How does it feel, Detective, to finally arrest the man you’ve been tracking all these months? You likely have a better understanding of the breadth of his criminal activities than I do, now that it’s clear that counterfeit handbags are only one small part of his empire.
You took him into custody before he had a chance to pressure Winnie and me to participate in his other ventures, but trust me when I say it would have happened eventually. Our competitors, for instance, had begun streamlining their operations, packing bags of fentanyl pills into their counterfeit purses to save on shipping costs. And if Boss Mak had wanted to implement this, Winnie and I would have had little recourse. As I’ve already said—and as I’d warned Winnie months earlier—they controlled the inventory; we had no choice but to submit to their orders.
So I can say unequivocally that the Maks and Winnie and I were not a team. He was the boss, and we were his employees, or, perhaps more accurately, he was the kingpin, and we were the pawns.
Case in point: when the department stores tightened their return policies last month, and our shoppers went into a panic, and counterfeits piled up on our shelves, do you think the Maks told us to take our time, assess the situation, and come up with a solution? No, they demanded to be paid on schedule, regardless of whether we could put those handbags to use. Does that seem like the attitude of a business partner to you?
At the same time, Detective, I don’t want you to think I gave up Boss Mak as an act of revenge. This is first and foremost about taking responsibility for my actions. Believe me when I say that I would have found my way to you, whether or not you’d found your way to us.
So why did I wait until November 1 to give myself up? That’s a very good question. Because I knew you could arrest me on the spot, and I had to be sure that my son would have someone to take care of him. He’s only three. Sorry, I’m sorry, I never cry. I’m embarrassed, this is so unlike me.
That’s kind of you to offer, but I don’t need a break. I want to keep going. You see, back in September, Maria had decamped for a British expat family in Laurel Heights once Henri started preschool, leaving us without a nanny. Two and a half weeks later, he proceeded to get himself kicked out. (Yes, almost exactly when the department stores caught on to us.)
How did he get expelled, you ask? Well, by crying nonstop for seventeen days straight. And lest you think I’m exaggerating, I can assure you I was there to witness it all. Adhering to school policy, on each and every one of those days, I’d accompany my son to the classroom, plant him in his seat, and tell him I’d return in fifteen minutes. Then I’d wait in the teachers’ lounge for the specified amount of time, come back to check on him, and tell him I’d return in thirty minutes, and then forty-five minutes, and so on and so forth. So I can say for certain that Henri never stopped crying. His stamina was frankly impressive. He’d sit in his chair in the back corner of the room, red-faced and wailing, while the other children sang and danced and played and listened to stories.
On day seventeen, when Principal Florence Lin invited me into her office, nestled her chin in the basket of her hands, and said, He’s young to begin with, keep him at home for another year, all I could do was slump in my chair, exhausted to the point of delirium.
What choice did I have? I took him home and tried to convince Maria to come back. But no matter how much money I offered, she gently but firmly refused. So here I was in the house, alone with my kid, trying to meet Winnie’s demand to figure out a way to get around the department stores’ new policies, while simultaneously soothing our spooked shoppers, all in the couple of hours in the afternoon that the new babysitter dropped in to plant Henri in front of the iPad and talk to her sister on the phone, as though I wouldn’t notice.
As a mother yourself, you must see where I’m coming from. I couldn’t risk getting myself arrested and stranding my son with this indifferent community college student for who knows how long while his father toiled away in Palo Alto. I needed a better plan. I wasn’t foolish enough to think I’d find another Maria, but maybe someone who wasn’t simply in my home to collect a paycheck, someone who actually cared about Henri.
Meanwhile, Winnie was formulating her counterattack against the department stores.
I got it, she said. We’ll hire a white shopper.
I was clearing the lunch dishes while listening to yet another potential nanny read to Henri in the other room. What are you talking about?
If Purse Addict and the others are right that they’re being racially profiled, then we have to adapt. We hire white people.
