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

by Tanya Thompson

  I chose to walk. My wrist was again the focus of interest. The doctor clucked over it, “You poor thing. This is a terrible place for someone as young as you to be.” He looked at my other wrist and said, “I’m glad there is only one.”

  I laughed, “I can’t imagine what events would lead to this happening twice.”

  And he sighed, “We never can and I hope you never do.”

  Goodness, it seemed everyone in Texas was intensely melodramatic.

  The psychologist was in an angry drama that saw her slamming her hands down on the desk. She’d lost all patience with me, commanding on my return, “For the last time, the truth!”

  “It was a nail.”

  “I’m not going to listen to your lies. Get out of my office!”

  The next morning, I was woken with a rough shake and opened my eyes to someone’s face just an inch from mine, shouting like a Marine drill sergeant, “What is your name? What is your name? Full name now!”

  He had me by the arms and I gave him what he wanted in a rush, “Tanya Thompson.” Then backing up the wall to escape, made the correction, “Constance Mitchell.”

  With a smile and a wink, he turned and left.

  The aftermath was a shocking quiet calm. I looked over the room, taking in the white stone walls, the bars over the windows, and then, at the open door, was the psychologist. I was full of contempt. “Bloody hell, is this how you people amuse yourself?”

  “Tanya?”

  “No, Constance.”

  “Who is Tanya?”

  “A sister. A friend. Someone I know.”

  “Then why did you give her name?”

  “We look very similar and I’ve used her name before.” And when she rolled her eyes in disbelief, I asked in defense, “If you woke to some unknown man on top of you wanting your name, would you give your real one? Well, of course you might, but then you are rather witless.”

  We didn’t become any greater of friends as the days passed.

  She demanded, “Why are you so thin?”

  But I was stumped to explain it.

  “They say you don’t eat.”

  “The food here is different than what I am accustomed.”

  “You will eat it, or you will be confined to the cafeteria until you do.”

  After four hours, the mess on my plate was no longer a steaming spread of unidentifiable mush but was instead something congealed and sickening. The men in white left their positions at the exit to come stand beside me and shake their heads. They reached a whispered agreement between themselves and then silently took pity on me, dumping the whole tray in the trash and swearing to the nurse I had eaten.

  The next day, the psychologist turned it all around by saying, “Until you tell me the truth about how you cut yourself, you are not allowed to eat. Don’t even bother going to the cafeteria because I have instructed them not to feed you.”

  By evening I was uncomfortably hungry. The woman with the scissors who had thought my hair was pretty pulled me aside to dig bits of bread out of her pockets. She’d collected slices from other patients at the table and then balled them in her fist to shove into hiding. The bread was caked in pocket fluff, and I wasn’t that desperate, but it was a touching gesture that sided the patients against the staff. I thanked her for the effort but had to decline.

  She granted it wasn’t perfect, saying, “Next time, I’ll wrap it in a napkin.”

  The following morning I was starving and started performing physics experiments in my head. I was trying to determine if it was the angle or the depth that betrayed the cut to my wrist had not been a nail but a chain link fence. Again and again, I replayed the dark tangle with the fence in the night, but it had happened so fast I didn’t notice the cut until the blood started dripping from my fingers. Instead, I tried to imagine swiping my hand over a railing and how easily the same injury could be done with a nail. I could not find the flaw in my lie.

  I studied my wrist and had to consider that I was out of my depth. I had to concede that I was dealing with people far more intelligent than I had assumed. Everyone in Texas could see something I couldn’t. They were all decades older than me, and some experience gave them insight that I lacked. It was frustrating. I wondered repeatedly if I should just give up and admit my real name, but I was not yet prepared to return home.

  The psychologist tried again, her temper barely concealed. “Tell me the truth.”

  I asked, “About what?”

  “Anything.”

  “The only constant in the universe is change?”

  She shouted, “Get out!”

