Seeing the likely location of a safe in the Gotham City Ballet's company director's office had been a catalyst for Xing Fu Lee. And it had come at just the right time, becausey, X couldn't stick entirely to one thing. He had too much energy. He only slept four or, at most, five hours a night. And he was almost too good at pretty much everything he did, whether it was a physical or intellectual challenge. He enjoyed pretty much everything he did. Sticking to just one thing was difficult for him. Everything interested him.
It had been tough at first. He was the new boy at Gotham City Ballet's school headquartered in their building. The school groomed most of the dancers for one of the most prestigious companies in the world. The instructors were especially hard on him at first. He suspected they wanted to take him down a peg, him the scholarship winner. But he could out leap any other boy in the school and he was stronger than them, too, even though only a few were skinnier than him. He was the most impressive athlete the school had ever had in tights. Six feet and 165 pounds of coiled spring fast twitch muscle. He was pretty sure the instructors were intentionally giving him unfair criticism, but he just focused as intensely as possible in ballet class the first few months in Gotham. Every little thing had to be absolutely perfect. He could leap higher than any of the other boys, spin faster than any of them, carry a ballerina higher, more easily and put her down more gracefully and at the end the instructors would still be shouting, "Point your toes, X!". Even when he had done a better job of pointing his toes than any of the other boys. The criticism would always be of him.
Some boys, weak ones or insecure ones, maybe most of them, would have felt persecuted by such treatment. Other boys, the strongest ones, the most secure ones, would have snapped back angrily at the unfairness of it and demanded an end to the critcism. It came to be a regular feature of dance class. And the other kids marveled at it. The new kid, mister pretty boy scholarship winner was the instructors' whipping boy despite being such an amazing dancer. But he never said anything despite, they all found out over time, being a complete wiseass. So, they waited for some kind of blowup, some kind of confrontation or spectacular scene, a rebellion, a revolt against the unfairness of their overbearing instructors.
It never happened. X had such complete confidence in himself that it didn't bother him. X saw the big picture. A bit of unfair carping about the angle of his arm displaying a ballerina didn't mean a damn thing to him. His sense of his own exceptionalism was so strong that these words bounced right off X. He made sure he did everything perfectly the next time and made the instructor try to find something else. And his confidence let him immediately see the bigger picture that this would make him a better ballet dancer. And he was going to be the best. Of that he had no doubt. He was Xing Fu Lee.
The instructors weren't being sadistic. They saw that the skinny pretty boy with the butt could take it. There was something about him that he just couldn't be shaken. And he never complained about it. A lot of the time it served to critique the other boys in the class anyway. They would get on X for some infinitessimal flaw in his spin or his technique, or one that wasn't even there, and the others, who hadn't done the steps nearly as well as X knew they'd better keep their heads down and work on it. If X could get such a ration of shit when he was practically perfect . . . gulp.
It impressed the other kids, that he was so incredibly good and yet caught all this flak from the instructors but didn't let it bother him. A lot of the boys came to be fairly intimidated by the will he showed. A lot of the girls were even more attracted to him. What sort of boy was so strong that he could just shrug off all of it . . . ?
And, at a certain point, it was hard to say just when, X started to sense that the cause of the hypercritical way the instructors treated him had shifted. It was no longer almost a sort of hazing or a way of showing the new boy that this school had higher standards than some place out in freaking Jump City. You're in Gotham City, now, pretty boy! He sensed that they knew how good he was and wanted to push him to be as good as possible. Once or twice he overheard them talking to the company director about him and it was 180 degrees different from all the carping he heard in class.
. . going to be fantastic!
. . best we've ever had!
. . finally won't have to import a star from russia.
They didn't say these things to him in class. But, then, it wouldn't have mattered if they'd never said them. He was Xing Fu Lee.
Then, the ballet company's long time star messed up his knee in the middle of a performance and X took his place and drew standing ovations by the end of the night. X had arrived. Now everyone knew he would be a star including the general public. That was when the company directors called him up to their office and offered him a contract that he'd have been an idiot to have signed. At first, they cajoled and pleaded with him. They acted like they were doing him a tremendous favor. Him, Xing Fu Lee! Then they shouted at him and tried to intimidate him. What if you blow out your knee tomorrow, Xing Fu? But they couldn't budge him. It was at that meeting that he saw the painting that he figured hid a safe.
