by John C. Ford
Ben flew out, leaving Russell to pay the fare. He bounded up the cracked steps he’d walked a thousand times, crashed into Uncle Jim, and wrapped him tight. “We did it,” he said. He said it once, and then couldn’t stop until Uncle Jim pulled away and held him by the shoulders.
“I’m so proud of you,” he said. “Who’d’ve thought you’d pull it off, with your Asperger’s and all?”
They cracked up. Ben’s closest experience with Asperger’s was the hours of Internet research he’d put in, reading articles and watching YouTube videos of people who actually had it. He’d faked it all, just like he’d faked coming up with the fast-factoring algorithm. Just like Uncle Jim had faked being the NSA agent Ken Gary.
“Erin and Zach are coming with the check. Let’s pay this guy, get ’im out of here.”
“Yeah.” Uncle Jim waved Russell in. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” he said, and ushered them upstairs to the apartment. Russell lumbered up the steps behind them. He was a friend of Uncle Jim’s, and when Ben had laid out the plan, Uncle Jim had suggested Russell might make a decent candidate to play the second NSA agent, Cole. He had, but he wasn’t nearly as good at poker. Ben had taken $450 off him over the last two days, which they’d spent at a downtown hotel to keep things authentic, Russell popping his cherry cough drops like candy the whole time. Uncle Jim had come back early to check on his mom, but Ben and Russell had only left the room once, on Sunday morning, to put on the show for Smiles. Other than that, it was a lot of room service, seven-card stud, and television.
But now Zach had the check in his hands. They’d gotten the call from him fifteen minutes ago. He’d just picked Erin up from Smiles’s cabin—the last step of the plan, complete. There wasn’t any need for appearances anymore.
They clustered giddily around the kitchen table, where Uncle Jim poured two glasses of whiskey and another of ginger ale. Uncle Jim and Ben used to sit at the table, sometimes with his mom, playing long games of gin rummy. Ben sat there and played and listened to Uncle Jim’s old stories about his lawless days, never knowing exactly how true they were. And then Ben got his big idea and thought, I wonder if he’d want to help with a really big job?
Russell shed his suit jacket and started in on his tie. “Get me out of these things,” he said, flopping them over a chair. They had been careful about maintaining their roles, and for a second Ben had to remind himself that the guy wasn’t an NSA agent in real life.
Real life.
It was a concept Ben had clung to for the long months he’d spent pretending to be someone else: a sixteen-year-old MIT student. Ben was actually eighteen in real life, just older than Smiles, but small and thin enough to pull it off. He wouldn’t have to do it forever, he had told himself a million times. Someday, when Smiles believed in his character enough, and when the perfect moment came, they would pull the con. Months into the plan, Ben had tired of the role, almost lost his faith. But then the IPO came along, giving them the perfect bit of leverage to use against Smiles. When it was scheduled right after CRYPTCON—the ideal setting for their plan—Ben knew they could do it. And that, someday, he’d get back to real life.
Uncle Jim passed the drinks around. “All right, all right,” he said, and raised a glass. “To Ben.”
“To Ben!” they shouted, and then Ben had four hands thumping on his back.
“To you guys, too,” he sputtered.
Russell drained his whiskey and poured another. “To us, then!”
“To us!” they all said, clinking glasses.
It went on like that for a while, and Ben was soaking up every second. Real life. At some point Russell pulled out his receipts from their hotel stay and Uncle Jim tallied up his expenses. He added it to the cut they’d promised Russell, throwing in a little extra for scaring off Smiles’s girlfriend. That wasn’t in the script until Ben’s mom called, letting them know she was snooping around.
Ben took in the old apartment: the water stains on the ceiling, the slanting floor that could make you seasick. He had hated this place for so long—thought of it as a prison—but it wasn’t so bad when you weren’t trapped in it anymore. Pushed up against the living room wall were the entire contents of his apartment at the Pemberton—an old mattress, the card table, the folding chair, and the desk. Ben had given Uncle Jim the keys before he left for Fox Creek.
