Con Ed

by Matthew Klein

  Agent Davies reaches down, presses the stop button.

  He looks at me.

  “So?” I say. “What am I supposed to say?”

  Agent Warren says, “Don’t you care?”

  “Of course I care. If it’s true. But men like Sustevich say a lot of things.”

  “Do you know who it is?” Agent Warren asks.

  “No,” I admit. “Do you?”

  She shakes her head. I feel relieved. I don’t want to know. After all, the possibilities are few. And none will make me happy.

  Agent Davies finally gets to the point he’s been tacking toward for the past ten minutes. “So,” he says, “here’s the deal. Give us Sustevich. If you can’t do that, give us Vilnius. Whoever he is. Or she is.”

  “And if I say no?”

  “Then you’re looking at Strike Two and three more years in Lompoc.”

  “That’s not a very appealing choice,” I say.

  Agent Warren shrugs. No it’s not, dear, but now you’ve learned a very valuable lesson.

  “If I help you,” I say, “then I walk?”

  “For now,” Davies says. “I can’t make any promises about what happens next month if people start getting interested in you, or if we turn up something else that you’ve done that we don’t know about. Which is why you might want to disappear for a while.”

  “And let’s say—just for the sake of argument—let’s say that I have some property that once belonged to Andre Sustevich.”

  “Like what?” Davies says. “You swiped an ashtray from his mansion?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well,” Davies says, looking to Warren for support, “I think it’s safe to say that, if you hand us someone from Sustevich’s organization, we’re not going to worry too much about whether the Professor got fleeced.”

  I smile. “You guys are cruel.”

  “Are we?” Agent Warren says. “I think we’re being very fair.”

  I say to her: “Where were you fifty years ago, when I needed you most?”

  She squints at me, shakes her head—doesn’t understand.

  “Forget it,” I say. “Long story.”

  Did I always know that there was a Vilnius?

  I suspected it, of course. And my fears—or my hopes, depending on how you look at it—were justified, as soon as I saw the stock price of HPPR rise. When HPPR went from three cents to six dollars—even before our press release went out, even before Ed Napier was told to buy it—I knew that someone close to me was working for Sustevich.

  I suppose I always knew. It was just too convenient, after all, that Jess called me when she did. That she reinserted herself into my life at the exact moment I was going to launch my con. That she me made me fall in love with her again.

  There’s no such thing as a coincidence like that. A coincidence is God telling you to watch your ass.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  On Sunday morning, I take the black leather attaché case that Elihu gave me, and head down to the hotel lobby. I walk outside, ask a bellhop to hail a cab for me. He flips a toggle; a green light illuminates under the hotel awning. Twenty seconds later, a taxi pulls up.

  I slide into the cab. “Sixty-five Cahill Street,” I say. “The Amtrak station.”

  The cab driver, a middle-aged black man, says: “You got it.” He starts his meter and pulls into the traffic.

  We get to the station five minutes later. I say, “Can you wait? Keep the meter going. I’ll be one minute.”

  The cabbie nods. I get out of the cab. The Cahill Street station is an L-shaped building, with railroad tracks running along the bottom of the L, and a bus depot along the vertical. The exterior walls of the building are happy red and brown bricks, with a bright red clay roof.

  Inside, the station seems bigger. It’s built in Italian Renaissance style, a grand 1930s project designed to put the city’s unemployed to work, with a waiting room two stories tall, Caen stone walls, marble wainscoting. Above the ticket counter, a mural showing San Jose during the year the station was built, back when the city was not the southern extremity of something called Silicon Valley, but rather an agricultural depot, a convenient terminus for rail lines that carried California prunes and apricots to markets back east.

  I head across the marble floor, to the far side of the lobby. The public address system is switched on, and a voice—or something like it—echoes through the hall, either announcing the departure of a train, or the arrival of a train, or maybe of a bus, on either track five or perhaps track nine. The PA system seems to date from the station’s construction, too.

