The Big Mark

By Mark Saxer

The Big Mark rides the rails in early 20th century America, lying in wait for the con men traveling alongside him. Portraying himself as a moneyed rube, he plays the short con against the long con and makes off with the money his would-be fleecers dangle in front of him before they realize they've been had.
He makes a living in this manner for years, until he is eventually caught out following a failed ploy. Given one hundred days to pay back the hundred thousand he has been accused of scamming from the collective con industry, the Big Mark finds himself faced with two options: go legitimate as a con man and begin roping marks of his own, or convince the Big Store to work with him on a scheme that may bring in double what he owes, a plan that involves extracting a ransom from the family of a man who himself is unaware of his abduction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark Saxer
• Release date: Sep 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370809233

Mark Saxer

Mark Saxer has five albums of electronic music which compose the sonic novel The Orbiting Shadow. He is also the creator of the phoneticsforfanatics.com website, which offers pencil puzzles based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for students of English as a Second Language.

Book preview

The Big Mark

by

Mark Saxer

Copyright 2016 Mark Saxer

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is licensed for personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away.

Table of Contents

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part One

You have to understand that in those days there were men who would go to tremendous lengths to put their hard-earned money in your hand. First in the hundreds, then by the thousands I had this money entrusted to me, driven by the promise of a future return. These men were called con artists, and they were so focused on fleecing their victims that they failed to see that they themselves were being fleeced.

I have been told, not in so many words, of course, but actually quite a few more, that I have the kind of face you can deceive, though I was never sure what it was about my countenance that made so many ropers elect to address it out of all of the other faces that were staring off into space on a train. They say that the hardest thing to see is that which is directly in front of your nose, and that is never truer than when what is in front of your nose is also what is behind it, and by that I mean your face in the mirror.

I was an unsightly child, and I also suppose unsoundly, and untouchly, and all the other uncoined senses of affront that constitute the word unseemly. But I was there all right. An ugly child is a prodigy of ugliness, and he is resented all the more by his contemporaries because of it. Of course, with many prodigies, the thing that manifested itself so suddenly can just as abruptly unmanifest itself with adolescence, although, I suppose, unlike his fellow sensations in music or chess, the uncomely prodigy has the supreme knowledge that, given enough time, his endowment will ultimately be restored.

Mine never left me and in fact only seemed to get worse over time. Perhaps it seemed to con men that a person with just such a face would have to be susceptible to some sort of friendliness and the promise of good fortune, but there had to have been more to it than that. A con artist has to pick up on a capacity for a venality in his mark, and while I’d like to think that it was merely my looks that conferred on me a suspicion of villainy, as is so often the case in the movies, there was something in my character that my first roper detected in me of which I was not yet aware, something that said if I were presented with the opportunity to make a dishonest dollar I would partake in it. What neither he nor his successors realized was that this capacity for venality suspected in me was actually being used against them.

Of course, I would have never been ready for my first meeting with a roper if I hadn’t previously been warned of their ranks by the middle-aged businessman who had sat opposite me for a good deal of my train ride to California, where I was hoping to find work beyond what wasn’t to be had in my hometown. Perhaps he, having been a victim of a con artist himself, was unwilling to see anything worse than naivety in those who lost their respective fortunes to the con, for as I sat across from him in the suit I had just purchased before the trip, I must have appeared to him as exactly what I was, someone who had the entirety of his life’s savings concealed in the pocket of what the rest of it had already been spent on, someone who furthermore would instantly lose it to whatever sophisticated grifter happened upon him.

He disclosed to me that in his line of work he traveled by train quite regularly and warned me not only to be cautious of those I fell asleep around, as trains were rife with pickpockets, but also of those whose company I kept when I was fully conscious, as the train was also frequented by another type of thief who would attempt to relieve you of your money as he walked you through a kind of waking dream.

Perhaps the simultaneous rocking of train passengers leads to a kind of mirroring among those who sit across from one another, and perhaps a rapport over a long train journey is fostered out of nothing more than that, for he felt comfortable going on at length about his experiences and, when the train was congested and noisy, he then went on at height. As he told his cautionary tale, with the entire car seeming to nod along like ruminants in pews, I began to wonder if the ropers of which he spoke took a similar advantage of the train’s jostlings to establish the confidence they needed to swindle their marks.