He'd put a massive amount of energy into his complete dedication to improving his dancing. Maybe he'd been half as good as he could be when he first got there more than athlete enough but not polished. Now he was something on the order of 95% as good as he could ever be. He'd still work to improve but the biggest part of the struggle to be great was over. He'd done it. He was a star only needing the opportunity to show it performance after performance. There wasn't too much more he could do to become an even better ballet dancer. But he still had all that energy, all that fire of will that had gone into making himself better. And now the idea of that wall safe started to intrigue him, to fascinate him and eventually to challenge him.
He was going to have to rob it. This would be the goal toward which he'd direct all his overflow of energy. It kept him running at top speed, in a way, to have another outlet for his drive. And it felt refreshing to be planning out a heist. X liked being a ballet dancer but the whole thing could be such a privileged, protected sort of atmosphere, like being society's hothouse flower of the arts. It felt odd. Being completely the opposite, an outlaw and a thief at the same time, that felt like balance to X. High society and heisting at the same time.
His acclimation to repitition in the pursuit of perfection in ballet served him well. X meticulously planned out the job, remembering everything that old man Guttman and the various heisting tutors had taught him. X had the job planned out and was almost ready to find out what was in that safe when he got the chance to be in that commercial alongside Kobe Bryant.
After rejecting the petulant jackass NBA star's attempted dunks twice in a row, fame exploded on him. And, where the Gotham City Ballet's directors had angrily kept him from the best roles in the months after he'd first burst on the public scene, now they couldn't feature him enough. He was a public relations and box office godsend for them.
Their effete little cultural backwater had actual street cred! One of their boys had rejected Kobe Bryant twice. On video. And while wearing tights and a top, while dressed as though dancing in a ballet! Their guys weren't all wimps and wusses! They weren't all gay. Oh, if they could just tell the press half the rumors about Xing Fu Lee they could dispel that idea. But, the parents of the girls at the school of the Gotham City Ballet probably didn't want to hear the school assure the general public that Xing Fu Lee had apparently fucked all but one or two girls in the school over the age of 14. All of a sudden, reviews of their performances weren't 4 column inches on page 37 of the times. They were above the fold on the front page of the Arts section of the Gotham City Times. Xing Fu Lee got his picture on the front page and the ballet got consistent air time in all the local news broadcasts.
There was a crush of publicity focused on X, specifically, and he didn't exactly shy away from it. He got as many ballerinas as possible onto TV interviews and talk shows with him though he didn't do much for the other guys. But then he wasn't trying to fuck all of them. He did fuck all the ballerinas, even the older ones.
And with his notoriety, not only the Gotham City Ballet's long time backers and patrons wanted to meet the new sensation, Xing Fu Lee, the ballet dancer who could block Kobe Bryant's shots. Everyone with money and prestige in Gotham City seemed to want to meet him. X was invited into so many incredibly rich homes in the 13 more months he danced with the company that he lost track of them all. And he was trying to keep track of them all. He'd get back from spending four hours at some rich banker's house, being fawned over by the man's younger trophy wife, every one of them thinking she was being risque by commenting about how good his buns looked in tights, and he would feverishly write notes about everything he'd seen. Jewelry. Paintings. Possible wall safes. Possible floor safes. Anything they said. They were so busy openly checking him out that they never noticed him more discreetly casing the joint.
He played his part. There were a few options based on what their expectations were. Mostly he was the quiet intellectual type, a bit shy, totally dedicated to his craft. I live for the dance. Something like that. And he gave them bits of other things as appropriate to get them to say the right things to him. He found that really rich people wouldn't talk about their baubles and bullion if he made up a story and told them his family was poor. He'd tried that route once just to see how it played. But that seemed to introduce guilt. They felt at least a little bad about lording it over on a poor boy. But if he told them the truth, about the affluent upper middle class home he'd come from, they would go into high gear, competitive spirit then being okay, and show off all their trinkets. They loved lording it over on the middle class. Loved it. It made it easier for X to see them as targets, not that it was ever that hard.
As far as him, they must have believed him to be harmless. It was perfectly safe to talk about things in front of him, wasn't it? This pretty boy was a ballet dancer for god's sake! A ballet dancer! Maybe a fruit or a switch hitter even if he had rejected Kobe Bryant twice.
Yup, that's 25 carats, Xing Fu. See how it catches the light?
