Swindler & Son, Page 3

  “Helena, you’d be the ideal guardian, if only…”

  Pause now and let the blood rise to her cheeks.

  “…if only what?”

  “You’re too high-profile. People notice everything you wear, everything you carry, everything about your style.”

  She soaks up this flattery as though it’s obvious—it may even be true, within her circle. “Well, I do have a reputation.”

  “Our foremost responsibility, Helena,” Harry intones, sounding like the State Executioner, “is to relieve the owner’s…financial distress…without embarrassing her.” Is it Birkin herself? Financial distress? Every successive level of humiliation only makes the gossip more juicy. “And there’s the problem, darling—you’re an icon. Every time you leave the house, you’ll be calling attention to something we want to hide. Surely you understand.”

  “I do,” Dame Helena murmurs so earnestly I fear we’ve overdone it. I hold my breath for several ticks. “So if I were to buy it, I just couldn’t take it outside—or tell anyone I owned it.”

  “Could you have it under those conditions?”

  “I’m assuming those conditions,” she assures us. “I wouldn’t want it otherwise. The poor girl, to have such distress at this point in her life.”

  “You didn’t hear that from me.”

  “No, of course not. This is a legendary bag. I’ll curate it the way it deserves. I won’t take ‘no’.”

  My turn: “Dame Helena, sometimes things come to us when a person in distress seeks help from the wrong people, giving trust where it’s not deserved. So sometimes we find ourselves trying to honor an agreement long after the original conditions have disintegrated or become distorted. Does that make any sense to you?”

  If it does, it’s not my fault. I’ve done my best to cloud any sensible meaning behind seventeen layers of smog and dry ice. All I want her to get out of this dialogue is the sense that something here is not entirely kosher.

  -Excuse me?

  RULE FIVE: THE PARTNER MUST BE IMPLICATED.

  Are we selling the bag off the back of a truck? Did we offer it to someone else who proved indiscreet? Was it lifted from the Hermes museum, if there is such a place?

  What’s important is, if Dame Helena ever has doubts later, about what she paid or why she can’t show the silly thing to anyone, we want her to remember that she sensed something wobbly about the whole transaction from the start—and went ahead anyway.

  -You aren’t serious, surely. That works?

  Rich people don’t get played just because they have money—they really are the easiest targets. Most have been sheltered and protected all their lives and know it. They’re hungry for an adventure that gives the thrill of a dark alley or a steep nosedive—without any real danger, because most of them know damn well they can’t handle real danger.

  Anyway, if we’ve played this right, Dame Helena knows someone’s being taken here—she just doesn’t realize it’s her. And if we get her a little wet with the thought that she’s up to something a little bit shady, it gets much harder for her, later on, to call the police or even complain to friends.

  The question is, does she realize she’s in danger of being taken—or does she think she’s part of taking someone else? If it’s the first, she’ll ask about price. If it’s the second, she’ll ask about provenance.

  “Harry, my darling—” here it comes “—how do I know the bag is what you say it is?”

  And that’s when I see something I’ve never seen before. I see Harry fail.

  Diamante warned me on the phone the week before. “He’s fading in and out. He tried to sell a Ming vase to the Modigliani lady. We don’t have anything I could pretend is Ming.”

  And now, it’s happening in front of me. Harry’s eyes go blank. He’s lost the narrative, the melodic line, it’s all slipping away.

  “Dame Helena, you’re right to be cautious,” I jump in, a bit too strong but what can else can I do? “Harry said this wasn’t for you. You won’t hear another word about it.”

  The problem now isn’t just that Harry’s failing but that he’s aware he’s failing; the fear distorts his whole being—his body shrivels, face receding. He’s groping for words: “Uh…protect…the poor dear…from…uh…”

  I lead Dame Helena toward the door. Better to lose the play than have her see through it. Harry moans another of his lines, “Oh, this is just where things stalled with Madame Pellicant—”

  “Harry!” I snap. “Names! Jesus!”

