To Have and to Heist
Sara Desai
To Sharon, Rana, Adele, and Tarick:
we were our very own heist crew.
Prologue
Jack
Imagine you are just an ordinary guy. You have a good job. Your financing is almost paid off on your Ford F150 truck. You have a contact list of women around the globe who delight in your company. Your Acanthocereus tetragonus cactus is thriving. And you have your health.
On a cool summer evening in Berlin, you repossess a $10 million Caravaggio painting from a private collector. Don’t worry. The collector is a bad guy. On your way to the airport, you are run off the road by four goons in a Saab. They blow up your rental car, beat you, shoot you, and take the painting. With your dying breath, you ask who sent them. Since you are almost dead, they tell you. It was Mr. X. You are not surprised.
One year later you are not dead, but you wish you were. Your new girlfriend wants a commitment. The Ford dealer has repossessed your truck. Your boss has put you on probation even though it wasn’t your fault he didn’t get insurance for the rental car. And to top it all off, Mr. X is always one step ahead of the game.
You get a lead on a job in a small, obscure European country. You dump the girlfriend and retrieve an ancient artifact from a royal residence. Easy peasy. You make it across Europe to London. While you are waiting for your flight to Mexico, Mr. X’s goons find you in the restroom at Heathrow Airport. You know things are going to be bad when they don’t even wait for you to wash your hands. You are still in therapy from the last beating/shooting, so you just hand over the artifact. They shoot you anyway. Just for fun.
This time it takes you six months to recover. No work means no pay and no pay means no truck. You finally return to work and get a lead on the perfect score—the Wild Heart, a magnificent necklace containing twenty-six oval-shaped pink diamonds surrounded by diamonds and emeralds with a forty-carat heart-shaped pink diamond pendant center. The necklace was one of thousands of priceless items stolen by the British from India during the colonial period and is now on display in a boutique museum on the Near North Side of Chicago, Illinois.
You haven’t been back to your hometown in over fifteen years, although you still call your cousin Lou on his birthday every year. He thinks you work as a conman in New York. Your real job would disappoint him.
This time you play it smart. You travel with a fake passport under an assumed name. You book a room in a fancy hotel and forgo loyalty points at your usual budget hotel chain. Lou hooks you up with a Sig Sauer 45 and two small Beretta M9-22s. He has just been released from prison and now sells black market weapons from behind the peonies in his wife’s greenhouse. He’s 16 percent certain arms dealing isn’t a violation of his parole.
You have a good feeling about this job. When you get back to your hotel, you make two calls. First, you call the Ford dealer and tell him to get your truck ready. Then you call Lou’s wife. Her peonies are suffering from botrytis blight. You tell her treatment begins with good sanitation and she needs to prune off and destroy the infected parts of the plants. You doubt she’ll follow your instructions, and you make a mental note to buy your peonies elsewhere.
After three days of recon inside the museum, you pay a midnight visit to check out the building and grounds. The garden is thick with unpruned vegetation and smells like piss. Whatever. You aren’t there to help with the gardening. You are there to retrieve the necklace, and the thick foliage is a perfect place to hide. You take a few pictures and hide your supplies in the hellebore under a magnificent oak suffering from bacterial leaf scorch. Now you just have to wait for the perfect night.
One
There are people who need people, and then there are introverts.
You don’t get to choose that particular personality trait when you’re born. You’re either the kid who spends recess running around the playground looking for friends, or you’re the little angel who sits quietly in the reading corner with a book, lost in another world.
I’m definitely one of the people who need people. Leave me alone for more than a few hours and I’ll be speed-dialing my way through my contact list or skulking around the local coffee shop looking for familiar faces. I’m the person who will ask if the chair is free at your table if you look like you need a friend, or chat with you in the grocery line and tell you that you’re lucky you’ve picked this till because Charlotte scans things so fast, a few items always get missed and you might go home with a free can of beans.
I’ve always admired people who are content with their own company. My bestie Chloe can go an entire weekend without talking to another human being if her daughter is away at a sports game or sleeping over with friends. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I don’t think we’ve gone more than a few hours without communicating in some form ever since we met on the school playground in fourth grade. Even in the blackest moments of her favorite romance books, when all is lost and it seems like the couple will never find their happily-ever-after, Chloe will always be there for me.
I don’t know what I would have done if she hadn’t answered my call the day I, Simi Chopra, almost killed a man.
“Oh my God! Chloe!” I held a mirror over the mouth of the naked octogenarian on the floor to see if he was breathing. People who need people are adept at multitasking, even if it involves getting emotional support from your bestie while trying to revive one of your landlady’s many “gentleman callers.” Not that I begrudged eighty-year-old Rose her extracurricular activities. She’d kindly rented me her basement suite at a reduced rent in exchange for helping with chores and keeping her company on her rare evenings in. Someone in the house had to be getting some good stuff, and it wasn’t me.
“What’s wrong?” Chloe’s soothing voice crackled over my phone speaker. I was due for a phone upgrade, but between rent, loan payments, therapy, and living expenses, even my entry-level office salary plus a side gig in a candy store didn’t pay enough to indulge.
“I think I killed someone.”
Chloe didn’t miss a beat. “I’ll grab some bleach and be right over.”
“You’ll be late for work.”
“It’s an IT help desk, babe. We spend most of the day telling people to turn the computer off and on again. I can easily get someone to cover for me.”
Chloe is my ride-or-die. No questions. No judgment. Everyone should have a friend whose first thought is to run for the bleach when you call to tell her you might have killed someone.
“Hurry. He’s barely breathing.” I cleaned the mirror and held it over his mouth again, making a mental note to thank my parents for sending me to a first aid course in twelfth grade. They thought they were paving my way to med school. Instead, the course just confirmed that no one should put their life in my hands.
“I’d better bring a tarp, too,” Chloe said.
“There’s no blood.”
“You might still need the tarp in case he loses control of his bowels.”
“Crap.”
“Exactly. I’ve been reading a lot of romantic suspense books,” she said. “I know everything about dead bodies.”
“I don’t think he’s that dead.” I held the dude’s wrist in my hand. “I feel a pulse. I’m not sure if it’s his or mine. My heart is pounding so hard, I can’t tell.”