“Souvenir?” Russell said, and tossed his NSA ID tag onto the kitchen table. Ben and Uncle Jim had made it together after some research at the library. The bar code at the bottom actually worked, but it was only good for a price check on orange juice. Making the ID had been much easier, actually, than faking the letterhead from the math journal.
Ben followed Russell to the door. “You’re a pro,” Russell said on his way out. “If you don’t go into retirement after this, give me a call next time you need a shill.”
The door closed behind him, and Ben turned to Uncle Jim. From behind the kitchen table, his broad smile dropped as he realized what was on Ben’s mind.
“In her room?” Ben said.
Uncle Jim nodded solemnly.
“How’s she doing?”
Uncle Jim gave a small shake of his head. “Same.”
Ben wished he had the check in his hands. He wanted to show her the actual thing.
She was lying in bed with more covers than the weather called for, but Ben had seen worse. He would have thought of it as a so-so day, back when he lived here. He sat on the bed and fixed the nightgown at her shoulder.
She put her hand over his. “My boy.” Her eyes were lazy with sleep, but you could see the beautiful woman that she had once been.
Ben smiled for her. “Yeah, it’s me. I’m back.”
“Jim told me. You really did it, huh?”
“I really did it,” Ben said. “I did it for you. For him.”
Her mouth twisted with sentiment, and as Ben drew his hand away she held on to the lace of her nightgown. “He gave this to me, you know? He used to give me presents for no reason.”
Ben had heard her stories a thousand times each, but he never tired of them. “Yeah.”
“I’m gonna wear it till one of us wears out. Me first, probably.” Her laugh was halfhearted.
“I know it’s not enough,” Ben said, “but we did it. We got ’em.”
“I know, baby.” She sat up in bed and asked for his hands. Ben gave them to her and listened. “I’m real proud of you. You’re a good little man. Promise me something, though: Make this the end of it. We gotta live now. It’s time to live.”
“I promise, Mom.” He was okay with that—he was ready to move on, too. “But can we look at houses for you?”
“Yeah, darling. No big mansions, though.”
“No big mansions.” Ben smiled with her, and this time her laugh had something behind it.
“Go and keep Jim out of trouble. Let me get dressed here, so I can take my son for an empanada.”
Ben nodded. He didn’t want to talk, because the tears were right in his throat.
They got a bunch of empanadas from Mercado Rosanna and took them up to the widow’s walk in a pink plastic bag. Ben and Uncle Jim ate at the railing, their legs swinging over the roof. Ben’s mom spread a blanket and hugged her knees to her chest, a bittersweet smile on her face the whole time. She wasn’t eating, but Ben didn’t mind; he was just glad she’d come up.
Uncle Jim had brought his whiskey upstairs. He poured another glass for himself and asked Ben for details. There weren’t many more to give—Uncle Jim had been there the whole time. Ben had been feeding him daily updates ever since he moved into the Pemberton with the money Uncle Jim had fronted for the plan.
“So proud of this kid,” he said to Ben’s mom.
She reached for his bottle of whiskey. “Pace yourself.” She gave Ben a wink, and he had one of those rare glimpses of the woman she must have been without the depression.
It wasn’t going to end today—maybe it would never end—but it filled him with joy.
“I’m proud of all those kids,” Uncle Jim said, as if he’d never been interrupted.
“Here they come,” Ben said, pointing to the edge of the parking lot below, where Erin and Zach had just appeared.
Uncle Jim stood up and crossed his arms above his head. “Oh, yeah! There they are!”
Erin saw them first. She flashed a piece of paper victoriously, then followed Zach in a sprint to the house and up to the widow’s walk. Ben had found them both—Erin through his math research, Zach an old friend from grade school who had designs on being an actor. Their footsteps thundered on the stairs, and then they shot onto the roof. Uncle Jim lifted Erin off the ground and twirled her in the air.
