nor vetting me; she’d just been stringing Hines along.
Now with this new player, Scovil, the string was running out.
I’ve said it’s hard to forge stress. I think it’s also hard to fake fear. I decided to treat Allie’s as true. She was a spy coming in from the cold. Into the comforting arms of Uncle Radar. And how would Uncle Radar use this new scared and skittish ally? I hadn’t worked that part out yet, but I figured that comfort, at least, was called for.
I dipped a fingertip in a puddle of maple syrup on my plate, reached across and pressed it to her forearm, then gently pulled it away. Held together by surface tension, a sugary string lifted some downy hairs. Then the surface tension broke and the hairs fell back, bedewed with syrup. I’m not sure what I expected to convey by this, but looking up I could see Allie’s features soften. She recognized the tenderness there, and it became clear that if I was prepared to buy Allie’s story, she was prepared to buy my acceptance. We had reached a rapprochement.
So, for the second time in two days, I made Anschluss with another practitioner of my odd craft. Each partnership was unlikely in its way. With Billy, I didn’t have nearly enough history to make the judgment of trust, and with Allie, I already had way too much. But a grifter goes with his gut. If you can’t do that, you end up second-guessing yourself at critical times, and then you end up dead or in jail. With Allie in particular, it was a huge relief to unload my doubt. I felt as though two irreconcilable pieces of me were suddenly in harmony. It’s not just that I wanted her again, or still (I did, of course). I just much preferred to think of her as indentured to Hines rather than working willingly for him. In other words, harlot no, helot yes.
And the horrors of her past? What of them? So she was damaged goods. Who isn’t? Are you telling me you escaped your childhood unscathed? I think you’re forgetting your parents’ casual neglect, or the tyranny of your older siblings, or rough treatment by a teacher or bully. Teenage heartbreak. Something. Maybe just the burden of self-awareness at an age when self-awareness is a tool we can’t handle. Does it take a truly ruinous past to cast a grifter? Probably, but so what? Even if I think I’m normal, I don’t imagine I’m the norm. At that, I’m just trying to get from one end of my life to the other with a reasonable amount of sanity and happiness, just like everybody else. If someone like Allie comes along and we can make common cause, that’s great. If we can forge something more lasting, that’s a damn miracle.
At that point, though, I wasn’t thinking much past the necessary moves for the day ahead. Among other things, Scovil would need a report. I’d tell her that Billy had made me, rated me, and welcomed me onto his team—I was still her bitch, though, and awaiting further instructions. That was a reasonably accurate version of things, all except the me-being-her-bitch part. Hines, meanwhile, would get a different tale. Since he believed that Billy bought me as a trust fund baby, I would now tell him that Billy had offered to deal Chad Thurston into a play that would sound to Hines’s jaundiced ears (though not to Thurston’s innocent ones) like the Penny Skim. Thurston, the putative guileless pup, would of course have signed on, but the price of admission was a rather large wad of cash, and since real-world Radar Hoverlander wasn’t well heeled like simulacrum Chad Thurston, the money would have to come from elsewhere. This would be the logic of using the take from the Merlin Game simultaneously as seed money for the Penny Skim and bait for Billy Yuan. I knew that both sides of that equation would appeal to Hines, and I would lead him to believe that he could have it both ways. He could bust Yuan and also dip his beak in an obscenely larger birdbath. That Hines knew about the Skim—had heard about it from Allie during her post-Australia debriefing—would only serve to harden the mortar around his assumptions.
Now all that had to happen was for Scovil and Hines not to compare notes. I knew they weren’t best buddies, but they were still at least notionally colleagues, and they would share