Part 13 (1/2)

”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.

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 partners.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+t out. We just have faith. If you can't have faith, you don't team up. 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 partners.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+t 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 a.s.sumption 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 pa.s.s 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 Steal status, I thought. She'd probably readjusted the hat just so 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 f.u.c.king 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.

We also worked out a verbal code, in case we happened to need to communicate meaningfully with each other in front of others. This entailed embedding some no-means-yes switches in our speech, so that we could stay on the same page no matter how convoluted our explanations or prevarications became. In addition, we compared our respective cryptolects, the natural dialect that develops among thieves, grifters, or any underground affinity group. Here in America, grifter slang is much the b.a.s.t.a.r.d child of carny talk, while in Australia it has many roots: Gypsy jargon, rhyming slang, convict cant. For example, my word for an easy mark was mook mook, while Billy's was gudgeon gudgeon, a type of fish. Slang provides an organic sort of code, but it would take some doing to harmonize ours.

Of rather more pressing urgency was the need to burn down the house for Hines. The safe move, of course, was simply to do it and be done with it, let Hines have his own little offsh.o.r.e 401(k). Yet it kind of offended my sensibilities to just hand over the spoils of my grift. After all, what had Hines done apart from providing a list of qualified leads? And while we're on that subject, how did a bent fibbie gain access to so juicy a pool of mooks? Was there a master government list of major fraud victims somewhere? Every grifter knows that chronic dupes make the best customers; presumably the feds know this, too. Still the problem remained, how could I balk burning down the house without-possibly homicidally-p.i.s.sing him off?

The answer lay in Billy's ambition to rob China. An operation like that needs seed money. What better source of funds than a simple rollover of the Merlin Game? Hines wouldn't like it but perhaps could be made to like it if he saw it as an investment in an even bigger payout. In a sense, I'd be holding his money hostage to his greater greed. This appealed to me, for it kept the cash in my pocket, and rather kept Hines there too. He might be a fibbie, but he was also a mark, and the cla.s.sic strategy for holding the mark is equal parts promise and threat. As long as I had the money, Hines had to fear that he might not get it. But the promise of a mind-numbingly huge payday ... yeah, that felt like a carrot I could dangle.

I went home and crashed for a few hours, then woke up and started pus.h.i.+ng the many b.u.t.tons to close out the Merlin Game. My ripe targets got urgent instructions to act now or risk missing out on ”the biggest score in the history of ever.” I knew they wouldn't all come across-marks get cold feet-but statistic history taught that enough of them would jump in to make the play pay. I told them where to wire their instruments of deposit, and it was not to Hines's little Liechtenstein S&L. I launched everything from my laptop, which I still a.s.sumed was gaffed, but now that was okay. Let Hines discover for himself that his money had gone walkabout, and let him stew in his own self-righteous juices till his anger boiled over. It was all part of the plan.

Not part of the plan was the predawn instant message I got from Allie. How did she know my IM handle? I didn't even bother to ask. By now she probably knew my shoe size. part of the plan was the predawn instant message I got from Allie. How did she know my IM handle? I didn't even bother to ask. By now she probably knew my shoe size.

My computer booped its signal for incoming traffic, and a message popped up in a box.

Hola paco. Que tal?

I checked for the sender's name, and typed back, Miss Terious? Is that the best you can do?

Wanted u to know it was me. What r u doing?

Playing cribbage.

Who with?

No one.