Текст книги "Con Academy"

Автор книги: Joe Schreiber

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Six

WHEN I GET BACK TO MY ROOM, THERE’S A NEATLY wrapped bundle sitting outside my door. I pick it up and peel back the tape, peering down at a perfectly folded blazer and dress pants, white shirt, and tie. My uniform has arrived.

I carry it inside along with my backpack. The room is still a mess from last night’s hurried departure—my bed is unmade and the half-finished orientation paperwork is scattered across the floor. It feels strange to be back after crawling out the window in the middle of the night, but I’m already starting to get used to the idea of being a student here.

I sit on the bed and take a second to get my thoughts in order. From here, one of two things is going to happen. Either Andrea will rise to the challenge—which was really her idea anyway—or she’ll rat me out to the administration for real, in which case I’ll have no choice but to leave for good. But I really don’t think that’s going to happen, because Andrea knows she can’t do that without getting herself in trouble. Besides, I saw the look on her face when Brandt smashed her cello.

She wants payback.

While I’m sitting there contemplating the situation, I get a text message from Andrea117 on my phone.

Meet me after English Lit outside the arts center.

I read the text twice before deleting it and making sure it’s gone for good. The message means she’s either in or at least interested enough to talk through the details. Grabbing my towel, I head down the hall for a shower, mindful of my bruised stomach muscles where Brandt hammered his elbow. When I get back to my room, I try on my uniform for the first time.

The jacket, shirt, and pants fit perfectly. I get the tie right on the first try, then rake my fingers through my hair until it looks halfway presentable. For the moment, the guy staring back at me from the mirror almost looks like he belongs here. I smile. If I can fool myself, then the rest of my classmates should be a breeze.

Five minutes later, armed with my class schedule, I’m speed-walking down to the dining hall for an epic helping of gourmet huevos rancheros with a latte and fresh-squeezed orange juice. The eggs are delicious, light and fluffy, with roast tomato-serrano salsa, corn tortillas, black beans, and fresh cheese, and I manage to polish the whole thing off without getting any on my tie. Meanwhile, it’s almost nine o’clock, which means I’ve got World History 443: Twentieth-Century India and China starting in less than ten minutes. If I hurry, I can make the bell.

I head out of the dining hall, riding on a river of well-dressed, bright-eyed baby billionaires on their way to various training seminars on how to rule the twenty-first-century world. I’m glancing down at the map to make sure I’m headed in the right direction when I see a big group of students up ahead gathered around the statue of Lancelot Connaughton.

Except it’s not the statue they’re looking at.

There’s a student perched on top of Connaughton’s shoulders. He’s wearing nothing but a ski mask and a pair of red swim trunks, and he’s trying to hold perfectly still, like he’s part of the statue, but it’s cold out here and I can see him shivering. Written across his bare chest in what looks like black marker is a stylized letter S. As uncomfortable as it seems, it’s pretty obvious that he’s actually choosing to be up there.

“What is this?” I look at the girl next to me, who’s snapping a photo with her iPhone. “What’s going on?”

“Hazing ritual,” she says.

“For what?”

“The Sigils.”

“Who?”

She glances at me. “You’re new here, aren’t you?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“The Sigils are a secret society on campus. Every year they invite two or three new students to join. Nobody knows who’s in it, but the members always make new recruits do something like this to get in.”

For a second we both stand there looking up at the poor kid. “How long does he have to stay up there?”

“Till his assignment’s over.” She shrugs, and then from behind us I hear a man’s voice shouting. “I guess his time’s up,” the girl says, and I glance around to see two security guards lumbering across the quad, making a beeline for the statue.

“You!” one of them shouts. “Get down from there now!”

The kid in the ski mask jumps off Connaughton’s shoulders and hits the ground running at top speed, with the two guards struggling to keep up. The crowd of students cheers him on. Before the guards can reach him, the kid ducks into a nearby building and disappears. A roar of approval goes up from the crowd.

“Looks like he made it,” the girl next to me says, and the other students are already starting to disperse, heading to class.

“So, this secret society,” I begin. “How long has it been around?”