  Madame Pellicant is our backup pigeon, should Dame Helena fail. She is the second-most-rabid Birkin fanatic in Europe. If things were going well, we could use the rivalry to push up the price with Dame Helena. But only after Dame Helena made us an offer, which comes after we’ve convinced her we’ve got the real item. With Harry losing the thread, we’ve jumped the line and these things don’t work out of sequence.

  “Maybe you should sit down, Harry,” I say. “The doctor warned you, when you get dizzy?” I see the offended look in his eye—he’s fighting my diagnosis but he still can’t remember his lines.

  “Sit down, Harry,” I say again and, this time, he sits, doleful eyes like a basset hound staring at me.

  I make excuses to Dame Helena—a missed doctor’s appointment, pills that should have been taken. We’ll contact her next week to pick up where we left off. She’s still interested and I assure her we’ll take no action without speaking to her first.

  But the damage is done. We’ve lost the play and Harry knows he’s blown it. When I return from packing Dame Helena into a cab, he’s gone.

  Lost at Home

  Diamante’s got two phones and a tablet wired together on the conference table; he’s working the bunch of them at a feverish clip.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Pokemon Go—we liberated Misty Hannah! A brand-new life of endless possibilities!”

  “Great. What’s all the machinery?”

  “I’m spoofing the GPS.” He reads my expression and reverts to English. “You can only catch certain Pokemon from certain locations in the world. I’m not traveling to Australia just because I want a Kangaskhan. So this app tells the GPS I’m in Australia or Antarctica so I can collect more Pokemon.”

  “There are Pokemon in Antarctica?”

  “Sure. There’s—”

  “We need to find more work for you. But I owe you an apology—you weren’t kidding about Harry losing it.”

  “I wouldn’t kid about that,” he says, his face growing serious. Diamante and Harry were lovers for almost a year before any of us caught on, Diamante’s discretion outweighing Harry’s total lack thereof. “Tuesday, he didn’t know who he was talking to. I’m not sure he knew who he was.”

  “How long did it last?”

  “Maybe two-three minutes in total but it scared the hell out of me.”

  “How did this happen? I was gone two weeks.”

  “He unraveled fast while you were away.”

  “Should I worry about where he is? I walked the partner out and he’s gone.”

  “It’s six o’clock,” Diamante shrugs like it’s an answer. “You sure you want to see him?” He pulls on his coat, hands me mine and leads me out into the dark afternoon.

  The snow whips confetti-like around the trees and swirls in wakes behind the cars on the Rue Reaumur. Around the corner through a carpark, on a layer of snow on a metal bench, sits Harry, an old-fashioned bag of peanuts in his hand. Diamante points and sighs and leaves us. I bundle my coat around me and sit alongside my mentor, my friend.

  “Whatcha up to, pal?”

  “Waiting for the chimes—it’s six o’clock,” he says, like he was expecting me. The Parish Saint-Nicholas faces us across the street.

  “There’s no chimes,” I say. “There’s no clock.”

  He looks up and crooks a finger. Following it, I see a sundial-shaped window three stories up. Yeah, it’s shaped like…more or less, but…

  “It’s not a clock
. Not really.”

  “Six o’clock. Have you thought about God?” he asks, like the two concepts inevitably follow one another.

  “We’re not on a first-name basis. What about God?”

  “Well, if there is a God, it can’t really be a Him or Her, can it? So many different things to different people, that’s the powerful thing about God. An idea, an idea so big and central that it leaves room inside—room for multitudes.”

  I don’t remember Harry ever showing an interest in the Almighty—not even the spiritual, as far as I remember. He hands me a peanut. One peanut. Who wants one peanut?

  “First there was Old Testament God—good and evil, scary judgment—and hovering right there, just over your shoulder all the time but you never know how to please. Throws you into a fiery pit without a second thought, strikes you blind, orders your father to sacrifice you on the altar and you never know why.

  “Then comes Jesus and Mary and forgiveness and compassion but this God sees us as parables, not people. He isn’t close by us like the old Father. More forgiving maybe but more distant. Mercy is promised but the guilt just gets worse.”