You don't know what a bearer bond is? Let me show you the ones I got through Goldman Sachs.
I bought that painting on the right for three point two million. That's by Turner. My art guy tells me I could sell it for five, now. Five!
Only a few of them seemed to have any inkling of what a dangerous sort of animal this extremely handsome dark haired boy they brought into all their mansions really was. One was a blonde trophy wife whose old husband nodded off in the middle of dinner, just dropped face down into his plate. X got up and checked his pulse and breathing then smirked and moved the man's face out of the rice pilaf and onto a napkin then brought the trophy wife up to her bedroom and did her right there while the old man snoozed. Forty minutes later they went back downstairs, wolfed down most of their food and jarred the table just enough to rouse him. Oh yes, that blonde knew what an energetic, forceful athlete Xing Fu Lee was and how single minded he could be. But she didn't see what else he was after. No one did and X reveled in their misjudgement of him.
Finally, he robbed the safe behind the painting in the company director's office. It was 3 floors up, 8 stories above the street and at the other end of the building that housed the company's ballet school, the school's dormitory rooms and the studio practice areas with their glass walls facing busy Gotham City streets. But, elsewhere, the exterior walls of the building were gray stone. It was the classic sort of "respectable" facade. Safe and boring and imposing looking and with lots of places where a great athlete could get a toe or finger hold and climb up. And that's what X did. He had made notes of all the traffic patterns around the building and the apparent times of surrounding buildings being occupied. He changed into some gray under armour stuff that matched the color of the stone facade and a mask and, at 3 AM Thursday morning climbed out his own dorm window and up the side of the building. He made his way over to a window into the director's office and, using a small but very powerful magnet, got the lock on the window to move to the unlocked position then climbed in. He went straight to the painting and, sure enough, it swung out on one side revealing a stainless steel faced wall safe just over a foot square. He went right to work on the dial and cracked it in under a minute.
Just as with the principal's safe, he was greeted by a wonderful surprise. Stacks of one hundred dollar bills in their neat paper wrappers with a bank's name stamped on them. X calmly transferred them all to the small bag he'd had over his shoulders. About sixty thousand he quickly estimated. Maybe it wasn't stolen or embezzled by the guy but whether or not this was true didn't much concern X. He was going to take it whether it was or not.
It was funny, the next day, X was so completely focused on his dancing he amazed even the instructors. The need to thieve had been sated. But he knew it would return. It always would.
X knocked over two mansions and a high rise condo in his remaining time in Gotham City. Each heist was meticulously planned out. One mansion had alarm circuitry that he dealt with as he'd been taught by one of old man Guttman's friends. A sort of a patch across circuits left the alarm's signals in a sort of never ending loop, never getting out of the house. And while the system's frantic alarms went round and round but never out, X went in. He took the painting bought for three point two million and purportedly worth five, carrying it off in the plastic tube he slung over his shoulder.
Another mansion had both guards and an alarm. The huge, beefy guards, two coke machine sized doofuses in leather jackets, turned out to have glass jaws. X sucker punched them both in turn, taking them by surprise and taking them out with one punch each. Neither much saw him and he had a ski mask over his face. They might be able to recall that a skinny guy 6 feet tall knocked them out but nothing more. This mansion's alarm was a much more intricate affair and it took X several minutes to adequately pacify it. Dressed all in black, he sprinted upstairs to the wife's incredible stash of jewelry and in the extra 90 seconds he'd allowed himself he found and cracked a floor safe, making off with a bag stuffed with cash and diamonds as the two huge goons were just waking up.
The high rise condo was his favorite job. It was a floor up from one he'd been in. It was owned by someone even richer than the couple who had him over for dinner. They'd been 33% of the Gotham City Ballet's budget in some years. but the guy a floor up was richer still. Much richer. X went into the building with a mask and a perfect looking blond wig. Let them look at that on the security video. Then, he broke into one elevator shaft, jumped atop an elevator as it shot up past his floor and leaped off to a utility walkway that led from that shaft to the supposedly secured elevator up to the exclusive 15 million dollar penthouses. It was a pleasure to loot that place. The guy had been a top official in the Clinton administration and was now fucking up one of the biggest banks in the country while somehow getting paid a huge salary, a monstrous salary. X had talked to a caterer who had delivered something there. He'd found that a certain top end caterer had done the wife's birthday party a few months back. There was a picture in the society pages of the Gotham City Times. He went by the caterer and made up a story. He was one of he guests at that party. He'd lost something. Which of their guys worked it? Gary and Julio? Thanks. He sent two thousand dollars in cash to Julio at his home address and called him from a throwaway cell phone. The man was hesitant to say anything at first even though X only asked him one question. What kind of lock do they have on the door in the hallway? The man hesitated again. X pointed out that the man was $2,000 richer already. Eight more will join those two if you just answer one question. What kind of lock do they have on the door in the hallway? The man still hesitated. X could tell, he was pretty much a straight arrow. He changed tactics.
