"Never give away all your pocket change." her mother had told her that over and over. For years growing up she thought it was about bus money, or lunch money, or coins for the arcade. When she was 24 and finally had that new badge she could never show, her task was backgrounds. Setting up the safety nets agents would use when they needed new identities, safe houses, safe cars, safe money, nice safe fake lives they could assume. She was in the field for a year trailing along beside Gwendolyn, learning the trade. Together they were selling perfume, or real estate, or cosmetics to house parties of distracted rich housewives. They would change costumes, change names, banter about new sets of well honed lies. It was like being an actor on permanent vacation with someone else's money. Lots of it. Gwen was an old pro at it. She relished it, feed off it, never wanted to do anything else, and inside she was terrified because she knew it would come to an end for her soon. Gwen never slipped. Not her demeanour her tongue, her pocketbook, or her professionalism. She treated her protege like a daughter when they were faking it, when they were being themselves, Gwen was a rock. She didn't give advice of a personal nature, didn't smile knowingly, and never showed a pregnant pause while thinking about what to do next.
They were in the south of Sicily, in February, in a balmy 20C pretending to be finding fortified condos for the daughters of a Saudi Prince. while surreptitiously setting up a pair of double blind safe houses. Gwendolyn Veraga Surtees was tuning 55 the next afternoon. She hadn't said anything. She never would. They were having dinner while watching Japanese women yammer on about crap for sale in the windows of shops that had been closed for months. Gwen was drunk. She knew this not because Gwen was acting drunk, she would never, but because she counted her drinks, like she counted everyone's, as she had been trained.
"I'll be gone tomorrow." Gwen said. She said nothing. Waiting was better, as it gave the confessor time to feel what they were feeling, only more so. It was an old trick, and Gwen knew it better than she, even drunk. She was not rising to the bait, she wasn't confessing, she was departing. Last and only words of wisdom. Deep inside Gwen loved her like a daughter, as if she knew what that was like, which she didn't. Gwen had plans. She always had plans, she taught plans, made them, gave them to others without taking credit, juggled them five in the air at a time. Gwen didn't get drunk and slip her words. Gwen had read her file. Likely she had every damn last word of it committed to memory. She looked over her glass of red and threw her own mother's words right at her. "Never give away all your pocket change."
She had been eating. Fork in hand, in mid bite, half paying attention when she got hit with that stone from the past. She put her fork down, looked Gwen in the eye. She wasn't playing, she wasn't a real estate agent for a Saudi Prince, or a tax collector, or a random tourist talking too loudly at the Coliseum, or anyone else she had ever met before. She was Gwen. Gwen without that stone cold stare though. Just Gwen with some semblance of love in her eye. Of pride. Gwen spitting her dead mother’s words at her. Gwen looked at her. Really looked. Put down her glass. Smiled gently. "If we're both lucky, and you don't fuck up, we'll up, we’ll never see each other again.". She stood up and walked down the hill for 20 meters then broke a heel on the cobblestones. She took them off and kept going. She didn't look back.
That was over a decade ago and though she never saw or heard of Gwen again, she never failed to think about her at least once every day. She took the advice her two mothers had given bar and kept some pocket change in reserve. It was easier than she thought it would be, as the name of their game was safe and untraceable. She set up more houses for them, more bank accounts, more passports, more identities, but she kept some for herself.
It took them two days of driving slowly on the village roads to get there. When she pulled the big car into the driveway of the villa she almost just kept on driving through and out the other side because she in fact almost didn't recognise the place. She had not been there since she bought the house years ago and it looked completely different now. She had found Plamen after a deliberate search for a groundskeeper who had no attachments. No wife, no kids, too old to start finding either, and no nosey friends. It took longer to find Plamen then it did to find the house and he was rather more important too.
She had given Plamen an ATM card with a 400 Euros per week limit. She had set up accounts in a chain that automatically fed each other when they got low. Had he gone into the bank to look at the balance it would never have impressed him, but it would also never run dry. There was no overdraft protection either. The money would just stop, then later it would continue. She had seeded the main source with 700k Euros almost 8 years ago. In that time it looks as though Plamen had gotten rather bored. The hundred year old house and grounds which were liveable, but run down and ugly, were now basically perfect.
The hot summer sun was beating down through the grapevines that wound through the trellis that wrapped around the side of the house and spread out into the covering of a beautiful garden in the back. She led the girl by the hand with her left, her right hand was on the pistol inside the cute little purse hanging over her right shoulder. She tried to ignore the immensity of the amount of work that Plamen must have done over the years, tried to ignore the great beauty of the place he had resurrected. She kept her eyes open scanning for something, someone out of place, something that felt wrong but it was no use, the only thing and person out of plate was her, and she had a weird feeling that was so old she could barely recall it. Something like safety mixed with ice cream.