Focused on extricating myself from this job, I said, All right. Whatever you say.
And that, Detective Georgia Murphy, is what led Winnie to hire you.
Now, perhaps you might fill in a couple of blanks for me. Am I right to deduce that you’d been monitoring our eBay store for some time? That we’d attracted attention by putting out limited editions earlier and earlier, so much so that the brands had begun to take notice? That’s what I feared from the start.
From what I can gather, you purchased one of our bags on eBay—a Mansur Gavriel bucket bag in camel (excellent choice, by the way)—took it to a professional authenticator, and determined it to be the real thing. This raised questions about how we could be turning a profit, since all our bags were listed at, or even slightly below, retail price.
A search for reviews of our store led you to an online forum for handbag fanatics who raved about our merchandise. Digging into different topics on the forum, you came across a thread of disgruntled Neiman’s shoppers who claimed to have been sold knockoffs, which led you to a Reddit community of die-hard replica buyers, which led you to Winnie’s job posting. Have I got it right so far?
As you saw for yourself, Winnie took pains to make the posting look like a generic want ad for secret shoppers, the kind hired by legitimate companies to pose as buyers to help them evaluate their customer experience. It’s only after an applicant had been vetted and hired that Winnie provided further information about our business—and always via an anonymous Telegram account.
On a hunch you posed as an ordinary suburban mom who happened to love high-end replicas and was looking to make some extra cash. Like I said, Winnie was desperate. She hired you at once. She started you off with a basic assignment. You were to go to Bloomingdale’s, pick up a Longchamp Le Pliage in mustard, and ship it to our P.O. box. You swiftly completed the task, prompting her to send the corresponding superfake to your address.
I’m guessing you needed the replica in hand to obtain the search warrant that allowed you to eventually uncover Winnie’s identity? Of course, back in October, neither Winnie nor I had any inkling you were onto us. We were too busy managing the inventory that was piling up on our shelves—handbags that I turned in to your team, every single one in our possession.
Naturally, like you, I noticed the discrepancy in numbers. My records show there should have been an additional two hundred units. I can only assume that Winnie managed to liquidate those bags sometime at the end of October before fleeing the country. She certainly needed the cash.
You’re saying that Boss Mak confirmed as much? He told you a contact informed him that those two hundred superfakes changed hands on October 26? Of course I’m stunned. How would he know that? Who would have told him? But if you’ve verified the information and believe it to be true, then you must be right. Winnie wasn’t in the Bay Area then, but I suppose she could have easily sent a lackey to our office unit in South San Francisco to get the bags and make the sale. By this time, she strongly doubted my commitment and had accused me multiple times of slacking off, so it makes sense that she’d manage the liquidation on her own.
I hope you’re not suggesting that I sold those bags and stashed away the funds. That would have been impossible. You see, Detective, October 26 was the day of my fifteen-year college reunion. You have my cell phone location data; you can see for yourself that I was down in the Peninsula all day, despite my reluctance to be there.
Why didn’t I want to go? Imagine the situation, Detective: Here I was, at what had to be the very nadir of my life, forced to confront the most accomplished people on the planet. I felt like the brunt of the universe’s sick joke, the laughingstock of Silicon Valley, the punching bag of the global elite.
Carla and Joanne must have sensed my anguish, because that morning, I awoke to a flurry of text messages, warning me to not even think about backing out.
Carla typed, I’ll even pick you up. Door-to-door service. I won’t take no for an answer.
In the end, my friends agreed to let me skip the official on-campus events in exchange for coming to our classmate Aimee Cho’s backyard brunch.
As Carla already told you, she picked me up at around 10:30 in the morning and drove me straight to Aimee’s Woodside mansion, where I remained until approximately 2:30 in the afternoon, at which point I hitched a ride back to the city with another classmate, Troy Howard. At no point in the day did I go to South San Francisco—not to offload our inventory nor for any other reason.
