Jai LaSai was dismayed to see her grandmother’s grave all shot up and ruined. She wasn’t one to believe in the supernatural, that were a grave to be disturbed, the dead would rise. The grave was a rock and her grandmother was dirt food. Jai just found it quite rude for someone to just shoot up a grave. Not that she wanted to go into the vast and intricate conspiracy (a phrase Jai frequently used to mean “mob shit that would probably end with her dead”) that led the her grandmother’s grave being shot up. The ISSP could handle that.
The problem, as these things often happen, was that she couldn’t afford to replace the gravestone. The funeral occurred three days after her grandmother passed of old age. Mei LaSai was a veteran of many a war, and as such gained a cavalcade of enemies. She did not go quietly into that good night. The day before she was hospitalized for the final time, she was rallying several unions to strike over the inequality and injustice done to janitors. She even tried to uncover a conspiracy of medical abuse while in the hospital, but a plucky journalist beat her to the punch.
Mei lived an extraordinary life, but her funeral cost more than her life savings. It wasn’t an extravagant funeral, not even one with a lot of people in attendance (most of Mei’s friends were in hiding and Jai was the sole member of her family to show up). Nonetheless, the cost of the funeral just barely left Jai out of debt. It would take her an entire decade to recoup the costs. Mars is a world built on economic inequality.
She didn’t want to go into debt, so Jai left the grave as is. It’s not like her job would give her the skills to achieve the money extra legally. A window washer can only do so much. Besides, she had her own kids to worry about. The circumstances of their birth is perhaps too tragic to convey at this time, and as such will not. Suffice it to say, the father of Jai’s two children, Lem and Bob, was not a good man, did horrible things to Jai, and got what was coming to him. But she was alone with them nonetheless, and thus couldn’t do anything that would put them in danger.
So she lived her life as a humble window washer. That was, until she came across an angry looking man who was at the building she was washing. He had the angry face that only Jupiter could produce. A kind of instinctual anger that tells you that the only way to speak is with a small amount of contempt for everything, even those you love. Jai would never learn the name of the man, but she knew his company well. It’s hard not to hear the goings on within a building as a window washer. You just have to learn to ignore their cruelty.
The organization she was washing the building of called itself Lucifer. At the time, she was outside the building, and so could not hear most of the conversation. Words like “money” and “defenestrate” were thrown about like candy in an exploding candy factory. Usually, when these words were spoken, Jai knew better than to focus on the scene at hand. And yet, something within her made her continue watching. She didn’t know any of the players, nor did she know the context. She picked up enough to know that the man with bruises on his face was being beaten for betraying Lucifer for a skim of the money. They wanted the money back. The man was confused, as many people would be after having their heads beaten to a pulp in quick succession. He could barely speak the words “sorry,” “ick,” and “do it.” Indeed, those were the only words Jai could hear from the sentence “I’m sorry Patrick, but I didn’t do it.”
Jai looked closer (or at least as close as she could from her distance) at the angry man. There was an air of sadness to his anger and cruelty. Like a lover who had found out their true love faked her death to get away from them. The angry man said “Why can’t you stop lying to me, Jude” (which Jai could not hear) before lifting the man with bruises on his face by the lapels, and defenestrated him.
The remains of the window made it quite hard for Jai to finish her work. The sharp edges and gory entrails left dangling on them made her work necessary. In three hours’ time, a man would come with a replacement window, which would be replaced before the sun set. But the man must not know why the window was broken. Unlike Jai, he had no knowledge of those who owed the building or their intentions. He had no ties to them. For all intents and purposes, he was a nobody.
Which made him the perfect partner for the scheme. But Jai wasn’t thinking about that. She was thinking about the shape the man with bruises on his face made when he hit the pavement. Rorschach tests were long considered by her mother as complete bunk, a trick created by big pharma to get money out of everyone by telling them they’re insane for thinking a splotch of ink looks like a dinosaur and that the money should go to more important matters like the military (Jai didn’t get on with her mother that much).
