Simple Grifts

by Max Cossack

  Elinor arched one eyebrow. “What else did they promise?”

  Gloria said, “Anyway, why would anyone influential show up at a party thrown by the local leader of the Democratic Communists of America?”

  “It’s more complicated than that. Soren’s on all these committees and he has the final word on who gets scholarships and awards and who gets hired or promoted or fired. I told you. You’ll be surprised.”

  And Gloria was surprised. That evening, when Gloria followed Elinor through the back door into Soren’s kitchen, stifling heat and humidity swamped her. Bodies packed the kitchen. To get to the food table, the two women had to squirm their way through the pack.

  A tall large woman with straight brown hair met them by the food. She said. “Hi, Elinor.”

  Elinor said, “Hi, Sylvia. This is my friend—”

  Sylvia extended her hand. “Oh, of course. I recognize you. You’re Gloria Fiorenzi. I read all your articles and books. Great stuff. Always stimulating. And I’m Sylvia Platt.”

  “Nice to meet you, Sylvia.” Gloria said, and shook her hand.

  “Me too.” Sylvia said, “Oops. Have to keep the party rolling.” She squirmed through the crush to greet another guest.

  Elinor said, “Sylvia is Soren’s wife.”

  “I never thought of Soren as married.”

  “The way he likes it.”

  Gloria recognized a few people from the orientation sessions they’d dragooned her into her first week on campus. At the time, she had found the proliferation of diversity officials and titles fascinating enough to actually sit down and type out a list. Now she met a bunch of them one after another.

  Bob Ellison was waiting his turn at the punch bowl. He was Vice Provost for Equality and Inclusion. Chief Diversity Officer Roberta Swalwell stood nearby munching on a plate of shrimp. Robert Schiff, the Dean of Equity and Inclusion was chatting with Bobbie Lieu. Lieu might have been the Associate Vice Provost, maybe for the Office of Institutional Equity. Or something. Gloria looked over the crowd for Assistant Dean of Equitable Outcomes Rob Waters, but she didn’t see him.

  Plates in hand, Gloria and Elinor managed to elbow their way through to the living room, where she saw even more officials. They stood in clumps, sipping wine and laughing too much.

  Gloria maneuvered her way to the card table holding the bottles of cheap wine and a stack of clear plastic glasses and poured drinks for Elinor and herself. By prior agreement, Elinor went her way and Gloria another. Gloria wandered to a clump of people and listened long enough to learn that the subjects the talkers were chattering over and gossiping about had nothing to do with her own areas of interest, which were books, art and ideas.

  She tried another clump with the same result. Like a hummingbird hunting from one cactus flower to another for nectar, she flitted from clump to clump, but the event was an intellectual desert barren of sustenance—not a single withered blossom to be sucked.

  After Gloria found no one to talk with in the living room or the dining room or the guest room, she spotted Elinor leaning alone against a wall and signaled across the crowd. They met halfway, and together, they pushed their way back through the kitchen and found some stairs and walked down them into the basement.

  The basement was a relief. It was much cooler and the crowd was thinner. Gloria spotted a vacant two-seat sofa in near darkness against the wall in the back corner. She tapped Elinor’s shoulder and pointed, and Elinor nodded. They sat down together, Gloria in the dark corner and Elinor on Gloria’s left. They sipped their wine and munched carrots and green bean pods from the paper plates on their laps.

  Gloria said, “Remind me again what people I’m meeting here who can help me?”

  Elinor said, “The night is young.”

  “I’m not,” Gloria said. “Hey, I’ve seen that guy around.” She pointed with a thumb at the young man just to Elinor’s left sitting on the floor and leaning back against the wall. A young woman sat on his far left side.

  Elinor muttered, “He’s Mason Offenbach, Pafko’s teaching assistant.”

  Gloria whispered, “Who’s the girl with him? She’s cute.”

  Elinor whispered back. “Deirdre Katzenberger. She is cute. And very smart.”

  Gloria said, “He’s obviously crazy about her.”

  Elinor shushed Gloria with a finger to her lips. “You’re interfering with my snooping.”

