The Con Artist

by Fred Van Lente

  I acknowledged the smattering of clapping and cheers with a nod before continuing:

  “Yeah, and he really was like a second father to me, no matter how corny or cliché that sounds. And I just found out he was having serious health issues, and because of that, serious money problems. And yeah, Heroes 4 Heroes was gonna help him out, but the fact we need a nonprofit charity to help our greatest creators in their golden years shows that we’re not honoring them while they’re still around. Not with awards but with, you know, money. Royalties. Option money. At least some of the millions others make off their characters. It’s just not right.”

  The applause was now growing, and at every table at least one person near the rear was standing up and clapping hard, Charles-Foster-Kane-at-the-Opera-House hard. This was basically the speech I had written when I was planning on giving the award to Ben K, alive, on this very stage, and so the words just kept spilling out of my mouth:

  “But partially we have ourselves to blame. We, the members of the comics community, and not just because we sign bad contracts and constantly undervalue ourselves at every turn. No, we’re as bad as the fans sometimes, in the sense that we don’t shout from the rooftops that these characters don’t just spring out of nowhere, you know, like Athena from the head of Zeus or whatever. I know that’s a weird classical reference, but my parents are college professors and it just popped into my head.

  “Comic books and superheroes aren’t mythology. They didn’t just spring out of the ether, out of some collective cultural unconscious. And they aren’t cranked out in some nameless factory by a bunch of anonymous drones, either. Every single hero or villain up there on Hollywood’s screens came from someone. This isn’t a product of corporations. This is art made by human beings. Every image on every booth and cosplayer out there came from people, and until we make sure everyone knows their names, not just the names of Batman or Wolverine or whoever, there’s no point in us handing out awards to each other every year, because we’re all still gonna have to beg for handouts when we’re old and gray. I’m probably just rambling at this point, but I just had to say it: honor people now the way they deserve it, not just here in this ceremony but out there, in the world, everywhere, before it’s too late.”

  By now I could barely hear myself over the applause. Everyone was on their feet and clapping. I hefted the Kirby Award over my head and said, “And thank you again for this cosmic broccoli. Good night!”

  If there was a mic in my hand I would have dropped it. But it was mounted to the podium, so I just walked off the stage to a thunderous ovation.

  * * *

  – – – –

  As I returned to the green room, I was vaguely aware of cartoonists and celebrities thumbs-upping me from the peripheries of my vision, but all I was really thinking about was joining Christine at the Bayfront bar.

  I almost made it to the door before a human roadblock blocked my path. The man, if that’s what it was, wore a dark blue suit and a white button-down shirt and no tie. His head looked like it was the prototype from which the Madballs were cast, those foam toys from my eighties childhood in the shape of heads of mummies and skulls and aliens and things, basically spherical but with bumpy protuberances to suggest eyes and ears and nose and such. The best way I can describe him is that he looked as if an Irish rabbi had animated a golem made entirely out of corned beef. His expression projected profound boredom with the world’s myriad horrors. He didn’t have a giant neon sign on his massive forehead flashing COP over and over, but maybe that was because it was so completely unnecessary.

  Its mouth opened and said in a distinct Noo Yawk accent, “I really liked your speech, sir.”

  “I’m not sure it made any sense at all, but thanks.” I tried to walk around him but he simply stepped sideways to cut off my escape, giving truth to the oft-uttered superhero comic cliche: How can something so big move so fast?

  “My name is Brendan McCool,” the apparent human said. “I’m head of security for Atlas Entertainment.”

  “Security? I didn’t know Atlas had a security department.”

  “I know, that’s how I like it,” he said. “It’s more of an informal position, really.” McCool shifted, one foot to the other. I couldn’t be sure I didn’t feel the ground move with him. “I’d like to request that you come with me.”

  I gaped at this giant cracked Liberty Bell of a man, who could squash me by accident and not realize it until he looked at the bottom of his shoes. “And if I turn down your request?”

  McCool’s expression didn’t change. “Then I’ll keep making the request until it’s granted.”

  I sighed. “Yeah, okay, sure. Let’s get it over with. Where we headed?”

  “You’ll see.” He reached out with his pylon arms to lead me to the door. “I promise not to take very much of your time. In fact, I think you’ll be back before the ceremony is over.”

  “Then could you just throw me in the ocean instead?” I asked, following behind him.

  * * *

  – – – –

  McCool opened a series of fire doors that led into the hidden burrows of the hotel where busboys dashed past with trays and maids pushed laundry carts. A large, bald, human male in a suit with an earpiece nodded at McCool as he passed, speaking the wordless cant of former law enforcement.

  Ultimately we emerged in the parking lot, where palm trees swayed and you could hear the boats in the marina creak. A limousine idled at the end of the sidewalk, and McCool opened the passenger side for me. I looked suspiciously into the purple-lit interior: no one was in there.

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked.

  “Not far,” McCool said in the monotone of a man who doesn’t care if you believe him or not.

