Uptown Thief

by Aya De León

“Not without a bigger building,” Marisol said.

  “You’re delusional,” Eva said. “Bring the girl in here and I’ll break the bad news then call the shelters.”

  Eva set the shelter list on the desk. Between tall stacks of client files sat a half-eaten container of Indian food.

  “Never mind,” Marisol said. She put the cushions back onto the couch. “I know where to take her, and it won’t break the fire code.”

  “Not your apartment.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Marisol said. She walked to the office door. “I just funded the clinic. You run it. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Boundaries,” Eva said, as she followed her to the door. “You ever hear of professional boundaries?”

  “Is that what they taught you in law school and shrink school?” Marisol asked. She unzipped her bag and held a brick of the stolen cash aloft. “I think I would’ve flunked ethics.”

  “Don’t even go there,” Eva said.

  Marisol put the cash back in her purse. “If I wake up in the morning with my TV missing, you can say ‘I told you so.’ But if I wake up with a girl ready to dump the pimp, let’s get her some services, okay?”

  “Fine.” Eva sighed. “I’ll set up an intake.”

  “I love you,” Marisol said, kissing Eva on the cheek.

  “Glad you’re back safe,” Eva said.

  Marisol trotted back down the stairs.

  “Come on, Dulce,” she said when she got down to the lobby. “Change of plans.”

  It took nearly fifteen minutes to climb the four flights of stairs. Marisol helped Dulce limp up past the upper floors of the clinic and the administrative offices, and then up to her apartment.

  Dulce leaned against the wall of the hallway as Marisol unlocked the door. She led the girl into a cozy studio with hardwood floors. The walls were bare except for a few family photos. Above the stove, an aloe vera plant struggled to survive. Marisol only remembered to water it when she emptied the teakettle, every couple of weeks.

  “I can’t believe you’re taking me in like this,” Dulce said, slumping into an armchair.

  “Make yourself at home, nena,” Marisol said. She walked into the bathroom, a closet-sized box that only fit a full-sized bath because the sink was above the toilet tank. Marisol turned on the tub’s hot water.

  “You’ll feel better after you soak in this,” Marisol said. She poured in some Epsom salts.

  Through the open bathroom door, she saw Dulce looking at a photo of ten-year-old Cristina, with sandy brown hair and similar features to Marisol’s. “Is that your daughter?” Dulce asked.

  “My little sister.” Marisol walked back across the main room. “But I basically raised her.”

  “Is this your mom?” Dulce asked, looking at a heavyset gray-haired woman on a rural porch in the Caribbean.

  “No, my abuela,” Marisol said. She indicated a photo of a thirty-something woman in a brightly colored dress, smiling on the Staten Island Ferry. “This is my mami.”

  “She’s so pretty,” Dulce said.

  “Forever young,” Marisol said. “They both died around the same time. Come on. Get in that tub.”

  Marisol had longed for this as a teen. An aunt or female cousin to appear out of nowhere and rescue her. Not another worker or counselor she’d have to figure out whether she could trust, but someone who would claim her and take her in—both her and her sister. Mija, you don’t have to live like this anymore . . .

  Marisol carefully closed the apartment’s shades. She listened for the gentle splash of the water as she pulled all the books off of a shelf in the bedroom alcove. Behind it, she lifted out the false back and piled in the heist cash from her purse.

  The splashing stopped.

  “You okay, honey?” Marisol asked.

  “Yeah,” Dulce answered in a sleepy voice.

  Marisol secured the false back into its place and returned the books to the bookshelf. She knocked on the bathroom door and stepped inside.

  Dulce lay in the tub with her eyes closed. Her body looked like a garden with burgundy, violet, and navy blue flowers blooming.

  Marisol’s jaw was tight as she washed her hands in the sink. So many days she’d gone to high school with bruises under her own clothes.

  “I don’t know the last time I took a bath,” Dulce said. “The guys have hot tubs sometimes, but you never get to soak before they want to fuck.”

  Marisol laughed. “I remember.”

  “What?” Dulce opened her eyes. “You used to be a hoe?”

  “I prefer the term ‘sex worker,’ but yeah.” Marisol laughed. “Why do you think I run the clinic?”

