Geek Mafia (11 page)

"What is it that you think I do Paul?"

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"You know, steal from people."

"Apparently that's what you do now too," she replied with just a hint of tartness.

"No, I only steal from my former best friends."

"So far."

"I'm not planning on making a habit of it. Besides, I'm running out of friends fast."

"But you're making new ones all the time." She patted him on his shoulder. "You'd be very good at it, I think.

You came up with this comics con."

"Comics con. That's funny."

"What do you mean?" she asked. "I really do think it's a good idea."

"I meant the phrase 'comics con,' as in comics convention. They call the big comic book convention down in San Diego 'Comic Con,' and that's what we're doing. A comic con."

Chloe laughed at this. "You're right, it is pretty funny. Maybe some day we can pull a score at the real thing -

do an honest to God Comic Con comic con. You should start thinking about that."

"Yeah, you know. I'm really not all that interested in making this a full-time thing you know? I'm only helping out on this one because I feel like I owe you guys for all the help you gave me."

"That's cool," she said. "No pressure. We'll just see how things go."

They drove on in relative silence for a while, listening to music. Paul wondered what she was thinking. If they'd been dating he would have just asked her. He had the habit of asking his girlfriends 'what are you thinking?' every time they got a pensive look on their face. Some of them found it pretty damn annoying and hadn't been shy about telling him that fact. He didn't think Chloe would appreciate it any more than they did.

Probably less. After a while he couldn't handle the silence.

"How much do you think you'll make with this deal?" he asked.

"I'm not sure. Raff ran some numbers and thinks we can clear fifty grand gross without too much trouble. That about makes it worth it, although I don't want to spend more than a week on it. We've got too much else going on."

"Can I ask you something?" said Paul, slightly nervous now.

"Sure."

"What the hell are you guys?"

"We're a crew."

"You mean a gang."

"Same sort of principal I guess, except we're a crew. Not a gang. I don't really know how gangs work these days, but from what I've seen in movies they've got bosses and soldiers and everybody does what they're told.

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We're not like that."

"Aren't you the boss? Or is Raff?"

"Ha! He wishes. If we had an official leader I suppose it would be me. I'd be the captain of this crew. We're actually modeled on how pirate crews used to work, although we rotate the "captain" responsibilities on each score, depending on whose idea it is and who has the best plan."

"Pirates. As in 'yo ho ho and a bottle of rum'? You don't even have a ship." Paul paused. "You don't have a ship do you? Do you have cannons? Or parrots?"

"I think Filo has a parrot, or maybe a cockatiel. I don't really know the difference. No ship or cannons though

- although not for lack of trying."

"But I thought pirates had captains who ran the ship. Like Blackbeard or Captain Hook."

"Sure, they did, and some of them were certainly pretty fucking authoritarian, but not all of them. In fact, lots of pirate crews were about the most democratic institutions you were likely to find anywhere in the world back then. In a lot of ways they worked like kind of floating communes. They voted about where to go and what kind of prizes to take. And when they took down some booty, everyone got a pretty much equal share.

The captain got maybe like a share and a half or something. It was really quite egalitarian, which only made sense, since they were all in it together - outlaws with no one to count on but each other."

"Is that how you guys see yourselves? A band of outsiders?"

"I suppose so. But without the scurvy."

"How did you find all these guys anyway? Did you pick all of them up in Mexican restaurants on the day they were fired?"

"You might be surprised how often that works," she said with a smile. "But no, most of them have a little more criminal experience than you."

"So did you, like, go to the local thief's market and start recruiting? Or is there a chat room or something where you all hang out and sharpen your digital knives?"

"I think you're great and all Paul. Don't get me wrong. But if the others heard you asking too many questions like this, they might take it the wrong way. You're still an unknown quantity to them and they - well, me too I guess - we're all kind of guarded about our own history."

"Oh man," said Paul. "I'm sorry. I should've realized. It's just, well, this is all so weird for me."

