 
Can't Hold A Real Job

Tales of California Grifters And The Spies Who Follow Them

Mel C. Thompson

Copyright © 2018

Mel C. Thompson Publishing

3559 Mount Diablo Boulevard, #112

Lafayette, CA 94549

For more information about Mel C. Thompson's work or to learn more about how you can support his ongoing literary projects, including his work with the other authors published by Mel C. Thompson Publishing through Amazon's Kindle subsidiary, please contact the email below or write the address listed above:

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Cyborg Productions, Blue Beetle Press, Citi-Voice Magazine, Zero Capital Press, The Lost Continent Review, and Marble Lobby Press are all imprints of Mel C. Thompson Publishing Company.

Preface: Influences Found In This Work

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I was heavily impacted by the financial crisis of 2008 and the problems in the sub-prime home-loan market that led to the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and, more recently, moved with morbid curiosity regarding the details of the collapse of Theranos, Inc. And what economically-cynical person could fail to be enthralled by Leonardo DiCaprio's "The Wolf of Wall Street" which depicts the rise and fall of Stratton Oakmont? Virtually all of the acts of corruption in the book are modeled on these very public cases.

The spies who appear in the work might be said to be modeled after characters in overly-obvious pulp fiction, and to the extent that they achieve three-dimensionality, they might alternately be influenced a by Somerset Maugham, (not that I could claim to have carried off such craftwork properly). The continual reintroduction of the absurd into all of their lives has primarily to do with the way I view life, and secondly has a bit to do with my love of Woody Allen's ability to blend the gravely-serious with the almost-slapstick. (I make no pretense to have escaped the realm of the derivative, but only attempt to make an original collage, as it were.)

The main federal agent in the story is basically a pastiche of various people I have known who seem to, by their pure grace and disarming nature, all but fumble their way to success. That character is a tribute to my admiration and envy of such characters, admiration and envy being two things which the French and Russian novelists admitted came together quite naturally.

Table of Contents

Preface: Influences Found In This Work

1. God Will Forgive The Life of Crime

2. Ten Thousand Years' Worth of Felonies

3. Politely-Tolerated Outcasts Forever

4. A Bunch of Reprobate Gangsters

5. Every Major Antidepressant

6. Chief Killer Among Killers

7. Your Desperation And Flexibility

8. A Pink Sheet For A Failing Steel Mill

9. Burn The Whole Thing Down

10. Weapons He Was Prepared To Use

11. A Wonderful Addition To Our Most Peculiar Society

12. The Global Friendship Bank

1. God Will Forgive The Life of Crime

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"Hugh, you do know if they ever catch you, or me, or our clients, you'll go to prison for life, right?"

"Yes, you've told me that a dozen times now."

"But I think if you got out of here, while you still can, the trail on you will go cold in a few years. Then, you know, when the feds finally kick in our door, you'll be a kind of distant afterthought. Of course it's way too late for me to get out of this business, so my life ends whenever they shut down this office. But you're still young. I feel kind of guilty keeping you involved."

Cheryl was prematurely wrinkling and had a husky voice from too much drinking and smoking and casual sex. But Hugh, at least a decade younger, loved her just the same.

"Try to think of it this way," Hugh noted by raising his typically didactic index finger into the air. "Somebody fucked up bad when we were young, and somehow we didn't have the sparkle and shine that it takes to make it in this city. How could mediocre performers like ourselves ever compete with the indefatigable go-getters who are fighting each other to pay double the rent of normal cities? We've both tried living other places and nowhere else works. We'd be screwed if we were forced out. We live as long as we get to live here. And these scams are the only way to make enough money to keep our heads above water. So we play this game till Big Brother comes and hauls us off for good. What does it matter? Our families can't stand us. Nobody's going to marry us. Hell, I can't even keep a cat. Be real. Who would miss us very much? They'd make a show out of weeping for us for two weeks tops, then they'd forget we ever existed. Our real lives ended long ago. All we have left is this charade. You recruited me. I took the job. And now we both have to live with it. Too bad they don't have co-ed prisons. I would really like to be your cellmate."

"That's so sweet of you," said Cheryl Horton, a slender brunette with big hair whose large brown eyes almost seemed to melt whenever a coworker said something nice. "Ah well," she continued, "I tried to warn you."

"Yes, morally you're covered regarding me. God will forgive the life of crime part of the deal. Heaven knows you're painted into a corner and that's that. And me, I'm as manic as the day is long. I can't hold a real job. No truly credible employer could live with that for long, and even if they did, I'd probably run away. My doctor says it's something about the fear of intimacy. And, as I said before, I've seen downtown Stockton enough times to be afraid of what economic exile would do to me. We have nowhere else to go. This is our last stand. We have to face it bravely."

Cheryl put down her pen and hunched depressively over her desk. "I would just die if I had to move to Stockton or Reno, or Modesto, or wherever it is the losers have to go to once they're booted from their rent-controlled apartments."

"Precisely. The only happy tenant is a tenant paying market rate in a new high-rise with concrete floors and steel-mesh walls and double-paned windows. No noise; no substandard conditions; no angry landlord who feels you're mooching off him through rent control. No one gets those conditions in San Francisco without stealing or inheriting. Since your parents fucked you under, that rules out the inheritance thing; and so that leaves . . .

". . . stealing," agreed Cheryl. "Okay Hugh, enjoy the rest of your day. You know where to go tomorrow."

As per their ritual, and against company policy, Hugh stood up to go and Cheryl stood up to see him out of the office, usually slipping him just one warm hug for the road. But before they walked outside, he pulled a flask of Kentucky rye out of the vest pocket of his rather outdated pin-striped suit. After setting the small flask down firmly on her desk, he went to Cheryl's bookcase and removed two shot glasses that were sitting on the top shelf. Looking down seriously for a moment, he briskly filled each shot glass and pushed one into Cheryl's hand while taking the other in his. They toasted quickly and quickly downed the full shot glasses of Kentucky rye.

With the whiskey still dripping from one side of his lip, Hugh said, "Until they kick the door in?"

"Until they kick the door in," agreed Cheryl.

2. Ten Thousand Years' Worth of Felonies

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"Only five dollars an hour more than minimum wage to illegally pose as a top-flight loan underwriter?" said Hugh, feigning incredulity.

"It's just clerical work. What do you care? All you have to do is open each file, sign your name in the blank spaces we marked out in yellow highlighter and give the loan a 'prime" rating.' The real estate loan manager was annoyed at having to justify his ostensible cheapness to a supposed general clerk from a temporary agency, but, to be sure, he knew this was no ordinary general clerk, and the project would be far more profitable than word processing or filing.

"I told my agent that I have a Post-Graduate Credential in Real Estate, but that I've never worked in the field of real estate. And anyhow, wouldn't the feds think it's unethical for a person who's never worked a single job in finance to be making the final decisions on the quality of loan applications? It's been years since I took those classes and, given how little I remember, these files might as well be written in Russian," protested Hugh in phony indignation.

"That's perfect, since I already told you that you don't have to read the files. You just sign your name and give the loan a 'prime" rating."

"When the big boys come to audit your files, how are you going to justify my involvement in this?"

"Easy, we leave behind a cover sheet for each file claiming we sincerely believed you were fully qualified."

"But they'll see right through that in an instant, considering the loans will all go bad by then and all the people who invested in these loans will go bankrupt."

"That's where my other identity and my other passport come in to play."

"Ah, so you'll be bouncing around the Caribbean under another name by the time the shit hits the fan?"

"Exactly, and unless they can really find me, and unless they want to go through all the hellish trouble of extraditing me from a country that doesn't give a rat's ass about this circus, then I guess I'll keep the hefty commission on this stack of loans and live out my life hopping around tropical islands."

"Well, this is bullshit," said Hugh. "Why would anyone do this for the chickenfeed you're paying me and my agent?"

"Because of Starla," the real estate loan manager replied, now crossing his arms and glaring down at Hugh as he walked over to the front of his desk.

"Starla?"

"Yes," said the real estate loan manager firmly as he pressed one of Starla's "Executive VIP Certificate Cards" down on Hugh's desk. "You get one of these for each of the three weeks you work here until all of these files are 'processed' favorably. She sells me, in bulk, two-hour hot-oil massage-and-hand-job sessions. You get to go once a week until the job here ends. These cards are worth $400 each, and they're tax-free, since Uncle Sam never knows I give them to you. The tip is included in the price. Look, I've known your agent Cheryl for a long time. We both know how hard up you are."

Hugh smiled brightly. "She knows me well. It looks like you do too. You know, each of these loans I fraudulently process constitutes another felony count against me."

"Yeah, that's why we picked you, because Cheryl and I both know when they do the full paper trail on you, you'll never see the light of day again."

"And so what would a few hundred years more really mean to a guy who's racked up ten thousand years' worth of felonies already?"

"You got it, kid. Cheryl told me you and her are lifer San Franciscans. You can't ever leave, and you can't hold a real job. That's batshit crazy to me, but to each his own kink. So anyway, do we have a deal kid?"

Hugh did not reply, but again smiled pertly and put the "Executive VIP Certificate Card" in his pocket. He silently turned his swivel chair around to face the counter behind him on which the stacks of files were laid and began applying his illegal underwriter's signature to each and every place those yellow highlighter marks appeared, giving each loan the highest possible rating.

The real estate loan manager turned to leave, and as he walked down the hall he muttered to himself, "I think I'll have someone write that kid a good letter of recommendation. Maybe he could use it at his parole hearing or something."

Back at the agency office, Cheryl was taking a late afternoon break, smoking yet another cigarette on the back patio which offered up a panorama of the Marin Headlands. She luxuriated in the fact that she'd scored another commission on another job that no other agent in their right minds would take. Of course she was not in her right mind and so there was little to lose on that front. And she might have thought to herself that the ends justifies the means, but the means were all that was left, the ends having disappeared into the fog some time ago.

*

Huge condors were circling in the wind high above the Marin Headland cliffs, riding the thermals effortlessly, knowing time was always on their side. It was their job to clean up the messes of life, and when did life ever go for very long without making a mess?

3. Politely-Tolerated Outcasts Forever

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Special Agent Howard Folsom was taking a non-scheduled break beneath those very Marin County hills that Cheryl Horton had been pondering. He was looking toward the city. They were, without realizing it, staring in each other's direction. There was no way, without special equipment, that Folsom could have literally seen her right then. He was not there to do any long-distance spying, but just to enjoy the view. And he thought to himself, "If only the average man could have even a tiny sliver of the money stolen in that great city every day; why then he'd never have to worry again, at least not about money."

He was not far from the Sausalito waterfront, and he could hear seagulls arguing with one another over scraps of sea life left behind by sloppy fishermen. Because his hearing was perfect, he could even hear tiny waves washing against the pilings of the docks. Occasionally an excited child would let out a playful shriek and then break into a run, often with other rambunctious children following close behind.

Couples walked by, hand in hand, many on the holiday of their lives, having saved for years just to afford a week in what was rapidly becoming the most expensive place on earth. He studied them and concluded that they were "normies" who had "real jobs."

Folsom had a far different view of real jobs than civilians did, (and he included Hugh and Cheryl in the category of "civilians with real jobs."). It wasn't that "normies" didn't have preoccupations, but rather that they could "chill out" or "give it break" far more often than he could. Nobody who tried to bust white collar frauds could ever have a consistently peaceful life and he knew it, and he accepted that. He'd gotten to the point where he no longer even craved ordinary peace. He was who he was. He was not trying to be all things to all men. The criticisms directed at him and his work were all true, but he was beyond caring about that.

Real jobs, as he viewed them, had a sort of mindless rhythm to them, which was why he considered crime to be a real job too, because one could get good at it, so good that it became second nature. Financial law enforcement was, in his way of thinking, an unlearnable profession, one in which a person's mind, if they did the job fully, could never rest for very long.

He'd often observed a certain calm in the faces of the professional criminals he arrested, a certain resignation. But anyone tracking and busting business crime could never be normal again. They would likely be politely-tolerated outcasts forever. (His sole consolation was that he was not working in someplace like Switzerland or Luxembourg, because they surely would have run him out of there by then, and then where would he go? What would he do? He could never return to civilian work, and he could never bring himself to be a true criminal. He'd be lost.)