  People thought having sex for money was the worst thing in the world. For Marisol, it had been a step up.

  “You’re pretty enough,” Dulce said. “But you must’ve not had a pimp if you still look so good.”

  “I had a pimp at first, a Russian guy named Sergei,” Marisol said as she took the rubber band out of her long, wavy hair and began to brush it out. “But he was only a businessman. He would have been just as happy to sell farm animals if he could make as much money.”

  Dulce laughed.

  “He protected us,” Marisol said. “Made sure we got to a clinic when it hurt to piss. He even paid for the antibiotics.” She ran some warm water and got a facecloth.

  “And he was okay with you leaving?” Dulce asked.

  Marisol looked up from washing her face. “We were like cows or horses. It wasn’t personal.”

  “Why’d you get out of the business?” Dulce asked.

  Marisol shrugged. “I wanted to be the businesswoman. I had ideas about how to make more money. Make things safer. He wouldn’t give my brains the time of day. These young Eastern European guys ran his errands, or called my pager with his messages. Maybe he listened to their business ideas. But he just wanted the women on their backs.”

  “Then why’d you stay and give him your money?” Dulce asked.

  “Half my money,” Marisol said. “He had one of the safest operations in the city. He provided clean hotel rooms, protection, some alcohol. We were lucky. If he thought you were cheating him, he just told you not to show your face in any of his bars. I remember girls getting stiffed by clients, then servicing an extra client to pay Sergei so they wouldn’t get fired. And when girls left, he’d just find someone else. See? Not personal.”

  “You really were lucky,” Dulce said. “Everything with Jerry is personal.”

  “Did he start out as your boyfriend?” Marisol asked, blotting her face with a towel.

  “He was never really my boyfriend,” Dulce said. “I was just too young and dumb to know that. I met him when I was fourteen. Cutting school with my best friend, smoking weed in the park. He approached us both, but she wasn’t interested. He said he wanted to be my man. My friend found out he was a pimp and begged me not to mess with him. Easy for her to say. Her dad lived with them and had a job. I had four brothers and sisters at home in our small-ass apartment, including my big sister with her two kids.”

  “Your dad wasn’t around?” Marisol asked.

  “Left when I was five,” Dulce said. “My older brother was the man of the house. Every fucking thing fell apart after he got deported. He had his green card, but he was selling drugs. They sent his ass back to Santo Domingo.”

  “You two were close?” Marisol slid the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet to the side and took out a small tube of lotion.

  Dulce shrugged. “He looked out for me. The same month he got deported I met Jerry. Hooking up with an older guy with money was like having parents again—at least in the beginning.”

  Marisol had had a sugar daddy when she was in her twenties. At first it did feel like a fairy-tale rescue. For different reasons, her honeymoon had also been short-lived.

  “Sometimes it’s okay,” Dulce said. “Sometimes me and him and the girls are like a family. His brother Jimmy is kind of a dick. But other times . . .”

  “O
ther times you end up in the emergency room,” Marisol said. She capped the lotion and put it away.

  “I’ve tried to leave him before,” Dulce said. “I guess I’m not strong enough.”

  “Here’s the thing,” Marisol said, sitting on the edge of the tub. “For almost every woman in a bad situation, it takes more than one try to get out. Maybe your number is two. Maybe five. Maybe more. I’ve seen girls trying to leave some asshole for ten years. And then one day it clicks. I don’t know why. I just know you can’t be afraid or ashamed to keep trying.”

  It had clicked like that for Marisol, the day she decided to get away from her uncle.

  “I wish I could stay here forever,” Dulce said. She trailed the hand of her good arm back and forth in the bathwater.

  “Maybe you can,” Marisol said, rubbing the excess lotion into her hands. “You can stay in the shelter short-term, and the case managers can help you figure out your next steps. We’ve got partnerships for housing, job training, and school. Plus entrepreneurship classes if you wanna stay in the business.”

  “Now I know why Jerry didn’t want us coming here,” Dulce said and closed her eyes again.

  “Come on, nena,” Marisol said. “We can’t have you falling asleep and drowning.”

  After Dulce came out of the bathroom, Marisol gave her an oversized T-shirt and a clean pair of underwear, and they put her arm back into the sling.