“Who knows? Some people say that Lancelot Connaughton himself started it as a kind of inner circle. Only the members know who the other members are, or why certain people get invited and others don’t. It’s all very Skull and Bones.”

I’ve started walking again and am consulting my map when a heavy hand falls on my shoulder.

“Hey, hey, there he is.” The voice is grating, intimate, and familiar in a way that makes my skin tighten and slither across my shoulders. “You sure picked a crazy place to end up, didn’t you, buddy?”

I turn around slowly and look at the man standing there smiling at me, wearing an ill-fitting navy suit with a laminated visitor tag dangling crookedly from a lanyard around his neck. Despite the cheap apparel, he’s good-looking for a guy on the verge of forty—a touch of gray at the temples, bright pale-blue eyes, and the kind of two-day stubble you get from sleeping in your car. You might even use the word charming. I give back to him the best smile I can muster, which, under the circumstances, ought to win me an Academy Award.

“Hey, Dad.”

Seven

“TOOK ME LONG ENOUGH TO FIND YOU UP HERE,” HE SAYS, locking one arm around my shoulder and wrenching it tight enough to hurt. “Looks like you’ve already landed on your feet, huh?” He ruffles my hair in a way that probably looks fatherly, then gives me an extra little open-handed smack on the back of my skull. “I missed you, boy.”

“I bet,” I say.

“You really left me holding the bag down in Trenton, you know that? Not that it’s anything your old man can’t handle, but when the authorities dropped by and I realized you’d taken off with the last of our seed money—”

“You weren’t exactly in any shape to travel,” I remind him.

He scowls and shrugs it off with a happy-go-lucky grin. “Sure, kid, whatever you say—we all make mistakes. All I’m saying is, I just wish you would’ve told me before you took off. Would’ve at least given me a fighting chance. Anyway, bygones, right?” He shrugs again. “We’re back together again, the old team—that’s what matters. Looks like you’ve already got something pretty swanky set up for yourself too, huh? What’s the game?”

“Nothing.”

“Right.” He laughs. “Your mother and I taught you better than that.” He leans back and, without even breaking stride, his head does that casual kind of swivel that I’ve seen him do since I was old enough to walk: his saucer-size eyes taking in everything—the manicured campus, the million-dollar buildings, the rich kids with their lives of privilege stretched out in front of them like an endless red carpet of private jets and fivestar luxury hotels. “So who’s the mark?”

I shake my head. “It’s not like that.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I mean it,” I say. “I’m done with all that. I’m going straight. That’s why I’m here. I’m sick of that old life. I’m never going back to Trenton.”

Dad gives me a long, slit-eyed look, and for a change I can’t tell what he’s thinking. In the past I always could, back when it was the three of us, him and me and Mom, running the wedding-planner scam out of our apartment on Clinton Avenue. In the early days, Dad said they cleared five thousand a week while pulling a pigeon drop on the weekends. He used to talk about retirement until Mom got sick and things changed.

“Billy-boy,” he says. “I think maybe you better give this some thought before you go and do something stupid.”

“My name is Will.” I start to pull loose from him. “Will Shea. And I’m going to be late for class.”

His grip tightens around my neck. “I don’t think so.”

“Mr. Shea?”

I pause and we both turn around to see a heavyset, bearded man coming toward us, walking a dog. I recognize him from the school website as Dr. Melville, the real Dr. Melville, the head of school. Suddenly his dog lunges at Dad, pulling at his leash and barking like crazy, as if he knows exactly what kind of guy he’s dealing with. Score one for the dog.

“Chaucer, heel,” Dr. Melville commands, then turns to us with a chuckle. “You’ll have to forgive him. I’m afraid thirty-two generations of pure English breeding have convinced him that he’s on the hunt.”

“Yes, sir.” I turn and glance at Dad. “This is . . .”

“Louis Keene.” Dad smiles, suddenly all sunshine and lollipops. “I’m Will’s uncle.” He shakes Dr. Melville’s hand and then reaches down to scratch the dog’s head. “Nice pooch.”