  Where is this coming from?

  “And then comes the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution and the Space Age—Science, the New God, the first God in our own image. The Universe as Machine.”

  “God is dead, you mean?”

  “No—God is Us. We learn the secrets of the Universe and master them. Split the atom, defy space and time with transcontinental airlines, telecommunications and the Internet. We mimic God’s tricks—they’ve become tricks, now that we can do them ourselves, the mystery’s gone out of them. The Earth was our Mother and your parents are always a resented mystery, aren’t they? No more. Now it’s girders and silicon and Man worshiping himself. But we resent this God—deep down, we know He’s us. It’s no good trying to please ourselves! We crave something bigger—something awesome, something too big to reckon. Restore some of the mystery. Isn’t that right, pal?” He’s trying to fix his eyes on me but they keep wandering in and out of focus.

  O God. I get it now.

  “Harry, who am I?”

  “You’re my new pal. Not on a first-name basis with the Almighty, I like that. Very good.”

  “But who am I? What’s my name, Harry?”

  “I’m sorry?” He begins adjusting his scarf, fluffing his hair at the sides over the ears. God, he’s pulling all the actor’s business he uses when he’s forgotten a client’s name! No wonder he was spouting—he has no idea, right this moment, who I am. Is he enthralled at something else, something a thousand miles or fifty years distant? Or just blank altogether. One way or the other, he’s clearly in the moment. Lost in the moment.

  And then he rallies. Harry may be lost, but he’s still Harry—he can spin without yarn, summoning tapestries from thin air.

  “And now we have Money, of course! Darwin turned on his head—Unnatural Selection! A God we’ve created, but Godlike only in that it has no human characteristics, no moral vulnerabilities, no closeness to us or to anything at all. Godlike in that it’s totally self-contained, self-referential. It only cares for success, knows nothing but winning.”

  I at least get this line of thought, for what it’s worth. “And the winners are obvious—”

  “Because they have the most money, of course! You don’t need to explain the value system—which is good, because you can’t. It’s self-defined, a perfect logical loop. Of course, the problem is, this God is so much smaller than we are. We have to reduce ourselves continually to stoop to His level. But here’s a god, finally, that we can be as contemptuous of as God once was of man.”

  “Harry, think about what you’re saying. It’s insane.”

  “God must evolve to suit the times,” he winks and I see in those twinkling eyes that he knows me again.

  He gazes at that non-existent clock. “There we are. Six o’clock it is. Feel like a daiquiri?”

  Sure, I’ll go for a daiquiri—and to watch him, to watch him flicker. Now that he knows who I am, as far as he’s concerned, he’s totally recovered, as though he never dropped the vase on the floor, as though we both never saw it shatter to a million pieces.

  But I did.

  The oldest name I know for our trade is ‘confidence man’. The words were well-chosen and they pinpoint the problem with Harry. What happens to a confidence man who’s lost his grip, his marbles, his ability to think on his feet? What happens to a confidence man once he’s lost his confidence?

  Nothing good.

  Regrets

  -So Harry’s unreliable. Wish him a pleasant retirement and kick him out the door. But you don’t.

  Well, like I said, all this craziness erupted in the middle of surely the worst forty-eight hours of my life. By the time I’m sure I’ve shaken off GIGN, approaching Harry’s apartment building early Christmas evening, I really need his help, in whatever shape I find him.

  I circle the apartment from several blocks out, clearing nearby streets and rooftops before drawing closer. No plain white vans with antennae at the corners, no plainclothes with bulging pockets and earpieces, just the normal flics on street patrol and not even many of them. A regular exhausted Christmas evening. Whatever net GIGN has thrown after me does not yet extend to Harry. Maybe they want me safely put away before tipping him off, before he can start barking to his friends in high places.