What can I tell you about the party? It was one of those perfect Northern Californian fall days: a crisp seventy degrees, a cloudless blue sky, all that overflowing golden light—the kind of day that only seemed to underscore my miserable mood. Gripping my elbow, Carla pulled me into the group taking a tour of Aimee’s newly redecorated home. As my friends swooned over the sustainably grown Brazilian teak floors and the dining room chairs upholstered in mint Thai silk, I tried to figure out how to convince Winnie to stop hiring shoppers, white or any other race, to pause all operations until we had answers. Her primary objection would obviously be the loss of revenue, but that was paltry compared to getting caught.
Again and again I answered my classmates brightly, I’m focused on my son right now. I’ll start looking in earnest once he goes to preschool. Oh, we decided to wait a year because he only just turned three.
That’s so brave of you to take a break, Aimee cooed. She was a fellow dissatisfied corporate lawyer.
Her husband, Brent, who did something in finance that earned him ten times her already ample salary, added, Aimee was sending emails, like, fifteen minutes after delivering.
She mimed slapping him across the face; he pretended to strangle her. They laughed and pecked each other’s cheek. Everyone else laughed along, and I followed suit, a split second behind, like an alien desperate to appear human.
Let me be clear, Detective. It’s no exaggeration to say that at this moment in time I was failing on all fronts: as an employee, a wife, a mother, a friend—hell, as a flipping Stanford grad. What I wanted more than anything was to crawl into a cave and hide from my shortcomings, the polar opposite of what I’d walked into.
Retreating to the bar, I asked a uniformed bartender for a mojito. When Joanne spotted me and waved me over, I downed as much of my drink as I could before joining her. She was with Javier Delgado, who did something important at Google, and Javier’s partner, Andrew.
We donate a hundred bucks to the alumni fund every year, Joanne said, pointing out her son, who dashed past squealing in pursuit of a pack of children (all of them, no doubt, potty trained and enrolled in school). It’s a small investment in the future.
We need to get on that, Javier said, smacking his partner’s elbow.
Andrew rolled his eyes and stage-whispered, We’re not even sure we’re having kids. He turned politely to me. Do you have kids?
What’s that? I said, struggling to keep up with the conversation.
He repeated the question.
Oh, yes, one.
Her husband works at Stanford so they don’t have to donate, Joanne said.
Say, said Javier, is anyone in touch with Winnie Fang? I heard she’s back in town.
Joanne looked at me.
A little bit, I said. She comes to SF for work from time to time. I didn’t elaborate.
Predictably, the conversation turned to the SAT scandal of our past, and to how it compared to the more recent Hollywood scandal, and then to another classmate who’d been arrested for insider trading, but had successfully fought the charges with the aid of a costly lawyer, and was back at a hedge fund and richer than ever.
I chugged the last of my drink and went to get a refill, ignoring Joanne’s raised eyebrows.
I assume, Detective, that Joanne told you she lost track of me for, say, half an hour midway through the party? That’s because Winnie called while I was waiting for my drink, and I had to dart into a bathroom to talk to her.
We have to pause all activities, I said. Just until we figure out what’s going on. We can’t risk a shopper getting caught.
Wrong answer, Winnie said. I asked for solutions, not this.
How can I solve a problem we don’t fully comprehend?
With that kind of attitude, you’ll never come up with anything good.
Around and around we went, talking past each other, unable to reach a compromise. At last, she ended the call, and I turned on the tap to assuage the suspicions of anyone waiting outside. (That’s how paranoid Winnie had made me.) Rinsing my hands, I observed my reflection in the mirror, the deep groove between my eyebrows, the lusterless eyes and pinched mouth. Who was this craven person looking back at me, expecting to be told what to do?
Outside, I paused by the patio doors, taking in this backyard abounding with power brokers, all tanned and relaxed, basking in their success and good fortune, in their lives of plenty and ease. This was what I had lost. No, this was what Winnie had stolen from me.