“Thank you.” Dr. Melville nods at my dad and then turns to me. “I make it a point to personally welcome all new students to Connaughton, but you’re a difficult man to reach, Mr. Shea. We’re glad to have you here.” He turns to my father. “You must be very proud of your nephew, Mr. Keene.”

“Oh, I am,” Dad says, beaming. “Will’s been like a son to me.”

“After what happened to his parents on that island . . .” Dr. Melville shakes his head. “What a tragedy. I don’t know if you’ve heard, Will, but I actually wrote my doctoral thesis about the indigenous people of the Marshall Islands.”

“No,” I say, and feel my throat start to tighten and go dry. “I didn’t . . . know that.”

“Oh, yes indeed. That was one of the reasons I was so interested in meeting you. Which island was it that you grew up on? Ebeye?”

“Right.”

“I know it well,” Dr. Melville continues. “In fact, I did most of my research from that military base on Kwajalein, which, as you know, is only a half mile away by ferry.” He scowls upward and then glances at me. “The name of that base slips my mind, though. What was it, again?”

“It was . . .” My chest is beginning to ache and I can feel sweat starting to pop out across my upper lip. For a second the morning sun feels ten times brighter than usual, blinding my eyes. Dr. Melville is staring directly at me now.

“The Reagan Test Site,” Dad says with absolute casualness. “Right, Will?”

“That’s right, of course.” Dr. Melville nods and smiles. “Have you been to Ebeye yourself, Mr. Keene?”

“Just for a few days, right after Will was born,” Dad says, taking his time, as if there’s nothing he’d rather be doing than standing here discussing a place that he’s never even seen with his own eyes. “Beautiful lagoon, lovely area, but terribly overcrowded. The slum of the Pacific, they call it. I always hoped for something better for my favorite nephew. And now, thanks to you fine people”—he reaches out and pats Dr. Melville on the shoulder—“he’s going to have it.”

“Well, we’re certainly delighted to have him,” Dr. Melville says, and glances at his watch. “I’ve got a meeting to attend, but we’ll talk later, Will, won’t we?”

After Dr. Melville leaves, I feel Dad’s arm go tight around my shoulder again, delivering another painful squeeze.

“See how good we are together?” he whispers. “Just like the old days. I knew you were gonna pull out that dead-missionary-parents wheeze. Like I can read your mind, right? That’s why we’re partners.”

I manage to nod.

“Remember that.” His voice darkens, becoming more like the one I remember from after Mom died, a threatening growl with a thin layer of good humor painted over it. “I’m getting a room at the Motel 6 in town, but I’ll be in touch soon.” Then, with one last look around at the century-old marble buildings, Craftsman-style dorms, and immaculately groomed grounds, he drops his voice to just above a whisper. He’s practically rubbing his palms together with anticipation. “This is gonna be good,” he murmurs. “Son, we’re gonna make a killing here.”

And like that, he’s gone.

Eight

AFTER WORLD HISTORY, I’VE GOT ECONOMICS 155: INTRODUCTION TO GLOBAL RISK. I’m expecting a boring classroom full of half-asleep students guzzling energy drinks while some fossil in his sixties drones on about world markets.

Then I step inside.

The room is massive and packed with big TV screens and kids moving in all directions, shouting and talking and staring up at a mission-control center of gigantic wall-mounted monitors scrolling real-time stock quotes and financial data. Half of them are on their phones while the others are keying in trades. It’s the Wall Street of the Great North Woods, and for a second I just stand there taking it all in, trying to figure out where I should go.

“Excuse me.” I tap one of the students on the shoulder. “I’m new here and—”

“Hang on,” the kid says, not taking his eyes off a screen. Thirty seconds later, he throws one hand into the air. “Yes. Yes!” He pumps both fists, throws his arms around me, and slaps me on the back so hard that I almost cough up my eggs. “Okay, bro, what are you looking for?”

“Mr. Dalton,” I say, glancing down at my course schedule. “Is he around?”

