2953-11-05– Tales from the Inbox: The Swindler’s Confrontation 

Albie Schmelling, as it turned out, was not particularly difficult to find, though he probably thought he was keeping a low profile. When they found him in the lounge abutting the passenger liner docks, the cup of cold coffee by his elbow and the subtle bags under his eyes suggested he’d been there far longer than he had any proper business to be. 

Though Schmelling noticed Mari Robertson as she came in and rose to scuttle out the opposite end of the lounge, he only ran into Eddy Rothbauer, who’d gone around to cover that exit.  

“Albie! Long time.” Eddy fixed the bigger man with a humorless grin and gestured toward a table in the corner. “You must tell me what you’ve been up to!” Eddy was, of course, heavily armed at all times. Schmelling, as a former co-conspirator in ill-fated money-making schemes, knew that perfectly well.  

Schmelling, glancing around to see Mari behind him with her arms folded, shrugged. “I would love to, but I don’t have much time-” 

“Then we won’t take much of it.” Eddy clapped a hand on Schmelling’s shoulder. “We’re busy today, too.” 

Schmelling permitted himself to be led to the table, and Mari sat down next to him while Eddy took the seat opposite. Almost the moment his rear touched the cushion, Eddy started talking. “It wasn’t me. Honest it wasn’t. I don’t care who-” 

“Woah, hold on.” Mari held up her hand. “Albie, we don’t care. There’s not going to be an official complaint, as long as you give back the money right now.” 

“The money?” Schmelling paled. “That’s all you’re here for?” 

Eddy leaned forward. “Well, what did you think we were after?” 

“Slander, as usual. You know only too well all the things people will say about me when-” 

“When they’ve had the misfortune of spending any time with you.” Mari shook her head. “Whose daughter was it this time?” 

“What? No, I would never!” Schmelling chuckled nervously. “What would give you an idea like that?” 

Eddy and Mari both shuddered; they’d seen his womanizing and preference for younger partners in far too great detail to believe his denials. Mari's previous arrangement with him had foundered on his repeated insistence on pursuing naive young women instead of attending to their business.  

“No, no, it’s nothing, really. Just a misunderstanding. Should be taken care of tomorrow.” 

“Sure, a lot of things will be settled for you when the Otto Bofors shoves off with you on it.” Mari grinned. “You really need to come up with some new aliases, you know. Transit tickets are public records.” 

Schmelling groaned. “Come on guys. You know how it is. If you’d made a score like this, you’d be-” 

“On the fastest hull out of the Sprawl, yeah.” Eddy waved his hand. “But we didn’t. The people you robbed hired us to get their money back. And that’s how we make our score. Sure, it's smaller, but we don’t have to run.” 

Mari, recalling the datapack sitting under the bench in Rennecker’s suppressed a wince, feeling that she was correctly placed on Schmelling’s side of the table. Captured by officialdom or no, Eddy was at least for the moment engaged in pure white-hattery, that is, jobs in the grey trades that required no moral compromise and whose wages were clean. In a way, she envied that; if the Glitters had mostly white-hat work for him, perhaps capture wasn’t so bad. 

“I worked so hard for this, Eddy.” Schmelling wrung his big hands. “Look, I’ll give you a cut to go interrogate someone else until I’m gone.” 

“Just give the money back.” Eddy rolled his eyes. “Or if you’ve got it in hard chits, give it to me, and I’ll take it back. Nobody would ever trace it to you.” 

“Come on...” Schmelling glanced between them. “We can work something out.” 

“What baffles me, though.” Mari leaned in. “Is how you of all people tricked the Glitters. You’ve got more tics than a chronometer for anyone who knows what to look for, and they pick up on those really fast.” 

“That’s, ah, not how it is.” Schmelling looked down at the table. “I didn’t have to fool them. I had... a sort of go-between, yeah?” 

Eddy scowled. “You got some girl to believe you. And to take your idea to the Glitters. Because she was so earnest, they never saw the scam.” 

“Err, basically.” Schmelling shrugged. “You gotta do what you gotta do.” 

“What do you think is going to happen to her when you get off-station?” Eddy growled. “Even for you, letting a girl take the fall is low.” 

“I wouldn’t-” Schmelling looked up, brow furrowed, but at that moment, Mari noticed someone coming across the lounge toward them, and gestured for the men to be quiet. It was a woman, youngish, slim to the point of looking underfed. She was dressed in a simple overcoat draped over a modest smart-fabric jumpsuit, with a heavy layer of inexpertly-applied makeup on her face doing its best to hide her extreme stress and fatigue. 

“Herman, who are your friends?” The girl – Mari couldn’t think of her as anything else after hearing her quavering, falsetto voice – approached the table and put a hand on Schmelling’s arm. “Is everything all right?” 

“Former business partners, my dear.” Schmelling held up a hand. “Just finalizing a few loose ends before we depart.” 

The girl looked at Eddy, then at Mari, and with a nervous smile, retreated back toward the food-fabs at the other end of the lounge. 

“She still doesn’t know it was a scam, does she?” Eddy nudged Schmelling. 

“No, she hasn’t a clue.” Schmelling sighed. “She’s booked for the Bofors with me. I figured we could live it up for a few months until the money ran dry, and then...” 

“And then you’d be bored with her anyway, and vanish. On to bigger swindles.” Mari hissed. 

“Maybe not!” Schmelling shook his head unconvincingly. 

“I'm going to watch you give her the money and tell her the truth, Albie.” Eddy drummed the fingers of his left hand on the table while his right hand slid down toward one of his pistol holsters. “Then I’m going to watch you get on that ship. And I’m not going to watch you come back, do you understand?” 

Schmelling winced, face pale. “I can’t-” 

“Trust me. You can.” 

Eddy Rothbauer and Mari Robertson are, most likely, pseudonyms. I was surprised to find un-anonymized names in this account, as you likely have been; these are even the names of people who really are Sprawl residents, but likely they are people unrelated to this business. These names seem to have been picked because they are common: as of this posting there are three Edward Rothbauers on the station and no less than four residents with some variant of the name Maria Robertson. 

The name Albie Schmelling, however, seems to be the real name of a real con-artist who was a Sprawl resident until very recently. He departed the station under unknown circumstances in mid-September and has not been recorded aboard since. One of the motivations for submitting this account seems to be warning people of Schmelling’s predations, though if he has as many aliases as our submitter suggests, I’m not sure how much good this warning is going to do.