It would have surprised the casual observer to know that Folsom didn't have any high moral pretensions about his work, no air whatsoever of moral superiority. He viewed the world as an ecosystem. He told anyone who inquired about his attitudes regarding right and wrong, "You got your parasites and you got your predators. You got your grazers and you got your scavengers. God put every one of them here for a reason. That's why you got your criminals and you got your cops. I got nothing against any of them. I'm a fed the way a cheetah is a hunter. They do their job and I do mine. No hurt feelings all around. That's the way the good Lord intended it. That's the way a righteous man is. He never lets hatred get the best of him."

And so although his mind was always churching, and although he hardly got any rest, still, his health was good, and he'd been in the field for a decade longer than most people, and he was nowhere near burnout. He got tired, frazzled and dazed, but very rarely angry. It was this lack of anger that gave him the edge. He never gave himself away prematurely as the bitterly frustrated investigator is liable to do, nor did he become vindictively vengeful as the supercilious investigator was tempted to become. Both bitterness and vengefulness were traps that got in the way of seeing all the way through to the whole truth of a schemer's life and work. If a commander assigned Folsom to a job, he took it unquestioningly and worked it, night and day, until he solved it.

It practically goes without saying that he knew better than to pursue romance or marriage. He had no major problem with women, but he saw clearly that his coworkers who tried to juggle marriage, children and financial fraud investigation were on the verge of madness. He'd experimented with dating for a long time, but then one day, after a few fitful dreams made it clear to him the situation he was really in, he simply called every woman he'd ever dated and let them know he would not be petitioning them for love any longer. He knew what the great kings of old knew, that some jobs just go better with celibacy, which was why many an ancient ruler was seen with a hoard of celibates around him. He never maintained that he didn't feel any erotic urges. But it became obvious to him that there was a choice to make, a choice between work and romance, and the choice wasn't close.

A traffic cop beeped his horn and suddenly the loud roar of a street-cleaning truck came up behind him. He came out of his reverie, his nearly dream-like waking state. In truth, it was this ability to fade into a beta-like brainwave state, while still awake, that caused his "revelations." (As many a scientist pondering an imponderable problem has reported, "One day I was just sitting there, and the whole answer came to me at once.") This openness to "revelations" or "epiphanies" was the whole of his secret. In "the zone" he was able to give up everything he thought was true and everything he wanted to be true. In this "clear" state, five or six strands of thoughts and problems would suddenly unwind, like the strands comprising a heavy rope unraveling, and the answer, or rather a whole "set" of answers, would present themselves in rapid succession, untangling a whole complex web of mystery surrounding the psyche of the criminal in question.

To avoid getting a ticket, Folsom pulled out into the empty lane to his left and eventually headed over the bridge into "The City."

4. A Bunch of Reprobate Gangsters

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Folsom was balding, a bit pudgy, had thin arms without much muscle tone; and he just never fit quite right into his frumpy blue blazer. There were some advantages to this. It enabled him to play the game of: "I'm just a no one. Never mind me." He had a way of walking into any building in the world and looking both unimportant and extremely average. This gave him the appearance of being far too feckless to be committing trespassing. Security guards and door men looked at him with a condescending smirk and just waved him through. He could stumble into extremely sensitive areas in government offices or corporate buildings, and almost no one would bother to even ask him a question. It was as if he looked like too much of a conventional loser to possibly be doing anything illegal.

He pulled up to the small waterfront building and parked his car. It was an ugly 1970s type of post-modern, multi-story, quonset-hut fiasco, three stories if you counted the garage on the bottom floor. The parking lot had only a smattering of cars. The sound of the wind roaring over the top of the Bay's water and underneath the billowing clouds calmed him. He took a moment to "sense the entire atmosphere" of where he was. "Yeah," he said to himself. "I'm just not feeling any resistance here. It's like hiding in plain sight has been their speciality. I'll be virtually invisible to them. They're obviously not overly suspicious types; and why would they change that now? They've gotten away with everything for so long doing things just this way. Hmph. This should be easy enough."

He pulled an out-of-date, extremely-obvious listening device out and thought to himself, "Low-tech, old-school spying is still the most cost-effective method." It was a small yellow square with a very problematic flaw: It had no internal battery and was attached to an ordinary wall plug. The downside of this device was that any paranoid person would find it right away. But an easy-going kind of God-will-protect-me sort of thief might not see it for months. The upside of this device was that it would be fully powered up until the moment the suspect figured out what it was it and angrily pulled it out of the wall. At that point it would be clear to the suspect that he or she had been being listened to nonstop for way too long and that enough evidence to put them away for many years was already sitting on some investigator's desk in the form of transcripts from the taping of all those seemingly clandestine conversations. At that point the feds had to raid that day, since the suspect would already be packing their car and preparing for interstate flight, if not international flight. He chuckled lightly and shook his head almost disapprovingly before slipping the yellow square, with wall plug attached, into his blazer pocket.

*

He walked slowly and laboriously up the steps leading to the second floor, thinking to himself, almost mechanically, "No disability access elevator? They're lucky no one's hit them with some building code violation or a nuisance lawsuit."

Pulling open the front door, he wondered, "Where are all the sales people? Look at all those empty desks. Not even a receptionist on duty? Hmm."

Assuming his "I'm almost nobody" posture, he sat, in his nearly-invisible way, on a wooden bench just inside the front doors and leaned back against the wall behind it, shifting awkwardly and wearing a blank and open expression. The wooden bench seemed a rather tacky touch for an office that specialized in very sought-after sorts of temp workers, ones willing to lose their long term future for a few moments of brief pleasure and the illusion of prosperity, or, in the case of lifer San Franciscans, ones willing to perish for a few months more rent before the walls closed in.

As he sat there examining his way-out-of-date Blackberry and humming ineffectually to himself, he occasionally pulled out a handkerchief and wiped sweat from his deeply and prematurely wrinkled forehead. Joking to himself he thought, "It's so great how I look like a disoriented door-to-door salesman who probably has bad breath and doesn't even know it."

In the office immediately to his right, he could hear Cheryl's hoarse voice and Hugh's high-pitched replies. What they were saying, exactly, was not clear, as only the tone of their voices was audible. It sounded like a tense conversation, but not an acrimonious one. People occasionally emerged from an office just beyond Cheryl's and walked by Folsom without noticing him, just as he had expected. At last one woman emerged who had an executive air about her. She was most likely the Vice President of this concern. And since such executives tend to have more empathic powers, she looked at Folsom in a slightly-disturbed way and came to a stop. She tilted her head disconcertedly and chirped, "Can I help you today?"

She was smiling impatiently and was obviously in a hurry to get back to her office on the other side of the building. She felt slightly uneasy about him, but the pressures of her job weighed on her more than her mild disliking of this hapless character in front of her.

He purposely fumbled his Blackberry and dropped it on the ground, and, in the process, the yellow cube fell out of his coat pocket. As he scrambled to pick the items up, he wiped his mouth, as though he were on the verge of drooling due to a lack of coordination. And then, as if coming out of an incompetency-inspired daze, he looked up at her with his eyes wide open and went, "What? What? Oh, I'm sorry."

At this point the Vice President, in her three-inch heels, sheer nylons and knee-length skirt bent down in disgust to help the absurd guest to gather his spilt belongings. Then, standing up and staring down at him from beneath a large head of dyed-red hair, so bright it was almost orange, she said, "Now, just who exactly were you looking for? Most of the sales staff is out today and our receptionist has called off."

"Oh, my goodness, I seem to have forgotten," he said as he reached into another blazer pocket and pulled out an ancient contacts book with pages falling out of it, and, of course, he dropped that too, causing the loose pages to also scatter on the ground, and said, "Oh, darn it. I'm just a mess. Sales people did you say?"

Now exasperated, the Vice President said, "Marlene is out on pregnancy leave this week, and George will be out on calls for the rest of the afternoon. Was it Sandy?"

His eyes bulged open as though he might be suffering from early-onset dementia. "Uh, Sandy, yes, um."

"Well, she's not supposed to be back for another half hour; so, if you want to see her, you'll just have to wait here in the lobby or come back later."

"Yes, wait, wait. Will do," said Folsom as he pretended to struggle to put his contacts book back into his jacket as the loose pages spread themselves too widely to allow for it all to be easily reinserted into his blazer jacket.

By then the Vice President had lost all patience and was already heading back to her office. Our federal agent watched her stalk off briskly and mumbled to himself, "Damn, Folsom, you're good." And he was good. His boss once told him, "If you weren't working for us, you could have played some loser in a bunch of indie films about failed businessmen."

*

Folsom listened intently for any sounds coming from Cheryl's office. Beneath the tone of the conversation, which now seemed to alternate between extreme warmth and mild conflict, he could hear the running undertone of what sounded like another conversation, that of a cable news channel. "Hey," he thought to himself, "these really are rather retro people. They've probably got CNBC running in there on an oversized television hooked up to an old fashioned cable wire. I'll bet the television is even sitting on some large cabinet with files stuffed inside the compartments below. Hmph, that's almost too easy. I should feel guilty or something."

*

Cheryl was too distracted to pay attention to the mind-numbing details of their current scam. She loved the game they were in, and could happily absorb almost any tale about it, however protracted and technical that story might be. But today she had an old fashioned crush on her employee, and she felt both irritated and ashamed. She was even a little angry with Hugh because she felt certain he didn't share her feelings, though this was not really true.

As Hugh droned on about all the sleazy devices their current client was using to milk the world for an obscene amount of undeserved money, Cheryl found herself staring at one of Hugh's hands, which was somehow laying on her desk and stretched out in her direction more than normal, even as he gesticulated into the air with his other hand. As he rambled on, she pretended to listen and even smiled winsomely. Being rather self-absorbed, Hugh did not seem to notice, Cheryl's hand inching ever-so-incrementally towards his. And then he felt a tug on his hand, and noticed Cheryl had grabbed two of his fingers and would not let go, even why he tried to gently pull his hand away.

"Now Cheryl!" said Hugh in a very annoyed tone, "you know better than that."

Cheryl now had her hand completely around his and said, "Why do you have to be so fucking principled? We're both headed to the slammer. Let's just enjoy ourselves."

Hugh then forcefully pulled his hand away and protested, "You know the agreement! No shitting in your own backyard. You know how it goes with me. I'd fall in love with your for two months, then get claustrophobia and want out. Then where are we? You lose your best worker and piss of your clients, and then I'm left to wander Market Street seeing if I could find serious employment? You're out of your fucking mind, Cheryl.

Cheryl finally pulled her hand to her own side of the desk and replied, "Oh, I know. I know, okay!" And then her voice softened. "I'm sorry again. I'm sorry, okay?"

"Cheryl, you know I love you. You know I always will. I just can't go there right now. And anyway you know me well enough to know this isn't really all about me. You're letting your loneliness get the best of you. You're letting your neediness drive you into things you know aren't good for you. Come on, baby. We got such a good thing going. Don't do this."

There was a moment of silence and Cheryl regained her composure and let out an exasperated breath, then laughed. "Do you forgive me, Hugh?"

"Yes, yes, of course I forgive you. It's okay. You just went off the rails a bit. That can happen to anyone. I'm cool with you. Don't worry. You're still my best friend."

Just then the door flew open and startled them both. It was Folsom stumbling in almost like he was on heavy psych meds. He stood in the middle of the room looking startled. Having untucked his shirt and loosened his tie, he looked like one of those lost souls who's so battered they can only get work through a temp agency working at other temp agencies. His eyes were bugging out, and he practically seemed not to notice the two people in the room. Using this phony confusion to pretend he had to look all around the room to get his bearings, he finally, after getting the lay of the land, said, "Oh dear, I'm sorry, you were . . . were . . . something personal . . . please excuse, excuse."

Cheryl laughed lightly and said, "No, don't worry. It's okay. What do they have you doing today? Who are you helping?"

Folsom pulled out his trusty handkerchief and wiped his sweaty forehead and pretended to wipe his mouth to catch the drool that might have just emerged from it, as he mumbled, "Sandy . . . her . . . she said . . . the files. The files. Yes?"

