I want to meet wealthy men, I explained, because they’ve just seen so much more than I have.
I want to meet wealthy men and women, I mused, because theft is an art, and you are my canvas.
I work out three times a week, and am a champion 10k runner. I think my best quality is my smile; it just seems to make people happy.
The invitation came back within hours. Digital records remember me, and my name was left on the clipboard by the door.
Sounds at a party. The crowd is vastly international; English is the default language. The waitresses are dressed as geisha girls, but no geisha would wear such shiny wigs or permit a thread of polyester in their glimmering robes.
“I tried dating, but my money became a problem; women didn’t know how to be around me once they found out how rich I was.”
“The key to my success? I knew I’d succeed. That’s all I needed.”
“I have to travel by helicopter now, because it’s not safe for someone like me to be in the streets.”
“People are complicated; money is simple.”
“This isn’t prostitution. Prostitution is illegal. This is a mutual agreement between potential partners with realistic expectations.”
“People — people and governments — try to punish people like us for being rich. Envy, that’s all it is. Why should I give up money that I earned, so someone else can live off the state? If they can’t pick themselves up, like I did, then I don’t see why I should give a damn.”
I move through the room, skimming a credit card here, a phone there. This is the research stage. I don’t need to say very much; a hello, a goodbye, and then if I need to return to the target, hello again, goodbye again. But I want to talk, I need to talk, words silent on my tongue, so I say: “Oh my God, that’s so interesting, you’re so right,” because that’s what Rachel Donovan would say, and then I realise I hate the words, so I smile a different smile and say, “Actually, no, fuck you, fuck you and your arrogance, fuck you and your selfishness, fuck you for thinking that you deserve what you have, for thinking that because you know which little green numbers would get greener, because you knew how to play with abstract quantities and mathematical variants, you somehow deserve to rule the fucking world.”
Mouths drop, people move to summon the staff, to complain, there’s a woman here, there’s a woman in a red dress and we thought you vetted these people before they came, we thought you were selling us demure little children who were only interested in us for our money and knew how to pretend, what the fuck is this?
But I turn away, and push through the crowd, and feel like the queen of the universe, and by the time the man has found a manager to complain to, he’s forgotten what it was he was going to complain about.
Only briefly, only for a moment, do I remember that I am a thief, and that I lost the moral high ground a long time ago.
“Fuck you,” I repeat to myself. “Fuck that.”
Discipline in all things.
I am a machine.
I am my smile.
I am delight.
Okashi, delight, joy, enchantment. An old-fashioned word, much beloved of Sei Shōnagon, who found her delight in the little beauties of this life. A sprig of cherry blossom, delicately borne by a handsome boy. The icy cold of snow falling from a clear sky. I find all this wonderful, she wrote, and marvel that others do not.
I am okashi.
I stand on a balcony overlooking the street, a glass door separating me from the rest of the party. A few people have stepped outside too, away from the light nothing-music and the swirl of people in Dior, Hugo Boss, Chanel, Armani. I observe them haggle over the price, champagne flutes in hand, smiles never faltering. I count patent-leather shoes and gold wristwatches, tailored shirts and cashmere socks, and feel for a moment almost ashamed.
“I’m looking for someone who’ll be there,” says a man who introduces himself to me as Geoff — just Geoff. American accent, greying hair. “My work takes me places, but sometimes, when I come home, I just want to have a few days with someone who I can hang out with. We’ll go to the cinema, maybe the theatre, we’ll have supper together, and yes, I’d like the relationship to be sexual, but I don’t demand monogamy, she can lead her own life, do her own thing, I’ll put the money into her account in advance.”
“It’s a good deal,” whispered a woman in my ear after Geoff turned away, confused by my polite rejection. “It’s better than what most men want.”
A recollection of a similar system, an ancient idea. Danna. Patron to geisha in medieval Japan. Sometimes the relationship was sexual; sometimes artistic; sometimes an undefined, unspoken agreement between geisha and patron that it was considered uncouth to ever express. How little the world had changed.
“Do you have Perfection?” a woman asks another, their bodies turned as though they are contemplating the view, their eyes flickering constantly back to the room. I only half tune into their conversation, my eyes drifting shut, the wind cold against my skin.
“Yes, it’s just wonderful. How many…?”
“Two hundred and thirty-three thousand!”
“You look sensational on it.”
“I am, I am, I feel sensational, it’s just changed my life. You know, this is how I got into this party?”
“Seriously?”
“I hit two hundred and thirty thousand and there it was, just like that, the invitation in my inbox, a gift from Perfection — find the perfect man for the perfect woman. And so good, I mean, look at this place, so good, the men just so…”
“I know.”
“And have you seen him? I mean, I would just for the fuck, just for that body, but he owns like, one of the biggest tyre manufacturing companies in East Asia or something.”
“God, with a body like that…”
“Jesus!”
“Do you think he has Perfection too?”
I squeeze my eyes shut, let out a breath, count to ten, look for the three men I was meant to be tracking.
Okashi, okashi, I am okashi.
“I’m looking for the perfect woman,” explained one, a Brazilian man with a gold watch the size of my fist — bespoke, engraved, nightmare to fence even if I could be bothered stealing it. “I need her to have at least eight hundred thousand points on Perfection, and be willing to work to reach a million.”
“That’s very precise.”
He stared at me like I was an idiot. “A man can’t be perfect until he has a wife,” he explained. “Marriage is the union of two hearts, two bodies, two souls. Whoever she is, she has to be perfect too.”
“And how do you measure that perfection?” I asked. “Will your app tell you?”
“Of course it will,” he replied. “That’s how I’ll know.”
I stole his watch.
Something of a spite had settled over my soul.
On my ninth day, I followed Mrs Goto.
Apartment 718, forty-three years old, divorcee of two years’ standing, currently re-engaged to Mr Moti of apartment 261 — the perfect man, for the perfect woman. How I was learning to loathe those words.
Her driver took her towards the Meiji Royal Gardens, but she showed no interest in this royal spread of land, in its arching bridges and hanging trees, crafted so that every step changes the vista that you might behold; instead she buzzed at an anonymous white door to an anonymous white building, which closed with a pneumatic hiss behind her.
Anonymous reinforced doors always engage a thief’s curiosity. At seven p.m. I stole the security pass from a guard going off-shift, and at two a.m. I broke in by climbing the rubbish chute from the rear car park, his swipe card in my pocket and internet-purchased lockpicks in my bag.