  At the far end of the room I find the lockers. These are the new kind—keyless—that allow you to set your own three-digit combination. I insert a five-spot into the bill reader—enough for twenty-four hours. I read the printed directions on the inside of the locker door and attempt a dry run: closing the locker while still empty, then unlocking it with my combination—9-1-1, which I think is somehow equally clever and memorable. I wonder if Sustevich will agree.

  Satisfied, I deposit the briefcase into the locker. I shut the door and leave fifteen million dollars’ worth of diamonds in the train station lobby. I don’t look back.

  In the booth of a Vietnamese noodle shop down the street, I dial Andre Sustevich’s cell phone. A voice answers—not the Professor’s. I recognize it.

  “Hello, Dmitri,” I say. “How’s it hanging today?”

  “Yes,” Dmitri says, “good.”

  “Bad news, Dmitri,” I say. “I’m afraid I won’t be having that drink with you, after all. That acid? I’ll take a rain check. Professor around?”

  “Hold on, please,” Dmitri says. I hear the sound of Russian being spoken, a clatter as the phone is handed from one person to another. After a moment, the Professor comes on the line.

  “Mr. Largo, where are you?”

  “I was about to ask you the same question. I stopped by your house, hoping for a drink. You cleared out of there mighty fast.”

  “Just temporary,” Sustevich says. “A few logistical issues to work out.” There are more Russian voices in the background, and then I hear highway sounds—a horn from a passing big rig, the rush of tires on asphalt. Even the Professor himself sounds different than I remember him: harried, out-of-breath—as if he were literally on the run. That veneer of sophistication which I’m so used to was apparently left behind, like his appliances, in the Pacific Heights mansion. Send Russian hit men and a squad of FBI agents after someone, and sangfroid grows warm fast.

  “I see. Well, listen, Andre, I have some good news. The money I owe you? I have it. I left it for you at the San Jose Amtrak station, in a locker. You have a pencil?”

  Rustling sounds. I picture the Professor reaching into a glove compartment, tossing aside an old pack of Soviet chewing gum—Big Red?—to find a pencil. “Yes, go ahead.”

  “The Cahill Street station. Locker 1440. The combination is 9-1-1.”

  “I see.”

  “There’s fifteen million dollars’ worth of gems in the suitcase. That’s three million more than I owe you, to cover any transactional costs. So keep the change. Buy something nice for Dmitri—I’m thinking maybe a pashmina or some earmuffs?”

  “That’s very generous of you.”

  “So, we’re Even Steven, right? Once you pick up the gems, we’re done with each other.”

  “Yes,” Sustevich says.

  “And you won’t bother me again? Neither me or my son?”

  “You have my word,” Sustevich says.

  “No more scalps in garbage cans,” I say. “No more random freaky murders.”

  “As you wish.”

  “Send my regards to your boys. Especially Dmitri.”

  “Mr. Largo, allow me to say: You were a pleasure to do business with.”

  “Hey, Professor,” I say. “Allow me to say: pa shyol na hui.”

  “Ah, very good, Mr. Largo,” Sustevich says. “Fuck off, to you, too.”

  CHAPTE
R FORTY-SEVEN

  I call the telephone number that Agent Davies gave me. He answers on the first ring.

  I say: “The San Jose Amtrak station on Cahill Street. You know where that is?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Locker 1440. Inside there’s a black attaché case that contains fifteen million dollars’ worth of diamonds. Sustevich is on his way to pick it up. Either him or someone who’ll lead you to him.”

  “Locker 1440, Amtrak Station,” Davies repeats, probably for the benefit of whoever is in the room with him.

  “Whoever opens that locker works for Sustevich,” I say. “That’s your arrest. Okay? Am I off the hook?”

  “Lead us to Sustevich,” Davies says, “and you’re free.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Why do I feel compelled to watch the end?

