FEBRUARY 12, 2022 – Blogger’s note: This post is a “double-feature,” meaning it’s twice my daily limit of 500 words. Of the 999 posts of this blog thus far, this is the first to violate that rule. The second half of this post bears the 500,000th word of “Write Makes Might.” To mark the 1,000th post–tomorrow–I will give the reader a break from the current travel series and address other matters. Stay tuned, and thanks for reading.
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White and solo, I was a target. It didn’t help that I wasn’t wearing Indian clothes. In shorts and a “St. Patrick’s Day 5-Mile Race” T-shirt, I was a stand-out.
The swindler marked me faster than the vendor could pop the cap off a bottle of “Gold Spot.” The worst of it was that everything about the con man signaled he was on the make—polyester, Western attire; cheap but recently polished leather shoes; sunglasses, which, I noticed, were an uncommon accessory; and of course, practiced, conversational English. When I answered his question about my nationality, he said, “I’ve been to America.”
“Where?”
“New York. I do business with people in New York.”
No pedestrian beggar, he was an actor in the Theater of Swindle. Against my better instincts, I entered the playhouse without keeping an eye on the exit.
In a letter home, I detailed my dialogue with this swindler. When I found the letter the other day, I laughed at my cringe-worthy naïveté.
The opening scene was a fairytale about the guy’s family business (“exporting Kashmiri carpets [. . .] to New York,” since I was American) and the need to devise convoluted schemes to foil the Shiva-like arms of Indian taxes and bureaucracy. His job in the business was to garner assistance from travelers carrying travelers cheques.
For their kindly assistance, he “was in a position” to provide a 20% profit, payable in rupees, which the traveler could then use to buy replacement travelers cheques. In those days, AmEx travelers cheques were the long-haul traveler’s primary form of cash.
Once the backdrop had been sketched, the con man’s next step was to gauge his potential gain—the total dollar amount of my travelers cheques. “Five hundred,” I lied. It was a fraction of the true amount that was tightly squeezed into my passport, tucked in a case hidden securely around my neck.
Having set the stage, the con man went straight to development of the fraud. This, I saw from the letter home, involved the illusion of additional assurances. Plus, the con man certainly saw through my lie and was intent on getting me to commit more cheques to his scam.
“I’m meeting another American at a restaurant across the bay,” he said. “He’s got travelers cheques too.” Soon we were aboard a cab honking through traffic to the appointed meeting place. Dying of thirst, I ordered another “Gold Spot.” The con man chose a classier lassi—but a drink notorious, I’d been told Down Under, for giving Westerns the “trots.”
Soon the other American arrived—Thomas, who, according to plan, surely had been watching and following furtively, ever since the con man’s initial contact with me. “Thomas” wore familiar, casual Western attire a step up from mine (slacks and a collared shirt). For my ears, he confirmed that he’d taken the cash—$480 worth of rupees, including his 20% profit— from an earlier transaction with the con man and bought new travelers cheques at the AmEx office inside the swanky Taj Mahal Hotel, all exactly according to plan.
Having tested the system, Thomas was now prepared for high drama. He pushed into the con man’s hands, travelers cheques “in 100s and 50s totaling fifty-four hundred,” he said—wrapped in a recent edition of The Times of India.
“And how much do you have?” the con man asked me, confirming that he didn’t trust what I’d told him earlier. But I stuck to “500,” and he didn’t press for more—perhaps, I surmised, he was thinking that like Thomas, I’d cough up a lot more if my test run of $500 plus 20% came through.
The con man then explained that an uncle worked at a bank and would “handle the transactions for us” while Thomas and I waited back at the crowded restaurant. When I asked to accompany the con man, he replied that since it was a Saturday and the bank was officially closed, my presence would trigger suspicions on the part of anyone who saw us enter the bank.
“What collateral, then, can you provide?” I asked.
Well-rehearsed, the con man said, “Write down the serial numbers of the cheques you’re giving me. If I don’t return, report them as stolen to American Express and you’ll be issued replacement cheques.”
Duh!—as it used to be said of an obvious explanation.
Now that all possible statutes of limitation have long passed, I can divulge that the “Duh!” in this context had a contractual exception: AmEx’s obligation to replace “stolen” cheques didn’t extend to those that had been given voluntarily to a swindler. I’d learned a parallel principle in law school: “As between innocent, defrauded parties [e.g. AmEx and me], he who deals directly with the swindler loses.” But I hadn’t yet read the fine print of the AmEx contract, and as I was chugging down my “Gold Spot,” I wasn’t thinking much about law school on a distant planet called, “earth.”
With The Times of India bundle and my $500 worth of cheques, the con man left “to meet his uncle at the bank.”
Still wary, I asked Thomas what he knew of the con man. As waiters and patrons moved and shouted around our table, my fellow American said confidently, “He seems legit.” I then realized that Thomas’s character had likewise remained wholly undeveloped.
A minute later, he complained of the “trots” and went to the loo. He soon returned to report that the loo was “too gross” to use, and he’d just have to suffer until the con man’s return. So much for “character development” on the part of Thomas: By this time we were too focused on the pending transactions and trustworthiness of the main character.
The “trots” returned. This time, hoping for a “less gross loo,” Thomas said he’d have to try one at a restaurant down the street and that I should sit tight until he returned.
It took about 20 minutes for the turning point of the play to overcome my greed-based denial. In the falling action, the truth was exposed. Having played his role to perfection, Thomas the Accomplice had exited stage left, and the con man was a cab ride away from the Theater of Swindle, forging my signature on $500 worth of travelers cheques.
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
