The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 16

Lying awake in the hot darkness of a Muscat summer.

Sleeping not a wink.

Thieves are prone to paranoia. The car in the night, the footfall in the shadow; trust. Who do you trust? In most petty crime, hate is as good a word as honour. Hate the cops, hate the law, hate the world. For this reason, your average two-bit mugger banged up for three years in Pentonville isn’t going to rat on his mates, because, for all they’re backstabbing bastards, they’re not the cops, the pig, the filth, and even if they’re not friends, they’re still your mates.

Up the crime, up the stakes, up the reasons for betrayal.

A night run through Muscat, and three men in white call out, Hey, pretty lady, you hot, you sweet, you hot?

These men might be married, might beat another man to death for even looking at their wives, their sisters, their children, but when a lone Western woman walks through the streets of Oman, that’s fair game, because Western women are like that, aren’t they? They must be, to walk the way they walk, talk the way they talk.

You sweet, you hot?

Briefly, I feel the fear of being a woman in a strange land.

I am the queen of taster classes: self-defence, half a dozen different forms of martial art; fired a pistol on a range in Nebraska, a rifle in Kentucky. I carry a flashlight in my bag which may, with very little effort, be turned into a blunt impact weapon in an emergency, and I am prepared to hurt someone, to really hurt them, if my safety is threatened.

I carry on running, and count steps as I do, twenty-seven until the men are completely out of sight.

I have been caught by cops three times in my career.

The first time, I was seventeen years old, and I was nabbed red-handed shoplifting from a department store in Birmingham. The security guard who tackled me held onto my arm until the police arrived. They took my name (false), my address (false), and when they discovered the lie, the sergeant looked me in the eye and said, “It’s a shame, luv, cos we gotta put you through the system.”

They put me in the back of the police car and drove slowly to the station. I hunkered down low, silent, listening to the cops in front chatting about the game, what their missus had said, how one wished he had more time to see the kids, the other was worried about his dad. When they got to the station one said, “Cuppa?”

“Lovely-jubbly,” replied the other brightly, and so saying, they got out of the car without checking the rear seat, slammed the doors shut and went in search of their tea break, leaving me sat in the back, forgotten, wondering what I was going to do now.

In the end, a constable found me, and called the drivers of the car, and asked them what the hell was going on. They had no idea; they recalled being summoned to a shoplifting, but there hadn’t been anyone there to arrest.

“Then what the hell is she doing here?” demanded their superintendent. “Who is she?”

I said, “These guys just grabbed me off the street, they grabbed me and said they were going to do things and I don’t know why, they were just saying stuff like I thought maybe they were drunk!”

Then I cried, which, given the situation, wasn’t very hard, and the cops let me go, and asked me not to sue.

The second time I was caught, they got me through the darknet.

I was twenty-four years old, and had come to Milan for the food and the fashion. First impressions — my life is about making a good first impression. When one attempt fails, I will go away, and reinvent myself, and return to try again. Though first impressions may be the only thing I have, at least I get to practise until they’re right.

Milan during fashion week is full of strange crowds at unlikely venues. Turn a corner and there they are, the young and old, dressed in incredible shoes and ridiculous hats, waiting to see someone-who-knows-someone-who-is-someone’s-friend walk up the red carpet. Models abound, but are surprisingly hard to spot in the streets without their make-up and pout, the glamour gone, walking with legs, not hips. It is an exercise in transformation, one I was determined to study.

Getting into the Dolce & Gabbana after-party was easy. You walk in as a waitress, and once inside you change into a gown. That year, collars were high, skirts were short, and the look was paisley meets Star Trek. I noted every woman of power, every model climbing that greasy pole, and copied their smiles and walks, one foot in front of the other, a perfect straight line, toe to heel.

It was a spiteful whim that led me to rob Salvatore Rizzo, sixty-nine years old and the king of beauty.

“A shame, a shame,” he said, looking at me. “You could be someone, but you’re not someone, you don’t have the face, the eyes, the lips; and if you were going to be someone, you’d be someone by now.”

I thought about speaking my mind, and didn’t. I was twenty-four years old, and I was learning professionalism.

“These,” he said, running his fingers down first the gold-and-sapphire choker around a model’s throat, then the line of her collarbone, then the slope of her arm, “are the Tsarina’s Tears. They were worn by Alexandra of Russia the day the Winter Palace fell. Do you know what they’re worth?”

