Assuming Names: a con artist's masquerade (Criminal Mischief Book 1)

  I was shrugging but not inclined to argue with the titles of the magazines when Sergiu started chuckling. “I think you play trick, Constanzia. I think you play trick on everyone. You make your face,” he turned his features deadpan serious, “but you laughing. This very good trick,” he smiled like we were sharing the joke, but then abruptly he ceased to show any humor. Leaning forward to bring his face close to mine, he was severe, “But you remember, you no trick me.”

  ~~~~~~

  When Tricia told me the twenty-odd men from the Eastern Bloc were afraid of me, I laughed.

  She said, “I knew you would react like that. You don’t see it, but you scare them.”

  “There is nothing even remotely frightening about me.”

  “Imagine it from their perspective. I cannot explain who you are or where you come from. And because you work here as a volunteer, this makes them very suspicious. They don’t understand why you would not work somewhere for pay.”

  “Because I do not have the thing you say I need.”

  “A green card. But they don’t believe this, or how else would you be here with the agency?” Tricia grinned, “They think you are a government agent that has bamboozled me.”

  I laughed again.

  “It is the way things work in their country.”

  It was comically absurd that anyone would think me tough or forceful enough to be either FBI or CIA, but apparently, “Your gentle mannerism is what makes you particularly dangerous.”

  It was funny to consider, but I didn’t believe it. I tried to convince Tricia she had heard the men wrong, that the misunderstanding was one of language, but then after two weeks of thwarted efforts, I suspected she was right.

  I would spend hours on the phone arranging job interviews for the Eastern Europeans, and the men would say to me, “Yes, yes, thank you, I go to interview,” but then they wouldn’t. I would call the prospective employer once more, apologizing, charming, lying, saying, “It was my fault, I gave the wrong date,” or, “the wrong address.” I’d reschedule and then implore the wary men not to make me look unreliable again, pressing them to accept my offer to drive them to the appointment, cornering them with solicitous attention, freaking them out until they assured me, “I go, I go.” And they would go, making their own way there only to stare at the floor, mute with passive resistance, or outright decline the offer of employment.

  Tricia would warn them, “There is only so long the agency can afford to support you. You need to accept the next offer.” But if the job had been arranged by me, the suspected government agent, the offer was refused.

  For camaraderie and support, all the Eastern Europeans had been settled into one apartment complex. In an attempt to make them more comfortable with me, Tricia started going to the complex to do paperwork and see how they were getting on, taking me with her to arrange for furniture and other essentials that would help transition them into the United States. Alone among the men was Sergiu who did not require the assistance of the agency to pay either his rent or the utilities, and not once did he ask for money to buy groceries. He shared a three-bedroom apartment with Eugene and Daniel, but they had no need for furnishings as Sergiu had decorated the place. Black leather couches and chrome tables sat on grungy brown carpet, and garishly framed oil paintings hung on the white, patched walls. The rundown apartment had never seen anything like it, and Sergiu, with his affable humor barely contained, sat amongst it in a beautifully stitched suit telling Tricia he had a job as a dishwasher.

  “Excellent,” Tricia commended him. “Where are you working?”

  “Restaurant,” he flicked it away.

  “Yes, but which one?”

  “Ah …” he rolled his hands, one loosely circling the other, thinking, stretching out time. Taking a breath, he looked up to the mismatched spackled ceiling and frowned. Finally, he dismissed the question with an open palm, “I no remember name. But good place. Very nice.”

  “Do you think they could hire more, like Daniel and Eugene?”

  Sergiu’s eyes widened with his smile as he tried not to laugh. “Ah … yes,” flex of the shoulders and turn of the head. “Yes, maybe this okay.”

  “Will you ask?”

  He’d already been chuckling under his breath, but when he saw Tricia was seriously waiting for a response, he threw his hands up and laughed loud, “Yes, I ask.” Then, still laughing, he said to Eugene and Daniel, “Maybe we dishwasher together.”

  ~~~~~~

  Tricia had a private matter to discuss with a Bulgarian in an apartment across the courtyard and told Sergiu, “If you don’t mind, I will leave Constance here with you for the moment.”

  “Yes, yes, good,” he fluffed the air in front of him, sending Tricia out the door. To me he said, “Constanzia, you make us coffee,” gesturing in a circle around the room to include himself, Eugene, and Daniel.

  Sure, okay. Perhaps I should have been insulted to be dismissed to the kitchen, but I had absolutely no opinion about it. I simply got up and went to investigate the coffee maker. It was a standard electric machine, but I had no idea how to use it. I examined it from top to bottom then started pulling and prying at the parts. Finding the swinging bowl that held the grounds, I searched through the cabinets to locate the beans. Five pounds of canned coffee in hand, I treated the electric maker like a stovetop percolator and dumped the grounds into the basket without a filter. Having nothing else to go by, it seemed reasonable to fill it to the top.

  I was tap, tap, tapping the can on the edge of the plastic basket, scattering dark grounds across the chipped Formica counter, struggling to keep the wide brim from spilling its contents over the edge. The whole process was taking ages, but I was concentrating hard, determined to get it done.

