Casual Heroing

Chapter 240: The Price of War

“Bitch! Why don’t you answer your goddamn phone?!” Nadine shouts from the other end of the phone.

“Bitch, what time is it?” I grog with the oversized smartphone by my ear, rubbing my forehead.

“Time to wake the fuck up, bitch,” Nadine says.

“Fuck you, bitch.”

“Bitch, I’m going to slap your ass red! Come down, I’ve been under your apartment for thirty minutes! Let’s go have breakfast!”

Putain.

“I hope you choke on a dick one of these days,” I reply to her, looking around the messy room from the bed and opting for the first semi-clean top I could put my hands on. I grip the soft duvet covering my naked body and take in the cozy warm feeling of it, hoping to bring some of it with me in the cold foggy Fall in Paris.

Seeing my face with make-up still on from the night before, I sigh.

…

“Bitch, you look like you have seen the Devil,” Nadine says to me.

“You always look like I should choke you,” I reply to my hyperactive friend.

“Wouldn’t you like that?” she says with a laugh, bumping her much wider hips against mine.

“So, what’s new?” I ask her with a yawn.

“Bitch, you just came down and you are already talking business? Get me some croissant if you want to hear anything from me. And we are going shopping this afternoon. Your current look likes the nightmares that haunt those two cocksuckers of Dolce and Gabbana.”

“Always the Duchess, Nadine,” I say with a smile.

“You can bet your Muslim ass on it,” Nadine says while maneuvering a cigarette to her mouth with four-centimeters-long nails.

“Do you have a lighter—” she starts mumbling with the cigarette between the pink glossyied lips when I have the thing already halfway out of my pocket. “I love you so much,” she adds, biting the sounds down.

I snatch a cigarette for myself and light it up.

“You better start buying them for yourself, bitch.”

“If I start buying them, I become a smoker. If I just steal them from you, I’m just having fun, you know,” I smirk.

Nadine is a black prostitute whose parents came from Nigeria to make a better life for themselves. Her father was an architect back there. Right here, instead, he’s in prison. He started dealing drugs when he couldn’t find any job, not even in the most remoted village in France. Nadine brothers deal drugs and, in a way, they work for me. She’s always been my friend and when I started my little shenanigans, she immediately went along. She’s my fashion guru and my big sister, probably the person I love the most in the entire world.

We sit in one of the most expensive places to have breakfast at in the entire city, getting a bad look from all the waiting staff. Once they even asked us to leave because of our aspect. I kindly asked some of my subordinates to have a word with them after hours.

“Two cappuccinos, two brioches, and…” Nadine lets the last word hang, waiting for me to add something.

“A water, and maybe some fresh-squeezed orange,” I tell the nervous white girl who came to us.

“Maybe?” the waitress asks.

“It means that you choose what to do, if you mess up, we mess you up, bitch,” Nadine says with the smile of someone who owns the place.

“Bring it, please,” I say, waving Nadine quiet.

“O-ok,” the girl is basically crying when she goes back.

“Nadine, you don’t have to do that, you know,” I tell her with a judging stare.

“Oh, why not, bitch? If the girl’s going to cry, let her. And it was a joke, bitch.”

I raise my hands, not willing to argue with this unreasonable woman. I love her, but she has her own views of the world and it’s not easy to challenge her on them. Or better, it’s very unpleasant and loud to do so.

She dishes outa fashion magazine like a teacher with a retarded student. She even put some post-it notes on some outfits I should buy. I start browsing the thing while she keeps smoking. We are sitting outside, both of us in furs. The one she’s wearing it’s a gift from me, something that she could have hardly afforded on her own. I helped her improving her clientele by miles, but she’s still not racking in the same kind of cash I managed to land my hands on.

I take out and rip a few post-its on the most obscene outfits but I keep most of them in. Nadine, for all she’s a prostitute, has excellent taste. She wanted to give a shot to the fashion world, but even in our times it’s not really somewhere where people like Nadine can easily get into.

“Good stuff,” I tell Nadine while putting away the magazine in my bag.

“Cassie, bitch, I don’t understand why you can’t put a little more effort to look like the queen bitch you are.”

“They got Capone on tax charges,” I say shrugging.

“But your money,” she looks around and puts her claw-ish nails on the table, hunching forward and whispering, “looks legit because of that fucking internet.”

How?

Subscription websites to launder money. As simple as that. Take a bunch of prostitutes, make a ‘photographer’ profile on the most well-known websites, then it’s down to create a net of dummy accounts doing untraceable payments. I didn’t handle most of the technicalities, but I know enough to be sure that my income looks like the next upstart making her way through the world thanks to selling sex fantasies to those who have the cash. In reality, only a small part of the payments I get to my accounts are real. There are people paying for those pictures, but mostly it’s a net of fake accounts being created to pay the highest subscription possible. That creates a taxable income. Plus, if you deal in things impossible to put a real value on, even if you post hot pictures that wouldn’t really gather that following, who can prove otherwise? What are they going to do, a cross-analysis between the nude-content creators?josei

I take another cigarette from Nadine while sipping on my orange juice.

