A CON-MAN SLEEPS with one eye open, a con-woman sleeps with both eyes open.
Which, I admit, is a fancy way of saying "all I got for Christmas was insomnia and an indefinite residency inside an asylum".
See, the nuthouse wasn't meant to be a permanent part of my plan. It wasn't actually meant to be part of my life plan at all. Shocking, I know. But this isn't a biography and you're not an idiot. I'm a con-artist; telling the truth isn't in the job description—telling you a good story, however, is.
/
I don't know why I shelled out and paid a lawyer to tell me that pleading insanity to avoid a one hundred year long prison sentence was a good idea. Regardless, the question reverberated in my head all day and all night. Maybe I missed my true calling in life. I thought, watching time bleed weeks into months.
For someone who was accustomed to living beyond the law, being confined in a concrete kingdom and suffocated with mental health nurses was slowly but surely killing me.
I missed my freedom like a dying man on Everest misses home while he clings to a cliff's edge and prays to a god who doesn't hear him. I missed even the boring parts. The days spent burrowed in a nondescript apartment watching and re-watching recordings of my next mark and studying them, the tedium of rehashing the same point to your dumb mark, and even the paperwork was preferable to acting clinically insane.
It was like having the same nightmare every night, except you wouldn't wake up and everything blurs into one twisted montage.
Wake up. Shower and eat goop for breakfast. Attend an aimless group therapy session. Yard time. Lunch. Stare at the security fence for hours. Dinner. Sit in silence in the common room. Get sent into your cell. Try to sleep, fail, beg the nurse for pills, fail that too, stare at your eyelids, repeat.
Didn't I have a right to die?
/
"Please, stop!"
My head snapped up. I had a crudely fashioned shiv in my right hand and a deathwish in my left. Not my best work, of course. It was reinforced chicken-wire glass attached to a duct tape handle. There was no explaining my way out of this one. Shit.
I expected to see Josefina with the hook nose or Magdalena with that ever-present day-old tuna stench — or any of the other ladies who worked in the facility — but instead, I came face-to-face with a man.
My shiv went clattering onto the cold concrete. I scrambled back but smashed my back against the kitchen dumpster. The man snatched my makeshift weapon away from me. I stared up at him. He looked young-ish. Probably in his thirties. Classical features, tidy facial hair, glasses — and the impression of a bookworm from one glance alone.
Although, the speed and assuredness at which he seized the shiv betrayed a background in some sort of combat sport. None of the other nurses ever had that sort of reflex.
"Who are you?" I asked, impatient to be left alone again.
"Currently, a nurse for your ward," he said, "possibly, your ticket out of this place."
I blinked at the unassuming, gentle-looking male nurse and burst out laughing. If this was a con, it could get a three out of ten for effort. Opening my palm, I gestured for him to return my little knife. He slipped it into his pocket and clasped his hands together. His eyebrows knitted together and a cute, little frown twisted his lips.
"Possibly, a patient even more insane than I am," I snorted and thrust my outstretched hand towards him again, "give the shiv back, sweetheart."
He fished for something in his other pocket before he pulled out leaves of photographs. My jaw slackened and I stared at the evidence he brought out.
"I know you don't belong here," he said.
On top of the pile was an image of my planning corkboard. The notes, photographs, and important details I pinned were all in clear view. It was a miracle that he even found my former hideout, let alone managed to take photos of something I destroyed shortly after creating. I nodded along, stunned.
"I'm not a nurse. In fact, I'm here because I'm looking for your talent with manipulating your marks," he fanned out the rest of the photos, all of which were evidence of my sane mental state and meticulousness with planning serious fraud.
"You're bailing me out of here and hiring me?"
He nodded, leaned in, and lowered his voice to a whisper.
"I need someone who can convince hostages that you're one of them for eleven days. Earn their trust, encourage complying with the robbers, and discreetly sabotage their escape attempts," he said, "You'll be among over sixty captives. It could be dangerous, but you and the robbers will bring back 2.4 billion Euro."
With that much money, I could leave the country. I could start anew and put everything behind me. Maybe never spend another day dancing with crime.
"Consider it done."
/
BIENVENIDOS
The man who smuggled me out of the nuthouse wrote on a dark green chalkboard.
Alongside a colourful group of strangers, I sat in an improvised classroom in an abandoned countryside mansion. The only information offered to us all so far was that our mastermind preferred to be called "The Professor", which was a little corny but I wasn't about to turn down the two billion Euro heist. We were a ragtag group. A melting pot of adults of different ages and backgrounds.
Three heavy-set, bearded men looked well into their forties. Two of the men were younger, bright-eyed and a little too restless for comfort. There were two other women in total, both of them pretty in the same way ocelots are. Gorgeous, dressed in either fur or silk jackets and eyes full of dangerous ideas.
There was another man sitting near the front, but I was seated at the very back and couldn't glimpse his face. Broad shoulders, a perfect fit of a suit, and oozing confidence like souffle oozes caramel.
Then, he turned. Just a fraction and I saw him. The prolific robber, the thief, the criminal who once relieved Paris's Champs-Elysees of over four hundred diamonds. The man I once left at the altar. My heartbeat stuttered and, for a second, I felt my body go cold with denial.
"Welcome. I welcome you and thank you for accepting this job offer."
The Professor fixed his glasses.
"We'll live here, far from the worldly noise. For five months. Five months spent training on how to do the job."
One of the older men raised his hand. This one wore a knitted sweater, with a checkered collar peeking out from the top of it.
"Five months? Are you crazy?" he asked.
"Look. People spend years studying for a salary, which at the end of the day, is just a shitty salary. I've been working on this plan for much longer. When it's over, you'll never have to work another day of your life. Your children wouldn't need to work either."
The older man fell silent and The Professor continued.
"You don't know each other yet, and I want it to stay like that. I don't want any names or personal questions, and of course - personal relationships," he said, "I want each of you to choose a name. Something simple. Like planets, numbers, cities."
"Okay. So I can be Mister 17 and someone can be Mister 23?" said a young guy with a chain around his neck. He laughed a little in an unreal way. Picture one person saying 'ha-ha-ha', except in the exact same note for each 'ha' and spat out like a machine gun. I swallowed my urge to scrunch up my face at the sound I'd be hearing for the next half year.
"That's a bad start," The Professor said. I mentally agreed. The last thing we need is to forget someone's obscure pseudonym in the middle of a heated shootout with the law.
"Yeah, I can hardly remember my phone number. Let alone random digits for names," the older man with the knitted sweater scoffed.
"That's why I said it."
There was some sneering from the front of the class and the sweater man sighed at the jab. Eureka. We've got a probable father and son in the team.
"How about I be Mars and he can be Uranus?" Boy-next-door with the hoodie on asked.
I rolled my eyes at the overused planetary joke. Did anyone ever laugh at this after turning, I don't know, twelve? I threw a glance at my ex-fiancé's back. If he found it amusing, he wasn't showing it. The Professor cleared his throat.
"It'll be cities. Cities." And that was that.
My name is Cairo. My would-have-been husband: Berlin. I would be infiltrating the hostages and ruining any rebellion. He would be leading the rest of the robbers while we're both locked inside a mint for eleven days. Can a criminal love? The answer doesn't matter.
Berlin must fall.