Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  She blinks in the light as her boyfriend runs his palm across her cheek. “I’m fine,” she says, and all the bravado finally runs out of her so that she’s shaking, her whole body quivering from stress (but also, it’s true, with giddiness, with the high of it all). “I drove him home, in his Bugatti. Lachlan, I got inside. I got everything.”

  Lachlan’s face lights up. “Fair play! My clever girl.” He pulls the woman to him and kisses her hard, his stubble scraping her chin, his hands reaching under her pajama top.

  The woman reaches back for him, sliding her hands up across the smooth skin of his back, feeling the clench of his muscles under her palm. And as she lets herself sink into that twilight state between arousal and exhaustion, a kind of waking dream in which the past and present and future come together into a timeless blur, she thinks of the glass house on Mulholland. She thinks of the Richard Prince painting, of the bloodied nurse watching over the frigid rooms below, silent guardian against the night. Trapped in her glass prison, waiting.

  * * *

  —

  As for Alexi? In the morning, he will wake up in a dried puddle of his own urine, wishing he could detach his head from his body. He will text his friends, who will tell him he left with a hot brunette, but he will remember nothing. He will wonder first whether he managed to fuck the woman before he passed out, and whether it counts if he doesn’t remember it; and then, somewhat idly, he will wonder who the woman was. No one will be able to tell him.

  I could tell him, though, because that woman—she is me.

  2.

  EVERY CRIMINAL HAS AN M.O. and this is mine: I watch and I wait. I study what people have, and where they have it. It’s easy because they show me. Their social media accounts are like windows into their worlds that they’ve flung open, begging me to peer inside and take inventory.

  I found Alexi Petrov on Instagram, for example—just another day of scrolling through photos of strangers until my eye was caught by a banana-yellow Bugatti and the man sitting on its hood with a self-satisfied grin that told me exactly what he thought of himself. By the end of the week, I knew everything about him: who his friends and family were, where he liked to party, the boutiques where he shopped, the restaurants where he dined, the clubs where he drank, as well as his lack of respect for women, his casual racism, his raging ego. All of it conveniently geotagged, hashtagged, cataloged, documented.

  I watch, I wait. And then, when the opportunity arises, I take.

  It’s easier than you’d think to get to these kinds of people. After all, they provide the world with minute-by-minute documentation of their itineraries: All I have to do is put myself in their path. People open the door to pretty, well-dressed girls without bothering to ask a lot of questions. And then, once you’re inside, it’s all about timing. Waiting for the purse to be abandoned at a table while its owner is in the bathroom; waiting for the vape pens to come out and the proper level of inebriation to be achieved; waiting for a party crowd to sweep you along in its wake and that perfect moment of carelessness to present itself to you.

  I have learned that the rich—the young rich, in particular—are so very careless.

  So this is what is going to happen to Alexi Petrov: A few weeks from now, when this night (and my presence in it) has faded into a vague, cocaine-addled memory, he will pack up his LV luggage for a week in Los Cabos with a dozen of his jet-setting friends. He’ll post Instagram photos of himself climbing aboard a #gulfstream swaddled in #versace, drinking #domperignon from a #solidgold ice bucket, sunbathing on the deck of a yacht with the #beautifulpeople in #mexico.

  And while he is gone, a van will pull up to his empty mansion. The van will bear a sign advertising a nonexistent furniture restoration and art storage business, just in case any neighbors are watching from inside their own gated fortresses. (They won’t be.) My partner—Lachlan, the man from my bed—will enter the house, using the gate and alarm codes that I’ve collected. He’ll select the pieces that I’ve pointed out for him—two of the slightly less valuable watches, a pair of diamond cuff links, the Gio Ponti armchairs, that Italian end table, and a few other items of note—and he’ll load them into the truck.

  We could steal so much more from Alexi, but we don’t. Instead, we follow the rules I set when I first got in this game a few years back: Don’t take too much; don’t get greedy. Take only what won’t be missed. And only steal from those who can afford it.