Approximately six million dollars, I thought. “Oh no,” I replied. “How much?”

“To ordinary people — money. To me — the human soul. The girl who wears this isn’t just beautiful, she is extraordinary, she is an icon, an icon of what women should be. Women should be beautiful, they should be diamonds, we should worship them, we should want them, we should need to be wanted by them, we should keep them safe and polished and perfect, that is what I believe in, that is what I fight for, I am a feminist you see, it is the only thing that is important in life. Women. And beauty. And the soul.”

I smiled and wondered if any of the on-site security personnel carried guns.

At the bar, a model from Riga, seventeen years old, whispered, “They told me I should sleep with him, but my friend let him do things to her last month and then got sent home without her pay, so I’m just going to keep working, stay in control, get to the top the hard way.”

“Why do you do what you do?” I asked.

“Cash,” she answered. “If I can keep this up, I can pay for university, but it’s hard — it’s a hard life, you have to change everything you do, how you eat, how you speak, how you exercise, how you sleep, how you walk; everything. But sometimes, when I walk down the catwalk, and everyone stares at me, I feel it.”

“Feel what?”

“I feel like… yeah. Fuck you. I am fucking amazing. I am fucking strong. That’s what the clothes mean, you see. When they’re good, I feel more like me, and I’m unbeatable.”

That’s what the smile means too, I thought, lips locked in place. I smile, and I do not speak my mind, because when I am restrained in my actions, I am more than myself: I am unstoppable.

“What do you want to study?” I asked.

“Urban redevelopment.”

“Not fashion?”

She shrugged. “I know about fashion already. But I don’t know enough about mass transit links.”

For a moment, the smile becomes genuine. “You should study,” I said. “I think it sounds like an excellent idea.”

Three hours later, I found her passed out behind the bar. Someone had slipped something into her drink, and her pants were torn. The hospital said there was no sign of penetration, but the management let her go, just in case. Two hours later, the Tsarina’s Tears vanished from Salvatore Rizzo’s room, taken by a woman whose face no one could remember.

Usual pattern of behaviour.

I offered the stolen jewels for sale, agreed an exchange in a café in Vienna, arrived, ordered sachertorte, and within five minutes was staring at an arrest warrant and a small man with the beginning of a premature bald spot who said, “Did you have a coat?”

So stunned was I by the situation, by the policemen swarming around me and the small crowd of tourists staring at me through the café window as the handcuffs were clamped on, that I didn’t register the question at first.

“What?”

“A coat,” he repeated patiently. “It’s very cold outside.”

“By the door; the blue one.”

“This coat?”

“Yes.”

He patted it down quickly, found nothing of interest, draped it over my shoulders. “All right then.”

He sat next to me on the drive to the police station, and was applauded by the Viennese officers as he led me inside. They took my fingerprints — a problem. Computers remembered me. I’d have to be more careful after this.

In the interview room I asked, “Why did they clap when you came in?”

His German was laced with an accent I couldn’t place; neither the precise snap of Berlin nor the low scuffle of Vienna. “I’ve been looking for a jewel thief for three years,” he replied. “Catching you is a big break. Would you like tea, coffee?”

“You’re not with the local police?”

“Interpol.”

“I thought Interpol was just something people talked about in movies.”

“In movies, there’s less paperwork,” he replied with a sigh. “Writing emails and sorting spreadsheets doesn’t sell cinema tickets, though I have some very exciting databases.”

To my surprise, I smiled, examining this policeman anew. He was an inch shorter than me, long-armed and squat-necked, with a tight constellation of three small, flat moles by his left ear. His fingernails were trimmed painfully short; had he chewed them as a child?

Onychophagia: an oral compulsive habit, nail biting. Apply a chemical lacquer to the nails to prevent chewing. Denatonium benzoate: the most bitter taste known to man.

“What’s your name?” I asked, surprised to hear myself speak.

“I am Inspector Evard.”

“Interpol has inspectors?”

“We are policemen as well as pen-pushers.”

He spoke gently, shoulders curved, hook-nosed and narrow-eyed, intent through his aura of polite absent-mindedness. My fear at being arrested was beginning to diminish in the face of more rational thought. The odds of escape seemed high. This was only a slight setback, surely? Then again, he had my fingerprints, and now a photograph too.

He watched me, watching him, and said at last, “Your German has an accent.”

