The Grift Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part I The Grift

  August 2005

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  December 2005

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  February 2006

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  November 2006

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  December 2006

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  January 2007

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part II The Gift

  February–March 2007

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  May 2007

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  August 2007

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Debra Ginsberg

  Copyright

  For my family

  grift – n. a group of methods used for obtaining money falsely through the use of swindles, frauds, etc.

  gift – n. a special ability or capacity

  Prologue

  September 1976

  Madame Z had been sitting in her spot on the boardwalk for hours and the only forms of life she’d seen were a few listless seabirds. It was too hot and bright for casual strollers and too late in the season for vacationers. And for Madame Z, it was both too hot under the crushing blue sky and too late in a long life to wait much longer. It seemed unlikely that she would tell any fortunes today. Nor did she think she’d be back tomorrow or perhaps ever again. But this was not something that caused her anxiety. For some time now Madame Z had sensed her own end drawing near and she’d made her peace with it.

  She watched as a seagull pecked at a shell a few feet in front of her, lost interest and flapped away. Madame Z looked up to follow its flight and saw a woman and a little girl walking toward her through the hot shimmering air.

  So, she thought, one last fortune to be told.

  As they approached her small table, Madame Z could see that the woman and child were mother and daughter and that their roles were working in reverse. The woman was unkempt, twitchy and petulant while the girl was quiet, serious and unnaturally self-contained. As they got closer, Madame Z could see that they were both dark-haired and green-eyed, and she could feel waves of unhappiness emanating from both of them.

  “How much?” the woman asked.

  “Twenty dollars for your future,” Madame Z answered.

  “That’s a lot,” the woman said. “Too much.”

  “It’s your future.”

  The woman scratched the side of her face and scowled at the fortune-teller. “I want the ten-dollar future. I was told you could give me that.”

  Madame Z pursed her lips and tried to contain her disgust. She could smell it now, that chemical odor mixed with stale sweat. She’d been approached by desperate, misinformed drug seekers before, but this was the first time she’d seen a child in tow.

  “You are mistaken,” the fortune-teller said. “I don’t have what you are looking for.”

  The woman pulled a few grimy bills from the front pocket of her dirty jeans. “Listen, I only have fifteen and I have to feed the kid, okay? Give me a break. I can do ten.” She cast a backward glance at her daughter, who was standing very still, eyes wide and expressionless, hands folded in front of her. “Ten,” she repeated, a note of panic edging her voice. “Okay?”

  “You are not understanding,” Madame Z said. “I do not have the thing you want. I read the future. That is all.” The woman eyed her with suspicion and then faltered, comprehending at last, her arms falling to her sides in a gesture of defeat.

  “Well, that’s just great, isn’t it?” the woman said, pulling a crumpled cigarette pack and matches from her back pocket. “Now what am I supposed to do?” She walked back a few steps, sat down on the ground and lit a cigarette. “What the hell am I supposed to do now?” she repeated to herself.

  After watching her mother smoke in silence for a few moments, the little girl approached Madame Z and dropped four shiny quarters on the faded green felt of the fortune-teller’s table.

  “I want to know my future,” the girl said.

  Madame Z wanted to tell the girl to keep her coins. It didn’t take second sight to know what was in store for this child. A quick glance at the mother, still smoking and softly cursing to herself, was all that was needed. But the girl’s eyes, the same sparkling green as the sea, forbade pity or sympathy, and Madame Z found herself sliding the quarters into her pocket and gesturing for the girl to sit down in the folding chair next to her.

  “What’s your name?” the fortune-teller asked. The girl continued to give her a steady, unwavering gaze and held her hands out, palms up, toward Madame Z, the gesture quick and easy as if she’d done it many times before. “Here,” the girl said instead, “tell me my future.”

  Madame Z took the small soft hands in her own and peered down as if she were deep in concentration, wondering what this solemn child would most like to hear. Perhaps that she’d get a favorite toy or some new clothes or…Madame Z’s eyes were old and playing tricks on her. The lines of fate cut deep slashes through each of the girl’s hands, slicing through the head and heart lines. And there was something else she had never seen before. She checked one palm and then the other. There was no life line on either hand.

  Madame Z dropped the girl’s hands and reached for her deck of tarot cards. “Let’s do this,” she said. “You choose a card and I will—”

  “I know this game,” the girl interrupted. “I choose the man with the eight over his head.”

  “The eight?” Madame Z positioned the deck in front of the girl. “What do you mean?”

  “This one,” the girl said, plucking the top card from the deck and turning it over to reveal the Magician holding a wand aloft. Above his head was the symbol of eternity, a sideways figure eight.

  “That’s very good,” the fortune-teller said, sliding the card to the bottom of the deck. “Why don’t you pick another?”

  The girl picked the next top card and turned it over. Impossibly, the Magician stared back at her again.

