The Polish Program (LSD, #2)

8. Roxanne

Roxanne

My spiPhone translates my spoken question into Polish: "Is this the best spot?"

Anja nods: "The exclusive whores work for the escort services, the nightclubs and the magazines. The cheap hookers work in the industrial park. The best ones can be found here, at the red traffic lights in the shopping centre. Every car has to stop here. The shop-owners have made a deal with the town hall: these traffic lights stay red twice as long, forcing people to watch shop windows and buy more. That's why they call this the red-light district."

Scarlett is uncomfortable: "I don't like it here. I'd rather go home."

I look at her. She looks terrific. She's got the looks, and she's getting all the looks. High boots with high heels, black shiny leather with laces, form the foundation. The rest of her legs are captured in a savage maze of black stockings, all the way up to a pair of candy-cane-pink shorts, two sizes too small. On top, she wears a white top, that's well filled, but hardly covers what fills the covers of the magazines that interest the visitors of this open-air meat palace.

Anja tries to talk some confidence into her new colleague: "«Success» starts with «suck»."

Scarlett doesn't stop pulling her top up and pulling faces of embarrassment: "Tell me again, Red. What are we doing here? This is a terrible plan..."

"This is a terrific plan. The best mouse trap has a «welcome» mat in front of the door, inviting the mouse to come in. It will work. Trust me. I'm good at this game."

A car pulls over and the window opens. Anja speaks with the driver in Polish, negotiations about prices and what can be expected. Then, she enters the car, blows us a kiss, and wishes Scarlett good luck. We're on our own, together with five or six other self-employed women from the adult entertainment business.

I look at my reflection in the shop window on the other side of the street: horrible. If I were a man... I know, I am a man, but right now I'm dressed up as a woman with a platinum-white wig and cheap lipstick and false eyelashes and a mint-green miniskirt and a blouse that hardly hides my false tits... If I were a man who passed by now, I wouldn't give myself a second look, but rush home to take a cold shower.

I feel naked too. For obvious reasons, I left my Makarov in Pension Chopin, but even without my gun, I have bad dreams about men, asking me if I'm hiding a gun in my knickers because they can't imagine I'm just glad to see them.

"Tonight, you're Roxanne. We're setting a trap for William Oglethorpe, the banker of Treesome Ltd. He is the mad genius who convinced your ex-boss to fire you, the powerful tycoon who threatened to cut the credit and close the company if profit didn't go up, the one who lowered the interest given on savings and pumped up the interest to pay on loans, so the bank can go on with its policy to let bad debtors get away with their behaviour, while good, thrifty clients pay the price and the bonuses."

"Right. And now I'm dressed up like a hooker and you're disguised as a... Sorry, a monkey in the zoo looks sexier than you in that miniskirt, Red."

"Perhaps I look terrible, but this plan looks terrific, Scarlett. We checked what we could find of Mister Oglethorpe, we found the number of his private bank account, we convinced The Nerd to crack that account, we rewarded him with a set of photos of Roxanne, and we found out that our man has a very regular life, that he pays all his expenses with his bank account, except... Every Thursday, between 19:00 and 20:00, he takes out 1.000 zloty in cash. I wondered why he would do that, but you thought that Mister Oglethorpe, a single, ugly elephant, might spend his cash in this shopping centre, buying some nice female company for the evening. So we dressed up for a stake-out, we asked Anja to help us find the place where we might have the biggest chance to catch our fish, and now we wait."