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

  “Constance, you come to airport for us?” Tricia had already volunteered me in the agency’s car, but Daniel wanted it confirmed.

  But on hearing it, Sergiu erupted in Romanian. Pacing between the curb and the porch, he directed Daniel’s attention to the mud sprayed across the back fenders and then pointed at the golf course, all the while raging loud and throwing his arms wide to emphasize the insolence he’d endured.

  I shrugged my shoulders at Tricia as though the scene playing out across the lawn was utterly inexplicable.

  The close tussle against the car had left me smelling like him, and the scent almost made me want to apologize. I even turned before retiring into the house, had the words “I’m sorry” in my mouth, but he was still seething and I thought it would probably be easier to just go buy a bottle of Givenchy.

  It took all of the days he was away for Sergiu to find anything remotely humorous about that night. He returned with annoyance still pinching at his eyes, informing me we were going to dinner. Once in the Jaguar, he tried to explain his frustration. “You always calm. You,” his hand dropped across his face to erase all but the merest hint of a smile, and he spoke with a near comatose expression, “You show nothing. You say, ‘Yes, Sergiu,’ and, ‘Of course, Sergiu,’ but nothing here,” he punched his heart. “But you sit here,” indicating the driver’s seat, “and ahi,” hands up and screaming followed by “brum,” his arm shot off down the road. He barely managed to chuckle, “You no drive again.”

  I’d already seen the Jaguar key with no teeth turn the ignition and thought his assertion was highly unlikely, but I wasn’t going to give him any cause to suspect it. I nodded and looked out the window, mostly just glad to be out of the house. Tricia was having nightly asthma attacks brought on by stress. She knew the cause of it, but she wouldn’t stop searching for the missing women.

  The agency was overseen by a board of directors and Jeff was Tricia’s primary contact among them. I had listened to Tricia’s even voice behind the partitions at work as she quietly told Jeff her concerns. She’d flipped through the growing stack of files, counting off the young women who had arrived at the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport only to vanish.

  Jeff’s tone was at first soothing, sounding like he was placating, whispering something smooth like, No, no, you’ve got it all wrong. Everything is fine.

  Tricia tried to make him understand. “No communication has ever been established. The women have no known addresses. And no one will admit to meeting them.”

  Jeff kept giving soft assurances, sounding like a father putting a troubled child to sleep, murmuring things I could only imagine. Hush now, nothing lives under the bed.

  But Tricia was clear and insistent, “I can’t find the most recent woman, Chantou. No one’s heard of her.”

  It’s the dark, shhh, you’re imagining things.

  “Who was the man? No one will say.”

  There are no monsters in the closet.

  “But he took her and she’s gone.”

  And no faces in the window either.

  Then, Tricia mentioned the Cambodian mob.

  Now Jeff was grumbling angrily. A filing drawer in her office slammed shut. Something else, a coffee cup or fist, came down hard on her desk, and finally Tricia was silenced.

  Jeff stamped out through the lobby and hit the front door with his open palm. He’d thrown it wide to slam against the weatherboards and wasn’t stopping to close it.

  I went around the corner to find Tricia ashen, too stunned for asthma, asking, “Did you hear that?”

  “Most of it.”

  “Does he know?”

  “It does appear that way.”

  She spent the next week trying to find the former director of the refugee agency, wanting to know what he knew and why he left. There was no clue of who he’d been in any of the agency’s books, so she went covertly to another member of the board for the information.

  “It was something Jacobs,” but the board member couldn’t remember and would have to get back to Tricia, then unwittingly, the matter was referred to Jeff to deal with.

  Jeff was on the phone shouting loud enough through Tricia’s earpiece for me to hear at my desk.

  Through it all, I’d been a teenager, oblivious to danger, unconcerned with mortality, thinking if there was any reason to be alarmed someone would surely react. As far as I knew, everything that was occurring was perfectly common.

  Tricia was on edge, and she was having asthma attacks, but she wasn’t running or screaming. When she looked to me for support to continue, I’d glance up from my book and think it made perfect sense to carry on with the plot.