  My curiosity was piqued, I will admit, and that overcame my initial survival instinct to bolt the hell out of there. Besides, I was pretty sure McCool could run me down and trample me like a rhino. So I climbed inside, snapped on my seatbelt, and held my Kirby Award in my lap. McCool followed me laboriously, with much huffing and grunting and groaning, and that was just from the car’s shocks.

  The limousine barely whispered as it pulled away from the hotel and turned onto Pacific Highway. I wasn’t sure where we were going until I saw signs for San Diego International Airport.

  “Whoa,” I said, sitting up straight. The Kirby nearly fell out of my lap. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. What are you trying to pull here?”

  “Cool your jets,” McCool said.

  “The cops—San Diego PD—they told me not to get on a plane.”

  McCool shook his head. “No, they didn’t.”

  “Were you there?” I said. I practically stood out of my seat as if I was going to open the car door and jump out. “They explicitly said not to get on a flight—”

  The big man reached out and flicked me back in my seat like I was a booger on his fingernail. “Sir, I served in the New York City Police Department for twenty-five years, and I can guarantee you that they did not tell you not to get on a plane.”

  “I—”

  “What they told you to do was not to leave town. Which you are not.”

  McCool poked a meaty finger in my direction:

  “But you are getting on a plane.”

  * * *

  – – – –

  The limo did not turn into the arrivals entrance to the airport, or the departures, or even long-term parking. Instead, after a couple right turns away from the harbor, it drove down a deserted unlit access road alongside a tall chain-link fence surrounding the runways. Planes took off so close the limo’s windows rattled from the force.

  The road took us farther and farther from the gleaming terminal in the distance until the limo slowed in front of a gate in the fence. Inside a small blockhouse a uniformed police officer watched a movie on his iPad until the headlights panned into his vision. He got out, said something
to the driver, then unlocked and opened the gate by hand and waved us through.

  I could only look out the side windows, not through the windshield because of the opaque screen separating me from the driver, so all I saw was an isolated runway surrounded by grass. Then the car turned and parked. Looming before me was a white private jet with a gangway leading up to the door near the cockpit. Running down its side were Chinese characters and some kind of part-elephant, part-squid, part-cat-chibi thing grinning down from the tail wing. XI’AN INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISE CO., LTD ran in smaller letters underneath the Mandarin.

  McCool rocked forward and back once, twice, a third time, propelling himself out of the seat and through the open door without tipping the limo onto its side. For the first time, he was talking and moving at once.

  “We won’t waste your time, so we’d ask you to do the same for us, please. We will be short and direct, and if you respond in kind we will have you back at the con before you know it.”

  The big man motioned for me to get out of the car and follow; I left the Kirby trophy on the seat. I saw there was a second limo parked on the tarmac, and before I could walk over to the gangway a second bruiser descended the stairs, followed by a somewhat baffled-looking Saudi man in a white linen thobe. By the time McCool led me up the gangway and into the jet, the Arab guy and his minder had climbed in the other limo and driven away.

  The plane’s main cabin was dimly lit, with about a dozen seats arranged around small tables; a small man with white hair and a thin gray beard clicked through emails on a laptop; when we entered he glanced up to register our presence before flicking his eyes back down to the screen.

  This was the not the first time I had laid eyes on the multi-billionaire owner of Atlas Entertainment, Ira Pearl. This was not even the first time we had been in the same room together.

  The first time had been in the Mister Mystery Room in Atlas Comics headquarters in Manhattan. The conference room was named after Ben K’s most famous creation and had acrylic pictures of the hero plastered over every wall; fittingly, me and Danny Lieber and a few other editors and writers were hunched over notes and laptops plotting out the next few story arcs of the Mister Mystery comics series.

  Danny was in the middle of issuing some directive, looking down at the printout of an Excel spreadsheet publishing plan; I was looking at Danny, so when he looked up and fell silent, I followed his gaze to see someone standing in the doorway.

  Dirtbag had told me innumerable stories about Ira Pearl’s legendary cheapness: that he went from cubicle to cubicle berating employees for buying Post-its when they could just rip scrap paper into squares and write notes on the blank side; that one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world didn’t have its logo on the elevator floor designations because Ira refused to pay the $200 to have the Plasticine block installed. His frugality bordered on OCD mania and his attention to the slightest minutiae of his company’s expenditures was married to slightly darker stories—that he never allowed himself to be photographed or interviewed, that he never went anywhere unarmed, that he had a shadowy cabal of ex-NYPD running interference and favors for him (this part apparently was true).

  But when I looked into the doorway of the Mister Mystery Room in Atlas Comics HQ that day, all I saw was a diminutive gnome, white-haired with bushy eyebrows, wearing a tie with no jacket and slacks hiked up above his waist.

  “Oh,” the gnome said. “You’re using this room?”

  Dead silence. Nothing about the gnome’s appearance led me to believe this was one of the richest men in the world, and therefore one of the most powerful. For one thing, contrary to legend, no holster hung at his waist.