He steers me through the mob and points out my instructor, Mr. Dalton, who looks about five years older than I am and turns out to be a former day trader and master of the universe whose name even I recognize—mainly from a semi-successful SEC investigation that very nearly shut down his investment firm. He’s talking to Brandt Rush, leaning over his shoulder, coaching Brandt’s every move.

Not that Brandt needs it. He seems to be completely in his element, trading commodities and raking in piles of virtual cash with the ease and confidence of a born conquistador. Every buy, every short sale, is accompanied by a fist-bump or a high-five with one of a half-dozen sycophants surrounding him. The fact is, I’ve never seen anybody so utterly in control of a situation. After the end of one particularly complex trade, Mr. Dalton himself actually gives Brandt a chest-bump.

“What’s the big deal?” I ask the kid who brought me to the scene.

“We’re all trading with virtual funds,” the kid says. “Brandt’s the only one whose parents let him use actual cash. He just cleared three million dollars short-selling this biotech start-up.”

“Three million actual dollars?”

“Yeah.”

At one point during class, while I’m sitting in front of a massive six-screen Bloomberg Terminal and trying to learn which of the yellow hot keys represent which market sectors, I look up and see Brandt himself staring at me. For a second I know how a field mouse must feel when the shadow of a hawk passes over him. After a moment Brandt makes his way over, all swagger and sneer.

“Yo. Missionary kid.”

I don’t take my eyes off the screens in front of me. He taps me on the shoulder.

“I think you’re in the wrong class,” he says, leaning in close. “Why don’t you go get me a coffee or something?”

Now I look at him. For the moment, he seems to have lost interest in all the money changing hands, temporarily distracted by the opportunity for a little midday cruelty.

“You heard me,” he says. “Lots of cream, lots of sugar.”

As I stand up, something snags me around the ankle and I go sprawling forward. I catch myself in time and see Brandt giving me the slightest smirk as he turns back around to the overhead monitors.

“Better watch your step,” the kid whom I’d been talking to earlier says. “He’s the king of the jungle in here.”

“Right,” I say. “Thanks.” I make my way out into the hallway, heading for the exit. It’s cold outside but I don’t mind. I’ve got English Lit in twenty minutes, and I could use the cooldown time.

Now more than ever, I know that we’ve picked the right mark.

Andrea doesn’t look happy to see me.

After English Lit—where she wouldn’t meet my eye, and I managed to avoid Brandt—I find her waiting outside the arts center, Connaughton’s brand-new five-million-dollar performance hall, which has been finished so recently that seedling grass outside the main entrance still looks like green hair plugs. The curved glass and steel construction resembles a renegade escape pod that’s crash-landed from Planet iTunes, some ultramodern reality where everything is chrome and sleek and ergonomically designed for maximum coolness.

“So.” Standing there for a second, Andrea looks me up and down. “I see you learned how to tie a tie.”

“Yeah.” I reach up and straighten it, feeling unexpectedly self-conscious. “Does the uniform fit okay?”

She doesn’t bother answering, just gestures for me to head inside the arts center. The space is bright and airy and crackling with a kind of no-limits excitement that comes from being young and rich with your whole life ahead of you. From above, vast and unobstructed shafts of sunlight cascade down into the three-story lobby, where students are hanging out, chatting and texting like the casually beautiful citizens of the world that they are. Artistic black-and-white student photos line the walls. I smell fresh coffee and glance up to see the familiar green and white sign. “Wait, you’ve got a Starbucks in here?”

“Try not to look so shocked,” she mumbles. “You’ve been here twenty-four hours.”

I follow her through the lobby toward the coffee shop. According to Connaughton’s website, the arts center is the home for four art galleries, a three-hundred-seat theater, an acting lab, art and architecture studios, a darkroom, a music computer lab, and an orchestra room, not to mention a state-of-the-art recording studio. There are rumors that Foster the People mixed part of their latest album here.

Andrea points me to an empty table in a corner of the café, and we sit down. Somewhere off to my left, a man in a dark suit passes by, and I have a panicky moment when I think it’s Dad in the crowd. It would be just like him to follow me here. But I realize it’s just an instructor.

Andrea leans in. Her eyes are locked on mine. “What’s wrong, Will?”

