Текст книги "Con Academy"

Автор книги: Joe Schreiber

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

Twelve

“WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR FACE?” DAD ASKS.

It’s Sunday morning, and I’m sitting on a lumpy mattress in the two-hundred-dollar-a-week room that he’s got at the Motel 6 in town, twelve miles from Connaughton, while he finishes shaving. The bathroom door is open just wide enough that I can see his half-lathered face in the mirror, his eyes reflected back on me, our conversation punctuated by the occasional clink-clink-clink as he taps the whiskers from the razor into the bathroom sink. The room smells like stale bourbon, dirty laundry, and somebody else’s cheap perfume. Put them all together and you’ve got a scratch-and-sniff Father’s Day card that basically comprises my entire childhood.

“Mind if I open a window?”

“Are you kidding?” He steps out of the bathroom, toweling off. “It’s twenty degrees out there.”

“Yeah, well, I can barely breathe in here.”

“Don’t change the subject.” Crossing the room, he picks up the Cumberland Farms coffee that I brought him, peels off the plastic lid, and takes a big gulp. “I thought you were living large over at that fancy school of yours. But you don’t return any of my phone calls all week, and now all of a sudden you show up looking like somebody’s been using your face for a catcher’s mitt. What gives?”

I take a deep breath. The next four words are going to be painful, but there’s no sense in delaying the inevitable. “I need your help.”

He grins. “At last, the boy sees reason. What’s the play?”

“I want to run the online poker con.”

“The online . . .” Dad stops smiling. He puts the coffee down, and his freshly shaved face now looks pale and hung-over. “That’s suicide, kid. You trying to get clipped?”

“You haven’t even heard my angle yet.”

He shakes his head. “Don’t need to.”

“It’s a solid grift.”

“I know it’s a solid grift, boy. I invented it.”

He’s wrong, but right now I don’t see any reason to argue the point. The online poker swindle is a modern-day twist on the prehistoric wire con that guys like us have been running since the invention of money.

Here’s how it works: You tell the mark about your boss, some shady character who runs an online gambling business out of a rundown office space. The specific type of gambling doesn’t really matter—it can be poker, blackjack, the ponies, whatever. You bring the mark by, in person, to see how the whole thing works and then tell him you’ve figured out a way to beat the system—all you need is a guy on the outside to place the bets. Naturally the mark is going to be suspicious of this, so you prove your trustworthiness by fronting him the money and letting him win a few small bets—a thousand here, a thousand there. Once he starts winning, the small potatoes don’t satisfy him anymore and he slaps down a huge bet with his own cash, a big enough buy-in that winning is going to bring the whole place down around your boss’s ankles.

And that’s when we all suddenly disappear, along with the mark’s money.

For a guy like Brandt, I’m thinking two million isn’t too much to expect.

Dad listens to everything I’m saying without adding a word. Finally he goes to the closet, takes a shirt off a hanger, sniffs the pits, and slips it on. “That scam got us clipped down in Trenton, in case you forgot. What makes you think it’ll work any better here?”

“We didn’t go wide enough with it in Trenton,” I tell him.

Dad sighs. “Kid, you tax me. You really do.” He rubs one freshly shaved cheek. “Who’s the mark?”

And I tell him about Brandt Rush.

“Two million? Seriously?”

That’s how I know he’s interested, because he’s already sitting at the wobbly, cigarette-marred table in the corner of the cheap hotel room, his coffee forgotten, while he works out the figures in his small, careful handwriting. “If he’s that rich already, what makes you think he’ll go for it?”

I hold up two fingers. “One, he’s greedy, and two, he holds a grudge. This is a guy who’s still creased that Moira McDonald turned him down for Homecoming last year, and he got twice as creased when I told him that her father sent me in to cheat him in his own casino. He’s ripe for the plucking.”

Dad thinks about that for a long time, looking down at the numbers he’s been adding up and then back at me.

“If we do it—and I’m saying if—we’d need a base of operations, computers, office furniture, and at least six guys who look like they know what they’re doing . . .” His gaze drifts slightly off to the right as he considers the necessary components of a swindle this size. “They’ll have to work on percentage. I don’t know if I can swing that.”

“I was thinking I could talk to Uncle Roy,” I say.

Dad grimaces but doesn’t argue, tipping me off that he’d already been thinking the same thing. For him, going to Mom’s side of the family for money is kind of like walking into a Boston sports bar wearing a Yankees cap. But if we need operating cash, Uncle Roy might be our only option.

“How soon does it need to be set up?” he asks.

“That’s the wrinkle.” I sit down across from him. “I need to pull the whole caper off before Thanksgiving.”

“Four weeks?” Dad scowls. “That’s nowhere near enough time to set the hook and make our play.”

“It’s going to have to be.”

“What’s your hurry?”

I don’t say anything.

