Operation Bamboozle (39 page)

“We're leaving anyway,” Julie said. “Our lease is up.” The tone-deaf coyote, high in the hills, howled his gloomy howl. “No melody,” she said. “No rhythm. No talent.”

“In the movies,” Luis said, “this is where the cops always say, ‘Don't leave town, we may need to talk to you again.' Or something.”

The detective spread his arms wide. “What's to say? Nobody's looking for work here. The Mob has a bad day, ends up minus two. Is the city worse off? I don't think so. Was anyone else involved? Not that we can see. Should we spend the taxpayers' money on the Mob's problems? You tell me.”

They watched his tail lights get smaller and vanish. She wondered if she should tell Luis about Michael Stagg now. Or ever. It was complicated. “In three days we could be in Kentucky,” she said.

“In three minutes we could be in bed. That is not a criticism of Kentucky, of course.”

She took his arm and they strolled toward the french windows. No, forget Michael Stagg. Although, now she thought of him, Stagg had been a very well-built young man.

Sterling Hancock III saw the news on TV and next day he read about it in the newspaper while he was having his haircut. “I met DiLazzari once,” he said. “He talked a lot. Mostly about himself.” The barber said, “That a fact?” It was a very small fact. Nobody cared. But it confirmed Hancock's belief that he'd been right to leave LA. Kansas suited him. He bought a dry-cleaning outfit in a good neighborhood and joined the Kiwanis, never regretted it.

Michael Stagg settled into the family's ski chalet, high in the Sierras. Winter came early. He skied every day, until he was so damn healthy that a talent scout who saw him on the slopes asked if he was interested in taking a screen test. Instead he enrolled in a drama school and was never heard of again.

Jerome Fantoni saw Princess Chuckling Stream riding one of his horses, without permission, and was so furious that he leaned on a fence until his pulse stopped pounding. By then he had to admit she rode a hell of a sight better than he did. On a horse, he was a passenger; she was a partner.

After that, they rode out every morning. Didn't say much, just rode. He offered her a job, in charge of the stables. “Do I have to shoot anyone?” she said. He laughed, the first time he'd laughed in months. Stevie heard him. “You got hypostatic neurostasia,” she said. “The B strain.” He even laughed at that. Amazing.

Fisk visited Prendergast in Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. “The doctors tell me it was the size of a plumstone,” he said.

“Doctors always lie. It was as big as a golfball. When I passed it they heard the bang in Queens.” Prendergast looked weary but he sounded better. “I have to drink two liters of water a day. My stomach thinks I drowned at sea. I hear you had tickets for the dumping of DiLazzari.”

“Very messy business. No attempt at finesse. I thought they had more style on the West Coast.”

“If you're looking for stylish crime, Fisk, you're going to have a sad career.”

“Cabrillo's got style.”

“You're back to connect-the-dots again. There's no pattern in crime. It's what greedy, angry, lazy people do instead of thinking. Society has crime the way I have kidney stones: it hurts but it passes.”

“Cabrillo isn't kidney stones,” Fisk said. “More like gemstones.”

“Here, drink a liter of water,” Prendergast said. “Help me out.”

Operation Bamboozle
is fiction containing small nuggets of fact. The reader is entitled to know which is which.

Nearly all the characters are invented. To my knowledge there is no Mafia family in New Jersey or New York called Fantoni and none in Los Angeles called DiLazzari. Sam Giancana did exist and he was a powerful force in Chicago, but Frankie Blanco, Tony Feet and Eugene Lutz are my creation, as are minor figures such as Milt Gibson.

The novel is a sequel to
Red Rag Blues,
where Fisk and Prendergast first appeared. Luis Cabrillo and Julie Conroy go back even further, to
The Eldorado Network
and
Artillery of Lies.
Those novels celebrate his extraordinary work for the Allies in the Double Cross Department during World War Two. That department was very real; when I created Luis, I had in mind a highly talented double agent codenamed Garbo, whose true achievements were similar.

Which take us to the cons. Both the Swiss clinic con and the Ukrainian lottery con are variations on tried and true—or tried and false—ways of making money by fraud. The first certainly dates back to Victorian times. Its success depends on the victim's willingness to pay quickly in order to conceal a family scandal. The second is more complicated.

The key to most good cons is telling people what they want to hear, which is usually that they can get what they want (probably money) without effort. It worked for Luis in Double Cross when he sold fake secrets to German military intelligence, and it works for him now in LA. He needs patience to exploit DiLazzari's vanity and restless ambition, his hunger for praise and adventure, and his greed. The greatest of these is greed, but when he buys
into the idea that greed is patriotic, he soon sees himself as a leader and a decision-maker in Operation Bamboozle. No longer just an investor, he is now an executive officer.

If this seems unlikely, consider what happened to Stephen Greenspan who, far from being a mobster, is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado and is considered one of the world's experts on financial scams. Recently he published
Annals of Gullibility: Why We Get Duped and How to Avoid It.
More recently, he lost much of his retirement savings in Bernard Madoff's $50 billion Ponzi scam, which also duped some of the world's biggest banks.

Professor Greenspan's book identifies four aspects of gullibility to financial scams:

1.
Situation
When so many big names are investing, how can they all be wrong? Vito believes he is joining a privileged club. Good enough.

2.
Cognition,
or: check the facts. Luis didn't bother to research James de Courcy's claim to be a Texas lawyer, and Vito didn't check whether or not there really was a lottery in Ukraine. Sloppy.

3.
Personality
Madoff was a charmer. So was de Courcy. So is Luis. How can your friend be cheating you? Unthinkable.

4.
Emotion
Easy money stimulates excitement, like 1–3 above, and this overrides commonsense. Ask Professor Greenspan. He's been there; he knows.

Madoff was always riding for a fall; he was always going to run out of money one day. Luis Cabrillo's scams are more modest, less reckless, and so far he's been lucky. Whether or not his luck will last, I for one shall be interested to discover,

D.R.

Derek Robinson lives in Bristol, England. He had the benefit of parents who read books, mostly from the nearby public library. The 1944 Education Act helped shunt him through the class barrier with a State Scholarship to Cambridge; his degree is in history. Stints in advertising in London and New York did much to kick the crap out of his writing style. He has written fourteen novels and a bunch of other books, some about rugby. For therapy he plays more squash than his friends, or his knees, think wise.