“Vividly. If that’s what you want.” We hiked on. The ponderosa pines drew close.

  “Suppose you tell me what you want,” I said.

  “But you know that, Radar. The chance to make amends.”

  “Man, they’re made,” I said out of sheer exasperation.

  “Now who’s selling yarns?” He cracked a grin, but I didn’t crack one back. “Look, Radar,” he said, “I know you’ve got a book on me, one with old pages, like Where did he go when he left? and new ones, like Why couldn’t he just come back clean? They’re your pages; read them as you see fit. But at least let it cross your mind, son, that when I say I want to make amends, I’m telling it exactly as it is. And if you’re having a problem with that, I would point out two things. First, you’ve never had a son, or been estranged from one, so you have no idea how that feels.”

  “And second?”

  “For how hard you’ve been working to get away from me, you’re still here.”

  “You’re saying I need you?”

  “I’m saying you need answers.” We entered the shadow of the trees. Woody settled down on a fallen log, sighing as he sat. “How about you get some now?”

  Charles Woodrow Hoverlander, called Woody since childhood, parlayed his gift for hand magic into a nightclub gig at Grossinger’s during that Catskill resort’s dowager days in the late 1970s. His was a close-up act, and he made lots of new friends that way. Later, he alerted his new friends to a variety of imaginative/ary opportunities, seeding plausible-sounding investment schemes with the latest blue-sky ideas from Popular Science. Steam-powered cars, flywheel energy systems, underwater radio, cryonics. Woody’s pitch was smooth as his magic act palaver, and he fooled almost everyone. Not my mother, though, Sarah Hoverlander née Blake, the local girl manning the front desk. She kept her keen lavender eyes on everything, including a certain paper-packing guisard long on salesmanship and short on specifics. She saw through him like scrim, but saw him also as just the sort of wild card she’d always wanted to draw. So, with the Borscht Belt unbuckling all around them, she Bonnied his Clyde and they hit the road, wafting across America wherever love and opportunity led them. Hasty nuptials preceded the birth of their only child, named (so one story goes) for the proprietary military technology* that covered the hospital cost of his parturition.

  But their essential natures cast a pall across fidelity. Woody worked sweetheart scams to the point of blurring the line between razzle and romance, and Sarah, no matter how many alternatives she sampled, could never satisfy herself that she’d cut to the best card in the deck. The times didn’t help: In the golden years between the Pill and AIDS, it was assumed that you’d sleep around, and neither lightly taken wedding vows nor a chubby bright toddler challenged that assumption much. Not even the tacit démarche of “don’t ask, don’t tell” could keep their relationship from foundering on the rocks of their mutual, and mutually earned, mistrust.

  “Then I did a real stupid thing,” said Woody.

  “What’s that?”

  “I fell in love.” He shook his head in self-mockery, as if that were the daftest move a man could make. “As it turns out, I was also falling apart. Gambling, dope, a few other things. Donna was my church wife. She put me on a path. For my own good, she made me purge my past.”

  “Made you?”

  “We co-conspired.” He shrugged. “What can I tell you? I thought it might work.”

  “And did it?”

  “Oh, sure. Often for weeks at a time. When I’d polished off her supply of second chances, she kicked me to the curb.”

  “Why didn’t you come home?”

  “Home? What home? Your mother had died. You were better off without me. I was still a mess, you know. Not a good influence.”

  “So now we’re back to how you did me a favor by staying away?”

  “Who knows, Radar? Who can say? Frankly, I wasn’t thinking about you all that much. I was lost in my own shit. Emphasis on the word lost. Emphasis on the word shit.”

  “Which you got out of, eventually.”

  “Yeah. Honey helped. I guess you know that. Mostly I just grew up. Figured out the difference between my career and self-destructive larks.”

  “Larks, huh? You make it sound so breezy.”

  Woody eyed me beneath hooded brows. “I don’t have your gift for language, son. If you don’t like my choice of words, choose your own, but if that’s where you’re going to draw your line, I have to say, I think you’re being petty.”

  Which, in fairness, I was. “What about later?” I asked. “Post-lark. You could’ve come and seen me then.”

  “Could I? I wonder if I’d have been welcome.”