  Marisol tied Dulce’s dark hair in a loose bun on her head, and the two women climbed into her queen-size bed.

  “So, if your pimp didn’t pressure you, how’d you get started?” Dulce asked. She shifted around under the beige down comforter.

  “Me and my sister were orphaned,” Marisol said with a yawn. Her body felt drained. “I was seventeen, a senior in high school, with an eviction notice in my hand. My little sister was not going into foster care.”

  “You did it for her?” Dulce asked.

  “I’d do anything for her,” Marisol said. Under the covers, her hand closed on the locket around her neck. “I haven’t seen her in over a year. I usually pay for her to fly here for the holidays, but I was too broke this year.”

  “I wish I’d had a big sister like you to look out for me,” Dulce said, reaching with her good hand for Marisol’s other hand under the covers.

  “Everybody deserves to be protected,” Marisol said, squeezing Dulce’s hand. She smoothed the girl’s hair back from her forehead again and again. It was pressed straight and bleached, but it had grown out dark and tightly curled at the roots. Dulce had a pair of deep cuts beneath her bangs. The bruised skin was held together with Steri-Strips. The shape of the cuts looked like heel marks. Marisol recalled tracing her finger along a similar crescent shape on her own jaw, decades before. She let Dulce’s hair fall back in place, as the girl began to snore.

  * * *

  During Marisol’s twenties, she spent two years as a mistress to a Fortune 500 VP named Campbell. After their first night together, she had woken up between Egyptian cotton sheets on a Memory Foam mattress. He left for work saying he hoped she’d still be there when he got home. Finally, she had found a man to keep her. She never bothered to get more than a couple of suitcases out of her dank basement apartment.

  Other than a little boredom, she had no complaints for the first six months. He wanted her to be on call, in his apartment, for that lunchtime quickie or that casual blow job when he changed for a dinner party with his colleagues. She was a convenience. She slept there, because he might wake up in the middle of the night and want a tumble. She had her own room, as he hadn’t wanted to sleep in the same bed with another person. She was more of a workout than a lover, a way to relax and blow off steam.

  Early in their relationship, there had been dinners, when he had asked her all about herself. She invented a bootstraps Puerto Rican immigrant story, quaint and spunky. When he asked her to quit her “waitressing” job to move in, he explained that he wanted a passionate woman who would be available to meet his needs. He promised he would give her everything: a lovely place to live, the latest technological toys; she could shop from home, buying all the clothes she wanted—within reason. He had a room in the apartment, which had housed his previous mistress, who hadn’t understood the arrangement. He provided the money, and she provided a soothing presence.

  Marisol understood. She aimed to please because it was a good gig. Unlike the ex-mistress, she made friends with the domestic staff, also on call, waiting for “his lordship” to get home and declare his desires. She played dominoes with them, ordered them gorgeous dresses off the Internet. The maid’s daughter went to her prom in Prada.

  Eventually Marisol understood why the ex had gotten stir-crazy. She rarely left the house. She was on call. She needed to be no more than half an hour away from the apartment at all times. You couldn’t get anywhere from midtown in half an hour—not uptown to Spanish Harlem, not downtown to the Lower East Side. She almost left him ten months in when she realized he had put a GPS in her cell phone.

  Her sister was a premed sophomore at Syracuse then. They hadn’t seen each other since Marisol had moved in with Campbell, but they talked a few times a week on the phone. Mostly Marisol listened to Cristina’s fragmented rants on why the microbial biology prof was an asshole or how the study group system was hard on female students.

  During one call Cristina asked about their plans for Thanksgiving. It turned out that “his lordship” was going to see his family in Delaware. Of course the mistress wasn’t invited. At the last minute, Marisol went upstate to see Cristina. They had Chinese food for Thanksgiving, and later slept in Cristina’s twin bed.

  “I know we don’t have money for medical school,” Cristina said over the cartons of takeout. “So I’m thinking of going to school in Cuba. They’ll pay for it and everything. But I’ll only go if we can still see each other.”

  “Of course,” Marisol had agreed. “I don’t care if you go to Siberia. Wherever you go, I’ll always find a way for us to be together.”

