The California Roll: A Novel

by John Vorhaus

  “Ever work an MLM?” he asked.

  I gave him my best blank look. “MLM?” I don’t know why I prevaricated, since we’d both already shed our fabricat identities. I guess lying has its own inertia.

  Billy called me on it, though. “It would be better for us both, I think, if you stopped playing dumb. You know what MLMs are as well as you know that I’m not Rick Chen, and you’re not Chad Thurston, the first, second, or third.”

  “Have it your way,” I shrugged. “MLMs, or multi-level marketing, are tiered participation vending schemes. They differ from pyramids in the sense that there’s always an actual product for sale, but the principle remains the same: get in early, get rich; get in late, get reamed. You’ve got breakaway plans, binary plans, stairsteps, power legs, profit legs, and base shop overrides. Me personally, I’ve started …” I paused to do a rough count, “something like two dozen MLMs, selling everything from cell-phone accessories to weight-loss products. The profit’s always in the distributor fees. The most successful MLMs are the ones that push prosperity consciousness to the point of cult frenzy. They also work best when they burn hot. None of mine has lasted more than sixteen weeks.”

  “Ever been dobbed in?”

  “Busted? For an MLM? Now who’s playing dumb? They’re legal as church if you set ’em up right.”

  Yuan smiled. “Fair go,” he said. “Let’s sit down.”

  We walked to one of the small wooden tables near the fake fire. At adjacent tables sat some skate rats munching French fries, a pair of speed-chess players with a small retinue of lookers-on, and a junior high school couple holding hands and pretending to be on a real date. On the principle of hiding in plain sight, this was the sort of place you could discuss the particulars of a murder for hire and raise not so much as an eyebrow from those nearby. They’d assume it was a movie pitch, anyway.

  “So,” he said.

  “So,” I replied.

  “The Church of the Orthodox Paradox.”

  “Come again?”

  “Your religion. That’s what I’d name it.”

  “I always favored ‘absolute relativism.’”

  Yuan nodded. “I could buy that.”

  Weirdly, we then talked religion for a while, and once again I found Billy Yuan easy to relax with, even in the current context. Perhaps it was a case of like minds, or just of being with someone who could keep pace in a conversation that hoboed to Nietzsche, n-space, and the Coptic Gospel of Thomas. Eventually, kind of as a game, I started searching for topics to stump him with, but finding holes in Yuan’s knowledge was tough. This guy was easily as polymathically perverse as I was. And, like me, he had a knack for sounding like he knew what he was talking about even when he didn’t. I think we enjoyed that about each other, like when two specialists in a really obscure medical field get together and at last have someone they can talk to.

  “Pemphigus foliaceus?”

  “As if! Pemphigus vulgaris!”

  “Ha, ha, ha!”

  But even at last can’t last forever. Ultimately we’d have to get down to the matter at hand, or else why had we bothered to meet? Being the first to raise the subject was touchy, though, a bit like those junior romantics at the next table jockeying not to be the first to admit that they like each other, not just like, ya know, but really like like. I thought that as it was Billy’s meeting, it was Billy’s move. He may have thought the same of me, since I’d fronted him first at the Blue Magoon. So we reached a certain impasse, which Billy broke obliquely with a rhetorical question.

  “In your opinion,” he asked, “what makes a perfect grift?”

  I thought about it for a moment before I answered. “No trail, no trace, no taste.”

  “Trail and trace I understand,” said Yuan, “but taste?”

  “In the mouth. No bad taste in anyone’s mouth. In my opinion— since you asked—I should be able to fleece the mark completely on Monday and have drinks with him on Friday, no hard feelings.”

  “That’s a big ask.”

  “You said a perfect grift, not an easy one.”

  “True.” Yuan lapsed into a thoughtful silence. I joined him there, for he had taken the lead and I was content to let him have it. “Would not the perfect grift,” he asked at last, “be one after which you never had to run another one again?”