  The plain honesty of the thought made us both uncomfortable; rather than open the can of worms of whether he was welcome now, we started brainstorming ways to button up Jay.

  Usually on the snuke, it’s best to create an identity from whole cloth. Not only does this let you build a consistent narrative, it muddies the evidence trail after the fact. Here, though, we were both known to the mark, so we’d have to build a con on the platform of our true selves and improvise outward from there. It cut off many options. Just the same, I found myself enjoying the exploration and quickly became lost in the comforting pleasure of combating a knotty problem in the company of a like mind. The more we explored various classic and handmade zazzles, the more I realized how much farther down my road my father was. Whatever scam I mentioned—Mozart’s Widow, Thai Gems, Rip Deal—Woody knew it, had worked it, and could deconstruct its strengths and weaknesses in intimate detail. He was like a museum of the con.

  Most of what we examined we quickly dismissed. Long cons—your pyramids and Ponzis—were just out of the question, for Wolfredian’s patience couldn’t be counted on to stretch that far. And no short con we could think of suited the twin ends of leading him on while sucking him in. Nevertheless, we dug into these, exploring various high-ticket versions of the Pigeon Drop and the Badger Game. When we’d scraped the bottom of that barrel and discovered nothing more than barrel bottom, we sank into a silent funk. The air beneath the ponderosas, formerly tranquil and perfumed, now took on an oppressive, foreboding quality. I got up and walked around, agitated. I’d taken it as read that once I fell into this thing, I’d be able to think my way out. Now I was not so sure.

  High overhead, in the sunlit boughs of the pines, a pair of Western Tanagers flitted back and forth, snatching insects from the air and punctuating the silence with their hoarse, flat calls of pit-er-ik, pit-er-ik. The term “free as a bird” crossed my mind (a measure of how runaway my train of thought), accompanied by a mind’s-eye action shot of Vic Mirplo happily constructing his Albuquerque Turkey. Could he really have it so made? True, trolling for patrons was no day at the beach, but at least his choices were his own, not constrained, as mine were. On top of everything else, he was getting good at what he did. He might really make it big. Yeah, he was definitely on that road. Hmm …

  “Know what?” I told Woody, “I think we’re oversolving the problem.”

  “How so?”

  “What’s Wolfredian after? What does he think he wants?”

  “A giant whale,” said Woody. “A big, dumb one he can fornicate out of a fortune.”

  “So let’s do that. Let’s give him a whale.”

  Woody shook his head. “You don’t know Vegas like I do, son. It’s not like in the movies, where planeloads of degenerates fly in with suitcases full of cash. Real whales are rare. Even when you find them, it takes months to build a relationship with them. Sometimes years. No way we have that long a leash.”

  “We don’t need it. We’ve got Nana’s Attic. Fresh meat. New on the market.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Really?”

  “Don’t dick me around, Radar.” Woody stood up, pulling at his pants to air a pocket of sweat. “Just tell me what’s on your mind.”

  So I did. I told him about Vic, how he was growing as an artist and starting to gain traction. “Suppose he got hot,” I said. “So hot, so fast that he suddenly had more money than he knew what to do with.”

  “That could work,” said Woody, thoughtfully. “Jay has a soft spot for artists.”

  “Really?”

  Woody waved it away. “He fancies himself a collector. It’s not important. Go on.”

  I went on. “So suppose Vic drags his newfound wealth into Vegas on the arm of the Gaia’s newest casino host.”

  “Who? Allie?” Why would he ask that? Was he pinging me?

  “Me,” I said, harshly. “I told you, she’s out of the picture.”

  “Pity,” said Woody. “Some of the best hosts are pretty gals.” A pause, then, “But you and Vic are friends. What if Wolfredian twigs to that?”

  “That’s part of the gag. Wolfredian hires me as a host, and I lure in my friend with all the fresh cash. All I have to do is fake a public record that his cash is cash, not flash.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “I’d better can. Without the public record we’ll never be able to sell Vic—excuse me, Mirplo—as a shooting star.” Already my mind was ablaze with the fake websites and fictive press releases I’d need in order to support Mirplo’s meteoric rise. I tended the blaze for a few moments, and when I next looked at Woody, he was beaming. “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” said Woody. “Just, I knew you’d think of something.”