  But always later, someone would find me trying to make myself small and unseen in some corner of the corridor, hoping to avoid the violent screaming in the dayroom, waiting for evening when the doors to the bedrooms were unlocked and I could hide from the madness. I’d be escorted back with the explanation the psychologist wanted to talk again.

  “I want you to tell me the truth about how you hurt yourself,” she said.

  “What do you want to hear? If there is a story you prefer, I am prepared at this point to tell it.”

  “If you don’t want my help, get out.”

  I turned at the door. “Why do you imagine I want your help?”

  “Because without it, you’re not getting out of here.”

  Then on Saturday, with my court case pending on Monday, she came in especially to intimidate me. “You either tell me now or, I promise, I will tell the judge you should be kept here indefinitely.”

  The threat was too big. The first psychiatrist who had threatened to send me to the Falls had seen it through, so I suspected she could to. I didn’t want my con to end in a mental institution over something so unimportant. I hated it, everything in me was against it, but I had to relent.

  “All right, all right,” I huffed in exasperated defeat. “It wasn’t a nail.”

  She sat back instantly happy. Her chin was high with pride, and she smiled, satisfied that she had finally cracked me.

  Then I confessed, “It was a chain link fence.”

  Her face fell, but I was too angry at having been terrorized with indefinite detention to look at her any longer. I started explaining in a fast rambling admission, “There was a section cordoned off on the boat, and I got tangled up in it when I slipped. I’m not accustomed to walking in heels on the high seas. Blessed hell, this seems a lot of fuss for me to keep a promise, but I swore to the man I wouldn’t tell anyone that he’d let me into the cargo cage. I wanted to see the birds that had gotten trapped. Some crew members were feeding them bread and I had some to give them too, but then there was a wave, and I fell and my hand went through the fence. I can’t even tell you what exactly cut me, but it was a sharp part of the chain link fence. Okay?” Full of hostility, I glared at her. “It was a chain link fence.”

  Her expression of slack-jawed dismay clenched tight and she pointed at the door, “Out! Out of my sight!”

  On Monday, the court heard I was uncooperative. The judge had read to the end of my file and said, “Well, I imagine so. I would be, too.”

  The state argued the psychologist’s opinion that I should be sent back.

  The judged flipped through the file again. “There is no indication she suffers from delusions or is a threat to herself or others. It is not a crime to have had a difficult upbringing. I’m letting her go.”

  False Refuge

  The investigation into my past was being handled by the Collin County Sheriff’s Department and primarily by a detective named Rick. While I was detained in the first psychiatric hospital, my details had been run through all of the fifty states’ missing persons reports, but the search parameter listed me as a twenty-three-year-old adult, and Tennessee had lost a fifteen-year-old juvenile.

  Then from the Falls, Rick received my real name. He ran Tanya Thompson through the same search, but the fates were on my side and no match was made. Seven months later, it would be called a computer glitch.

  But for n
ow, Rick was at a loss. He made contact with Interpol. They were anxious to get my file and start a search, but it was going to take a week to send the lost persons forms and then a while longer to fill them in.

  While the sheriff’s department waited to hear from the various US agencies investigating, no one was too certain what to do with me. I wasn’t insane, and although everyone was certain I knew more than I was letting on, no one could guess what it was.

  Free from the daily confrontations with the psychologist, I had returned my expression to one of sweet baffled innocence. The sheriff’s department wasn’t responsible for doing any more than turning me loose on the street, but as all the detectives agreed, “There are people you can do that with, however, she is not one of them.”

