“What do you know about me?” I ask.
He turns slowly toward me. Glaring into my eyes he opens his mouth, pauses, and then says, “Enough.”
“I doubt that.” I shrug.
I’m acting smug but in fact, for all I know, he knows everything.
“Anyway, it’s not a secret,” I say, trying another angle.
“I doubt that.” He smiles.
We drink our martinis in silence, unwilling to be the first one to speak up and show a sign of weakness.
“You used me,” I start. “You told me the story but not the mark.”
“You didn’t need to know who I was after or why.”
“It’s best when everyone involved knows what’s going on,” I correct him.
“It may be preferred, but you handled yourself quite well going in on it blind,” he says.
“You did that on purpose,” I say.
It’s less of a statement and more of an accusation.
“It was a test. I wanted to see how you would do under less than ideal circumstances.”
“You had no right,” I hiss.
Nicholas walks up to me, places his index finger under my chin, and lifts it up in the air.
“I had every right to know what the people who work for me are capable of,” he says stoically.
Of course, I think to myself. How could I be so stupid?
None of this is real.
He brought me here, told me a sob story about his sister, and made me think that we had some sort of sexual chemistry that we never really had.
That’s the thing about confident men (and women), they not only lie, but they make you think that it’s not a lie at all.
The best cons are those in which the mark, the person being taken for a ride, doesn’t even know that they have been swindled.
Like Kathy Moreno. She didn’t know that her bracelet was worth a million dollars and she didn’t know that she’d lost a bracelet worth a million dollars. For the conman, it’s a win-win.
“What do you want from me?” I ask.
“I need a partner. I have a number of projects that need to be executed in the next few months. You are the best person for the job…or so I’ve heard,” Nicholas says.
“From whom?” I ask.
“Does it matter?”
I lean on the railing and turn my body to face his. “Of course, it does. No one knows about my past. No one is supposed to, anyway. How do you?”
“Like I said before, I am very good at research.” Nicholas inhales deeply, clearly agitated. “Now, if you’re interested, I have one more test for you.”
“I’m not,” I say, narrowing my eyes. “My days of lying and cheating and stealing are over.”
“My real offer is this. You travel with me, pretend to be my girlfriend, wife, ex, whatever I need for 365 days. In exchange, I’ll pay you one million dollars for your services.”
If he’s offering me this much money then, not only must he really need me but these jobs must be bringing in a lot more than that.
“And forty percent of the take,” I say.
He shakes his head, giving me a laugh.
When he focuses his eyes on mine, I show him exactly how serious I am.
“Ten,” he says after a moment.
“Ten percent? Are you kidding me?”
“Don’t flatter yourself. You’re not the only pretty girl who can run a con out there,” Nicholas says to deflate my ego.
But I know that it’s just another bargaining tool.
“Thirty percent,” I say after a beat.
There’s a long pause.
I wait while he thinks.
“Fifteen,” he says after a moment.
“Thirty,” I insist.
Nicholas takes a step closer.
I can feel his breath on my skin.
His plump luscious lips are relaxed.
He opens his mouth a bit and I see his tongue.
A flash of heat rushes through my body. It takes an enormous amount of effort to keep myself from reaching over and kissing him.
He leans over and whispers, “Fifteen.”
What a son-of-a-bitch.
“Twenty-five percent,” I whisper, feeling my knees getting weak.
He takes his hand and runs it down my side.
A bolt of electricity rushes through me.
“Twenty-five percent and no sex,” I say as sternly as possible once I catch my breath.
I state the no sex clause out loud more for my benefit than for his, as a reminder.
“Sex is not part of the deal. I already told you that you’ll be begging me for it before our time is up,” Nicholas says nonchalantly. “Fifteen percent. That’s my final offer.”
Angry with how the negotiation went, I give him a slight nod. He puts out his hand for me to shake.
“This handshake is contingent on how everything goes tomorrow night,” Nicholas says.
“What’s tomorrow night?” I ask.
“Your second test. One word of advice: leave your prudishness at the door.”
5
When I receive the present…
After sleeping for fourteen hours straight, I wake up in a strange bed and try to remember exactly what I had agreed to the previous night. Things slowly come back to me.
The bracelet. The lies. The show.
A good con always requires a bit of a show.
It’s not about brute force.
It’s a sleight of hand.
It’s about telling an outlandish story with a smile on your face or tears in your eyes, depending on what’s required.
I stumbled upon this world by accident.
In high school, I spent my Friday afternoons at the mall stealing fashion jewelry, makeup, and the occasional pair of jeans.
Then one day, a security guard at Marshall’s stopped my friend Jamie Van Camp, took her to the back room and found that she had three unpaid for shirts on underneath her hoodie.
Back then, our modus operandi was to take a bunch of clothes into the changing room, put the ones we wanted to keep under our clothes, place a big pile on the clerk’s table, and tell her that we are buying the rest.
If you were chatty and had a big enough mess of clothes, she rarely bothered to make sure that you had the same number of pieces to match the number with which we went into the dressing room with.
But one day it didn’t work. The manager called the police and Jamie’s parents, but her parents’ lawyer convinced them not to press charges.
The following weekend, Jamie was ready to try her luck at Target but I was done with it.
If that had been me, I would’ve been arrested and my mother wouldn’t have paid my bail so I would be stuck in jail until my hearing. No, I didn’t have two caring parents who would save me from whatever mess I got myself into so I couldn’t risk so much anymore.
I take a walk around Nicholas’ estate. There is no one outside but the weather is marvelous and the crystal blue water of the pool calls to me. I slip into my bathing suit and dive in.
“One million dollars,” I say when I reach the other side.
I spent all of my years in high school, and especially in college, working as hard as I could just to give myself a chance.
I wanted to get as far away as possible from the life that I grew up in.