Hugh looked at Cheryl as if to say, "We're really scraping the bottom of the barrel these days, aren't we."

Cheryl said to Folsom, "Just go into that cabinet there. I think she might keep a few of her files in there. Almost everyone does, since our regular file cabinets are bursting at the seams."

Folsom bowed awkwardly a couple of times, let out a nervous half-laugh, bowed again and made a labored effort to get on his knees in order to get at the files near the bottom compartment. It never occurred to either Hugh nor Cheryl to question the assumption that this man was a "late-stage" minimum-wage file clerk who simply had not made it any field of work whatsoever. And while Folsom was on his knees, shuffling through files on the bottom compartment of the large cabinet, Hugh and Cheryl resumed their conversation, this time about more mundane matters, paying "the file clerk" no more attention at all. Folsom was invisible to them, and that's just how he wanted it.

As he moved files around, Folsom saw that, true to form, this large cabinet was too cheap to have a back wall to it, meaning that, as though by divine favor, a free wall socket was available, a wall socket which would be hidden behind the large, low-end cabinet. Additionally, the cabinet was about three inches away from the wall, meaning that all the sound in the room would float freely into the yellow cube, which, for all it's ordinariness, could have been mistaken for an abandoned piece of some appliance left behind by the previous commercial tenants of the building.

Folsom shoved most of the files he had displaced into the bottom compartment of the cabinet, taking only a few of them in his hand in order to continue the illusion that he was a temp clerical worker who was only in the room to try to find some files, a narrative he didn't have to invent, but which was given to him by other people who'd been impatient with his seeming passivity and lack of comprehension regarding his own duties. He again awkwardly bowed, muttered a few incoherent half-sentences and then ducked out of the room with the files. As he left to leave the building, he simply left the files on the abandoned reception counter before going to wait in his car for Hugh to leave the building.

*

It wasn't long before Hugh could be seen straggling out of the building. He was equipped with a lit cigarette and a styrofoam cup of cheap office-coffee. It was obvious enough that he was heading out for the waterfront to sit on a bench near the shore where he might more easily relax into the nicotine and caffeine high he was addicted to. After walking back and forth along the railing and stretching a bit, Hugh then took a seat near a long v-shaped bench. This was Folsom's cue to move.

*

Folsom, always knowing that being too imaginative and original was as dead a giveaway as being completely trite and predictable, shuffled along the waterfront sidewalk as if lost in thought. He acted as if he'd randomly chosen the v-shaped bench to sit down on, right across from Hugh. Trying to be somewhat coy, he waited until Hugh looked his way and saw him looking straight ahead with an affected absent-mindedness, as if he would not care, one way or the other, if Hugh noticed him.

Hugh finished taking a drag from his cigarette and said, "Hey, you're that temp guy that was working with Sandy. Why did you just leave the files on the front counter and go?"

"What? Oh, yes," began Folsom, as if himself woken from a near-dream state. "God knows what got into me. I've had a hard time concentrating on work lately. Too many worries, too many distractions. I'm just all flustered, you know."

Hugh turned back to gaze at the water in an intoxicated way, then off-handedly replied, "Right on. I guess we all get that way now and then. Well, anyway, I guess with us working temp jobs and not having a career and all, and us being in the most expensive city on the planet, (give or take a few Arab emirates and things), then I guess we have a right to be distracted and on-edge."

"But you," said Folsom, now looking more alive and speaking quite pointedly, "seem to have a kind of tranquility about you that I don't understand. Even with your money worries, you look like you're at peace, as if you had some kind of settled religious faith, not that I'm religions."

Looking up, and now coming out of his nicotine and caffeine torpor, Hugh said, in an almost confrontational way, "So you see something special in me, don't you, something about me that sets me apart from the average striver?"

"Yeah, it's something like that," replied Folsom. "I can't put a finger on it, but I've seen it before. Every so often I find a coworker as screwed up as me, you know, regarding the money stuff; and somehow that worker is just floating along without a care in the world, kind of like a Jesus Freak who really believes in Heaven, or something like that."

Shaking his head and chuckling a bit, Hugh took another long drag from his cigarette and swigged back another two hits of coffee from his styrofoam cup, then responded, "Yes, it's kind of like a sacred vow, something like a kind of sobriety or chastity, although it has nothing to do with sex or mind-altering substances, which, as you can probably tell, I don't have any reservations about consuming in mass doses."

"That's it!" responded Folsom, not trying to disguise the innocence or earnestness involved in his curiosity. "I've just got to know. What is it? If I had a fortune, I'd trade it away just to get what you got."

Hugh now looked at Folsom seriously and intently, then said, "Okay, I'll tell you, but just so long as you never repeat what I said to anyone."

And here Folsom answered honestly when he said, "That part of your 'testimony,' if you don't mind my using the word, is something I'll never repeat to another living soul. This is just between you and me."

"Okay," said Hugh. "I got my 'born again' experience from a bunch of reprobate gangsters I ran into in the Tenderloin. One day I was coming back home from a club late at night, a public sex club to be exact, and then I turned down the wrong alley and came upon five guys leaning against the wall shooting up heroin. You could see they had laid their loaded pistols down on the pavement next to them just as the dope began to hit. At that moment I decided I didn't care if they killed me, because I wanted to know the truth. So I sat down in an open space right in the middle of them, leaned against the wall and pulled out a flask of whiskey and downed it. They stared at me like they would murder me, but they didn't say a word. Several minutes later, as my own buzz set in and we were all high together, I asked them to give me 'they key' to how they did it, how they pulled off such a life so nonchalantly."

Folsom, genuinely impressed and now extremely alert, prodded Hugh on, "And so what in the world was their answer?"

"Life in prison without parole."

"That was it? I don't understand."

"That's the whole game. If you can accept that one rule before you start the game, then you win, in advance. In fact, cops can tell if you get the rule or not; and if you get it, they hate to even arrest you because you stole their thunder and took all the fun out of it for them. It's like they know that they're just going through the motions, since nothing they do can really affect you. That's what they told me."

"Why is that so effective?"

"Think of it this way: What if you looked around and knew there was no way in the world you could survive in the world of working stiffs? Maybe you were already sixteen and couldn't read or write. You could already tell that a high school drop-out could never compete in a game where a Master's in Computer Technology was the minimum bid. So you're fucked, right?"

"You lost me there."

"So there's two ways to go about this: Either you wring your hands night and day, living as a small-time burglar, or a small-time drug dealer, wondering, till you break out in a sweat, when the pigs are going to haul you off, or you come to terms with the hand God dealt you, and you say to yourself, 'I am going to jail for life, one way or the other. They might catch me tomorrow, or today, or a year from now, or ten years from now, or twenty years from now, but they will catch me, and when they do, I'll be in and out of jail till one day they trow away they key for good.' Well, once you finally learn to find your peace with that truth, once you let it sink into your bones that there's no other way, then, finally, you can relax and stop living in fear. Fear is the killer. It's the continual second-guessing that gets you. It destroys you from the inside. But once you know they've got you beat, that you're never going to win the conventional game, and you accept it totally and completely and don't try to wriggle out of it, then you can just let go and stop trying to control everything. You can be natural and free. You just chant to yourself, 'Prison for life. Prison for life.' And then one day, I don't know how, somehow a peace kind of descends over you."

"Is it a peace from The Lord?"

"Yeah. Have you heard about the drug runners in Northern Mexico? They have a patron saint of drug running. I guess they have prayers and songs to that saint. It's like they looked around them and saw that the odds of getting to live a real life were just slim to none; and once they saw that 'the life' was the only life for them, they settled into it and didn't try to tell themselves they'd 'go legit' one day and somehow cover their tracks. They faced the fact that their decision was irreversible. Once they accepted that, I suppose they could take it easy and let Jesus and Mother Mary handle the rest. At some point, either the feds or a rival gang comes and ends the thing. And that's it. Life and death are, like the Buddhists say, one side of the same coin. We're just the tail end of a gig that started in the biological kingdom a billion years ago. It's nothing personal. No need to take it personally."

"Then you admit you're a criminal?"

Hugh smirked, paused, and then said, "Who said anything about me? I was just talking about a kind of 'enlightenment experience.' True, it came from gangsters, but I never said anything about me being a gangster."

"But if you were one," replied Folsom as he leaned back again against the concrete wall behind the bench, "you would be at peace with it?"

"Sure. Why not?" said Hugh, as he also leaned back against the wall and took two more jolts of the now lukewarm coffee and another long drag from his cigarette.

Folsom suddenly stood up and shook himself off, as if to confide in his friend that he was both prepared to pretend their conversation had never happened and that he had benefitted from it just the same. "Ha! You're a bit of a storyteller, aren't you? But, you know, there's a nugget of truth in what you said. And me, I'm kind of a nervous guy, and what you said kind of cleared up some things I'd been wondering about. Please excuse me, but I have to get back to my car. It's along commute for me and I need to cut out early."

"Whatever," replied Hugh. "I'm glad you stopped by. I hope we'll be seeing you at the office again."

"To be sure," asserted Folsom. "Maybe one day we'll go on an assignment together."

"Nice!" said Hugh. "I'll roll with it, whatever way it goes."

Folsom winked and said, "I'm sure you will. You're the kind of guy I like to work with. You could almost say that we see the big picture in almost exactly the same way."

"Cool," Hugh replied as Folsom shuffled back to his car.

*

The sea lions from Pier 39 were out on patrol, and Hugh watched them as they closed in on a school of large Pacific Mackerel. Smaller fishing boats seemed to respond to the action by themselves circling close. All ecosystems were working perfectly. Only a fool would believe the universe could be mistaken in any of its actions. The laws of physics performed so accurately as to penetrate into the spiritual realms themselves, not that Hugh would classify his feelings of wholeness as religious, in spite of his sermonizing. His belief in God was so physical that it was indistinguishable from pure Agnosticism.

5. Every Major Antidepressant

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"You're going to have to start pulling yourself out of this or you're going to end up in the mental hospital," said the institutional psychiatrist of the only clinic in town who took people on a private-pay, uninsured basis for less than a third of a week's pay. "If you keep coming in here talking like this, I'm going to have to commit you."

"Can't you get me some better meds? I'll pay cash for them if I have to," replied Hugh.

"No, sorry, we already have you on the maximum dose; and we've been through every major antidepressant. Prescription medications are only going to get you so far. You've got to get into talk therapy too and work with the way you're thinking."

"But I'm already blowing all my money on you and the prescriptions you give me. I make too much money to qualify for Medicaid, and my temp agency doesn't go in for health insurance. Private insurance premiums would break me completely."

"I don't know what to say to you, then," said the psychiatrist as he shook his head. "Maybe you could become a Jesus freak or a Hare Krishna. Somebody, or something, is going to have to give you a shot in the arm, buddy."

As Hugh stood up to leave, he speculated, "Maybe I could try some Twelve Step group. My friends keep trying to get me into est. Werner Erhard has his house just down the road. Maybe some serious cult brainwashing would perk me up a bit."

The psychiatrist stood up, his eyes squinting through his wire-rimmed spectacles, his short-cropped hair still somehow messy on the sides of his head, and concluded, "I'll need to see you back here in a month, and I'll be expecting some progress, or we'll have to make other arrangements for you. We can't have you jumping off the bridge, because that's where this is heading if you don't figure something out."

Hugh turned away forlornly and went off to tell all these developing troubles to Cheryl. He knew it was stupid to depend on a woman who had a crush on him to also be his best friend and confessor, as well as his supervisor at work, but somehow none of his other friends, as good as they were, really "got it" about what Hugh was going through. There was never a thought of censoring or sugarcoating things around her. She could absorb whatever it was he had to say, and she could share whatever was going on with her without managing her image in front of him. As long as Cheryl was around, there was a place in the world to turn to when no one else could make sense of his life.

*

Hugh leaned back in his chair, and his long face made his body seem longer than it was. The project manager stared back at him for a moment. Hugh had an objection.

"That's a bright red line I just can't cross. I can't bring myself to lie about medical stuff. Someone could get hurt if we falsify this data."

"Don't worry, Hugh. We've already thought that part through. No patients will get hurt because real double-blind studies won't start till late in the process."

