Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 5, No. 10, October 1960

Con Man Par Excellence by Albert Ujcic

You all know that safecrackers are somewhat obvious and decidedly blatant. However, style — the elegant flourish, the masterly bon mot — is well thought of in some criminal circles.

The wind and sea shot craps with everything on deck not bolted down. The boat moved up and down and every way that motion goes. Me, I hung onto a lifeline while the deck slanted, sea-water washed to my knees, and the wind sand-blasted my face. Only it wasn’t sand, but little pellets of salt water. A whole world full of them. Here I stood knee-deep in the lower left-hand corner of the Gulf of Mexico, my fare paid from Veracruz to Merida, with no guarantees.

Lightning and thunder, a sea full of stabbing stalagmites, and then suddenly the pitch of the deck changed. What junk hadn’t washed overboard blew around me, iron like paper glancing off my feet and calves, breaking nothing I noticed.

Quite a few hours later I pried my fingers from around the lifeline. We’d escaped the witches. Their big dark skirts billowed over on the horizon. Putty water rolled under the boat.

I crossed the deck, closed the cabin door against still howling wind. Nobody was there but me, by myself. So I got out of the life jacket, out of my slicker and coat and shirt and pants. In my shorts and money-belt, I shivered. Before I got dry clothes though I dug a finger into the belt just to make sure I had the big stone. I had it all right. I took it out. A million of me stared back from the facets. How it shone. It occurred to me that I could’ve used the diamond as a reflector if I’d been washed into the gulf. Occurrences like this come to me all the time. I skip over the improbability of their working. Improbabilities I ignore.

Now I might as well tell you. You probably guessed it already from the flashy way I have of describing things. My imagination is keen. It’s a gift.

Like this stone was a gift. Practically. A gift from the gods. Because there I sat in the lounge of Del Prado in Mexico City, minding my own business, when these ladies at the bar started laughing. Laugh and laugh. Until all of them had out their handkerchiefs, wiping their eyes dry of joke-water. On the floor by my foot I saw the stone. Something connected with my hair-trigger imagination went to work. I covered the stone with my foot.

Stand up, bring over the gem, and ask which woman dropped it was what the ordinary right-thinking man would do. But barging into the conversation was wrong. Impolite. Anyway, I already figured the stone belonged to the middle woman. The one about thirty, with jewels, and smoky blonde hair. She outranked the dumpier women in style and quality of clothes. They had to be casual acquaintances. So what I didn’t want was just loud thanks.

Now I have to tell you how I live. I live by being useful to people. Without fawning. I accent my fine features and manly build with the best tailoring. Ladies are good to me. They buy me things I don’t ask for. The presents come from a deep desire to share my company. No gentleman could deny them.

I win the respect of men too. Maybe it’s the wide range of topics I know first-hand. Maybe they see in me the boldness they once had.

My uncle says if I weren’t so restless I’d be a millionaire by now. He’s a millionaire. It isn’t a criticism. More of him later.

So what happens is I promote. I illuminate my backer. I enrich him. Then I move on to something new. Change is a condition of my nature. The millionaire for all his strokes of brilliance gets rich by being conservative. That’s what I think. How I think.

The reason I’ve told you what I think, and how, is so you can understand two things. (1) I didn’t steal the stone. (2) I intended to return it to its rightful owner.

So I sat in Del Prado until the three women left. I picked up the stone, went to my apartment. The idea was that I’d check the lost-and-found columns. I could see myself declining the reward, a reward that might not even have gotten mentioned if I’d returned the diamond on the spot. In the privacy of the lady’s suite I could see myself allowing her to dwell on my attributes. We’d think of something.

No ad appeared.

So the stone was mine by default. Before I had time to worry about it I was on this boat headed for Merida, Yucatan. A friend offered to back me in a tourist hotel catering to Americans on their way to the Mayan ruins around Chichen-Itza. I was to look into the purchase of Hotel Narcissus now that I hadn’t drowned.

“Nice stone.”

