A Filthy Business [Kindle in Motion] Read online

  The job was to be on the phone. We weren’t paid to sit around and gossip about Joey’s past, or Shelly’s breasts, or the latest bit of action we picked up at the Carson City casinos, although we did, incessantly. We weren’t paid at all, unless we closed. Joey’s shop was pure commission, and that’s the way we liked it. You didn’t work for Joey Mitts to hedge the upside.

  On my desk, beside my laptop on which I typed up the official paperwork, was a sheet of leads, a calendar where I jotted numbers for callbacks, and an egg timer. The egg timer was the second most crucial piece of equipment next to the phone, far more valuable than the laptop or the calendar. As soon as I had a lead on the line I flipped the timer and started in on the script. If I couldn’t make the pitch, get a series of responses, and be on the edge of closing in three minutes, then I was off to the next number on the lead sheet. Some of these old-timers would take half a day with you just for entertainment purposes and then tell you to call back next week after they talked it over with their wives. Are you kidding me?

  “Luigi, one of the great advantages of trading with our gold program is the ability to utilize leverage. Now follow me closely on this. Gold’s trading at about twelve hundred dollars an ounce, right? Let’s say you put in fifty thousand dollars, that’s right, let’s not be pikers. If the price goes up to fifteen hundred dollars, which it will in a few months’ time, trust me on that, you’ll have made thirteen thousand dollars. Not bad. But we make our money not just on what we own, but on what we control, and if you use leverage to control three times as much, suddenly you’re making something like forty thousand dollars. That’s a boatload, Luigi. Better yet, that’s a boat. Do you see how I got that number? Isn’t that the type of security you’re seeking for yourself and your family?”

  On breaks I would pass by Joey’s office and head out the back door to stare at the terrain and smoke a cigarette. In the distance was nothing but the wind moaning its disappointment over a barren tract of wasteland. I was the highest-grossing senior account executive at Gold Dog International and the pay was pretty damn sweet, but still I was stuck in the wilderness. Like everyone else I had dreamed my future, and being just another drifting piece of desert trash wasn’t it.

  Don’t get me wrong, I was grateful for the job. It was tough out there for my generation. We were scrambling for the scraps left by the generations before us, and they hadn’t left much. The selfish bastards had outsourced the jobs that had kept them fat and happy for decades, had buried us in debt when we tried to get the education they said we needed to make a go of it, and had left us to fend for ourselves without health care or pensions in a freelance economy that was really as free as a set of shackles. Our generation did what we had to do to get by, showing off our tits on YouTube, or interning for peanuts with billion-dollar corporations, or selling gold certificates out of a boiler room on US Route 50. I once had a job in a law firm in Sacramento—that’s right, I’m a lawyer, put that in your little notebook—but when the boomers crashed the economy, that job went to hell and no one else would touch me. I was in scramble mode, and I ended up scrambling to Joey Mitts.

  And I’ll tell you something you might understand. I didn’t feel even a twinge of guilt at milking the geezers out of their end-of-the-world stash. It was their generation that had raised the generation that left us nothing but crumbs. If I was pulling out a piece of someone else’s inheritance, I figured I was just getting my share. And it was almost too easy. These old-timers had been primed by their favorite newscasters and political hucksters before I ever dialed their numbers. The world was going to hell, only gold would keep them afloat, and I was offering them a seat on the boat.

  “Now Luigi, our commission is only three percent. Based on the leverage, we can overcome that with a fractional move in the market. But I need to know now, am I wasting my time here, Luigi? Are we talking the smaller investment or the big move at fifty thousand dollars? Color me impressed. And what about your wife, is she going to step in and tell you to stick your money in a mattress? Why, I’m so sorry to hear that, Luigi, but I’m sure she’d want you to grab hold of the security you deserve in these difficult times.”

  I got the usual cheer from the other senior account executives when the printer started churning out the completed investment documents that would be overnighted to Luigi Cannizare. I’d call again in a few days and make sure the papers were signed and the check sent. Once the check cleared, my wallet would thicken with cash. Now I just had to get Joey’s approval. I slapped a few high fives, pulled the paperwork from the printer, gave Shelly a wink, and headed back to the big man.

