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By Root 693 0

if Raffy, urgently scooting on his knees over the sod, knew the end of these con artists’ stories? Count Lustig had died in Alcatraz Prison. The great Ponzi of the infamous Ponzi scheme had later sold his services to Mussolini and degenerated into a seedy bum. The plundering stock manipulator Serge Rubenstein had gotten himself murdered, and Ivar Kreuger, the Match King, who’d put billions of other people’s money into his own fake banks, had killed himself, and so had John Sadleir, bringing down the London Stock Exchange with him. They were all failures. The best of the confidence artists had failed in the end, not so much because they’d lost confidence but because they’d kept going until they did fail. To fail was, as Raffy might say, their destiny. Just as failure and not “a thing of beauty” was her father’s destiny. It was somehow deep down his desire.

Near the track rail, Raffy was now cutting out a square in the grass. He carefully removed the sod and scooped away the dirt. As if he’d been following her thoughts, he called out, “Jack’s gift!” Holding up a package, he ran back to her with it. Wrapped in green velvet like that in which they’d found the Queen of the Sea was a 2-inch by 2-inch ornately engraved old silver box. The box had a pronged setting on its lid that seemed designed for some (large) missing jewel.

He held the box in the palm of his hand, tapped it gently. “Right here sat the big ruby, 135-carat ruby, now in the bank in Havana. Inside this box?” He patted the lid as if it were a living thing. “Inside this box is a genuine thorn from the Crown of Thorns of the possible—who knows for sure?—Savior, Jesus Christ. Your father gave this treasure to me, a free gift, in order for me to present it to my mother, when I see her again, after all these years, in Cuba. This is a generous man, to make me such a gift.” He held out the box to Annie.

It did indeed look like very old silver, beautifully crafted. She gave it back to him. “Come on, Raffy, you honestly think a piece of Christ’s Crown of Thorns is inside this little box?”

Raffy’s sigh was like a yawn of relief. “I know there is. I don’t want to open it, you understand, because of the atmospheric pressure.” He refolded the cloth, slid the little box into his pants pocket.

Annie glanced around the clubhouse area. She checked her cell phone. Daniel Hart either hadn’t gotten her message, or he didn’t care about her offer. She wasn’t sure what she should do with the Queen.

She walked high up into the stands and took a seat, put her feet up on the rail in front of her, stared at the green empty track to think it through. Maybe she should just give the gold (if it were gold) statue to Raffy and wish him and her father good luck in making their own way to Cuba to collect the emeralds and ruby (if they existed). She herself would take a commercial flight back home to North Carolina. That would be the wiser plan, wouldn’t it? Just disappear out of her father’s life, the way he had disappeared from hers?

Raffy joined her up in the grandstand. They sat side by side and might have been watching an invisible horse race together. In the silence, the Cuban smoothed the flamingos on his shirt as if they had tried to fly away to join the flock of birds that suddenly wheeled into the sky. Quietly he said, “For me, it’s my mother. For your father, it’s you he wants to make amends to. The Queen is his way of making it up to you. The Thorn is my way.”

“Why do you need to make amends to your mother?” She didn’t question that her father needed to do so to her.

Raffy confessed that he had been a terrible disappointment to his mother. If only he had stayed with her and his brother in Cuba, or gone back to them, instead of falling under the influence of her no-good brother Mano, who’d introduced him to the high life in Miami, including booze, horses, craps, and show biz—none of which had done a thing for him but break his heart. In Cuba, he might now be an astrophysicist or at least have finished some kind of education, instead of turning into a deadbeat flopper on the grift.