"Do you know if she went any place tropical? Africa, say, or South America."

"No. Australia, I think. Didn't even bring me back a boomerang."

"If I may say, ma-" I caught myself, "miss, it doesn't seem as though there's much love lost between you two."

"Allie Quinn is a liar and a cheat. She lived here for six months and never paid a cent of rent. It was always, 'The money's coming in,' or she had an emergency or something." Kyoko made a moue. "She said she could get my screenplay produced, but that was bulls.h.i.t, too."

There it is, I thought. h.e.l.l hath no fury like a writer scorned h.e.l.l hath no fury like a writer scorned.

We talked awhile longer. Kyoko was generous with information, the way people will be when they feel needed or important. From what she said, I was able to construct a picture of Allie as a transplant from somewhere, working solo grifts and just trying to get by. Though Kyoko occasionally joined Allie on bizarre adventures, like her masquerade at the car show, they never were close. They started to fall out over rent, but before that could come to a head, Allie simply disappeared. "I think she got in trouble," said Kyoko. "Some men came and took all her things away."

"Men?"

"Policemen."

"And when was that?"

"Summer sometime. Before Labor Day."

"I see." I tucked my clipboard under my arm. "Well, if you see her, please tell her to contact County Health immediately." I handed Kyoko a bogus business card. "And if I were you, I would avoid close contact."

"Trust me," she said, "I won't be kissing her anytime soon."

I cleared out. When I got back to my car, the Chad Thurston phone was ringing. I let it go to voice mail. I wasn't ready to talk to Yuan yet. I had some new information to process.

So Allie came and went. In the country, out of the country, with no real job and not a lot of cash. Thanks to Kyoko, I could reasonably place her in Australia, and though I couldn't place her exactly next to Billy Yuan, it didn't seem that far a fetch. But what was she doing down under? Sightseeing? Or setting something up? Suppose Hines had caught her with her fingers in the honeypot and flipped her like he flipped Mirplo. Unlike Mirplo, she'd be light enough on her feet to feed Hines a consistent false narrative. Maybe that narrative was one of feminine weakness-unlikely, given Allie, but still-and inability to help Hines catch Yuan without outside agency, said agency being moi moi. She'd met Mirplo and me last year at the car show. Let's say she'd intuited (or researched-I wouldn't put anything past her) that I was a good enough grifter to be represented as world cla.s.s. Then she led Hines to Mirplo, and through him to me. In that case, I wasn't the source of some extravagant, sought-after skill package, but just an elaborate stall.

That explained a lot, but it didn't explain everything.

Like: why did she sleep with me?

I drove around for a while, mulling my hypothesis, testing it from different angles, seeing how other pieces fit. Could Scovil have picked up Allie's scent in Australia, either before or after Scovil made Hines for bent? Was Allie secretly (or additionally) working for Scovil? Did Hines thus feel a certain noose tightening around his neck? He wanted me to b.u.t.ton up the Merlin Game, with himself as offsh.o.r.e beneficiary. Was that money intended to grease his getaway? If so, when was getaway day?

Once again, I had too many questions and not enough answers, which was really starting to get on my nerves.

Or was it?

I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror. If I didn't know me better, I'd say I looked happy. This puzzle was proving satisfyingly difficult to solve. I felt alive in my mind. Apart from the risk of getting dead in my body, I was having a high old time.

But that risk of getting dead was not negligible. I couldn't overlook it.

Now my own phone rang. I ignored it, but a moment later pulled into the parking lot of a mini-mart to check both phones and play back my messages.

Mirplo had called. "Hey, Blue Leader," he chirped, in what I suppose he supposed to be code, "Big Bird is getting testy. Wants to know if you've forgotten about the thing with the thing. I played dumb." (A Mirplovian gift, that.) "But you'd better do the thing with the thing today, or Big Bird's gonna s.h.i.t on you." Threats aside, the thing with the thing-the Merlin Game-needed triggering soon, or it would lose the heat of its momentum and fall apart. This thought filled me with a strange indifference, and it felt weird to think of a $300,000 snadoodle as a distracting aside, but that's what it had become. I sent Mirplo a text telling him to a.s.sure Hines it would be done today.