  “Luigi Cannizare, fifty thou,” I said as I tossed the documents onto his desk, tipping his ashtray. “Boom.”

  The office was small, thick with smoke, sprinkled with bottles emptied, ashtrays filled, subpoenas ignored. Joey, his elbows on the desktop, took a long drag from his cigarette and let the smoke slide out his toadstool nose.

  “Tell me, captain,” said Joey. “You read him the script?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Every bit of it?”

  “Every bit that counts,” I said. “Every bit that got him to yes. What about a smile, Joey? I’m killing your leads. Don’t I get a smile?”

  Joey glanced down at the mess of ash and butts now spread across the wood in front of him, and swiped at it with the back of his hand.

  “Are you banging Shelly?”

  “What? Joey? No. No way. Give me some credit, she’s freaking fifty. And that was one of the things you told me at the start.”

  “Yes it was,” said Joey Mitts.

  “I wouldn’t do that to you, Joey. Not on my worst day. You’re like a father to me.”

  Joey stared at me a bit and then stabbed his butt into the ashtray. “I got a call from the attorney general’s office about a Roger Ludkins. Do you remember Roger Ludkins?”

  “Ludkins?”

  “His daughter says he was never informed that there was interest charged on the margin loan, or that the loan would be called if the price of gold slipped.”

  “Everything was spelled out in the documents he had to sign.”

  “The attorney general says that’s not enough. It needs to be explained in the sales pitch. Something about a contract of adhesives or whatnot.”

  “Adhesion.”

  “That’s it, yeah. Adhesion. He wants to interview the senior account executive on the case.” Joey lit another cigarette, inhaled deeply. “Dick Triplett.”

  “Good luck finding him,” I said, smiling broadly.

  “Who did you use for . . .” He shuffled quickly through the document pack I had just brought in. “For Mr. Cannizare?”

  “Look, I doubt this Ludkins can remember the size of his shoe, the way he was drifting in and out during our talk. He asked me if I was his son.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘I miss you, Daddy.’”

  “I’m gonna have to let you go, pally.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m making you money, here, Joey, real money. So Dick Triplett disappears. Who cares? I’ll be Tim Johnson, I’ll be Buddy Bernstein, I’ll be Dudley Downright Upright—it doesn’t matter as long as I’m selling, right?”

  “How many times did I make it clear you got to read the script? I had a lawyer go over it, it’s clean. That’s the point.”

  “Joey,” I said, putting a line of pleading into my voice, “from now on it’s word by word, I swear.”

  Joey just stared at me through the smoke, like he was staring into a mirror and not liking the view.

  “This isn’t right,” I said.

  “Since when does that matter? Don’t worry about it, pal, you’ll land on your feet, your type always does. There’s a guy. His name is Maambong. I met him when I was still in politics. A serious guy, if you know what I’m talking about. He’s looking for someone. He’s got other candidates, but it’s something you might should look into.”

  “What is he, Nigerian?�
��

  “No.”

  “What’s his racket?”

  “Whatever it is, you won’t play your bullshit with him if you know what’s good for you.” He handed me a slip of paper. “Give him a call. And try telling the truth for once, sport, it might pay.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. I rubbed my fillings with my tongue, tasting a copper that wasn’t there, and looked around at the dim, filthy office, the sun-bleached desert outside the window, the old mass of gristle that had been chewed and spat out onto the seat behind the desk. I always seemed to get cast out of whatever Eden I found myself in, even Edens as crappy as this. “Believe it or not, Joey, I’m going to miss this place.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have banged Shelly.”

  “What was I going to do? Have you seen the tits on her?”

  “Seen them?” said Joey Mitts, a sad resignation in his croak of a voice. “I paid for them.”

