Elliot Allagash (8 page)

Elliot nodded.

“Do either of the candidates have any physical defects?” he asked. “That haven’t been publicly exposed?”

“Geez,” I said. “I don’t know.”

“What are their sexual histories? Have either of them been involved in any scandals?”

I shrugged.

“Don’t worry,” Elliot said. “James will dig up something.”

• • •

After school, Elliot led me into a room I had never seen before, on the fourth floor of his house. It was completely empty, except for a single couch. The walls were bare except for a framed note on the wall directly across from the couch:

“It’s one of my family’s most treasured possessions,” Elliot told me, with unusual reverence in his voice. “It was mailed to my grandfather in the twenties.”

I walked over to examine the note up close, but I couldn’t figure out why it was so valuable. I knew Rockefeller was a famous billionaire, but how much could his autograph be worth?

Elliot continued, clearly sensing my lack of enthusiasm.

“Do you know how many letters Rockefeller wrote in his lifetime?”

I shrugged.

“A hundred thousand,” he said. “At least. But do you know how many of those were apologies?”

I shrugged again.

“One,”
Elliot said. “Just one.”

He sat down on the couch and stared at the letter for a while in silence.

“Hey, Elliot, do you think we should maybe get started on posters? Lance already put one up and it’s pretty funny. There’s a picture of Austin Powers, but it’s Lance’s head on the body. He’s saying, ‘Oh, behave!’”

Elliot did not respond.

“I’ve discovered some facts that I think you’ll agree are of interest,” he said. “Lance has a variety of reading-related learning disabilities. He’s barely passing most of his classes. And yet he’s managed to maintain an A-plus average in history, his most reading-intensive course. How does one account for the inconsistency?”

“Lance has learning disabilities? How’d you find that out?”

“I had James make me duplicates of everyone’s files,” he said, gesturing casually at a cardboard box behind the couch. “Students and teachers.”

“Oh my God,” I said.

“Congratulations on the French quiz, by the way, you scored a 91.”

“Really?” I said. “Wow. That’s awesome.”

Elliot took a couple manila folders out of the box and then closed it.

“Ashley is clean as a whistle,” he said, impatiently tossing her file aside. “But I’m pretty sure Lance has been cheating on his history tests.”

“How can you tell?”

“Because
I’ve
been cheating on the tests, too,” he said. “I went through everyone’s files. Nobody’s getting 100s, not even Ashley. And Lance is getting 110s! In every exam, Mr. Douglas includes two bonus questions about current events. I always skip them, to avoid suspicion. But Lance has been stupidly answering them, week after week. Last week, he answered a question about the Rwandan genocide. He’s
clearly
cheating.”

“How?”

“The same way I am,” Elliot said. “By breaking into Douglas’s desk each Tuesday night and copying down the answer key.”

Even though I had known Elliot for some time now, I was still surprised by how casually he had confessed to cheating.

“Maybe he’s just really good at history?” I said. “And, you know, follows the news about Rwanda?”

Elliot smiled.

“We’ll find out.”

• • •

I was always amazed by Elliot’s knowledge. Not just the things he
knew
, but the things he
didn’t
know. For instance: Elliot could recite the biography of every Roman emperor in history, from the number of palaces they built for themselves to the number of dwarfs they owned to the type of daggers they were murdered with. But he didn’t know anything about the New York Mets, not even which league they were in.

He could recite Shakespeare’s
Othello
from memory—or at least, all of Iago’s monologues. But whenever I quoted
The Simpsons
, he looked at me with confusion and disgust, like I had broken into some kind of animal language of grunts and squeaks.

He knew how to trade commodities on the Japanese stock market and detect Michelangelo forgeries. But he couldn’t make a paper airplane to save his life, and he had never even tried to toast a Pop-Tart.

He knew the functions of all of his father’s companies—which
ones made weapons, which ones made chemicals, and which ones made both. He knew the addresses of all of his father’s homes and the number of servants assigned to each of them. He knew the thread count of his father’s suits and the metric dimensions of his indoor Jacuzzi. But he didn’t know his birthday.