  “Turn the page. Let’s see what happens,” was my advice.

  And I held what she was doing as secret as I did everything else. I didn’t mention the events at the refugee agency to Rick or Sergiu or anyone. Dinner with Rick had nothing to do with dinner with Sergiu, and life with Tricia was private. If she wanted to chase the Cambodian mob and missing women, I’d no more speak of it than mention Sergiu and Daniel’s weekly trips to New York.

  False Gods

  It was November and I had been in Dallas for two months when I made the pilgrimage to Neiman Marcus. The documentary that had excited my young mind with inconceivable wealth had reiterated that Neiman Marcus could acquire absolutely anything you desired. You want a three tent circus? They could get it. You want two matching 20 carat black opals? Neiman Marcus would find them. Mink coats and diamonds were trivial to Neiman Marcus.

  When I got identification and could finally start my life as a countess, this was the place I hoped to shop. The store was in the heart of downtown, and I entered the busy first floor with a crowd. There was not much to see. There was a café in the corner but little else to explain the bustle. I watched a mother and daughter ride the escalator to the upper levels and assumed the fur coats and stunning wardrobes lie above.

  But the second floor was no larger than 20x20 feet wide, and it was empty. The walls and floor were beautifully colored, but they were bare. There was nothing: no pictures, no rugs, no racks, or shelves, or display cases. The place was barren. A solitary person by a featureless door considered me, and after a moment, deemed me just barely worthy, but before they could speak, I slipped around to continue up the escalator.

  The third floor was the same but a different colour.

  On the fourth floor, a stack of wool rugs were laid flat on the floor and the escalator ride was over.

  Whatever the rich came to Neiman Marcus to buy, it wasn’t made visible to the plebs. There was no sign of the mother and daughter. They had been welcomed through one of the doors into the private galleries.

  Returning to the first floor, I watched the escalator.

  I was vividly out of place. I did not look in any way similar to the people who ascended. The girls my age, my genuine age, in their teens, had wide ribbon bows in their hair. Every last one of them. I’d have to be held down and threatened with something greater than mortal embarrassment to wear a bow. It was the 80s when everyone had a perm, but I didn’t need one. My hair was naturally curly. I loved my hair, but the women on the escalator had spurned the look. They had straight hair, bobbed at the shoulders and flicked up hard at the ends. Their hair was precise. I took scissors to my own with no concern about making it straight because anything uneven would just spring up into the coils and be lost. The Neiman Marcus clients looked sharp, and I appeared to have just stumbled in from the wind swept moors.

  I wasn’t wearing nearly enough cosmetics, or perfume, or jewels to pass as their kin. My clothes had been donated to the refugee agency, and while most of them bore designer labels, they lacked the brand-new-worn-only-once sheen of the truly wealthy. I watched them disappearing into Neiman Marcus’s upper levels and knew they would spot me as a fraud.

  ~~~~~~

  I never wanted to return to Neiman Marcus. It was disheartening. I didn’t belong and I was fairly certain I would never be able to attain the severe appe
arance required of its women. It was better with Sergiu. He wore beautifully stitched suits with Italian labels. His watch was Bvlgari, his cologne Givenchy. He drove expensive cars and was as comfortable eating in a dark dive as any one of Dallas’s finer restaurants.

  He’d come to the house and say, “Constanzia, come,” and I’d stop what I was doing to put on lipstick and shoes.

  Wherever we went, we were accepted. And because we were foreign, I could have as crazy of hair as I liked.

  But we didn’t valet park. And the doors were left unlocked. Sergiu wore driving gloves and I essentially didn’t touch anything, but none of this was mentioned.

  Whether it was an Audi, Mercedes, or Porsche, he always had the appropriate emblem on the filed down key. It looked legitimate driving, but he didn’t explain.

  He was boisterous of voice but discreet with cash. We talked when others didn’t, often drawing in the surrounding tables. After the woman’s confession at the Mexican restaurant, Sergiu couldn’t bear to see a quiet couple. Wherever we went, we would stay for hours and he could afford to give the miserable twenty minutes.

  He was careful to work on the man. “This is very good drink. It makes me happy. You no so happy, I can see.” And he’d order the uncommunicative fellow a duplicate. “You have beautiful wife – pardon me for noticing. You are in beautiful place with beautiful food. But you have bad day, no?”

  Sergiu would have the woman smiling and the man agreeing, as though it were in no way normal for them not to be speaking. It was all just a bad day.

  “You drink and you forget. Constanzia tells me your wife maybe like this drink she like.” The look between men was that neither of them would have it, but Sergiu would encourage, and the man would order his wife whatever cocktail Sergiu had ordered me.

  One would always ask, “Where are you from?”

  And depending on his mood, Sergiu might say Romania, Portugal, Spain, or Italy, but he’d twist it around to someplace the couple had traveled. He was brilliant. He’d make them laugh and then speak well of each other. And when he removed himself from their conversation, they were under pressure not to fall silent. People were watching.