  The two women sat in silence. Out of the corner of her eye, Gloria could see Mason waving his hands as he talked with Deirdre. Deirdre nodded from time to time. Her eyes glowed.

  Gloria whispered, “Can you hear what they’re saying?”

  “Something about the Revolution. And comic strips.”

  “Comic strips?”

  Elinor shrugged.

  Gloria said, “So he’s DCA too?”

  “Makes sense, doesn’t it? Why else would Soren hire him?”

  “He hired me, didn’t he?”

  Elinor said, “You’re notorious. You add luster. You’re this year’s feather in the Ojibwa cap.”

  Soren Pafko appeared from the other side of the young pair and stood in front of them. Elinor covered her eyes with her left hand and looked down at the floor. She elbowed Gloria. Gloria did the same.

  Gloria whispered, “Why are we hiding our faces?”

  Elinor whispered back, “You know how Soren acts towards you?”

  “He’s friendly enough.”

  “Now you’ll see him with an underling.”

  Soren crooked his finger at Mason, who shrugged at Deirdre and stood.

  Soren said something Gloria couldn’t hear to Mason. Mason shook his head. Soren said something more. Mason shook his head again.

  Soren lifted his finger and stuck it by Mason’s nose and wagged it and said something more.

  Mason looked down at the floor in an almost canine gesture of submission and then glanced down at Deirdre and walked away.

  Deirdre watched Mason leave, surprise plain on her face.

  Gloria whispered, “What did Soren say to him?”

  Elinor whispered back. “Tell you later.”

  Soren settled onto the floor in Mason’s vacated spot between Elinor and Deirdre and leaned back against the wall and hugged his legs up to him. Deirdre moved almost imperceptibly away. He said something to her. She shook her head. He said something else. She shook her head even harder. He said something else and she got up and stalked away, leaving Soren by himself.

  Soren glanced around, obviously to see if anyone had noticed.

  Gloria cupped her left hand over her eyes to avoid his glance. When Gloria spread her fingers to glance over again, Soren was gone.

  Gloria asked, “What was all that?”

  Elinor answered, “Soren was ordering Mason to bug out.”

  “For what reason?”

  “Deirdre’s not a DCA member and she doesn’t have sufficient revolutionary consciousness and Mason shouldn’t fraternize with her. He’s not firm enough yet in his underlying understanding. She could taint him with colonialist and reactionary and cisnormative supremacist thought.”

  “Soren didn’t look too worried about that risk for himself.”

  “Those rules apply only to peasants.”

  “I get it,” Gloria said. “I’ve run into it before. In Boston and a thousand other places.”

  “Now you’ve seen it here for yourself.”

  Gloria said, “So what did Soren say to Deirdre?”

  “He came on to her, of course.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, he couched it in political rhetoric, but she got the message. Why do you think she took off?”

  Gloria said, “What am I supposed to make of all this?”

  Elinor said, “You think it’s the first time?

  “Has he come on to you?”

  “Are you kidding? Why waste his energy on a worn-out hag like me when he’s surrounded by dewy-eyed twenty-year-olds who think he’s the second coming of Che?”

>   Gloria sighed.

  Elinor said, “What impressed me was the way Deirdre handled it. I think she likes Mason too.”

  “That’s sweet,” Gloria said.

  “And smart too, like I told you,” Elinor said. “But why does Soren surprise you? You can’t be that naïve. Haven’t you made yourself semi-famous writing about sex for the past fifteen years? To a player like Soren Pafko, this campus is just another Hollywood Babylon.”

  Gloria said, “I get all that. But there’s something else.”

  ”What?”

  Gloria didn’t answer. She wondered, was it just a trick of the light? In the eerie near darkness of his basement, she’d seen Soren’s usually warm expression frozen into a hard mask, cold and carnivorous, absent all human feeling. Like a Renaissance painting of one of those Italian princes Machiavelli had taken as his role model for ruthless brutality—thin lips, beaked nose, and sharp chin.

  Gloria took her phone out of her pocket and turned it on.