  Madame Z repeated her movements, again replacing the card at the bottom of the deck and again instructing the girl to draw another. And again the girl turned over the Magician from the top of the deck.

  “This game is boring,” the girl said. “I want a different card. I want you to tell me my future.”

  Trembling, Madame Z looked up from the cards and into the girl’s face, but it was no longer the girl that she saw in front of her. Her own reflection stared back at her as clearly as if she were looking into a mirror. She saw her own face crease with pain and her hand reach up to her heart. She saw the shadow creep into her eyes and block out the light of life. There, in the girl’s face, Madame Z watched herself die.

  “Hey. Hey! What do you think you’re doing?”

  Madame Z blinked, her eyes watering. The woman was standing next to her now, too close, shouting. Her daughter, once again just
a child with wide green eyes, had moved away from the table and stood near her mother. “What are you telling her, huh? What do you think you’re doing?” The woman grabbed the girl’s arm and yanked her close. The girl’s expression never changed—still that same self-possessed, impassive stare.

  “She…” Madame Z had to catch the breath that was coming short and labored. She pointed to the girl. “She has the gift.”

  The woman raised her eyebrows, a momentary curiosity flashing across her face.

  “What does she mean, Mama?” Madame Z noticed for the first time how deep the girl’s voice was.

  “Nothing,” the woman snapped. “It doesn’t mean anything. This crazy freak doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Do you hear me, freak? There’s something wrong with you,” she said, starting to turn around. “Let’s get out of here. I’ve wasted enough time.” She walked away fast, dragging the girl in the direction from which they had come.

  “She has the gift!” Madame Z called out after them. They kept walking, out into the sunlit distance. The girl turned once, staring hard as if to imprint the image behind her. Madame Z watched as they became smaller and smaller in her field of vision. She watched through the pains that had started shooting through her chest and kept watching until the light became too bright and burned her vision to black.

  Chapter 1

  Marina Marks had been sweating for weeks. Constant, skin-crawling perspiration ran in tiny rivers across her body. Sweat started at the base of her skull and ran down her neck and back, traveling the length of her zodiac tattoo, sliding over the ram’s head symbol for Aries between her shoulder blades and finishing with the swimming fish symbol for Pisces at the very base of her spine. In front, the moisture condensed on her chest, disappeared in droplets between her breasts and pooled in the marsh between her legs. It didn’t matter how many showers she took in a day or how long she stood under the water. By noon, she was wrung out and flattened.

  They said the body was better equipped to deal with the dry bake of a desert than with the wet heat of a swamp. Meteorologists pointed to this fact when they talked about the heat index. It might be only eighty-five degrees outside, but when the air scorched wet and heavy it felt as if it were over a hundred. Babies, the elderly and the infirm were all at risk in this kind of heat, they said. Weak bodies might just give up and give out; even the healthy ones would struggle with discomfort. And they were right, Marina thought. She was one of the strong ones, but this relentless steam-box humidity was killing her.

  This morning had been the worst yet in a season that had already offered more than its share of bad days. She’d slept hard but badly, as if she were being slowly suffocated. At dawn, she’d startled into full consciousness, hot and gritty and thinking about her mother, a clear indicator of just how uncomfortable a night she’d spent. Marina never thought about her mother voluntarily, and when visions of that woman—always the horrible way she’d looked the last time Marina had seen her—managed to press their way to the surface from deep in her subconscious, Marina knew that she was stressed and uneasy.

  Marina lifted her heavy hair away from her neck and angled herself toward the standing fan next to her table, even though it helped very little and served mostly to just move the heat around. Three weeks earlier, her air conditioner had groaned as if it were in pain, spat ice for the length of an afternoon and then died. Living without an air conditioner in South Florida at the height of summer was ridiculous, even crazy, but Marina hadn’t fixed hers or replaced it. Either option would have required much more money than she was willing to spend for a couple months’ worth of relief. She had calculated that two months—three at the very outside—was all the time she needed to clear out and get herself set up in California, and there was no room in her budget for any expenses that weren’t strictly necessary. But it wasn’t just the money, because Marina could have found that if she’d really wanted to. Fixing the air conditioner would have made it too easy to stay longer, might even have implied a kind of permanence. The constant sticky discomfort was an ongoing reminder and incentive to leave as soon as possible.