And even though he knew my allergies, my shoe size, my locker combination, and God knows what else, he never seemed to know what I was thinking or feeling. Or why.

• • •

I was sitting next to Lance in science when Mr. Douglas marched into our class. He was one of our most laid-back teachers, a former Peace Corps member who played the same three Cat Stevens songs on guitar at every talent show. I had never seen him angry before, but now he looked furious. His face was flushed a fiery red and his ponytail had come unraveled. I wondered what a history teacher was doing in science class. He opened and closed his mouth a few times, but he was too angry to produce any sound.

“Lance,” he managed, finally.

Lance stood up and started to unbutton his lab coat, but Mr. Douglas flicked his wrist impatiently.

“Just come,” he said.
“Now.”

I excused myself to go to the bathroom and quietly followed them down the hall, toward the school’s administrative wing.

The principal’s door was glass, and when I walked by it, I caught a glimpse of the havoc Elliot had wrought. Principal Higgins was reading Lance’s latest history exam and shaking his head
in disgust. Lance’s parents had been called in for the meeting. They sat on either side of their son, staring at him in horrified amazement. Lance stared down at his lap, his face a mask of fear.

• • •

“What happened to Lance?” I asked, on the limo ride back to Elliot’s. “Did you tell on him?”

“Give me some credit,” Elliot said. “I’m not some tattling
child.”

“If you didn’t tell, then how did he get caught?”

Elliot cracked each of his knuckles, one by one, basking in my curiosity.

“Anyone with good information can destroy an enemy,” he said, finally. “But it takes a subtle genius to get an enemy to destroy himself.”

He dropped some ice cubes into a glass and filled it to the brim with Scotch.

“No interruptions,” he said.

• • •

Mr. Douglas had several eccentricities, the most famous of which was his obsession with saving paper. Instead of printing out forty-one tests each week, he wrote out a single copy in longhand and read the questions out loud. We wrote our answers on scrap paper, which he scavenged from the other classrooms’ recycling bins.

Mr. Douglas always wrote out his tests on Wednesdays, while supervising study hall. They took him about fifteen minutes to write. When he was finished, he waved the test in the air, announced
the topic, and deposited it into a locking desk drawer. If Lance was cheating—and Elliot was certain that he was—he
had
to be getting his answers from this drawer. No other copies of the test ever existed.

The lock was impregnable without tools, Elliot explained, but the desktop itself was light enough to pry open. All you had to do was ratchet it up with a strong ruler and the drawer’s contents would be exposed. Elliot usually broke into the desk at lunchtime, while the teachers and students were packed into the cafeteria. Elliot’s allergies required him to visit the nurse’s office every day at noon, to take an antihistamine. And Mr. Douglas’s classroom was conveniently located right next door.

“Do you actually have allergies?” I asked him.

“What do you think?” he said.

Elliot had assumed that Lance was stealing the test on Wednesday evenings. As captain of the basketball team, he was required to stay an extra fifteen minutes after practice to put away the cones and balls. By the time he left the gym each day, the halls would be deserted, giving him ample time to break into Douglas’s desk. Of course, by raiding the desk
after
Elliot had already had a chance to tamper with the test, he opened himself to sabotage.

“Did you take away the answer key? So he couldn’t cheat?”

Elliot shook his head.

“If I took away the answer key, Douglas would know someone had broken into his desk. I left an answer key, all right. Just not a particularly useful one.”

After copying Douglas’s test at lunchtime, Elliot went into the nurse’s office and faked a massive allergy attack. James arrived
promptly and took him home, where the two of them constructed a counterfeit exam for Lance to copy a few hours hence. James took great pains to replicate Douglas’s looping cursive. They kept Mr. Douglas’s questions intact, but they replaced the answers. When they were finished with the forgery, James drove Elliot back to school so he could plant it in Douglas’s desk. While Lance practiced free throws in the gym, Elliot strolled through the empty halls and quietly sealed my political opponent’s fate.

