Assuming Names: a con artist's masquerade (Criminal Mischief Book 1) by Tanya Thompson

made the pilgrimage to Neiman Marcus. The documentary that had excited my young mind with inconceivable wealth had reiterated that Neiman Marcus could acquire absolutely anything you desired. You want a three tent circus? They could get it. You want two matching 20 carat black opals? Neiman Marcus would find them. Mink coats and diamonds were trivial to Neiman Marcus.
    When I got identification and could finally start my life as a countess, this was the place I hoped to shop. The store was in the heart of downtown, and I entered the busy first floor with a crowd. There was not much to see. There was a café in the corner but little else to explain the bustle. I watched a mother and daughter ride the escalator to the upper levels and assumed the fur coats and stunning wardrobes lie above.
    But the second floor was no larger than 20x20 feet wide, and it was empty. The walls and floor were beautifully colored, but they were bare. There was nothing: no pictures, no rugs, no racks, or shelves, or display cases. The place was barren. A solitary person by a featureless door considered me, and after a moment, deemed me just barely worthy, but before they could speak, I slipped around to continue up the escalator.
    The third floor was the same but a different colour.
    On the fourth floor, a stack of wool rugs were laid flat on the floor and the escalator ride was over.
    Whatever the rich came to Neiman Marcus to buy, it wasn’t made visible to the plebs. There was no sign of the mother and daughter. They had been welcomed through one of the doors into the private galleries.
    Returning to the first floor, I watched the escalator.
    I was vividly out of place. I did not look in any way similar to the people who ascended. The girls my age, my genuine age, in their teens, had wide ribbon bows in their hair. Every last one of them. I’d have to be held down and threatened with something greater than mortal embarrassment to wear a bow. It was the 80s when everyone had a perm, but I didn’t need one. My hair was naturally curly. I loved my hair, but the women on the escalator had spurned the look. They had straight hair, bobbed at the shoulders and flicked up hard at the ends. Their hair was precise. I took scissors to my own with no concern about making it straight because anything uneven would just spring up into the coils and be lost. The Neiman Marcus clients looked sharp, and I appeared to have just stumbled in from the wind swept moors.
    I wasn’t wearing nearly enough cosmetics, or perfume, or jewels to pass as their kin. My clothes had been donated to the refugee agency, and while most of them bore designer labels, they lacked the brand-new-worn-only-once sheen of the truly wealthy. I watched them disappearing into Neiman Marcus’s upper levels and knew they would spot me as a fraud. 
     
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    I never wanted to return to Neiman Marcus. It was disheartening. I didn’t belong and I was fairly certain I would never be able to attain the severe appearance required of its women. It was better with Sergiu. He wore beautifully stitched suits with Italian labels. His watch was Bvlgari, his cologne Givenchy. He drove expensive cars and was as comfortable eating in a dark dive as any one of Dallas’s finer restaurants.
    He’d come to the house and say, “Constanzia, come,” and I’d stop what I was doing to put on lipstick and shoes.
    Wherever we went, we were accepted. And because we were foreign, I could have as crazy of hair as I liked.
    But we didn’t valet park. And the doors were left unlocked. Sergiu wore driving gloves and I essentially didn’t touch anything, but none of this was mentioned.
    Whether it was an Audi, Mercedes, or Porsche, he always had the appropriate emblem on the filed down key. It looked legitimate driving, but he didn’t explain.
    He was boisterous of voice but discreet with cash. We talked when others didn’t, often drawing in the surrounding tables. After the woman’s confession at the