  Marina bent closer to the warm stream of air. What small relief the breeze provided was canceled out by the thought that she’d have to turn off the fan and move it before Mrs. Golden arrived, which would be within the next fifteen minutes. Appearances counted for so much more than people ever imagined. Marina could not have a plastic fan on display in her house, where it would clash badly with her crystals, tarot cards and delicate silk scarves. Nor could she be seen as a person who suffered the effects of heat, humidity or any other physical indignity. She needed to be perceived as above and beyond the pains and ills of the flesh. This was the package her clients were buying and the likely reason why nobody had yet complained about how hot it was in her house. She could have played it straight—just your average work-at-home woman dressed in casual cottons who also happened to be a psychic—but Marina knew how well most minds responded to subliminal advertising. Looking the part without going over the top into some kind of caricature was one of her key selling points. This was why Marina wore darker makeup on her green eyes than she would have liked (“Witches’ Brew” eye shadow and “Voodoo” eyeliner, no less), dressed in a collection of flowing skirts and gauzy blouses vaguely reminiscent of Stevie Nicks in her “Gypsy” heyday and had dyed her hair “Midnight Black” for so long that she couldn’t remember its natural color. Marina would have cut that long, thick, hot hair short long ago had it not been such an important element of her image.

  But for this godforsaken place, Marina thought, none of it would matter. Florida, especially this piece of it, felt to her like hell on earth. It was no wonder the word muggy was used to describe weather that seemed to attack you every time you exposed yourself to it. No wonder, too, that the elderly, the ill and the spiritually lame all converged in this hot, soupy trough—misery coming to misery. She should have known better, or at least earlier, that she’d never find happiness here.

  When she’d arrived in Florida, the end of her slow drift down the eastern seaboard, Marina hadn’t intended to stay long. She traveled light, but even so it took weeks before she unpacked all her clothes and longer still before she started adding new items to the small house she was renting. Gradually, almost in spite of herself, Marina bought a lamp to go here or a chair to go there, until her place finally looked more like a home than a temporary box she’d moved into. She started earning money quickly as almost all of her early clients became regulars, and before she knew it she was settled in, making appointments for the months ahead, her feet firmly planted on the Florida ground. But the further entrenched she became, the more Marina wanted to leave. And it wasn’t just the weather or the general malaise of the place that was pushing her out. Underlying those things—and the real reason Marina had decided to head as far west as possible—were the others, those who were making it almost impossible for her to get on with her business.

  Slowly, and not very subtly, Marina was being squeezed. She had landed in a community where Gypsies, santeros and voodooiennes existed in a delicate and wary balance. Marina was an outsider, and she played by her own rules. It wasn’t her way, for example, to go for a big score with a client and then never see that client again. Hers was a slow build of confidence and a fostering of need. Many of her clients treated her with the same deference to authority that they showed their doctors. Marina had always believed that it took more skill to develop trust than inspire fear. It paid better in the long run, too, and was much less likely to end with angry clients feeling as though they’d been shafted. That she held herself to her own set of standards wasn’t really the problem, though; it was her refusal to ally herself with or pay her respects to any particular group. She didn’t try to make nice, and it wasn’t long before she discovered that she wasn’t welcome.

  She noticed little things at first: a few cold stares, the barely perceptible clicking of tongues. But then the friendly neighborhood cop stopped by one
day, just wanting to make sure she was “okay,” telling her that there’d been “some trouble” in the area, that she should keep her eyes open just in case. Oh, and if she were doing any kind of business out of her house, she should make sure that her licenses and permits were in order; she wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of the law in case she ever needed help of any kind…

  After that, she started hearing whispers everywhere, started seeing eyes in the bushes. She didn’t like to admit it, but she’d allowed herself to become spooked. How she hated Florida. She couldn’t wait to get out of this backward swamp with its ignorance and heavy superstitions. Two more months and she’d be breathing in the light California air and making some real money without having to contend with sacrificed chickens and pin-holed dolls. Californians loved the weird and the illusory as much if not more than anyone, but they never seemed to take anything too seriously, least of all themselves. But that wasn’t the only reason she had chosen southern California as her destination. She’d lived there once, though so long ago it seemed like a recollection from another life. She was only a little girl and it had been a very short stay, too short for Marina to attend school or to remember now which beach city it had been. But Marina recalled it as a bright moment in an otherwise hard and miserable childhood. That shining memory beckoned her now like a lighthouse glow across the darkness.

  Marina flicked off the fan and pushed it into a storage closet behind a bead-covered doorway. Sweat formed instantly, trickling down her ribs. The crawling sensation made her shiver, and she closed her eyes. There was a quick flash of light behind her lids and she flinched, blinking them open. Marina stared at nothing for a moment, wondering if the heat was short-circuiting her brain. She closed her eyes again and focused. The flash came again, but this time Marina could see its form—a fork of lightning illuminating rain—and then she remembered. This storm behind her eyes was an echo of a dream she’d had…was it last night? She’d woken up so abruptly, strangled in the damp, tangled sheets, her mother in her mind. Maybe there had been thunder outside—a real storm. But no, the day was cloudless, no sign of rain. Marina prickled with irritation at herself, not wanting to recall her dreams, good, bad or otherwise. The heat was now driving her mad as well as making her uncomfortable. A knock on the door reminded her that she needed to pull herself together. Mrs. Golden, usually punctual to the minute, had inexplicably chosen this day to come early. If only it were just five degrees cooler, Marina thought as she made her way to the door.