  “What are you doing?” Elinor leaned over and peered into Gloria’s lap as the little screen glowed to life.

  Gloria didn’t answer. She found Gus Dropo’s cell number and clicked the button to start a text message. She keyed in her text and ticked the send button.

  10 Triggered

  In bed after the DCA party, Gloria twisted the night away, strewing blankets and sheets all about. To give Elinor a chance to sleep, Gloria got up and went into the living room and sat on the couch. She stared at the wall, trying to focus on calm thoughts and sweet memories, but a whirlpool of anger began to suck her down into depths to which she hadn’t sunk for years.

  Gloria had run into Pafkos her whole career, first as student, then as teacher and writer and editor, in Boston and everywhere else on the planet: blowhards who substituted credentials for knowledge and humbug for thought and clichés for insight; soulless operators without real intelligence, but canny and sly, indifferent to ideas or truth; lazy and slapdash and amateur in what they passed off as thinking; spouting the best intentions in the most self-satisfied language while they grabbed positions of power and pushed everybody around; making any worldlets they controlled toxic dumps of ignorance, fanaticism and self-aggrandizement;.

  Everywhere, she ran into this one identical person with this one seemingly identical personality—or non-personality, really—inhabiting a multitude of bodies, self-absorbed, but lacking any authentic self to be absorbed in.

  And now, having left Boston fifteen hundred miles behind, hoping for a single blessed year of relief, here was Professor Soren Pafko.

  Just two years previous, in Boston, a clique of power-mad administrators and insecure professors and zealot students had ganged together and tried to drive her off campus.

  If Gloria Fiorenzi had any religious calling, it was teaching. She was born for it. She loved watching young people learn to think. She loved helping them develop the intellectual and emotional equipment to experience real life with rational minds and with maturity.

  Gloria escaped the Boston mob and saved her job, but barely. She had jumped at the chance to hide out to Minnesota for a year to recover her strength, planning to go back to Boston an even better teacher than before.

  But here was Pafko. A walking, talking, lying, conniving scheming embodiment of everything she hated, a true specimen of fraudster, flim-flam artist and charlatan.

  Gloria finally fell asleep on the couch. When she woke, it was six AM. She bathed and drank three cups of coffee and waited a decent interval and called Gus.

  Without even a “good morning” she opened with, “Soren Pafko’s going to buy L’Amination if it’s his last act on this earth.”

  Gus said, “I saw your text last night. Didn’t want to answer you until morning.”

  “It would have been okay. I didn’t sleep.”

  “I thought you don’t like to meddle in other professors’ grades, or, as far as I can tell, in the real world at all.”

  “This isn’t the real world. This is academia.”

  “This is some kind of revenge thing?”

  “No, it’s therapy.”

  Gus said, “Not my area. If you want therapy, see a shrink.”

  Gloria said, “Not therapy for me. For him. It will be a therapeutic experience for him to keep one promise to one person one time.”

  “Just to make sure I’m keeping up with you, your goal is to get him to follow through and buy the painting?”

  “It’s either that or go over to his house and break the thing over his head.”

  Gus asked, “That’s all you want?”

  “Yes. And you said you had a way.”

  “I did say that.”

  “Do you?”

  He said, “You picked the perfect morning to call. I’ve got some special friends dropping by. Come on out to my house.”

  11 Well Met in Ojibwa City

  “Let me get this straight,” Gus said. “You wintered in Minnesota and summered in Phoenix?”

  Hack Wilder said, “True.”

  “You going to do that next year too?”

  Mattie said, “We haven’t decided.”

  Gus said, “Most people do the opposite—you know, spend winter where it’s warmer, like for example, Arizona, and summer where it’s cooler, like for example, Minnesota.”

  “Some do that,” Mattie admitted.

  “People with limited imagination,” Hack said.

  “And no balls,” Mattie added.

  Gus was happy to see them, not only because they were two of his best friends, but because he could use their help, and the last time Gus had heard from them, the two had still been in Arizona. But here they were, sitting on his living room sofa, snuggling, sipping coffee, looking calm and happy, not at all like they had looked the previous winter, right after they finished up tangling with terrorists, when they’d been frazzled and suspicious and angry.

