# 22 December 2011, 23:00
She was good. She was very good. She might even have been the best, but they don’t give out gold statues in her line of work. The most she could hope for was that no-one would ever know her real name. Or recognise her face. She’d been trained by a master, and over the years that she’d been solo — strictly solo, always solo, never, ever trust anyone — she’d added a few finesses of her own that would have made the old man proud. If she’d told him.
She’d always known it couldn’t last. Sooner or later, the house always wins. It’s all about knowing when to fold. Now she knew it was folding time because she was looking at seven numbers printed on a slip of yellow paper that was worth… she checked the screen again… forty-two million and change. One small problem: she had no idea which mark she’d lifted this lottery ticket from during her Friday night stealth attack on the London Underground strap-hangers.
She didn’t like London. Not because it was dirty – it was filthy, but at least the sidewalks didn’t look like they’d been peppered by a twelve-bore gum machine, and not because it was an expensive place to stay – it never cost her a dime because she flitted between the empty urban investments of her coterie of young and thrusting commodity abusers. No, the reason she avoided London was because it had the highest density of public surveillance on the planet. They even had cameras watching cameras. She couldn’t decide whether the Brits really did have nothing to hide or if they were just stupidly naive. But the subway — the tube as the locals called it — was a candy store. Their wall-eyes were spaced too far apart and their shit-covered lenses sent distorted monochromes to vacant control rooms. Everything was covered in shit down there; no-one wanted to be in it for a moment longer than they had to be and no-one ever made eye contact. Perfect.
So she’d run her schtick. Switching back every second or third station, avoiding the centre stiles at Piccadilly, taking the third exit off the Jubilee at Baker Street to dodge the digital tech they’d installed last winter, hiding empty wallets in strollers and shopping bags, dropping credit cards into open pockets and slipping anything left into her Hello magazine. Friday was always her best night. She’d been the office drudge this time — all acne and greasy hair. The shoes had been a mistake. Cheap shoes always make you pay. The ratty blonde wig was already in the trash outside along with the rest of her thrift-shop disguise. Knightsbridge had its garbage collected early Saturday morning — very posh, very tidy, awfully nice.
She always kept the lottery tickets — and she was cruelly lucky. Never more than a hundred or so, just the type of cash you can pick up from a bored Pakistani in an all-night store without them even looking up. But you can’t do that with a jackpot. With a jackpot they’re going to ask a lot of difficult questions like ‘Where and when did you buy this, miss?’ and ‘Are you aware that someone else claims rightful ownership of this ticket?’.
Now, after she’d showered off the subway grime and dried her long, ink-black hair to a shine, she turned the small slip of paper over in her hands, weighing up the odds. First there were the odds of this ticket being the only jackpot winner in a multiple-cumulative week. Millions to one, maybe a few hundred-million to one. Then there were the odds of her dipping that particular billfold on that particular night — add another four or five zeros at least. Then there were the odds of her finding the exact same guy again from the maybe thirty marks she’d hit that evening. She only ever dipped business guys. It was a principle of hers — or the closest thing to a principle she’d ever had. And then there were the odds of her being able to persuade him to cash in his winning ticket and pony up her rightful share. After all, no ticket, no prize, right? These odds weren’t long, they were astronomical. Still, most of them had already fallen in her favour and the rest was down to her and she was nothing if not resourceful.
The apartment phone rang. It could only be Gerard, another one of her venal young male friends. She’d planned to let him have a gratitude fuck tonight, after a pornographically expensive meal of course, in return for the inside track he’d given her the last time she’d been in London. Her portfolio was doing very well, but it was chicken shit compared to tonight’s potential windfall. If she could convert it. She let the machine pick up.
She thought people who played the lottery were either dumb or desperate and there was always enough of those around but this time there had only been one — one ticket in about a grand and a half of cash. One ticket and something else with it.