  After Marisol got back to Manhattan, the boredom and the loneliness were worse. One day, she was at her wits’ end. Everything on television was stupid, and the cook wasn’t coming in until evening. Marisol wandered into Campbell’s library. She had dismissed it as a source of amusement because he didn’t have any novels, only books on finance. She picked up one of the books, Globalization and Microeconomics in the US, and found herself interested. She devoured the book in the next couple of days. She was glad just to have something in her head other than her own spinning thoughts. She went online and looked at MBA programs. What books were business students reading? His lordship had most of them in his library. Marisol began her MBA training. She supplemented with a few more liberal texts she found online, as well, reading the work of feminist economists, Caribbean economists, socialist economists, liberals, and conservatives.

  What had been a prison became a graduate program. She looked forward to seeing Campbell when he came home. She asked him leading questions about his company. He went on at length about profit shares and stockholder pressure, interrupting his own monologues occasionally to ask if he was boring her.

  “Oh no,” she said. “I don’t really understand it, but it’s still fascinating to hear you talk about it.”

  After a year, she had read all the books in the library. She did the MBA informally—never set foot on a college campus. She completed her GED and got an online degree in bookkeeping. Wandering through Campbell’s study, searching for something to amuse herself, she came across his wall safe—a Superlative model.

  It took her a week to work up the nerve to touch it. It might have had any number of security measures. But touching someone’s wall safe wasn’t against the law when you lived there.

  She slid the picture aside and moved her hand toward the dial. Just one finger. Just a touch. The silver metal was cool. She tapped it twice.

  Marisol held her breath. No alarm. No lights. She put the picture back and was on edge for the r
est of the day. But when his lordship came home, cranky about a board meeting, he said nothing about a safe, an alarm, or anything.

  The next day, Marisol got some of the maid’s latex gloves and began to move the dial.

  It took her two months and a stethoscope she bought online to learn to listen for the click of the tumblers. Four months to crack it.

  As the safe door swung open, Marisol gazed at more cash and bonds than she’d ever seen before in one place. She also found his will. Campbell was leaving everything to a boy in Belgium, a son he never talked about.

  She closed the safe. She never stole a dime from him in cash. Instead, she would buy designer clothes and then sell them on eBay (never worn—tags still on!). For herself, she started buying business suits and briefcases.

  She kept practicing safecracking. Blindfolded—so she couldn’t see the combination she already knew. She tried it without the stethoscope. After six months she could do it in three minutes. She felt elated every time the safe clicked open.

  Chapter 5

  The María de la Vega Health Clinic was one of five adjoining properties on either side of one corner on Avenue C. The clinic faced east, and had been carved out of a brownstone storefront.

  Marisol had bought the property just after September 11, 2001, in that brief moment when property values in lower Manhattan dipped. At the time, she and Eva were running a clinic in Chelsea. Marisol’s down payment included the cash she had accumulated from her eBay racket with Campbell. As time went on, she rented several properties in the adjacent building, as they became available. After the recession hit hard, she began the escort service to supplement the clinic income.

  Behind a bookshelf in the clinic’s fourth-floor hallway, Marisol had cut a door. The bookshelf slid to the side, and the door opened into a small loft in the adjoining apartment building. The “gift gallery” was where high-end clients could select escorts. The loft was leased by Loisaida Talent, but there was no sign on any of the doors or windows. Loisaida Talent was owned by a corporation with an offshore account. The corporation also leased the street-level offices, which were subleased to a chiropractor who worked exclusively with health center clients. Government reimbursements for chiropractic work covered only a tiny fraction of the fees. Most clinic clients couldn’t afford the co-pays, but sex workers really needed the bodywork. So the chiropractor was paid mostly with stolen cash. She had an appointment log of phony cash-paying clients, which effectively laundered some of the money. The adjoining door between the properties had been built without city permits and without the owner’s permission. Marisol was hoping to pay off the mortgage, close out the escort operation, and Sheetrock over the door before anyone found out. Unfortunately she had just received the official letter from the landlord of the modeling agency and the chiropractor that their leases were up later this year. He confirmed that he would be raising all rents significantly, and the building might be converted into condominiums.