  I didn’t know Sergiu was at my side until I smelled the heavy scent of Givenchy over the coffee. Holding the can still, I stopped to look at him and he asked painfully, “Why, Constanzia? I good with you. Why this,” he indicated the coffee maker, “with me?”

  I stared at him, baffled.

  He glanced at the amount of grounds already in the basket. “You try hurt me? Maybe you think I no …” he punched his chest.

  My furrowed brow meant I was clueless as to what he meant. I studied both him and the coffee maker for meaning.

  “This how you make coffee?” he demanded.

  I set the can down. “I thought so, but I’ve never made it before.”

  His head dropped forward to consider me with disbelief. Raising his brows, he stared at me, waiting for me to change my story or give something more, and when I did neither, he pulled back with a deep breath to ask gravely, “You laughing at me?”

  I looked myself over and then, rather perplexed it wasn’t obvious, answered, “No.”

  He exhaled confusion. At a loss to understand, he put both his hands on my shoulders and stepped me to the side to stand before the coffee maker himself.

  Palms open to encompass the mess I had made, he shook his head muttering, “Madonna mia.”

  Pulling the basket out of the machine and dumping the grounds in the trash, he spoke aloud as though he were explaining it to us both, “So, you no laughing whole time.” Rinsing the basket, stating as fact, “You think Kalashnikov is sport.” Showing me the filters and then daintily taking one to press into the basket, he held it for me to inspect. “You know how to cook?”

  I looked around the kitchen as though it were a hospital operating theater.

  He asked himself sardonically, “Why she know how to cook when she make coffee like this?” He swept his hand over the counter, pushing a pile of grounds to one side. “How many years you have?” He was filling the jug with water, waiting for my answer, but I was confused. He searched for the phrase he’d been taught, “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  He laughed. Pointing at the two and then just below the four cup measuring lines, he asked, “Two three?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.” Pouring the water int
o the coffee maker, “Why you say this, Constanzia?” But I remained silent while he scooped an appropriate amount of grounds into the filter. Once the machine was started, he watched it like he were in a daze, then huffing out a breath, he turned to look me over and declare, “Maybe you one nine. Maybe.”

  I smiled an expression of whatever-makes-you-happy, making Sergiu frown and say, “You pretty girl but,” his hand waved from the left of me to the right, “something no good with you.” Then, after a moment’s consideration, “I like this.”

  Cambodian Mob

  Sitting on Tricia’s front porch, we were looking over the park. Tricia was worried. She didn’t want to sound paranoid, but she wondered if maybe someone were watching the house.

  I shielded my eyes to squint into the setting sun. In the farthest distance, golfers were striking balls across the green, but no one else seemed to be around.

  “Perhaps I’ll ask your detective what he thinks when he gets here.”

  We were waiting for Rick to arrive. He’d called from the sheriff’s office while I was working. I’d been with Tricia for a month and he’d been meaning to check up on me, so he offered, “We’ll make a night of it, and I’ll take you to dinner.”

  But first Tricia wanted to tell me something. She’d been edgy the past week. We would go to see the Europeans and she’d keep her attention out the window, looking, watching. Sergiu would press wine on her, but she was too agitated to drink it.

  He had asked me, “What is problem with Tricia?”

  But I didn’t know. I hadn’t asked. She always seemed relatively calm in his living room with Daniel. It was with the Cambodians she was really troubled.

  And tonight it seemed like we were at the Asian apartment complex instead of her porch. She was jumpy, looking nearly manic while throwing back wine to drown her nerves. Her asking Rick if someone was watching the house sounded positively demented, and I was embarrassed for us both just imagining it. Hoping to prevent any such wild speculations from being voiced, I was keeping a lookout for Rick’s black SUV.

  Tricia had just started explaining, “There’s something going on at the agency,” when a new Porsche Carrera stopped in front of the house. Sergiu and Daniel got out, but their arrival made no difference. Tricia was primed by two glasses of wine to share her concerns.

  She was so obviously disturbed that the men approached quizzically, their faces showing instant compassion, both of them ready to assist or avenge. The whole Eastern Bloc of refugees adored Tricia.

  She had given Daniel the address, but they weren’t expected, and the reason for their visit wasn’t questioned with Tricia’s distress.

  Pulling a seat close to her side, Daniel patted her arm and asked, “What? What is it?”

  And Sergiu stood with one foot on the steps, rolling his hand to encourage her to speak.

  She spoke to no one in particular, “I have file after file of missing Cambodian women, and not a soul can tell me where they’ve gone. They arrived at the airport and then, poof, disappeared.”

  Sergui, Daniel, and I took a moment to shift back for a little distance and perspective. We all turned our heads as though we might hear it better in an echo. We were waiting for more, but Tricia was silent.

  I had to speak for us all, suggesting, “You might want to explain that a little further.”

  She’d taken over as director of the refugee agency some six months previous and noticed there was a large influx of young, single Cambodian women being sponsored by various churches and families in Dallas, but, upon arrival in the United States, they never made contact with the agency. In the past few weeks, she had started to track them down, but every time she called the pastors or families to inquire if the women required any support or assistance, she heard the same story: “We’ve never seen her.”