“You might as well tell me, kid. I’m gonna find out anyway.”

“It’s nothing,” I say. “I just don’t want this dragging on too long, that’s all. It’s too much exposure.”

Dad just squints at me. He’s about to say something when there’s a knock. We both stand up immediately, our old instincts instantly activated, and I duck into the bathroom as he crosses the room to the door, careful to keep away from the window. “Hello? Who’s there?”

“Who do you think, silly?” a woman’s voice asks from outside.

I hear the lock disengage and the rattle of a chain.

“Hey, baby,” Dad says casually, in a voice that curdles the acid in my stomach. I’ve left the bathroom door open a crack, and I can see a woman step inside the room. She’s dyed blond, probably in her late thirties but with that finely wrinkled tiredness around the eyes that comes from hours spent at the end of a bar with a cigarette in her hand, getting guys like my dad to buy her drinks.

“I forgot my scarf here,” she says. “I thought I’d come back and see if you were still around.”

“My loss,” Dad says. “I was just heading out for the morning.”

“You want company?”

“Wish I could. It’s kind of a business breakfast.”

“On Sunday?”

“The Lord’s business won’t wait.” Dad gives her a smile, his voice oozing charm. “I need to be alone this morning. How about I call you this afternoon?”

“You didn’t seem to mind me so much last night,” the woman says, pouting.

“That’s because he was drunk,” I say, stepping out of the bathroom to make my presence here known. The woman kind of gapes at me, and I just look back at her. It makes me think of the line from that old Rod Stewart song: The morning sun when it’s in your face really shows your age.

Dad doesn’t miss a beat. “Rhonda, this is my son, Billy, the one I told you was a student at Connaughton. Billy, meet Rhonda.”

I stay where I am while she glances at my father, then back at me. For a second the only sound is a TV playing in another room. Canned laughter.

“You found your scarf,” I say. “Was there anything else you needed?”

Rhonda opens her mouth and then quickly snaps it closed, hard enough that I can almost hear her lipstick flaking off. My father slips an arm over her shoulder and ushers her out the door, murmuring something reassuring about calling her later. He shuts the door behind her, then spins back to me, his arm shooting out to grab me by the collar, yanking me toward him.

“What was that?” he says sharply.

“Funny,” I say. “I was going to ask you the same question.”

Dad leans in until I can count the veins on his nose. “Listen, you snot-nose little punk. You might think you’re some big noise up here in the middle of nowhere, setting up a scam for this Rush kid. But if you start getting delusions of grandeur, you’re gonna end up face-down in the dirt before you even know what’s hit you.” He shakes me hard enough to rattle my teeth. “Are we clear?”

“Let me go,” I say, jerking myself free, and somewhere underneath my pounding heart, I can feel that old familiar thickening in my throat, the hot, salty heaviness of unspoken anger rising up in my eyes. It’s weakness, and I hate myself for feeling it, but I can’t make it stop. “Why do you always have to do that?”

He glares at me with disgust. “I didn’t even grab you that hard.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.” I glance at the door and try to ignore the stench of cheap perfume, but it’s so strong now that it makes me want to puke. “Mom wasn’t like that.”

“No,” he says. “She wasn’t.”

“Then why do you always do this?”

Dad sits down on the side of the bed and rubs his face with his hands. He doesn’t seem to know what to say, and for once it’s actually comforting. Finally he looks up, stretching out his cheeks as he glances at me, and draws in a deep breath. “Billy . . .”

“Forget it,” I say, and head for the door. “I’m leaving.”

“Just hang on, kid, okay?”

“I’ve got homework,” I say, not looking back. “I’ll call you after I talk to Uncle Roy.”

And I step out into the cold air, where my lungs start to loosen and I’m finally able to breathe again.

Thirteen

ON THE BUS BACK TO CONNAUGHTON, I TRY TO PUT MY thoughts together again. I don’t want to think about any of what just happened, but I know if I don’t, it’ll all keep festering in the back of my mind—Dad, the empty bottles in the motel wastebasket, and the women like Rhonda who appear to be drawn to him no matter where he goes. Dad has a penchant for the women who seem least like the woman I remember as my mother. I wish I could hate him for it, but instead it just makes me feel sick and sad. Involving him in all of this was a necessary evil, so in the end I start thinking only of the specifics of the con, to try to keep my thoughts off the uglier aspects of it.

As I get off the bus, the cold wind slaps me in the face and cuts right through my jacket. The whole campus feels empty and desolate, and without knowing where I’m headed, I find myself stepping inside the library.

The stacks are even quieter than usual, almost empty, and I see Gatsby behind the circulation desk, again surrounded by towers of books to be checked in.

“Hey,” I say.

She glances up at me from between two piles. “Oh, hey, Will.” Then she frowns. “What happened to your face?”