  ~~~~~~

  It was late when I got home from dinner with Sergiu. Tricia was still up and at the basin washing her face. I was watching her from the hall, leaning against the door frame, babbling something inconsequential when she rose up to the mirror. There were distinct finger marks bruising her throat.

  “Tricia? What happened?”

  “I’ve had a bad night,” was her understatement.

  She’d had a horrific encounter with Jeff and a Baptist preacher.

  Jeff felt there was a misunderstanding between them and suggested they resolve it at his office. He’d asked the preacher from the large Cambodian church to attend, telling Tricia the man would be present to mediate. But the pair’s insistence that she had her facts wrong was menacing, and only minutes into the meeting, Tricia felt threatened. She had watched me leave work with Sergiu and realized no one knew where she was.

  When she tried to leave, the preacher blocked the door. Both he and Jeff wanted to hear assurances that she understood no women were missing. She wanted to agree but first she needed to dig in her purse for her inhaler.

  Thinking she was reaching for a gun, the preacher splayed himself across the door screaming, and Jeff snatched her bag to search it while Tricia wheezed out the explanation, “Asthma.”

  Fifteen minutes later, she was swearing the issue had been resolved, harmony restored, and if they would only stand aside, she’d cease to be a problem.

  Outside Jeff’s office, the street was bright but the only way to her car was through an unlit alley. She didn’t want to enter, but she didn’t want to encounter Jeff again either, so she reasoned with herself, telling herself there was nothing to worry about, convincing herself the worst of the night was over. Halfway down the darkened lane, the very thing she feared stepped out of a black alcove. The same height as her, the Cambodian rammed her against the wall and then held her by the throat. She expected to be stabbed and hacked to pieces, left as a gruesome warning to others who dared to question, but the man barely moved. And he had nothing to say either. He just gripped her by the neck, rattling her small frame against the bricks to keep her attention, and stared silently in her eyes. Then unknown minutes later, as a second asthma attack choked her for breath, he released her. She backed away for the parking lot and he stood eerily at ease watching her go.

  Making Headlines

  At the end of November, Tricia resigned from the agency. Nothing had been resolved and Chantou hadn’t been found. But we didn’t talk about this. Any mention of the refugee agency would have Tricia wheezing for breath, suffering such debilitating asthma attacks, her inhaler was little help. She was being suffocated by guilt and fear; and though I didn’t recognize it at the time, I do now, she was having panic attacks.

  She seldom left the house anymore, so we spent our days at home. Daniel began spending more nights, paying for rent and groceries, and Sergiu came more frequently too. When they weren’t driving to New York, he and Daniel would take over the kitchen and cook for hours. Sergiu was always trying to draw me into their spirited task, wanting to teach me something, like how to use a knife so every attempt didn’t end with my blood staining the cutting board.

  I’d pick up the knife and he’d cross himself, say a prayer to heaven, and then hover over me insisting, “The garlic no fight. Is nice garlic. You no try to kill.” But he couldn’t bear to watch and was too afraid to turn his back.