  3. Viva Las Vegas

  There was a time while I was living in California that I tried my hand at surfing, and in that period I learned a lesson. When an ocean wave is slamming you face-first into a rock, it’s difficult to appreciate the pattern of dips and swells flowing like a mathematical equation across the surface of the sea.

  I didn’t waste any time in packing my belongings after Joey Mitts gave me the sack. One thing I had practiced over the years when things inevitably turned to crap in my life was stuffing my belongings into whatever bags I could find and burning rubber out of Dodge. Into the narrow backseat of my gray 911 Turbo, bought used when I was still flush with lawyering cash, I threw a couple suitcases of clothes. Into the front trunk I jammed a box of personal items, which, if you know anything about Porsches, meant there wasn’t much in this world I considered personal.

  I gave a celebratory whoop as I motored south out of Carson City. Time to move on, and good goddamn riddance. But I had given a whoop when I left the call center after Joey had gotten his mitts on me, and a whoop when I left the law firm after that dustup with Boggs, and a whoop when I left law school for the firm, and a whoop when I quit the Walmart for law school, and a whoop when I graduated from college, and a whoop when I left my father’s house in New Jersey at last and for good. I had to admit, each successive whoop was starting to seem less celebratory and more forced. This whoop was the yelp of a beaten dog.

  I had no job, no income, no lover, no friends, no family I could rely on, and not even an addiction to keep me entrenched in the present tense. I was as rootless and free as you could be in America, nothing to lose, which sounded a lot better when Dylan was singing it. Let’s just say that when the landscape becomes a metaphor for your life, it’s better not to be driving through Nevada. And I was headed where every loose tumbling weed of humanity heads when things go wrong: Las Vegas. But in Vegas, at least, I had a dice-thrower’s chance of getting back on track.

  “Mr. Maambong. This is Phillip Kubiak. Joey Mitts suggested I give you a call.”

  “Ah, yes, Mr. Kubiak,” said Mr. Maambong in a precise voice, with an accent I couldn’t quite place beyond being west of California and east of Kazakhstan. “We’ve been expecting your call. And how is our dear friend Mr. Mitts?”

  “Prickly as ever. He mentioned you might have an opportunity for me.”

  “We have an opportunity, yes, for the right person. The question is whether that person is you.”

  “What exactly is the job, Mr. Maambong?”

  “Does it matter, Mr. Kubiak?”

  “Shouldn’t it?”

  “The opportunity pays extremely well.”

  “Then maybe it doesn’t.”

  “All you need to know is that we service a specific type of clientele, and to that end we require a specific type of employee. Whether or not you are of the satisfactory type will require a face-to-face meeting. Are you still in servitude to our friend?”

  “Not since twenty minutes ago.”

  “Excellent news,” said Mr. Maambong. “We are not above poaching, but it can be an unpleasant business. We will be in Las Vegas next Wednesday, perhaps we could meet then. The suite elevators at the Aria, let’s say at two in the afternoon.”

  “I’ll be there, Mr. Maambong.”

  “Splendid,” he said. “Come ready to travel.”

  Approaching Las Vegas in the dead of night, I came out of the mountains to see the lights of the strip beckon like a vision of promise in the distance. Even at that late hour the spotlights were blazing, the video billboards were whirling, the crowds were thick. I drove past the Wynn, the Venetian, the Bellagio, Paris, New York–New York, and every possibility under the moon floated in the air like motes of gold. Vegas is a city of maids and moguls, of fish and whales, of sweaty mobs and tanned, perfect bodies in air-conditioned cabanas. Wherever the line between the sides was drawn, I was in town to get on the right side of it. But as I pulled into the cement self-park behind the Excalibur, all to take advantage of the thirty-nine-dollar room rate, I knew just where I stood.

  There is nothing longer than a Vegas week spent alone. I drank desultorily and whored perfunctorily and watched porn halfheartedly on the in-room television. I ran the loop at Red Rock Canyon in the early-morning hours, just as the sun kissed the flanks of the rugged rocks. I tried to discover what I could about this strange Mr. Maambong on the net and came up empty. I dropped a blue suit at a dry cleaners and fiddled with my résumé. I took a day to drive out to the Grand Canyon and had an ice-cream cone on the South Rim and then drove back. I swam in the piss-warm Excalibur pool.