"How well did they treat you?" X asked.
The line was quiet for several seconds. "Like dirt, he finally answered, "like peasant servants or something. Fuckin' assholes."
"So . . what kind of lock do they have on the door in the hallway?"
The man described in detail the sort of swipe card lock, like a hotel door, that the place had.
"Eight more in a week," said X then he hung up. He had needed to know. He would go after it that night and not give Julio time to change his mind. But he had to know. Someone that outrageously rich might have almost anything. And he couldn't whip out a black and decker saw to get through the door. Security made random checks of the public areas once or twice a night. And there was another massive condo on the other side of the hall. Each of these condos took up a half floor of the building. X was stunned at how big the place was when he closed the door behind himself and pocketed his special swipe card. You could play tennis in there if you didn't hit any lobs. But their taste was disappointing. The paintings were modern shit, bought hoping that other idiots equally gullible for the latest emperor has no clothes brand of art would buy it off them for even more. He took them all. He took all the jewelry in the bedroom though he wasn't especially impressed by it and he took a little light blue vase off a table in a hallway. That turned out to be worth more than anything else.
X made it out without a hitch, switching to another mask and a red hair wig in the utility walk between the elevator shafts and strolling right out past the security guys dressed like some rich slacker kid in oversized jeans and jacket with a skate board over his shoulder helping to disguise the fact that he had a plastic tube full of paintings and a bag of jewelry and a vase under his oversized jacket. He acted, for a moment, as though he was about to pull the board off his back and start skateboarding across the polished marble floor but stopped and smiled. "I know. I know. No boarding in the building. Just messin' with you guys," he said to the guards. They rolled their eyes at the stupid kid, one of too many to count among the rich assholes on the top 20 floors.
X had a great time reading the newpaper articles about his scores. For the condo job they eventually settled on either a blond guy or a redhead but they weren't sure which. For the two mansions, they had no idea. Same thing with the Gotham City Ballet's safe in the director's office. They had no idea. Only belatedly did they even bother to question some of the students. It was sooooooo easy to fool the cops. Now X understood how some crooks couldn't resist toying with them. It was so easy. The got to the L's just after his morning class. X loved it. His name was called on the intercom and he went up to the conference room off the director's office still in tights and a t-shirt. He had to work not to laugh at the way the cops looked at him. It was tempting. But X played it flatline low key. Nothing. He gave them nothing, no inkling how far beyond everyone's control he was. A few perfunctory questions and he was out of there. Between every line they spoke was their unspoken preconception. None of you artsy wusses could possibly have done this. He did a leap and a spin before leaving the room just to further cement their disregard for him.
And, of course, all the evidence was gone. X had an arrangement with old man Guttman. He sent everything back to him, Fedex. And the old man got 10% of the take for acting as the bank. He also made all the contacts with fences to turn jewelry, painting and innocuous looking light blue Ming dynasty vases into hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time. The old man was no comfortably well off and moved to a slightly better little house but spent each day at the same little locksmith shop, no one the wiser that he was the conduit for the transfer and re-sale of over ten million dollars of stolen cash, bonds, jewelry and art. The money was all in a safe deposit box in the name of a false ID that Guttman had had made for him. Xavier Pierce. X thought it was dumb to have kept either initial but when he told the old man that he always went by just 'X', the old man thought it was wise. Xavier Pierce had two extra large sized safety deposit boxes at the First National Bank of Jump City and later an account at one of the smaller but most discreet swiss banks.