"But once the FDA gets involved, then real patients will be involved, and everyone will see that this machine is a complete fake."

"That's right. They'll see it immediately and call a halt to the testing at once."

"So then why do you need me to pretend to be a radiologist diagnosing all these fake body-scans?"

"What you don't seem to understand is that we're operating in a small window of time. During the next month we can keep showing potential investors the weekly printouts of our own "private testing." As long as our in-house testing looks nice and shiny, people will keep pouring money into our project. After that, the FDA might come in and close that window. So we have one month, maybe two, maybe more. Eventually they see we're nowhere near able to develop in-home body-scanners and shut down our little dog-and-pony show. Until then, investors think they're investing in a portable MRI-quality scanner that everyone can own."

"Then they march us all off to jail."

"No, not really."

"Not really? Why?"

"Because we'll only raise fifty million or so. The FTC has their hands full of frauds that are measured in the hundreds of millions, not tens of millions. We'll look like small-time crooks, a minor nuisance. Ten million might seem like big money to us, but its small change to them. I mean, they'll send us threatening letters, but we've got a comeback that most of the money addicts in this town don't have. Instead of fighting them tooth and nail and greedily holding on for another hundred million to come in, like the crazy ones do, we come to them, hat in hand, pretending to be all chastened, and offer, as a settlement, to refund 25 million out of the 50 million we took in, (claiming the rest got lost in payments to shady consultants and contractors who overcharged us), then we offer to close down all operations immediately without a fight. The press prints the phrases '25-million-dollar fine' and 'suspending all operations' and the public thinks we got punished. The media has too much ADD to hunt down the other 25 million, and the feds don't like to go after someone who gives them the economical option of a total settlement and public capitulation right off. They've got too many folks fighting them like crazy over every dollar, and a lot of these cons are for half a billion, not 25 million. And anyway, we got a mole on the inside of the FTC who who's going to get himself appointed to be the one who comes after us and 'wins' the case. Out of the 25 million we keep, he gets three or four million all to himself in the form of a perk trail no one will have the energy to try to follow. My friend, we not only get out of this alive, but each of our 'special workers,' like you, gets a sixteen-day Caribbean cruise, (tips, hookers, taxes and booze included). What's the hangup?"

Hugh slouched in his chair and admitted, "I'm just too depressed to fake like I'm a radiologist for a month. I can't do it. My working life is over. I'm fucked."

"You don't have to be happy about it. Just follow the charts. The charts show you how to fill in each evaluation form; and the charts have subtle variations in them so that it looks like a real person was evaluating real cases. The first investors won't quite be slick enough to follow what we're saying anyway. Buthen the FDA gets ahold of this pile of statistical garbage, they'll laugh in our faces, but that's okay, since we won't even try to defy them. We'll shut the operation down the minute they 'call our bluff,' and they'll think they taught us a lesson."

"Last month I was an underwriter. This month I'm a radiologist. Next month I got to be something else. I'm just tired of this life. I've had it."

"Cheryl tells me you're depressed. Don't be mad at her, but she told me she's worries about you. You both have to make rent this month in San Francisco, and those buildings you're living in aren't cheap."

"She's only giving me ten dollars above minimum wage for this gig. That's better than last month's gig. But it's not enough."

At that point the project manager pulled out a tiny ziplock bag full of white powder and slid it over the table toward Hugh.

"Coke? You're offering me a few lines of coke? That's weak!"

"Not as weak as you think. You're depressed, and we've got a thirty-day supply. We give you one ziplock bag a day to make sure you don't use it all in one night. And after thirty days, I predict your psychiatrist says something like, 'You seem to be making progress.' This will keep you out of loony bin and away from the bridge."

"But the coke we get in this city is all cut up with junk. I don't need the side effects of whatever toxic sludge they mix in with their low-grade coke. Sorry, but life's too short for that."

"No, no. This is the real thing. We know a warlord who, when he's not commanding insurgents on the battlefield, likes to slip into the city and party for a few days. He only brings over the completely pure stuff, all the highest grade, not cut with any junk. It's so smooth, it'll take you an hour to even know that you're high. You'll glide through the day without a care in the world. We supply you till your next psychiatry appointment; and then, when we cash in, you get the vacation of a lifetime."

Hugh, popped open the ziplock bag and pinched some of the powder between his fingers, then he tasted it. His eyes opened wide with approval.

"That's pure shit!"

"Only the best for our star performers."

"I think I'm feeling more optimistic about life already."

"That makes two of us."

Hugh opened up the binder of charts, flipped through a few pages and nodded in mild amusement as yet another bright red line would inevitably be crossed.

Folsom, hearing Hugh's call come in to Cheryl, via that little yellow cube, was also amused at learning of the crossing of that additional bright red line.

Folsom parked openly in the parking lot of Cheryl's building, knowing she was not the type to even notice a strange car pulling into the parking lot every afternoon for two hours. She often walked by, even seeing Folsom in the car and waving at him with a smile. Folsom had decided to act like he was just a regular worker in their neighborhood. If questioned, he'd planned to apologize for stealing an unauthorized parking space, but he was never even questioned. And so he got to enjoy maximum quality reception due to his being only two hundred feet from that old-world listening device.

Folsom would not need much in the way of genius to crack this case. How hard was it really to just walk into a person's office, give a fake introduction, plant a listening device in the office and then go to your car to listen to what was said in there? The yellow cube broadcasted to Folsom's car radio at the frequency of 97.4 FM. It was sloppy methodology, since surely other people would accidentally tune into the broadcast; but, as things stood, apparently no one had; or if they had, they didn't understand what they were hearing; or, if they did, they were apparently too lazy to take any action. And thus, until his supervisors came out and forbid it, the little yellow cube would stay plugged into people's walls, broadcasting to 97.4 FM to a solitary-but-happy agent in a non-remarkable-looking car.

There was another car in that parking lot that Folsom didn't know about, and it was remarkable-looking, and it had tinted windows, and its occupant never did things the easy way. His life was more serious and perilous than Folsom's life. He was regarded as far more dangerous than mere warlords, federal agents or short-term grifters.

6. Chief Killer Among Killers

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Maggie Castlewhite was once again enjoying the fruits of her impeccable organizing skills. Tonight's success centered around a large party in her sprawling home in Burbank. The crowd was ostentatiously large considering there was no holiday or special occasion involved. And since this was not a holy day, birthday or anniversary, there was none of the dread associated with mandatory happiness or obligatory love, both of which are hallmarks of the emotionally-strangulating Southern California lifestyle. In a move designed to intimidate the most winsome conformists, she sent out invitations ordering that no one should bring beverages or food because a major catering company had been hired to supply a complimentary open bar and unlimited hours d'oeuvres to all the "esteemed guests."

In short, the host could not have enforced her popularity with a stronger hand. Of course there were rumors that she was a monstrous person, but those rumors were kept very hushed as one would not want to be stricken from such a stellar guest list as she wielded. Maggie was insulated from ostracism by the fact that anyone who had any social skills at all could, by remaining on her guest list, secure many undeserved business connections and thus manage to scare together some sort of presentable career by the most casual and easygoing means possible. A connection with Maggie Castlewhite meant you'd never be alone and hungry, so long as that connection lasted. People wondered how Maggie acquired such a high social station, given that no one really knew what she did for a living, (not even her husband), especially since her husband was a middling, tepid sort of half-winner who, while never a total failure, never quite ascended into positions of unquestionable status.

Tonight Maggie was wearing a tasteful skirt, almost knee-length and almost form-fitting. It was a pastel-peach and white affair of thinnish material. She herself was thinnish, but not skinny. She was blatantly too-well-toned for her age, and frankly everyone hated her for that. Most of her fifty-something crowd looked stocky and so far out-of-shape that one would could almost call them a resigned lot, resigned physically, but not financially. When it came to finances, no room of thirty-year-olds could match them. Since the time Stendhal's courts at Parma, one would be hard-pressed to find a set of rooms so frothing with naked ambition and lively, shameless greed. Maggie was the lord of all this and more, but the "more" part was largely secret, at least secret enough to prevent the truth from bursting out into the open.

She was energetic, limber, smooth, graceful and decisive. She avoided having overly big hair, but opted for precisely the middle ground between a bob and a fully-formed "do." There was nothing exactly overstated in her physique or her voice, and yet everyone felt the picture was not quite right. Any woman of such vigor and alertness ought to be either a famous entertainer or a blossoming female executive, especially since such an opulent circumstance couldn't have come from assets on her husband's side of the family. She implied, but never actually stated, that her money was partially inherited and partially earned by her husband; and she further hinted, but never openly professed, that her dominant role in life was that of a star-like housewife, (who inexplicably did no housework). She seemed to nonverbally insist that she was to be understood as a vibrant socialite, and nothing more.

However, it so happened that a series of accidental meetings in her younger years had led to a stream of contacts and employers that culminated in her current employment. Her current occupation was that of killer, or rather chief killer among killers, the person who did not carry out, but ordered, a long string of killings going back two decades. In plain and simple terms, she was a serial killer, albeit one completely sanctioned by law, (or rather, not by law but by custom, or rather a collection of customs that were the product of centuries of unwritten law). This allowed her something like total immunity in practice, though not in theory, (legal theory being, in Los Angeles, the sad little orphan that goes begging for attention in this wide world of big bullies).

*

The stereotypical opposite of a generalist philosopher is a worldly person who, completely uninterested in vast categories of experience or whole schools of thought, focuses on the most minute and trifling details of mundane existence, and does so almost religiously with, one might say, a near phobia for waxing theological. This low-grade hedonist focuses on endless lists of details: the exact feel of a handkerchief, the exact thread-count of a sheet, the precise region a wine is grown in and how long that wine was aged. Such a person must always be speculating as to how a piece of furniture was made, who the designer might have been, what woods and fabrics were used, and whether or not a better raw material or craftsperson might have been found. Such a being will continuously delineate between inferior foods and superior foods, and will never cease from pointing out the pros and cons of a certain brand of china or cookware. The details of clothing will also be pored over until one can bear to hear no more about the assorted technical and stylistic differences between one type of garment and another. Along with these considerations are the considerations of how everyone in one's environment is faring, given the ever-growing and ever-changing list of specific and detailed material requirements bandied about by the upwardly-mobile. In such an environment, one is all but morally enjoined to spend hours, days, or weeks, fleshing out whether or not someone is slowly falling out of favor and out of fashion. The all-important topic of who may or may not be on the ascendancy must also be turned over with near-surgical care. (Among Maggie's people, questions about mind-numbingly mundane details could, without fail, be used to interview those seeking membership in the upper-middle-class to see if they had a sentimental bent toward the world of ideas. Idea-oriented people were, as a matter of course, sent back to the lower-middle-class from whence they came until such time as they returned swearing that nothing but the most practical matters would ever interest them again. But lest we seem to be unduly picking on this one social scene in Southern California, it would be fair to note that it was most often the goal of the upper-middle-class everywhere to kill off curiosity and intellectualizing.)

Maggie Castlewhite made it her holy obligation to study up on, and become the master of, every vapid physical detail of the life of an upper-middle-class white woman from Burbank. This expertise in the canon of superficialities that, all taken together, form almost the entirety of Southern Californian life, had a dual purpose: It ensured that conversation would never drift into the decidedly low-brow realms of ethics, spirituality, economics or, god-forbid, politics, and it guaranteed one would have a lot of free mental space to be weighing the many grim alternatives involved in being the supervisor of assassins. When one masters all of the minutia with which the semi-idle and semi-rich occupy themselves, one can function on automatic pilot, leaving one's true inner resources available should the phone ring with some ominous portent or horrific project. The life of endlessly listing the details of where one went, what was said, what was purchased, what was seen, what was eaten and what beverages were consumed, left all of one's analytic faculties completely unused and therefore fresh. Were a letter, a voicemail, or any other communication to come, one would be free to spring into action, having not exhausted one's self with truly meaningful human contact. Additionally, with such an assiduously-myopic focus, one was bound to remain popular and surrounded by several layers of upper-middle-class insulation, again ensuring one would remain forever ready and competent to answer the call of higher duty, however evil or terrifying that duty might be.

