Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0) (18 page)

“Can you cheat?” Long-Drink McGonnigle asked.
 
“Like, say you want to tell yourself at age ten who’s going to win the World Series that year.
 
Could you time-travel back to, say, ten months before you were born, and leave a sealed note with a lawyer with instructions to deliver it to you on your tenth birthday?
 
Or would the action of handing him the envelope cause the universe to pop like a bubble?”

Erin closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.
 
“Uncle Phil, the fact that you could ask that question proves the point that people should be told as little as possible about how time travel works.
 
So here’s the last little bit you need to know—and it’s just about everything I know about the scam we’re going to run on Tony.”
 
She paused, looking for the right words.
 
“There’s…there’s a
sensation
, that I can’t describe to you because you’ve never felt it in your life, but in order to be able to talk about it, let’s say it’s a tingling on the top of the head.
 
That’s a poor analogy because it isn’t localized, but let it go.
 
When I feel that particular kind of tingling, I know it means that one of my future selves wants to travel back to my time.
 
It’s like an asking permission, or requesting clearance.”

“But if de older Erin does come back here,
youse
gotta go someplace else.”

“That’s right, Uncle Eddie.
 
Like the cliché almost says, you can’t be at two places in the same time.
 
A very big boom would result—at best!
 
So if you feel that special kind of tingling, you have two basic choices.
 
First, you can do nothing at all…and after awhile the tingling will go away and that’s the end of that.
 
Access denied.
 
Or, you could agree to vacate the ficton: hop to some other place/time where you don’t already exist, leaving this one to your future self for awhile.”

“It’s sort of like ‘condo-share Time,’ isn’t it?” Long-Drink marveled, adding “Ow!” when someone kicked him in the shin.
 

“How do you know when it’s safe to come back home to your own ficton?” asked the Professor.

“There’s another sensation.
 
Call it a tingling on the soles of your feet.”

“So this afternoon…” I said, trying to look as if I understood this well enough to complete the sentence.

“This afternoon just before Tony arrived I felt my scalp tingle, decided to assume my future self knew what it was doing, and the next thing I knew I was wandering around the year 2007, gawking like a tourist.”
 

Fast Eddie opened his mouth.

“And I can’t tell you how proud I am that none of my friends would be silly or inconsiderate enough to ask me about what I learned there.
 
‘Then,’ I mean.”

Eddie closed his mouth.

“I guessed immediately what I must be th…what I must be
going
to be thinking…no, wait, I was in 2007, so it’s ‘what I must
have thought’
…”

“Give it up, dear,” Zoey said.
 
“The language wasn’t designed to cope with changing fictons—you’ll only break it if you try and stretch it that way.
 
You guessed immediately that your future self was planning some sort of time travel con—”

Erin threw her a grateful look.
 
“Right.
 
That was really all the hint I needed.
 
A con that involves looking progressively younger…in Florida…what else can it be but the Fountain of Youth?”

“I ask it before, I ask it again,” said Bad Death.
 
“Okay, you make Tony Donuts think this fountain be real.
 
I see that you can.
 
What good is it
?”

Fast Eddie thought that was self-evident.
 
“We can sell it to him, in exchange for…
oh
.”

“We tell him ‘go way, don’t bother us no more, we make you forever young.’
 
Okay.
 
Next day he wake up one day older, like always.
 
How come he gonna let us live?”

Eddie shrugged.
 
“How come hair conditioner
always
looks like spoim?”

That stopped the clock for a few seconds.
 
When it became clear that nobody had a theory they were prepared to share, Erin went on.

“I’m not really sure
how
it helps us.
 
That’s one of the things I was hoping our five resident former players could help me figure out.”
 
She turned to them hopefully.

Joe and the Professor exchanged a meaningful glance.
 
“The basic outline is clear, I think.” Joe said.

Prof nodded.
 
“I agree, Guiseppe.
 
The cry goes up and down the Keys: “Donuts is toast!”

Arethusa shook her head.
 
“I don’t get it.”
 
Maureen added, “Me either.”

Joe turned to his wife.
 
“We persuade Tony the Fountain is real.
 
Then we offer to sell him the location—for more money than he can possibly come up with, even if he rolled up every Russian gangster in Key West.”

Arethusa brightened quickest.
 
She’s very empathic, and she used to have two heads, once.
 
“I get it, love!”

“Explain it to me, Joe,” Maureen asked.

“Follow Tony’s elephantine thought process.
 
Where could a guy like him possibly get a really big piece of money?”

“The Mafia,” she said at once.

“Right.
 
Noplace else.
 
And when you borrow Mafia money, whose money is it?”

“Charlie Ponte in Miami.”

Arethusa shook her head.
 
“He just hands it to you.
 
Whose money
is
it?”

Maureen blinked.
 
“Oh.
 
Well, ultimately I suppose it belongs to the Fi…
oh
.
 
I get it now.”

“
I
don’t,” said several of us.

“It belongs to the Five Old Men,” the Professor told us.
 
“They whose names are not spoken, and whose location is not speculated upon.
 
The ones who own everything.”

“The Five
Old
Men,” Maureen stressed.
 
“They have something damned close to half a millenium of experience between them.
 
These guys call Bert the Shirt ‘sonny.’”

Her husband nodded.
 
“As soon as Tony thinks of borrowing the money, he’ll think of two things: who he’s borrowing it from, and what a hassle it’ll be to get it from the old bastards.
 