  Mattie said, “We were all over Arizona and New Mexico on a little tour with Dudley and the band. Now Dudley’s trying to work out a bigger tour, so we thought we’d save some money and stay in my house up here for the hiatus.”

  “How long is this hiatus?”

  “At least a few weeks,” she said.

  “That could work out perfect for me,” Gus said.

  Hack flashed a suspicious expression Gus recognized from past entanglements. Hack said, “What does that mean?”

  “I’ve got some special friends coming over. I’ll explain then,” Gus said. “Any other news of interest?”

  “Hack and I got married,” Mattie said.

  Gus said, “Okay. Didn’t invite me, I notice.”

  “It was a very private thing,” Mattie said. “Just us two.”

  “Not even witnesses?”

  Hack said, “It’s safer to leave no witnesses.”

  Mattie elbowed him hard, but she was smiling.

  Gus looked at Mattie. “You do seem a lot more relaxed. Even serene, maybe.”

  She answered with a level gaze.

  But was the gaze a serene gaze? With Mattie, best to be cautious.

  The bell rang. Gus said, “Hang on.” He went to open his front door. Gloria stood on his stoop. He led her back into the living room and introduced her to Hack and Mattie, then said, “Gloria has a problem.”

  “No, I don’t,” Gloria said.

  “I think you do,” Gus said.

  “Soren Pafko’s the one with the problem.”

  Mattie said, “Who’s Soren Pafko?”

  “Someone I despise,” Gloria said.

  “What’s his problem?” Hack asked.

  “I just said,” Gloria answered. “I despise him.”

  “Sweet,” Mattie said and smiled. Gloria smiled back at her and said, “I see you two have coffee.”

  Gus told her, “It’s in the kitchen. I made a huge pot. Grab some.”

  The doorbell rang again.

  “What’s going on here?” Hack demanded.

  Gus said, “You’ve always kept perfe
ct time, Partner. And you picked the perfect morning to drop by.” Gus went to the front door and opened it and found two other old friends, the friends he’d actually originally invited.

  He smiled at them. He had the bunch he needed.

  12 A Man And His Plan

  Thirty minutes later, surrounded by Gus and four people new to her, Gloria was wondering what she was getting herself into.

  “You get how this works?” Gus asked Gloria.

  “All I get so far is that I sell Soren the painting.”

  Gus said, “Right.”

  “That’s all I have to do.”

  “Right.”

  “For ten thousand dollars.”

  “Right.”

  Gloria asked, “But he already stiffed me out of one thousand dollars. Why would he pay ten now?”

  “Leave that to me,” Hack said.

  Gloria glanced over at him. “Remind me again your role?”

  “If I understand Gus correctly, I’m the ‘roper’,” Hack said. He was a stocky short man with brown hair and a small neat black beard. He looked to be in his late thirties or early forties.

  Gloria asked, “Which means?”

  Hack said, “I’m supposed to rope Soren into coming into the big store.”

  “The big store? For what?” Gloria asked.

  Hack said, “I haven’t heard Gus’s whole scheme yet, but I’m sure it’s a doozy.”

  Gloria looked at the two other men in the room. “And these gentlemen work in this store you’re talking about?”

  So far, Gus’s two later guests had said nothing. One lounged in his easy chair like an old-fashioned dandy. He was a thin olive-skinned man with a neat Van Dyke beard. He wore what could have been a five-thousand-dollar suit.

  Now he stood and bowed like a Spanish Grandee and said to Gloria, “I am most frequently called the ‘The Mexicali Kid’, but you may address me as ‘Cali’. And this is my partner and frequent collaborator Humberto.”

  Humberto was a wide squat muscular man with a dark pock-marked face. He had stood with his thick arms crossed, leaning back against the wall and glaring at everyone in turn. Now he gave Gloria a cursory nod, maintaining his dark glower from under the shelf of straight black hair he combed down over his forehead.