They laughed. They grabbed up empanadas. They told stories.
Erin’s piece of paper was a receipt from a Third Boston branch they’d stopped at on the way back to Boston. As planned, they’d wired the money immediately to an offshore account. “Went through while we were there,” Zach said proudly. “It’s in our account now.”
“It’s done,” Uncle Jim said, holding the proof in his admiring hands.
And it was. They all beamed at one another, and it was a long time before they could sit down and utter anything but nonsensical sounds of joy.
At some point Erin cracked up about something, caught up in her own laughter until she noticed them all looking on. “So we’re at that disgusting fish place,” she explained, “and Smiles gives Zach the check. It’s fifty thousand dollars short, and Marlon Brando here doesn’t even say a peep.”
Uncle Jim cackled.
“What’d you want me to do?” Zach said. “Hold the whole thing up over fifty thousand dollars?”
“Of course not, but it was suspicious. You should have stayed in character. Never getting to Hollywood at this rate.” She shook her head in mock dismay. “Which reminds me,” she continued with the flush of excitement running through them all, “can someone explain to me how a guy who supposedly wears muscle shirts all the time gets a farmer’s tan like that?” She pointed to the tan line well below his shoulder.
Zach looked at his arm like he was seeing it for the first time. “Yeah, well, luckily the guy’s way too stupid to notice. How long did you have to ram that idea into his head at the blackjack table? Twenty minutes explaining to him about the government paying for prime numbers and he still barely got it. The guy’s brain-dead.”
Ben watched Erin. She crushed her foil wrapper and stared off. Ben knew how it felt. He’d spent more time with Smiles than anybody and didn’t like hearing Zach talk about him like that, either. Part of the relief of getting back to real life was the relief of not fooling Smiles anymore. He’d never admitted to Uncle Jim how much he actually liked the guy.
He hadn’t told Uncle Jim that he almost called the whole thing off at the conference. It happened in the opening session, when Smiles’s birth mother had appeared at the podium. They hadn’t known that was coming at all—it was the worst possible complication. As soon as he saw her, Ben knew who she was. And then he saw that horrified look on Smiles’s face, and it almost was too much. Was he a mark or a friend? The question loomed in Ben’s mind while the theater rang with applause, and he knew that by the time it died down he had to make a decision. The presence of his birth mother was going to absorb Smiles entirely, mess with the fine details of their plan. So he made his choice, ad-libbing on the spot, feigning the discovery that he was supposed to make later that night. Hoping that it would distract Smiles enough from his mother to salvage things. It had worked.
Ben wondered if Erin had gotten close enough to Smiles for it to mess with her mind, too—or even closer.
He watched her pull herself back to the group. “Did I tell you guys he called me a skirt?” She narrowed her eyes at Zach. “A skirt? Where did that come from? A 1940s movie?”
Ben’s mom chuckled in the background.
They all turned, happy to have her join in. But then she rose and kissed their heads in succession: Zach, Erin, Uncle Jim, and Ben. “I’m just getting a little chilly. I’ll be downstairs.”
Ben knew what that meant: She was going into her room for the night, probably not coming out again. He caught up to her halfway to the stairs and gave her a hug.
“Thank you,” she said into his ear, and he knew that something frozen in her had melted just a little. “Thank you, my baby.”
“Time to live, right, Mom?”
“Time to live,” she said, and went downstairs.
One by one they left the widow’s walk. First Zach went home, then Uncle Jim went downstairs, and then it was just Ben and Erin.
“So what are you going to do with your money?” Erin said.
Uncle Jim was getting a quarter of the money—Erin and Zach were getting paid out of that. Ben was getting the rest, but as far as he was concerned it was all his mom’s. “Who knows,” he said. “Are you going to, like, celebrate tonight?”
Erin sighed and lay back on the widow’s walk. “I don’t know. It was so draining, you know?” Ben did. “I might just go to bed. That’ll be my big celebration.”