  Harry’s apartment is on the Avenue George V, off the Champs-Elysees. The building is beyond lavish. Italian marble floors, facsimile medieval wall tapestries, Milanese leather overstuffed couches and a spouting koi pond in the lobby. Maurice the doorman is on our payroll—if anything is awry, his cap will be tilted across his forehead. When, from around the corner, I see a straight-on cap and a smile on his face, I know I’m safe—for the moment.

  “Go on up, monsieur,” he says. “I’m sure you’re expected.”

  I’m not but why argue? You can surprise Harry but you can’t embarrass him, even if he’s in bed with the cast of ‘Aida’, including the elephant.

  As the elevator doors close, I panic, as though they’re closing over me, suffocating and entrapping me. Every nerve is extended to its limit, I have no idea what’s waiting when the door opens again. It’s not as though I have another choice. Once I danced away from Belotise, every movement, every choice became potentially life-shattering. But I have to do something.

  Harry knows everybody in town. And, if he’s still lost in the ether, he at least has a laptop with an encrypted VPN connection to our office LAN. I’ve got to see the shipping certificate with my signature on it; thus far, it’s the only tangible piece of reality in this whole crazy story.

  The elevator doors open—and there is Sara.

  “You!” she fumes, stomping around the Moroccan rug (real!) outside Harry’s door. “How dare you?”

  “Dare I what?”

  “I can have dinner with Harry Sandler, or whatever his real name is, if I want to.”

  -And Sara is—

  My wife, ex-wife, that’s a bit unclear at the moment. Sara’s the main reason Christmas Eve was one of the worst days of my life—before this Christmas Day.

  On Christmas Eve, I went directly from the airport to our final divorce hearing at her lawyer’s offices, in a Beaux Arts chateau just off the Champs. It was one of those meetings that remind me that, no matter how much I love Paris, I’ll never be Parisian. I wear the clothes, my French is almost serviceable but, unlike a true Parisian, I will never smell great.

  Pierre Duillard smells great. I notice the instant I take my seat next to him. If I was across the table with Sara, I wouldn’t know this because Pierre’s much too tasteful to smell good that far away.

  He is, however, a dandy at any distance, a 5’7” whippet in a €5,000 YSL suit that mirrors his silver hair, gleaming teeth that must cost more than the suit and a tie-pin bearing an emerald the size of a pea. A big pea.

  Pierre is our counsel, one of those hires that pays for it
self many times over. He knows everyone who matters at the Quai D’Orsay, ministries of government and the High Courts. Pierre knows who to pay, if necessary—but only if. We can’t buy the whole fucking government like some of his other clients—it’s a godsend to small businesses like ours that Pierre understands that distinction.

  “I don’t understand why we’re here,” he rumbles. “We have a settlement on the table. Present it to the judge and let these young people move on with their lives.”

  He may as well suggest canceling a hurricane. Sara is a force of nature and Nature, at the moment, is against me. Disappointment is a glare lasering across the table.

  Sara’s avocate, Estrella Condido, wears an even darker gray suit under a Louise Brooks haircut. “There is an issue of clarification on an item of shared property.”

  “Our list of property is comprehensive,” oozes Duillard.

  “Line 22, ‘Loyalty Contingency’? Ambiguous name for such a lot of money.”

  Duillard sniffs the air, as though something’s feathering his nose. “This is a maintenance fund in association with a gift. It will be paid as long as needed.”

  “A gift!” Sara exclaims like it’s an insult. She drums the desk with her ex-smoking hand. Meanwhile, what I notice is, she’s—maddeningly—wearing the same dress she wore the day we met.

  Is this a needle? Sara’s not above wearing the same dress twice in a week, if it’s the right dress. But here, it feels like a taunt. She knows I wouldn’t forget that dress, that first time.

  We met on Bastille Day, at a party at the Anglo-French Amity Association, a club that offers English expats a place to eat blood pudding and complain about French music without traveling far from the mistress’s pied-à-terre. Harry spends big money for occasional appearances by the English football and rugby teams when they’re in town—he puts on a spread and gives away blocks of seats to the games. The club members are wealthy and nostalgic, without any real desire to return home—they’re perfect targets for Harry’s long game.