It was a wonderful life filled with contrasts. When X thought back to his year starring for the Gotham City Ballet as a 16 and 17 year old, he would remember screwing all those ballerinas. He'd remember party after party at the most exclusive clubs in the city. He'd remember screwing actresses on the rise and a couple of the biggest names in the music industry. Sure hundreds of guys had been there before him in Ms. Yoga and her 50 year old vajayjay but the woman sure appreciated a ballet dancer's backside. Damn. He'd remember making ballet significant again. He'd remember all the roles he'd danced and the feeling of exhausted satisfaction at the end of a performance as the audience jumped out of their seats with a standing ovation. And he'd remember robbing the school, the Carletons, the Burkes and the Rubins. For now he was not only a master dancer but also a master thief.
His year in Paris was equally full of contrasts. To begin with, X spoke french nearly fluently, having taken 7 years of it in Jump city. But he decided to keep this to himself and betrayed only a minimal ability with the language at the Paris Opera Ballet where he now danced. Many times, ballerinas said things to each other that they didn't think X understood but that he did. So foolish, he smiled to himself. Why wouldn't he know the french for 'huge penis' and 'best sex I ever had'?
The Paris Opera Ballet, the premier company in France, had two russians, a cuban, a pole, a dane and three french guys competing for the lead male roles with him. The only thing that seemed to unite them was that they all hated americans. At least that's how they acted toward X at first. He'd heard that they'd be stupid like this but it still surprised him.
No matter. The ballerinas were a little more open minded. And he was a better athlete than the other guys who'd been partnering them. The other guys hated him, they were jealous the first time he showed in their studio how he could leap. The ballerinas were impressed and . . intrigued. And the ballerinas also immediately appreciated how strong the slender a-mare-ee-cane was. X established what a great ballet dancer he was and even the french audiences reluctant to embrace an american ended up cheering and shouting his name at the end of performances. The french also put great stock in acting the part, in forcefully creating the impression that you really were a king or a prince, dark or light. They were shocked that this 17 year old a-mare-ee-cane boy did it so well.
And, as in Gotham City, X became a regular on the highest level of the Paris party circuit. No one cared at all that he was under 21 in Paris. There were occasional rocky moments early on but X's acceptance was aided by the discovery of what an intellectual sort he was. The irony was that he encountered a lot of french who met him with a presumption that any american would be dumb. They professed over and over their dedication to intellectual life. But, of the ones he got to know well enough to say, almost none seemed to like intellectual life as much as they liked the appearance of liking intellectual life. Maybe he'd just met the wrong ones. But he doubted it.
No matter. He was banging french girls left and right. Around fifty in that year. He didn't count. He didn't need to. He was Xing Fu Lee. Who did he need to impress? And, just as in Gotham City, he was being introduced to the elite rich patrons of the arts and every moment he was with them he was sizing them up or casing their homes, their palatial 12 foot ceiling ornate as a piece of Versailles homes. They smiled across the dinner table at le plus beau garcon americain. He smiled back, joy in his carmel brown eyes, looking at their jewelry and paintings.
His lack of familiarity with the city made X extra careful in planning and executing his heists in and around Paris but he still pulled off 5 jobs in a year there compared to just three other than the school in his last year in Gotham City. Just as he'd practiced and practiced and performed and performed and honed his athletic and artistic talents till he was a great ballet dancer, X had practiced and practiced and heisted and heisted till he was a master thief. In almost the same way as he enjoyed exercising his abilities on a stage, he got great satisfaction from flawlessly taking down big scores. He almost had a sixth sense now for where the valuables would be in any home. He almost felt like he could just look at a rich couple and guess exactly what those valuables would be. The whole rich man, trophy wife thing was just as prevalent in France, though some of the rich french men had almost open mistresses. One patron of the ballet was introduced to him beside a much younger brunette with fascinating green almond shaped eyes and full lips so well suited to her cute pout of an expression. Now, there's a really top notch trophy wife he'd thought kissing her hand backstage right after a performance. Oh. She's the mistress, someone told him right out front in everyone else, as if it was common knowledge. X didn't know what to say and the brazen hottie even patted his ass, murmuring 'quel cul t'as!' while he was trying to assimilate this information. French society could be pretty wild.
