Текст книги "Con Academy"

Автор книги: Joe Schreiber

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Seventeen

WHEN I SLIP OUT OF MY DORM AND ARRIVE AT THE chapel at midnight, there’s nobody there. I stand outside the main entrance with my hands in my pockets, holding my breath and listening to the sound of melted ice dripping off the pine boughs in the dark, already feeling vaguely foolish. I have no idea what to expect, or how long I’m going to be kept waiting here, or if this is all just an elaborate practical joke at my expense. With every passing minute, the last option seems more and more likely.

I’m getting ready to head back to my room when a voice says, “Wait.”

Two figures step out in front of me, both wearing ski masks. I hear a crunch of boots on snow, and when I turn around, three more people are standing there. A half-dozen more appear out of the shadows, and I realize I’m surrounded.

“What’s this about?” I ask.

“Follow me.” Without another word, one of the masked figures turns and starts making his way toward the cathedral, with the others shadowing him. I get in line to trail the pack. We walk past the arched wooden doors, heading around toward the back, where it’s so dark that I can barely see the person walking in front of me. Somebody up ahead flicks a flashlight onto the stone wall, revealing a smaller wooden door with an iron ringbolt on it. The leader takes out a key and unlocks the door, then sets it swinging open. I can see a flight of steps leading underneath the building, and the group makes its way down, single file, into a large bare room.

It’s dank down here and even colder than it is outside, and it smells ancient and subterranean, like wet limestone and moss. The noise of our footsteps echoes in the empty space. Vaguely I can make out engravings on the walls around me, crests or insignias, images and writing lost to the gloom. The group has formed a silent circle around me. Their shadows dance and stretch across the walls.

“William Shea,” the masked figure in front of me asks, “do you know why you have been brought here?”

“Um,” I say, “is it because I’m the king of Tray Day?”

Nobody says anything for a moment. I listen as something sprays against the stone floor, and I catch a whiff of lighter fluid and hear the scrape of a match. All at once the room bursts into flame, a huge letter S blazing on the floor in front of me, casting an orange light across the circle of dark-clad figures standing around it. I take a step back.

“The Order of the Sigils has existed here at Connaughton for almost one hundred and fifty years,” the voice says. “Our membership is absolutely secret. Every year we invite at least one new student from each class into our ranks. If you choose to accept our invitation, you’ll be given an assignment. If you’re successful, you’ll be inducted into a society as old as the school itself. Your entire life will change, both at Connaughton and afterward. From your induction on, wherever you are, you’ll be a Sigil first and everything else second.”

I stare at the flames. “What’s my assignment?”

“Someone will be in contact with you soon,” the voice says, and just like that, somebody turns on a fire extinguisher and the flames gutter out, leaving me in total darkness. There’s a faint scuffle of footsteps, then absolute silence.

I stand there for a moment, until my eyes adjust, and then slowly grope my way back up the steps and out into the night.

Eighteen

UNCLE ROY ARRIVES ON THURSDAY, WHICH IS TECHNICALLY Halloween, but I’m too busy to mark the holiday. By then the temperature’s shot up twenty degrees, the snow is almost completely melted away, and just like that, it’s fall again. People are already wearing light jackets and making jokes about our twenty-four-hour winter. I’ve never seen a blizzard come and go so fast.

Meanwhile, I’d been thinking about the Sigils, asking around as unobtrusively as possible, trying to figure out what to do. From what little I can learn, invitations to join seem almost random. I’ve been told that they choose new inductees without regard to how rich their families are, or whether their ancestors came over on the Mayflower, or if they are one generation out of the trailer park.

Which makes sense, I guess, considering that they invited me.

At five o’clock that evening I’m walking back from a long study session in the dining hall when a gleaming gray Cadillac pulls up alongside me. For a second the car just sits there, as subtle as a flying saucer, and then the driver’s-side window powers down to reveal Roy’s deeply tan, wrinkled face behind a pair of enormous mirrored sunglasses. Teeth as white as Tic Tacs gleam out at me in a wide, perfectly even smile.

