I'M FEMALE, I'M MAFIA

EVASIVE

The third night they were out, two young ladies who clearly knew Brenda stopped at their table. One of them had a pageboy haircut, with jet black bangs cut straight across her dark eyes. The other had a thick blonde braid that came down to the crack of her butt, the features of which were so clearly outlined by tight black spandex she could have worked as a live model in an anatomy class.

“Come party with us, Brendy!" the brunette said, her pouty mouth glistening with bright red lipstick, tugging on her leather jacket.

“Can’t you see I’m with a colleague?” Brenda said, her face flushed. The way Brenda said it, Jade felt like a piece of office equipment.

The blonde glanced saucily at Jade with her dark eyes. “You can breeng your colleague, Brendy. We no mind."

When she finally got rid of them, she glanced sheepishly at Jade. “I just hang around with them to keep my ear close to the ground. You pick up a lot of stuff that way."

“I hope it responds to penicillin,” Jade said.

Brenda smiled.

The younger Bulgarian women dressed to the nines, in short skirts, high heels, and low-cut blouses. They paid great attention to their hair, makeup, and their hands and feet - half of them wore fake fingernails and had eyelash extensions. It seemed to Jade all the girls in Sofia were in a life or death competition with each other to see who could be the sexiest. There were so many beautiful women that Jade felt positively plain and ordinary in her boring gray business suits and sensible flats.

One night when she, Brenda, and two other agents - both married men - were out at a bar, Jade made this observation to Brenda when a girl walked by with a skirt so short you could see her frilly black stocking tops.

“Life is tough here, Jade,” she said. “It’s not like in the States, where you have all those systems in place to protect women and give them equal opportunities and all that. Here, women need men to survive, and there aren’t enough good men to go around." Brenda shrugged. “To get a good man, they have to take full advantage of all their assets."

“And I’ll bet you take full advantage of their assets,” Jade said.

Brenda glanced at the other two agents and grinned. “Well, you know what they say. ‘When in Rome...’“

Jade wanted to strangle her.

* * *

By December of that year, Jade was so bogged down in checking the suspect one hundred dollar bills sent in from other offices that she had no time for anything else. Her office walls were covered with huge sheets of paper with hundreds of banknote serial numbers, linked together like huge family trees, showing when and where each note had been found, and the geographical interconnections between them. This helped other agents track down the origin of the counterfeit bills and locate the illegal printing presses. Jade’s detective work had been partly responsible for two big busts already, one in Romania and another in Chechnya.

“You and I make a great team, Jade," Brenda often said. “You track ‘em down and I bust ‘em."

As the Christmas holidays approached, Jade began to feel depressed - the Christmas season had made her feel down ever since her father died, as she had no family to spend the holidays with.

A week before the break began, Brenda came in with a new set of suspect notes for her to check, her leather jacket dusted with snow.

“So, what are you doing for the holidays?” she asked casually. She hoped she might stay around Sofia, and maybe they could spend some time together.

“Oh, probably I’ll go down to Minorca for a little R&R. That’s what I usually do."

A little Rest and Recreation. She wondered which one - or two - of his bar girls he was taking with him.

“And you?” Brenda said, smiling politely.

“Oh, I’m thinking of taking a trip with a friend to Rome or Paris." The vague “friend” part was a lie, an effort to make her jealous. A pathetic effort, she thought.

“Sounds good,” she said, unfazed. “But I’d head south if I were you. The winters here are murder."

When she turned around, Jade felt like throwing her glass paperweight at her. But she didn’t want her to leave.

“Brenda?” she said.

“Yeah?”

“What about those two bills we sent to Treasury that came from the genuine Giori press?"

“Oh, those?” she said. “I don’t know what happened, you know how they are. I’ll ask again."

After she left, Jade had the distinct feeling she was being evasive.

* * *

She ended up spending the holidays in Paris. She visited the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Versailles, and took a riverboat ride on the Seine.

And she was miserable.

When Jade returned to Sofia, her obsession with Brenda deepened. When she brushed her arm against her, electricity shot through her whole body. When Brenda left her phone messages, she would play them over and over again in the privacy of her office or living room, where she could relish the sound of her voice. Her emotional state would swing wildly to one extreme or another based on the slightest inflection or look in her eye. She longed for her to take her hand, like she had done the first day she had arrived in Sofia.

Jade could only imagine the shock she would experience if she knew the emotional turmoil she was causing inside her.

She felt like a schoolgirl endlessly pining over a boy who was utterly unaware of her existence, only Brenda was no boy even though she looked like a pretty one.

She hated herself for it, yet she seemed powerless to do anything about it.