But, while they all pretended to look down on american culture, they simultaneously desperately wanted to show him that they kept up with it, that they knew what was going on in the states. He smirked at references to "zee 'ip 'op" and their assumptions that all americans were pretty much alike. At one dinner party, a woman asked him if he was friends with Robin. X looked at her like she was crazy. She thought everyone in the U.S. was completely captivated by the rise of metahuman heroes, not that the little squirt was remotely metahuman. But she thought he was almost X's age and he was in Gotham City, after all. So when she saw some footage of Robin jumping around following Batman that made him seem almost like a ballet dancer, too, she thought that Xing Fu Lee probably knows him. X quickly corrected her that he was most definitely not friends with some midget "sidekick" who pranced around in a green speedo and elf shoes. What does thees 'sidekick' mean, she asked. Little loser who can't make it on his own, X told her. What about zee Keed Flahsh, another woman at the dinner party asked. X rolled his eyes. Not as much a loser as Robin, said X, but if there are fashion victims, that dude's a fashion casualty. Everyone laughed. X often felt like he was these people's sole conduit to what the States was actually like. At least some frenchmen wouldn't have the wrong idea about us.
Mostly, though, he very much liked the french women. They had such a strong sense of how to play the romance game. There were no misconceptions with them. When, upon meeting her, he told a french ballerina or a french fashion model that he wasn't looking for a long term relationship, they understood. There weren't any of the occasional angry scenes when an american girl found out that X meant exactly what he said. He was having a great time meeting and bedding ballerinas and models when he wasn't shmoozing rich people on behalf of the Paris Opera Ballet and scoping out their mansions for robbery in the process.
Fashion week in Paris was a particularly fun time for him. Each night, a different girl, a different model who'd been on the cover of Vogue, done editorial campaigns for this or that perfume, or who was just so smoking hot that you knew she would in the future. The last night of the week, he was at a party in the 16th arrondissement, one of the richest sections of Paris. There were about 30 people there. But the models just didn't do it for him. Hot but not in quite teh right way and, there was no way around it, dumb. Freaking stupid. Ugh. He liked 'em smart. Clever. Interesting. There was a french male model there, a ridiculously good looking blond guy named Jeremy, who was also working the room. And he seemed to have the same feeling as X. They commiserated at the bar and X was surprised to find that this Jeremy had a great sense of humor. But then Jeremy said the same thing about him. A ballet dancer? Funny? They both left intending to go to their separate apartments. Jeremy offered him a ride and they talked and laughed on the way and when they got to X's building they looked at each other in the half light of the small car and both knew. X stammered out that he'd never done anything like this before. Jeremy said that he hadn't either. But they both went up to X's apartment and Jeremy only left the next morning.
X didn't feel any shame or confusion. He liked Jeremy. Jeremy liked him. He still prefered girls and went out with a ballerina the next night. And it occurred to him that maybe, just as he wasn't completely part of high society or the world of crime he would always have a foot in every part of society. It didn't matter. He was Xing Fu Lee. He could do anything.
The police never got onto his trail. As far as they knew, he was only the star ballet dancer that everyone saw from afar. He was never even questioned about any of the heists he pulled. But, in the last few weeks he was in Paris, he started to have a vague sense that he was being followed. He mentioned as much to the Vogue cover model with whom he was walking down the boulevard one night. She laughed and said something about X thinking he was living in some sort of crime or spy novel. X said nothing. He pulled her in close to him and kissed her, reaching under her full length coat to massage her breasts with one hand. ". . Oh . . X . . " she gasped as they continued to kiss. But despite his manual ministrations, X was not as completely invested in their necking as she was. While they kissed, he looked past her with one opened eye and at last he saw what he was looking for, two silhouettes in a parked car. He noted the make, model and color of the car. And then he put his other hand on her breasts and kissed her without reserve.
"Oh . . X!"
He saw that same car a few days later and again a few days after that. Once in the 7th arrondissement and then in Auteuil, outside the mansion of a rich patron of the ballet who had invited X and a couple other dancers to dinner. And each time there would be two silhouettes the same size in it and it was parked a half mile away, just barely in a position to see him. He started marking his own apartment door, leaving something tiny, barely perceptible, a hair or a tiny scrap of paper held in place by the closed door so that the sight of it on the floor in the hall would reveal to him that someone had opened his door and been in his apartment.
A few days later, he came back from practice at the ballet's streetside studio and saw the hair on which he'd carefully closed his door lying on the floor in the hallway. X took a deep breath. Run or go in?