“Jump in, kid.” He doesn’t even get out of the car, so I go around to the passenger side with U.S. Diplomacy Between the World Wars tucked under my arm. The leather interior smells like a familiar combination of spearmint gum, Brylcreem, and Camel Lights.

“I missed you, Uncle Roy.”

Roy reaches over to punch me in the arm. “Good to see you too, William.” He’s wearing a freshly pressed dark blue Italian suit and a red tie, knotted in a perfect Windsor. He lowers his sunglasses to look at the textbook in my arms. “Studying hard?”

“I’ve got an exam tomorrow,” I say. “I’d like to pass.”

“Sure you would.” He nods and swings the Caddy around with an authoritative sweep of the arm. “You got a sweet gig going here. Gotta make it look legit, am I right? Sell it to the citizens?”

“Absolutely,” I say, and glance down almost guiltily at the history pages that I’ve been highlighting for the past two hours. The fact is, I started out making crib notes that I could smuggle into class in the palm of my hand and surprised myself by actually reading through the assigned texts and getting lost in the material—in a way that I realize is probably what people mean when they use the word learning. I decide to change the subject.

“Nice ride.” I nod. “I wasn’t aware they still made cars this big.”

“You bet,” Roy says, consulting the rearview mirror as he plucks at his tie, straightening the knot in some imperceptible way. “I told ’em at Avis that I wasn’t about to go driving around in some tuna can. They still got some actual Detroit muscle on the lot. You just gotta ask, is all.” As we drive out through the main gates, he whistles. “Beautiful setup here. A little cold for my taste, but classy.”

“Uh-huh.” There’s a second of silence. I glance at him. It’s time to talk about why he’s really here. “Did you get a chance to check out an office space?”

“North of Boston, a town called Lowell.” He accelerates, and the car surges smoothly forward with a low-throated rumble. “Be there in an hour at the most.”

We arrive in style forty-five minutes later. The space in question is tucked away in an industrial park outside of downtown, a three-story walkup where all the lights are turned on. There are half a dozen anonymous-looking vehicles scattered around the parking lot and a janitorial van parked in the corner.

“It’s perfect,” I say.

“You like it?” Roy beams. “I rented out the second floor for a month. Got the office, conference room, reception area—the works. I figure it’s more than we need, but it was dirt cheap, and they even threw in a few phone lines. Got the whole thing for three Gs and no questions asked. Come on in and meet the fellas.”

“Is everybody here?”

“The whole crew.”

I don’t ask the next question on my mind, nor do I need to. As we walk across the parking lot to the stairs, Roy shoots a glance over his shoulder at me.

“I talked to your dad about an hour ago,” he says as he climbs the steps, in the same voice that somebody might use to say, I ran over a rabid skunk on my way to the leper colony. “Says he’s going to meet us here.”

Before I can apologize, Roy swings open the second-floor door, ushering me into an empty lobby with faded orange carpeting, all of it just desperate enough to look real for our purposes. I can already hear voices. I follow Roy past a deserted reception desk and into a large, depressing-looking room where six men in their twenties and thirties are standing around, leaning against empty desks, drinking coffee and chatting. There’s a pile of computer monitors, phones, and office equipment in the corner and a coffee urn on a table. An open door at the back appears to lead to a smaller, private office. When the men see Uncle Roy and me walk into the room, they all stop talking and look at us.

“Hey, there he is,” one of the guys says, holding out his hand for Roy to shake. “Good to see you again, Mr. Devore.”

“Likewise.” Roy shakes everybody’s hand and introduces me around. “William, meet the boys—Rudy Morales, Southie McLaren, Iron Mike Mullen, Lupo Reilly, and the Righteous Brothers.” The grin on his face just gets wider. “Fellas, this is my grand-nephew William. He’s getting his feet wet on this caper, but he’s the brains of the operation. You got any questions about how much cheddar we’re gonna squeeze from this chump, you direct them straight to him.”