“Nothing. I’m fine.”

“For your sake, I really hope you’re a better liar than that.”

I shake it off, but something about her eyes, the way she’s looking at me, makes it difficult to focus. “I thought I recognized somebody, that’s all.”

“Like you’re being followed? Cops?”

“No, nothing like that.”

She doesn’t look convinced, and I don’t blame her. The truth is, I don’t even want to think about what it means that Dad has already found me here, or what he could do to mess up my play with Brandt Rush—not that I have one yet.

Dad is a problem. Even if he weren’t a gambling addict and constantly in debt to a half-dozen of New Jersey’s less patient bookies for the worst run of luck in the history of horseracing, I got the vibe from him that his drinking is getting out of control again. He’s an ever-expanding black hole of misfortune with a chronic habit of sucking in whatever’s nearby, and at the moment that includes me.

“Listen,” Andrea says, seeming to read my mind. “I’ve already got three good reasons why conning Brandt Rush is a terrible idea. If you’ve got somebody gunning for you here, that’s just one more argument for calling off this travesty now before you do some damage neither of us can walk away from.”

“I told you, I’m fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“Oh, Will.” She rolls her eyes. “You are a terrible liar.”

I give her my best innocent look. “You said something about three reasons?”

She still doesn’t seem to believe me but presses on just the same. “I don’t know if you noticed the plaque when we first came in?” she says. “Let’s start there.”

the rush center for dance and performing arts is what the plaque in the lobby turns out to say. And if you take the time to read the small print, you can actually see, for those too dense to grasp what the name means, made possible by the generous donation of victoria and herbert rush.

“It’s actually a twenty-six-million-dollar endowment,” Andrea tells me as we stand there, “to be paid out over the next ten years. Brandt’s father and grandfather both went to Connaughton. They paid not only for this new arts center, but also the refurbished boathouse and athletic field house that’s going up in 2017, on the other side of campus. All of which means—”

“They’re swimming in cash,” I say. “I kind of figured that one out for myself, thanks.”

“It means,” the voice behind me says, “that they own this school.”

When I glance around, I see two men standing behind us. The broad-shouldered one is tall and bald, with a head like a hollow-point bullet, and the other is bearded and bespectacled, wrapped up in about twenty pounds of imitation Savile Row tweed. It takes me about five seconds to recognize them as the two that shook me out of bed last night and sent me running across campus with my backpack slapping against my shoulders.

“Friends of yours?”

“Boys,” Andrea says, “you’ve met Will.”

“Yeah.” I take a half step back. “At one in the morning.”

“No hard feelings,” Mr. Tweed says, with a little smile. Behind his specs, his green eyes sparkle like sea glass, and I realize that one of his pupils is cocked in a slightly different direction. “Andrea asked for our help.”

“Chuck and Donnie are based out of New York,” Andrea says. “They were running a boiler-room scam in Queens, but I met them in Boston last year, glim-dropping out on Commonwealth Avenue.”

I take a closer look at Donnie’s face. “You’ve got a glass eye?”

Donnie grins and pops it out so I can see it. I’ve never run the glim-drop scam myself, but I’ve heard of it. Essentially you’ve got a well-dressed one-eyed man who walks into a storefront looking for his missing glass eye, and when nobody can find it, the one-eyed man offers ten thousand dollars for its return. The next day, the accomplice “finds” the eye in the store and announces that he’s going to return it, but the shopkeeper—thinking of the reward—offers to buy it from him for a few hundred dollars so he can turn around and clear the 10K for himself, but, of course, he never sees either of our boys again. Like all good cons, it works off the greed and selfishness of the mark. The wheeze is strictly nineteenth century, so old it’s new, and afterward, nobody wants to admit he’s been hustled by such an obvious ploy, meaning that if these two bozos play it right, they can run this game up and down the same three streets for weeks at a time before somebody calls the cops.

“So what are you doing up here?” I ask.

Chuck and Donnie exchange a glance. “Color tour,” Chuck says, deadpan.

“Yeah,” says Donnie. “We’re leaf peepers.”

