“Was her attacker ever apprehended?” he asked.
“Never caught him.”
On Monday morning Nick took the catamaran across to the island. Vince Bundy was not on the steam locomotive or anywhere else. He saw the conductor, Josh Lydon, and asked about Bundy. The man simply shrugged. “Gone, I guess. Haven’t seem him since last week. We’re mostly volunteers, you know. People come and go. Vince had only worked here a few weeks. I think he was just a train buff.”
“Didn’t he work with you at the printer’s?”
Lydon frowned. “No, I just knew him from here.”
Later that day, as he awaited his flight home to New York, Nick made a phone call from Heathrow Airport.
The following morning over a late breakfast, Gloria showed him an item in the Times. “Look, Nicky, they arrested a couple of counterfeiters in London last night. Wasn’t this Mona Walsh your client?”
“Yes, but nothing came of it. I didn’t make a cent.”
“What do you mean?”
“I suppose it gave them a thrill to try a long con on someone like me.” He told her what had happened.
“You mean they were conning you all along?”
Nick nodded. “It was Vince Bundy who sprayed Mona with the petrol outside the casino. That was for my benefit, to add some verisimilitude to her story. Of course when I met him he looked entirely different, with a false beard and a wig. The five-pound note looked so perfect because it was genuine. There never were any counterfeit pound notes, and nothing they could be arrested for. A lot of things made me suspicious of the whole deal. Mona went outside the casino that first night for a smoke, but the cigarette between her lips was unlit. She couldn’t take a chance of really igniting the petrol. She told me she’d changed her cell phone number so Bundy couldn’t call her, but then he told her he’d phone if there was a change in plans. And he knew about the attack on her at the casino, though she’d never told him in my presence. None of it added up, especially when they started asking me to invest money in their scheme.”
“But if their money was real, how could they be arrested for counterfeiting?”
Nick smiled and sipped his coffee. “Well, I had to get some satisfaction out of this whole thing. Their British pounds were all real, but the forty thousand dollars I gave them was counterfeit. I obtained it from contacts in London, and hid a global positioning bug in the package so Scotland Yard wouldn’t have any trouble finding them after I called in a tip.”
Copyright ©2006 by Edward D. Hoch
With the Rich, a Little Patience
by John Van Kirk
John Van Kirk teaches writing and literature at Marshall University in West Virginia. His short stories and essays have appeared in The Hudson Review, The New York Times Magazine, West Branch, and Paragraph, as well as in several anthologies. “Newark Job,” his first published story, won an O. Henry Award in 1993. He makes his EQMM debut here with a Christmas story with an O. Henry-like twist at the end.
Have you ever even lied to anybody? Did you ever just take something... you know, just because you wanted it? Christ, Little Ms. Perfect, did you ever do anything bad in your life?”
Nobody had ever spoken to Emily like that before, or nobody but her father, and he never would have asked those questions, but now, finally, secure in her seat on the train, her Christmas boxes tucked around her, she had time to think about what her boss was trying to tell her when he had called her into his office an hour before. “I’m not saying you have to have larceny in your heart,” Wade had gone on, “but, my God, you have to want something, you have to have hunger. If you go on like this, you’re going to give away everything we have.”
The train gave its first soft lurch and Emily looked up to see a hugely pregnant woman in a threadbare red coat teetering toward the open seat next to her. She had that glow people say some pregnant women have, and Emily said to herself, This is a beautiful woman, this is a beautiful pregnant woman steering her way toward me, and she started clearing her parcels from the empty seat to make room, another act of generosity that Wade wouldn’t approve of. Although she only saw Wade at work, she could easily imagine him on the train: He wouldn’t invite this girl, for as she drew closer she was revealed to be quite young, younger by ten years than Emily herself... Wade would never invite this girl to sit beside him; he would guard his space until he had no choice but to surrender it, and then he would manage to give it to a thin person who wouldn’t encroach on his breathing room.
“Permiso. Gracias. Thank you,” the young woman said as she settled herself and several shopping bags next to Emily.
“You’re welcome,” Emily said. “De nada.”
“You speak Spanish? ¿Usted habla Español?” the woman said.
“Yes. Sí, sí, algo.”
Suddenly a torrent of rapid-fire Spanish poured from the young woman. Emily could just keep up. “Could you watch my things a moment?” the young woman asked. “I must find a bathroom,” and she indicated her belly. “I can’t go ten minutes these days.”
Ill at ease with the responsibility of guarding the young woman’s possessions, but unable to say no, Emily stretched her arm across the seat next to her, and tried to extend her sense of property over all that it contained. The train had pulled out of the station, and was lumbering through the dark underground passageways that led out of the city. Emily could remember riding through these tunnels as a little girl, at once frightened and fascinated by the lights that would surge out of the shadows, wheel around, and vanish, roaring. Red taillights glinted from silvery tracks. The murmur of her parents’ voices comforted her from the distant past.
“Ai, gracias de nuevo.”
The young woman was back, shifting packages and maneuvering herself into the seat.
“Esta bien,” Emily said.
“Soy Emilia,” the woman said, extending her hand and smiling not just with her mouth, but with her eyes as well. She smelled like cornmeal.
“Emilia? Yo soy Emily. Tenemos el mismo nombre.” We have the same name.
And somehow, faster and more easily than she could have expected, she found herself in a conversation... in Spanish. As she listened to the young woman, and found herself responding, she marveled at how readily the language, which she hadn’t practiced in years other than in the occasional brief interchange with a Hispanic waiter or salesperson, came back to her. They spoke of the weather — as they burst from the tunnels the usually barren gravel railbeds of the old switching yards were beginning to be dusted with big flakes of snow. They spoke of the crowds and the rush to get home for Christmas. They began to speak of their families.
Emilia was from Guatemala. She had been in the U.S. for only a few months. Her husband had brought her and her mother up with the money he saved by working as a truckdriver, going back and forth across the country. They were renting a little house in the suburbs. It was pretty, but she still wasn’t used to the cold, and her mother was feeling lonely for Guatemala. And she was cleaning everything in sight and cooking all this food as if a multitude would be coming for Christmas. Emilia had had to get out of the house or she would go crazy. So she took the train to the city. It was her first time alone, and she practically had to sneak out of the house. But when the baby came, she told Emily, then her mother would be all right, she was sure of that; once she had a little baby to help out with, to keep her occupied, she would be fine. And Emilia had found a beautiful present for her, too. She reached into one of her bags and pulled out a white cardboard gift box about the size of a pencil case, and opened it to show Emily. There, on a snowy bed of cotton, lay a bright necklace of shiny green and red stones set in a delicate silver filigree. Emily knew it couldn’t have cost more than forty or fifty dollars, perhaps less, but it was tasteful and Christmassy, really quite beautiful. “Your mother will love it,” she told Emilia.