Soon, my classmates began to head to campus for the football game and various panels and lectures, more eating and drinking. This is when I rode back to the city with Troy Howard and his wife, Kathy. He’d been the sixteenth employee at Twitter and was now basically retired. All the way to San Francisco, they regaled me with stories about their family’s travels to Tanzania, Jaipur, the Azores.
Now, of course, we’re grounded for a while because the girls are in school, Troy said.
Kathy asked, Where’s your little one in school?
We decided to wait a year, I said. Henri only just turned three.
That’s good, no rush, Troy said, as though he hadn’t mentioned that his girls had been learning Mandarin since birth from their live-in Chinese nanny to ensure truly native accents.
It’s worse when parents force things, said Kathy. A friend of hers who’d started her daughter at Ming Liang Academy—you know, the Chinese immersion school?—had told her an absolute horror story about a little boy who’d cried nonstop for weeks and wet himself daily before finally getting expelled.
My mojito-filled stomach churned, sending acid up my gullet, along with the protest that Henri had only wet himself a handful of times. I choked out, How awful.
Troy said, Poor little guy. Who knows how long he’ll carry that trauma?
The parents should have known better, said Kathy.
Weakly, I agreed.
When the car stopped at a red light, I briefly entertained the thought of flinging open the door and leaping out, running away from it all, and if I broke a limb or got a concussion, maybe Winnie would finally leave me alone.
They dropped me off in front of my house. Instead of going right inside, I checked to make sure that neither Oli nor Henri had spotted me through a window and jogged up the street, away from them.
When the backs of my ballet flats chafed my heels, I settled on a bench near the bus stop and checked my phone, torturing myself with images of joyous classmates frolicking on our joyous campus, reveling in each other’s joyous company. Scrolling through my feed, I spotted a 60 Minutes clip about the SFO plane crash. The headline declared that counterfeit airplane parts may have been at fault. I pressed play and turned up the volume.
Apparently, Boeing routinely outsourced their manufacturing to subcontractors in China, who in turn outsourced work to sub-subcontractors, who commonly used substandard raw materials and fabricated production records to fool the inspectors.
What’s more, Lesley Stahl said, her piercing blue eyes locking with mine, many of those components are what are known as single-point-of-failure parts, meaning if they fail, the whole system fails. Could this have been the culprit of the tragic SFO crash? Investigators are working around the clock to uncover the answer.
My mind landed on the Maks’ other illegal businesses. Tell me, Detective, you must have an idea. What else do they manufacture? Counterfeit pharmaceuticals? Electronics? Do you know for certain that the Maks deal in counterfeit plane parts, too? I suspected as much.
Indeed, as I sat on that bench, thinking about those two little girls who’d been ejected from their seats, the lies that Winnie had fed me and that I in turn accepted—that ours was a victimless crime, that we helped more people than we hurt—all of that curdled into a foul, bitter brew.
This, Detective, is the moment I decided I would confess everything I knew about the Maks, Winnie, and, most of all, myself.
Why the skepticism? I’ve been completely forthright with you; I’ve laid myself bare.
What’s that? You looked up Winnie’s green card application file? I have no idea how she could have submitted a reference letter written by me. We weren’t in touch back then, so I certainly didn’t write it. As I’ve already said, I didn’t even know she’d married and divorced that uncle of hers until Carla and Joanne told me about it. Winnie must have written the letter herself and forged my signature. By now you know as well as I: she’d sign anybody’s name with a flourish, if it would help her get her way.
Come on, Detective. You can’t still be asking this question, not after everything we’ve covered. How can I make this any clearer? I do not know where she is.
Why would you go through the trouble of acquiring the call logs for my other phone? Why not simply ask me? Aren’t I here, of my own accord, telling you every last detail I know? Haven’t I given up every email exchanged with Mandy Mak and Kaiser Shih to substantiate what I’ve said?
