some point. As I said, a Mirplo is a blunt instrument, but sometimes a blunt instrument is exactly the tool you need.
Next I did what I should have done in the first place, a little research on Milval Hines. I found no damning evidence online, but I knew that didn’t mean anything. Self-affirming background backups, as we’ve already determined, are part of a grifter’s basic playbook, and radarenterprizes.com is exhibit A. So Hines was at the very least “he of whom he spoke.” I hoped he was on the level, or at minimum had a level side, because for the Merlin Game to work, I’d need a broad swath of his contacts, and contacts of his contacts, and contacts of his contacts of his contacts. If he was all smoke, we were game-over before we began.
When you don’t know how else to act, act like nothing’s wrong. I had already put together the first layer of the Merlin Game, and with Allie posing as my betrothed, I could now reach out to Hines’s clients, peers, and professional associates, spreading the pitch virally from friend to friend of friend to friend of friend of friend to the ultimate iteration of an investment pool deep and broad enough to sustain the game.
I got in touch with Hines and, still playing bent mentor, instructed him to write me a letter of introduction. I guided him to the type of language the marks respond to, phrases like “revolutionary new method,” “proven track record,” “earn your trust,” and so on. The key to this missive was that it offered information and asked for nothing in return, which is the surest way I know to flank a mark’s natural Maginot. At the end of the day, the pitch boiled down to what it always does in the Merlin Game: Watch the kid pick winners and decide for yourself if he knows his stuff.
While he worked on that, I made my first pick, a newish company called Longhorn Turbines, which went around converting West Texan landowners into wind farmers. Lots of wind in West Texas; I actually thought this company had a chance to go, but for my purposes, it didn’t really matter. There’s only two ways for a stock to go, up or down, and whichever way it moved, half my herd would think me a winner. Stock rise, stock fall, Radar cull herd, game go on.
I had my hands full over the next two weeks, establishing my database, picking my arbitrary winners or losers, building my fictive website, setting up the crucial endgame investment mechanism, and always selling, selling, selling. After Hines’s initial letter of introduction, I took over direct communication with the mooks, defining myself as someone with a frank interest in getting stupid rich and inviting everyone along for the ride. This may strike you as a bogus pitch, and I’m sure it struck some of my marks that way, but it was necessary to introduce and reinforce this element in order to prep everyone for the key moment when they put all their money in one big pot for one big push. For some, the accuracy of my picks was enough, but others needed the ol’ VPM, * so that when the time came, they would invest with 100 percent confidence. Why do you think they call it a confidence game?
Then, one afternoon, Allie stopped by my apartment and invited me down the hill for coffee. Of course I was wary, but of course I cloaked this and accepted her invitation with the distracted air of a man of my hectic agenda. We clambered down to Java Man, got hot wet somethings, and settled in at an outdoor table shaded by a taupe umbrella adorned with the Java Man logo, a caveman with a club in one hand and a latte in the other.
“Radar,” she said without preamble, “I’m worried.”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” I assured her. “Everything’s right on script.”
“It’s not that. It’s Grandpa. He’s starting to freak me out. He’s become totally obsessed with the grift. He’s reading all these books,” she said. “Everything he can get his hands on. It’s all he talks about, too. ‘Glim dropper’ this, ‘barred winner’ that. I don’t even know what half this stuff means.” At that my “false” alarm sounded, for I was certain she knew exactly what these scams were and how they operated. You don’t get good at the grift without first being a good and thorough student of the game,