And if he was that many moves ahead …

  “Allie, what about those phone messages? Were they real?”

  “I thought they were,” she said. “Now I’m not so sure.”

  “We should go look for him, maybe retrace his steps.”

  “Or maybe stay here, retrace ours,” said Allie, seductively. “We’re engaged now, remember?”

  “And you believe in sex before marriage?”

  “I believe in sex before breakfast.”

  So we ordered room service and beguiled the time till it arrived.

  I know, I know: so many unresolved questions. So many potentially disastrous outcomes. In the middle of a life-or-death crisis, where do we get off getting off? I have no answer. None. But look, it wasn’t just animal fun. It was the consummation of conviction: the first sex of the rest of our lives. Absent an engagement ring, this was how we sealed the deal between us. The deal thus sealed, everything else seemed to recede into unimportance. Life? Death? Whatever. She’s mine, I’m hers, and the rest is a ridiculously distant second to that. So bring it on, room service. Bring it on, morning sex. Whatever dangerous connivances waited for us beyond that hotel door … nuck it—let ’em wait.

  Breakfast came and went. The day aged. Allie and I took a spin to the pool, I in slow Speedos and she in Miriam Plowright’s idea of casual swimwear: a no-nonsense one-piece; severe sunglasses; black, broad-brim hat. She did not look cute. How Allie Quinn could look not cute was a bafflement to me, but she managed. I think it was more a matter of character than costume. When she was in Plowright mode, she oozed bad vibe.

  As for the two of us having hooked up, we decided to run that as a mutual setup for a mutual double cross, predicated on the notion that creeps like us will sleep with anyone if we think it yields an edge. Then, in extremis, we could plausibly turn on each other like a couple of quislings with privileges. By roundabout means, and thanks to Woody’s devious machinations, we had fortuitously repositioned ourselves as each other’s backdoor trapdoor spider. It was a play. Not much of a play, but a play.

  “Excuse me, señor, you dropped your wallet.”

  I must’ve been dozing in the sun, for it took me a moment to register that the voice—a soft lilt with a Mexican accent—was addressing me. I opened my eyes to find someone kneeling at the foot of my lounge chair, wallet in hand. He wore the uniform of a Gaia groundskeeper: khaki pants and shirt, lug-sole boots, and an engineer-style khaki cap jammed down over his unnaturally (because artificially) cordovan face. The cap shaded his face, but I could see that it was badly (and again artificially) acne-scarred. Looking at him, you’d want to look away, so you probably wouldn’t notice that the man behind the makeup was …

  “Woody,” said Allie, sitting up on the adjacent chaise.

  He just smiled and held out the wallet.

  “It’s not mine,” I said.

  “Let’s pretend it is,” he said. “Una fantasía.” He handed it off, stood up, and, quietly humming a narcocorrido, walked off to pluck dead fronds from a line of potted palms. I followed with my eyes until I lost sight of him among the scantily clad tanners, then turned my attention to the wallet.

  It was empty but for a plastic card key and a yellow sticky note with the words Villa 23.

  “Well, Miriam,” I told Allie. “It looks like we got an upgrade.”

  26

  Pitch and Switch

  We waited a decent interval, then made our way down the undulant length of the pool to the broken horseshoe of private-courtyard cabanas at the far end of the Gaia’s grounds. Villa 23 was a postage stamp of paradise behind whitewashed walls, complete with plunge pool, Jacuzzi, teak patio table and chairs, gas grill, and two thickly padded gliders with their own shade awnings. A babbling low waterfall fed a koi pond framed by sword ferns and bonsai boxwoods. Sliding glass doors led into a cozy little dayroom with a bed, hammock, and wet bar. Woody stood at the bar, mixing drinks. Eschewing the house options, he poured amber liquid from a hip flask into a highball glass. “Tequila Brain Death, anyone?” he asked.

  “Little early in the day for me,” said Allie.

  “Oh, there’s no alcohol in a Tequila Brain Death. Just grenadine, lime”—he waggled the hip flask demonstratively—“and apple juice. The tequila is entirely rhetorical.”