  THEFT, A PRIMER:

  Never steal artwork. Tempting as it might be, that multimillion-dollar painting—anything by a recognizable artist—is going to be impossible to move. Even Latin American drug lords won’t shell out for a stolen Basquiat that they’ll never be able to resell on the open market.

  Jewels are easy to steal, but the really valuable pieces are often one of a kind, and therefore too identifiable. Take lesser pieces, dismantle the jewelry, sell the gems.

  Brand items—expensive watches, designer clothes, purses—are always a good bet. Throw that Patek Philippe up on eBay, sell it to a tech bro in Hoboken who just got his first big paycheck and wants to impress his friends. (Patience, here, is the key: best to wait six months in case authorities are monitoring the Web for stolen goods.)

  Cash. Always the thief’s ideal. But also the most difficult to get your hands on. Rich kids carry Centurion Cards, they don’t tote around bundles of cash. Although once I found $12,000 in the side pocket of a limousine owned by the son of a telecom magnate from Chengdu. That was a good night.

  Furniture. Now, this takes a real eye. You have to know your antiques—which I do, that’s what a degree in art history will get you (if not much else)—and you have to have a way to sell them. You can’t just set up on the corner with a Nakashima Minguren coffee table and hope that someone walking by has $30,000 in their pocket.

  I’ve stolen three Birkin bags and a mink Fendi coat out of the closet of the star of the reality TV show Shopaholix. I walked out of a party at the mansion of a hedge fund manager with a Ming vase tucked in my tote; and slipped a yellow diamond ring off the finger of a Chinese steel heiress who had passed out in a bathroom at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Once, I even drove a Maserati right out of the garage of a twentysomething YouTube star best known for his videos of reckless car stunts, although I had to ditch it in Culver City because it was too identifiable to resell.

  So—Alexi’s cuff links will go to a jeweler of ill repute downtown, to be dismantled and resold; the watches will be placed in an online luxury consignment store, at a price that will be impossible to resist; and the furniture will end up in a storage locker in Van Nuys, awaiting its final destination.

  Eventually, an Israeli antiques dealer named Efram will come by the storage locker to peruse its contents. He will pack our acquisitions into crates and ship them to a free port in Switzerland, where no one will bother to check on provenance and customers tend to pay in ill-begotten cash. What we take from Alexi will end up in collections in São Paulo, Shanghai, Bahrain, Kiev. For this, Efram will take seventy percent of the profit, which is highway robbery, but without him, we are nothing.

  And at the end of the process, Lachlan and I will end up splitting $145,000.

  How long will it take Alexi to notice that he’s been robbed? Judging by the activity on his Instagram account, it will take three days after his return from Mexico to finally sleep off the hangover, wander into his living room, and realize that something is slightly amiss. Wasn’t there once a pair of gold velvet armchairs sitting in that corner? (That will be the day that he posts a photo of a bottle of Patron at eight A.M. with the caption Shit think Im going crazy need tequila.) Before long, he’ll register the missing watches. (Another post: a shot of shiny new timepieces lined up along his hairy arm, geotagged at Feldmar Watch Company in Beverly Hills. Can’t pick just gonna buy them all.) Still, he won’t report the robbery to the police; his ilk rarely do. Be
cause who wants to deal with paperwork and nosy authorities, and all that unpleasant rigmarole over a few trinkets that will likely never be recovered and can be so easily replaced?

  The super-rich are not like you or me, you see. We know exactly where our money is each minute of every day, the value and location of our most treasured belongings. The fabulously wealthy, on the other hand, have their money in so many places that they often forget what they have and where it’s supposed to be. The pride in the value of the things they own—$2.3 million for this McLaren convertible!—is often a disguise for a laziness in the care of those things. The car is crashed; the painting gets ruined by cigarette smoke; the couture dress gets trashed on the first wearing. Bragging rights aside, beauty is ephemeral: There’s always a newer, brighter bauble to replace it.

  Easy come, easy go.