Even someone as bone stupid as Tony should then think, ‘Yo, if I tell them what I want it for, and offer to share, I’ll get the money no sweat…and once I make them young, overnight I become the sixth richest man in the criminal world.’”
 

“Not enough to make it into the Fortune 500, perhaps,” said Joe, “but not bad for a wop without a button.
 
And maybe even enough to buy a button.”

Fast Eddie was already grinning like a wolf, and so was I.
 
“And then when the magic water turns out to be bogus—” I said.

“Donuts gets dunked,” Eddie finished.
 
Grunts of pain were heard here and there.

“Wired to an anchor,” Lexington agreed.

“Is that how they’re doing it now?” asked the Professor.

Lex nodded.
 
“For true, man.
 
Them cement shoe, the body come back up when the knees go sometimes.
 
Embarrassing.”

“Ah.”

“Also, very few boats already got cement on them.
 
All
boats got anchor and wire.”

I started to object…then realized that if you’re dumping a body at sea, and you’re not a moron, you’re doing it from a stolen boat.
 
Stealing a boat gets tricky with a struggling victim under one arm and a bag of cement under the other.
 
“Gentlemen, we digress.”

The Professor nodded happily.
 
“One of the reasons I come here, dear boy.
 
Try this, for example: imagine you’re an ancient evil lizard, blinking in the sun.”

“Huh?”

“One of the Five.
 
It’s been decades since you’ve felt a genuine emotion of any kind, let alone passion.
 
It’s been decades since you even wished you could still get an erection, nearly as long since you really enjoyed having an enemy killed.
 
You’re determined to live forever, but deep down you know you’re going to fail—soon, even.
 
Then somebody promises you youth.
 
Forever.
 
He brings proof that convinces you.
 
He takes your money.
 
Raises your hopes.
 
And then you find out he made a fool out of you.
 
Will you be upset?”

Picturing it, I shuddered.
 
“A tad.”

“Enough to affect your judgment, perhaps?”

I felt my eyes widening and the hair on the back of my neck beginning to stand up.
 
“Are you talking about
pinning
Tony’s murder on them?”

He spread his hands.
 
“Why not?
 
It’s not as if we’d be framing them: they’ll be
guilty
.”

“Could you pin it on all five?” Jim Omar asked.
 
“Non-slip?”

The Professor grimaced in thought.
 
“Maybe not,” he conceded.

“Then I say don’t do it.”

I got my voice back.
 
“Forget that—don’t even
think
about it!”
 
I climbed out of the water and stood at poolside to lend my words more weight.
 
“I’m sorry, Willard, but I’m invoking my authority as den mother, here.
 
I have very few house rules, but this is one of them: w
e are not taking on the Mafia
.”

“I have to say that sounds reasonable to me, Prof,” said Long-Drink.

“Fuckin A,” said Fast Eddie.
 
“Ya take out a shot dat big, de shrapnel spreads.
 
A lotta innocent bystanders fall.
 
I don’t want dat on my conscience.”

The Professor sighed and conceded the point.
 
“You’re right, of course.
 
The sheer elegance of it carried me away for a moment there.
 
All right, we settle for driving off the mammoth, and leave the brontosaurs alone, and yes, I
know
they’re not called brontosaurs anymore.
 
Would someone please bring me a large beaker of booze?
 
Sparing the lives of gangsters is thirsty work.”
 
A flagon of firewater was delivered to him, bucket-brigade style, and he drank deep.

“Okay,” said Erin, “we’re making great progress.
 
I like the general outline of the scam.
 
But I want to know the specifics.
 
What exactly am I supposed to tell the mammoth when he comes grazing in tomorrow and it’s time to Tell The Tale?
 
What is the Tale I’ll be Telling him?”

“Yes, Willard,” said Maureen.
 
“Where is this silly Fountain of Youth supposed to be, and how do we sell it to Tony?”

“All right,” the Professor said, licking his lips.
 
“Let’s discuss that.”

And for the next hour or so, we did.

6

When she was seventeen

When I was seventeen

I drank some very good beer...

—H.J. Simpson

The next afternoon found Tony Donuts driving down Duval Street in a topless Jeep, glaring into each tee-shirt shop he passed.
 

Nobody has
ever
driven Duval Street at more than thirty miles an hour, and the only one ever to reach that speed was a drunk attempting a getaway.
 
Generally traffic on Duval moves slower than some of the pedestrians, largely because of them.
 
So for one thing, Tony’s glares into storefronts were more than just split-second deals: they usually lasted long enough to constitute at least some real reconnaissance, without much risk of him rear-ending some elderly tourist couple from Wisconsin.

For another thing, he had plenty of time to notice the attractive blonde in a yellow shorts and top combo, coming his way on the south side of the street—even enough to recognize her and recall where he’d seen her before, though it took him awhile.
 
By the time he worked out
why
it had taken him so long to place her, however, he was already past her.

He jammed on the brakes, put the Jeep in reverse and stepped on the gas.
 
He just had time to see her wave at him and step into an alley between a bar and a headshop before he was rear-ended by an elderly tourist couple from Wisconsin.
 
He considered ignoring this and turning hard left into the alley, but saw that the alley was too narrow to accomodate his vehicle.
 
He sighed, shut off the Jeep and got out.
 
The already shaken tourist couple turned to stone.
 
A line of cars was forming behind theirs, but not one honked.
 
Tony tossed the geezer the keys to the Jeep, and pointed to it with his thumb.
 
“Meet me here this time tamorra,” he said.
 
“Have that fixed.”