Not, perhaps, the way he antic.i.p.ated, but h.e.l.l, you can't have everything.

I played back the message on the other phone. "Hey, Chad," Billy Yuan began, "how's that ol' universe treating you?" Man, you didn't need a subtext detector to hear the busted! busted! in Billy's voice. He was on to me, and letting me know it. "Listen, mate," he continued, "two questions for you: Why did w.i.l.l.y Sutton rob banks? And where is the money now? Call me when you know. I fancy we can do business." in Billy's voice. He was on to me, and letting me know it. "Listen, mate," he continued, "two questions for you: Why did w.i.l.l.y Sutton rob banks? And where is the money now? Call me when you know. I fancy we can do business."

So I'd been made. Made by an arrogant p.r.i.c.k who wouldn't even let me play his reindeer games till I pa.s.sed a little test first. It put me in mind of Allie and the whole Cinderf.u.c.kingella thing. Sometimes we grifters are too cute for our own good. Anyway, the first question was easy. Willie Sutton robbed banks because, as he famously (though apocryphally) put it, "That's where the money is." But where was the money now? Was Yuan referring to the Merlin Game, trying to get me to out myself about that? I didn't think so. He might know about it, of course, from several different sources, but I didn't think that was the money he was referring to. Why? Hard to say. A gut feeling. Something from his tone of voice that said the question was more about him than about me. Like an SAT a.n.a.logy, almost: Willie Sutton is to banks as Billy Yuan is to what? Willie Sutton is to banks as Billy Yuan is to what?

Well, what?

I cast my mind back to Willie Sutton's days. The Great Depression. When what money there was was in banks and almost nowhere else. Okay, if Yuan was using a.n.a.logy, maybe I could, too. Great Depression is to banks as today is to ...

Is to ...

Nothing. My gears ground on the question, and I got nowhere.

Broaden the search, Radar, I thought. Forget about "where is money?" Think "what is money?" Forget about "where is money?" Think "what is money?" And what is money, really, but an a.s.signment of value, a promise to pay? Wait, And what is money, really, but an a.s.signment of value, a promise to pay? Wait, promise to pay promise to pay. That tickled something in my brain. If you think of it, money stored in a bank, say, is just a representation of debt. Someone owes someone something, and the sum of that something is a bank's bottom line.

Okay, then. Who holds all the debt right now?

Got it!

I scrolled to Billy's phone number and hit dial dial. After two rings, Billy answered, "G'day, Radar."

Not even any Chadouflage. I decided to go shields-down, too. "h.e.l.lo, Billy," I said. "I know where the money is."

"And that would be?"

"China."

"Excellent," said Yuan. "You got it in one."

"So I did," I said. "So now what?"

"Now we meet and discuss our plan."

"What plan is that?"

"You already know it," he said. "We're going to rob China."

the california roll.

I t took us a little while to work out where to meet: someplace public but cloistered, where two grifters could size each other up with appropriate discretion and wary circ.u.mspection. We settled on the Brentwood Country Mart, an open-air warren of shops on the eastern edge of Santa Monica. There was a fake-wood fire pit in the center of the mart, surrounded by fast-food joints, but originals, not franchise. It was the sort of place where people sat around tete-a-tete in conversations covering everything from real estate deals to demands for divorce. It met our needs; plus, if we got hungry, the chimichangas there were dandy. t took us a little while to work out where to meet: someplace public but cloistered, where two grifters could size each other up with appropriate discretion and wary circ.u.mspection. We settled on the Brentwood Country Mart, an open-air warren of shops on the eastern edge of Santa Monica. There was a fake-wood fire pit in the center of the mart, surrounded by fast-food joints, but originals, not franchise. It was the sort of place where people sat around tete-a-tete in conversations covering everything from real estate deals to demands for divorce. It met our needs; plus, if we got hungry, the chimichangas there were dandy.

I arrived first, and killed some time studying the window display of a specialty food store where a pyramid of elegantly labeled wine bottles p.r.o.nounced themselves AcquaViva, which as near as I could tell was not wine but a fortified fruit drink that retailed for an incredible fifty bucks a bottle. A shopgirl noticed me and came out to hand me a brochure. I read it with, I guess you'd say, professional interest, as it touted the benefits of AcquaViva's "proprietary blend of 23 fruit juices and extracts, including the life-giving acai berry, one of Mother Nature's greatest gifts."

