide and the legroom too plentiful—you can actually sit like a human being—but the seats face the back of the plane, there’s no portholes to look out of, no flight crew, no drinks and no food service. Our fellow travelers are dressed casually, but they’re all ridiculously fit and keep to themselves. They virtually scream ‘military’ but there are no nametags here, no insignias. No one asks.

  I’m the individual in Seat 57 and the crew knows where I’m going but not why or what I’m doing once we land—because no one’s asked and no one will. My ID is bogus but nobody’s checked it—and no one will.

  We’re the loophole…

  I take a deep breath and truly relax, for the first time since I heard my name over the police headset.

  I’ve spent fifteen years caught up in not getting caught, learning the rules of the game and how far I can bend them without having to pay for it. It’s become second-nature.

  Now, thanks to Dieter’s magic pass, we’ve all slipped over to the other side of the veil. I understand all at once how guys like him become guys like him. On his side of the divide, nobody pays for anything.

  It’s the same atmosphere that made me so uncomfortable when Hastings, Dieter and Mr. Woczynski walked into our office—no rules, no limits. A world that thinks rules are for the suckers who aren’t on the plane.

  I lean over to Sara. “Harry’s reading the Bible. According to him, the Bible says Noah was a good man ‘for his time’.”

  She looks as puzzled as I was when Harry brought it up. “That’s nice—and?”

  “Harry says this means God accepts relativity, moral relativity. We all live in context, in a time and a society—and can only be judged fairly within that context.

  “For example, we’re moving an iconic vintage race car onboard a Defense Department military transport—and it’s by no means the least military thing on board. The palette leaking white powder would set off alarms in every airport in the civilized world—it’s a cartoon of drug trafficking. The speedboat in the custom cradle is a Riva Aquarama, my guess is, late 60’s, early 70’s, handmade, mahogany, double inline motors, goes for about half a million at auction, on the rare occasions you can find one. Nobody’s using it to fight the War on Terror—but here it is on the plane. The Humvee, next to the 917 in the cargo bay, is military hardware but there’s something off about it. It’s sitting awfully low on its springs—those things are built to carry ten men in full military gear without sinking an inch, so whatever it’s carrying is very heavy indeed. Want to hazard a guess? Gold bricks, maybe? And this is just this one plane from this one airport carrying today’s anonymous cargo.

  “None of these guys are worried about getting caught. Why should they? The System’s not trying to catch them—they are the System. They know what happens to people who play by the rules—and that’s not going to happen to them.

  “If they kill somebody in a foreign land, they get shipped safely home, care of the 3077th. If they want to smuggle opium, speedboats or one-of-a-kind racing cars, they’re invisible to records, law and history, because there’s always a loophole for whatever they want.”

  “We’re not really in a position to complain, are we?” she says and she’s got a point.

  “I’m just saying I used to think Harry and I were mad pirates. Looking around here, I feel like a rank amateur. These guys made us look like chumps.”

  She doesn’t quite get it and I guess there’s no reason she should.

  “I don’t know if this is much of a defense but I’m just feeling kind of righteous at the moment. Maybe, for my time, being just a swindler makes me a relatively decent guy. I’ll admit that’s not a rigorous standard but I’ll take it.”

  I can’t tell if she’s considering this idea or hating it.

  “You still have your Bourne phone?”

  She nods.

  “Can I have it?” She hands it over. “My job,” I say, punching in a number, “is to find the seam and push it open.”

  Qumradhi

  Qumrahdi, the capitol of Wadiirah, is designed to be seen from the porthole of a jetliner. The sun looks ten feet overhead and a hundred miles wide, glaring off a fever dream skyline of faceted, scalloped, pincered, twisted, Lego’d shapes in gimlet, azure and other brilliant shades, against the deep green of the Persian Gulf.

  Things take a right turn—literally—as soon as we touch down. The plane pulls off the runway early, rolling to a hangar set as far as you can get from the passenger terminal.


  Two Tech Sergeants come up the stairs, directly to our row. “You three, follow us, please,” they say, in a tone that does not allow for objection. All my paranoia kicks in but I feel Sara’s hand on my arm. She smiles and follows. By the time we hit the stairs, she leans into my ear and says, “Relax. There’s two of them and three of us. They’re not armed and they’re not surrounding us.” She’s right—if they were arresting us, that’s definitely how they would do it.

  We exit into a blinding, broiling Middle East afternoon. The mouth of the plane is open; I see crew buzzing around the Porsche, rolling it carefully onto the runway. Two uniformed Wadiiran soldiers stand at the edges of the hangar door. As we approach, they snap to attention.

  Inside the hangar stands Prince Rahim in his ceremonial white robe and keffiyeh—I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in full regalia before, other than in pictures.

  -You offered greetings to Prince Rahim, whom you’ve met at a ceremonial occasion, and went on your way. What happened next?

  Hold up! What’s your hurry?

  -We can hear this part of the story from Prince Rahim.

  The hell you can. I want my version on the record here and now.

  -Let’s be clear—there is no ‘record’. We will decide what story will be told at the end and that will be the record.

  Well, okay. Thanks for making that clear. I know where I stand now. Nonetheless, I’m still telling my story until you stop me.

  Rahim’s face is grave; any familiarity I’ve ever had with him suddenly feels perilously inappropriate. I nod respectfully and wait to be spoken to.

  “I hope you had a safe journey,” he says.

  “Thank you. Our God was good to us.”

  He raises an eyebrow; a smile tugs at his lips. “I didn’t know you had a God, Nicky.” This is the Rahim I know and I’m so relieved he’s shown up.

  “Flying brings Him to the front of the line.”

  “Not just flying, I suspect,” he says and waits for me to reply. I don’t, so he continues. “I was surprised to hear from you.”