“We did,” said Wednesday. “Although it was a close thing. If they’d not stopped to grab you, they might have taken the lot of us. It convinced several of the people who had been sitting on the fence that I might not be completely crazy.”
“So how did you get out?”
Wednesday shook his head. “I don’t pay you to ask questions,” he said. “I’ve told you before.”
Shadow shrugged.
They spent the night in a Super 8 motel, south of La Crosse.
Christmas Day was spent on the road, driving north and east. The farmland became pine forest. The towns seemed to come farther and farther apart.
They ate their Christmas lunch late in the afternoon in a hall-like family restaurant in northern central Wisconsin. Shadow picked cheerlessly at the dry turkey, jam-sweet red lumps of cranberry sauce, tough-as-wood roasted potatoes and the violently green canned peas. From the way he attacked it, and the way he smacked his lips, Wednesday seemed to be enjoying the food. As the meal progressed he became positively expansive—talking, joking, and, whenever she came close enough, flirting with the waitress, a thin blonde girl who looked scarcely old enough to have dropped out of high school.
“Excuse me, m’dear, but might I trouble you for another cup of your delightful hot chocolate? And I trust you won’t think me too forward if I say what a mightily fetching and becoming dress that is. Festive, yet classy.”
The waitress, who wore a bright red and green skirt edged with glittering silver tinsel, giggled and colored and smiled happily, and went off to get Wednesday another mug of hot chocolate.
“Fetching,” said Wednesday, thoughtfully, watching her go. “Becoming,” he said. Shadow did not think he was talking about the dress. Wednesday shoveled the final slice of turkey into his mouth, flicked at his beard with his napkin, and pushed his plate forward. “Aaah. Good.” He looked around him, at the family restaurant. In the background a tape of Christmas songs was playing: the little drummer boy had no gifts to bring, parupapom-pom, rapappom pom, rapappom pom.
“Some things may change,” said Wednesday, abruptly. “People, however…people stay the same. Some grifts last forever, others are swallowed soon enough by time and by the world. My favorite grift of all is no longer practical. Still, a surprising number of grifts are timeless—the Spanish Prisoner, the Pigeon Drop, the Fawney Rig (that’s the Pigeon Drop but with a gold ring instead of a wallet), the Fiddle Game…”
“I’ve never heard of the Fiddle Game,” said Shadow. “I think I’ve heard of the others. My old cellmate said he’d actually done the Spanish Prisoner. He was a grifter.”
“Ah,” said Wednesday, and his left eye sparkled. “The Fiddle Game was a fine and wonderful con. In its purest form it is a two-man grift. It trades on cupidity and greed, as all great grifts do. You can always cheat an honest man, but it takes more work. So. We are in a hotel, or an inn, or a fine restaurant, and, dining there, we find a man—shabby, but shabby genteel, not down-at-heel but certainly down on his luck. We shall call him Abraham. And when the time comes to settle his bill—not a huge bill, you understand, fifty, seventy-five dollars—an embarrassment! Where is his wallet? Good Lord, he must have left it at a friend’s, not far away. He shall go and obtain his wallet forthwith! But here, mine host, says Abraham, take this old fiddle of mine for security. It’s old, as you can see, but it’s how I make my living.”
Wednesday’s smile when he saw the waitress approaching was huge and predatory. “Ah, the hot chocolate! Brought to me by my Christmas Angel! Tell me, my dear, could I have some more of your delicious bread when you get a moment?”
The waitress—what was she, Shadow wondered: sixteen, seventeen?—looked at the floor and her cheeks flushed crimson. She put down the chocolate with shaking hands and retreated to the edge of the room, by the slowly rotating display of pies, where she stopped and stared at Wednesday. Then she slipped into the kitchen, to fetch Wednesday his bread.
“So. The violin—old, unquestionably, perhaps even a little battered—is placed away in its case, and our temporarily impecunious Abraham sets off in search of his wallet. But a well-dressed gentleman, only just done with his own dinner, has been observing this exchange, and now he approaches our host: could he, perchance, inspect the violin that honest Abraham left behind?
“Certainly he can. Our host hands it over, and the well-dressed man—let us call him Barrington—opens his mouth wide, then remembers himself and closes it, examines the violin reverentially, like a man who has been permitted into a holy sanctum to examine the bones of a prophet. ‘Why,’ he says, ‘this is—it must be—no, it cannot be—but yes, there it is—my lord! But this is unbelievable!” and he points to the maker’s mark, on a strip of browning paper inside the violin—but still, he says, even without it he would have known it by the color of the varnish, by the scroll, by the shape.
“Now Barrington reaches inside his pocket and produces an engraved business card, proclaiming him to be a preeminent dealer in rare and antique musical instruments. ‘So this violin is rare?’ asks mine host. ‘Indeed it is,’ says Barrington, still admiring it with awe, ‘and worth in excess of a hundred thousand dollars, unless I miss my guess. Even as a dealer in such things I would pay fifty—no, seventy-five thousand dollars, good cash money for such an exquisite piece. I have a man on the West Coast who would buy it tomorrow, sight unseen, with one telegram, and pay whatever I asked for it.’ And then he consults his watch, and his face falls. ‘My train—’ he says. ‘I have scarcely enough time to catch my train! Good sir, when the owner of this inestimable instrument should return, please give him my card, for, alas, I must be away.’ And with that, Barrington leaves, a man who knows that time and the train wait for no man.
“Mine host examines the violin, curiosity mingling with cupidity in his veins, and a plan begins to bubble up through his mind. But the minutes go by, and Abraham does not return. And now it is late, and through the door, shabby but proud, comes our Abraham, our fiddle-player, and he holds in his hands a wallet, a wallet that has seen better days, a wallet that has never contained more than a hundred dollars on its best day, and from it he takes the money to pay for his meal or his stay, and he asks for the return of his violin.
“Mine host puts the fiddle in its case on the counter, and Abraham takes it like a mother cradling her child. ‘Tell me,’ says the host (with the engraved card of a man who’ll pay fifty thousand dollars, good cash money, burning in his inside breast pocket), ‘how much is a violin like this worth? For my niece has a yearning on her to play the fiddle, and it’s her birthday coming up in a week or so.’
“‘Sell this fiddle?’ says Abraham. ‘I could never sell her. I’ve had her for twenty years I have, fiddled all over the country with her. And to tell the truth, she cost me all of five hundred dollars back when I bought her.’
“Mine host keeps the smile from his face. ‘Five hundred dollars? What if I were to offer you a thousand dollars for it, here and now?’
“The fiddle player looks delighted, then crestfallen, and he says, ‘But lordy, I’m a fiddle player, sir, it’s all I know how to do. This fiddle knows me and she loves me, and my fingers know her so well I could play an air upon her in the dark. Where will I find another that sounds so fine? A thousand dollars is good money, but this is my livelihood. Not a thousand dollars, not for five thousand.”