“Can I ask a racist question?”

“Bitch, you are a Muslim, what are you talking about?” Nadine almost chokes on her croissant laughing.

“You are such a bitch,” I laugh myself, “but how would you feel if they gave you one of those Nigerian names? Or have you ever thought why our parents gave us French names?”

Nadine goes silent for a second, giving me hopes that she’s seriously considering the question.

“Because they are dumb as shit,” she laughs.

“Oh, bitch, come on! Don’t you ever think about changing your name to something more…”

“More what? Nigerian? Bitch, I’m not gonna get called no Ukelele, okay?”

The orange juice goes out of my nose as I’m literally dying of laughter. Nadine drops the cigarette on her expensive leather pants and starts swearing. We paint a terrible picture to the rest of the mostly white audience at the place, and, even while choking, I can see the owner bitching about us with some of his staff.

“Fucking, bitch, are you trying to kill me? And what if someone from Nigeria hears you? Isn’t that racist?”

“Bitch, if any of them are near me, they are going to look at this ass, certainly not worrying about socio-political bullshit like you do all the time, Miss Bastille.”

“Do you ever think of the British group that called themselves ‘Bastille’?”

“Bunch of f—”

“Come on,” I put my hands over my ears.

“Bitch, you are too sensitive. You know how your job gets people—you know? Why you so sensitive, then?”

“Come on,” I repeat.

“Bitch, I’m serious. Gotta get those tits harder, you know. And maybe bigger, too. But harder, for sure.”

I raise a hand toward the waitress, ignoring Nadine.

“Another croissant. And another cappuccino. Also, you know what, bring me another orange juice, thank you,” I look at the girl and smile.

I don’t tip. This girl is waiting tables. If she thinks she’s entitled to my money just because of that, she’s wrong. Nadine and I come from the deepest viscera of this monster of a country. Basic courtesy should be extended to people only doing their work. But that’s where it ends.

“You got an appetite on you, bitch. Good for you, you need to flesh up those bones of yours,” Nadine says, whipping another cigarette in her mouth.

“Some days I wish you hadn’t passed this smoking thing on me, bitch,” I tell her, blazing up another cigarette with the butt of the last on.

“So, bitch, let’s talk business,” she says, happy I waited for her to get her filling of chit-chat.

I gesture with the cappuccino in my hand and nod.

“Got five properties good to go,” she says in-between puffs of smoke, “three of which in countryside around Nantes. One around Nancy. The last one is somewhere in the industrial zone of Lyon. If you put people working there, we are talking about twenty-three spot since we already have eighteen up and running.”

Do you know that cryptocurrency can, on a level, be traced? It’s not all ‘dark web this’ and ‘silk road that,’ as some people believe. When you are a big player, you have to deal on secret protocols, foreign countries, and many inconvenient things. The fact that I’m rich in the open, for example, is purely for my own convenience. And to travel around with the excuse of wasting all these money left and right. But when it comes down to it, the real deals of money are exchanged toward China and Pakistan. Not much dealings in India. But the two previously mentioned countries provide me with the workers needed to run illegal plants. People desperate for money that I can cover in literal gold.

Now, with twenty-three spots up and running, our supply of weapons skyrockets. The most isolated, basically basements running in the countryside, are where the bullets are made. It’s one thing to manage a gun-frame—and another to go around causing explosions in a city.

I look down at the flaky crumbles left on the table by the croissants just to raise my head a second later when I hear Nadine laugh.

“What’s up, bitch?” I ask with a smile.

“Do you ever think about the fact that we are basically gang leaders?”

Am. Not are.

Terrorists. Not gang leaders.

“Yeah, we are two boss bitches,” I say with I wink.

We laugh it over while I mull some of my plans on my own. No one has really figured out what we are doing inside our organizations. In the end, we do really just run gun manufacturing plants and sell the products. Some news channels are even catching up with it after almost two years of running this trade.

But no one has figured out the endgame.

…

I look down at Nadine’s body, butt naked on a hospital’s bed. She died with a horrible hospital’s gown on, something that she would have absolutely hated. Not in style, not covered in her precious gems and expensive clothes. She had died while they tried to remove a bullet to the chest. The surgery was not easy, and the hospital has always been overworked. There was a mistake dictated by how tired the surgeon was. Nothing to blame him – or worse, kill him – for.

I look at the body on the bed while her brothers are arguing about some stupid deal that she was supposedly involved on. She hadn’t told me anything about it. Our entire operation had a lot of scouts and spies among escorts and prostitutes. And Nadine had engineered most of that, she had been the boss bitch managing all of them with her snarling remarks and her sass.

I go out while the voices of those men are just white noise in the background, a sad soundtrack to yet another casualty of war.

The neons are flickering above my head, probably needing a change, and maybe some rest. Not unlike me.