4
As the taxi trundled down the long boulevard, a memory overtook Max O’Brien. Another city, another time, but a long drive nonetheless, in New York instead of Bucharest. Kevin was being held in a police station in Astoria. Or so he’d told Max over the phone.
Max’s ringing cellphone had woken him up. He was sitting on the side of his bed. Behind him, Susan, sleeping deeply. She was a young insurance broker who worked out of an office on Wall Street. He’d been seeing her for six months now in preparation for a grift.
“I need you to bail me out,” Kevin repeated.
Caroline had no idea, of course. Kevin was calling his friend to pull him out of this rough spot before his wife was any the wiser. Max hung up and hurried to find some clothes, still holding the cellphone.
“Who was it?” Susan asked sleepily.
“My owner. Water damage in my kitchen. I’ve got to go down there.”
Max leaned over the woman and slid his hand along her side. Her body was warm, heavy in the folds of sleep. He didn’t want to leave the bed.
“You’re insured, I hope …” she murmured.
Max smiled. Even half-asleep, her job came first.
Max had raced through Manhattan in his new Saab, which he’d purchased to demonstrate his rapid ascension in the world of finance to Susan. He reached Astoria and made his way to the police station. A typical scene: officers warming their hands with paper coffee cups. A waiting room sparsely populated by friends and family come to rescue someone from themself. People, like Max, who’d been woken up in the middle of the night to be told that their cousin, their son, their brother had been up to no good.
Kevin Dandurand had appeared, haggard but relieved. He’d been implicated in a series of warehouse robberies, monthly rentals along the East River. Kevin had joined up with a gang of amateur thieves who hung out in a coffee shop near the gym where he trained. His accomplices all had criminal records, but not Kevin; he would be getting off with a fine and community service. Hours spent teaching young delinquents how to run the ten thousand metres, for example.
A heavy silence in the car. Max had felt as if he were driving home a teenage son caught destroying the flower beds in front of his high school. He didn’t know what to say: he’d never been a good shoulder to cry on. No, encouraging words had never been his strong suit.
“They’re going to take my green card away,” Kevin finally said.
There was the crux of the problem. Sure, he could lie and keep his community service hidden from Caroline, but how could he possibly explain why he could never work in the United States again?
“They might even force me to leave the country.”
It was a possibility, and a dark one at that, especially since things were finally beginning to line up for Caroline. Serious periodicals were knocking at her door, some even ordering pieces from her.
If she went back to Canada now, it would be all over.
Not to mention Kevin’s athletic career. It was time for the young man to look at reality as it was and accept that his best performances were behind him. His private trainers were only exploiting his unrealistic dreams, his hopes. No one had the courage to tell him the truth: “Listen, Kevin, you’ve got to move on.” In a way, he was paying these people to convince him to the contrary; if Richard Voight and others were interested in Kevin’s career, surely it was because they believed in his abilities, in his future as an athlete. But he was slowly realizing it was just a pipe dream.
Kevin sighed.
“Your father could take you back,” Max suggested. “You could work in the factory, maybe. You could ask him.”
“Packaging?” he replied scornfully.
“I’m sure you could keep training in Montreal, right?” Max didn’t dare look at himself in the rearview mirror. He, the con man, giving a speech worthy of a priest.
“I’ll never go back.”
Kevin was never one to speak of his troubled relationship with his father. Max hadn’t insisted. He was in no position to demand the truth. He respected his friend’s discretion. He’d never really had a reason to get mixed up in Kevin’s relationship with his father. It had nothing to do with him.
“So what are you going to do?” Max asked.
“No idea.”
The two men fell silent, each lost in their own thoughts.
The night was full of light, the streets still wet from a too-brief rainfall. Taxis passing him, customers behind their windows. On the sidewalks, men and women desperately trying to find a cab in the small hours of the morning.
Max hesitated. There was something he could do for Kevin, but it might destroy their friendship. But Kevin was desperate. He needed help, and now; Max’s small, secret gifts weren’t enough anymore.
Or, Max thought, he could also do nothing. He could simply drive Kevin back home and return to Susan’s arms. He could let the marathon runner deal with his own problems.
Not a chance, Max decided. “Listen, Kevin, I’ve got to come clean with you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t work in a bank. What I told you and Caroline, it was all a lie.”
Kevin turned toward Max, confusion on his face. Perhaps a hint of disappointment at being lied to by his friend all these years.
With a few words, Max told him everything. He was a con man, a thief, really, but a thief who made his life harder by making his victims consent to their own fleecing. He played on their worst instincts: vanity, greed, ambition. Max tried to reassure Kevin that he and Caroline had never been marks. Quite the opposite; he’d always seen them as friends.
“And, well, I’m not even called Robert Cheskin. My real name is Max O’Brien. But all over the world the authorities are after me. So I need to change identities early and often.”
Kevin looked at him, speechless.
“These days, for example, I’m playing a broker for an investment company, luring a large insurance company.”
“And how much is that going to bring you in?”
“A lot. But there are fees. Accomplices to pay, informants to compensate …”
Silence again.
Kevin could have reacted by ordering Max to stop the car and let him out here, now, on the wet pavement. Clearly, his ventures with criminality had been a complete failure; he might not want to fall into the same trap twice.
But Kevin remained silent, as if he were trying to guess his friend’s intentions.
Max told Kevin about his early days in the craft. The operations he’d been part of, then those he’d initiated. The bad experiences, as well. Painful memories. Time in prison, for example, time that had seemed to drag on even once he was out. The prison walls surrounding him now were made of fake names and counterfeit papers, of aliases and invented pasts.
“The work I can offer you is dishonest and illegal, of course,” Max added. “And might just lead you straight to jail.”
Kevin still seemed perplexed. He raised his head just as Max’s Saab stopped in front of his building in Sunset Park. “And what would I do, exactly? I don’t know the first thing about any of this.”
Back in his room in the Intercontinental in Bucharest, Max tried to reach Josée Dandurand. No dice; she must’ve still been sleeping. He emptied two tiny bottles of whisky he found in the refrigerator. His appetite teased, he went down to the bar to have a bite. The place was full of conference-goers, and it was happy hour. The barman poured a Scotch for Max before moving on to the other end of the counter to settle