  “Ah, the big one. The getaway grift. Around here we call it the California Roll.”

  “Because it sets you up in sushi for life?”

  “Something like that.” I paused then to consider his question. At last I said, “Can I be honest?”

  Billy laughed. “I don’t know, mate. Can you?”

  I laughed back. “Let’s pretend I can. I’m not so sure I’m interested in a California Roll. What would I do with tomorrow?”

  “I agree it’s a problem. For blokes like you and me, there’s the risk of …”

  He groped for the phrase. I found it first. “Chronic understimulation.”

  “Indeed. It’s not as if we can write our memoirs. I doubt we’re qualified for much of anything else.”

  “I thought I might study philosophy.”

  Yuan chuckled. “Did you now, Chad? But there comes a point, wouldn’t you say, when your ambition is such that any grift you bestir yourself to run has the potential to be a California Roll?”

  “If you’re any good at the game, I suppose. I mean, you’re not going to be satisfied selling overpriced fruit juice forever, right?”

  “Right. Exactly and precisely right.” From that point forward, and by halting degrees, Yuan outlined his grift. The more details he revealed, the lower my jaw dropped, for this was truly a visionary snuke.

  As all the evidence indicates, in the world of larceny, there’s simply nothing new under the sun, so this scam, like all scams, had historic antecedent. Back in the early days of minted silver and gold currency, it was common practice to “clip” coins; that is, shave off some unnoticeable part of them and put them back into circulation. Clip enough coins, you eventually accrue a convertible pile of precious metal. Meanwhile, the coins still trade at full value, and no one’s the wiser—until everyone starts clipping, that is, and then you have all sorts of nasty problems like currency devaluation, inflation, and loss of faith in the coin of the realm. Left unchecked, clipped coins can actually tank an economy, but that’s someone else’s troubles, right? And if you’ve ever wondered why modern coins have milled or serrated edges, it’s because milling makes clipping hard to hide. Not that minting matters much anymore. After all, cash was never anything but a conveniently portable metaphor for the things it might buy: corn, cows, chickens, land, salt, wine, whatever. These days, we have even more abstract metaphors, such as ATMs, EFTs, direct deposit, debit cards, credit cards, electronic checks, even microchip transceivers that let you charge what you want to your cell phone. Someone sufficiently wired into the virtual money motif could go weeks or months without handling any actual cash, and only know his worth for sure by dint of his bank statement. And if the bank isn’t telling the truth? If the bank shaves a cent off his total every month, how will he ever know? He won’t—no more than the guy you hand a clipped coin to can tell it’s been clipped. * Thus we have an updated version of a venerable snadoodle called the Penny Skim, a scam predicated on the fact that it’s impossible to go broke a penny at a time—but quite possible to get rich that way. Especially if you’re working the Penny Skim on as vast a revenue pool as, say, the People’s Republic of China, where all the money is.

  Fun? Oh, hell, yeah. Catnip to a grifter. And when Yuan invited me to be part of it, I didn’t think twice. Sure there were questions of feasibility, risk, and especially trust, but if Neil Armstrong offered you a ride to the moon, wouldn’t you strap in first and ask questions later?

  I had some trouble grasping the magnitude of the grift. Of course I was familiar with the concept: If you think about it, anytime anyone shortchanges someone, it’s a penny skim of a sort. The last time I’d worked this snuke, I�
��d been … let’s see … treasurer of the Oconomowoc Businessmen’s Association. I moved their money through so many different accounts—applying the tiniest financial friction to each transaction—that by the time I retired from my post and repaired to sunnier climes, I’d cleaned them out six times over—and they still didn’t know, because you can’t go broke a penny at a time. Don’t lose sleep; the organization was nothing more than a strip-club slush fund to begin with.

  But what Yuan contemplated was so audacious that it stretched my imagination to the snapping point. Could you really skim an entire nation’s economy? Billy seemed to think so.