Of course I made some calls to Beijing—and, as you’ve no doubt observed, Guangzhou, Dongguan, Shenzhen, Shanghai. Up until yesterday, the Maks believed that Winnie and I were running a thriving counterfeit handbag business, and they had absolutely nothing to worry about. How else do you think you arrested your guy?
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude. Let me say, Detective, that it’s such a relief to tell you everything. What I want most is to excise this small stretch of time like a tumor, go home to my husband and child, and start anew. What a fool I was to take my beautiful life for granted.
Yes, yes, I know you’re not done with me yet. There’s more to get through. Where was I? The decline, the fall, the finale.
At this point, Detective, the story shifts back to you—how you infiltrated our business to build a case against us. Honestly you worked so quickly and efficiently, you likely could have ambushed Winnie at home in L.A. if you hadn’t decided you needed additional evidence and asked to complete a higher value assignment.
This is when Winnie grew suspicious. She dispatched her private investigator to dig into your background, and once she figured out who you were, she called to say that at long last she agreed with me—it was time to shut things down.
She said, There’s a midnight flight from SFO to Taipei with one seat in business class.
I’m not going, I said.
You must.
I won’t.
It was the kind of exchange we’d fallen into countless times these past months. And yet, she must have heard in my voice a new steeliness, a diamond core.
Have you lost your mind? There’s no way they won’t come after you.
I know.
Her tone dripped acid. Don’t think you can bring me down with you. And with that, she ended the call and disappeared.
The phone plunged from my trembling grip. My limbs gave way and I fell to the floor, shaking, sweating, dispelling a fiery animal stink. I was hollowed out, empty, exorcised, reborn. The ground rose up to cradle me. There on the rug I remained for who knows how long, until Henri wandered in, threw himself on top of me, and growled like a lion, thinking it a game.
Hours later, when Oli came home, I was waiting for him in the living room. I asked him to sit down on the sofa next to me.
He said, What’s going on? Where’s Henri?
He’s in the high chair with the iPad. He’s fine.
Oli kicked off his shoes and joined me, his messenger bag still slung across his torso.
I need to tell you something, I said. I need you to not say a word until I’m done.
He ran his fingers through his hair and said, All right.
Then and there, I told him everything from start to finish. No more secrets, no more lies.
He listened and did not interrupt, his expression growing more and more strained with the effort to remain silent.
When I finally stopped, he said, Now can I speak?
I nodded. My mouth was parched, my throat tender and sore.
When will you go to the police?
First thing tomorrow.
He rubbed the stubble on his chin.
In a small voice I said, Is there anything else you want to ask me?
No, he said gruffly. Yes.
I wet my chapped lips with my tongue.
I still—I just—I—. He couldn’t complete the thought.
I stared out the window at the darkening street, and he did, too, anticipating that magic moment when the streetlights glimmered on.
So this is it. This is everything. I guess the only other thing I want you to know is that I’ve given a lot of thought to the future and how I will atone for my mistakes. I’ve started researching MBA programs—I know, can you imagine? At my age? If I’m fortunate enough to go back to school, my dream is to build a direct-to-consumer clothing company that sells luxe basics, produced in the most ethical factories—factories that will provide good jobs for women in the developing world.
I hope to have the chance to be a better mom to my son. This upheaval has been so challenging for him, needless to say, but I’m ready, finally, to be there for him, to focus on his needs and not the things I desire for him. As for Oli, he’s still processing what I’ve told him; of course that’ll take time. But the fact that he listened, really listened, and that he’s still here—well, that gives me hope. I’ve started looking for a house in Palo Alto. Henri and I will move the instant we’re able. All I want is for the three of us to be a family. It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted. I was a fool to let Winnie convince me otherwise.
Okay, now that’s truly everything. I think you’ll agree I’ve held up my end of the bargain, and please, Detective, I’m pleading with you to hold up yours.