And so our Maggie hosted and chatted, always remembering to criticize, mock and belittle every lower-middle-class attempt to be hip, while simultaneously fawning over and lionizing every person who looked like his or star was rising. By adhering so strictly to the protocols of her crowd of people, and by achieving mastery over every pettiness they concerned themselves with, she was able to keep her true self in reserve. She was, after all, a truly deep person; and the degree to which social success lay in such obviousness and amidst such an ocean of axiomatic truisms — this never ceased to amaze her. Were being so false and so empty a thing not required by her current line of employment, she would have never bothered with it. And thus it was under such circumstances and among such people that she sat when the upstairs phone line rang. (She had slipped up a bit, because the party was at its crescendo and the noise was almost deafening, and thus she didn't catch the sound of the upstairs phone ringing. Unfortunately, her husband did, and this was not the first time he did. There was something that bothered him about the separate phone line upstairs, and this sometimes created tension in his relationship with his wife.)

*

Maggie's husband had gone upstairs to tuck their younger daughter in bed in hopes of having the rest of the night free to enjoy socializing. But the wrong phone rang, the one that always gave him a funny feeling. While he'd agreed before marrying Maggie that he would not insist on knowing what she did for a living, he now rather regretted agreeing to that. It somehow felt that every time he forgot about the nagging question of what his wife did to support their elite lifestyle, that pesky upstairs line would ring and throw him into a troubling inner-debate as to whether he should have signed on for such a life with such a partner.

He answered the phone and was told to tell Maggie that Howard was on the line and that he needed to speak to her urgently. As he went downstairs to tell his wife who was waiting on the phone for him, his daughter called out from her room. He went over to tend to her.

"Daddy," said the daughter from her bed as her dad came over to reassure her.

"What, honey?" he replied as he sat on the side of her bed.

"Is mommy a murderer?" inquired the child tremblingly.

"What on earth would make you ask such a thing?" said the dad reproachfully.

"The kids at school — they sometimes say that they overhear their mom and dad talking about it. Is it true?"

"Oh good God," said the dad gently.

He took his daughter up in his arms and added, as he looked into her face, "Please forgive you mother. Her life is hard. She involved with some bad people."

"But they say she's a police woman?" protested the daughter.

"Yes, yes," the dad said with a resigned chuckle. "Maybe it's something like that. But listen to me," added the dad sternly. "When the other kids talk about these things, pretend you don't understand and change the subject. Nobody really knows what your mother does, not even I do. We're all only guessing. But please, when you get older, don't judge her too harshly. I don't think she meant to end up this way. Her kind of life — I don't think you can ever change once you live that way for too long. She has to be who she is now. Be kind to her."

"Okay," said the child in far too adult a way for one of her age.

After giving his daughter another hug goodnight, he waddled down the stares morosely, feeling a little bit guilty for stranding Howard, (whoever Howard might be), on the phone for so long. Maggie was surrounded by a talkative groups of social climbers when her husband interrupted her, looking at her in a sadly judgmental way.

"It's Howard on the phone," he quipped bitterly. "It's urgent, of course — always urgent."

Maggie's husband gave her another long, somber look before turning away to go pour himself some Kentucky bourbon on ice.

Maggie suddenly put on a bright smile for her guests and said, "Oh, it's just my friend Howard. He's probably going through a hard time. Please excuse me. Never mind my husband. He's a bad mood. I'll be back in fifteen minutes. In the meantime, get yourselves back into the catering line and keep all that good food from going to waste, okay darlings?"

*

"Howard, my dear. I haven't heard from you in ages. You're mister smooth. I'd kind of thought you'd never have a real problem again. But you're not calling to be social, are you?"

"Maggie, I'm in trouble, serious mental trouble."

"This isn't like you. You're the most well-adjusted guy we've got. I've seen your background. You don't have any psychological issues, not that I saw in your file."

"I know. I know. But my skin is crawling — like I want to jump out of my skin. Should I go to the emergency room and get some pills?"

"This is crazy, Howard. Does your supervisor know what you're going through? How long has this been going on. Why now? Is your case falling apart?"

"No, the case couldn't be coming along more perfect. It's textbook classic, not even a hitch. That's the thing that's bugging me. Why am I walking around feeling horrible? It's like a paranoid thing. I catch myself looking around, looking over my shoulder."

Maggie said, "Hold on, Howard. I've got to go downstairs for a moment."

She got up from the bed she was sitting on and laid the cradle of the phone on her nightstand. Breezing downstairs, she caught her husband making another bourdon-on-ice for another party guest.

"Darling," she said curtly, "don't put that away. Pour me one right now."

"Whatever," said her husband as he shook his head and spilled some bourbon into a glass.

She grabbed it and whisked herself back upstairs with the drink, all the while smiling brightly back at her guests.

She picked up the phone and sat on the bed again.

"So listen, Howard. I've got bad news for you."

"Is it bad? Am I crazy?"

"No, my dear, you're not crazy. That's the problem. If you were, I wouldn't be so worried."

"What are you worried about?"

"Howard, you're being followed."

"How do you know?"

"Because you're — a sensitive guy. You run on natural instinct, being so straight and all. What we have here is your subconscious telling you something that you can't consciously know. But that's what it is, my friend. You're skin is crawling because you're picking it up somehow, picking up a signal, a vibration, somehow, that you're being followed. I've seen this happen before."

"You mean I'm psychic or something?"

"Well, that would be overstating it. It's nothing as glamorous as all that. But it's a bit like that. I know when an agent has it and when he doesn't; and you would be just the type."

"What do I do now?"

"Nothing, Howard, nothing at all. You just let mama take care of that kind of thing."

"Take care of?"

"Yes, take care of."

"What are you going to do to the guy who's trailing me?"

"You know I can't tell you that right now. All I can tell you is that too much of the economy is at stake. Whoever is following you won't just bust some of the people. He'll get everyone busted, and that will put too much strain on the system. You know the way we do it — skim a few of the bad guys off the top to keep everyone from overdoing it. But, the people we're up against want to get rid of all corruption and they want to do it now. They're juveniles and haven't faced the fact that all of us are too deep into this kind of economy to rip the whole thing apart like brutes. Your kind of work needs to be incremental, not earth shattering."

"Okay, but what do I do about these creepy feelings I got all over. How am I going to get to bed tonight?"

"You're going to get to bed because I'm the mama and because I say that tomorrow the creepy crawlies will be gone. I promise."

"You mean you're going to off someone."

"Howard! Do not push me. You know the rules. I handle the tough business. You keep to investigating, okay?"

"Maggie, I'm scared."

"Honey, I promise you. By tomorrow you won't be feeling this way. Trust me. I always keep my word."

Upon receiving this firm and overly-parental reassurance and guidance from Maggie, Howard noticed that he did, in fact, calm down a bit. There were some minor pangs of conscience as to the fate of whoever it was that was apparently tailing him, but somehow, when he laid down, his problems all seemed to wash away like sandcastles at high tide.

*

There was a kind of Internet before our Internet, and Maggie had a computer that could handle that. She quickly got on her machine and asked which economic operatives were known to be lurking in Northern California. It was not long before she received an answer back. UKEU, (UK Economic Underground), a subversive European business publication that specialized in exposing things so big that no one could afford to have them exposed, had one of their people roaming about the Bay Area with an eye on exposing, as one of their editors put it, "the entire kleptocracy that masks itself as the world's largest economy." He was apparently driving a Lamborghini with tinted windows. She would have an agent follow that person to see if that person was following Howard. Word had already come back that no one wanted Howard's work disrupted by any outsider. If indeed someone was trying to break in on Howard's game, that person would have to be made to, as she liked to put it, "become gravely ill," the way out-of-favor Soviets used to do.

Sure enough, when Howard got up the next day, he felt great, as if he'd had one of those miraculous one-day recoveries from a cold that one fears will last weeks. In a couple of hours he was back in the parking lot in San Francisco with a steaming mug of coffee, listening to 97.4 FM, or, as he liked to call it, "yellow-cube radio." His near-nervous-breakdown state seemed to vanish as quickly as it came. The car with tinted windows, the one he'd never noticed, never returned to the parking lot. (Additionally, the Northern Marin coasts have very high infestations of great white sharks, and so the body of the UKEU agent was quickly devoured, torn apart by three competing sharks. Some murders never out.)

Maggie's "special helpers" bore no malice toward their victim and thus were not upset about concluding their "patriotic duty." Baleen whales were easily seen in the distance, surging out of the water, gulping thousands of fish at a time. Neither the fish nor the whales were favored by nature or by the gods. And this reminded the leader of the group that they had intended to do some sunset fishing before they went all the way back to the dock. No one could deny there was something special about Point Reyes and the surreal, almost phosphorescent way light glittered on the "wine dark" water there. Oddly, the giant herd of renowned tule elk stood frozen on the hills above the shore a half mile away. They always seemed frozen there, as if somehow they never ate, never mated, never fought, never ran. But clearly they'd had to do all of that to be as successful as they were. But the questions surrounding them would continue to be unanswered for most ordinary observers. Substantial fish, dinner-catch size, were pulling hard on the assassins' fishing lines. Dinner would be good and fresh, and almost free. You could never get rich doing this kind of government work, but it had its perks. Maggie's special helpers ate and drank well.

7. Your Desperation And Flexibility

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Weeks later, Hugh asked, "What's the matter, Cheryl?"

"Hugh, I've got another job for you, but the job is a bit too big for just one worker."

"Just send someone else along with me."

"It's not that easy. It needs to be someone we trust. This job is a nasty one. We need another worker, like you, someone who won't fret over the job being illegal and someone who won't snitch on us. That's kind of a tall order these days."

"Bummer," said Hugh, "so what are you gonna' do?"

"Well, I was hoping," said Cheryl looking forcefully at Hugh, "that you might have a friend who would be interested in our . . . business model."

"You know me. I'm not that social. Sure, I've got a few pals here and there, but no one that close."

"I'm in a bind here. I can't be pestering the gals on the legit side of the office to try to convert one of their normie workers into one of us. They frown on that kind of thing. I've tried before."

*

97.4 FM, yellow cube radio, was broadcasting loud and clear, and Folsom had a hunch this current exchange between Cheryl and Hugh would present him with another opening to get a bit more intimate with his "persons of interest" (as his agency like to call such criminals). He turned off "the radio" and got out of his car and locked it. He was not exactly sure how he was going to handle this, except that he would do what he always did, wait for everyone else just to give him the answers he needed. One thing for sure, when his intuition told him to move, he didn't wait till the moment passed and the opportunity was lost. His superiors were aware of how often Folsom acted boldly on such hunches and didn't appreciate this almost beatnik style of improvising; but on this one point Folsom was a bit rebellious and unreasonable, and so his supervisors had learned to live with Folsom's quirky way of doing business.

*

Sandy said, "Excuse me, but what are you doing in here?"

"Oh nothing, really, I just was applying for a job."

"But weren't you that weird guy who was telling people you worked with me?"

"Oh, I got the name wrong, silly me. They told me it was Cheryl, not Sandy."

"Is that where you're going, to Cheryl's office?"

"But yes, uh. Um, the paperwork. I forgot the — do you have the forms?"

"Do you mean the application packet? You lost your application packet?"

"Ah, yeah, the packet, yes, yes. Um, do you have an extra, I just . . ."

Exasperated, Sandy turned around to go get the application packet from a file cabinet, all the while muttering to herself, "God, what a dumb-shit. Where the hell are we digging up these people. For Christ's sake! We're not going to be in business long if we keep this up."

She pulled an application packet out of the file cabinet and gently slapped it into Folsom's hand which was on his chest. She took another look at his messed up hair, his crooked tie, his un-ironed long-sleeve shirt and his coffee stained blazer, beneath which was a little too much bulk, and shook her head reprovingly.

"Okay, handsome," she said, now chuckling to herself, suddenly overcome by pity for this unsightly creature. She put one hand on his shoulder, as if to comfort him slightly, and pointed down the hall to Cheryl's office.

Folsom grinned like a grateful goofball upon whom the authorities have momentarily had mercy. He kind of half ducked and bowed as he trudged toward Cheryl's office door.