  All banks, he explained, need centralized operations in order to function efficiently. You certainly see it in a piggy bank—without the deposit slot, it’s just a ceramic pig. At a neighborhood bank, it’s the president or one of his minions who stands over the shutoff valve. Even your local loan shark will vest decision-making authority in someone’s hands—perhaps those hands will be holding a baseball bat and squaring up on your kneecaps. As banks grow in size and complexity, the need for centralization grows accordingly, so that every financial institution, even (or especially) a national one, has some sort of organizational choke point. That’s what Billy had been looking for when Scovil and her pals caught him hacking into the Reserve Bank.

  “That were never a hack, though,” he said. “I was just having a squiz.”

  “Squiz?”

  “A look around.”

  And his investigation led him to two new thoughts. First, though a national bank is orders of magnitude larger than local banks, it’s not orders of magnitude more sophisticated or secure—less, in fact, because the need for centralized operation makes the choke point that much larger and easier to spot. Second, free societies have way too much transparency. If you want to steal without being seen, you’re better off working in a secret system, where such theft is already institutionalized as graft and corruption.

  “Think about it,” said Billy. “If you’re skimming from your people (and don’t tell me in China they’re not) the last thing you want is easy accountability, yeh? So all we need is a way into the tent.” He smiled fiendishly. “It’s already nice and dark in there.”

  I was, of course, interested in what Billy fancied as a way in, but something else caught my ear, a certain spasm of enthusiasm in his voice that went beyond mere avarice. Why was he so keen to rob China in particular? This needed exploring, but tangentially. “How do you know?” I asked. “Spend a lot of time there?”

  “Never set foot there in my life,” he said. Nor, he added, did he want to. And here Billy made a kind of mistake: he overanswered the question. Told me how his industrious parents’ prosperity had been destroyed by greedy Party officials, who picked them clean and drove them from the country. He didn’t come right out and say it, but I vibed it; this was a revenge tip. After all, they’re plenty rich in Qatar, right? Switzerland. The Vatican. And equally cloaked in secrecy. So why make China the target? Not just because that’s where the money was—that’s where his hate lay. I wondered if this would be a problem. Hate can make a man lose focus.

  And if you’re planning to rob an entire country, the last thing you want to lose is focus.

  * * *

  * In 1559, that is, before milling.

  * * *

  21.

  the bite and the bark

  W hen two grifters commit to a common con, there’s no paperwork, no handshake, barely even acknowledgement that agreement has been reached. You just move smoothly and seamlessly from proposal to planning, with the understanding that task, command, risk, and reward will all be equally shared. I’m not saying that such partnerships are arrived at lightly; given the bedrock mendacity of the trade, you’ve never met such a look-before-leap crowd in your life. But we know there’s no point in saying anything or signing anything, since the whole model for our business is the subversion of that which is said or signed. So we make no effort to spell shit out. We just have faith. If you can’t have faith, you don’t team up.

  And if your faith is betrayed? I suppose the unspoken assumption is there’s always some way to make your partner get dead.

  I had no trouble having faith. That may seem shocking, considering all the ridiculous funhouse mirrors I’d been looking in lately. But of everyone I’d met from Allie forward, I felt I could trust Billy Yuan. He had that light in his eyes: a total commitment to the con. I knew he would see this thing through.

  I knew also that he needed me, which made a huge difference and gave me huge leverage, for he was the bite and I was the bark.

  In grifter slang, the bite is the person who works behind the scenes to set everything up, and the bark is the face of the con. To take a low-tech example, if you’re working a driveway resealing scam, the bark will be schmoozing the mark while the bite is off preparing the bogus hot-mix asphalt, a slurry of oil and water that will wash off in the first good rain. A top grifter, of course, can work both the bark and the bite, but let’s face it, everyone has their strengths. While I know my way around a website, there’s no way I can climb walls of data security like Billy. By the same token, though Billy had a certain gift of gab, he couldn’t do what I can do: sell you Ebola virus and do repeat business while you’re coughing up blood. So we yinned each other’s yangs. We both knew it, too. Looking back, it was mutual admiration at first sight.

