Less than an hour remained until Heitor would be killed for different crimes.
Every week, at least two policemen searched the convent’s surrounding gardens for criminals, all seeking sanctuary on holy lands, all trying to evade having their hands and feet cut off for stealing. No one dared covet the king’s gold, won back as it had been only a few centuries before from the Moors, from those stealthy, marauding dark ones—and before that, seized by the Portuguese explorers and traders, those daring wise ones, those Europeans unafraid to travel to the far end of the world.
Mariana was from one of Lisbon’s wealthiest slave trading families. A year away from permanent vows, she talked of leaving the convent. She teased Heitor, allowed him to see her nude body, left him gifts at the slave quarters, even compelled him to stand near while she took her bath. She pled sick so she missed prayers; through cook and gardener, she had sent word asking for him, only him. Her merchant father could have bought Heitor from the nuns, at Mariana’s pleasure. Terrified of being sold again, Heitor pretended to run away.
Caught, again enslaved, Heitor could die knowing no one would ever learn the truth. That he, Heitor, had stolen back the conqueror’s gold, the stolen Christian gold, stolen before that from Indian temples and palaces, from statues melted down so that the features of gods and goddesses were long ago forfeit. That gold, accumulated, stacked, a pestilence to the native people, a providence to the Portuguese, and which they seized, triumphant and knowing, at their first opportunity.
The bags of gold he’d filled up with pilfered coins, only a few at a time, would pay for Sita to escape to America. She would be a stowaway, a crewmember’s concubine. To gain her freedom, Sita would smother this man, once he was drunk and asleep. Once Sita freed herself from him, whoever would be her last master, as soon as the ship reached Manhattan Island, she would tell her descendants that it was Heitor, a man possessed of his full powers though forced to pretend otherwise, whose gold had carried them across the waves. A man who’d been a slave, yet staked the mother of his beloved child, so she and the baby she carried could hide in the New World.
NEWBERRY
VINITA TOOK HER LAST DRAG from the stolen cigarette. From under a tree outside the salon, she watched the morning ladies as they passed. She felt proud of how much smoother her own skin was, and how much flatter her stomach than theirs, even though she couldn’t tell if any of them had given birth, and she wouldn’t have judged their bellies if they had. But none of them walked holding the hands of their children. These women paid others to do the morning school run.
“You really shouldn’t smoke here,” one of the women muttered, making brief eye contact with Vinita before walking on.
Being this close to so much money made Vinita want to smoke. She’d made sure that the purse she lifted the cig from was not only designer, but well stocked with packets of nicotine gum bursting from one of the pockets, so she could tell herself that by stealing she was helping the owner. Vinita wasn’t one to lie to herself, though. What she and Marco were planning had nothing to do with helping anyone. Maybe they wouldn’t even help themselves. But they were in it now; she’d taken the money. They had no choice but to finish it.
Later it would be tempting to offer up reasons like: “My father had a stroke and we needed to pay for a home nurse,” or “Marco was frightened that he’d be deported because his visa was expiring in a month.” These were facts but weren’t exactly excuses. The real fact, the one she allowed herself to enjoy as much as the cigarette, was that if they pulled it off, Vinita would never have to stand on this street corner again.
In this city, what counted as a city, a single street that substituted for city streets that were riotous, out of control, lavish with loud inequalities, on this staid Newbury Street, Vinita had spent the past year hating herself but saying, in her mind, how much she hated everyone. It gave her flickers of amusement, sometimes, to think the words “I hate you all” as she was smiling the smile her boss Leo swore “guaranteed gratuity.” To think those words while all along saying a comforting mm-hmm or really?, while Vinita settled a stressed-out customer in the deluxe manicure chair.
The regulars paid for manicures daily. Then they went on their way to the Commons, stopped at the N’espresso store for coffee, nothing more, probably liking the absence of pastries, distractions. Then to the Taj Hotel, just near the park, for champagne brunch or a meeting. Maybe dressed down in new-looking jeans, high heels, sleeveless blouse under a blazer, if the woman was on the executive team of a biotech or pharma company, or even one of the younger hedge funds or venture capital setups that had their unpretentious offices upstairs in some shop building on Newbury. Nothing too fancy.