A person who can talk at length about something assumes that his addressee must have a similar capacity for listening, and I found myself in the type of situation in which one’s genuine interest in a speaker is mitigated only by the feeling of being compelled to express that interest, even though my addressor seemed to treat any kind of validation on my part as interference, with the slightest sound I made seeming a retort to his notion that he should be able to tell his story without interruption. After exhausting each round of the nonverbal cues I was reduced to, I would periodically look out the window, only to see that his reflection’s eyes would try to engage me there as well. As I found our eyes’ meeting via this pane of glass even more direct than looking at him head on, I would return my gaze to his face and resume my tropes of nods and brow liftings.

The end of his story in no way coincided with our arrival at his station, so he began to regale me for the rest of his trip with some of the other methods con artists employed, ones he had learned of during his subsequent researches into their lifestyles. He told me that, having been prevented from getting any justice for himself--he returned the following morning to the betting hall where he had lost his fortune only to find that it had returned, with a fairy tale’s alacrity, to its mundane form of a storage room, while the local police who accompanied him there had been paid to look dubiously at him, but not paid enough to do so convincingly--the only recourse he had left was to alert the fellow travelers who cared enough to listen to him.

He became pensive as the train began to approach his destination. He told me he had been fiscally savvy his entire life, a sober entrepreneur and shrewd investor who had insured himself against any type of loss, both professional and personal. He said he was too ashamed to say how much money he had lost to them, only that I could not possibly comprehend the amount, which was why he wanted to warn me, for if it could happen to someone like him, then it could just as easily happen to anyone, and it didn’t matter how much money you had, what only mattered to them was that they got all of it.

When we reached his terminus, he handed me his business card, telling me that if things didn’t work out for me in California, he could see about finding a place for me somewhere within his company. I didn’t take his offer very seriously, but at the very least I thought I might have impressed him enough on our journey that I could use him as a personal reference, one which I sensed would be more valuable to my chances of getting a job than any of the meager professional references I had accumulated in my lifetime.

For if he monopolized the conversation, I eventually capitalized on it, though not in the manner I had intended. I hadn’t been approached by any ropers during the remainder of my journey out west, and I thought that perhaps his experience had led him to overstate their presence on the rails. It wasn’t until the following year, when I was returning home with even less to me than what I had on my journey out, that I first suspected I was having the touch put to me.

A return trip always feels shorter than the initial one, even after a year’s interval. Most often this sensation is attributed to an eagerness to get home, but I can attest that the trip feels even shorter when you have no desire to arrive back at where you began. Despite the fact that I would be using up the very last of my funds, I took steps to delay my arrival by selecting a train route that would enable me to complete a short circle around my home town before I headed directly into it. Though the simile wouldn’t be available to me for at least a half a century, I was like an astronaut firing himself into the orbit of the planet he was intending to descend onto, as a direct shot into its atmosphere would have caused him to break up entirely, and by this I mean that the stories of financial and personal successes which I had written about in my letters to my family would splinter off of me upon reentry until there was nothing left.

For the entirety of my return trip I had sat facing in the same direction that I had on my travel out, and for those desiring a more contemporaneous simile for the journey, the sensation was like watching the film reel of that previous trip being cranked in reverse, with my current circling of my hometown feeling like the end of that film flapping around its reel. I had spent the entire journey unaccosted by anyone, save the conductor, until some point after entering this spiral home, when a snappily-dressed man with the steepest nose I had ever seen sat down in the seat directly across from me. It didn’t even occur to me that he could be a roper, most obviously because I didn’t think I was exuding the kind of success that would lead a con man to believe that he had sized up a moneyed victim. Perhaps he saw nothing other than the suit I had on, which was as immaculate as it had been on the trip out, as I had little opportunity to wear it during the intervening year, since doing so would have left me overdressed not only for what jobs I could find, but also for what leisure activities their salaries would afford.

The man asked me where I was headed, and I told him. (Though it is hardly necessary anymore, out of fidelity to precaution I still conceal my hometown’s name.) He voiced the assumption that I was returning home early from the office, but I said, no, I was visiting there on business, as I was unwilling to tell the story of my failure to a stranger. He asked me where I was from, and I named a Springfield I had passed through more than a few hours previously on my journey.

He told me he had lived his entire life in the town and said that he hoped I would find it as hospitable as he knew it to be. I immediately regretted lying to him, if only because I was afraid I would run into him sometime afterwards, and so, to say no more, I started to ask him if he could give me a little bit of local color about the town whose environs we were rapidly approaching. As he started discussing the local charms, I suddenly became aware of that he possessed an arresting dental malformity, and what he might have taken for as my lip reading was more of a skimming through them to get to his eye teeth, one of which was googlie, the other wall.