The guys nod and smile. It’s pretty obvious they’ve all worked together before, and they all seem honored just to be sharing a room with a grifter legend like Roy. I know exactly how they feel, and now that they’re all staring at me, I get the distinct sensation of being out of my league with men who are all much better at what they do than I am.

“Go ahead, William,” Uncle Roy says. “Lay it out.”

I draw in a slow breath and tell myself to take it easy. My heart’s still pounding hard, but I gradually manage to slow it down.

“Okay,” I say. “I don’t know how much my uncle’s already told you, but here’s what it looks like so far.” I reach into my U.S. Diplomacy textbook and pull out a photo of Brandt. “This is our mark, Brandt Rush—heir to the Rush retail chain. On paper he’s worth about sixty million dollars, and that’s not counting the shares in his family’s Fortune 500 company, which grossed about twenty times that in the last fiscal year alone. We’re going to take him only for about two.”

“Wait a second.” One of the guy’s eyebrows shoot up. “Million?”

“For starters,” I say.

Another guy, one of the Righteous Brothers, lets out a smoky chuckle. “You’ve got some oysters on you, junior, I’ll give you that.”

“He gets ’em from his old man,” a voice says across the room, and that’s when my dad steps in. “How’s it going, Billy? Did you tell them it was all my idea?”

Right away it’s like all the fun goes out of the room. Everybody stiffens, and I realize that Roy hasn’t told the others about my father being part of this play. Dad doesn’t seem to notice, though. He spins a swivel chair around and straddles it, settling in like he owns the place. I can smell the whiskey wafting out of his pores from here. For a second, nobody says anything. Then, from the reception area, I hear a pair of high heels clicking through the doorway, and a woman enters the room and stands behind Dad—the dyed blonde from his motel room.

“Wait a second,” Roy says. “Who’s this?”

“Rhonda’s a friend,” Dad says breezily, dismissing the question with a wave of the hand. “We need somebody at the front desk, and she’s got a secretarial background, don’t you, sweetie?”

The guys look at one another, then back at Uncle Roy, who’s already got his arms crossed. “No,” he says. “No way. No outsiders.”

“Come on, Roy,” Dad says, leaning back, “you’re gonna hurt her feelings.”

“I’m gonna hurt a lot more than that,” Roy says, “if you don’t swivel your girlfriend around and send her back to wherever you found her.”

Dad’s eyes narrow. “Hey, take it easy.”

“Take it easy?” Uncle Roy can’t seem to believe his ears. “Let’s get something straight, Frank. I didn’t even want you on this thing, okay? Carting your playmate in here just queered the whole deal.”

“Well, that’s a shame,” Dad says, “because she’s already in it. See, anything that I didn’t get a chance to tell her yet? She just heard the whole scheme through the open door. So . . .” His lips wrinkle back in a yellow, reptilian grin. “I guess we’ve got nothing left to talk about, huh?”

Uncle Roy’s nostrils flare wide open and I can see the war going on beneath the muscles of his face. He doesn’t want to walk out on this deal, but everything inside him—every instinct of self-preservation that’s kept him out of jail throughout his adult life—is screaming that this isn’t safe. Finally, he just shakes his head like a fighter shaking off a punch.

“You better vouch for her,” he mutters under his breath.

“Sure,” Dad says flippantly, and settles back as though the outcome was never in doubt. He turns to the other guys in the room, all of whom suddenly look as though they wish they were somewhere else. “You boys all know the online poker racket, or you need me to run it down with you?”

Uncle Roy shakes his head. “William’s gonna tell it.”

“Of course,” Dad says, and smiles. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“It works like this,” I say. “I’m going to bring Brandt here and introduce him to the office. He’s going to sit down to play, and halfway through the hand, he’s going to get a text on his cell phone from one of you guys, telling him how to bet. The bet pays off, of course, and he doubles his money, so he wants to go again. In fact, because he’s already got it in for my fake boss—Brian McDonald—he’ll want to go big enough so that when he wins, he’ll put the whole operation out of business. I’m figuring two million.”