  “To what end?” asked Allie.

  I answered for Woody. “To the end of appearing drunk when you’re not.”

  Woody nodded. “Handy for all manner of hustles.” He smiled broadly at me, all proud papa. “As I knew you’d know.”

  “Yes, could we stop marveling at how clever I am? Since manifestly I’m not or I wouldn’t be here now.” The frustration in my voice summed up my ire at all the ways I’d been tricked, misled, manipulated, cornered, juked, snuked, and sock-puppeted since this whole enterprise began. From front to back, not Radar Hoverlander’s finest hour, particularly considering that by now I was supposed to be on the high road to normalcy as a high school algebra teacher or some such. Fine role model I’d make. What’s the square root of deception, class?

  Woody cut through my bitter reverie. “Don’t sell yourself short, son,” he said. “I’ll grant I’ve played things a little loose around the edges”—his eyes shifted back and forth between us—“as you and Allie have no doubt discussed at length by now. But you’ve pulled a few threads, too. Some admirable ones, I’d say. Right now, I hazard to guess, Jay and Louise are in a great state of confusion about where Vic’s money really is and how it’s to be had. They’ll be improvising now.”

  “And if you’re not particularly good at improvising …,” I said.

  “Things can come rather quickly unspooled. Now all we have to do is unspool them further.”

  “Still,” I said, “that thing with Miriam Plowright was a lucky audible.”

  “Not lucky,” said Woody. “Inspired.”

  “Lucky,” I insisted.

  “Well, lucky or not, it was well done. Congratulations.”

  “I bask in your approval. That said, and if it’s not too much trouble, would you mind filling me in on the Pitch and Switch you’ve sent me to such wearisome lengths to set up?”

  “Pitch and Switch?” asked Woody, blankly.

  “You’re really going to play that dumb?”

  “Let’s imagine I am,” he said. “You say you’re not that clever, I say you are. Let’s test it. Tell me what I have in mind.”

  And why did I rise to his bait again? I guess with Woody so successfully ghosting my every thought, I wanted to show that I could get inside his head, too. So I told him what he had in mind.

  There’s a gaff the old-timers used to run called the Fiddle Game. In that snuke, a short con good for maybe a hundred bucks or two, some down-and-out old folk musician comes up short for the price of his restaurant meal. A conveniently expired credit card usually does the trick, and our honorable minstrel collaterals his sentimentally beloved instrument while he goes to get some cash. Now here comes his confederate, masquerading as a stranger who recognizes the modest fiddle as an undiscovered masterwork—a genuine Flapdadivarius!—and essays to buy it for some goggly multiple of its real worth. As it’s not the restaurateur’s to sell, the disappointed buyer can only leave behind his contact information, “should the situation change.” When the old folkie returns, meager dosh in hand, he’s entreated to sell the tool of his trade for a fraction of the above-mentioned multiple. The geezer reluctantly relents, and the Midan proprietor eagerly awaits the buyer’s return. Naturally, neither buyer nor geezer is ever seen again, and repeating the scam awaits only their purchase of more pawnshop catgut* and another restaurant meal. The Fiddle Game is such a trope, of course, that no one in the know falls for it these days. But you can dress it up in different clothes. Represent an old book as a rare first edition or fake bling as real. Plus don’t forget that in this life those in the know are never in even the bare majority.

  The Pitch and Switch is essentially a scaled-up version of the gag. You invest more time, energy, and evidence in cementing the false value of the item in question, but the scam remains the same: Put something of seeming value in the hands of the mark, jack up the value in his mind, get paid, and get lost before he twigs. The first half of our snuke had been to install Vic as a high roller. The second half, predicated on the notion that Jay was repeat business, had to be a Pitch and Switch. But switch to what? It had been Woody’s job to determine what would push Jay’s “buy” button. Had he done so? Probably. And withheld the information from me, as usual, just to see if I could tease it out on my own. Really, Woody, after all these years, I don’t need homeschooling. Still, if I had to hazard a guess …

  “What’s going to happen,” I said as I finished telling Woody a dozen things he already knew, “is that Miriam Plowright will turn out to have something she grossly undervalues, something for which you’ll be on hand to set the proper price.”