I clamped my hand over my diamond. I looked around. Hanging over the edge of the upper bunk was the face of one of my fellow passengers. Nothing but a boy, maybe sixteen. He grinned. Teeth came to points like a row of tobacco-stained gabled roofs. “Quite nice,” I said putting the stone back in the money-belt, sitting on my own bunk, and taking off wet shoes and socks.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “your secret’s safe with me.”

I said, “You seem to be trying to stimulate a conspiracy.”

He just grinned.

I reached for my clothes, started dressing. The stone was on me and my conscience was clear. I even felt good-natured. Maybe it had something to do with being alive after the storm.

“Taking it to Merida for sale?” he said.

“I’m going to Merida on business. Other business.”

“You’re in business?”

He was harmless. I ignored his sarcasm and told him my hotel plans, changing only names and locations. He didn’t believe me. Nobody believes the truth. With his dark, pitted face and big-boned meatless nose, he suggested deserts and tents. Cunning. Which is not to say he was anything like me; I saw that at once. His motives were practical. Mine are charged with an intuitive search for grandness everywhere.

He swung up on his bunk, then sprang to the floor. “You want to sell that stone, don’t you?”

“It’s a keepsake.”

“You can talk to me. Call me Abel.”

“It’s a keepsake, Abel.”

“I don’t ask where you got it. I ask if you want to sell it. I think we can get a quarter of what it’s worth. That’s good, considering.”

“We?” I admired that. “If I meant to sell it, I’d’ve gone to a dealer in Mexico City.”

“You’re from the capital?”

I admitted I lived there.

“Then why didn’t you sell it there?” He cocked his head. “Because the police have its description.”

“You’re wrong,” I said.

“I don’t care how you got it. The point is you’ve got it and it doesn’t belong to you.”

“Oh...?”

“I could tell the way you looked at it, and handled it. It’s the way I look at a thing that doesn’t belong to me. My eyes feast.” He gave me the rip-saw grin. “Don’t admit a thing. Just listen. Merida is my home. I know the place. People. I get around. Let me take you to him.” One of the other passengers in the four-bunk cabin came in, a student who’d spent part of the morning telling me about climbing Mount Popocatepetl. He’d shown me his membership card in the Alpine Club of Mexico City College. Because he majored in anthropology, he thought it only right to see the Chichen-Itza ruins before going back to the States and into his father’s grain-elevator business. Climbing into his bunk now, he just moaned. His tongue lay like dead liver over his lower teeth. He turned his face to the bulkhead.

“Outside,” I said to Abel. We left the seasick student after I got a coat. Wind blew across the deck. Lime seas nipped at the railings.

“The man I know,” Abel said, “used to work in customs. During the war many Europeans tried to slip gems into Mexico. This man made a fortune. He knows how to dispose of such things.”

What Abel didn’t say impressed me. “The man has influence?”

“Everywhere!”

I looked for men like that in every town. From what Abel told me so far I could find him for myself. But I try not to spread bad feeling. I spread good feeling. “Suppose I said yes.”

Abel said, “We split.”

I looked out to sea.

“You can’t sell the stone in Mexico without me. And you can’t smuggle it out. I don’t think you’d dare.”

I liked the boy even though he had no aptitude for what he was doing. “What do you think the stone is worth?”

“Let me see it again.”

Up in the wheelhouse, the captain was looking the other way. I fished out the stone, stamped it into the palm of Abel’s hand. He held the gem to the light as if he understood what he was doing. “You might get eight hundred dollars. That’s four hundred dollars each.”

He was guessing. I don’t know gems so I guessed too. “It’s worth three thousand.”

“In a window.”

I took back the stone. “I’ll give you a hundred pesos for the man’s name.”

Abel just grinned. “Not pesos. Dollars. I get half of whatever you get.”

“You know the man?”

“I guarantee he has influence,” Abel said. “I’ve dealt with him. In a small way.”

I saw Abel’s flaw. His aims were trivial. Still, I liked his curiosity. His problem was to keep out of jail. I said, “The man’s name.”

“Half.”

“His name.”

“Half?”

Money isn’t everything. “Half,” I said.