She saw a figure that appeared to be asleep in a hammock with a big straw hat over it‘s face. There was a small gazebo built around an old well. She sat the girl there and motioned to her to be quiet and not move. She walked silently to the hammock and removed the old man's hat. He looked the same. The same only more tan with a few more lines around the eyes. Plamen had pleasant eyes. When she was in her late 20s and Plamen was in his early 60s, and she had lived at the house for the first month after she had bought it with their money but without their knowledge, they had every meal together. Sometimes in the run down kitchen, sometimes in the garden, and she would often lose herself staring into those eyes. She at first thought of them as kind eyes, innocent. She spent weeks looking into Plamen himself to make sure she would find no surprises later that would become a problem. Sometimes you see what you want to see in a pair of eyes and she had wanted to see only kindness, but Plamen had killed a man when he was 44 and spent 12 years in prison for it. The dead man in question was human garbage from what she could find out, and Plamen had killed him for fondling his 9 year old niece. The fact he was Plamen's brother was what excommunicated him from the rest of the family forever. So that look was kindness true, but it was also the look of a murderer. But it was a look she liked. She always felt safer with a convicted murderer in the house, and she would sometime wake up at night dreaming about what Plamen had been like when he was in his 40s.
The night before she had left those many years ago, she had one of those dreams, and she awoke in a fright, excited and sweating. She got out of bed and went downstairs and into Plamen's room. It was a hot summer night then too and she had been sleeping naked. She woke him up with her mouth on his cock. He didn't fuck her. She thought he must have still been asleep and only dreaming that a young woman was sucking him at first, as he didn't act like a man awake and ready to fuck. After a few minutes though he was very hard, and very large in her mouth, and as she engulfed him, and when he was getting close, she tried to come up for air for a second but his powerful hands were on the back of her head forcing her down. She choked on his big cock as he held her powerfully down and came deep in the back of her throat. She coughed up his load when he finally let her up. Her face was red all over and her eyes were crying and her lips were numb. She had cum everywhere as she stood up. He didn’t look
at her and she didn't look at him. She rubbed his cum into her breasts and went to take a shower, then grabbed the bag she had already packed and left without a word. It was the reason that right now, as she held the pistol to Plamen's chest, she was wet. Her hand started to sweat as she held the pistol and thought about his big cock and the best, most amazing blow job of her life, and she clicked the saftey back over so as not to accidentally get too excited and kill the old man as he lay in the hammock.
He opened his eyes and took a few seconds to focus on her. He saw her and smiled. He looked down at the pistol she was holding then looked back up at her with that same kindness, plus that look of someone who had killed his own brother for a good reason. He laughed. She smiled and put the pistol back in her purse. "She doesn't really look like you." He said. "Do you want a biscuit? Chocolate?" Plamen was talking to the girl who was now standing at the foot of the hammock nodding. So that was two things, the girl knew English, and knew how to sneak around silently. Three things actually, she also knew how to ignore the directions of false mommies, perhaps from all mommies.
"Cookies Plamen, we call them cookies, not biscuits." "This is an argument I will never surrender to Mishka". He was still agile at over 70 years of age and got out of the hammock with a grace few younger men could muster. Plamen was not shockable. She once saw him calmly flatten himself against a wall in the garage as a few hundred kilos of old roofing tiles fell all around him when one of the old oak beams suddenly collapsed into a cataclysm of falling dust and debris. Prison taught him patience, and calm. His cellmate was a 23 year old English Lit major who had been rightly convicted of drug smuggling, so prison had also taught Plamen English, although having grown up in communist Eastern Europe, there were word usages like biscuits vs. cookies that he was not to be trifiled with about.
Either he had been expecting her every day since she left years ago, or he was always prepared for female houseguests and small children, because the house was fully stocked. Her room was in the same place at the top of the stairs, but the stairs themselves had been moved and completely rebuilt along with just about everything else. The little old dirty cot she once had was now a king size canopy bed next to a antique wooden side table. There was a fireplace in the room now and a huge double glass door that opened onto a terrace that overlooked the garden and the valley. It looked like a magazine ad you see in the back pages of airline magazines.
He had always called her Mishka the mouse, she was not sure if it was because he somehow sensed that the name she gave him was fake, or if he just gave everyone nicknames, or that perhaps it was ironic humor to call a tall woman by a little tiny name.
"How long will you stay?" He asked. Honestly she had no idea. She had to figure out how safe it was. She didnt answer, he didn't press her on it further. She thought they didn't know. About the house, about Plamen, about the rest of the pocket change she had hidden about in Eastern Europe and Northern Africa, and a few places in the south of Italy and Spain. She thought they didn t know because she tabs very quietly on all of it. It was all there as far as she knew, untouched and unnoticed. It could be. It could also be that they knew everything and were just waiting. Not because they were pissed off she had stolen from them, they didn't work like that, but waiting all the same to see when and if they could use her. Use what she had stolen, what she had built, what she cared about, use her hate, or her fear. at her loyalty, or lack thereof. Use it against her, or someone else, at the worst possible moment, in the best or worst possible way, for some good, great, or nefarious purpose, or because they wanted to, or needed to. Use it all to leverage some other good or bad thing they likely didn't really care about either, but was timely expedient. That was the thing, she didn't know. She did for a fact know that feeling safe and being safe were not the same thing.