  Which didn’t in any way reduce the number of hazardous land mines. Despite Billy’s confidence that “all we need is a way into the tent,” there was no guarantee that he could find the Chinese choke point, nor that I could talk us past it. It would take a ton of work and a ton of luck just to put the major pieces of the snuke into play. Nor did we have entire freedom of movement. With Scovil thinking Billy had made me and Hines thinking I was Billy’s mark, our every step would have to pass two separate and largely contradictory sniff tests. Could Mirplo help? He’d been flipped, but would he stay flipped? Or would he have to be kept in his own little circle of dark?

  And what about the elephant in the living room? It was time for some straight talk about her.

  We discussed Allie at length. I mean serious length. Before we were done, the skate rats had skated off, the chess players had packed up their board and gone home, and the junior lovers had had a fight and broken up. Day turned to dusk, leaving the only light the cheesy glow of the artificial fire in the fire pit. And still we were no closer to getting Allie than we’d been at the start. Was she straight or bent? A grifter? A Jake? Both? Neither? We couldn’t tell. No matter how we counted her, she didn’t add up. In this, at least, she earned our awe, for she’d addled the brains of top grifters on two continents, and that’s certainly not nothing.

  They’d met outside a pub, Billy’s local in a backwater part of Sydney, though what Allie had been doing so far off the tourist track had never been adequately explained. Their meeting seemed innocent enough—she’d asked him to take her picture—but in retrospect, Billy felt that they’d met rather more by design than by accident.

  Yeah, that rang a bell.

  “She had this ridiculous hat,” said Billy. “An outback hat with corks hanging all around the rim. The tourists buy them. She posed with it on and then made me pose with it on. I felt a right fool.” Steal status, I thought. She’d probably readjusted the hat just so, and then told him how cute he looked. “We shouted each other some drinks and got to talking. She asked what I did for work. Mostly when people ask that, I tell them ‘consultant.’”

  “But Allie got the truth out of you?”

  “Yeh, she did.”

  “Yeah, she does.”

  “And I can tell you she nearly wet her knickers when I told her. Wanted to know all about it. There didn’t seem any harm in telling her. She was just this sugary tourist, yeh?”

  “She put you up on an outlaw pedestal.”

  “And looked right up my fucking skirt.” I was sure Billy didn’t tell Allie anything about the grift that she didn’t already know.
He had come to suspect the same thing, for they soon started working some yaks together. “And she was just amazingly good. To the manner born.”

  “A natural bark,” I agreed. “What kind of jobs did you pull?”

  “Sidewalk cons. Day entertainment. Aussies are a credulous lot. They can be had pretty regularly for small sums.”

  “Did she ever suggest stepping up?”

  “No, that was my idea.”

  “You wanted her help with the Penny Skim.”

  “I did. It needs an American face.”

  “Was she game?”

  “Not at all. She said that grifting was good holiday fun, but she couldn’t see doing it full-time.”

  “And yet,” I said, “it’s what she does. Full-time.”

  “So she lied.”

  “News flash. Allie lies. Film at eleven.”

  “Too right.” Billy essayed a wry smile. “Anyway, then she was gone, you know? Just one day gone.” He paused, looking wistful. “Do you know, I think I was half glad when I had to leave Oz. I thought I might look her up over here. Instead I get you.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Well, whatever.”

  We parted company around eight, arranging to communicate from that point forward through anonymous e-mail drop boxes and throwaway cell phones. There was, of course, the possibility that our phones were tapped, in which case Tweedledee and Tweedlestupid (Scovil and Hines) were already onto us, or soon would be. About that there was nothing we could do, but why give them further easy targets to hit? And if they busted us on it, we’d both insist that each was just easing the other in.