  “You signed the sponsorship papers,” Tricia accused them, “and you’ve made no attempt to meet her?”

  In every case, the sponsor couldn’t tell Tricia where the woman was because a Cambodian relative, either her brother or uncle, had insisted on picking her up from the airport. “She’s gone to live with her family,” they told Tricia. “We weren’t concerned because it’s what we expected from the start.”

  When the uncle had come asking for sponsorship, he’d made assurances it was merely paperwork and the woman would require no further assistance. The sponsors thought they had been acting charitably, getting the woman out of an asylum camp, certain she had family in Dallas waiting on her.

  But the agency’s books listed no relatives. Tricia started searching the years before she had arrived and found countless more instances of women vanishing at the airport.

  She looked at me and said, “I thought this was the sort of thing you might know something about.”

  Neither Sergiu nor Daniel knew my story, so Sergiu was bewildered. “Why Constanzia know anything about this?”

  I was still oblivious to what I had implied about myself, and Tricia wasn’t going to reveal what everyone else thought of me. She gestured for me to clarify and looked away.

  Truly perplexed, I shrugged my shoulders and Sergiu didn’t doubt I was sincere. He cut his hand straight through the misunderstanding, his expression reading, “Never mind, it’s the stress.”

  Shaking the notion out of his thoughts, he explained to Tricia, “This is problem you have with mob. Cambodian mob. Is problem.” He’d been nodding his head, calmly reinforcing Tricia’s suspicions before casually adding, “They have many prostitutes.”

  “Yes,” Tricia pointed at him like he was the backup she’d been looking for, “that was my exact fear.”

  “The Cambogianis give straw to the fire,” Sergiu seemed to be taking it personally. “Maybe problem terminate soon.”

  Tricia scowled her confusion at him. The Cambodian mob was going nowhere. They were one of the top stories in the newspaper. In less than a decade, they’d displaced the Italian and Mexican criminal gangs in Dallas, and no one knew what to do with them because they hacked people to death for minor offenses. When angered, they were known for being especially grisly. The Cambodians had seen way too much under Pol Pot’s rule to think a baseball bat to the knees was anything more than a friendly tickle in a territorial dispute.

  The refugee agency took in significantly more Cambodians than Eastern Europeans but spent a quarter of the time on them, only helping in the first weeks of their arrival, because after that the mob would have made contact, and they alone dispensed assistance. Any support provided outside their influence made them look bad, and everyone quickly learned you didn’t want to make the Cambodian mob look bad.

  And anyway, Tricia would later ask me, “What could Sergiu possibly know of it having just come from Romania?”

  I thought very little of any of it. All of this was just background noise while I waited for Rick and Interpol and the FBI to figure out who I was. In my wildest flights of fancy, I hoped I might fit the description of a child abducted in Europe and her family might claim me as their own. That would be exciting. I’d get to go to Europe. But even if nothing like that ever happened, at some point the authorities would give me legitimate identification, and then my real life in Dallas would begin. Until then, I was just passing meaningless time.

  The last thing I wanted was for the drama playing out on the porch to spill over into my future, and around the corner I had seen Rick’s SUV turn onto our street. I rose and said, “We should take this inside. Come gentlemen, we’ve been very rude. We should have offered you something to drink.”

  Then once I had everyone over the threshold, I pulled back saying, “I’ll join you after I get the mail,” but instead, I shut the door and left with Rick.

  ~~~~~~

  The detective in Rick had taken note of the shiny Porsche sitting outside Tricia’s middle-class bungalow. It meant very little to me, and when pressed to think about it, I assumed there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for why two new immigrants to the United States were in possession of it
.

  Rick tried to discuss it casually, saying, “It appears to be new.”

  But his suspicion was apparent, so I only answered, “Oh,” as though I were disinterested to hear it.

  “It’s a very expensive car.”

  “Hmm,” my interest was no more engaged.

  “You’d have to be quite wealthy to afford one.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Is it Tricia’s?”

  “No.”

  Rick had already had too many of these conversations not to realize it would go nowhere without a direct question. “Do you know who owns it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s just parked outside Tricia’s house?”

  “Yes.” All technically true. Not that I’d had a sudden crisis of conscience and thought I should be honest with Rick, but over the matter of the car, I had no reason to outright lie to him either, yet his presumption that something was amiss made me cautious.

  I shifted the topic, saying, “It’s nice to see you again,” forcing Rick to move along or be openly distrustful.

  And he did consider it, but then he set the subject aside. There were more relevant matters to discuss. He had a stack of forms from Interpol, and he didn’t have the answers to most of the questions. Neither did I.

  Date of birth was unknown, as was living family members, and I couldn’t say exactly where I had lived the last five years. Place of birth was probably Europe. The doctors at the psychiatric hospital had already determined I was not born in the United States because I did not have the immunization scar most adults had on their arm. I’d gotten lucky there. My childhood doctor had thought such blemishes were ugly and had hid it on my thigh.

  When Rick asked if I spoke another language, I thought it might be beneficial to instill a bit of doubt, so I let the question sit for a while before answering, “No.”