  Rick knew someone would take advantage of me, and unable to abide that, he arranged for me to live with the director of the Dallas/Fort Worth Refugee Agency. The director of the agency was primarily working with Cambodians who had fled the genocide of the Khmer Rouge, but she also assisted Romanians, Bulgarians, and other political refugees that had escaped the Soviet Eastern Bloc. In the confusion of foreigners seeking residence, I was not the only one pretending to be something I wasn’t. There was no way Rick could have known when he delivered me to the agency that I would meet another imposter, or that six months later, the Italian posing as a Romanian would threaten to blow his head off.

  ~~~~~~

  Like so many others in Dallas, Tricia had no reason to help me, but she did. As the director of the Dallas/Fort Worth Refugee Agency, she was assisting a fair number of misplaced people, but unlike the others, she invited me into her home. The bungalow wasn’t large, but it was newly remodeled and sat in a pleasant middle-class area across from a park and golf course. It was decorated in a style that reflected Tricia — part art deco, part bohemian. In her bedroom was an antique traveling trunk that mesmerized me with its compartments of feather headbands and long strands of beads. It also had a delicate flapper dress that perfectly suited Tricia’s blond bobbed hair and slim build. She was in her mid-thirties and comfortable enough with herself to not be bothered by me or my story.

  From the start, she took me to work with her, giving me a desk and a purpose. I spent my days calling local businesses, arranging job interviews for the agency’s unemployed, and occasionally I would be given the keys to the agency’s car to get one of them to an appointment.

  Tricia didn’t think to ask if I knew how to drive, and I didn’t mention I never had, so I struck out into Dallas traffic with no previous experience of one-way streets, no idea who had the right-of-way, and far too busy trying to learn the actual mechanics of driving a car to spend any time deciphering the inexplicable road signs. From the start, it was obvious that I was the focus of a great many horns, but they were seldom any louder than the person screaming hysterically in the passenger seat. It seemed the best way to get clear of it all was to go faster, but the traffic in Dallas was relentless, so my rides of chaos tended to sound like one long cacophony of experimental jazz in an Oriental opera.

  At our destination, I’d put the car in park, triumphant that we’d escaped all the maniacs on the road, and then look over to my passenger and truly wonder why they couldn’t return my elation.

  Maintaining a constant impression of round-eyed naivety was not hard, as it was not terribly far from the truth. Most things were new to me. I had been raised in rural Tennessee and now had the freedom of an adult in Dallas. It was assumed I knew the basics of life, or, at the very least, to possess a sense of preservation to keep myself and others safe.

  I would repeatedly prove I didn’t.

  The very first day at the agency, I went with Tricia as she helped a Cambodian family transition into a first world apartment. While Tricia spoke with the husband and dealt with official paperwork in the living room, she asked me to teach the wife how to use the oven. I didn’t know myself, so I had to study it before passing on incorrect and incomprehensible instructions through language charades. Two days later, the woman filled the stove with wood, set it on fire, and burned the entire apartment complex to the ground.

  The second day, I was left in charge of several Cambodian children while Tricia spoke with their mothers. I gave them paper and crayons, and when they didn’t know what to do with them, I told the children to draw pictures of their families. Every one of them drew bodies hanging dead from the trees. Without the sense to take the crayons away, I sat in horrified astonishment as more and more graphic illustrations were laid in my lap until eventually the mothers returned to find their children in a sort of shock, maniacally covering the pages in the blood of red crayons.

  The third day, I collected a newly arrived Cambodian family from the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport and deposited them many hours later, hysterical and crying at the agency door, every one of them certain they had escaped Pol Pot only to die in Dallas traffic with a lunatic at the wheel.

  A general consensus was very quickly made within the Cambodian community that I should be avoided. Tricia shifted my attention onto the asylum seekers from the Eastern Bloc. A newly arrived group of three was waiting to speak with her, but Tricia was running an hour late and asked if I would spend the time conversing with them. They had been learning English while in asylum camps in Europe, but she didn’t feel they were very proficient. To give them a chance to practice, she suggested I go to the convenience store and buy a couple of sports magazines, as the men were all keen on soccer and sports in general, and then use the articles to initiate conversation.