*

Cheryl's office door flew open. Folsom stood there, blinking dumbly, like the proverbial deer in the headlights. He was slightly hunched over. His now untucked shirt hung loosely over his pudgy stomach. He held the application packet with both hands, delicately, as if handling radioactive material. He stared forward.

"Hey, mister," Cheryl said, "don't you know it's rude to just burst into people's offices without knocking?"

"Rude, yes," replied Folsom. "So sorry. I didn't know . . . didn't know where . . ."

Hugh turned to look at Folsom, and he was amused. He simply smirked and said, "Oh, it's you again. What's up?"

"They gave me an application packet . . . here," said Folsom.

Cheryl tuned to Hugh as if pleading for advice on how to deal with this ungainly intruder.

Hugh said, "I thought you were working for Sandy. Anyway, me and Cheryl are like a different division of this company. We sort of operate on our own over here and she doesn't take in many applicants. Our work is sort of specialized. It probably wouldn't be your thing."

"Um," grunted Folsom. "I'm tired, very tired. Could I sit down . . . sit down here for a moment?"

Cheryl looked on in mild revulsion, but Hugh reassured her. "He's a cool dude, not a bad guy. We had a little talk out by the waterfront. Who knows, but maybe he could help us out a little. He seems like a very understanding person."

Cheryl motioned with her hand graciously, indicating that Folsom was welcome to take a seat near the wall next to the door. Folsom lumberingly plopped himself into the chair and leaned back, heaving out a heavy sigh.

"Why don't you tell us a bit about your employment situation?" inquired Cheryl.

"I tell you, it's not easy. All the temp agencies are out of assignments for me. I've worked hard all my life, but it seems like I'm just spinning my wheels, growing old and alone with no payoff."

As Folsom reached for his trusty handkerchief to wipe the sweat of his forehead, Hugh smiled and said, "You practically read out minds. Me and Cheryl talk about that all the time. All our money goes to rent, no matter how much we seem to earn. How will we ever buy a house? At the rate we're going, it's all going to amount to a Medi-Cal nursing home."

Folsom leaned forward and clasped his hands together, letting the application packet fall to the floor. He looked up and said, "At least you two are making rent. I'm a month-and-a-half behind on my rent. If I don't pull off a miracle in the next couple of weeks, I'm walking the streets begging for change. You know, I'm all alone in this world. Parents died when I was young, and then it was just foster home after foster home. I got no roots, nothing left to loose. If I disappeared tomorrow, no one would even notice. I tell you — it's like I'm invisible. Do you know what I mean?"

There was a momentary silence as Folsom looked at them. Now there was a look of alertness on his face. Suddenly Folsom didn't seem goofy at all. Hugh and Cheryl looked at each other severely.

"Did one of our clients tip you off about us?" inquired Hugh.

"Bingo," replied Folsom. "They told me not to tell you who they were, 'cause they were worried you might be mad, but they told me I wasn't making it . . . that I'd never make it, you know, the way I am, unless . . . unless I was willing . . . willing he said to go . . . go all the way, he said."

Hugh turned to Cheryl and said, "Hey, this could be the extra guy we need to finish that huge stack of paperwork for your stock market friend."

Cheryl nodded to Hugh almost imperceptibly then stood up and walked over to the spot on the floor in front of Folsom. She leaned down and gathered the materials in the application packet. Then she stood up and tossed the whole packet into the trash and sat back down.

"You won't be needing that application packet. Over here we have a much simpler form." She handed him a single sheet." You just put in your name, your social security number and your driver's license number; and there's W2 form on the bottom. That's it."

"That's it?" said Folsom incredulously.

"That's it," replied Cheryl. "You might say that your desperation and flexibility are your strongest attributes. You can be trained to do the rest."

Hugh leaned forward and shook Folsom's hand, "Welcome aboard, friend. It looks like we'll be working together, after all. You came at just the right time for us to get this next gig done without too much fuss. You might as well have been psychic, seeing as how you had perfect timing."

Folsom chuckled, "Yeah, one woman I dated long ago, back when I was still doing that sort of thing — she said to me, 'Howard, it's like you can hear everything I say, even when we're not together — like you've got magic ears.'"

"Well," concluded Hugh, "you don't strike me as a guy who drinks hard liquor, but we'd be honored if you made an exception and joined us in a toast."

Folsom nodded in solemn agreement as Hugh went to the shelf and pulled out the bottle. After Hugh pored each of them a large shot glass full, they all toasted to their next assignment.

*

The roar of the ocean at Ocean Beach was almost deafening. The old Sutro Baths always made for a fantastic sunset walk. And, in Cheryl's case, she was making that walk with her main beta-orbiter, J.D. As they walked along the shore, suddenly a school of flying fish emerged from the water and began flying toward the Farallon Islands, alternatively diving into the water and hurling themselves out of it, winging their way into the incipient twilight. She was not in love with J.D. and had never slept with him, preferring to keep the friendship limited to kissing and hand-holding. J.D. tolerated this because he had no other dating prospects whatsoever. In the distance killer whales peeked their heads out of the water to observe the migrating arial fish. They would not waste their time trying to catch them.

8. A Pink Sheet For A Failing Steel Mill

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"Howard? Um, Mr. Folsom?"

"Yeah, that's me."

"So, would you consider yourself a writer?"

"Mm, not really so much."

"But did you ever have a creative writing class in high school?"

"Oh sure. Yeah, they made us writer a few poems, a short story or two, that kind of thing. It was no big deal."

"True, but that's enough for us to work with. You don't have trouble expressing yourself in your jobs, do you?"

"Nah, no trouble with that. I could write your basic report, fill out forms, all that. Heck, I once helped write an office procedure manual when I was younger."

"Great, that'll be more than enough for us to work with."

"So what is this job again?"

"It's your basic penny-stock pump-and-dump operation. We got hundreds and hundreds of stocks that are going nowhere unless we give them a shot in the arm, so to speak, a real dose of uppers. Each week, for the next few weeks, we send out a mass mailing to people with real portfolios, people who've got some spare change to throw around."

"But I don't understand my role in this."

"Where you and your coworkers come in — that's the key element here. Each of these stocks is basically garbage. We call them pink sheets. On a normal day, you couldn't give these stocks away. The sales commission on them exceeds their value."

"So that's where the creative writing comes in?"

"Exactly, so we've got to pump the stocks up by sending out a full-color brochure with all these leaflets stuffed in them. Each leaflet is a story, a completely fabricated story about how the stock will soon be shooting up in price due to some new development."

"What development?"

"The development you make up. Me and my partners — we don't have time to be making up a hundred separate stories per week, so that's why you two are here. You and Hugh will be our creative writers."

"How does this work?"

"Okay, so each of you has dozens of stock listings on your desk. But next to those pink sheets is a big binder full of descriptions of almost every industry running in the U.S. today. In that binder, each of the industries is described in some detail, including what it takes to make it in that industry, and, you know, what it takes to fail in that industry. At the end of each article, it's got phone numbers of all the leading players in that industry. Your job is to look up the industry, learn just enough about it to talk a good game of bullshit, and then call a few of the players and ask them a bit about what makes their industry work. You find out who the winners and losers are and what they did to end up that way. Eventually an angle occurs to you, something that the buyer would want to hear, something, if it were true, that would make the stock seem like a no-brainer."

"Okay, let me try this." (Folsom finds a pink sheet for a failing steel mill on the verge of filing for bankruptcy, a floundering concern called "Seminary Ridge Steel Company.") "Hey look. I don't even need to go into the binder for this one:"

Chinese steel mill giant, Han Dynasty Metal Works, bids to buy out Seminary Ridge Steel Company. Han Dynasty brings with it several new American contracts situated in the American Midwest. Rapid expansion planned. Thousands of jobs to be added to the local economy.

"Howard, that's perfect! I wouldn't have taken you for the sort who could have come up with that off the top of your head."

"You could say I've had an insider mindset for a long time."

"Great! So what we're going to do is bundle together about fifty of these every few days and send them out to everyone our direct-mail specialist has made out as a possible mark. The marks drive the price from a few cents to a few dollars. That's when we sell all our shares. (That's the dumping part, after you just pumped them.) That's the whole game. We're going to be in the other room buying up shares of all these worthless pink sheets, and you'll be pumping them like crazy. Our direct marketing guys mail out the brochures with all the pumps, and then we all get ready to dump."

"But won't the SEC be on you within a month?"

"Yes, in almost exactly a month, which is why this operation stays open for four weeks and then vanishes. It's a shell corporation inside a shell corporation. It's offshored and outsourced and headquartered in a P.O. box in Liberia. By the time the feds close in, there's nothing here but the carpet and the acoustic ceiling tiles and some deactivated wires sticking out of the walls. Not even you or Hugh will ever even know my real name. But don't worry, your temp agency is the one bill we're going to pay. In fact, we already paid part of it in advance, just to show that we treat our brothers and sisters in crime with all due honor."

"Hey, I like this. I could do this creative writing thing all day. It's like my creativity's been kind of pent up for so long. I just feel like I could use this gig to really express myself."

"Far out, guy. Cheryl really found a live wire with you."

"Yeah, a live wire. That has a ring to it. Yeah, a live wire for sure."

*

"Cheryl, It's Hugh"

"What's up? Is everything going good over there? Is Howard working out?"

"Oh yeah, Howard is really taking to this game. He's a natural. As for me, well, they got me on the right medication. It's all smooth sailing."

"What can I do for you?"

"Right, that's the tough part. We're going to need to break a bit of protocol, just this once."

"Why?"

"The job is bigger than we thought. Business is really hopping over here. We're going to need you to come and help out, just for a week, till we're caught up with the pace of these folks."

"Ooh, but that's not a good precedent to set, me leaving my desk here and being a regular temp over there. And it screws up our plausible deniability when the feds come. If we can claim not to know too much about what each other is doing, maybe one of us lives to work another day."

"I know. I know. but this job just rocks. The manager here says he thinks, if we can keep up with the guys on the purchasing side, that there might be more money for all of us in this job than he originally thought. They're really enthusiastic folks. I think you'd get inspired just being around them for a little while. And Howard reads his pump pieces out loud to us, like a poet would. This is really a fun gig. It might be worth it to make an exception to our usual policy and work with us here in the — what do they call it — 'public relations pit.' You don't have to tell the Vice President. Just pretend you need to call off sick for a few days or so. The folks on the legit side don't ever have to know you did some temp work with us. Who knows, but maybe we could get a month or two ahead on rent and have a little breathing room for a change. What do you say?"

"Oh, alright. But just this one time."

"Great, then can I tell the client the three of us will be here tomorrow morning to keep putting out press releases on time for the big buys?"

"What the heck? I could use a change of pace. Why not? We've kept the rules pretty good up till now. We can loosen up for a big gig like this. Sure. Okay."

*

The next day got off to a productive start. Cheryl was not quite as good at writing press releases as Hugh and Howard were, but she was good enough and fast enough to keep everything running on schedule. The most important part of the operation, from the point of view of management, was the first few of 'launch days.' Once they got off to a fast start, Howard and Hugh could do okay on their own and Cheryl could return to her office. That was the theory, anyway.

Howard wanted to stretch out his term as a temp pump writer till he really felt he got the most intimate knowledge he could of this type of enterprise. He regularly plied the managers of the operation about every aspect of their work, claiming he felt he might like to work with them at future 'pop-up' enterprises.

*

About four days into the operation, the office was humming like a finely-tuned machine, with buyers in one office scooping up hundreds of thousands of shares of stock per hour, all nearly worthless. Howard, Hugh and Cheryl were trudging through industry binders, calling information sources and scribbling down exaggerated and fabricated claims about the future potential of these stocks. And, in turn, the buyers were scheduling dump days when millions of shares of stocks could be dumped back into the market, causing the stocks to again collapse to their natural levels and, in turn, damaging the portfolios of thousands and thousands of unsuspecting amateurs out there in the investing world.

Howard, Hugh and Cheryl had their heads down as they sat at a row of tables which all faced the door. They were all high on either coffee, cigarettes or coke, or all three. At first they did not notice two burly, thuggish men quietly sliding up to each side of the office door. As it stood, the whirring sounds of bulky computer fans in the other room had precluded the possibility of them hearing anyone walking softly on the carpeted floor. Emerging from among these men, and standing in the middle of them, was Maggie Castlewhite, dressed, as always, in a form-fitting, knee-length pastel skirt. Her eyes were wide open and shining, and she was completely at ease.