“Wait a second. One thing I don’t get.” One of the guys—Lupo Reilly, I think—shakes his head when I finish talking. “What teenage kid can actually get his hands on two million bucks?”

“I’ve personally seen it happen,” I tell him. “Since his dad’s accountants let him manage his own portfolio, Brandt has got an almost unlimited trust fund that he can draw from. They let him play the market. They say it’s good practice for when he takes over the family fortune. And best of all”—I take a deep breath—“Brandt already thinks that this McDonald guy is trying to get revenge on him for what Brandt did to his daughter Moira. So now it’s personal.”

“You’re sure about that part?” Uncle Roy asks.

“Trust me,” I say. “He’s vindictive as hell.” I turn to face the group. “Tomorrow night I’ll bring Brandt down here to check out the operation. He’ll see how it all works. Dad will play Mr. McDonald, acting like he’s still bitter about what Brandt did to Moira, but when Brandt puts down the cash I’m fronting him for the first bet, McDonald will start to change his tune and suck up to him. Hopefully it’ll just make Brandt want to scam him for even more.”

“I like it,” Dad says, and shoots a grin at Rhonda, who’s been busily chewing her gum. “Of course, I should. Since the whole thing’s my idea.”

Uncle Roy grimaces. “That’s my least favorite part of the whole deal.”

“I’ll need about two thousand in cash to front Brandt tomorrow,” I tell him.

“No problem.” Roy opens his wallet and peels off a crisp stack of hundreds, handing them over. “And I’ll have the boys here hook you up with some dummy credit cards. They bill to a shell corporation in the Caymans, so once the charges catch up to us in a few weeks, we’ll be long gone. Just don’t charge anything big. No real estate, nothing like that, you got it?”

“Got it,” I say, as Lupo Reilly hands me a Visa and an American Express. “In the meantime, I’ll get Brandt buttered up for the deal, let him know how much Mr. McDonald has been talking smack about him.”

“Good, kid, but don’t oversell it,” Uncle Roy says. “We don’t want Richie Rich hating us so much that he decides not to come back.”

“Believe me, I know this guy,” I say. “The angrier he gets, the deeper he’ll want to get involved.”

“Sounds like my kind of sucker.” Uncle Roy looks at me with narrowed eyes. “Is there anything else I need to know at this point?”

Andrea’s face flashes through my mind, but I decide now is not the time to bring up our bet. I shake my head. “I don’t think so.”

“So we’ll see you tomorrow.”

I nod and turn to go. “I’ll be here.”

“Hey, William,” Uncle Roy says, his hand falling on my shoulder, “you mind if me and the boys stick around for a while and talk through some of the details?”

“No problem,” Dad says, and grins at me. “I’ll drive him home.”

Nineteen

“YOU DIDN’T TELL HIM, DID YOU?” DAD ASKS, OUT IN THE parking lot.

“Tell him what?”

His face pinches. “Don’t play me for a patsy, kid. I invented this racket.”

For a second we just stand there in the exhaust-reeking, cold darkness outside the office building. Rhonda has already climbed into Dad’s old Chevy and now she’s sitting in the passenger seat, having swapped out her gum for a Marlboro, fiddling impatiently with the car radio.

“I know why you’re in such a hurry to pull off this scam,” he says, peering at me from under his eyebrows. “I know all about your Thanksgiving bet.”

I stare at him. “What—?”

“Your little friend from school paid me a visit the other day. What’s her name—Andrea? She must have seen you leaving my motel in town, because she came by later and told me everything.” He tilts his chin up so that I can almost see a ghost of a smile tucked into the corner of his mouth. “Gutsy move on your part, seeing who can fleece this Rush brat first.”

I don’t say anything.

“Don’t worry,” Dad says. “Your secret’s safe with me. Still, I gotta say, it’s a good thing you didn’t go against me on bringing Rhonda into it.” He makes a fist and chucks me on the chin, hard enough to hurt. “I’d hate to break up our father-son bond, right?”

“Just make sure you’re here tomorrow,” I say.