  In the long list of things I knew nothing about, sports and sports magazines were close to the top. Thinking myself clever, I scanned the periodicals and picked the ones with the word sports in the title. I came back with the October editions of Sports Afield and American Sportsman, unaware there was a difference between sports in an arena and sports in the woods.

  For thirty minutes, I flipped through the pages, trying to initiate conversation, commenting, “And here’s another double-barreled shotgun.”

  But the men would only stare at the carpet.

  “Well, as none of you will say whether you’ve used one, there’s not much for us to discuss there.” Turning the page, I offered, “Let’s see what else there is. Oh look, a bolt-action rifle. Any experience with one of these?”

  The men had just come from the Soviet Bloc, and unbeknownst to me, their paranoia turned my ignorance into one of the most surreal interrogations they had ever endured. Experience told them they shouldn’t cooperate, but Tricia had set me the task to get them speaking, so I kept trying.

  After the pistols were emphatically denied, I read aloud, “Well, this says it’s a M21 sniper rifle adapted from the M14,” but then sounding rather dejected, “I already know none of you are going to admit to using that.”

  The weapons advertisements covered half the page, making the pictures impossible to overlook, but still Eugene and Daniel would scarcely glance at what I pointed to. They kept their faces blank, divulging nothing, and refused to interact, which left only Sergiu hiding a smirk behind his hand.

  His enjoyment was not the only thing that set him apart. He didn’t look like the other two either. There was something about the way Eastern Europeans dressed that marked them as foreign. It was the way they matched different prints and textured fabrics. Stripes might be paired with argyle, or a polka dot tie worn under a hideous snowflake sweater, and the socks would be business thin in running shoes. They seemed incapable of matching styles. But Sergiu was dressed in a dark suit with a plain shirt, and where the Romanians would have finished this look with Nike sneakers, Sergiu was wearing appropriately shined leather.

  I didn’t doubt that Sergiu was the one wearing Givenchy either. It was a heavy masculine scent, smelling rather like a leather boxing glove pounding on a patchouli-scented hippie. Violent yet spiritual.

  Besides his cheerful mannerisms, his wardrobe, and cologne, there was another difference: he wasn’t small or thin like his comrades, but was
instead a big barrel of a man that overfilled the small seats in the agency’s front room.

  They were all about the same age, somewhere in their mid-thirties, but this and a common language were the only things they appeared to share.

  Alarmed by my strange and inexplicable questioning of their experience with weapons, Eugene and Daniel stared at the floor, convinced I was a government agent, but Sergiu wasn’t the slightest bit concerned. He kept his finger curled hard against his lips to keep from smiling, shaking his head no to each inquiry I made, but at the same time raising a brow as if in doubt I had actually asked, “Not one of you has fired a gun?”

  I flipped the page and it was finally more than Sergiu could take. He saw something he recognized. His smile broke free and he leaned forward to point out, “AK-47. Eugene, Daniel, you know this, Kalashnikov AK-47.”

  But they both looked away making Sergiu laugh aloud.

  The conversation dropped into stilted Romanian, full of terse warnings and suspicious glances that did not exactly fall on me but in my direction. Eugene took the offending magazine from my hands and started to absently fan through the glossy images, as though we could be done with it faster. At the back, he stopped on a block of type. He passed it to Daniel, and they studied it together, then returned it to me, asking, “What is this?”

  I read it twice before explaining, “It’s an ad for a mercenary.” Then when all three men looked at me from the top of their eyes, I clarified, “Someone who accepts payment for fighting.” And then even plainer, “For shooting people.”

  “This is job in America?”

  “Well,” I considered the ad again, “it appears so.”

  While Daniel and Eugene exchanged apprehensive glances, Sergiu gave up trying to conceal his humor.

  “Constanzia?” he pointed at the ad and then to another magazine opened to a scoped rifle, “You like this?”

  “I thought you did. It’s sports.”

  “This is sports in America?” Eugene had been a professional tennis player and Daniel had been a professional soccer player, and both were hoping what I said wasn’t true.