She ran down to the garbage in her Harrods bathrobe and hauled the black plastic bag up the stairs of the mews house. She emptied the contents onto the kitchen table. There, ketchup-stained and torn, was a Polaroid of a sailing boat. It wasn’t much to look at, she thought; two or three births, single mast, twenty-five footer at most. She’d played around in the Med one summer with a banker whose conversation stretched to money and yachts and nothing else and some of his running commentary on other people’s boats had stuck to her fly-paper mind. The marina where it was moored was a stalag of concrete wharves under motorway bridges, but above the overpass, above the trucks was a regional jet. It was very low — low enough to see the silhouette of the landing gear below the wings.
It didn’t take long to narrow her search to five marinas on flight paths within a fifty-mile radius of the city. Two days later she found the boat at Smuggler’s Point, a soulless jumble of masts and tarpaulins run by a lecherous old biker with an interest in young girls. Especially blondes in short skirts who study photography at the local technical college. He didn’t take much persuading to let her see the client register. He even thanked her.
She tracked down the boat’s owner to a bar around the corner from his Liverpool Street office. She was wearing a get-up she liked to call ‘sweet’n’lo‘ — curly red hair, just a little too much highlighter, just a little too low cut blouse. He’d obviously been athletic when he was younger, but his forty-something, beer-soaked midriff and thinning blond hair, coupled with the shoulder-stoop of a guy who’s done with climbing the greasy pole, pinned him as a loser. She’d chatted up the barman and asked him, in her best Brooklyn, who had pissed in the sad guy’s beer. He told her, without raising his gaze from her chest, that the guy claimed to have won the lottery and ‘lost’ the ticket. “Sure,” he said, “we get guys like that in here every day, what’ll you have to drink, darling?”
Bingo.
Now she was on a schedule. Believe it or not, lottery tickets expire. If you don’t collect in ninety days, you can frame it and stick it on the wall because it ain’t worth shit. She’d taken a week to find him, now she had to get into him, turn him and figure out a way of revealing the ticket and not get fucked in the process. Well, she was undoubtedly going to get fucked — hopefully, all the way to the bank.
He lived in a four-story terraced house in Notting Hill. It looked like a whitewashed prison to her. She could never understand how these places were worth fortunes, but somehow people seemed to like crumbling stone and rising damp as long as the locale had expensive wine bars, exotic restaurants and wannabes with goatees in the corner pubs. She followed him home on the tube, all the time worrying because she’d broken her unbreakable rule to never stay any place she was working for more than two weeks. She convinced herself she wasn’t working. She might never have to work again.
If she was going to get this right she would have to break more than a few work disciplines. She needed to do something she hadn’t done for a very long time: she needed to get some advice. She went back to her hotel (she’d moved out of the mews house on schedule but delayed her planned trip to Rome) and opened her laptop. Thank God for encrypted chat. God or Jobs. Same thing really.
“You’re looking more beautiful than ever,” said her mentor. “I apologise that you can’t see my ageing countenance, my dear, but these Sri Lankans have a charming take on the concept of broadband. They think it means that they should share the bandwidth out over a wide area.” She didn’t need to see him to know he had a twinkle in his eye as he spoke. “So you’re going to retire. Good for you. You realise this is going to be the most dangerous thing you have ever done, don’t you?”
They talked for a while but it only served to validate her decision. She was going to have to do something that no professional thief ever does. She was going to have to reveal herself.
She was sitting in a Notting Hill café sipping a god-awful blend of chicory and something vile (but Fair Trade) and ignoring her sugar-free bar of organic superfood when he walked in. She knew he was going to walk in because she’d watched him take the same breakfast walk from his home to this scruffy coffee-bar-cum-hippy-hangout for a week. Every morning he bought a copy of the FT from the store next door and then sat by the window stirring a black coffee until it had cooled enough for him to dunk his oatmeal biscuits. But today she was sitting at his table reading Yachting Monthly and wearing Jackie-O glasses. Other than the shades, she was completely naked as far as she was concerned — she had her true eye colour, her own lustrous hair and no chin extenders, nose bulbs, tooth caps or cheek fillers. She looked, as far as she could judge, exactly as nature intended. Well, almost. A girl has to have her secrets.