  “Already done,” said Woody.

  “And that something is …?”

  Woody gave me that same blank look, but by this point it didn’t even bother me. I figured the answer was already staring me in the face. So I mentally scanned Plowright’s clients’ portfolios, which, given that they were entirely fictive, could arguably contain anything. Antiques. Baseball cards. Solid gold meteorites. Pieces of the True Cross. But how could fake assets be made real enough to snuke a man so manifestly on his guard? Wolfredian was a hard case. Always. Well, almost always. Last night …

  Wait …

  Last night …

  I said it softly. “Mirplopalooza.”

  “And you say you’re not clever.”

  “Yeah,” I said ruefully, “I’m the head of the nucking class. But would you mind telling me why you think it’ll work?”

  “But, Radar, you’ve been working on it all this time. You must’ve figured it out. Are you really going to play that dumb?”

  “Let’s imagine I am,” I said. I glanced at the bar. “And I believe I’ll have a Brain Death after all.”

  Woody began the discussion discursively. “Do you remember,” he asked, “a fellow named Clifton Greenwald?”

  “No,” I said. “It doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “He was an artist. About fifteen years back. Called himself Kagadeska.”

  That bell rang. “He did those Japanese cartoons, right? Manga?”

  “Cartoons,” scoffed Woody. “That’s like saying Mozart wrote ditties.” He recounted Greenwald’s career, an asymptotic upslope from greeting cards through graphic design to his big breakthrough in American manga. “Did you know he went to Stanford?”

  “You …,” I couldn’t help asking, “you weren’t him, were you?” It seemed impossible, but at this point, I wasn’t putting anything past the old man.

  “No, I wasn’t him,” said Woody. “Especially after he died.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” Allie snapped her fingers. “Rode his bike off a mountain.”

  “And that, dear friends, is the slender thread by which we all hang. One random patch of gravel … poof, you’re posthumous.” He eyed us keenly. “And if you’re an artist of some note, your works start to appreciate. The story goes that someone broke into Greenwald’s studio just after he died and stole hundreds of unpublished one-sheets.”

  “And you know this story because …?”

  “I started it, of course. And made sure it reached Wolfredian’s ears. He’d sold a start-up, had some money, was splashing it around.”

  “Was this before or after you snuked him with your private business model?”

  “Oh, during. I worked him from all kinds of angles. In this case, I hired a beard, a gallery gal who introduced him to the market and helped him corner it. He was an avid buyer.”

  “So he never saw your fingerprints?” asked Allie.

  “And still doesn’t know he bought fakes.”

  “Or the other fakes you’ve sold him,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Over the years. Through beards. He’s repeat business, right? I assume you didn’t establish that fact by accident.”

  Woody shrugged. “It’s true I’ve kept tabs on him. Even steered a few items his way, by roundabout means. But he’s grown. He tracks bigger targets now.”

  “Like Mirplopalooza,” I said. “Which I thought was Vic’s idea.”

  “Let’s call it a collaboration,” suggested Woody. “Purpose-built to appeal to a man of Wolfredian’s taste.”

  “And supported by all the shills and ancillaries I’ve been pumping into the event for … well, I have to say right now I don’t even know what for.”

  “Need-to-know basis, Radar, that’s all. No time for every tiny explication.”

  “Hey, lack of data’s one thing. I can live with that. But why all this keeping us in the dark? Sending Allie instructions ‘through’ me. Engineering our breakup—that was just cruel. And working with Vic on your own. Look, if you didn’t think you could trust me …”

  “Well, did you think I could trust you? You haven’t had both feet in this snuke since the start.” He turned to Allie. “You may find this hard to believe, but I honor your goals. Your life is yours to live as you see fit. You want to be a professional. Scientist. Save the world, I don’t care. But you’ve put my boy in a place of ambivalence, caught him between two things he knows he loves.