“I’m fine. I just fell down some stairs.”

“And landed on your face?”

“Crazy, I know. Do you have any books about gravity?”

She gives me a sympathetic smile. “You didn’t read that one I gave you on self-defense, did you?”

“No, but I’m seriously thinking of reading Immanuel Kant,” I say, and seeing her knowing expression, I realize that what happened with the security guard could not have been mere coincidence. “How did you know about George?”

“Who’s George?”

“The security guard who let me in. He was reading that same book by Kant.”

“Well, you know, everybody reads Kant.” She gives me an innocent look. “He’s like the J. K. Rowling of western philosophy, right?”

“Uh-huh,” I say, and wait for the truth. Finally she sighs.

“Okay,” she says. “I grew up in a used bookstore. Wherever I go, I can’t help noticing what people are reading. I know George is Brandt’s personal doorman on Friday nights, and when I saw he was reading Kant, I figured it wouldn’t hurt for you to have something to make small talk about.” She looks at me curiously. “Did it work?”

“Not exactly.”

“How did the gambling go?”

“As expected.”

“So that’s good?”

“More or less.” I glance at the desk, where Gatsby’s own notebooks and course materials are mixed in with the library books that she’s cataloging. “How’s work?”

“Slow,” she says. “But that’s fine with me. I’m just trying to finish that Hawthorne paper for Bodkins’s class. How’s yours coming along?”

“Bodkins?” I say, and think: Oh no.

“Will, are you serious?” Gatsby gives me an incredulous look. “You forgot about it, didn’t you?”

“It’s okay. I do my best work under pressure.”

“I bet you do.” She looks at me for a long moment and seems to decide something. “You want to see something?”

“Sure.”

“Okay.” She flips a little library sign around so that it reads back in five minutes and grabs a set of keys from beneath the desk. “Follow me.”

I trail her across the reading room and through a door in the back, then up two rickety flights of wooden stairs. It’s drafty back here, almost as cold as it is outside. The landing at the top takes us to a long, narrow corridor that seems to stretch on forever, past darkened rooms full of dimly lit shelves.

“Where are we now?”

“This place is huge,” she says. “Apparently there are whole levels of this building that nobody ever goes to anymore. I’ve heard that hidden somewhere there’s actually a secret library within the library.”

“What’s in there?”

“Contraband books. Arcane compendiums of forbidden lore.”

“Like vegan cooking?”

“Like the basement of the Vatican.” At the far end of the hallway is another door, and Gatsby unlocks it and pushes it open. “Watch your step.”

We make our way inside, into darkness. It smells different in here—not dusty, but still very old. As she switches on the lights, I realize that we’re standing in an open rotunda looking down into a huge circular room. It’s climate-controlled with special receded track lighting, shining down on different glass cases as in a private museum—a Batcave for bibliophiles.

“Whoa,” I say. “What is this?”

“The rare books collection.” As we enter the main room, I look into one of the cases and see that it’s full of life-size paintings of birds, a riot of bright colors. “That’s Audubon’s Birds of America,” Gatsby says. “An original edition from the 1820s. They printed them on the biggest paper they could find at the time, what they called double elephant folios.”

“What’re they worth?”

“This particular volume?” She thinks for a moment. “I’m not exactly sure. It’s not complete, but then again, almost none of Audubons are, since the original plates were sold individually to subscribers. Still, Connaughton’s got the most comprehensive collection this side of the New York Public Library.”

“How do you know so much about books? You really grew up in a used bookstore?”

“Yeah. It was my parents’, so I worked there growing up. We lived on Martha’s Vineyard. The store went out of business a few years back, but I spent my childhood in an old barn, sorting through boxes of old hardcovers. Occasionally I’d find a treasure.”

“The Vineyard, huh?”

She nods. “So I guess that means we both grew up on islands.”

“I’m pretty sure the president never vacationed on mine.” I’m walking toward the largest case, in the very center of the room. “Is this what I think it is?”

“That’s it.”

She’s joined me. We’re both standing at the case with our heads almost touching, looking down through the glass at the oversize illuminated pages of what can only be an original Gutenberg Bible.

Gatsby glances up and whispers: “Do you want to touch it?”

I stare at her. “Are you serious?”

“Here.” She pulls a pair of latex gloves from a box beneath the case and hands them to me. “Put these on.” Then she crosses the room to a console on the far wall and taps in a quick series of digits.

“What are you doing?”

“Overriding the alarm.”

I stare at her, aware of a rising swarm-of-bees sensation in my stomach, which is expanding to fill my chest. “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

“Once or twice.” After walking back over to where I’m standing, she slides a key into the bottom of the case and I hear a single, muted click followed by the faintest sigh of released air. Raising the lid, she reaches down and lifts the Gutenberg from its display pedestal. “Sometimes when I’m feeling depressed, I come down here and hold it.”