To avoid this eyelock, I averted my eyes out the window, or more specifically onto it, for I was able to continue my fascination with his anomaly via his reflection. Seeing his reflection in the train window, however, reminded me of the businessman from the previous trip, and how his reflection had looked me dead on, telling its tale of woe as it floated amidst the clouds in the sky. I believe that even by that time this had already become a convention used in the cinema to illustrate a remembered voice from the past, and my recollection of what he said struck me with such import that it seemed as though the entire train window could have been filled with a title card that read, Remember, they don’t reveal themselves until they get you off the train.

I looked back at my interlocutor as he said something about one of the local high schools that wasn’t quite right, and I thought I hadn’t been away so long that I could have started misremembering things. He turned the conversation back to me, asking about what line of work I was in, and I suddenly had the sense that we were both so intent on deflecting scrutiny from ourselves that we were missing the suspiciousness of the other person, so I became more forthcoming with my lies, free associating a name and occupation for myself, and I realized that the letters I had sent home to my family detailing my successes had in no small part prepared me for the stories I was telling him now.

As the train pulled into the station where we would both make the connection into town, the man asked me who I had business with, and here I could see that the film of my travel was now being rewound past its starting point, for I told him it was with Consolidated Machine and Foundry, which came to mind only because it was the last company I had interviewed with before deciding that the only opportunities to be had for me lay far outside of town.

During the short wait for the next train, he asked me how long I would be staying, and I told him a couple of days, which for all I knew I might actually hold myself to. He then asked me where I would be staying, and I told him I was going to work that out immediately after my arrival. In order to redeflect attention from myself, I asked him if he could he recommend a place. The hotel he mentioned as one of the nicest in town would probably have been eighth or ninth on my list had I been asked the question in his stead, though he quickly added that he merely frequented the restaurant there, and if the food were any indication, then the rooms had to be of a similar quality. He then offered to take me to there, if it would be of any help to me.

As our conversation continued on that final stretch of the journey, it occurred to me that perhaps I was only slightly newer to the con racket than he was, and, if so, then who better to observe in action than this fellow, as the inept reveal what the expert disguise so artfully? And so, with the intent of nothing greater than perhaps delaying my reunion with my family for a few more hours, I told him, as our fellow passengers began to rise around us in order to be the first out the doors, If you don’t mind, I think I’ll take you up on your offer.

A con man plays on the sense of dislocation his victim feels from being in an unfamiliar environment, and in truth, as we walked out of the station, an alien cast had been placed over the town I knew, as I was coming to find that an element that was familiar to more cosmopolitan cities could be found even in a town as unremarkable my own. I thought my travels would have made my home town seem picayune in comparison, but right at the very end, they had revealed an exotic aspect of it.

I made the point of asking him if he wouldn’t mind showing me the CMF premises first, but he said we might as well stop at the hotel beforehand since it was on the way, which was further indication that he wasn’t as familiar with the town as he was trying to lead me to believe.

I was afraid I’d be instantly recognized by a fellow resident as we walked the streets, but in truth we were headed to a part of town I had rarely frequented. As we turned the corner onto the street I knew the hotel to be on, I suddenly wished that I had been accosted by someone who knew me, as I could use the encounter to thank my presumed roper for his invitation and then tell him that I was sorry but I couldn’t pass up the remarkable happenstance of running into an old friend in an unfamiliar locale by not catching up with him or her.

For despite my suspicions, I had to accept the possibility, as we approached the facade of the hotel, that I was entirely at the mercy of a well-meaning, but misinformed, fellow resident, which meant I would shortly reveal myself to be lacking the money to pay for my share of the meal we would soon enjoy, much less cover any room at the establishment. The man, who had introduced himself as Harold Neckis, even seemed to misinterpret my trepidation innocently, reading the expression on my face as disapproval of the building.

Look, admittedly the exterior could use some updating, he said, as he pulled open the door, but the interior’s nice. The meal will certainly give you a much better indication of the quality of the place.

Regrettably, the lobby was as he said, and the desk manager looked at us brightly as we entered.

My friend here is in need of a room for a day or two, Neckis said, but first we thought we might have something to eat first.

The manager told us that the restaurant would be open for lunch for the remainder of the hour. Neckis thanked him and led me into the restaurant.

As we sat down at the table, I told him I wanted to impress my prospective clients with my knowledge of their town, so I hoped I could continue to ask him questions about its history. The responses he provided revealed far more about him than the town, which I guessed from his answers he had lived in for no more than the