“Oh, I’ll be here,” Dad says. “For two million bucks, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

We drive back in silence.

When I get to my dorm room, my weekend assignments are piling up on my desk—course packs, textbooks, unfinished papers, two chapters for Global Risk, and about a hundred pages of U.S. Diplomacy, plus math and English Lit—but I can’t concentrate on any of it. I can’t stop thinking about what Dad told me about Andrea, how she went to him with everything. Of course it makes sense that she’ll do whatever she has to do to derail the con, and I know it means I just have to step up my game, but something in me is resisting.

I force myself to open a textbook and start reading about Wilson’s Fourteen Points, but almost instantly there’s a tapping on my window.

I go over and push the curtains aside. Gatsby’s standing out there with her arms crossed, looking in at me. Her hair is tucked up into a black knit cap and her breath is steaming out in clouds. She looks cold. I flip the latch and swing the window open.

“Hey.” Her cheeks are flushed, and she tosses a quick look over her shoulder. “Can I come in?”

“Sure,” I say. “What’s up?”

“It’s complicated.” She climbs through the window, ducking her head down, and I notice that she’s wearing a huge black nylon backpack. Whatever’s inside is bulky enough that it almost catches on the window frame. Once she’s inside, she shuts the window and yanks the curtains closed behind her, turns around, and looks at me. Her glasses are starting to steam up and she takes them off to rub the lenses on her scarf. “So,” she says, sounding out of breath and sitting down on my bed. “How are you?” She takes off her gloves and gives me a weak smile.

“Uh, fine,” I say. “What’s—”

There’s a sudden banging on my door. Gatsby shoots up like she’s on springs, her head swiveling in all directions, looking around the room. The knocking continues, becoming more insistent.

“Who is it?” I say.

“Security. I’m looking for Ms. Haverford,” a man’s voice says. It’s familiar, but I’m not sure why. “I know she’s in there. Open the door, Mr. Shea.”

I look at Gatsby, but she’s frantically struggling with the backpack, taking it off and shoving it under my bed, where it barely fits.

“You’ve got the wrong room,” I say. “This is an all-male floor.”

There’s silence for a second, and then I hear keys rattling outside the door. Apparently the guard has had enough with the small talk and is already letting himself in.

“Okay, all right,” I say. “Just hold on.” I’m trying to stall, but the door’s opening. From the corner of my eye I see Gatsby crawling under the bed next to her backpack.

Seconds later, a uniformed man steps inside. It’s George from the other night, the Kant-reading security guard who let me into Brandt’s dorm. His face and neck are flushed like he’s been running, and he smells faintly of tobacco.

“Where is she?” he asks, craning his neck to look around the room.

“Who?”

“Don’t play stupid with me, Shea.”

“Look,” I say, “I told you, I’m alone here. And as you can see”—I point at my desk and the mountain of papers and books—“I’ve got a ton of studying to do. So if you don’t mind . . .”

“Nice,” George says, lifting one of Gatsby’s gloves off my bed and holding it up for closer examination. “Not really your color, though, is it?”

“I found ’em outside. Going to put them in lost and found in the morning.”

“Uh-huh.” After crossing the room, he opens my closet and starts yanking out my clothes. Once he’s finished trashing my wardrobe, George takes another walk around the room and ends up next to the window, staring out at the night. Then he looks at me.

“I told you,” I say.

George’s whole face clenches, and then he just shakes his head and walks out. The door clicks shut. I wait until I hear his footsteps fade down the wooden hallway. Then I exhale.

“He’s gone,” I say.

Gatsby comes sliding out from under the bed, brushing herself off. “Wow,” she says, “you’ve got a lot of dust under there.”

“Are you going to tell me why security is looking for you?”

“I accidentally tripped an alarm in the rare books collection tonight.”

“What? Why?”

She reaches under the bed for the backpack, unzips it all the way, and pulls out the Gutenberg Bible. For a second I just stare at it, this historical artifact lying on my bed next to an empty Mountain Dew bottle and a rumpled T-shirt.