"Chill. It's cool. I'm not mad or anything. I'm just giving you a little advice by way of preface for what I'm about to tell you. And just to let you know, I'm not going to tell you anything about any of the others. About how they got into the Crew or where they came from. But I'll give you the abridged version of my story. Keep in mind though that the names have been changed to protect the innocent and that I'm probably making the whole thing up."

"Ok. I like a good story, fact or fiction."

"Good, because mine's got a little bit of both."

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Chloe's Tale

"Like all great stories, mine begins at the tender age of fourteen, which is the first time I ever saw a live theater production that involved real actors and sets instead of middle school kids in homemade costumes. It was a school trip to see a touring production of Macbeth, and man was it cool. I mean, the actors and stuff were probably fine, I don't really remember, but it was the costumes and the sets that blew me away. Their set designer was a miracle worker. They'd gone all out for realism - not something you see much anymore with these wacky modern dress Shakespeare productions - and they'd turned that stage into a fucking castle. It was brilliant. I just assumed it was real stone they'd used, it looked so good. But afterwards we got a backstage tour 'cause our teacher knew the stage manager or something. Anyway, I saw those stone walls up close and they were Styrofoam. It blew my little teenage mind."

"That's when I decided theater was my new obsession. I've always been an obsession prone kinda girl. Not so much about guys or bands or any of that bullshit, but more about hobbies. Before theater it had been rock climbing and before that it had been rollerblading and before that it had been gymnastics. Always something.

And I wouldn't just do whatever it was; I'd also learn everything there was to know about it. I'd read every book the library and the local bookstores had about mountain climbing. I'd planned out all these elaborate trips I was going to take some summer - all this even though I'd never climbed a rock outside of a climbing wall in a gym."

"But the theater thing was different. My high school had something approaching a decent drama club, and I joined the day after we got back from the play. There weren't a ton of us in the club, so everyone got to do a little bit of everything. I acted some, made costumes, learned to run the lame ass lighting system we had. And by lighting system I mean a couple spots and not much else. But mostly I was all about working on the sets. I read everything I could find and talked my way back stage and into the prop shops of every major and minor theater company here in the Bay Area. Our little school plays got to lookin' pretty damn cool by the end of my run in high school."

"In college I was still all about the theater. I thought maybe I'd get into making sets for movies or something like that, so I stuck with it. I never did finish that degree - I ended up getting distracted. This was back in the early nineties you know? And the Internet was just coming on strong. BBS's and newsgroups were the shit back then, and there were even a couple devoted to theater and prop making and stuff like that. I was so hungry for any little piece of knowledge I was posting on all of these all the time. I became addicted."

"Then came that fateful day. Some guy posted a thing on a theater BBS about trying to duplicate a fancy corporate office. He said it was for a movie or a documentary or something like that that he was making and that he needed it to be exactly like the real thing, but he only had a limited budget - like maybe a thousand bucks. The real tough part was that he wanted to recreate the view out the window of this office, which was twenty stories high and in Manhattan somewhere. I had some ideas on the problem and we got to going back and forth online and through e-mail about it."

"He was real cagey about who he was and what this movie was about, but he seemed pretty smart. We even talked on the phone a couple of times. Finally he invited me to come on down to LA (it turned out he was in LA, not New York at all as he'd said in his posts) and help him build the thing. I was a nineteen year old college girl whose parents paid for her gas. Of course I went."

"Without going into details that, while I'm sure you'd love to hear them, I'm not ready to tell you, the whole thing was a con. Luckily, I wasn't the one being conned. But I could also tell fairly quickly that these clowns weren't making any movie or anything like that. They were actually working out of a rundown warehouse that they were squatting in. I only ever met them there. Each night they disappeared to wherever their homes were and I sure as hell wasn't invited to come along. I ended up sleeping in my car. But they never would've pulled it off without my help, I can guarantee you that. They had pictures from a magazine and from some shitty Chapter 10

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videotape that they'd shot in the office (which turned out to be in LA, too, not New York). They'd scored some professional grade lighting and shit, but the hardest part was getting that backdrop to look real. We finally figured it out, though."

