Simple Grifts

by Max Cossack

  The man also has a nice head of straight brown hair and blue eyes that look kind through his glasses and sad like something big hurt him.

  Zita’s friend the Fly-By Concierge tells her this white man’s name is Claude Riviera, which sounds French, but of course he’s no Haitian.

  Zita’s entourage makes fun of Claude Riviera. They laugh and giggle and play catch with lemons or balled up socks over his table while he works, trying to get him to look up from his scribbling. But he never does. This white man Claude Riviera has a quality Zita respects, because she needed so much of it in her own life and career. This white man has focus.

  Zita is sick of this whole bunch of her hangers-on anyway, moochers pretending to be her friends just to come on the traveling party she pays for out of her concerts and royalties and her celebrity deal with the Fly-By. She knows there is a better life than this, and better people, too.

  After watching Claude Riviera for two weeks, Zita can no longer bottle up the curiosity bubbling from within. On her way to breakfast, she stops and stands behind Riviera and looks down over his shoulder and watches him scribbling. Just this moment he’s crossing out something he’s written. She says, “Did you make a mistake?”

  He swivels his head and peers up over his glasses with his kind sad eyes. “Many.”

  What a wonderful answer. She knows exactly what he means. She asks, “If you don’t mind me being officious, may I ask what it is you’re doing?”

  “Officious?” he asks.

  “I am asking if I am being rude,” she says.

  “No, not at all.” he says. She knows he has now gotten a good look at her. “Not at all. Math. I’m doing mathematics.”

  “The mathematics you are doing I have not seen before,” she says. “It looks hard.”

  “It is.”

  “You have been doing it long?”

  “All my life.”

  She grabs an empty chair and pulls it out and sits across from him. “I got a “One” in mathematics. That’s Roman Numeral “I.” Like an ‘A’ in your schools. Also on the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination.”

  “That’s very good.”

  “You are surprised?”

  He smiles a warm kind smile to match his warm kind eyes. “Not at all.”

  “Then explain a little please what is your mistake?”

  35 The Breakdown

  Soren dreaded facing Abarca. First Soren had failed with the painting—he still had no inkling how—but now he would have to show up without the ten thousand dollars he had promised. Soren rehearsed in his mind several feeble explanations for the cashier’s check debacle and hoped Abarca would settle for the money in ninety days.

  Soren had no idea what to do about the painting. He had made up an excuse to drop by Gloria Fiorenzi at her office, but the painting no longer hung on her wall. He didn’t dare ask what she’d done with it for fear of arousing her suspicion.

  When Roper called and said Abarca wanted to see him right away, Soren had to go. The entire silent drive to St. Paul, Roper’s smirk glinted especially nasty.

  When Enrique opened the front door, Enrique glowered at Soren with the same contempt he had shown on Soren’s first trip there, and it felt like Enrique followed Soren very closely, treading almost on Soren’s heels the entire way down the hall.

  But Abarca surprised Soren by greeting him with a warm embrace and a smile. The Venezuelan seemed positively chipper as he said, “Well, my friend, our world is full of surprises. Disappointments, yes, but sometimes wonderful surprises.”

  Soren was still unsure how to break the news about the ten thousand dollars he didn’t have. He felt a touch of gratitude. “Really?”

  Soren waited for Abarca to offer him a spot of favor in the gold upholstered chair, but Abarca remained standing. Abarca rubbed his hands together and said, “So much good news. So much.”

  “What about?”

  “Wait, friend,” Abarca said. “Just wait.” He called through the door, “Enrique, please go out to the car and call in Roper.”

  Soren asked, “What’s going on?”

  “You will see.” Continuing to rub his hands, Abarca paced the room in a small circle until Roper stepped through the door.

  Roper said, “I’ve got it, Senor Abarca,” and he did. He set a painting on the sofa so that its back faced the room:

  ILIANiUS

  The lower case letter ‘i’ was in the right place, the third one in.

  “I don’t understand,” Soren said.

  Roper positively leered. “I bet you don’t.”

  Soren said, “That’s the original?”

  Roper said, “Obviously.”

  Soren asked, “Where was it?”

  “In Fiorenzi’s apartment,” Roper said. “I switched it out myself.”

  Soren asked, “What was it doing there?”

  Roper shrugged. “The woman must have taken it home. And I made the switch the right way.”

  Roper gave Abarca a significant look at this final part, as if to say, look who’s the real operative now? Soren felt sick. Roper was beating his time with Abarca. Soren said, “I still don’t understand what happened in the first place.”

  “Don’t feel bad,” Roper said, and put his arm around Soren’s shoulder in a patronizing gesture even more offensive than his usual grunts, smirks and leers. “Obviously, you screwed up the switch. You hung the real one back in Fiorenzi’s office and took the forgery. An easy mistake to make, especially for an amateur.”

  “You see?” Abarca broke in. “We are all friends now.” He smiled an expansive smile that took in both Roper and Soren as if the two were equals.

  Abarca said, “One more item, and the day is perfect.”

  Soren dreaded what came next. But no avoiding it. Abarca was going to ask. The right approach was to spin the bad news out himself. “I’m afraid there’ll be a small delay about the ten thousand.”

