Swindlers

THE SWINDLERS

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

Blue Zephyr at Smashwords

Copyright © 2010 D.W. Buffa

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CHAPTER
ONE

It was our own Gilded Age, a time of excess
and raw exuberance, in which the rich got richer and, instead of
trying to hide the fact, did everything they could to make sure
everyone knew just how much they had. The lavish display of wealth
became an art form, a competition not so much over what things
looked like than how much they cost. If there was a single winner,
someone who defined the age, it was Nelson St. James, the man some
considered a financial genius when he was making them staggering
amounts of money, and something rather different when their profits
began to turn into substantial losses. He had, when I first met
him, houses everywhere, so many of them that it was hard to think
he had a home. He visited them the way other people stayed a few
days in a hotel. If he had a residence, a place he felt
comfortable, a place he could lounge around in an old pair of
sandals and a shirt bought somewhere off the rack, it was here, on
his own private yacht that, as the rumor said, had cost as much as
some countries spent on their navies. Blue Zephyr could sail in any
ocean, go anywhere in the world, which meant that Nelson St. James
never had to be in the same place twice, and, more importantly,
never, even in his sleep, had to stop moving. It was that, and not
any great love of the sea that made him spend so much of his time
on the water; that, and perhaps the sense that out here he was more
difficult to find.

I had come aboard in San Francisco, invited
for a weekend cruise down the California coast. Where Blue Zephyr
was going after I left it in Los Angeles I had no idea, and I am
not sure anyone else knew either. The last thing anyone on the
yacht was interested in was their destination. There were more than
a dozen guests, and all of them, or at least those I had met so
far, were there for no other reason than because they had been
invited. No one turned down an invitation from Nelson St. James.
There was too much money involved for that.

Standing at the starboard railing, I watched
the evening sun turn a stunning reddish gold as it drifted down
toward the sea and hesitated, hovering, as if just this once,
playing havoc with human certainty, it might desert the western sky
and go off in some new direction. Finally, as if instead of
belonging to necessity the decision was now its own, it slowly
melted along the line of the horizon and drowned in a shining flow
of molten bronze. I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“I’m Nelson St. James. I’m sorry it took me
so long to get away.”

The voice was different than I had expected,
softer, less sure of itself, almost diffident, as if he had to make
a conscious effort to approach someone he did not know. But when I
turned around and we shook hands, that first impression quickly
yielded to a second. His eyes, a steady grayish blue, were eager,
alert, the eyes of a gambler quick to grasp the nature of the game,
and quicker still to take advantage. His smile was full of
mischief. That was what caught your attention, what gave him an
interest, that look of keen anticipation, a sense of what might
happen next, because otherwise he seemed fairly ordinary, no more
remarkable than any other middle aged man you might pass on the
street.

He continued to make his apologies as he led
me to the starboard side, explaining that he had been forced to
spend all day in his cabin below, working on “some business thing I
had.”

I was still trying to fit the quiet,
self-effacing voice of his with that bold and almost avaricious
look he had. In some odd way he seemed aware of it, amused at the
condition, as if his voice belonged to someone else, someone he
used to know and whose sudden disappearance caused a puzzled smile
to come to his lips. He spoke in fits and starts, the words never
quite adequate to the thought he meant to convey; words being slow,
heavy things compared to what, if the look in his eyes was any
indication, was all the wing-footed calculation racing through his
brain.

“You’ve met…the others?” he asked with a
vague half turn toward the small crowd gathered at the stern.

I nodded, but made no other reply.

“They’re not very interesting.” He said this
as if the point were obvious, but obvious or not, he waited to see
my reaction, and when I said nothing, he seemed to approve. “You’ve
just met them; I’ve known most of them for years. Trust me,” he
said, laughing under his breath, “dull as dust. All they know is
money.” Pausing, he tapped his fingers on the brass railing.
“Actually, they don’t know anything about that, either.”

St. James, short and slight of build, gripped
the railing with both hands and gazed at the coastline little more
than a mile away. “There,” he said presently, pointing toward the
red tile roofs and white stucco walls of a massive estate clustered
at the top of the hills, bathed in the solemn twilight colors of
the vanished sun. “That’s something worth seeing, not the way the
tourists do who buy their tickets by the bus load and go gaping
through it, but from out here, where it doesn’t look any different
than when it was first built.”

His eyes, filled with a strange, vicarious
pleasure, moved in a steady arc until he was looking straight at
me. It was as if he wanted me to guess what he was thinking, some
secret he had not shared with anyone and was not yet certain he
wanted to share with me. It was one thing if I could figure it out
on my own; it was another thing if he had to tell me.

“The Hearst Castle,” I said, returning his
gaze. “The only castle in the world named for the man who could
afford to build it.”

“Exactly. Hearst was not like Getty or Howard
Hughes, hiding from the world, afraid of what other people wanted.
He wanted everyone to know what he had, all the things he had
taken, taken from all over the world, to fill up that castle and,
some might say, the empty corners of his life. And America is the
only place he could have done it, built a castle like that,
dedicated to his own importance; because we don’t worship royalty
here, we worship money. We’re a nation of thieves, Mr. Morrison;
it’s what we’ve always been. That’s what makes this country
great.”