But Leo. Leo’s name a jinx even to think.
Leo said Vinita looked a lot like Rachel Roy. The designer? The pert Indian girl born in the US? The one linked to famed black sportswear entrepreneurs, though her own parents were Keralite Christians, just like Vinita’s. Rachel with her “good” straightened hair, which Vinita copied. The rumored “Becky with the good hair” from the Beyoncé video about Jay-Z’s cheating. More than once, Vinita imagined herself photographed like Rachel in a recent glossy W Magazine spread, draped in white silk, pushed down onto a couch with her young husband’s muscled and naked back showing. Like Leo’s back.
Vinita’s smoke break was well timed. A customer she loathed was just leaving. Soon three more women came to take her place on a backbench. It wasn’t the woman’s obesity Vinita detested. It was that the fat cow had once accused Leo of stealing. That was a few years ago, under the previous owner, who’d thankfully let go of the whole thing when Vinita saw the supposedly missing gold chain dripping from the customer’s pocket. The thoughtless woman, who’d fallen asleep during her pedicure, had forgotten that she put it there to keep it safe. The woman grudgingly apologized without looking at Leo, went on about the necklace having “sentimental value,” but Vinita took it as proof. That people like that woman deserved to have things taken from them.
That perhaps it could be justified, how, using the hacking skills she’d picked up in college, last night Vinita stole forty thousand dollars from this nail salon franchise’s overseas bank account.
Vinita’s boss—Don’t call him Leo, she told herself—was still away, still on a planned two-week vacation to a spa in San Francisco where he would be without Internet or cell phone access until next week. His absence meant Vinita was unofficially in charge, overseeing the receptionists and the front desk, making sure there were fresh flowers and water jugs containing lemon and lime slices within customers’ reach. Her boss had recently become the franchise owner of this nail shop, one in a chain. The others were in malls in Chicago, Detroit and Oakland. Places Vinita knew she and Marco would have to avoid going to, once everything played out.
Today would be her last day at work, if all went as planned. Only eight hours remained. The normal routine meant taking her lunch break at around one, to bring her boyfriend Marco a sandwich like she often did. Then she would come back with a bag from the dubious Indian “street food” restaurant. That would make it credible for her to call in sick tomorrow with “stomach problems,” giving her and Marco about six extra hours to disappear. And in that time, she could make sure that the metadata changes she’d made, to make it look like hackers in India had stolen the money, didn’t contain any mistakes.
Like checking over work before turning in a school exam. Like catching glimpses of others’ papers, whenever she could.
The owners of the nail salon franchise were rumored to be related to the heirs of a Malaysian syndicate. But far from being brutal overlords, these living remnants of the pre-Mao Triad system didn’t interfere with the salons. The night Leo, drunk, told Vinita about the syndicate, she’d promptly looked up “Asian gangs” on Wikipedia. The salons, like other shell businesses, were where the syndicate supposedly laundered money. There was nothing visibly different about the franchise’s “miscellaneous expenses” bank account. Their
passwords were appallingly easy to crack. The previous owner of the franchise, a chubby, comfy Mrs. Jairaman, was now retired to India. She’d frequently browsed bargain Indian websites, ordered cheap decorations from New Delhi cottage industries, and even used Indian Independence Day and her own birthday for the account login passwords. Every so often, a good-looking, slick-haired Indian male “relative” would come to visit Mrs. Jairaman, chatting about the weather with Vinita when she brought him tea. Then he’d leave with heavy-looking leather briefcases.
Vinita discovered the old laptop in a closet, left behind by Mrs. Jairaman. The screen still opened into the record of the bank account number and location when “Jairaman” was typed in, which Vinita tried doing once, long before the thing with Marco, simply out of curiosity.
“All I was hoping was to confirm the old biddy looked at porn,” Vinita said, showing Marco the printouts of the account’s past balances. Its maximum was in the tens of millions, she noted; its fluctuations, by week, varied by as much as four hundred grand. “No one would ever notice, like, forty thousand,” Vinita said.