  Abarca raised one eyebrow. “What are you saying?”

  “The money isn’t available right now. Bank rules. We have to wait ninety days to get it back.”

  “Why?”

  “Fiorenzi insisted on a cashier’s check. I still have it. But the bank won’t return the money for ninety days.”

  “You thought you’d get the money back right away?”

  “Yes. Sorry.”

  Roper settled down in Soren’s gold upholstered chair and began shaking his head. “Oh, boy.”

  Abarca asked, “You don’t know how cashier’s checks work?”

  “It was a wrinkle I hadn’t anticipated.”

  Roper looked at him. “Hold it a minute, Pafko!”

  “What?”

  “In your emails, you definitely led me to believe you already had the painting for a couple of months.”

  “You must have misunderstood. I meant the transaction had been in process for two months. But it hadn’t quite consummated.”

  Roper looked at Abarca. “I bet a lot of people who deal with this squirt wind up misunderstanding things.”

  Soren said to Abarca, “I didn’t know you back then. It was just the normal slight exaggeration you do when you’re selling something to a stranger. Puffery.”

  Abarca said, “Puffery. You are disappointing me again, my friend. It is just one puffery after another. You promise ten thousand dollars you don’t have.”

  Soren said, “But I can get it in ninety days.”

  “Maybe,” Abarca continued, “And then you lack the skill to switch the copy for the original painting, something it turns out our Roper can do in a single moment.”

  “With ease,” Roper put in.

  “I think it’s only fair to remind you I was the one who had the copy made in the first place,” Soren said. “That was my idea.”

  Abarca nodded. “In fairness, I give you credit for that. But our Revolution is ruthless. As Che explained, fairness does not enter in. Che said: ‘To execute a man we don't need proof of his guilt. We only need proof that it's necessa
ry to execute him. It's that simple.’”

  Abarca continued, “Therefore, much as it distresses me personally—for I am already quite fond of you—the Revolution requires me to ask, what for the Revolution you have done lately? What can at this point you contribute?”

  Roper sniggered from Soren’s gold-upholstered chair.

  Abarca’s eyes took on the serpent’s yellow cast Soren had seen their first meeting. “You must realize that the degree of your advancement in our ranks depends on the extent of your contribution.”

  “Yes, sir,” Soren said.

  “And I mean your contribution going forward. As capitalists are always saying, past performance is no guarantee.”

  Soren said, “Yes, sir, I do realize that.”

  “And, despite your promises and my reliance upon them, so far you have not contributed nada.”

  “I understand.”

  Abarca said, “So what can you say now on your own behalf?”

  Abarca and Roper were looking at Soren. Soren sensed Enrique’s unseen presence in the hallway, a hulking shadow between him and any possible front door exit.

  Soren said, “There is something.”

  36 The Breakup

  Mason was sitting in Sven’s Hot Mug trying their new Icelandic glacial meltwater, suffering from two simultaneous and mutually contradictory passions.

  First, Mason had spent this new part of his life overjoyed—a first. He had often found himself underjoyed, but never over.

  Which joy had somehow brought him to this current misery. Mason had suffered from misery before, but he now recognized that his past misery had been nothing but the commonplace teenage angst. Everybody he knew suffered from it. All the songs to which he and his friends drank and danced were about that juvenile nihilism and nothing else.

  But now he was suffering the genuine gut-wrenching misery that came with making an adult decision that would decide the course of his entire life.

  Mason was in love for the first time. That was the joy. The misery was his developing awareness that Deirdre and he had to break up, an awareness now souring every sweet moment he and Deirdre spent together.

  Of course, they had to break up. There was nothing wrong with her, of course, she was totally perfect, not only for him, but for the world in general, but there were so many things wrong about her.

  For starters, just a few months previous, under Soren’s tutelage, he had resolved to devote the rest of his life to the DCA and to the revolution. At the time, Soren had spelled out that the DCA frowned on permanent sexual relationships in general and with outsiders in particular. The Revolution was an all-consuming commitment. Nothing could interfere with it. Soren made it clear that of all the possible forms of interference, love was number one. Also numbers two and three.

  Not only was Deirdre not a DCA member, but she was adamant she never would be. She hated the DCA. She had only one word for Democratic Communism: “bullshit.” Mason tried to argue with her, but she won every argument.

  She just talked smarter than him, at least about politics. His vague idealism was no match for the specificity of her knowledge. Her grasp of history seemed encyclopedic. She showed him books and pictures and documents. She knew all about Mao and Che and all the others. She drilled him with facts of his heroes’ personal crimes and societal destructiveness in ways no teacher ever had. The logic of her mathematical mind was cutting and remorseless. Her tongue stung quick and without mercy.

  And there was another wrong thing about her: like him, she was also a Jew. How would his being in a relationship with another Jew further the social and political goals of diversity and inclusion? If they had children, the children would just be some more Jews and not the least bit multi-racial or multi-cultural. He wouldn’t be contributing to diversity at all.