Really?

Reading on, I learned that AcquaViva was a bona fide superfood, packed to the rafters with flavonoids, phytonutrients, antioxidants, esterified fatty acids, and just a splash, it would seem, of Ponce de Leon's original fountain of youth. It promised to boost energy, reduce muscle fatigue, arm the immune system, and bind free radicals. While the studies that backed these claims were suspiciously vague in provenance and methodology, they did have impressive-sounding names, such as "Double Blind Matrix Match of Antioxidant Versus Placebo Benefit-Vectors." Better still, for the professionally athletically inclined, AcquaViva had been certified by the Global Anti-Doping a.s.sociation as 100 percent free of all banned substances-though in fairness, the same could be said of an empty bottle. More good news: Lucrative distributorships were available now. I marveled at the sheer chutzpah of selling, basically, grape juice at half a yard a pop. It tickled me to think that snake oil, yet another venerable and storied snuke, was still alive and well in this modern world. Truly, nothing beautiful dies.

"Why didn't we we think of that, eh?" I turned to see Billy Yuan standing beside me. "Low overhead, high markup, s.e.xy product." He shot me a wink. "Bit too much like real work, though, yeh?" In the light of day, outside the smoky confines of the Blue Magoon, I was able to get a better look at him. He was rather shorter than me, with a thin, wiry frame that suggested agility. I put him on yoga, or perhaps qigong. His features were so purely Chinese that it kicked up puffs of cognitive dissonance every time he opened his mouth and that flat Aussie accent poured out. I'm sure it made him good in the grift, for he was a walking cloud of deception, just by being who he was. think of that, eh?" I turned to see Billy Yuan standing beside me. "Low overhead, high markup, s.e.xy product." He shot me a wink. "Bit too much like real work, though, yeh?" In the light of day, outside the smoky confines of the Blue Magoon, I was able to get a better look at him. He was rather shorter than me, with a thin, wiry frame that suggested agility. I put him on yoga, or perhaps qigong. His features were so purely Chinese that it kicked up puffs of cognitive dissonance every time he opened his mouth and that flat Aussie accent poured out. I'm sure it made him good in the grift, for he was a walking cloud of deception, just by being who he was.

"Ever work an MLM?" he asked.

I gave him my best blank look. "MLM?" I don't know why I prevaricated, since we'd both already shed our fabricat ident.i.ties. I guess lying has its own inertia.

Billy called me on it, though. "It would be better for us both, I think, if you stopped playing dumb. You know what MLMs are as well as you know that I'm not Rick Chen, and you're not Chad Thurston, the first, second, or third."

"Have it your way," I shrugged. "MLMs, or multi-level marketing, are tiered partic.i.p.ation vending schemes. They differ from pyramids in the sense that there's always an actual product for sale, but the principle remains the same: get in early, get rich; get in late, get reamed. You've got breakaway plans, binary plans, stairsteps, power legs, profit legs, and base shop overrides. Me personally, I've started ..." I paused to do a rough count, "something like two dozen MLMs, selling everything from cell-phone accessories to weight-loss products. The profit's always in the distributor fees. The most successful MLMs are the ones that push prosperity consciousness to the point of cult frenzy. They also work best when they burn hot. None of mine has lasted more than sixteen weeks."

"Ever been dobbed in?"

"Busted? For an MLM? Now who's playing dumb? They're legal as church if you set 'em up right."

Yuan smiled. "Fair go," he said. "Let's sit down."

We walked to one of the small wooden tables near the fake fire. At adjacent tables sat some skate rats munching French fries, a pair of speed-chess players with a small retinue of lookers-on, and a junior high school couple holding hands and pretending to be on a real date. On the principle of hiding in plain sight, this was the sort of place you could discuss the particulars of a murder for hire and raise not so much as an eyebrow from those nearby. They'd a.s.sume it was a movie pitch, anyway.

"So," he said.

"So," I replied.