  Nevertheless, next to me every muscle in Daniel Lieber’s body tensed. He didn’t even breathe. Lieber was a purely corporate creature. He owed his very existence to his facility for hegemony; he existed only to curry the favor of those above him and secure the obedience of those below him; he had no discernible skills other than the maintenance of whatever hierarchy he found himself in. Lieber’s expression didn’t change, he didn’t move, he didn’t say a word, but in the most primitive part of my brain, unevolved from its tiniest mammallian ancestors whose lives hinged on microsecond observations and subsequent reactions, I read the silent vibrations from the other man’s body that signaled we were in the presence of an Apex Predator.

  It was the fear radiating off Danny that made me realize I was looking for the first time at the oft-whispered about, never-photographed Ira Pearl.

  “You’re using this room?” Ira said. At the table half a dozen people were working, hunched over legal pads and laptops, so you could almost call it a dumb question. But there were no dumb questions, really, when you surrounded yourself with underlings who would answer any query that dribbled out of your mouth.

  “Yeah?” Danny Lieber said quietly, cautiously, clearly floating it only as an option.

  Pearl just looked at us for a second.

  “Okay,” he said, and turned and left.

  Everyone in the room started breathing again.

  Now, in the cabin of the private jet, I couldn’t help but notice that the mug from which Ira Pearl sipped coffee was marked with the logo of Home Lots, the big box store specializing in heavily discounted merchandise damaged in other companies’ warehouses; this was the company Ira had first made his fortune on, reselling the broken stuff that other retailers refused to sell—the slightly stained mattresses, the bureau that got a hole punctured in it while in the back of the truck on the way to a Poughkeepsie store. Ira specialized in taking other people’s junk and making it a treasure, the business equivalent of “You gonna finish that?”

  Thus it was with Atlas Comics, which had crawled, gasping, out of the primordial ooze of Depression-era pulp publishing with all its other four-color brethren. But after stumbling into cultural relevance in the hip and ironic sixties, it had suffered through a series of neglectful corporate parents, each more incompetent than the last, until the once-proud producer of childhood visions filed for bankruptcy in the 1990s. Ira was already doing business with Atlas anyway through one of his other companies, Toyetic. Action figures were a business tailor-made for the Ira Pearls of the world, in which Chinese wage slaves cranked out violent plastic boys’ dolls for pennies that wound up on big-box shelves for twenty bucks a pop, the kind of ridiculously imbalanced profit margin that made the Iras of the world tumescent with desire.

  Atlas owed Toyetic an obscene amount of money for making action figures of their superhero characters, and Ira used that debt to buy the publisher and its catalog of beloved characters for peanuts. (“You gonna finish that?”) The company acquired funding to produce a series of ludicrously popular Hollywood movies based on those characters and turned Atlas Comics into Atlas Entertainment, a branding behemoth inspiring almost as much confusion and terror in its competitors as Ira Pearl inspired in his employees.

  “Mac here tells me you’re having some trouble with the San Diego Police Department,” Ira said, his face largely disguised behind the open clamshell of the computer.

  “You could say that,” I said.

  Ira slammed the laptop shut with one hand. The frozen Hokusai waves masquerading as his eyebrows unfurled like the collar of a frilled lizard confronting a foe. “Listen, don’t try and play me, guy. I don’t play games. I don’t have time for it. You either have trouble with the law or you don’t, which is it?”

  I had no idea where any of this was going. “They’re a little confused. They think I might have killed Danny Lieber.”

  “And who is Danny Lieber?”

  “He—he works—worked—for you.”

  Ira’s eyebrows flapped hard this time, as though his face was trying to fly off his head. He looked to McCool.

  “Yes, sir. He was an editor.”

  “A film editor? With the studio?”

  “No, the dead-tree kind. In our comics
business.”

  “Comics? We still make those?”

  McCool nodded apologetically.

  Ira’s eyes rolled back to Mike. “Now, tell me honestly, did you kill what’s-his-name?”

  “I did not.”

  “Okay. I believe you. I feel for your situation. I get accused of garbage all the time. That’s why I don’t give interviews. I don’t allow my picture to be taken. They just use it as grist for more lies. The way the press talks, you’d think I was personally there at the Crucifixion, that it was me who handed out the nails. When I’m nothing more than a small-business owner, just like you.”

  I arched an eyebrow at that. Is it that the richer you get, the more you believe your own bullshit? Or is believing your own bullshit a prerequisite to becoming rich in the first place? I can’t help feeling out of luck either way.

  “And I say that because you should know I have many close friends in the San Diego Police Department, and in the government of California. Well, not me personally, but I have friends of friends. What I’m saying is, they do favors for me from time to time, as friends do for friends, and friends of friends, and I might be able to help you with this predicament you find yourself in. But because we’re both small businessmen, you would understand I am not in the position to simply do this favor for free. I don’t do charity. I don’t believe in it. It’s unearned life support for the weak, it doesn’t do them or us any good, you see.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Mac tells me that you were close with the late Mr. Benjamin Kurtz.”

  “That’s…true.”

  “And you’re still in contact with his widow, uh, uh, uh, uh.”

  Ira started snapping his fingers and kept snapping them until McCool realized on his own that it was he for whom the boss snapped and blurted out, “Rebecca.”