  3.

  NOVEMBER IN LOS ANGELES feels like summer just about anywhere else. A heat wave has blown in with the Santa Anas, and the sun bakes the packed dirt of the canyons, bringing up the scents of skunk and jasmine. Inside my bungalow, the bougainvillea vines rattle against the windows, shedding their leaves in passionate heaps of despair.

  On a Friday, a month after the Alexi job, I wake up late to an empty house. I drive down the hill for coffee and a yoga class, and when I return I take a novel onto the stoop of my porch and settle in for a quiet morning. Next door, my neighbor Lisa is ferrying supplies from her car to her backyard, bags of fertilizer that are most likely destined for the marijuana patch she’s growing. She nods at me as she passes.

  I’ve lived here for three years now: my little aerie, a woodsy, two-story bungalow that started its life a hundred years earlier as a hunting cabin. I share it with my mother. Our home is tucked up in a forgotten corner of Echo Park, bedraggled and overgrown, too inaccessible for real estate developers and too uncool for the gentrifying hipsters raising real estate prices down the hill. If you stand outside on an overcast day you can hear the groan of the interstate at the bottom of the hill; but otherwise, up here, it feels like you are far from the rest of the city.

  My neighbors grow pot in their gardens; they collect broken pottery; they write poetry and political manifestos and decorate their fences with bits of sea glass. No one worries about maintaining their lawns up here; no one even has lawns to trim. What people value instead: space and privacy and a lack of judgment. I’d lived here for a year before I learned Lisa’s name, and then only because her copy of The Herb Quarterly ended up in my mailbox by mistake.

  On Lisa’s next trip through, I wave her over, and pick my way across my own neglected clutter of succulents to the collapsing fence that separates our properties. “Hey there, I have something for you.”

  She pushes a wild lock of graying hair out of her face with a gardening glove, and walks to meet me. When she’s close enough, I reach over the fence and tuck a folded check into the pocket of her jeans. “For the kids,” I say.

  She wipes her gloves on the back of her jeans, leaving brown crescents of dirt across her rear. “Again?”

  “Work has been going well.”

  She nods, and gives me a crooked smile. “Well. Good for you. Good for us, too.” Perhaps she finds it suspicious that her neighbor, the “antiques dealer,” regularly gives her four-figure checks, but she has never said a thing. Even if she knew, though, I think she might not judge me anyway. Lisa runs a nonprofit that advocates for children in court, children who are there because of abuse and neglect: I’m sure it would secretly delight her, as it does me, to know that some of the money that I take from the most spoiled children in the world goes to children who have the least.

  (And yes, I’m aware that the check is an attempt to assuage my own conscience—like the robber barons who write checks to charities and call themselves “philanthropists”—but really, it’s a win-win for everyone, right?)

  Lisa peers over my shoulder at the bungalow. “I saw your mom head off in a taxi at the crack of dawn.”

  “She went in for a CT scan.”

  A pucker of concern. “Everything OK?”

  “Yes—it’s just a routine follow-up. Her doctor’s optimistic—her last few scans were promising. So it’s likely that…” I leave the thought dangling there, too superstitious to articulate the word that I most want to say: remission.

  “That must be a relief.” She rocks back and forth on the heels of her work boots. “So, what then? You going to stick around if she’s clear?”

  That word—clear—triggers a little spasm inside me. Clear connotes clarity, but also blue skies, freedom, an open path to the future. Lately, I’ve been letting myself imagine, just a little. I’ve found myself in bed at night, listening to Lachlan’s shallow breath beside me, and turning over the possibilities in my head. What might be next. Despite the adrenaline kick that I get from what I do—the self-righteous thrill of it all, not to mention the financial upside—I never intended to do this forever.

  “I’m not sure,” I say. “I’m feeling a little restless here. I’ve been thinking about going back to New York.” Which is true, although when I mentioned this to my mother a few months ago—Maybe when you’re really and truly healthy again I’ll head back to the East Coast—the look of horror on her face was enough to stop the rest of that sentence right in my throat.