Elliot staked out Mr. Douglas’s classroom for a while from the classroom across the hall. And sure enough, after about an hour, he saw Lance creep into the room and copy down the answers from Elliot’s phony exam. After Lance fled, Elliot took back his fake and returned Mr. Douglas’s original.

The next morning, when Mr. Douglas read out his questions during history class, Lance wrote down Elliot’s answers, wholly convinced of their accuracy.

“He was like a man accidentally signing his own death warrant,” he told me, “or mistakenly digging his own grave.”

“So you put in wrong answers?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” Elliot said. “Even if Lance had gotten a zero on the test, he wouldn’t have received any disciplinary action. He could’ve just claimed not to have studied. Everyone is entitled to an off day, even proven scholars like Lance.”

“So what did you do? How did you get him in trouble for cheating?”

“I didn’t,” Elliot said, handing me his modified exam. “I got him in trouble for something far worse.”

• 1) Which fearsome terrorist organization sprung up in the South during the 1860s?
  

  The Underground Railroad
  

• 2) Who commanded this group of terrorists?
  

  Harriet Tubman
  

• 3) Which 1863 decree is commonly referred to as “our country’s finest law”?
  

  The Poll Tax
  

• 4) Which series of laws have since been debunked as an unjust perversion of democracy?
  

  The Emancipation Proclamation
  

On and on it went, each answer more damning than the last.

“Lance wasn’t punished for cheating,” Elliot explained. “He was punished for his hateful belief system.”

I pictured Lance, sitting with his parents in the principal’s office, weighing his nightmarish options. He was either a thieving plagiarist or a horrible racist. Either way, his presidential campaign was over.

Elliot snatched the fake exam out of my hands, held it out the window, and ignited it with a cigar lighter.

“One down,” he said. “One to go.”

James opened the sunroof and the smoke filtered out of the limo. He was talking on his cell phone, but the soundproof window was closed and I couldn’t hear what he was saying.

“Where did your father find James?” I asked.

“It’s a long story,” he said. “One that you’ll enjoy immensely.”

He was about to launch into it when the limo pulled up to the curb in front of a nondescript granite building.

“What’s this place?” I asked.

Elliot sighed.

“My father’s club.”

Terry staggered down the stone steps and shuffled over to the car, his face unusually red. James hopped out of the limo and opened the door for him, discreetly holding his elbow to keep him from falling.

“Seymour!” he said. “It’s always a thrill to see you. How is everything?”

“Great, Mr. Allagash,” I said. “Elliot’s about to tell me a story, about how you found James?”

“How I found James? Please! I don’t have the energy or patience to find anyone.
James
found
me
!”

Elliot finished his drink and turned his gaze toward the window.

“I’ll tell you the whole business,” Terry told me. “We wouldn’t want this one to butcher it. I’ll give it to you in the study—but no interruptions!”

• • •

“Fifteen years ago, I was sifting through my mail at this very desk when I came across an unusual postcard. The glossy side featured a terrifying painting of a skull. The other, a short handwritten message.

“‘The Giants will win Game One.’

“I threw the postcard into a special drawer my lawyers make
me keep for death threats and forgot about it, until the following week, when another morbid postcard landed on my desk. This one featured two dancing skeletons—and predicted another victory for the Giants. I ignored this card, too—and the next one, and the next one. But after seven weeks of receiving these mysterious cards, with their morbid illustrations and scribbled football predictions, I started to pay them some mind. You see, every single one of them had come true.

“When I received the eighth postcard—which predicted the Giants would lose to the subpar Eagles—I decided to take the anonymous kook at his word. I called up a friend from my club and placed a bet on Philadelphia. The postcard was correct, as usual, and I won a sizable sum. I continued to take my personal prophet’s advice, betting more money each week as my confidence in his accuracy grew. By week twelve, I had made an amount of money so obscene that it was difficult to collect it without laughing.

“Who was sending the postcards? How did he track me down? Why was he giving me football predictions? What the hell was in it for him? I found out when the thirteenth postcard arrived in the mail.