He decided to go in. He didn't think anyone had anything on him. He guessed that maybe they would go through his place looking for something. But just as with his Gotham City jobs, he'd fedexed everything to old man Guttman in Jump City. He had some books, workout clothes, ballet tights and outfits, and some food in his furnished apartment. Nobody would find anything, not even anything to connect him to old man Guttman. But, when he went in, X could see that someone had tried. They'd tried to find . . something. Who knows what? He had left his books and things in very specific positions and lots of things seemed to have been slightly moved. Someone had lightly tossed his place.
X couldn't stand not having the upper hand, wondering what someone else might do next, why they were shadowing him. He furiously went through his options and decided to fight fire with fire. First, he drew the blinds and set up a stack of books, wider at the base and half as wide at the top, covered it with a shirt and topped it with a beret he'd been given by a ballerina and set it up at his desk lit so as to be vaguely visible as his silhouette but not seen clearly enough to be discerned as not him. Then he dressed all in black and went down the hall. There was only one door out of his apartment building except for ground floor units lived in by some families. He couldn't go through there. But the trash chute emptied into a dumpster behind the building, too. He dove in, slid down and went flying into a relatively cushioned landing against trash bags. He got out and circled a half mile out before coming back toward the rue on which he lived. Sure enough, there, just barely within sight of his front door was that same car. X snuck up to a Citroen 6 cars back of them and waited and watched them. he pressed a button and the lights went off in his apartment. After another 25 minutes, when they got tired of watching nothing happen in there, the car started. X frantically broke into and hot wired the Citroen and tailed them.
They drove to a non-descript parking lot beside a small warehouse in a crappy neighborhood on the mostly crappy north side of Paris and one guy got out. In the light, X got a look at them. Both had short cropped hair and a look about them that screamed "Cop!". They said good night and X had to pick one to follow. He chose the one who'd been passenger and followed him to an apartment building in the 15th arrondissement, a mile south of the Eiffel Tower, making note of his car and its license plate, too. He watched the guy go in and then X parked his stolen car. As luck would have it, there was a police station right there. He left it in their lot, looked for a light to go on in a window in the guy's building. When one did, he rushed to the door and figured out that it was one of three different french names or "Carreker". He went back to the street and disabled the alarm on the guy's car and looked in the glove box. He found registration papers saying the car belonged to "Overseas Investments Ltd" and a letter addressed to Paul Carreker at that building and from Sue Carreker of Schaumberg, Illinois. She seemed to be talking to her brother. It was all about their parents' troubles with no hint of what he really did.
But X smirked. Now he had some info. He slashed one of the guy's tires just for the hell of it then loped off down the rue toward the Paris subway. Two days later, they let the dancers out early and X practically sprinted out a back entrance of the place while the others were streaming out the front entrance. He made his way to the guy's apartment building and snuck in as a young woman left. She smiled at the glimpse of handsome X but he had no time for it now. He raced up the stairs and picked the lock on the guy's door. The info wasn't right out in the open but poking around a little, X soon became convinced that Paul Carrker was some kind of spook or quasi cop. He found an odd tiny camera and a set of old, probably broken surveillance microphones in a desk. The key was to figure out what this "Overseas Investments Ltd" was.
Luckily, the other guy was not as careful as Paul Carreker. Waiting for the two of them at that same crappy warehouse a few nights later, X followed the other guy. He lived in a bit lower class area than Carreker, indicating that Carreker had the higher rank. His name was Nolan Keller. X broke into Keller's place the next day and, deep in a desk drawer, found an ID badge to get him into a National Security Administration, NSA, office in Virginia. There was also a note on a pad about "Section Chief Carreker". X took the ID badge with him and got the hell out of there.
But, the idea of the NSA shadowing him perplexed him. They didn't do regular policing. Why would they be following him? He formulated a couple general ideas but waited to see what their next move would be.
Finally, a week later, X had just finished a performance, dancing the role of Albrecht in Giselle. He was still in costume back at the door of his dressing room accepting some roses from a pair of school girls, very pretty but, alas, only about 12. He was smiling and merci'ing them when two men with shortcropped hair in dark suits approached down the hallway. X could not help himself.
"If you're going to pretend to be gay admirers, you two should at least kiss," he whispered to them. The two men looked at him in horror. "People are watching," said X and he nodded to the side where some other fans were asking for the autographs of other dancers. "Kiss!" he whispered frantically motioning for them to get together with his hands then nearly burst out laughing as the two NSA agents turned their heads toward each other and had the least enthusiastic kiss in human history.