  “Might be good for you to start fresh,” Lisa says mildly. She pushes her hair from her eyes and settles them on me. I blush.

  A car turns in to the road and slowly bumps along the rutted asphalt. It’s Lachlan’s vintage BMW, its engine clicking and whirring from the effort of ascending the hill.

  Lisa raises an eyebrow, tucks the check deeper into her pocket with a pinkie, and shoulders her bag of fertilizer. “Come by one of these days for some matcha,” she says as Lachlan parks in the driveway behind me. She vanishes into her garden.

  There’s the slam of a car door, and then I feel Lachlan’s arms slip around my waist, his pelvis pressing against my backside. I turn in his arms so that I’m facing him. His lips slide across my forehead, down the side of my cheek, and end at my neck.

  “You’re in a good mood,” I say.

  He steps back, unfastening the top button of his shirt collar and wiping a bead of sweat off his hairline. With one palm, he shades his face against the sun: My partner is a nocturnal animal, his translucent blue eyes and pale skin more suited to dark places than the incinerating L.A. sun. “Eh. I’m a fair bit annoyed, actually. Efram didn’t show.”

  “What? Why?” Efram still owes me $47,000 dollars from the Alexi job. Perhaps I shouldn’t have given Lisa that check after all, I think with alarm.

  Lachlan shrugs. “Who knows? He’s done this before; he probably got himself bolloxed or something and couldn’t ring. I left a message. Anyway, I’m going to run back to my place later today, check in on things for a while, so maybe I’ll stop in at his shop while I’m on the west side.”

  “Ah.” So, Lachlan plans to disappear again, until we have another job lined up. I know better than to ask when he’ll be back.

  Things I know about Lachlan: He grew up in Ireland, in abject poverty, in one of those enormous Catholic families with a kid in every cupboard. He saw theater as his ticket out of this hardscrabble life and came to the States when he was twenty to try to make it on Broadway. That was two decades ago and the events that conspired between then and the day that I met him, three years back, remain murky. You could drive a semi through the gaps in what he chooses to share.

  But this much I know: He didn’t make it as an actor. He puttered along in background roles and fringe theater, in New York and Chicago and finally L.A., and got fired on the first day of his one big break in an indie film because his accent was “too Irish.” Eventually, however, he discovered that his acting talents could be put to more lucrative, if less legal, uses. He became a confidence man.

  I didn’t much like Lachlan when w
e first met; but over time I came to realize that he was a kindred spirit. Someone who knew what it meant to drift along the edges of life, looking in. Who knew what it meant to be a child eating canned beans for supper while wondering what it would take to be a person who ate steak. Someone who believed the golden beacon of the arts—theater, in his case; fine arts, in mine—would light the path out of an ugly life, only to find walls thrown up along the way. Someone who understood innately why one would choose to conceal one’s past.

  Lachlan is a reliable partner, but not a very good boyfriend. We’ll do a job together, joined at the hip for however long it takes, and then he’ll disappear for weeks without answering any of his phone numbers. I know he does jobs without me; he won’t tell me what they are. Eventually I’ll wake up in the middle of the night to find that he’s slipped into my bed and is sliding a hand up between my legs. And every time I roll over to him and open myself wide. I don’t ask where he’s been; I don’t want to know. I’m just glad that he’s back—and frankly, I need him too much to press the subject.

  Do I love him? I couldn’t clearly say that I do, but I also couldn’t say that I don’t. I know this one last thing about him: That his hand on my bare skin makes me go liquid. That when he walks into a room that I’m in, it feels like there’s an electric current running between us. That he is the only person in the world who knows everything about what I am and where I’ve come from, and that this makes me vulnerable to him in a way that is both excruciating and thrilling.

  There are so many varieties of love—the menu does not have just one flavor—and I see no reason why this can’t be one of them. Love can be anything you choose to wrap around the word, as long as the two people involved agree upon the terms.