  “Where I come from, there’s a saying: ‘The truth is revealed under pressure.’ What you call misdirection and manipulation, I call just an attempt to arrive at a certain truth. Radar’s truth. The thing that’s in his heart.”

  “I know what’s in my heart,” I said. I put my arm around Allie.

  “Yes, but now, unfortunately, she’s not so certain of hers. Because loyalty goes both ways. She wants what’s best for her but also what’s best for you. It forces choices.” He looked at Allie. “Isn’t that right, Miriam?”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “You adopted a role,” said Woody, simply. “You made a choice.”

  “Doesn’t mean I can’t unmake it.”

  “True,” said Woody. “Everything is fluid.”

  “Okay, that’s great,” I said, “but this conversation is netting us nothing. Let’s review what we know.”

  “Very well,” said Woody, “This much is gospel: Wolfredian sweet-talks whales into bogus investment schemes.”

  “And uses those proceeds to fund his art jones?” asked Allie.

  “Jones is too weak a word,” said Woody. “It’s an obsession.”

  “Which makes Mirplo a kind of harmonic convergence for Jay. Which you must’ve recognized the minute you met him: the perfect tool to crack Wolfredian’s safe.”

  “With just a few complications like Miriam Plowright and Red Louise to keep things salty.”

  “Speaking of Red Louise,” I said, “weren’t you kidnapped? Or was that staged for my benefit?”

  “No, no, not staged. Jay wanted me on ice. I think he finds you less formidable than me. In that, of course, he is wrong. But he’s also thinking of another move to make.”

  “What,” I asked, “hold you hostage so I’ll ransom you back?”

  “You’ve done it before,” said Woody, referring to the money I gave Jay in Kingman.

  “And said I’d never do it again.”

  “Which Wolfredian obviously read as ‘protests too much.’ ”

  “How do you like that?” I said, almost chuckling. “Jay thinks I’m repeat business.”

  “Funny old world,” said Woody.

  “I can’t help noticing,” I said, “that you’re no longer on ice.”

  “What can I tell you? Ice melts.” He was thoughtful. “But it would certainly be better if Jay continued to think otherwise. So you might reinforce your concern for me next time you talk to little Martybeth. Did she try to seduce you, by the way?”

  “Who’s Martybeth?” asked Allie.

  “She’s frisky, that one.”

  “Who’s Martybeth?” Allie asked again.

  “No one,” I said.

  “Oh, do I let cats out of bags?” asked Woody, a twinkle in his eye.

  “There’s no cat and no bag,” I said. “Stop making trouble.” I turned to Allie. “Martybeth is a girl whose ample charms I resisted. I flipped her. She confirmed that Woody once had Jay’s ear, but now Jay can’t decide whether he likes Woody better as a partner or a stashed asset. Or,” I added thoughtfully, “a revenge tip.”

  Woody waved that notion away. “Honestly, you have to like the play from Jay’s point of view,” he said. “He’s eyeing Mirplopalooza for an investment and working Miriam Plowright for the angel fund. If everything goes according to his plan, he’ll be using Vic’s own money, through his own investment counselor, to buy his own crown jewel.”

  But just then it occurred to me that things might not be entirely on Wolfredian’s script. A snippet of Louise’s conversation came back to me. “You fucked with me,” she said. Notice she didn’t say “fucked with my boss.” I shared this observation with Woody.

  “You think she’s going rogue?” he asked.

  “Maybe it’s just improv,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, me neither.” It struck me that this was the first piece of information I’d handed Woody since … ever? … that didn’t lay flat in the groove of his expectation. It seemed to rattle him. Which kind of rattled me. “Can you deal with that?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Deal with that problem. Make it go away. Find some counter-improv.”

  I looked at Allie. “We’ve still got a couple of trapdoor spiders,” I said. “I suppose we might.”

  “It would be best if you did. A little conflict there, a little bad blood … it could help in the endgame—maybe rush the mark some.” I heard distress in Woody’s voice, and that distressed me. Unsettling as it was to have Woody outthink me at every turn, I realized I’d come to rely on him. Now here he was telling me he didn’t have complete control over the snuke and was counting on me to hold up maybe more than my end.