"One of them went away for a day and then came back. He had us make a bunch of different small changes to the office set up we'd built. We changed the calendar on the desk and added a new set of pens that he'd bought somewhere. Small shit like that. They were going to cut me loose then and promised to send me my money in a week (they'd promised me a couple hundred bucks). I was like, 'Fuck the money, I wanna help on the shoot.'

This didn't go over real well at first, but I held my ground. I hinted that I knew they were up to something hinky here and I wanted to be in on it. That went over even less well."

"Now Paul, here's a little tip for you. What I did back then was wicked fucking stupid. I mean, just dumb, dumb, dumb. First of all, the golden rule - never let 'em know what you know. Second, I didn't know these guys. In retrospect they were pretty tight but kinda taking a risk bringing me in on the set-up. A good risk, as odds are I was gonna be some ditsy theater chick. Turned out they were wrong. If they'd been a different, harder core crew, they probably would've disappeared me right then and there. I could tell one of them was maybe thinking that very thought. But I was lucky. They let me stay and help with the shoot before sending me on my merry way. They even let me do the make-up. Although, for the record, I never did get my money, the fuckers."

"This other guy came in. Someone I'd never met before. He didn't seem at all curious to see me - treated me like a flunky on a film set. To this day I'm pretty sure he was some wanna-be actor that they'd conned into thinking he was playing a part in an indie movie. Hell, they might've even paid him. I did his make-up for him and then we lit the set and put him to work. He was wearing some kind of little domino mask and a suit. He looked like the Green Hornet or the Spirit or one of those old pulp heroes. It was kind of silly I thought."

"They shot the thing on SVHS and had a boom mic on the guy to pick up every word. He gave this weird speech about how he'd obviously compromised their state of the art security system and could do so at any time. Then he said that whoever was going to see this tape should give in to his demands or face serious, serious consequences. Next time they wouldn't be shooting a videotape. Next time they'd be planting a bomb.

The actor guy actually sold it pretty well. I felt chills going up my spine. I knew then for sure that I'd been right, and that these fuckers were up to no good."

"We did a few takes and then let the guy go. We broke down the whole set in less than an hour, piling everything into a couple of vans and combing the warehouse for any last piece of evidence that we'd ever been there. I was scared shitless by this point. I thought about making a run for it but I realized that one of the vans had blocked my car in. I'd never get away from them. As it turned out, once we'd finished cleaning up, they piled into their vehicles and took off. They said they'd call me in a week. I never heard from them again."

"I had to know what the fuck these guys had been up to. In fact - that became my new hobby obsession. I needed to find out what I'd been a part of. I knew a few things - that the office was in LA and even generally what part of town it was in (based on the backdrop we'd created. It could still be one of a dozen different buildings at least, and then any of hundreds of different offices. I also knew it had been photographed professionally for some magazine since they had cut out pictures to use as a model. I blew off school and spent the next week at the public library in LA, going through every damned home and garden and local magazine they had on file and pouring over the daily papers for any signs of some kind of story related to any of the businesses in any of the buildings I'd identified as possibles."

"Eventually, I did find the office. It had been featured in some local magazine like three years earlier. It was the offices of a pretty well known lawyer who specialized in medical malpractice cases. I looked him up and he actually had a pretty darn good record on such things - not the kind of guy who makes lots of baseless lawsuits or whatever. I couldn't find anything about him in the news. I even went down to the Clerk of Court Chapter 10

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and read the files on all his recent cases, but I didn't see any names I recognized or make any connections to any of the people I'd worked with. I eventually came back up here and somehow managed to pull out barely passing grades despite the three and a half weeks of school I'd missed. I used the old dead grandmother routine."