He knew from the moment he saw her that his miserable life was about to finally take a turn for the good. He was an hour late for work that day. And the day after. He didn’t give a damn. He told her about his frigid, desiccated wife who ran an antiques shop and was constantly swapping the furniture at home for stock she couldn’t sell. The house was hers. She’d acquired it from a previous marriage and now spent all of her spare time tending to tropical flowers in the greenhouse behind it. He told her of his interminably grey job in the city and his paralysing fear that he would die at his desk. And most of all he told her about his dream of buying a yacht and sailing the Caribbean for the rest of his life. She laughed at his jokes and shared his passion for all things maritime. The one thing he didn’t talk about was the fact that if it wasn’t for some slime-shit, no-good, pick-pocket scum, he could be sunning himself on the deck of his dream boat right now. That was because he was looking at someone who made him forget everything else. Four days later she had fucked his brains out in a suite at the Hilton on Park Lane and, despite herself, had actually grown to like him. Once he had thrown off the mantle of loser-of-no-desire, he showed himself to be a witty, stimulating companion and a remarkably empathic lover. Well, she told herself, I could have done a lot worse.
Passion is a transcendent thing. They discovered that it was possible for her to get past the security in his office building and make it up to the executive restroom on the fifteenth floor so he could fuck her during the Thursday afternoon strategy meeting (to which he was never invited) and that, if they were quiet, she could give him a blow job in his own front room while his wife was out back spraying the orchids. It was after one of these furtive events that her hand trailed down the gap between the seat cushion and back of a mock eighteenth-century chaise longue and pulled out a couple of twenties and a lottery ticket.
“Oh!” she said. “Hidden treasure! I love it when you find cash like that!” She scrunched up the yellow slip and threw it into a flock-covered wastebasket. He dived after it.
He carefully flattened it out and sat staring at it for a long time, his head twisting slightly as if on a spring ratchet. His numbers — the same ones he always bought; his dad’s birthday, his boat’s call sign, the room number of the hotel where he’d lost his cherry. More importantly, the draw number was right — this was the jackpot ticket. Then he told her the story and how no-one had believed him.
“I rang the lottery people to tell them it had been stolen. You can guess what they said.”
She smiled weakly and said that he had better ring them back, then looked like she might be about to cry. She said that now he was rich, he was going to dump her and sail off forever without her. He laughed. They walked out of the house together holding hands. He didn’t even take a suitcase.
Six months later the divorce had been agreed and the two tanned, rich and over-sexed lovers were in the Royal Suite of a Mustique hotel overlooking the azure bay and sweeping white sands. At the end of the long hotel jetty was a carbon fibre Open 60 racing yacht bought from an Arabian prince who’d fancied ocean racing — until he’d tried it. She’d introduced him to her city friends and erstwhile admirers who had readily accepted his story of making it big in property and drank his Cristal, ate his Beluga and then jetted off to their next important liaisons in exclusive ski lodges or Grand Prix hospitality suites.
They were planning the wedding. She wanted something simple — maybe in Sri Lanka. He wanted a celebration that would have put the local annual fiesta to shame. They were happy. He told her how he had dreamt about this all his life and now that it was real he couldn’t believe it. He told her how he hated living in that house with the ever-changing tatty furniture and the smell of mothballs. She said it was a good thing his wife hadn’t sold that old chaise longue. That would have been the bargain of the millennium. She never saw the shadow cross his face as he turned to crack another bottle of Cristal over that one.
The next morning, he, and the boat, had gone.
© 2011 S. Spencer Baker – all rights reserved.
Note – this short story was originally submitted to popcornfiction.com in June 2011 – they never responded which means they didn’t like it. I do. If you like it too, please give it a thumbs up.