"Hey guys," she softly, but firmly said, "can we talk?"

*

Folsom looked up, pen still in hand, as though he'd been caught in the act of breaking into a safe.

9. Burn The Whole Thing Down

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Before Maggie Castlewhite walked in on the pump-and-dump stock puffers, one of which was a subordinate, she'd had a short exchange in the parking lot outside the office building where the market manipulators were renting their suite.

A man was sitting in a Lamborghini with tinted windows, yet another scandal monger from the UKEU. Her two bodyguards approached the car with guns drawn, slowly creeping to within about a dozen feet of the vehicle. They were anticipating the windows rolling down and gunfire pouring out at them. This however did not happen.

At last Maggie decided to risk her own life in order to have a frank discussion with this reporter. As she approached the vehicle, one of the tinted windows slid down two inches. From the crack in the window a darkish sounding voice emerged saying, "Get in." Maggie's instincts told her she was not in danger. She crossed to the other side of the car as the door unlocked. She got into the passenger seat as the doors relocked.

"Don't you know we just killed the last guy you people sent here to spy on Howard? Why are you trailing him so avidly? It's not like he's penetrated the biggest crime network on earth."

"That is where you would be wrong, ma'am. It's true no one of Hugh and Cheryl's clients are big bosses in the world of white collar crime. But, if you think about all they've seen over the last several months, you've got to admit that they're dangerous."

"I don't get it. Why would any of these busts mean much of anything to the average citizen?"

"What you don't get is that my investigation is not about any single crime. It's about the fact that the whole economy runs on crime. I'm not here to uncover one scam. I'm here to prove the point that scams are the very backbone of the whole economy. That's what your average news consumer doesn't want to see and doesn't get told. Me — I plan to rub it in everyone's faces until they can't escape the truth."

"That will collapse the whole world market. Stocks wold plunge overnight, exposing . . ."

". . . exposing that beneath all the stealing is nothing but piles of debt, that debt being another kind of stealing. It's all stealing. I don't mean to say that no one works hard for a living. Hundreds of millions of people put in eight, ten, or even twelve honest hours every day for most of their lives. I'm not calling anyone lazy. In fact, you have to work really, really hard to even get yourself in the right position to really steal. They don't hand out stealing rights to useless bums. The right to steal without getting punished, is, in fact, the ultimate reward in every puritanical system. So yeah, those CEOs work fifty, sixty — seventy hours a week on stealing. It's hard, hard work. I'll be the first to admit that. In a way, they kind of earned the stuff they stole. But, you know, the courts — they don't take into account whether stealing is a twenty-year career path or a one-time spontaneous opportunity. They just look at whether the proceeds were stolen or not; and I'm here to tell you everyone's going to see how much stealing really goes on."

"So you don't give a shit how many people get hurt? If you unravel all this at once, a billion people go down. Do you really want that on your hands?"

"Let the capitalist simps go to hell. I say burn the whole thing down."

"Burn it down so you can rush in and exploit the chaos and grab the reins of power?"

"Vladimir Lenin could not have expressed it better."

"Do you believe in Vladimir Lenin?"

"Fuck yeah, I do."

"But nobody believes in Communism anymore."

"They don't have to believe in it. Remember, we don't allow voting, so their disbelief isn't a factor. The only thing I need them to believe is that their whole economic world is just one sandcastle at high tide. The rest takes care of itself."

"But you're not much of a Marxist, considering you're here in a Lamborghini and you don't even carry a gun. Revolutionaries are supposed to be armed and live in austerity."

"Ha, the childlike innocence of such a caricature. We live like the party leaders live everywhere. The fact that we won't allow our people to be caught with guns on them is a separate matter. Don't worry, though, because when the time is right, there'll be more than enough guns to spare."

"You know that my two guys out there wouldn't hesitate to kill you if I got out of this car and so much as winked at you."

"Bulletproof windows, ma'am."

"But you'd have to get out of the car at some point, and then, just like the last guy, you'd end up shark bait."

"It doesn't matter. We've got an army of people who vow to take my place if you off me. The fleet of tinted Lamborghinis goes on forever, and so do the investigators after me. Kill me — and a week later my replacement continues on. Our sheer numbers will wear you out."

"So your bottom line is that Hugh, Cheryl and Howard get subpoenaed and sing for a month to a grand jury that rocks the planet."

"Exactly, madam."

Maggie heaved out a frustrated sigh and exited the car, telling her men to put their guns away as she waved them toward the office building.

As they approached the elevator, one of the agents said, "Why didn't you just have us shoot that guy?"

"For one thing, we're in the middle of San Francisco and someone would see; and then that would be another mess we'd have to cover up for," replied Maggie, " and the windows were bulletproof anyway. It wouldn't have been as easy as it looked."

"But what was he carrying? I'm just curious," prodded the other agent.

Maggie smiled ironically and said, "We were outgunned by people with no guns."

*

After Folsom had a moment to recover from the unplanned intrusion of Maggie Castlewhite, he said, "I wasn't in on this bust. Why didn't my direct supervisor notify me?"

"That's because I'm taking over this case, and your supervisor happily handed the job of supervising this mess over to me."

"So we're hauling them in now?"

"No, it's not like you think. Your two buddies will not have the privilege of going to jail in any way. We don't want them there."

"You mean they know too much?"

"Way too much. And you know way too much too. The three of you are a problem for me right now."

"What's going to happen to the guys in the buy-and-sell room?"

"We'll be taking all their computers and files and dismissing them from work. That's it."

"Where do Hugh and Cheryl go?"

"They go with you."

"And where am I going?"

"You ever been to Switzerland?"

"No, why?"

"Because you and your pals will be living there for a few years."

"How many years?"

"Three, Four, maybe five years, long enough for the UKEU to lose interest in you."

"The who?"

"I'll explain who the UKEU is on the way to the airport."

"But," objected Howard, "couldn't they just follow Hugh and Cheryl there?"

"Okay, I'm embarrassed to admit this," said Maggie, "but the Swiss authorities are much better at hiding people than we are. They've been hiding so many things for so long that you could say they've perfected the art form of making people vanish into thin air."

"I thought they agreed to let the world see their books. Total transparency and all that."

"They promise that every ten years just to cool the world community down, but, they've got old habits that don't change. They're the same old people, I promise, no matter what they say to the press."

"What am I going to do for a job?" asked Folsom.

"My thought is that you could be a kind of trainee, of sorts."

"What would I be training in?"

"The Swiss authorities will teach you all the ins and outs of hiding people, and, of course, hiding financial records too. We need to up our game in that skill set."

*

By the time Maggie and her entourage had arrived at the San Francisco International Airport, the UKEU was already waiting and watching. The UKEU saw Hugh, Cheryl and Folsom get onto a Swissair jet bound for Zurich. What they did not see is the same three people being loaded onto a vehicle disguised to look like a luggage and air-freight transfer truck. And thus they did not see our three protagonists being ultimately loaded into the first-class compartment of another Swissair jet bound for Geneva. Such was our protagonists' first experience of "the new Swiss transparency."

In all fairness to the Swiss government and banking system, more than one whistleblower had attempted to inform the world that the promise of reformed financial behavior was not being kept. Those souls were not killed, nor even beaten, but ever so gently chased from Switzerland to live the lives of lonely exiles in Germany. This is the way true gentlemen do things.

It seemed to Maggie that in the long run the UKEU would prevail. She harbored no belief in some final happy ending for the world economy. She described her job as one of "buying time" and "staving off the inevitable." As a point of thieves' honor, she did not have the UKEU reporter she'd just spoken to killed off. He'd done her a favor, and maybe even had some mercy on her. That counted for something. But, as if to make up for that, she'd make a point of hunting down and killing a few more of his colleagues once she was settled back into her sprawling home in Burbank.

*

Off the Daly City shoreline, just south of San Francisco, an unusual current had changed the temperature of the water. And with that current came a very rare appearance of several gargantuan, filter-feeding whale sharks not generally found in those waters. These creatures had only one daily mission that anyone could detect. They propelled themselves forward with their massive tales and opened their inordinately huge mouths, mouths so large that a whole human could easily fit inside them. Whatever creatures happened to evade those gaping jaws did not get eaten. Those creatures too small, slow or inattentive to get out of the way did get eaten. Rather than hunting by stealth or speed, a filter-feeder hunts by inhaling as great a volume of water as is possible. That approach leaves a lot to chance. There is obviously a limit as to just how controlling or preoccupied a whale shark could be. As random chance would have it, billions of krill were situated off the Northern California coast just then. The filter feeders opened their cavernous mouths and simply inhaled millions of creatures at a time. It was a good day to be a whale shark, a very rough day to be a krill.

10. Weapons He Was Prepared To Use

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The Swissair stewardess was never happy when she saw people enter the plane from beneath the plane. Why did any passenger have to be hustled onto a plane as if they were a piece of luggage? She did not know for sure, but the arrangement, about which she was warned to say nothing, didn't sit well with her. That level of absurd awkwardness had to mean that something about the world was out of control, and that particular something was so horrible that neither the government of the United States nor the government of Switzerland could control it. And her Swiss brain thought this: "One government is the most powerful in the world, and another government is the most clever in the world. Could not those two governments take care of their problems? If not, where did that leave the rest of the world?"

She was obliged to treat the three new "luggage passengers" like any other first-class passengers, as the whole crew had been ordered to try to be as professional as possible to people entering the plane through unorthodox means. She came down the aisle after the flight was securely underway and offered the guests anything they needed from the menu. Hugh ordered a double whisky on the rocks with no food. Cheryl ordered a mimosa and a small salad. Folsom would have a whole frozen-food-style steak dinner; and his tastes were such that he would not object, even slightly, to the low quality of that kind of fare on European flights. He ordered an ice-milk coffee with his meal. She took their orders as courteously as possible, but could not control the her urge to turn away coldly before gong to fetch their food and beverages.

After she returned with an involuntary scowl on her face, she gave the strange passengers all the things they had requested. They all received these with gratitude.

"So, I suppose you only have a one way ticket?" she inquired.

"Yes," said Hugh artfully, "it's urgent business. We didn't have time to plan for our return."

"But will you ever return?" pressed the stewardess, going against her strict orders not to ask any questions of passengers who came by way of the luggage compartment of the plane.

Folsom looked up, slightly alarmed, and added, "I'm sure we'll see you again when we come back the other way."

The stewardess turned away and mumbled to herself, "I shall be long retired by then," as she headed back to the bulkhead to fetch other passengers' orders.

Cheryl turned to Hugh and Folsom and said, "She's not happy about having to play along with this. It looks like they've made this move a few times too often for her comfort."

As the stewardess analyzed their faces, she thought, "There's two bad ones. They are bad already. And the third — he is not bad yet, but he will end up bad. All of this is very bad."

The Swissair stewardess also objected to an additional passenger on this flight, but this passenger did take round-trip flights. He was no good either, but he always returned, and he was clearly not on the run. He was there each time the "luggage passengers" were there. His blazer was a bit too bulky and he never took it off, even when the flight was well heated. He barely pretended not to be a government thug. His polite one-word and two-word answers were always unfulfilling and somehow painful. There was nothing very undercover about him, and his blazer even had a Swiss government logo above it. Obviously he had weapons on him, weapons he was prepared to use. And his hefty physique seemed to make it clear that he could wrestle more than one person at a time. The whole air about him had a grim darkness to it. It didn't help that he had a half-friendly smirk plastered on his face. That expression never left his face. He never drank alcohol on the plane and he never slept during flights.

She'd tried, countless times, to think of other work that she might do; but she was too old to find new employment based on her looks and too unskilled to find better work based on her intelligence. In a word, she was boxed in. The pay was just a bit too good to allow her to leave, but not good enough to liberate her in any way. She took a break in the stewardesses' seat in the bulkhead and thought, "This is just awful." But she could get no sympathy anywhere. Her coworkers really seemed to either not know what was going on, or perhaps they knew but were not bothered by it in the least. They smiled sincerely throughout most of their shifts and buzzed around the cabin in a breezy and effortless way.

