Tinsel In A Tangle

It should have taken no longer than two minutes.

The first fart came when he was just inside the room. It was symphonic. He hit the floor, crouching by a padded club chair because a fart like that could wake a dead man. He held his breath, watched the bed, readied himself to dive for the window. The dealer snoozed on. It was a miracle. Outside on the balcony, Aria had slammed her hand over her mouth to stop from laughing. He shot her a warning glare and readied himself to move, but then the smell came.

It was biblical in its intensity, rising up from the curled shape on the bed, through layers of bedclothes, the smell of eons of rotten fruit and crumbling cities, acrid cat-pissed swamp water and steaming fresh manure, baking in the sun. Cleve gagged, biting off the sound but involuntarily shrinking further against the chair because that was the kind of smell you should’ve been able to see. It had such presence it should waft like a dark cloud, or the smoke of an ancient curse. It was the kind of smell that could knock a large man over. He didn’t dare look at Aria, but he heard her muffled cough.

He gave it a second or two and rose to a low crouch. He only made it to the foot of the bed before the second fart sounded, a series of wet, sloppy toots. He hit the floor again as the dealer rolled over to his back and the soft snores that had signaled he was still asleep halted. The smell was a few degrees less vile this time, but it was still enough to asphyxiate a dog.

Cleve waited on his hands and knees. He’d been inside the bedroom far too long already. Palazuzum was still well out of reach and the likelihood of the dealer’s own eruptions waking him was ripe. He should abort. Everything the professor had taught him said the stakes were now too high, the chance of being caught too certain. No amount of sweet-talking was going to work in his favor if he was discovered wearing cat burglar black in the dealer’s bedroom, and the professor abhorred violence—it was for amateurs and thugs.

But the girl of his dreams was waiting on the balcony and she’d not only voluntarily risked the wrath of her father by speaking to Cleve for the first time outside of “pass the salt” and “get out of my way,” she’d scrambled across rooftops with him, and now she waited to see what he’d do. He couldn’t let her down.

When the dealer’s snuffling became even snores again, he crawled forward. The third fart, a fart to end all previously recorded farts in living memory, came as Cleve put his hand to the base of the statue’s alarmed stand. This fart was a clarion trumpet blast. It was reveille calling the ancient dead to wake and roam the earth bringing pestilence and inspiring TV production runners. He froze, and since he was positioned not far from the end of the bed, roughly between the open legs of the dealer, the smell was a direct hit. Rotting flesh and carbonated bile—his eyes went to water and he rammed his arm over his mouth to muffle his cough while he went facedown on the floor, his short life flashing before his eyes.

The death of the grandmother who’d raised him, the months of shoplifting and drifting, working odd jobs and sleeping in his car before he decided the only way out of his misery was by pretending to be someone bigger, better than he was, using the only asset he had: his gift of gab. That led to three months of living in a Walmart overnight, and a permanent job talking pensioners out of their weekly allowance for a local gang who cut him in on the proceeds of th

eir scam. He’d played the perfect down-on-his-luck orphaned earnest student raising money door-to-door for his education, because he was the perfect orphaned earnest student, but he was also smarter than the thugs who started the scam and had enough morality to despise how good he was at tricking people who didn’t deserve to be fleeced out of their grocery money.

He’d fled the scene of that crime with a bag of money, enough to stake him in a regular poker game with a bunch of persistently drunk college jocks he systematically conned out of clothing, watches, laptops and passwords. What he didn’t pawn, he used to remake himself in their image.

He’d already spent a few months going to school at Harvard before the professor had cottoned on to the fact he wasn’t a Kennedy’s shoelace, let alone scholastically or financially able to attend the school, but since any deal was preferable to being locked up, he became the professor’s apprentice in thievery.

And now he was going to jail without ever having put his hand to the naked scalp of Aria’s head, never having held her serpent beringed fingers or kissed her black lips. And that was the worst thing that had ever happened to him.

Except the fart king was snoring again, long-drawn, airy in-breaths followed by choppy, snorting out-breaths, a silent pause and then the rhythm started up again. Cleve came up on his hands and knees and peered over the bunched bedclothes at the sleeping man. There was no visible miasma of the farts from gut hell, just the slightly open-mouthed dealer lost to REM sleep.

It could almost make a criminal believe in God.

Cleve moved quickly. He slid a tool between the base and dome of Palazuzum’s home and disabled the alarm. Then he lifted the dome, palmed the statute and replaced it with a Darth Vader figurine that’d come in a Happy Meal. He secured Palazuzum in his zipper pocket and rearmed the alarm, then moved cautiously back across the room to the window.

The dealer let another musical fart rip just as Cleve was stepping on to the balcony, and he almost stumbled, but Aria caught his arm and pulled him upright, managing to close the door softly behind him.

Jammed together on the narrow Juliet balcony there was a fraction of a moment where he thought she’d kiss him, but she was up the drainpipe and on the roof before he could mourn it. They made it across the roof, into the parkland behind the house and almost to the stolen getaway car before she started laughing. A silent shake, then a stuttering sound, he shoved her in the car just in time for her to let go.

He’d never heard Aria laugh. He’d heard her shout. He’d heard her stomp and rage against her father. He’d heard her sulk. He’d heard her go about silently living in the part of the house the Harps shared where he was forbidden to go, and the part where they crossed over—the kitchen. She could open the refrigerator door with the sound of fury, she could unstack the dishwasher with the sound of despair, and start the microwave with the sound of confusion.

Once when entering the house, he thought he’d heard her crying. It’d made him want to break the rules that kept him safe, find her and comfort her. The sound she made in the car, raucous and wild was the clearest indication he’d ever had that there was true joy in the world.

Her laughter was like sex. It put a shiver up the back of his neck and made his own laughter curl in his belly with the urgency of starvation. He could barely get the car started he was laughing so hard and when she forced out the words, “I can still smell it,” he almost drove up the curb. Three streets away from the crime, but still too close to be safe, Cleve pulled over and they laughed till tears rolled down their faces and they fell over each other. And then they kissed for the first time, because she’d promised, because he couldn’t live any longer without it.

After that night, they’d snuck away to talk, to hold hands and laugh and kiss till their lips were swollen and their tongues were tired, until the week the professor was away at a conference and they broke every rule all over both parts of the house and each other’s bodies.

All of that was more than a decade ago and it was made fresh and vivid like a pink diamond by a model who couldn’t walk in her heels.

He looked at Brandon and pointed at the screen. “That was fucking funny.”

Decision made. He would find Melody Solo and he’d make sure she knew someone appreciated her work.

The joy of Melody stayed with him all day, while he ate, worked out in his home gym, swam and watched the computer as Gus, Santino and Ajax took possession of the Sweet Celestia. It was with him the next day when he called his patron about the good news and it was still just under the surface of his skin when Ajax arrived at the villa with the diamond.

But the opposite of joy is pure burn-the-world rage.

They’d snatched a fake. A better fake than the one they’d left behind, but still a fucking fake.

“How is that possible?” he thundered. Dangerous enough in his wrath that Santino flinched, and Ajax, who outweighed him by fifty pounds and six inches, took a step back.

“It’s impossible. Since the stone arrived at Greville’s, we’ve had eyes on it,” said Gus. “Electronic and human.”

“It has to have been switched out before it got the auction house,” said Santino.