“Sandalio Fuentes. I’ll tell you how to get to his house.”

When we landed in Merida, I accepted Abel’s invitation to stay at the home of his parents. The house was surrounded by mildewed walls. The boy’s parents greeted me like their son’s guardian. They owned a store. The income, I figured, didn’t justify Abel’s shady inclinations.

The father did the talking while the mother stroked her beard and stared into ceiling corners. He recited local business conditions, suggested bargaining attitudes when I went to see about buying the hotel. Casually I asked if he knew a Sandalio Fuentes. “Everyone in Merida knows Sandalio Fuentes,” he told me. “A man with connections!”

After everyone else went to bed, Abel’s father and I had chocolate. He told me how worried he was about his son. People confide in me constantly and completely.

Then he showed me to my room. We said good night. At the door he turned. “The room has just been sprayed,” he said. “So don’t worry about tarantulas.”

I said good night again. I dreamed nothing.

After breakfast Abel took me aside. He volunteered to lead me personally to Sandalio Fuentes. Quietly but firmly I said no. He said, “How do I know you won’t cheat me?”

I told him he had no way of knowing, that at his age hot blood stood in the way of clear judgment. “I’m twice your age,” I said. “Take my word.”

The residential district Abel directed me to exploded with tropical flowers. I didn’t appreciate them. Abel was headed for trouble. Adventure is the exclusive business of adventurers. It’s an art. It takes brains and discipline. All Abel had was the flourish. The itch to try. He needed scratching.

Sandalio Fuentes met me in a white shirt and slacks. In his study hung a diploma from Georgia Tech. Next to it was a photograph of himself with an arm around Jack Dempsey. He started to talk about the good times he’d had in New York during prohibition, shifted into an account of his chairmanship of the Yucatecan delegation to the last Mexican presidential convention, unfolded newspapers in which his name and picture appeared. Facts gushed like a river. I noticed though that none of the facts cost him anything. He knew how to keep his mouth shut. I’d come to the right man. “Now,” he said with confidence, “you want something from me.”

“Possibly.”

He made me a drink. He said that a liver condition kept him from drinking with me. He told me about his operation.

When he gave me a chance, I told him how the diamond came into my possession. I wasn’t dealing with a boy now.

“What’s this to me?” he said.

“I thought you might like to look at the stone.”

Sandalio Fuentes bit off the end of a cigar, mentioning that he had them imported specially from Cuba. “Who sent you?”

“A boy named Abel.”

He went through a filing system in his head. “I don’t know him.”

“I thought not,” I said. “Still, he sent me. Would you like to look at the stone?”

“Look?”

“Buy.”

Sandalio Fuentes lit his cigar. “You have it?”

As I laid the big diamond on the green desk blotter his eyes swelled. Fine hairlines webbed his brows. He blew smoke away. Without taking his eyes from the stone he reached into the drawer of his desk, took out a magnifying glass shaped like a chess rook. The kind jewelers use. He studied the stone a long time. Then he turned to me. “This is glass. Well-cut glass. It’s worthless!”

“Make an offer.”

He laughed in my face.

I left with the stone in my pocket. What I supposed was the opening shot of the negotiations proved to be his last word. The sparkling thing was worthless. Worse than that, I’d jeopardized an important connection in Merida.

Abel came down the path from his house to meet me. His eyes slitted with worry. “You came back!”

“Did you doubt me?”

“How much did you get?”

“He hasn’t paid anything.”

Abel threw bony arms at the sky. “How much did he offer?”

I said, “Eight hundred.”

“Exactly what I predicted!” He did a dance in the dust. “That’s four hundred for each of us.”

“No.”

“No? You’re backing out?”

“Listen.” I described Sandalio Fuentes’ passion for the diamond, a passion I supposed would’ve been there had the thing been real. “He’s a good man to know,” I acknowledged. “I’ll let him have it for a thousand dollars.”

“But he offered eight hundred!”

“Don’t underestimate me.”

“You should’ve taken the eight hundred! We’ll never get a thousand! We won’t get a peso now!”