He laughed, but he was serious. Everyone took
what they could, he seemed to suggest; some were just better at it
than others.

“I’m glad you came.” He glanced over his
shoulder at his other guests, talking loudly in the shadows at the
other end. “Dull as dust,” he then muttered, shaking his head.

“You’re the lawyer – right?” he asked with
sudden interest, as if he had just remembered. “Morrison. You work
with criminals. Some of them must be interesting. At least they’ve
done something that isn’t just like everyone else.” He put his hand
on my sleeve, and with a strange, almost malevolent sparkle in his
eyes, studied me for a moment. “Or maybe they’re just as dull as
the rest. Maybe the only different is that the rich are just
criminals who haven’t been caught.”

“In this nation of thieves you were talking
about?” I ventured.

“Exactly, Mr. Morrison; exactly right. A lot
of people think that about me, you know. But they’re wrong.” The
sparkle in his eyes grew brighter, became more intense. “I’ve never
done a dull thing in my life.”

He stayed there, talking, mainly about
William Randolph Hearst and the way he had lived, for another
twenty minutes or so, and he might have stayed there even longer,
talking about the past, if his wife had not come on deck to remind
him that he had to change for dinner.

“Aren’t you going to introduce us?” she said
as he started to leave. But she did not wait. “I’m Danielle,” she
said as she offered her hand.

It was painful, so painful that for a moment
I did not think I could breathe. It was the story of Medusa, told
the other way round, a face so lovely that, if you were not
careful, you might lose all sanity. She was younger than her
husband, though by exactly how much I could not say, but her
intelligence was certainly as quick, and just as instinctive. Her
eyes were full of laughter, and yet at the same time, just behind
the laughter, there was a kind of sympathy, as if she had become
used to the effect she had on men, the awkward stammering, the loss
of all confidence, the sudden blank expression, and wanted to offer
at least a word of two of kindness and encouragement.

“You didn’t want to join the others?” she
asked, tossing her head in the direction of the voices that, loud
enough a moment earlier, now seemed muted, distant and
irrelevant.

My mind had gone missing. I felt a smile
start to twist its way across my mouth. I tried to pull it back,
but too late. She gave me a teasing glance, the way someone does
who knows more about you than you do yourself.

“Is it because you’re…shy?”

“No, I was there.” I heard the words and only
then realized they had come from me. “I had a drink…but then…” I
kept looking away, and kept looking back, my eyes both sentry and
traitor of what I felt. “And then the sun was going down, and I’d
never been out here before, and I wanted to see it all – the way
the light changed color, the way the sun….”

I shook my head and laughed, held what was
left of my drink in both hands and studied, though it was barely
visible, the planking on the deck. I laughed some more, struck by
my own sudden incapacity. There was nothing to do but shrug my
shoulders and admit defeat. I looked at her again and this time did
not look way.

“And because after a few minutes, I didn’t
have anything else to say to them.”

“Anthony Morrison, the famous courtroom
lawyer, didn’t have anything to say?” Her voice was warm and
breathless, every word seeming a mystery with more meaning than
anything it said. “But then I suppose it must be different, what
you do in court, when you talk to juries and ask questions of
witnesses sworn to tell the truth, and a normal conversation, like
this one, in which two people who have never met before try to make
themselves sound interesting by telling all the lies they can.”

It was stunning how easily she made you want
to believe her. Even when she told you that she was not telling the
truth, you knew, or thought you knew, that she was telling you the
truth about her. Taking my arm, she began to lead me toward the
others. The sun had vanished completely, all that was left a few
jagged streaks of deep purple in a scarlet colored sky. Across the
water, on the distant shore, where Hearst had built his castle,
lights began to appear.

“Don’t worry,” whispered Danielle, her breath
close against my face, her fingers pressed tighter round my arm.
“I’ll take good care of you.”

It had been difficult enough to keep my
composure, difficult enough to think clearly, when she was moving
among the shadows of early evening; it was next to impossible in
the fevered atmosphere of wine and candles when we gathered for
dinner and, protected by the anonymity of the crowd, I could watch
her closely. Her high cheekbones and soft teasing mouth, her eyes
that seemed to grow larger the longer they stayed fixed on you, her
hair an auburn shade that rivaled dusk. But it was the small
gestures, the subtle smile that added warm to what she said, the
eyebrow lifted in delight or surprise at something someone else had
said, that made her so fascinating to observe.

She sat at the end of the long table, a table
covered with crystal glasses and fine china, carrying on a
conversation with one of those same men her husband had dismissed
as uninteresting, drawing him out in a way that made him seem
interesting at least to himself. It was a gift she had, an instinct
for the vanity of men, making them believe by the questions she
asked, the things she said, that there was no one with whom she
would rather be, no one who could hold her interest in quite the
same way.

“So if I should decide to murder someone,
you’re the one I should hire?”

I was still watching Danielle. The
conversation around the table came to a stop, and I became aware
that suddenly everyone was watching me. I turned and found Nelson
St. James, leaning back in his chair at the other end of the table,
the crooked smile on his face growing broader as he waited for an
answer.

“That’s what you do, isn’t it?” he asked with
a friendly and, as it seemed, sympathetic glance. “Defend
murderers, rapists, and thieves, and -”