it was tony’s last chance, at least so far as trixie was concerned.
if this one did not work out, trixie was through with tony and his schemes, and she was leaving his “crew” and if joey did not want to come with her and wanted to stick with tony, she was leaving him too.
of course she did not come right out and say so, but she suspected that they both suspected what her intentions were.
so be it.
here was the deal. it was tony’s most elaborate scheme yet.
like most of tony’s schemes, it involved stealing an incredibly rare and expensive something or other.
and like all his schemes. the first question trixie had was “who is actually going to pay you for this thing, tony, and how much? you can’t put an an ad in the paper or online for it, or walk out in the street and yell, hey anybody want to buy the mona lisa or whatever?”
and tony would just look at her with that smirky way he had since they were in the third grade, and say , i know that, sunshine. do you think i would go to all this trouble if i did not have a buyer lined up?
and trixie would say, well, do you have a buyer lined up?
and tony would say, what do you think? with his little mean eyes trying to look twinkly.
and joey would say nothing and just look kind of sad, like, can’t we all just get along?
trixie did not think tony ever had any “buyers” for any of his schemes, but just trusted to luck to come up with one.
somehow the “buyers” always seemed to back out or disappear at the last minute, especially on the rare occasions when they actually got their hands, however briefly, on the mona lisa. (“mona lisa” was trixie’s term for whatever they were trying to grab.)
whatever. this was it. the last go-round.
tony knew a guy who knew a guy who worked in some mysterious job for these incredibly rich people who were so rich you never even heard about them. not peasants like the waltons or rothschilds or jeff bezos or elon musk who got their names in the media.
tony always knew guys like this. joey and trixie never got to meet them.
trixie had a name for these guys. “dick skinner”. the guy tony knew was “dick skinner”, just like the thing tony was going to steal was the “mona lisa”.
these particular really rich people had a farm, or estate or whatever, in west virginia.
and according to dick skinner, what they had on the farm was not pictures on the wall like the mona lisa, or statues like the venus de milo, or the only 16 mm copes of lost movies by andy warhol or orson welles.
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