“Okay,” I say, “that’s the Gutenberg Bible—”

“The fake Gutenberg.”

“You stole it?”

“Borrowed it.”

“Okay, but I’m pretty sure this particular item doesn’t circulate.”

“Will, listen.” She looks up at me, absolutely serious. “We just need you to hold on to it for a while.”

“We?”

“It’s important. Consider it an assignment.”

“An assignment? Wait, you mean . . .” For a second, it’s dead silent, as if all of the air has been sucked out of the room, and Gatsby’s face is expressionless. “You’re in the Sigils?”

“Is that such a shock?”

“Well, kind of, yeah.” Then it hits me. “Are you the one who nominated me for membership?”

Gatsby allows herself the slightest smile. “I knew you were smart.”

“Why me?”

“For one thing,” she says, “you threw that snowball.”

“What?”

“At Brandt’s head. On Tray Day. Nobody’s ever done anything like that before.”

“That? It was just a lucky toss. I didn’t even think it would hit him.” Then the implications of what she’s saying finally occur to me. “Wait. You mean, Brandt’s not a Sigil?”

“Are you kidding?” Gatsby laughs out loud at the thought of it. “The Sigils are the antidote to the Brandt Rushes of the world. We’re outsiders, Will.” The laughter has drained away from her face. “Like you.”

I just look back at her. For an instant the room is absolutely quiet again. I’m an outsider, all right. She has no idea.

“Now,” Gatsby says, and nods at the Gutenberg, “in order to prove yourself worthy of the Sigils, you have to complete this assignment. Keep this in your room for one week. If you can do that without getting caught, you’ll be inducted into full membership.”

I shake my head. “I don’t understand. Why the Gutenberg, other than it’s incredibly difficult to hide?”

“Funny you should ask,” she says. “It took some digging, but I did some research on the school’s acquisition of the Bible. You know how I said it was purchased thirty years ago from a rare-book dealer in the U.K.? The school actually got it for a bargain-basement price, under one condition—that the book dealer’s son got a full scholarship here. Any guesses what his name was?”

“I give up.”

Gatsby can’t hide her smile. “Melville.”

“Wait.” I blink at her. “As in, the head of the school?”

“That’s him.”

“Dr. Melville’s father sold the fake Gutenberg to the school?” Now I’m smiling back at her. “That’s unbelievable. Do you think he knew at the time?”

“Well,” Gatsby says, “the fact that Melville senior disappeared not long afterward, never to be heard from again, should tell us something, shouldn’t it?” She lowers her voice. “I wonder if maybe Melville himself knew about it too, even then.”

The idea that Dr. Melville might have been in on it—a father-and-son con team—hits way too close to home, and all at once I feel myself straining to change the subject. “That thing’s huge.” I glance down at the enormous Bible again. “How am I supposed to stash it in my room for a week?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Hang a picture on it and disguise it as a wall?”

“No, seriously. What if security comes back through here with Bible-sniffing dogs or something?”

“You’ll figure it out.” She’s getting ready to climb out the window and it occurs to me that in a few seconds she’ll be gone, that all I’ll have is the smell of her shampoo in my room and the emptiness where she was standing. And I realize that, no matter what happens, I need to mark this moment somehow in my mind so that I can come back to it again.

“Hey,” I say.

“What?”

I take a deep breath in. “You know how Homecoming is on Friday?”

“It hasn’t escaped my attention,” she says.

“Are you going?”

“That’s tomorrow.” She narrows her eyes. “Are you seriously asking me to Homecoming?”

“It starts at seven.”

“Will—”

“Just say yes,” I tell her. “Before you have time to talk yourself out of it.”

Gatsby looks at me for a moment in silence.

“You’ll need a tuxedo,” she says.

“I’ll rent one in town.”

“Can you afford that?”

“I’ll figure it out.” I wait. “So is that a yes?”

She smiles. “Seven o’clock. I’ll meet you there,” she says.

And that’s how she leaves me, with a fake Gutenberg on my bed and the promise of something better, as she climbs back out the window and into the night.