The shape, which could also look like a man having his tongue ripped out or a dog, looked to Jai like a flower she saw three days after the father of her children died. She was quite grateful they never married officially, as that would involve having to pay for his funeral. She attended, of course. Appearances had to be accounted for. There were more people at the funeral than there would be for Mei’s. But then, it’s more culturally acceptable for a man to be a mobster than for a woman to be a protester. People in positions of power were there along with the servants they forced to come with them. All told, only two to five people who actually knew the man were in attendance.
One of those people, a man with silver hair, had a flower on him. It looked like an open mouth with a tongue sticking out. And he placed it on the grave without a word spoken. (He did say words, just ones Jai couldn’t hear. Mainly “Why couldn’t you just be with me. Why did you love her? You knew she was bad news from the moment you met her.” If Jai heard those words, she would wonder who they referred to, even as the answer was plain and clear.) And then he left. Jai would never see the man again, but the flower was stuck in her mind for reasons she could not comprehend.
The thought passed as the window replacer entered the room. The entrails, flesh, and blood had since been removed from the area, tossed aside with the rest of the body changing the splot into something more akin to a man running in circles after his head’s been chopped off. The bag the window replacer had was rather large, but then windows in that room required something to hold them in. That’s what he told the people who owned the building, at least. In truth, the window was probably better transported within a box. When he left, he told them the bag still looked full because it held the glass shards, which were, in reality, melted with an acidic property with a name that’s too long, but sounds science fictiony.
While her skills as a window washer did not give her the capability of successfully getting the money extra legally, it did give her some skills such as knowing which rooms had the safe, when would certain people be in those rooms, and how many fingerprints a man leaves on a window on a daily basis. It took some of her grandmother’s friends to make the scheme work. There were rules, of course. No names on a job, no names for the marks, and once the job was done, she would leave the building and never return. That’s what her grandmother taught her.
The first couple of attempts were trial runs for the big one. Little skims on the top that no one would notice. When it became clear that people were noticing, the big one had to be moved up a bit. Not that that was a problem. They’d been in trial run phase for three months and had been waiting to be noticed. The first step was setting up a patsy. The man with bruises would do just fine. Ironically, he was already skimming money from the top. He just had the capability to change the books. Once proper evidence was left pointing the finger towards him, the small band of thieves would wait for the organization to do a big show in the room where a good portion of the money was kept. (They were calling themselves Lucifer.)
Once the body was disposed of through defenestration (a common technique used by Lucifer), the two would take as much money out from the safe as possible (Jai had seen the numbers put in enough times to know the combination) and the window replacement man would leave through the front door. (Organizations with a large enough clout, Jai had noticed, often got a big head. Show one or two pieces of glass, and they’ll assume it’s all glass.) Jai would then leave the gig, citing a better paying position was offered cleaning windows on the other side of the city.
There was enough woolongs in Jai’s cut to afford a new gravestone and get her family into a better life. As she walked home from the funeral house, having made preparations for a replacement gravestone, Jai thought about her children’s father. She thought about the things he did to her. The things he made her do. She was in love with a man who didn’t love her back. He didn’t pay for his kids’ livelihood, barely even knew their names (Lamb and Boo, he’d call them). It wasn’t until Lem was hurt that the full extent of his cruelty dawned on Jai like the sun on a city that has only known night.
She didn’t want him to stay. He did. She didn’t want him in her life. He said it was his. She didn’t want him near her children. He told her he would never hurt them. She begged him to put the knife down. He didn’t. She grabbed him by the wrist. He tried to fight. She broke his heart in the struggle, piercing it with the chaotic precision of a tornado in Kansas. He broke her face and arm. She won. He died.
When she arrived home, she discovered that the house had been broken into. Her children were safe, Bob and Lem in the kitchen acting as if nothing had happened, and doing a poor job at it. Jai held her children tight, like a blanket on a cool winter’s night. She was crying, heavier than they were. She was always a crier, even at their father’s funeral. She tried to hate herself for crying for him. But something deep inside made such tears feel right and true.
Bob would later say that a man with grey hair broke in asking if Jai could meet up for lunch. Apparently, they had a lot to talk about.
Run along, little thief…
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