  The day before my interview I checked out of the Excalibur and into the classier and more expensive Hard Rock, in case Mr. Maambong happened to ask where I was staying. Wednesday morning I breakfasted early, took a quick swim, picked up my suit at the cleaners, printed my résumé on bond paper in the hotel’s business center. I shaved my jaw and my ears, plucked the hairs from my nose. I was brushed and bright and spiffy when I pulled into the front of the Aria and casually handed off my Porsche to the valet as if nothing could be more natural.

  I was sitting on a green couch in the Aria Sky Suite lounge, beside a square vase of white orchids, when she came for me. “Mr. Kubiak, my name is Cassandra. I’ll take you to Mr. Maambong now. Follow me, please.”

  In the ride to the high floor I tried not to give this Cassandra the up-down and failed, but she wasn’t paying me the least bit of attention. Red hair, green eyes, pale skin, loose white blouse, tight black skirt, green high heels. Her head was bowed, her neck was long, the toe of one shoe pointed to the elevator floor. She was a perfect piece of porcelain, and in the presence of her flawlessness I was as inconsequential as the elevator carpet. If I had a hammer I would have tapped her into smithereens. Mr. Maambong, Mr. Maambong.

  “Cassandra,” I said, “could I ask a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “What exactly does Mr. Maambong do?”

  “This and that,” she said, no smile cracking her faultless face. “And sometimes the other thing.” The elevator doors hissed open. “This way, please.”

  Cassandra led me through the wood-paneled entrance to the suite and then parked me in the parlor. I watched the twitch of her tight black skirt as she left the room. With its plush couch, its tasteful gray walls, the swirl of colors in its painting, it was like sitting in the waiting room of a topflight plastic surgeon. I opened my briefcase and pulled out my spiffed-up résumé. My leg bounced as I wiped my hand on my pants.

  “Ah, Mr. Kubiak, you have come.” The accent was familiar, the tone as formal as the phone call. The man who stood before me was tall, stick thin, bald as a coffee bean, cinnamon roast. His suit was white, his shirt red, his tie thin and black. He leaned heavily on a cane and wore dark round sunglasses.

  I leaped to my feet with embarrassing alacrity. “Mr. Maambong,” I said, reaching out a hand to shake. “Phillip Kubiak.”

  “Yes you are,” he said, lifting the cane in his right hand as an apology for not taking hold of my clammy palm. “You ha
d an easy trip, we hope. And we assume you are keeping yourself busy.”

  “Well, you know Vegas.”

  “Indeed we do, Mr. Kubiak.”

  “Call me Phillip.”

  “No thank you. Where are you staying?”

  “The Hard Rock.”

  “Ah, youth. Good. The pool, we are told, is a scene. What have you there?”

  “My résumé.”

  “A résumé, how charming.” He took my proffer, glanced at it for a moment, and then with his oversize hand crumpled it into a ball and tossed it onto the floor like a sneeze.

  “Maybe I should have put Harvard on it,” I said.

  “It would not have mattered. This is not the kind of employment you get with a résumé. A résumé only tells us what you think we are looking for, but we can assure you, Mr. Kubiak, you have no idea. We knew most everything on that piece of paper before we accepted your call, and we have learned more in the time since. Now let us find out the rest, shall we?”

  4. The Test

  Mr. Maambong sat across from me, his hands braced on his cane, the too-bright Vegas light reflecting in horizontal slashes off his dark round glasses. “You are lost in a desert,” said Mr. Maambong. “It is broiling hot, you are weak with thirst.”

  “Where’s the desert?” I said.

  “It does not matter. It is just a question. You are weak with thirst and you see a tortoise on its back, its little green legs waving helplessly in the air. On the tortoise’s belly is a jug of water with a red cap on top. Drawn on the red cap is a black X. What do you do?”