Crashed

“And he was devastated,” Trey said. “One of the problems with living on this side of the law is that there’s no pension plan. No health insurance.”

“And his wife,” I said. “She was sick or something.”

“Shirley,” Trey said. “I knew her when I was little. Alzheimer’s. Anyway, you took care of it.”

“I can’t take the credit. A kid did most of the work. But Antoine had a friend who was a mentor of mine, a burglar named Herbie. Herbie told me about it, and I met Antoine and Shirley, and I got really pissed off. So I got it back for him.”

“And some extra,” she said.

I shrugged.

“Antoine told my father what you did, but he didn’t understand how.”

“I reverse-engineered it,” I said. “I knew a fifteen year-old kid, a girl, who could make computers leap through rings of fire while they sang arias from Verdi. So we set up a virtual bank, the Bank of US, that was really nothing more than an invisible forwarding link to a real account with a few thousand bucks in it. Then we sent responses to the con man’s e-mail as though it had been sent to us, with the number of the phony account. The second he hit the link we’d set up, which was on our own computer, we followed him, electronically I mean, to the account he was transferring to. The kid hacked the bank the con man was using and found that he’d set up a couple of linking accounts at the same bank. We cleaned them all out and then we sent him an e-mail from a phantom mailbox saying the next time he tried to pull the scam he’d lose more than just money.”

“Like what?” Hacker asked.

“I think the right hand was mentioned.”

Trey was back in the chin-on-hand pose. “And you gave Antoine how much?”

“I don’t know,” I said uncomfortably.

“All of it, I believe,” she said. “About two million. He’d only lost three hundred thousand.”

“Pain and suffering,” I said. “Antoine was a nice old guy.”

“So the long and short of it,” Trey said, “is that my father had heard both these stories, and he told me about you. He said you were a smart guy and I should keep track of you in case I ever needed you.”

I held up both hands. “Hold it. I thought you went to Hacker here, and then Hacker went to Wattles, and-”

“All true,” she said. “I told you that my father suggested I keep track of you, not that I succeeded in doing it. You’re a hard man to find.”

“Not hard enough, apparently.”

“By dumb luck, I went to people who knew where you were. When Lyle told me your name, I thought, well, here’s virtue rewarded. I’m trying to go straight, and I get the very man I need. A man my father called smart. My father didn’t exactly throw compliments around.”

“If I were smart,” I said, “I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

“Where did you go to school?”

“Here in the Valley,” I said, although it wasn’t true.

“Cal State Northridge?” A faint wrinkle of distaste briefly shortened her nose by a hundredth of an inch or so. Not enough ivy for a Stanford post-grad. “What did you take?”

“Nothing,” I said. “But it was a great place to meet girls.”

The tendons in her neck were suddenly tight. “Mr. Bender, I am asking about your education.”

“And I’m avoiding answering you.”

Hacker said, “Answer the lady.”

“Lyle.” It was a snap, but she sweetened it with a smile. “When I want basic muscle, I’ll request it.”

“Sorry,” Hacker said.

“Mr. Bender? I’m prepared to believe you’re an unusual man. But I strongly believe that higher education trains the mind. It’s not a matter of what you learn, it’s that you learn how to learn. Given the way your mind seems to work, I’m curious about your education.”

“I read a novel,” I said.

She tried to put her glass down without looking and missed the table. “You … read a novel.”

“In the one class I attended regularly, Modern American Literature. The novel was called The Recognitions.”

“One novel,” she said, as though she was trying to make sense out of the words.

“It was written by a guy named William Gaddis, back in the fifties. Came out, no reviewer knew what to make of it, and it sank without a ripple. Maybe the greatest novel of the twentieth century.”

She grabbed the bottle and poured her own wine this time, ignoring the sound of Eduardo tripping over his feet to get into the room. “I have to confess that this is a disappointment,” she said. “One novel? I don’t care if it’s War and fucking Peace. One novel?”

“With all due respect to your wonderful degrees,” I said, “a lot of people come out of college too dumb to exhale. I gave myself a better education out of The Recognitions than any college on this coast, including Stanford, could have offered.”

“That’s quite a claim.”

“You haven’t read it. It’s roughly a thousand pages long, and it’s about everything in the world. But most of all, it’s about forgery and faith, and between those things you can crowd most of life. I read it in five days, pretty much around the clock, and then I went back to the beginning and started taking notes. I got though the first hundred and fifty pages, writing all the time, and then I got every book I could get my hands on about the things Gaddis talks about in those pages.”

She had angled her head slightly to one side by way of demonstrating that I had her ear. “For example.”

“Spanish monasticism. The Gnostics. Authorship of the New Testament. The Flemish masters, especially van der Goes and van Eyck. The music of Pergolesi. Inherent vice-that’s the tendency of certain artistic materials to deteriorate over time, the way most frescoes eventually peel and chip. The Catholic Church’s use of fictitious martyrs to convey the faith. The international trade in art forgery. How to mix seventeenth-century pigments. Greenwich Village society in the early fifties. The spatial organization of triptychs. The symbolism of the elements in a painting of the annunciation-with your last name, that might interest you. And about fifty other things. And I had eight hundred fifty pages to go.”

I drained my wine, reached past her, and poured myself some more. She watched me, her mouth drawn in at the corners and her eyes on my hands. “And this continued,” she finally said, “for how long?

“About five years. Some books led me to other books. Other topics. The Spanish Inquisition, for example, led me to the Jewish diaspora, which led to a million things, including the invention-speaking of your new chain of opticians-of eyeglasses. Did you know that Spinoza ground lenses all his life?”

“Do tell,” she said. “Maybe I should call it Spinoza’s.”

“And then I did the same with Moby-Dick,” I said. “That leads you to an entirely different world of stuff.”

“A wetter one, certainly.”

“For the last three or four years, I’ve been working out of a seventeenth-century Chinese novel called The Dream of the Red Chamber. Just to get away from the Western tradition.”

“And what, of any possible practical use, could you get out of that?” she said.

“Your hairpins,” I said. “They’re seventeenth century, probably from a tomb near Nanjing. And the Chinese government would like them back.”

For a count of three or four, she just looked at me as though I were a trinket she was thinking about buying. Then she reached over, picked up the bottle of wine, and topped up my glass.

“So,” I said, “I may not be a whiz with spread sheets, accrual accounting, and business plans, but I’m not Barney Flintstone, either.”

“No,” she said. “No, you’re not.” She put down the bottle and her glass, and clapped her hands twice, and Eduardo shot into the room as though he were propelled by a slingshot. Without turning, Trey Annunziato said, “Eduardo. Bring us some food.”