“The point is,” Andrea says, “we can’t play Brandt Rush like some garden-variety sucker and then give him the brushoff. He gets away with murder at Connaughton precisely because his family has the whole administration in its pocket, and if he gets the slightest whiff of a scam, we’re dead before we start. Which means he can’t realize that he’s been conned—even after the con is over.”

“What’s the second reason?” I ask.

“He’s smart.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I got to witness him this morning in my Global Risk class. He seems to know what he’s doing.”

“That’s putting it lightly,” Andrea says. “Did he talk to you?”

“We’re practically best buds.”

“Check his GPA,” Andrea says. “He sets the curve in all his classes. Daddy sits on the board of Wall Street’s oldest brokerage firms, and believe it or not, Brandt’s actually inherited his old man’s brains.” She glances up at Chuck and Donnie, then back at me. “Not that he would ever admit to it. He’s way too busy for academics.”

“Doing what,” I ask, “training for the stringed-instrument demolition squad?”

Andrea shakes her head. “On weekends, he runs a casino out of his dorm room. It’s invitation only, exclusively for upperclassmen. Occasionally he’ll allow freshman and sophomore girls”—her face tightens with distaste—“but only if they’re good-looking enough to meet his exacting standards.”

“Have you been there?”

Andrea doesn’t answer my question. “It’s strictly a Friday-through-Sunday shindig, and of course the administration lets him get away with it. He’s got a blackjack table, a roulette wheel, and poker.” She pauses. “And he cheats.”

“How do you know?”

“Trust me.”

“Right,” I say. “So what’s the third reason?”

Andrea takes in a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “He’s mean, Will.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

She shakes her head. “I’m not just talking about what he did to my cello,” she says. “He’s the most vindictive guy I’ve ever met.” She lowers her voice and leans in close. “Last year, when he was a sophomore, there was a girl here, a senior named Moira McDonald, who turned him down for Homecoming. At the time Brandt just blew it off like it was no big thing, but then the following spring, he must have sneaked a hidden camera into her room. The next morning there were photos of her on Facebook . . .” She closes her eyes and shakes her head. “You can imagine what kind I’m talking about. Everybody saw them. Moira was going to be valedictorian. She left school two weeks before graduation in total humiliation.” Andrea’s staring straight at me now. “That’s how Brandt Rush treats people he doesn’t like.”

“Okay.” I shake my head. “Now I’m definitely going after him.”

“Bad call, Will. Take my word for it.”

“So you’re backing out of our deal?”

“Wow.” Andrea doesn’t move for a long time. Then I realize that she’s started to smile. “You seriously don’t have an ounce of self-preservation in your body, do you?”

“Look.” I shrug. “You can do whatever you want, but as far as I’m concerned, a schmuck like that was born with a bull’s-eye painted on his back. I’m going to take him down on general principles.” I stand up. “And when I do, I’m expecting you to honor your end of the agreement—pull up stakes and leave.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Donnie puts in, and shoots a glance at Andrea, even though one of his eyes doesn’t quite go that way. “What are the terms?”

“Hold on.” I turn to look at the two of them. “This is between me and Andrea.”

“Andrea’s a friend,” Chuck says. “We owe her one.” He takes a step closer to me. “You got a problem with us helping her out?”

After a second, I shake my head. We’re all professionals here, and anyway, it appears that the specifics of this arrangement are just one more aspect over which I have no control. But that’s fine. The first hints of an idea have already started to incubate in my mind, and I already know how I’m going to win.

“First one to get him to pay out ten thousand dollars cash,” Andrea says.

“That’s sucker money,” I say, shaking my head. “He’ll see through it. Make it fifty K, between now and Thanksgiving break.”

“Fifty thousand?”

“What, too rich for your blood?”

She cocks her head. “Please.”

“That gives us a month to make our play.” I extend my hand. “Are you in or out?”

Andrea smiles a little. Her expression is somewhere between awe and pity. “You’re already in way over your head.”

She’s so right. I am in over my head. At least it’s nothing new.

I’m still holding out my hand, and Andrea’s still smiling as she shakes it.