Joe Gores: Cons, Scams, and Grifts

It was Easter. From his exquisite one-story art deco building in the 9100 block of Sunset Boulevard, Victor Marr talked on the scrambler phone with the Yakuza gangster named Kahawa, in Hong Kong on his behalf. Marr was a mid-60s granite block of a man, with a stud-poker face not easily bluffed, a bold nose, and pale eyes that held no mercy. Tall and wide, still with the unruly hair and whipcord muscles of the Okie oil drill rigger he had been, summers, while attending the Colorado School of Mines. Then geologist for Standard. Out on his own. The first massive wildcat strike...

Now West Indian Oil was one of the Big Five.

“Were you able to close the deal?” he demanded.

From Hong Kong, Kahawa said in accented English, “A man in Europe put money down. Brantley says a number of cutouts were used, he does not even know the buyer’s real name. But I saw the contract. It is of iron.”

“Of course you outbid this man.” The Hong Kong silence was eloquent. Marr’s face tightened. “You did get it from Brantley.”

“I stole it. But moving it safely out of Hong Kong undetected poses certain... problems. It might take time...”

The tension left Marr’s face. His steel-shaving mouth turned up at the ends. He thought he was smiling. For the first time, he used a title of respect in addressing the Yakuza.

“Most satisfactory, Kahawa- san . Make sure no harm comes to it. I need the time to beef up my security arrangements at Xanadu anyway. Tell Brantley to keep news of our acquisition from the man in Europe until it is in my hands. And he must never tell the authorities about this. Not ever.”

“Both will be difficult. Brantley is a man of honor.”

“Until it is in my hands — and never. Understood? If he refuses to cooperate, quote Falstaff to him: ‘Honor... who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday.’ ”

Marr hung up. His tastes had been refined over the years. Now, he could quote Shakespeare. Now, no truck stop waitress could satisfy his sexual urges. Now, no work of art except an original by a grand master could excite him.

But one could possess only so many women, could own only so many grand masters. One wanted... more . The archetypal. The unique. Hence this little gem of an office building on Sunset instead of a Century City penthouse suite. Hence... it.

No need to show his prize to others. Enough to know no one else had one like it because there was no other like it.

Marr speed-dialed Xanadu, his hilltop estate three hundred miles up the coast in the Big Sur wilderness. He asked for, and despite the holiday got, R.K. Robinson, his head of security. He gave Robinson very specific instructions without telling him why: never let a subordinate know too much.

He made the call because there was always the possibility that the unknown European, upon eventually hearing of the theft, might try to reclaim his prize. But Victor Marr, in that secret inner place other men might call a soul, did not believe for an instant there was any actual danger. Who else in this ruthless world was as ruthless as he?

He was right — but also wrong. He was forgetting that in this ruthless world there is also sly.

On that Easter Monday at Universal Studios, just over the hill from Marr’s Sunset Boulevard office, a shaggy black bear came down a flight of stairs with the shambling side-to-side gait of an animal not used to walking upright. In front of him half a dozen orderly queues of Easter week vacationers waited for open trams that would take them on the last of that day’s famous Universal Studios backlot tours.

Among them was a small black girl of about five, pink dress, matching pink shoes, with pink-beribboned pigtails sticking straight out from each side of her head. When she saw the bear, her eyes flew wide, whites showing all around, even as her face scrunched up to deliver a wail of urban terror.

The bear stepped off the curb in front of her, tipped his Smokey Bear forest ranger’s hat down over one eye, and did a soft-paw shuffle as he sang in a fine bear-i-tone voice.

The child’s face was illuminated by a radiant smile. The bear did the old vaudeville head dip so his hat rolled down his arm on its rim to land in his wide clumsy bear’s paw.

And by some strange magic it wasn’t a hat anymore, it was a magnificent paper lily all of gold.

And somehow his lily had been transmogrified into a paper rose.

The bear stepped back to do a clumsy bow for the laughing children, lost his balance, and went sprawling over the curb right in front of them. As they OOOHHH’ed in alarm, he clambered clumsily to his feet, opened his arms, and finished his song:

And yes! His single paper rose had become a small circlet of tiny, real, red tea roses with green leaves and interwoven stems. Which fragrant crown he balanced on the little black girl’s pigtails. Somehow, for a moment, wearing her tippy crown, she was the regal woman she would become.

The trams were there. The bear hugged the little kids and even their mommies, and posed for pictures with them all. He ended up sitting on his haunches with his upside-down Smokey hat rematerialized in his hand. This gave the jovial, invigorated people the chance, should they so desire, to drop change into it as they boarded. Many did.

Br’er Bear shambled away from the deserted tram stop. He stepped over a waist-high barrier to slip into the janitors’ shed where he had hidden his vinyl satchel. In a few moments he had become just a shaggy puddle of fake fur on the concrete floor out of which Ephrem Poteet emerged as butterfly from chrysalis.

Poteet was an almost-swarthy gent in his late 30s, with dark eyes he could make glisten like those of Antonio Banderas. He was still handsome despite new fine lines etched into his face by weeks of strain. Strain indeed. Terrible things had been done up in San Francisco, but that was all over now. He was once more wuzbo , pure and unashamed, back where he belonged, his secrets safe. No one knew he was here, especially not his wife, who was utterly ruthless and had strange powers that he feared.

All the time he had been cavorting around, Poteet’s long-fingered hands had been busy through slits under each front paw of his suit. Now he dug into the long, hidden pockets he had sewn down the outsides of the bear’s legs. Lo and behold, here were wallets rich with cash, here were credit card folders and a poker hand of phone cards, here even was a folded sheaf of old-fashioned traveler’s checks. All of them lifted from purses and wallets and handbags and back pockets.