  After the second mishap requiring liquid sutures, he wouldn’t let me near anything sharp. Instead, he tried to show me how to core a head of lettuce by striking it once “at the base of skull, no, of root, this here.”

  “The stalk,” I offered and noticed the punch exploded through the head to splay the leaves out like a bowl.

  “Now it is cooperative.”

  He was boisterous and gregarious, dominating the scene, pulling everyone in, always animated and holding a laugh just beneath the surface. And he was passionate about dinner. It was the high point of every day. He complained that he could not fully express himself in English and if only I knew another language: Romanian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, even French would be better. “How you only know English?”

  But even so, we never spent less than two hours at the table.

  It was very different than eating with Rick.

  Sergiu and Daniel had been in New York when Rick called. There was something we needed to discuss.

  We were in a chain restaurant, and I was following Rick’s subdued lead. The meal was one of good Southern manners, full of restraint and general pleasantries. At the end, he explained that my case was public record and had “gone out on the wire.” Straight through October and now most of November, the Associated Press and a number of other reporters had harassed him to reveal my location. He had steadfastly refused, putting them off and making excuses to protect me, but he couldn’t very well tell them he didn’t know where I was, as, “That would make my office look unprofessional.”

  He didn’t seem comfortable with the idea, and he was happy to keep turning them away, but if I wanted to speak with a reporter, there was a journalist from Austin whose inquiries were far more polite than the others.

  I didn’t know what to think of it. It sounded like I’d be putting myself forward for further scrutiny without benefit, but it also appealed to me as potentially diverting. I was torn, so I was ambiguous, responding with nothing more than an acknowledging smile.

  Rick asked, “So, you’ll speak with her?”

  I raised my eyes in a wordless expression of Should I?

  “Do you want to talk with her?”

  I didn’t know, so I wasn’t helping. I’d found silence to be the best tactic when in doubt so far.

  And when Rick finally recognized I wasn’t giving any more, he said, “I’ll give the journalist Tricia’s phone number and
you can think about it.”

  ~~~~~~

  Tricia couldn’t think of a reason why I wouldn’t talk to Patrice. It sounded quite exciting. Patrice was from the Austin American Statesman and she’d already spent an hour on the phone with Tricia privately discussing my story, asking Tricia what she could expect from me, how to approach, no doubt discussing the sensitive topic of my life as a submissive prostitute.

  She came at the start of December while Sergiu and Daniel were away.

  It had been over two months since anyone had questioned me, and I’d forgotten where the line of inquiry inevitably led.

  Patrice’s playful insistence that I had sex with the unnamed masters left me puzzled. “Come now, not once?”

  I assured, “No, never.”

  She was in good-natured doubt, grinning, asking like we were best friends, “Have you ever?”

  I thought it made me look unsophisticated to be twenty-three and inexperienced. Virginity was a hindrance to my image I wouldn’t admit. I was coy, “Of course, there were others.”

  Patrice leaned forward smiling. “Who?”

  “An occasional friend of the master.”

  It was all clear to her now. “You had sex with the masters’ friends. Ahhh …” Then without warning, “Were you forced?”

  “No.” But I was once more utterly mystified why the issue of sex kept coming up, and now it was veering into rape. Blessed hell, no one had any respect for masters of craft. Not that I had said what any of them held a mastery of, but wow, adults were really obsessed with who was going to bed with whom, and they’d just frankly ask you who you’d slept with. Amazing, if not a little disconcerting.

  It was 1985 and what young teenagers knew about sex was limited to what you or your friends could either gather or glimpse when you were strictly not meant to. I had been the first in my class to know much of anything. I had learned about this, too, from a book. I had found it on the shelves of the public library, right next to Emily Brontë, but unmarked by the library’s filing system, and I knew by the end of the first page it didn’t belong. The back cover still had the sticker price which revealed it had come from Nashville’s Biggest Adult Bookstore. I had no idea adults had their very own exclusive book store, but fanning through the pages, I could see why. Slipping it under my sweater, I had secreted it home, and then read it from start to finish in a night.