As her break was concluding, she sat with her head in her hands and thought, "Do the young ones just have no morals at all?"

After her break, she walked by the seats of the "luggage passengers." Hugh had his eyes closed and his headphones on. Grandly buzzed by his double cocktail, he was nodding his head and tapping his fingers softly, indicating that he was rocking out. Cheryl's head was tilted to the side and she was dozing lightly, her left hand extended over the seat partition and rested on Hugh's arm. Hugh seemed quite at ease with his former boss taking such liberties with him. Folsom, unlike the other two, had adjusted his seat back as far as it would go and was completely crashed out, lightly snorting as his wide nostrils took in huge, generous breaths.

The stewardess passed them and thought, "No conscience at all. They are as relaxed as three old puritan women knitting in a rocking chair. How utterly shameful. There is a wide-awake government thug staring at them, yet they are all in dreamland, as if nothing was amiss in their lives. The young man with the headphones seems to think this is all some kind of entertainment. How very disgusting."

*

The Swiss alps were teaming with thousands of alpine ibex, the males sporting large, scimitar-like horns with which they would do battle in mating season as females looked on curiously, some nearby, some perched on cliffs so steep that one would have thought only birds could have flown up there.

11. A Wonderful Addition To Our Most Peculiar Society

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When the plane landed in Geneva, the hulking security agent came over to the three first-class passengers and spoke frankly and sincerely. "Having watched you three for several hours now, I must say that you seem like truly fine people who will make a wonderful addition to our most peculiar society." He then reached out with an oversized hand and gave them all a generous and open smile. His handshake was warm and firm.

Cheryl, as she was shaking the security agent's hand said, "You wouldn't happen to have a business card would you?"

Seeing that Cheryl was trying to pick up on him, he said in a most empathetic and kindly way, "Madam must understand that I am forbidden from mixing my professional and private life. Such conflicts of interest could pose a danger to my government. Involvements of that sort would surely interfere with the world-renown objectivity in which so many of us here are trained from a very young age. We are not a heartless people, but we do place professionalism above all other personal qualities."

Hugh laughed as Cheryl said jokingly, as though nursing hurt feelings, "Damn, I'm always striking out."

The security agent pretended not to hear this remark and again with a warm smile bowed courteously and replied, "It has been an honor." He then silently motioned for them to exit the airplane.

They were met in the terminal by several other security agents who put them into a luxuriously-appointed van and drove them into downtown Geneva where they were set up in a palatial three-bedroom apartment and told to await further instructions.

*

Folsom would be driven to work the next day to begin his new training position with the Swiss security services where he would, over the course of a few years, learn to hide anyone, including himself, no matter how desperate or complicated their circumstance.

It was well known that the witness protection program in the United States was almost silly in its ineffectuality, and everyone knew that witnesses in the United States were essentially volunteering to sacrifice their own lives whenever they testified. The sad pretenses of things like restraining orders and name changes were so weak in America that basically anyone with a high IQ and some savvy could find anyone. Revenge was not only sweet in America, but it was almost entirely cost-free and risk-free.

Folsom was to eventually head a new division in which really real witness protection and identity changes would be effected. Up to that point, everything in America, including the justice system, was so underfunded that almost every government program was more or less a skeleton composed of virtually thin air. The rule in the U.S. was essentially: Put up a shiny facade that says 'we care,' and then basically dump everyone to the curb to fend for themselves. Sophisticated people all over the world always marveled at how easily the vast majority of Americans unquestioningly fell for this. In Folsom's case, however, it was finally decided to truly fund the new department he would head.

12. The Global Friendship Bank

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The first few days in Geneva were quite amusing for Hugh and Cheryl. They wandered all the streets and took all the trams, stopped at cafés and bistros, and toured the museums and art galleries. They even held hands sometimes as they walked, although neither broached the touchy subject of romance. It was obvious enough their feelings were mixed and they were unsure if they wanted to complicate their lives, given that neither could choose to move out of their apartment if things went badly.

Finally Hugh complained to both Cheryl and Howard, "I'm too young to retire. It turns out I'm not the bum I thought I was. It's going to get boring just wandering around Switzerland with spies watching us at every turn. What am I going to do with myself? I need to work!"

*

The next morning Cheryl decided to make her big move. It was to her advantage that Hugh was bored and frustrated. It was the perfect mix of emotions for a former supervisor to take unfair advantage of. Hugh was seated in his pajamas at the kitchen table as Cheryl was toasting him a bagel. She didn't resent Hugh's laziness about doing housework or cooking. There was no excuse for it, but she didn't care. It was fun to be maternal and to treat Hugh a bit like an oversized child. It was an interesting change of pace, and, at this particular moment, it gave her a bit of additional power.

Hugh was droning on, (as he always did in the morning when under the influence of caffeine), basically telling the whole of his life story and the whole of his personal philosophy. Cheryl didn't pay too much attention to the specific ideas or plot twists, but instead focused on the musicality and the tonality of the monologue.

At last she brought him his bagel with both cream cheese and lox on top. She was wearing a pushup bra, and she brushed so close to Hugh when she set the plate down that one of her breasts brushed by his mouth. She lingered there for a moment, pretending to arrange things on the table when she noticed a slight erection forming in Hugh's pajamas. It was time to make her move. She grabbed his face and began planting wet kisses on his mouth. He yielded easily, and they had just began to french kiss in earnest when suddenly the front door flew open and startled them both instantly out of their romantic mood.

Howard had returned from work with a colleague, and the colleague said to them, "Now, now, kids. That will be enough of that sort of thing. You'll be reporting to work this afternoon and we need you to maintain some level of professional detachment. Of course I can't order you to desist, but I strongly advise it. The Americans have not subsidized this operation enough for us to give each of you your own separate apartment once lovers' quarrels start."

Both Hugh and Cheryl laughed. Cheryl let her hands fall to her side and hung her head as she stood there red-faced, but smiling. Hugh turned to the pair entering the room and said, "You're right. We just got a little crazy."

"No bother at all," said the slender, conservatively-dressed man accompanying Howard. "Geneva is not such a big city. Boredom sets in and folks can get a bit stir-crazy. It's a kind of cabin fever, if you will. People are driven to do inadvisable things every so often. As long as we eventually get our heads screwed on right, it all works out."

*

Just about a mile from the apartment, a new bank was opening up in a somewhat unsightly and cramped strip mall, not unlike the ones seen in sprawling U.S. suburbs. It's name, translated into English, was something like "The Global Friendship Bank," a name that came off as both cloying and just plain awkward.

The interior had a distinctly unfinished look, as if the whole operation were rather hobbled together in an undignified rush. Their future supervisor, the gentleman Howard had introduced them to at the apartment, took them on a very brief tour of the minimalist facility. The facility consisted of a smallish vault, (seemingly installed over a hurried weekend), a thrown-together data facility with a few bulky and outdated computers, and a rather austere-looking break room with a tiny microwave oven and a cheapish coffee maker. The two tables and the four chairs in there were made of remarkably-thin plastic and aluminum. There was no facility for ordinary tellers. Instead, there was a row of several cubicles in front which would house "account managers." Hugh and Cheryl were brought to the facility to see if they might like to train to work there to become account managers.

As they concluded their tour, it was obvious that Hugh and Cheryl were anxious to get to work as hanging around the apartment together all day was proving a bit emotionally-dangerous; and they had become clear that they needed to do something with their lives. And all they really knew was criminal work, and so Hugh pressed the supervisor with questions.

"Okay, so wait. This place doesn't look quite legit, right?"

"Oh no, it could never be, as you Americans say, 'legit.' We will soon begin to get on in years, and we can't wait forever for five percent raises to get us where we need to be. The math just isn't there, and, I assure you, I've done the math quite thoroughly. Rents in Geneva and San Francisco are comparable, and so the dilemma you faced there is the dilemma I face here. Of course your rent is paid, but mine isn't, so I'll need your help here."

"This is going to be your basic kind of money laundering operation, right?"

"Yes, unless you know of some other way to rescue a discredited man like myself who has failed at every conventional career?"

"Do Howard's people know about this?"

"Yes, they do. They had planned on you coming to work for me and my people."

"Where are the rest of your people?"

"They'll be moving into this office next week, but their English is not the best; and we have many English Commonwealth clients who would prefer people who speak English as a first language. That's where you could offer us a very valuable service."

"So everyone knows?"

"My good sir, it's not a question of how much money laundering goes on, but a question of where to shift it to. And, for now, we've decided to shift it back to this side of the Atlantic, not that Panama City isn't a great place to go. I find their banking sector to be perfectly robust."

"By 'robust' you mean corrupt?"

"Naturally, sir. I was assured by Howard that such things would not offend you."

"No, I'm cool, but I thought Switzerland was cracking down."

"Yes, cracking down on the old banks. The authorities have their hands full with making show-trials of the old-time bankers, (with the understanding that no one really stays in jail for any longer than a symbolic amount of time, just long enough to satisfy American reporters who fall for just any old thing)."

"But won't they catch us too?"

"In theory they could, but it would take at least three years before a small operation like this showed up on anyone's radar. Three years from now, incidentally, is the projected closing date of this little operation. So, you see, there just aren't enough auditors to crack down in any comprehensive way. And auditors usually don't push matters too very hard if you make it worth their while."

"But what if they did push hard?"

"A few have. Unfortunate fellows, really. But, to be clear, no one ever shoots them or assaults them. That kind of messiness is alien to our culture."

"Then where do they go?"

"After they are dismissed from their employment, we advise them to vacation in Germany for a decade or two. We're so charitable that we even buy them new homes there. It's all good and fine if they try to tell the German press everything they know, because the German press somehow gets bored of such stories after a short time. And anyway, German media moguls need a private stash to hide from their mistresses."

"Their mistresses?"

"Exactly."

"So, who are the customers, mostly?"

"The usual crowd, you know: folks who traffic in assorted vices, organizations that perpetrate unseemly levels of violence, higher ups in authoritarian regimes, that kind of thing."

Hugh shrugged his shoulders and said, "I'm game if she is."

"I'm cool," replied Cheryl.

"Then you shall report for training next week?"

Hugh looked a Cheryl who nodded in agreement. Then he looked at the supervisor and said, "See you Monday, friend."

They shook hands enthusiastically and turned to go back to their overpriced apartments.

Meanwhile the UKEU searched Zurich fruitlessly from top to bottom, looking for Hugh, Cheryl and Howard, but came up with nothing.

*

The sheer number of life forms in the Lake Geneva ecosystem are beyond our ability to calculate. Suffice it to say, in spite of everyone's misgivings and forebodings, the world is full of surprisingly resilient and adaptable creatures, and the world will not be ending anytime soon. The vast system of organisms in and around the lake continues its exploits without the slightest notion of there being any fundamental problem with the universe and its laws. The air above is full of birds and the water below is full of fish. Small crustacean and plankton abound. From around the world one can find sportsmen coming to the lake to cast their lines. The less adventuresome watch the boats from the balconies of their hotel rooms. A Eurasian otter, thought extinct in Switzerland, makes it way across the border with France. Life is forever beyond planning or controlling. It is endlessly inventive and persistent. It returns again and again.

*

At the Global Friendship Bank, many friends indeed were being made, friends whose deposits were both large and illegal. The bank itself, were it to be classified as an animal, would be classified as a parasite. In nature there is no stigma attached to animals that live off their wits or live of the fat of the land or sea. Hugh and Cheryl are of a subset of human beings that would be classified as just such parasites, were zoologists permitted to make such crass statements about human beings. And money itself could be seen as a kind of migratory species, always seeking lower taxes, higher interest and safety from predators. You never know which continent it will be going to next in its endless search for just the right environment to flourish in.

*

A world away, back in Northern California, surfers were hurling themselves onto the waves at Mavericks, placing their bodies in front of surges that could travel over sixty miles per hour and weigh over a million pounds each. Quests for love and money are like the attempts to surf those waves. Anyone unwilling to risk everything in order to conquer them can't be considered a serious contender. The big waves emerge like giants on the horizon. The human species is bold. It cannot resist the challenge of confronting them.

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