“So does yours.”

“We can speak in another language?”

“I prefer Spanish.”

“My Spanish isn’t very good.”

“Then German’s okay.”

“Did you want a drink?”

“Coffee, please.”

He uncuffed me, and left the room. I was alone.

The walls were beige. There was no two-way mirror, but a CCTV camera watched my table. The door was heavy blue metal, locked. I stood up, walked until I was standing directly beneath the CCTV camera, and began to count.

Sixty seconds: my face would begin to fade.

One hundred seconds: Inspector Evard would begin to wonder why he was holding two coffees.

Two hundred seconds, and the cops who applauded Inspector Evard on making his arrest would already have forgotten why they clapped. Perhaps they applauded him for recovering the Tsarina’s Tears, waiting to be returned to their unrighteous owner. Perhaps already their minds were spinning a story, the diamonds recovered but the courier fled, a half victory for now.

I waited, back pressed against the wall, CCTV camera above my head.

I waited an hour, then two, then four, not moving, not making a sound, out of the line of sight of the camera.

I waited until eleven p.m., when at last I hammered on the cell door and barked in my best German, “Let me out of here! Idiots, where is my client?”

After a few minutes of banging, someone came running, and the interview room door was unlocked. An astonished officer stared at me, and before he could speak I exclaimed, “Where is my client? I have been waiting here for an hour!”

Confusion, doubt: what was this woman, dressed in smart clothes, doing locked in an interview room? “Where is your senior officer?” I added, pushing past towards the reception desk. “Tell him I wish to lodge a complaint — oh, the bathroom!”

I lunged for the toilet door before the copper could say anything, and he, foolish he, did not follow. Inside the bathroom I waited another five minutes, then washed my face, straightened my shirt, pushed my hair back and marched out of the police station, past the receiving desk, back straight, head held high.

No one followed.

The next day, newspaper headlines reported the recovery of the Tsarina’s Tears, but that, regrettably, the thief had evaded capture. Two days later, I followed Inspector Evard from the station to the hotel where he was staying, a square, grey thing in Donaustadt, and when he went out to find supper, I pulled on my coat and my winter boots, and followed him through the night.

Snow fell, four inches on the ground, a boot-clinging crispness that soaked up trousers and turned your knees blue. It hushed the trams, emptied the pavements, made the yellow lights behind every window seem hot, far away. I shoved my gloved hands under my armpits and followed, and sometimes Evard saw me, and sometimes he turned away, only to see me again for the very first time.

Now.

And now.

But never again.

He walked to a Gasthaus of minimal merit, a low-ceilinged room slotted beneath a concrete apartment, where they served Czech spirits that smelt of aniseed and tasted like cough mixture, and German beers each in their own special glass, and boiled sausage and boiled vegetables and breaded chicken and various flavours on a theme of cabbage. He settled into a corner and to the waiter’s disgust ordered only a half-pint of unremarkable beer, and schnitzel with chips. When he had finished his beer, I sat down opposite him and said, “Excuse me, are you Inspector Evard?”

“Yes, but I…”

“I’m Joy,” I said, hand out in greeting. A hand which is offered, most people will instinctively take; rejection requires conscious decision-making. “We met in Milan, do you remember? I’m a freelance press photographer, I saw you and thought…?”

He didn’t remember, but the mind will fill in gaps. He had been in Milan, certainly, tracking the thief behind the Tsarina’s Tears. Sometimes he met journalists. His eyebrows creased, how had he forgotten me? Well — who remembers the photographer?

I let the thoughts play out behind his eyes then said, “Congratulations on recovering the Tsarina’s Tears, I read about it in the papers.”

“Thank you. It would have been better if we’d arrested her, but… thank you.”

“Her? The thief’s a woman?”

“We have her face on CCTV from a dozen different robberies. She’s been lazy — fingerprints, DNA.”

“May I buy you a drink?”

“I was going back to the hotel, an early flight…”

“Of course; not to worry.”

“Miss… Joy, did you say?”

“Joy, yes.”

“I’m surprised I don’t remember you.”

“We only met briefly, in Milan, and there were a lot of people that day.”

“Well,” he murmured, “well. I hope I see you again soon.”

So saying, he rose, and I followed him at twenty yards distance back through the night and the falling snow, and stood outside his hotel until I saw the light go out in his room, and I was happy, giddy even, like the new girl at school who has finally made a friend.