  “How could you know that?”

  “You’re a Hoverlander, son.” That sort of struck me sideways. All my life I’d been Radar Hoverlander, but I’d never been a Hoverlander before. It felt rather good. Like joining the Rotary. But I shrugged it off; Woody may have been fluffing me.* “So,” continued Woody, “how do we leverage Mirplo into a raid on Wolfredian’s mint?”

  “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it,” I said, in unconscious echo of Vic. “In the meantime, we buy time, because Jay sees us being good boys and running his script. So I’ll set up the backstory, and you set up the mark. How does that sound?”

  “That sounds just fine,” said Woody.

  We spent some time sketching out the details of the snuke and divvying up our responsibilities. I had to admit that it felt great to be back working on this sort of thing again.

  But the great feeling didn’t last.

  Because when I got home, Allie was gone.

  *Radar target enhancers—“Now available for the first time to the investing public!”

  *Inflating my ego to cloud my judgment.

  17

  True Believers Sell Best

  No, I mean gone gone. Pots and pans gone. Hangers and hairbrush gone. Gone as grunge. Gone as pay phones. Gone. I called her cell right away. I wanted to lead with “What the fuck?” but all I said was, “Allie? Honey?”

  “Hello, Radar,” she said, with a timbre of reserve I’d never heard before. “Is Woody with you?”

  “No.”

  “Good. But anyhow we shouldn’t talk long. We have to get used to not talking at all.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That’s funny,” she said. “I’m gonna miss the funny.” There was a wistful hitch in her voice. “Clean break, Radar. That’s what we’re trying to sell. You know true believers sell best.”

  The line went dead.

  Imagine you’re me, standing in the half-empty living room—half empty because she took the damn bookshelf—of your formerly cozy formerly home. You’d agreed to a mock breakup with your darling con artist girlfriend because it seemed like the smart play, the safe play. But now you’re there, turning stuttering circles on shaky legs, wondering where the mock in the mock breakup went. “You know true believers sell best,” she’d said. Was that a pep talk or a kiss-off? You don’t know. Your analytical circuits are blown. In your current state of mind, you couldn’t process a knock-knock joke.

  Knock, knock.

  Who’s there?

  Who’s where?

  You stagger to a chair and subside into it. You rub your eyes, run your fingers through your hair; you find you’re massaging your scalp. Or maybe trying to hold in your brains. You cast around mentally for a paper bag to breathe into. Then, right in the middle of your panic attack, a sound cuts through the stale air. It’s the soothing jingle of dog tags; someone’s waking up from a nap.

  She loves you! She left you the dog!

  Boy ambled in. I took him down to the floor and held him for a long, long time.

  “I don’t know, Radar,” said Vic. “Things are going pretty good for me right now. I’ve got orders … The Goro-Lubke Gallery wants to do a show, and they’re prestigious as hell.”

  “Do you have enough stuff for a show?”

  Vic didn’t answer immediately. He seemed lost in his yogurt and cereal. Lost, really, as I was in mine as I sat across from him at the yellow Formica table in Zoe’s kitchen. I could hear Zoe in the other room, singing one of Vic’s songs. It was hooky, catchy, evidence upon evidence of Mirplo as a Renaissance dude.

  This was the morning after the night before, a long and mostly sleepless night I’d spent alone in a big bed, pining for Allie’s warmth. Boy had joined me around dawn, hopping up and sprawling out beside me, instinctively trying to fill the void. But a big, prickly mutt with dog breath and restless leg syndrome was no substitute for the woman I loved, not by orders of magnitude. I lay awake watching sunlight crawl up the adobe wall and wondered if Allie was watching the same sunrise. I didn’t know where she was staying. Hell, I didn’t even know if she was still in town. This was bad. Verisimilitude is one thing, but the thoroughness of her departure suggested something more fervent than mere verisimilitude. Yes, the true believer sells best, and yes, we wanted Allie on the outside for reasons both of safety and of strategy, but I couldn’t help wondering, Was there a third reason as well? Had she decided that a Hoverlander (ha! now we’re a clan) can never go straight and that it was therefore time for her to cut (A) her losses and (2) me loose? In other unhappy words, was our trapdoor spider plan actually her exit strategy? I didn’t know, couldn’t know, and had nothing to rely on but my faith in her love and the potentially deflective evidence of a dog left behind. Faith was hard for me to come by—I didn’t have a lot of practice in that area. As for Boy, who knew? Maybe she’d cut him loose, too.

