The name is Sofia, with an F, none of that snobbish big time college girl moniker, it is pronounced Sofffeeeya, Sofia Manyack, that's Maneeack. Don't forget it buster or trouble will be coming your way, and don't dare to think badly of my initials else my knee will meet your nuts and you will findyourself on the M side of the equation. Sorry folks, I have heard it so many times I have lost patience with it.

I was ripping off this one or that one in the big city for the hell of it when I met Marc Bellefleure, don't sweat that pronunciation, he doesn't give a rat's ass. Actually he prefers that peoples blow it since he may change his first name several times in a day from Gordon to Jules to Michael to Abdullah to Pinafore to Sanchez to Eldridge etcetera. He is very handsome, unlike me, although I can turn heads when I want to. Think a super tall Nicole Kidman in the eighth grade with boobs.

Really, I have the looks of an half-starved street urchin. It's pretty much what I was way back then in Belgrade, a nice town which I had to leave in a hurry after causing severe injury to a policeman's groin. What the heck, the fool didn't show his badge quick enough. So twenty hours later I got off the train in London still in character. Skinny legged babe with big jugs and an angel's face with a button nose, that's me. Put that in a short skirt on platform shoes or heels and I guarantee you the clickety clack and the little they have of peripheral vision will snap men's eyes from their cell phone. I have done it licking an ice cream cone over lunch hour in Picadilly just to count my score per block, but when I'm not on the job I prefer an oversized hoodie over cargo pants and sneakers, stolen of course.

It's amazing what you score from a spilled shopping bag with a major league logo by inflating your chest to the max and bumping into your mark. You have heard of things that bump in the dark, well I am the bump in the day type of gal. It works best if I carry a similar bag on a crowded corner, I can disappear fast, or put on the so-sorry hairbrained female act. Slipping into men's pockets in a spilled bag's pick-it-all-up confusion can also pay, but usually not that much except for the quick use of a credit card out of a wallet.

I even scored coffee from gal-fridays on the run before the 9 o'clock deadline, but I felt bad about it and I began to stash a ten or a twenty in the slot my coffee came from. All in all, it was small time work and it didn't pay that much. I was tired of it and ready to try a new genre.

I stayed in my cargo pants and sneakers adding a denim shirt that was missing its two top buttons and coiffed myself with a cyclist cap I found in the street. As a sorry looking working stiff I hunched into commercial buildings with a clipboard and I rode elevators to the fifth floor, that's just high enough to run down the fire exit stairs if I have to, and I worked my way down passing for a plumber inspecting the men's bathrooms and looking for their supposedly common way to slip off their watch while washing their hands. I was dreaming of a Rolex, but I wasn't making much hay by the time I met Marc.

"Plumber," I said and began turning faucets on and off in the row of sinks, working my way along, noting that his watch was in place and, be still my heart, even featured a gold color bracelet. He was slightly bent over, soaking his hands so I excused myself and leaned over his side with my left tit on his shoulder, my right hand reaching the hot water faucet and my left sneaking to that utopian Rolex. Cat's in the bag, I thought, but noted a suddenly increasing severe pain as my hand was being crunched over the watch and his other hand was exploring my cleavage. I had to hang on to the faucet for a breath of air while he did some diverse palpating of my nipples much enhanced by dampness and warmth, a sensation that brought to mind the notion implied in my initials, but it was a thought too soon broken by the squeal of the door to the facilities. While I recovered my balance he reached to the hand dryer and slipped his watch back on while marching to the door and announcing over his shoulder "how about a cup of coffee, sweetie..." What could I do? I was the cat in the bag this time so I straightened my attire, picked up my clipboard and my cap, and walked out sneering past the interested gaze of the just entered creep.

"I'm not a cop," Marc said in the lunch room downstairs, "but I am interested in you, think of me as a social worker." He looked anything but a do-gooder but he wasn't threatening and too properly dressed to be a pimp and I told him too much about my life and my other professional outfits while much unnerved at the way he stared at my sore hand doing double duty to keep that stiff denim shirt to conform to my curves. After he asked me if I would be interested in doing some freelancing for him, "no sex involved," he said, I walked him to my garret and changed into one of my platform shoes and Goth outfit and there was a lot of sex involved. We all have our needs.

Marc became my respectable father showing the town to his daughter and shepherding her through the maze of its galleries and museums in preparation for her postgraduate studies in a still unchosen institution or museum, although her field of studies would be without a doubt her long time passion for newly discovered antiquities. All I knew about the stuff was what Marc told me, it was highly coveted and commended astronomical prices on the black market, but the sole mention of my interest was enough to generate lengthy commentaries from the graying men Marc had discreetly pointed out to me. All I had to do was respectfully smile and ignore their checking out of my properly and expensively wrapped personal assets until Dad Marc joined us and steered the conversation to more technical and financial considerations. Meanwhile I stood recording facts and information, nodding to old codgers and their ladies, haughtily ignoring leeches and occasionally smiling at a passing waiter for a Perrier.