"The Church of the Orthodox Paradox."

"Come again?"

"Your religion. That's what I'd name it."

"I always favored 'absolute relativism.'"

Yuan nodded. "I could buy that."

Weirdly, we then talked religion for a while, and once again I found Billy Yuan easy to relax with, even in the current context. Perhaps it was a case of like minds, or just of being with someone who could keep pace in a conversation that hoboed to Nietzsche, n-s.p.a.ce, and the Coptic Gospel of Thomas. Eventually, kind of as a game, I started searching for topics to stump him with, but finding holes in Yuan's knowledge was tough. This guy was easily as polymathically perverse as I was. And, like me, he had a knack for sounding like he knew what he was talking about even when he didn't. I think we enjoyed that about each other, like when two specialists in a really obscure medical field get together and at last at last have someone they can talk to. have someone they can talk to.

"Pemphigus foliaceus?"

"As if! Pemphigus vulgaris Pemphigus vulgaris!"

"Ha, ha, ha!"

But even at last at last can't last forever. Ultimately we'd have to get down to the matter at hand, or else why had we bothered to meet? Being the first to raise the subject was touchy, though, a bit like those junior romantics at the next table jockeying not to be the first to admit that they like each other, not just can't last forever. Ultimately we'd have to get down to the matter at hand, or else why had we bothered to meet? Being the first to raise the subject was touchy, though, a bit like those junior romantics at the next table jockeying not to be the first to admit that they like each other, not just like like, ya know, but really like like like. I thought that as it was Billy's meeting, it was Billy's move. He may have thought the same of me, since I'd fronted him first at the Blue Magoon. So we reached a certain impa.s.se, which Billy broke obliquely with a rhetorical question. like. I thought that as it was Billy's meeting, it was Billy's move. He may have thought the same of me, since I'd fronted him first at the Blue Magoon. So we reached a certain impa.s.se, which Billy broke obliquely with a rhetorical question.

"In your opinion," he asked, "what makes a perfect grift?"

I thought about it for a moment before I answered. "No trail, no trace, no taste."

"Trail and trace I understand," said Yuan, "but taste?"

"In the mouth. No bad taste in anyone's mouth. In my opinion- since you asked-I should be able to fleece the mark completely on Monday and have drinks with him on Friday, no hard feelings."

"That's a big ask."

"You said a perfect grift, not an easy one."

"True." Yuan lapsed into a thoughtful silence. I joined him there, for he had taken the lead and I was content to let him have it. "Would not the perfect grift," he asked at last, "be one after which you never had to run another one again?"

"Ah, the big one. The getaway grift. Around here we call it the California Roll."

"Because it sets you up in sushi for life?"

"Something like that." I paused then to consider his question. At last I said, "Can I be honest?"

Billy laughed. "I don't know, mate. Can you?"

I laughed back. "Let's pretend I can. I'm not so sure I'm interested in a California Roll. What would I do with tomorrow?"

"I agree it's a problem. For blokes like you and me, there's the risk of ..."

He groped for the phrase. I found it first. "Chronic understimulation."

"Indeed. It's not as if we can write our memoirs. I doubt we're qualified for much of anything else."

"I thought I might study philosophy."

Yuan chuckled. "Did you now, Chad? But there comes a point, wouldn't you say, when your ambition is such that any grift you bestir yourself to run has the potential to be a California Roll?"

"If you're any good at the game, I suppose. I mean, you're not going to be satisfied selling overpriced fruit juice forever, right?"

"Right. Exactly and precisely right." From that point forward, and by halting degrees, Yuan outlined his grift. The more details he revealed, the lower my jaw dropped, for this was truly a visionary snuke.