  Vic, meanwhile, had finally gotten to the bottom of his granola. “Enough stuff?” he repeated. “Enough for a bluff, I guess. It’ll have to do.”

  “Well, that’s what I want to do, too. Run a bluff. Take your game to a higher level. Look, when you do a show, what are you saying to the world?”

  “That I’m an artist.”

  “An artist bigger than you are, right?”

  “Well, yeah, I mean, that’s how you step up.”

  “Okay, then, so it’s all self-fulfilling prophecy. And that’s all I’m saying: Think big. You create a market for yourself by saying, ‘Well, there should be a market for me,’ yeah?”

  “Yeah …,” Vic allowed.

  “So let me pump you up a little. Make you look bigger than you are. Then you’ll go to Vegas and splash some money around. What’s not to like about that?”

  “I lived in Vegas, you know. Back in my poker days.” I knew about those days. Vic had decided that his destiny lay in tournament poker; however, unburdened by skills, stones, or the remotest whiff of card sense, he’d quickly sailed the ship of that career onto the rocky shoals of extreme poverty. I understood that when he decamped to Los Angeles he’d left some unhappy backers behind. “Some people,” said Vic, “might not remember me fondly.”

  “I gotta say, Vic, you flatter your past if you think the guy you once were is worth settling a score on.”

  Vic nodded solemnly, acknowledging the truth of this without suffering it. I had to hand it to him, he had the most straightforward ego I’d ever seen. One could go to school on it. “You’re right,” he said. “Not that I’m not better now.”

  “Inarguably,” I said, and I wasn’t just fluffing.

  In the next room, Zoe unsuccessfully essayed to hit a high note. “What about Zoe?” asked Vic. “Can she come, too?”

  “Your entourage,” I said. “Your call.”

  “Entourage,” he mused. “I’d like to have an entourage. And what the hell, I could even get something going there, artwise. I am ready to step up.” He collected himself. “All right, Radar, I’ll do it.”

  “Thanks, Vic. I appreciate it.”

  “Mirplo,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Not Vic, just Mirplo.”

  “Oh, right. I forgot.”

  Mirplo. Just Mirplo. Sheesh.

  I’ve lost myself in my work many times. If you love what you do, this can be a Zen thing, where past and future recede to a vanishing point and leave nothing but the perfect vexing, challenging, beguiling now. I’m told that golf nuts feel this way, that the buzz of golf is really how it lets you (okay, makes you) forget about everything else for the four or five (okay, six) hours you’re out there. Well, the grift is my golf, and there’s nothing I like better than subsuming myself in the prep and planning of a cool snadoodle. If I lost myself in this one with a rather greater sense of urgency than usual, I think I can be forgiven. I was trying to keep Allie off my mind.

  First thing I did was backpredict Mirplo’s arc as an artist. I built him a website using 1990s tools (hello, HoTMetaL; hello, Front Page) and filled it with bitmapped photos of the sort of jejune, self-referential artwork you’d expect of a late adolescent. Harsh, earnest self-portraits, charcoal drawings of disproportionate nudes, that sort of thing. I parked the site in a dead-letter corner of the Internet where, if Jay Googled hard enough, he’d find it. This is basic housekeeping. You don’t know if the mark will do his due diligence, but you can’t assume he won’t. So you leave an electronic paper trail. People think the Internet makes it harder to fabricate histories, but actually it’s easier. Back in the day, you needed forged documents and live testimonials—hard copy, real-world shit. Now all it takes is a Facebook page and a Wikipedia tap dance. The proof is in the pixels. In fact, I was probably going way the extra mile; when Mirplo hit town, the only thing Jay would likely check was the color of his money. But like I said, I had reasons to get wrapped up in the work.