Of course there were other times when my young and naïve self was led into a bit of inebriety and partial disrobement, but my faithful chauffeur Bub', an old friend of Marc, always was there to rescue me in time. Some cell phone documentation may have been involved and the three of us would later take advantage of an easy access to some deserted mansion where antiquities reigned in all quarters. We had cloth bags and rags for safe transportation of those and other knickknacks of jewelry or objects made of precious metals and on most of our raids we walked out of the place with a loot worth a couple million pounds, but currency be damned, Marc dealt only in Bitcoins. We were rich, but how rich? I didn't have a clue. Though Marc once told me that an antiquity of sort had passed through the hands of one of his high end fences three times, doubling in value in the process.

The rich were crazy, but some of them were mad and so were their insurance companies. Local cops, Interpol, the FBI were rediscovering a neglected interest in the arts and they were present at every auction. My right knee was itching to spring up, but I knew better, those guys were trained professionals, the heat was on. Bub' took off to visit family and friends in Ireland and we decided to go for a driving vacation in the US.

Off the plane at Logan we rented a Ford and headed north through New England enjoying the scenery and sleeping in the car at rest stops. At roadside dinners we called each other 'Honey' over our lobster sandwiches and so did the waitresses. Such a good looking couple in jeans and LL Bean lumberjack shirts, they thought.  We attracted nothing but welcoming smiles at the roadside attractions and the small town museums where we stopped to see what they had and could be priced in bitcoins in the real world. Just keeping up with business, you understand.

Too soon we noticed a sign directing travelers to an eighteenth century mansion. It had been built by a lumber baron who had hired a craftsman from Europe to finish the interior and build the furniture. The man had spent his lifetime there and from the flying staircase to the intricate moldings and the double door to the dinning room with its enormous table and chairs, the work was exquisite.

On a wall of the dining room there was one of these tricky portraits where the subject appears to meet the gaze of an observer from any position in a room. The eyes of the late master of the premises were fixed on Marc, he said, but I could tell without a doubt that the old man was looking at sexy me. "If he is looking at you," I said, "that's because he's gay." The challenge was on. We were alone in the place we thought, and Marc suggested that we could easily settle our difference of opinion if he went to the far end of the room and dropped his pants on cue while I raised my top as high as necessary without obscuring my vision. Of course the old fart in the painting equally shared his attention and we stood there stupidly laughing at our college level joke until we realized that we were no longer alone. A sea of wide opened eyes on little faces were at the double door with a formidable matron who was not laughing at all and was fingering her cell phone while saying something about perverts and sheriff as we were filing by the children who weren't laughing either. Fortunately the school bus was not double parked and the Ford proved surprisingly capable of speed bursts where possible and we escaped from the state by skillful navigation of secondary roads by yours truly and Google maps. The rental situation was resolved with a fifty-dollar bill gratefully accepted by a couple of teenagers charged with returning the car to wherever they pleased on their way to New York and we escaped to Canada on the bus with our second set of passports and our backpacks.

In a second rate tourist motel in Montreal we weren't smiling yet. The headline "Suspected traders in antiquities and cryptocurrencies arrested in Maine and charged with exposing themselves to fifth-graders" would have gone around the world and been trending on social media overnight. We were done, we had to go straight. Marc was talking about converting our nest eggs into a modest retirement account and disappearing to Ibiza, but I was not convinced. We would have to live three hundred years to blow our bucks and I wanted to go home, or near home. I was flipping through an European rag about vacationing in Romania, a beautiful country. Incidentally, do you know that's where Anthony Minghella filmed Nicole Kidman and Jude law for much of 'Cold Mountain?' Renee Zellweger got a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in that one. Anyway, the rag had an ad in there for a castle for sale, a nineteenth century reconstruction with its own ghost story, the painting of a mysterious lady whose eyes eternally wandered in search of her painter. The place was priced low. The maintenance you know, those steeply roofed turrets will kill you. We could afford it.

Let's go legit I said: "First, we will be Mr. and Mrs. Manyack-Bellefleure. Second, we will buy this castle and rename it 'STEAL FROM THE RICH' to shelter an additional ghost, Robin Hoodyack who may or may not capitalize on the market. Third, all our loot will go into a foundation for struggling writers and artists, with us well paid administrators wintering in Ibiza of course. Do you really think the FBI will be on our ass? You figure out the details."

Marc thought about it a while and nodded his ascent. "That could work," he said, "let me talk to Bub'..." He walked out to the pay phone and came back smiling. "He's in, he will put his money into it and take charge of the deal and the lawyers etcetera, but he wants a raise in status, like chief of the ghost patrol. I told him why we were in Canada, he was still laughing when I hung up the phone."

THE END