As all the evidence indicates, in the world of larceny, there's simply nothing new under the sun, so this scam, like all scams, had historic antecedent. Back in the early days of minted silver and gold currency, it was common practice to "clip" coins; that is, shave off some unnoticeable part of them and put them back into circulation. Clip enough coins, you eventually accrue a convertible pile of precious metal. Meanwhile, the coins still trade at full value, and no one's the wiser-until everyone starts clipping, that is, and then you have all sorts of nasty problems like currency devaluation, inflation, and loss of faith in the coin of the realm. Left unchecked, clipped coins can actually tank an economy, but that's someone else's troubles, right? And if you've ever wondered why modern coins have milled or serrated edges, it's because milling makes clipping hard to hide. Not that minting matters much anymore. After all, cash was never anything but a conveniently portable metaphor for the things it might buy: corn, cows, chickens, land, salt, wine, whatever. These days, we have even more abstract metaphors, such as ATMs, EFTs, direct deposit, debit cards, credit cards, electronic checks, even microchip transceivers that let you charge what you want to your cell phone. Someone sufficiently wired into the virtual money motif could go weeks or months without handling any actual cash, and only know his worth for sure by dint of his bank statement. And if the bank isn't telling the truth? If the bank shaves a cent off his total every month, how will he ever know? He won't-no more than the guy you hand a clipped coin to can tell it's been clipped. * * Thus we have an updated version of a venerable snadoodle called the Penny Skim, a scam predicated on the fact that it's impossible to go broke a penny at a time-but quite possible to get rich that way. Especially if you're working the Penny Skim on as vast a revenue pool as, say, the People's Republic of China, where all the money is. Thus we have an updated version of a venerable snadoodle called the Penny Skim, a scam predicated on the fact that it's impossible to go broke a penny at a time-but quite possible to get rich that way. Especially if you're working the Penny Skim on as vast a revenue pool as, say, the People's Republic of China, where all the money is.

Fun? Oh, h.e.l.l, yeah. Catnip to a grifter. And when Yuan invited me to be part of it, I didn't think twice. Sure there were questions of feasibility, risk, and especially trust, but if Neil Armstrong offered you a ride to the moon, wouldn't you strap in first and ask questions later?

I had some trouble grasping the magnitude of the grift. Of course I was familiar with the concept: If you think about it, anytime anyone shortchanges someone, it's a penny skim of a sort. The last time I'd worked this snuke, I'd been ... let's see ... treasurer of the Oconomowoc Businessmen's a.s.sociation. I moved their money through so many different accounts-applying the tiniest financial friction to each transaction-that by the time I retired from my post and repaired to sunnier climes, I'd cleaned them out six times over-and they still didn't know, because you can't go broke a penny at a time. Don't lose sleep; the organization was nothing more than a strip-club slush fund to begin with.

But what Yuan contemplated was so audacious that it stretched my imagination to the snapping point. Could you really skim an entire nation's economy? Billy seemed to think so.

All banks, he explained, need centralized operations in order to function efficiently. You certainly see it in a piggy bank-without the deposit slot, it's just a ceramic pig. At a neighborhood bank, it's the president or one of his minions who stands over the shutoff valve. Even your local loan shark will vest decision-making authority in someone's hands-perhaps those hands will be holding a baseball bat and squaring up on your kneecaps. As banks grow in size and complexity, the need for centralization grows accordingly, so that every financial inst.i.tution, even (or especially) a national one, has some sort of organizational choke point. That's what Billy had been looking for when Scovil and her pals caught him hacking into the Reserve Bank.

"That were never a hack, though," he said. "I was just having a squiz."

"Squiz?"

"A look around."

And his investigation led him to two new thoughts. First, though a national bank is orders of magnitude larger than local banks, it's not orders of magnitude more sophisticated or secure-less, in fact, because the need for centralized operation makes the choke point that much larger and easier to spot. Second, free societies have way way too much transparency. If you want to steal without being seen, you're better off working in a secret system, where such theft is already inst.i.tutionalized as graft and corruption. too much transparency. If you want to steal without being seen, you're better off working in a secret system, where such theft is already inst.i.tutionalized as graft and corruption.

"Think about it," said Billy. "If you're skimming from your people (and don't tell me in China they're not) the last thing you want is easy accountability, yeh? So all we need is a way into the tent." He smiled fiendishly. "It's already nice and dark in there."

I was, of course, interested in what Billy fancied as a way in, but something else caught my ear, a certain spasm of enthusiasm in his voice that went beyond mere avarice. Why was he so keen to rob China in particular? This needed exploring, but tangentially. "How do you know?" I asked. "Spend a lot of time there?"