But Marco didn’t bother going there with her. He never even brought up having money, or more accurately not having it. All he said, looking at the papers with their tiny, narrow columns, was, “Damn, am I lucky my girl’s a math person. Our children will be geniuses.” Now Vinita had to hold onto the scheme for both of them.
Back inside after her smoke break, pouring fresh water into the pitcher at each of the stations, Vinita mentally rehearsed the steps again.
At 1 p.m., two and a half hours from now, she’d walk the four blocks down Newbury, in the direction where suburban commuters got on the Mass Pike. Newbury Comics was very close to that Mass Ave end of the street. That was where she’d first met Marco almost a year ago. He’d surprised her by not looking at the usual vaporizing villains and big-breasted women comics, but actually reading Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese graphic novel. Very different than the zap ’em and shazzam! stuff Vinita herself happened to be buying.
While Vinita waited her turn in line, Marco—barrel-chested, black-eyed, shaggy-haired with his soft beard—was staring at her from over the top of the novel. When she saw the title and smiled, he hadn’t seemed to realize he’d already earned a thousand points toward getting her in bed.
“My ex-girlfriend was from Beijing,” he’d told Vinita, in a voice of needless and sheepish apology. “I just couldn’t deal with all her gambling. She even took her teenage sons out to Foxwoods. And no matter how I tried, I couldn’t love her food. I’m Mexican.”
Hesitant, he’d tried out Spanish on her, and Vinita answered, near fluent, admittedly a little formal, remembering her AP courses in high school Spanish. The ones she’d done in homage to the actress and lifestyle blogger Gwyneth Paltrow, who’d once lived with a host family in Spain. Marco, chuckling, said he’d stick with English.
“Your parents came from India, didn’t they? Doctors or something, right?” he’d guessed, as if he knew this as a fact, though neither of her parents were doctors, and in fact there were no doctors in her family. “Your eyes. Indian eyes,” he’d said. Like those two proofs that she was beautiful made it impossible for thirty-year-old bohemian Marco not to fall for Vinita.
Marco was a softie, no question. Vinita wasn’t going to think he was a wuss, though, not today. For the twenty-four hours, about two months ago, that the two of them believed she was pregnant, Marco and not Vinita was the one crying his silly and impractical tears of happiness. Naming their daughter and praying out loud that she would have Vinita’s eyes. Why he was so sure the baby was female, she had no clue, except Vinita suspected it had to do with Marco being a poet. How else could one explain his joy in accidentally fathering a child with Vinita, who at that point he’d only been dating for a month?
Despite Marco’s deadening day job as attendant for one of the Early Bird Special! parking lots on Newbury, his mind remained both starry and suggestible. He still sent his poems, written in English with crucial Spanish words, the sound of which Vinita admitted she liked, to little magazines that she’d never heard of, nowhere that paid him actual money. He still submitted poems widely, every week.
Marco could have stuck with it, writing poems eternally, for all Vinita cared. Probably, she would’ve become bored with him. She would have moved in with Leo. Let her cool boss be Damon Dash to Vinita’s beauteous Rachel Roy; get her nails done, like Rachel did, so she could scratch up his velvety skin. She would have broken Marco’s heart, left that old sentimental screw-up to languish.
All changed, “changed utterly,” Marco repeated, on Monday morning, and here it was the Thursday with only days before Leo’s— before her boss’s—return. Before she’d gone, Leo had somehow earned Mrs. Jairaman’s trust. He was the one responsible now for maintaining and securing the syndicate’s money, Leo was the one thugs would come after and punish, if those criminals did discover the paltry but still missing forty grand.
The men of the syndicate were criminals, murderers, pimps, Vinita reminded herself. No different, except in sophistication about skirting punishment under the law, from any of the hedge funders and their wives on Newbury. Just people who should be stolen from.
Leo, the name she shouldn’t say. Leo, the one who’d smiled so sweetly at her when Vinita, looking through Paper Magazine, lingered for a while on an old photo of Madonna visiting Malawi, holding a beautiful black child Vinita hoped the pop star had adopted legally. “Vinnie, let’s go and make us one of those,” Leo said, squeezing her shoulders.