Ben didn’t know if he should ask, but Erin was the only one he could pose the question to. “You think you’re going to miss him?”
Erin didn’t answer. Maybe she thought he was stupid and loud and obnoxious at first, like Ben had. Maybe he won her over. Maybe at some point she stopped holding her nose and laughed at one of his jokes, if only on the inside. Maybe she thought it was unfair what happened to people in this world—even the ones who were supposed to deserve what they had coming. Maybe she considered him her best friend.
“You were great, Ben,” was all Erin said. “You were really great.”
“You, too,” he said. She walked away and down the stairs.
And then Ben was alone on the roof.
He sat there for a long time, wondering what Smiles would think when he found out why they’d done it.
223
SMILES WAS ON his fifteenth call to Melanie’s cell phone in the last two hours. She had to answer one of these times.
He held the phone to his ear as he raced up the stairwell at the Pemberton. His knees were stiff from the drive back from Squam Lake, most of which he’d done at over ninety miles an hour. He’d gotten three different calls on his way back, and each time he’d deflated at the sight of the 510 number on his caller ID. His mother. She was the last thing he could handle right now. Smiles rejected them and drove even faster. And now, finally, Melanie was picking up.
“Hello?”
“Mel!” He stopped in the stairwell, catching his breath against the cinder-block wall. Talking to Melanie was his only chance at getting any answers.
“Smiles, what’s going on? You can’t keep calling.”
“I know I know I know. I’m sorry, don’t hang up.” He collected himself and tried to do his best impression of a person who was not currently going out of his mind. “I just had to talk to you.”
“Okay, but I had to step out of English to take this. Are you okay?”
“Sure, right.” Smiles was walking to his apartment now. Across the hall, the door to Ben’s was open. Two members of the Pemberton maintenance crew were putting a fresh coat of paint on the apartment, which was otherwise completely empty.
“Oh, God.”
“What?”
“You know that kid in my building? Ben?”
“Yeah—your friend, right?”
“I’m starting to think he just stole my trust fund money.” Smiles entered his apartment, checked his fish (still alive), and dropped onto his sofa.
“He what? How?”
“It’s, like, kind of complicated. But listen. I’m really sorry I wasn’t calling you back this weekend. I listened to your voice mails, though, and right now I really ne
ed to know everything you know about that Andrei guy who killed himself.”
“Okay, but why?”
“Because I think Ben is his son.”
“His son? Whoa. I have no idea about that, but Tarasov was a Russian spy who stole research from your dad at Harvard. It’s really sad.”
Russian spy? Stolen research? “Who’s Tarasov?”
“Andrei Tarasov. The guy you’re asking about. Are you okay?”
“Oh, yeah, I just thought his last name was something else.”
“Well, he changed it so he could sneak back into the States after he got deported.”
“Naturally,” Smiles said.
“I didn’t learn that until yesterday. Turns out he caused your dad a lot of trouble—like, a whole lot. I actually spent my entire weekend thinking about that guy, ’cause I knew he had something to do with that letter from your mom.”
“The letter from my mom is about Andrei Tarasov?” The letter would have the answers, then. But it was gone, destroyed . . .
“Well, I’m not really positive any—”
“Hold on, didn’t you say there was a guy at Northeastern who knew about the letter?”
“I’m not sure what he knows, actually.”
“Didn’t you meet him or something?”
“I was going to. Today. But then my dad came to the lake and—”
Smiles was already out the door. “Do you know where his office is?”
227
MELANIE PRESSED HER back to the wall and slumped to the floor, landing hard on her butt.
His trust fund . . . stolen?
The bell rang and the classroom doors swung open. Melanie watched from kneesock level as her classmates washed to the exits in a faceless parade of Kingsley uniforms. Three minutes later only the stragglers remained, the rush of sound thinned down to individual voices.
Melanie remained against the wall, trying to let go of the strange news she’d just heard from Smiles.