“Is it heavy?”

“See for yourself,” she says, and hands it to me.

“Whoa.” The book fills my arms with surprising weight. “You know, it’s funny—when I woke up this morning I never thought I’d be holding a five-hundred-year-old Bible.”

“Connaughton acquired this particular one thirty years ago from a private collector in the U.K.,” she says.

“It’s beautiful.”

“The workmanship is exquisite.” Gatsby reaches down and runs her black fingertip along the two long columns of Latin script. “There are only forty-eight known Gutenbergs remaining in the world. All the originals were printed on high-quality linen paper imported from Caselle in Piedmont, northern Italy. It was one of the most important centers for papermaking in the fifteenth century. Every page had an authenticating watermark—either an ox head or a bunch of grapes.”

“Huh.” I stare at the pages for a long time. “That’s weird.”

“What?”

“The watermarks.” Squinting, I hold the book up to the light, angling it this way and that, and turn the page. “This page doesn’t have either one.”

“You just need to look closer.” Gatsby leans over my shoulder until I can feel her hair tickling my neck. She doesn’t say anything for a second. Holding the Gutenberg between us, we turn the heavy pages together, the heavy, brittle paper rustling like autumn leaves. The room falls very still. When Gatsby speaks again, her voice is slow, almost a whisper.

“You’re right,” she says. “There’s no watermark.”

“So at least part of this edition is . . .”

She looks at me. Nods. “A forgery.”

“Whoa,” I say. “I can’t believe the school bought a fake.” Given the amount of money and prestige at stake, I’m impressed that somebody managed to pull off a bogus sale. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind talking a little shop with the counterfeit dealers. “Do you think Dr. Melville knows?”

“The whole thing might not be a forgery. Maybe there were just some missing pages and they got replaced with duplicates. Still, that means it’s not completely authentic.”

“Crazy.” I glance around the room, and now I’m wondering how many of these other priceless books might contain forged pages.

“Come on.” Gatsby reaches over to take the Gutenberg from my arms. “We should lock this back up again before somebody finds us down here.”

Five minutes later we’re back at the circulation desk, out of breath and trying to act casual while Gatsby takes a seat behind her computer and starts checking in books. “Stop looking at me like that,” she says.

“Like what?”

“Like we just did something illegal.”

“We didn’t,” I say. “I just haven’t had this much fun in a library since . . . well, ever.”

“Fun?” She picks up a book and slides it under the bar-code reader with trembling hands. “We just discovered that the crown jewel of Connaughton’s rare books collection is a forgery.”

“Well, anything that starts out with overriding an alarm system can’t be all bad.”

Gatsby just looks at me. “I still can’t believe it. It’s incredible.”

“I know.”

“It just never occurred to me that it could be a fake,” she says. “How could anyone do something like that?”

“Yeah, I know.” The truth is that people like me are always trying to figure out a way to fake something and pass it off as real—rare books, business contracts, deeds to nonexistent real estate. “People will surprise you, I guess.”

She glances at the phone on her desk. “We have to tell somebody.”

“Like who, the library police?” I shake my head. “I think maybe for right now we should keep this to ourselves until—”

“Hey, bro. Where you been?”

I stop midsentence and look around to see Brandt standing there with Andrea on his arm. For a second, he just glowers at me, and then his face breaks into his easy-like-Sunday-morning grin. Andrea is already smiling, bright-eyed and cute as a button above her scarf, her cheeks apple-red from the chill of the day. Brandt slams me on the shoulder with a bone-jarring thwack.

“How’s it going?” He leans down, voice dropping to a whisper. “Glad to run into you here. I wanted to talk to you about that opportunity you mentioned the other night. When can we go see this boss of yours?”

In the moment of silence that follows, I can feel Gatsby’s questioning eyes on me. “Actually”—I turn to flick a glance at Andrea, hoping my reaction comes off as looking nervous enough—“I’m not really sure if I can still—”

“Friday night is Homecoming,” Brandt says. “I won’t be running the casino that night. We’ll go together to talk to him then.”

“What about the dance?” Andrea asks.

“I’ll put in an appearance and be out of there by eight.” He looks at me again. “Make it happen, okay?” His voice tightens. “Don’t waste my time.” He turns to Andrea, who’s pretending to look at the books on the circulation desk. “You ready, babe?”

“I’m always ready . . . babe,” Andrea murmurs, and leans in to kiss him with enough visible tongue that Gatsby and I are basically forced to pretend we’re someplace far enough away that we can’t hear the sucking noises they’re making. We’re talking feeding time at the aquarium. I don’t even want to know what Andrea has to think about in order to sell it.

“I’ll see you around,” I say, nodding toward Gatsby, and walk away. The last thing I see is Andrea’s face smiling smugly at me as I head out the door.