  Worse yet, she frankly said his also being a Jew was a good thing. That contradicted everything his own liberal upbringing had raised him to believe. Obviously, being in a relationship with another Jew—as opposed to someone Muslim, for example, or at least maybe Mexican or Puerto Rican—carried a taint of bigotry. What kind of tribalistic chauvinist would choose something like that?

  He was stewing over all these worries when the Hot Mug’s front doorbell rang. Deidre came through the door and smiled and waved in innocent delight at seeing him. She bought herself a cup of black coffee at the counter and brought it over to his table and sat down across from him.

  So here he was. About to have the toughest conversation of his life. He started with something simple. “How are you?”

  “Me? I’m fine.” She reached across the table and laid both her hands on his left hand resting there. Even together, her two hands were too small to cover his single big one.

  “Good,” he said.

  “And you?”

  “Very good, I guess. But…”

  Concern darkened her face. “Are you all right?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “You aren’t working too hard, are you? That bastard Pafko got you running more errands for him?”

  One more thing that bugged him was her nonstop bitching about Soren. She was always nagging him about Soren and how much she detested the way he treated Rivelle and Mason and everyone else in range. She reminded Mason of the time Soren had come on to her at that DCA party. “Didn’t you see what he was up to?”

  Mason hadn’t been able to explain his cave, except to say that he hadn’t known Soren was going to act like that and to mutter something about “revolutionary discipline,” which she dismissed as, he guessed it, “bullshit.”

  Which reminded Mason of another question. She was smart and beautiful and kind. But what did she see in him? Whenever he asked her, she just smiled and kissed him.

  The whole situation was ridiculous.

  He answered, “No, I’m not working too hard. I mean, I’m working, and I’m working hard, but that’s good. It’s what I want.”

  “That’s good. You should think hard about what you want.” Her blue eyes were serious. “I know I do.”

  “You think hard about what you want?”

  “Yes.”

  He couldn’t help asking, “What is that?”

  “What I want?”

  “Yes.”

  “Simple,” she said. “I want you. Forever.”

  Dammit! Now he really had to do it. Right now, in Sven’s. He had to tell her. It was fun for a while, but they couldn’t be some kind of permanent couple. Assuming such a thing existed. Couldn’t happen.

  The thought of her had been one thing, but the sight of her shook his resolve—not to mention the sweet smell of her and the sound of her voice and the electric touch of her hands lying across his.

  He focused his thoughts back where they belonged, square on the DCA and on the revolution. Plus, didn’t she have her own interests in Quantum Mechanics she needed to focus on?

  That thought gave him a sliver of comfort. It wasn’t just himself and the Revolution he was protecting; he was going to do this just as much for her benefit.

  Which gave him an idea. In that instant, the argument came to him fully developed, the perfect way to tell her, the magic phrases that would end his ambivalence and put a kind and charitable period to their whole silly relationship. He could say a few magic words and sure, it might crush her, it might crush him, he had to admit to himself, but feelings like that were only temporary, and life was hard, and you had to make choices.

  Mason made a momentary effort to cast in his imagination a brief vision of himself as a noble soldier of social justice, renouncing mere individual personal happiness for the sake of the greater good, becoming the kind of person she would admire and remember forever with nostalgia. That could be nice.

  It was a lame unconvincing effort. He dismissed it.

  Deirdre looked at him. She was obviously waiting for him to declare his love right back to her.

  Sad he had to disappoint her. He formed in his mind again his magic phrases, even rehearsed them there a few times
, reformulated them with just the right word—“fair?”—no, “necessary” was a much better choice, with more clarity and determination and no sentimental overtones.

  As he delayed his answer, her expression transformed in phases from happy to concerned to uneasy. He knew he was taking too long. But in the end it would come out okay because he knew exactly what to say and he was ready to say it. He opened his mouth to tell her exactly why their time together must end.

  Instead, out popped the most astonishing words he had ever uttered: “Will you marry me?”

  37 Abarca’s Big Offer

  The instant Roper dropped Soren in front of his house, Soren hopped in his Prius and drove to his campus office and picked up his second auxiliary phone and dialed. “Flo, I’ve got see you as soon as possible.”

  She said, “Of course, Soren. Where and when?”

  “Your house in two hours?”

  “Okay.”

  He hung up and made another call. “Mason, Can you take my two o’clock Semiotics of Literary Theory?”

  “Sure. But I don’t know anything about semiotics. I don’t even know what that means.”

  “Neither do the students. You can all sort it out together.” Soren hung up and dashed out to his Prius and took off for Wayzata.

  Traffic was light and Soren made it to Flo’s house in ninety minutes. She opened the door and he rushed past her into her house. He stopped in the living room and turned to face her. “Can we talk?”

  “Of course.” She closed the door and took his hand. As they neared the stairs, she tugged him towards them, but he tugged her back. “The kitchen, please?”

  She followed him into the kitchen. She said, “I can whip up something for you.”

  “No, that’s all right. I’ve got something I want to talk to you about.”

  “Tea, at least?”

  “Sure.”

  He seated himself at the kitchen table.

  She heated the water and poured it over the strainer with the leaves into two mugs. She brought the steaming mugs over to the table and set the mugs and herself down. She stared at him through the steam.

  He began, “You know I’ve been careful not to press you on that financial contribution you promised.”