me with a puppy’s remorse. “I never really intended for things to go this far, Radar. I think I never thought they would. You really are good at what you do.”
Smoke up the ass kind of tickles, but I kept the conversation perking along on the text level. “Look,” I said, “this is the best Merlin Game I’ve ever run. It has everything going for it. Shaky economic times, qualified leads, and a solid insider’s in. It’s going to wrap with a handful of extremely live ones out there primed and ready to wire transfer their fool asses off. We can’t let them off the hook now. Karma won’t allow it. The universe demands that they balance their stupidity with poverty. If you and g-diddy have suddenly developed a case of the yips, that’s your problem, not mine. You can run along. I’ll bring the fucking game home by myself.”
I was going for the tough-guy grifter thing, coming on strong enough to pop some kind of reaction out of her. Well, I got one.
She burst into tears.
Dumped her drink in my lap.
And left.
I wondered if this meant the engagement was off.
* * *
*verbal prostate massage
* * *
11.
the afterparty snuke
I suppose that if I’d taken Allie’s tears at (streaming down the) face value, I’d have felt bad about hurting her feelings or whatever. But just as I was capable of dialing up some fake anger, I considered Allie capable of croco-dialing in some fake tears. Was I taking a risk by causing a rift? Could she not have chosen to drop a dime on me just then—outed the Merlin Game to the SEC or whoever? Maybe … but only if my whole read on her was wrong and she really was a citizen. Otherwise, well, she knew I wouldn’t give up the Merlin Game without a fight; ergo, a fight was what she wanted. The question was why—a question, I confess, I was getting kind of tired of asking. Maybe when I played the anger card it wasn’t all card. If so, that was a bad sign, a sign of tilt, or loss of control. Was Allie that under my skin? Was my chosen strategy of seeming to play right into her hands really just playing right into her hands?
At least I had this going for me, that just as Allie knew I wouldn’t walk away from the Merlin Game, I knew she wouldn’t either. Sooner or later (and it would have to be sooner because the house was about to burn down) she’d be back on my doorstep, either with a go-along, get-along apology or her real reason for wanting to kill the gaff.
Meantime, Mirplo asked me to pitch in on one of his street plays, and I agreed because I owed him for shining the sodium vapor light on Allie and also because I needed to let my subconscious chew on the deepening mystery of Allie’s self-contradictory moves, and the equal mystery of my self-contradictory feelings. As it happens, the back of my mind works better when the front of my mind is occupied. So I helped Vic stooge off some afterparty passes at a rock show at the Nokia Theatre.
The beauty of this scam is, your mark won’t even know he’s been snadoodled until after the show is over and he tries to get into a backstage afterparty that either won’t honor his bogus credentials or doesn’t exist to begin with. You, meanwhile, are gone baby gone, so there’s nothing he can do at that point except swallow the loss. Hell, he probably paid too much for the tickets to begin with, so what’s a little more out-of-pocket pain? Besides, he got the whole fun of anticipating the afterparty throughout the entire show, and that’s not nothing, right? Or am I just rationalizing?
Vic had run this game before, and I had to admit he was pretty good at it, maybe because he could relate so effortlessly to the low-wattage rock fans he targeted. Also, he picked his spots, favoring the kind of bands whose fans favor altered states. In this case, it was a Somnifer show, Somnifer being one of these eclectic jam bands who definitely sound better if you’re high.
Vic had cheesed up some phony laminates on lanyards and cooked up a story about how he worked at the William Morris Agency and had peeled off these party favors from a stack intended for the agency’s A-list clients. Naturally, he would tell the marks, he couldn’t go