The boy’s panic didn’t surprise me. It surprised him I’m sure. Showed him how ill-equipped he was for this kind of job. He needed the scare. I left him.

I walked toward the downtown district of Merida. I composed the telegram I’d send my uncle. I have an uncle. Everyone has someone. My uncle loves me with the love of one outcast for another; my father speaks to neither of us. In the telegraph office I wrote out the message: Everything as splendid as usual. Need five hundred dollars. Thanks. I’d repay, as I always do loans from my uncle, at the next good turn of my luck.

I sent the telegram, then walked to the Hotel Narcissus. Before introducing myself to the owner, I decided to observe the hotel’s business so I went into the bar. I ordered the drink Sandalio Fuentes mixed me. All wasn’t lost with him. He had style. He could appreciate style. A shrewd man. An artist.

All at once I recognized someone. I checked her clothes and the spray of jewelry on her well-formed wrist. I couldn’t mistake the smoky blonde hair.

The stone had to be hers.

Ice melted in my drink before she decided to reach into her purse for cigarettes. Then I constructed in my imagination the fall of the stone from her purse, I even recreated, for my own amusement since she looked the other way, an expression of surprise and decision I might’ve shown on discovering the stone. I marched over to where she sat. I pretended to pick up something. “This is yours?” I said.

Her large gray eyes matched the smoky blonde hair. “What?” She took the stone, turned it over and over. “Why! That’s astonishing! Astonishing!”

“I think it fell from your purse.”

“But, you see it’s been missing. I don’t know how I could’ve overlooked it. I’ve searched and searched. Thank you. But this is astonishing!”

I observed her cultivated features, the evaporation of boredom from her milky brow. Now I glanced at the stone in her hand. “You’re wise not to carry the original. That’s a convincing copy.”

A light blush ignited her face. “Then you know precious stones.”

“A trifle.”

The play in her eyes meant growing involvement. Her blush became something else, a glow of anticipation. I knew it would do me no harm. She said, “How charming.”

Where there is an imitation, there has to be an original. We compared the two in her suite.

The original stone now winks from my tie-pin. She insisted.

I told her the truth when I thought her ready for it. That is to say, I presented the facts about the stone as an insert into the larger truth about myself. My candor, as it always does, especially with women, delighted her. She had the artistry to comprehend. As I made certain she had beforehand.

I outlined Abel’s misguided greed and my attempt to educate him. She saw the wisdom of giving Abel a “split”; I mean, my claiming to have sold the stone to Sandalio Fuentes and making Abel a party to the pretended sale. Her laughter jingled like bells when I described Abel’s pitiful anxiety during the interval be feared I’d ruined the sale, an anxiety which proved to him finally he lacked the talent for this subtle work.

You ask why I bothered with Abel. True, I made no visible profit. Precisely here is where I differ from the millionaire and approximate the aristocrat. I did it because it pleased me to do it. My spirit and style of life require flamboyance. To me style is everything.

The lesson probably saved Abel from jail, for he took the cash and entered his father’s business. From behind a counter he still tells one and all of my adroitness.

I paid him with the five hundred my uncle sent me. She wished to contribute. I refused to accept her money, rich as she is. Later she persuaded me to allow her to repay my uncle, in fact, insisted on it.

She is very rich, in fact. A widow. Her husband was killed by a boulder spewed from one of their oil wells. A young woman in search of adventure. But prudent too. She’d had sense enough to carry an imitation of the valuable stone.

In Merida these days I sometimes see the anthropology student who shared my cabin on the boat that brought me here. He never did go back to his father’s grain elevators. And I view those days with a tender longing.

At the Hotel Narcissus, Sandalio Fuentes and I often sit together in the Jack Dempsey Dining Room. We discuss politics and other artful games while she, her lovely brow under the smoky blonde hair crimped in concentration, keeps the ledgers.

She also handles the cash. But I don’t need cash if I decide to embark on new adventure. All my nature needs is the urge. But this widow, she has style. I did not expect her to domesticate me. I suppose no husband does. This question has occurred to me: Did I truly get the valuable stone, or did she get me?