Damn Leo for always being involved with someone else. For not seeming to care when she started dating Marco, as long as it didn’t stop her from going out with Leo too, for drinks, when he wanted. For never answering his phone in front of her, but always checking it for texts, for sexts, chuckling. Diversified.
“Decisions and revisions that a minute will reverse,” Marco had muttered, over and over, after the episode Monday, when he had almost killed a child. He hadn’t been drinking—he never drank. “Kills the brain cells I need for writing poetry,” Marco always said, when Vinita wanted to go out for a few beers. But that morning, Marco was distracted. He had been working on a new poem in his head. That was allowed, but he’d made the error of getting behind the wheel while daydreaming. The three-year-old son of some corporate vice president, a blond boy actually dressed in seersucker, Vinita saw from the newspaper photo, had nearly been hit when Marco backed his black Land Rover out of its space too rapidly. Marco hadn’t thought to check below, behind. The child was standing, unseen, watching God knew what. Maybe composing a poem too.
No harm was done, per se, the child quite startled by the mammoth car moving sudden and heavy toward him, not stopping, as if seeking him, the mother having to snatch the boy away, but the boy’s mother was nervous, a wreck for how she’d been texting on her cell phone and not holding his hand. (“Probably sexting some tennis pro she’s cheating with,” Vinita said). The mother said Marco was “dangerous,” and now that Back Bay white woman was threatening to have Marco fired. And deported.
The woman’s famous portfolio manager husband hadn’t even donated to the RNC. Vinita checked his campaign contributions on the Internet.
“It’s the Trump age, what can you do,” said Anthony, Marco’s boss at the parking lot. A tall, mournful-looking man from Ethiopia, Anthony had sympathy for Marco, but just so much. Anthony hadn’t said anything when Marco pleaded, somewhat desperate, not to lose his job. “But we could all get deported,” Marco’s boss reminded him.
“She could Homeland all of us. It takes one call. Thank God your visa is still valid, for now. You have a chance to move out of her way. Take ten days, man. Settle things down. But please, do go. I’ll have your last paycheck next Friday.”
Marco, like Vinita and her parents twenty-two years before, was all along planning to overstay his visa. He lived in a sublet in East Boston, in nice-weather walking distance from Newbury. His landlord never asked for refe
rence checks, proof of citizenship, or any other paperwork. He drove using a fake license that his cousin Hector, who’d become an American citizen last year, charged him a discount to obtain.
“If you can give me twenty grand, I’ll get you and your lady to Canada, easy,” Hector promised Monday night, when Marco couldn’t get the word “deportation” out of his head. Luckily, Hector didn’t know that, by Wednesday, Vinita had stolen twice that amount.
At just past one, Vinita eased on a delicate black cardigan to cover the skimpy camisole she always wore inside the salon. Her shoulders were hurting, as if she’d carried heavy loads, but all she’d done was lift bowls of water, the larger ones for clients having pedicures with special stone washes. One of the treatments even flecked their skin with gold. Vinita, hands still sparkling though she wore no wedding ring, slipped through the door of the salon, only to find her whole body pressed against Leo’s. He stood still in the doorway, blocking her from getting out, but looking, to anyone, like a macho boyfriend pressing flush against her. She almost moaned. She had forgotten the lemon and sweaty smell of Leo Jones.
“Too early in the day for dirty dancing, girl,” Vinita heard in the background, the receptionist tittering at the sight of her breasts crushed against Leo.
Leo, unsmiling, took Vinita’s hand and pulled her outside.
“What,” she said weakly, not questioning why Leo was back two days early from vacation, already accepting that he knew what she’d stolen.
But he didn’t. Or, rather, what he knew now would soon stop being relevant.
“V, I really, really liked that Ashis Nandy shit,” he said. “I read the whole thing on the plane. The Intimate Enemy? Shame, and all of it? It would have resonated deep for Malcolm X. Thank you for giving it to me.”
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