  Why am I here in the lobby of the Amtrak station, hiding in a phone booth, pretending to chatter to a friend while I keep a lazy eye sweeping the lobby floor, watching the FBI agents as they try, hopelessly, to act nonchalant, to blend with the crowd of backpackers and vagrants, businessmen and Japanese tourists?

  Maybe I am here for the same reason that Elihu Katz wanted to be in the front seat of my limousine, on the morning I concluded my own con: Because the endings are best, because I want to see her face.

  So: Am I the betrayer or the betrayed?

  The phone call I made to Sustevich, telling him to pick up fifteen million dollars’ worth of diamonds from the locker a hundred yards from where I stand has set in motion a chain of events that can end only one way.

  Sustevich is no fool. He still has that knack for self-preservation which has allowed him to survive in his brutal world.

  He will not appear in person today. He will send “Vilnius,” a person he trusts, because you can always trust what you own.

  He will send Jessica Smith.

  I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s true that I’ve known her for eighteen years, and loved her for as long, but it’s not as if we met at a church potluck, or volunteering at the Red Cross blood drive. She was a hooker I solicited one rainy night in L.A., and introduced to a life of cons and double crosses. How much money did we steal together? How many lives did we ruin? How many men did we break and shatter?

  So: How can I be surprised when it turns out that the woman I love is betraying me? She is a con woman. What did I expect?

  I suppose I knew all along. How else could I have expected the con to work? It required a betrayer in our midst. It’s exactly as you learn on Sundays: Without Judas, there can be no salvation. To be saved, you must first be betrayed.

  How will it end for her? There is little mystery. In the next few minutes she will enter this nest of FBI agents, and walk to the locker at the far side of the lobby, and punch the three-digit combination into the keypad. As soon as the door springs open, the lobby will come alive: that businessman in the far corner, with the suspicious earpiece; that woman in the bulky overcoat; that Asian man reading the paper—and maybe a few more I can’t recognize—will swoop down and arrest her.

  She will be trundled to a gray room, the first in a long series of gray rooms that will be her world for the next ten years. Then men will threaten and bluster, prosecute and harass, until she gives them what they want: Sustevich. And then she will wind up in prison anyway, whether she gives up the Russian or not, because that is the way the FBI works: When it spends six million dollars on a crime task force, there needs to be a crime. Someone must be arrested, and prosecuted, and locked away for a long time. Who gets caught is immaterial. What matters is that the god of justice is given his sacrifice, and that the public learns a lesson, that crime hardly ever pays.

  At one o’clock I see a figure walk across the Amtrak lobby. The betrayer. The afternoon sun streams through the station’s atrium windows, washing the marble floor white and bathing the Caen stone walls, so that the figure is a dark shadow in the backlight, a smudge with a limp.

  A limp.

  When I see Toby hobbling across the floor on his crutches I am momentarily addled—it is so unexpected that I forget why I am here, who I am waiting for—and my first instinct is to step from the phone booth and shout a greeting. Then the pieces fall back into place, and I fully understand everything: that Toby has been working for Sustevich since the beginning, and now the Professor has sent his student to this train station for one last errand.

  How did Toby fall into Sustevich’s grasp? Maybe it was exactly as my son claimed—stupid gambling debts, sixty thousand dollars’ worth—and then the wily Russian was pleasantly surprised when he learned whose son he owned. Once Sustevich discovered that he controlled the son of Kip Largo, con man, he used Toby to manipulate me, to launch a con to ruin his nemesis, Ed Napier.

  But maybe Toby is right about me. Maybe I never give my son enough credit. Maybe it was not Sustevich who discovered Toby. Maybe it was Toby who went to Sustevich. Maybe my son had a proposal for the Russian: He would manipulate his con man father to help Sustevich acquire the Tracadero. Maybe there never was a gambling debt. Maybe it was pure brutal ambition—my son’s ambition—to score at his father’s expense.

  Now I recall that night in Las Vegas, when I walked downstairs to the bar and saw Toby cuddling with Lauren Napier—and the look he gave me, when I told him to leave. Could he have been fucking her the whole time? How long was he with her before I had her? How long had he been planning to use me?

