The Ilium Obligation (A Matt Savage Adventure) Chapter 48

[seymoure]

Slight of Hand

 

“I think con men are as American as apple pie.”
-Bill Paxton

 

The four of us piled into my Ford Fairlane. Amazingly, I was still buying cars by virtue of their usefulness more than anything else.

The idea was simple. If the kidnappers were there, we would have to get some kind of entrée.

Hugo and I were armed. Gerald was to stay in the car after he pointed the house out to us. Rayleen had a stack of magazines she had picked up in one of the lounges back at the college.

She would be a subscription seller (something she had done up until she came to work for me) and check out what she could get by a glance through the front door, while conning them about what great deals they could get on the most important periodicals that were available.

Then, when she came back to us, we would use what she could tell us to sneak in and rescue whoever we could safely get out.

She would use her shotgun to protect Gerald and our escape vehicle.

Not the D-Day Invasion plan, but it was all we had.

The house was way out in the country. It had seemed so much closer to Gerald because, as a kid, he had only been driven there. It was about as remote as you could get and still be relatively close to a city.

The place was a two-story grey (though once it had certainly been white), slightly run-down place. It was well back from the road, with a circular drive. It was not someplace you would walk to, so we had to change the plan.

Gerald would station himself a bit down the road. Hugo and I would be outside the gate, but in sight of the house. Rayleen would drive the car up to the door.

It would be reasonable that she had driven there, but no one would be convinced that she had walked.

It was hard to stand by the bushes and watch her waked up on the porch and knock on the door. There was a porch-swing and two large windows that stretched from six inches above the floorboards of the porch to within a foot of the ceiling of that same porch.

Someone looked out of the window and then came to the door. They didn’t open it wide, but we didn’t expect much.

While she was talking to the unseen person within, I noticed something in the back yard. An older lady was hanging clothes on the line. She was relaxed and smoking a cigarette. She did not hurry, but took her time.

Rayleen had turned and gotten back in the car. She turned onto the road and passed us, stopping just past us.

“What do you know?” I asked, getting in the car.

“Connie Cho answered the door,” she answered. “She was unbelievably calm for someone being held captive.”

“I saw a woman who could very well be Gather’s mother in the back yard. She wasn’t showing any signs of fear, either.”

Just then a car drove past and turned into the driveway. It pulled up just past the house and parked to the left of the house.

Out of the car came two men and a young woman. They were laughing and happy. When they got up on the porch, the front door opened and Connie Cho hurried out and embraced one of the men.

“Put away your gun,” I told Hugo.

I got out of the car. The others joined me.

We walked up to the house, and I knocked on the door.

The sound of excited discussion exploded within the house.

Finally, after the scuffling of many feet, a man opened the door and peered out.

It was Dr. Emile Fox.

“Doctor Fox?” I ventured.

It was as if I had shot his dog. He wilted like a rose on a grill.

“And you are?” he answered.

“My name is Matt Savage,” I said.

“The detective that we sent the shard of . . .?”

“The non-existant Trojan Horse.”

He opened the door and let us in. We were introduced to all the participants in this horrible fraud.

Fox and his clandestine girlfriend, Connie Cho; Dr. Fred Gather and his girlfriend (Rachel Cobb); and the mother. The dog had been yapping since we came in the door.

“We met at a conference in London,” Fox said, sitting dejectedly on the couch. “We talked all night. We had so much in common. We both loved the study of the Trojan War and felt it was underappreciated today.”

Gather continued, “After quite a bit of drinking there was an accidental stumble that ended in the breaking of a coffee table. That was when we came up with the idea. We would send three pieces of the wood to be identified as belonging to the Trojan Horse. Think of the world wide hubbub if people thought some of that artifact still existed?”

“We sent the first two to officials in the governments of our countries. We knew that they would inevitably check with us as to the identification of the wood. We would set up the con there. The third we would send to you.”

“Why me?”

“Connie knew you had hired her cousin to do scientific investigation for you, and you would use her to get to me. So you would be the perfect third person to prove the reality of our fraud.” Fox was obviously humiliated by what he had done. “We knew you would be contacted by Gaspion, and so we used that and let you think that he was the one who got you involved. By the time you could prove otherwise, you would be in so deep you wouldn’t want to get out.

“That was as far as it was supposed to go. It would blow up, stoke up interest in the Trojan War, and then we would come out and say ‘Oops, we were wrong.’ And it would be over.”

“But you didn’t think about the greed,” I said.

“Who knew people would kill each other over something they hadn’t cared about a week before?” Fox said, exasperated. “Insane people started threatening us if we didn’t tell them the way to find the rest of the Horse.”

Gather added, “We were getting offers for more money that we knew existed from people who were invisible to the rest of the world. They also let us know that if we didn’t give them what they wanted, they would kill us and our families.”

“So you all went into hiding?” Hugo speculated.

“Of course,” Emile admitted. “We just wanted to have time to think of a way out of it. Connie said she knew a real remote place we could get away from everything. So she hired a car . . . .”

“They were watching the planes and trains,” Frederic jumped in.

“Right,” Fox continued. “So we all drove out here.”

“It was a long trip,” Connie joined in, “especially after having to go back to New York.” She glared at the dog.

“Mum,” Gather defended, “didn’t know how long we’d be gone and she couldn’t do it without Mr. Bond.”

“It isn’t easy to drive half way across the U.S. when you have to stop every 20 minutes,” Emile said.

“Dog has a bladder the size of a grain of sand,” Connie swore.

“So, Mr. Savage,” Gather asked, “what do we do now?”

I thought about it for a moment. After sitting in an overstuffed chair, I said, “Well, I can’t think of any laws you’ve actually broken. You didn’t file any false police reports, you didn’t ask anybody to do anything illegal. You’ll probably lose your jobs, but that’s all the legal problems I see.”

“But,” Gather said, “we’ve destroyed our reputations!”

“And that,” I concluded, “you must live with. Along with any guilt you feel for the deaths of at least a dozen people I know of, including those at Scotland Yard. You may walk, but you will not be very popular.”

Rayleen jumped in, “I’d start doing a lot of charity work.”

With that, I got up and moved to the door.

“Do we go to the police?” Fox asked.

“And I’d do it now,” I told them and walked out.

We walked to the car and found Gerald waiting.

“Is Connie all right?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Hugo, “but I think she’s going to be looking for a new boyfriend.”

© C. Wayne Owens
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