"Good job section chief Carreker and agent Keller," he chuckled under his breath. Their eyes went wide in shock.
"Are you guys actually ballet fans? Or do you just like following young guys around Paris?"
As expected, they got pissed off. He hoped they might make a mistake as a result. It turned out not to matter. They followed him into his small dressing room and left the door ajar so as not to attract suspicion. Keller glanced frantically at the door every couple seconds to make sure no one listened in. X started undressing right in front of them as they spoke.
"Listen, Lee. We're gonna cut to the chase here. We saw you take down the Vigo place out in Neuilly."
"I don't know what you're talking about Section Chief Carreker."
"How the hell do you know who we are?" demanded Keller.
X only smiled.
"We know you took it down, Lee. We don't quite get the two sides of your coin being pretty boy ballet dancer and master fucking thief but we know that those are the two sides come up when it's tossed."
"Like you guys tossed my apartment. I should thank you for not making a mess. But I have no idea what you're talking about," he smiled, "I mean, other than you two guys who just kissed outside my dressing room thinking I'm a pretty boy."
Keller grumbled. Carreker continued as X finished stripping and stepped into his shower leaving the door open so that he could hear them.
"We saw you, Lee. We saw someone in black leave the grounds and followed him. It wasn't easy. I give you credit. You ducked into that auto parts place then you made your way to the subway and back to your place but it was you."
"Do you have any proof of this or do you just like making wild allegations, Section Chief?" asked X from under the spray as he soaped up.
"No, we don't have any proof. We're not here to arrest you or investigate you," said Carreker. "We're here to ask for your help."
X looked out at them past the spray as he was rinsing off then turned off the shower, stepped out in full view of them and started drying off. "Let's pretend that you aren't actually spinning a tale of fantasy and continue. Why were you outside this guy Vigo's fricking chateaux of a house? Why were you outside his place?"
Carreker glanced at Keller while X continued drying off. "What do you know about Vigo, Lee?"
"Um, a patron of the arts, a super rich guy who had me and some other dancers out to his place a few months back."
"Also assistant to the foreign minister and their point man on dealing with Iraq."
"Um . . . yeah?" said X intentionally drying off his equipment in full view of them. "Oh. Sorry," he added. "I wasn't thinking about how small you guys might be, didn't mean to embarass you."
Keller grunted an expletive under his breath. Carreker continued. "France took a bribe," he started. "Hussein did a deal with them paying them off to vote against having the United Nations take any action agaisnt Iraq. We're sure of it. But we can't find the documents, the papers with signatures. Vigo was the point man. We've already been through his office. Nothing."
X pulled on boxer shorts. "Maybe his superiors have these documents."
"No. We've been there, too. We think his bosses didn't want any copies of the paper work to exist. Kind of embarassing to take a public stand saying how moral you are and be found out to be on the take. We think Vigo has copies as blackmail ammunition. Like, even think of letting me go and these documents get out. That sort of thing."
X combed his hair and looked at them in the mirror. "Okay, I'll bite. Where do I appear in this fantasy?"
"We tried to rob his place. We didn't even get past the topiary 200 yeards out. We tripped alarms we didn't even know were there. You got in and out and fleeced the guy. How? And . . . well . . would you do it again for us?"
X pulled on his dress pants and then shirt without saying a word till he started buttoning his shirt. "So . . . my country wants me to rob people for it?"
Carreker shrugged. "Certain people. Yes. You could phrase it that way."
X pulled on his socks and shoes. "I'm not even going to be in Paris two weeks from now. I'm going to Moscow for six months then to St. Petersburg for 6 months. The Bolshoi then the Kirov, he said and did an elegant spin in the toes of one dress shoe.
To his surprise, that didn't put an end to it. Carreker and Keller didn't seem disappointed. They almost seemed to perk up.
"Really?" asked Carreker.
"Yup. First time an american dancer goes there to star instead of the other way around."
"And . . you'll probably be going to dinner at the homes of super rich so called patrons of the arts out there, too, right."
"Absolutely," said X combing his hair again. "They love doing that sort of thing. They love staring at us up close."
"How would you like to do your same thing but with some . . technological support?"
"I don't know what you're talking about, Section Chief Carreker, but keep talking."
KF***KF***KF***KF***KF***KF***KF
Author's note: Sorry this is so long. Up next, The Story of Red X pt IV of IV-- Super Thief