  But what about the cast and the broken leg? The injury was real. Was the violence, too, part of his con, a wrestling injury, like the ones we watched together on TV—real, for the sake of the drama? What kind of man tells thugs to break his leg, to make a con look real? Perhaps the same type of man who gets punched in the mouth to make a con look real. Maybe Toby and I are not so different, after all.

  The more I think about it—Toby’s quiet hangdog looks, his begging to stay in my apartment, his wanting to be taught how cons work—the more I admire my son. He played it just right. He was never a threat. It takes determination and confidence to play the dope. How much do you have to hate your father in order to betray him?

  Yes, I think Toby and I are not so different, after all.

  So he’s hobbling across the floor, toward the locker and the diamonds. When he opens that locker, the next ten years will be set down before him, as if the concrete prison walls themselves will be tossed from the sky, one after another, landing with finality on each side of him, penning him in darkness.

  Can I let that happen to my son? Can I fail him again?

  How many times can a man fail, claiming to be a victim of circumstances beyond his control, before he realizes that circumstances are another word for the world in which we live? I think about my life with Toby. The milestones that most fathers regard as normal are missing. Instead, the milestones are of disappointment and failure: my betraying his mother when he was fourteen; getting kicked out of his home; letting him grow up without me; then the newspaper notoriety about securities fraud; the long prison sentence; the years of being locked in Lompoc while he grew from boy to man.

  How many times can one man fail his son?

  I think about my own father, and I know that the answer is: for as long as he is alive. There was no redemption for my father; no salvation. His failures simply grew, like a bizarre malignancy, for as long as he breathed. Even in his death, he failed us: leaving nothing, forcing me to turn my back on college and to rejoin his world of cons and rip-offs and crime.

  This is the place where it will end. The failure that I have been, that my father was, that his father was. The failure that Toby surely will be, too, if I allow him to continue across the train station lobby, and open the locker door.

  The FBI needs to arrest someone today; they have made that much clear. But it does not have to be Toby.

  And as much as I’d like to get on that plane and go someplace warm, and have a rum drink, or two, or three, I guess that’s not in the cards. Not today.

  I pul
l open the telephone booth door, and the glass pane rattles in the wood frame. I step into the lobby. Toby is twenty yards from the lockers, but moving slowly on his crutches. I am forty yards behind.

  It’s an easy race. I start off across the lobby, and I see the FBI agents—the Asian man, and the woman with the overcoat—look at me curiously. Do they know who I am? Do they know who Toby is? No matter. I walk briskly across the marble tile floor. Now I’m in the middle of the atrium, walking too fast—so that everyone is looking at me—but no one can stop me.

  I pass Toby from behind. As I do, I say, practically into his ear, our last moment of intimacy: “Keep walking and don’t turn around” and I stroll ahead of him, without looking back at my son.

  I head straight for locker 1440. I reach out to the keypad, and I press 9-1-1. I hear the lock mechanism click. I press the latch. The door opens. I remove the black attaché.

  “Freeze freeze freeze!”

  Their voices echo through the vast stone hall.

  They come at me from all directions—people I never figured for FBI: two of the drunks that were lying on the benches, two of the Japanese tourists, and the woman in the bulky overcoat. They have guns out, pointing at my face. I gently lay the attaché case filled with fifteen million dollars’ worth of diamonds at my feet, and I slowly raise my hands above my head.

  As the FBI agents swarm toward me, I look past them, and I see my son, continuing to walk coolly through the lobby, toward the exit. As he pivots on his crutches, he turns momentarily toward me, and his face is caught in a beam of sun from the atrium windows. It’s hard to read the expression. At first I think it’s puzzlement, maybe curiosity. Then I see something else. I’m not sure what. I know I will think about this expression for years to come, and will try to figure it out. What is it? Relief? Gratitude? And somewhere in the back of my mind, I wonder: