Meet Prey Shove

Devian used the same modus operandi every time. He would select his victim carefully and then, as she left the restaurant, his accomplice, a Javanese man whom he paid a pittance, would aim his motor scooter at her and accelerate.

At the last minute he would swerve to the right, always the right, while Devian grabbed the victim and turned her around so that she was looking into his eyes. Most women wouldn’t be able to resist his blue eyes and Southern American accent, or the carefully rehearsed line he always used with every victim. “Don’t let the beauty of this place intoxicate you so much that you don’t concentrate on the traffic!” he would say, his mint-freshened breath and expensive cologne caressing her, “Come, let me buy you the best coffee in Bali.”

With that most women, especially the ones he had carefully selected, would melt, ensnared by the sticky web of his orchestrated charm.

He always selected and stalked his prey at the same café in Hanoman Street, Ubud. He would go there every morning for breakfast and sit at the same table, which would enable him to scan the whole place discreetly. This he would do as he looked up, deep in thought, from his writing pad. If anyone had been able to look at the pad, they would have seen a jumble of meaningless prattle which had been written months before to support his bogus identity.

He would pass himself off as a novelist, a moderately successful one, who was waiting for an advance from his publisher. To support this, he had established a website on which he had constructed an elaborate biography and reviews of the two novels he had already written. One had been a small commercial success and, the other, critics felt, was too obscure and “arty” to ever make money or sell more than a few hundred copies. It was, he told his victims, the one he had to write for his soul, while the next one would put food on the table. It was the one on which he was pinning his hopes. His publisher had promised him a generous advance on this in response to a synopsis he had sent. He even had a bogus letter to this effect which he would show his victims, reluctantly, and only when pressed.

His scam was so perfectly practised that he seldom missed a beat and he was so expert at selecting his victims, every scenario, no matter how long, would adhere to the same scrupulous framework. He used this framework to control the entrapment and would ad lib within it to suit the situation.

His selection process was simple. She would have to be over thirty-five, and with a vulnerable look about her. Preferably, she would be reading a copy of Eat Pray Love, although recently he had noticed that it didn’t happen that often. A fidgeter was a good sign, or any sign of neurotic unease. She should never be reading anything too literary or she might be able to see through him. She should, at the same time, have an open and trusting air bordering on the naive and gullible. If he could, he would follow her for a while to pick up ideas with which he could further construct his web.

He was an excellent judge of character and took great pride in his success rate. There were only a few rare failures. When they occurred, he was able to pull out quickly and without hurting the woman’s feelings. His code of honour compelled him never to hurt a woman while she was with him. This was left until she was thousands of kilometres away.

He first had the idea for the scam after he had taken out a copy of the DVD of Eat Pray Love to find out why so many women had been reading the novel. He didn’t bother to read it, because he didn’t like reading anything more than magazines. He had, as part of his vocation, skimmed a small number of literary works and modern best-sellers so he could bamboozle a victim who had the right amount of literary ignorance, and just the right amount of interest in reading. He would also watch DVDs of literary works, especially Jane Austen, who he claimed was his favourite author. He had studied English Literature in his final year of high school and was able to use the correct terminology when discussing matters literary.

He had also once read about method acting, and whenever he looked into his victims’ eyes, Devian would recall his first love, which brought him so much joy and later pain. He would imagine he was looking at her face and recreate the feelings he had experienced so long ago. When he had to make love to his victims with the help of a dose of Cialis or Viagra, he would relive those frenzied bouts of love making he had experienced back then once the initial clumsiness had worn off. Even his fantasies were tightly scripted.

As for that code of honour: he had overheard so many courtship rituals and seen so many elaborately constructed personalities on Facebook that he knew that most people were far from truthful when presenting themselves to others and felt that he was only doing what most people do anyway, only to a different degree.

He reasoned that most relationships were based on some form of deception and that the deceived often embraced the deception. His victims had a few weeks of happiness which they might not otherwise have enjoyed. He was, in short, both happy and ethically secure in what he did. Had he not seen so many ugly older men with beautiful young Indonesian girls who feigned a few weeks of love for payment? Was he any different; except for the fact that his victims were not aware of the charade and, therefore, in their eyes had an authentic experience? He was adept at juggling such conundrums and always ending up with a result which suited him. 

There was another person who breakfasted every morning at the same café. She too had a writing pad, but it was a genuine one. Her name was Rita and she was an Australian poet and short story writer. She had been awarded a small grant by the Australia Council and was spending a few months in Ubud culminating in a poetry reading at the Writers’ Festival. Unlike Devian, she would sit unobtrusively at a small table, often with her back to the rest of the patrons, in order to read through what she had written the previous evening. Her table was often right alongside Devian’s, but she took very little interest in him initially. He looked too good-looking and staged, a poser; probably a narcissist.

Then one day when he brought his latest victim to the café she couldn’t resist eavesdropping. Especially when the victim thanked him profusely for saving her life and then, in a hushed tone, for not insisting that they have sex on the first night and being happy to just kiss and cuddle. It was another tactic which Devian used when the time was right. He had learnt that sex coupled with love was the best sex, and that, after a period of anticipation, it was at its very best. He knew, too, that for most women it was romance that was the most important factor in a relationship.

Rita was, in everyday life, not a prying or vindictive person but, as a poet and writer, she was always looking for new material and inspiration. Since she didn’t know the people she observed, she didn’t feel that she was intruding and felt abstracted, like the omniscient narrator in one of her stories. The characters she created were types and not actual people.

She, too, was a good judge of character and subscribed to the philosophy that everyone she encountered was a good person until they proved otherwise. She was hardly ever duped by anyone and could see through flattery and superficiality very quickly. She had been married once, to an academic, but they had parted amicably and she was now content to be single with the odd relationship, but only when it was suitable. She was as far as you could get from one of Devian’s targets and once he had noticed her, it did not take him long to realise this. All he needed to see was that she was a genuine writer, and if he had taken the time later, which he had no need to, he would have quickly seen that she was calm, reassured and in no way neurotic. She exuded control and ease with herself and others.

She was fascinated by the direction of the conversation between Devian and his victim. She was, at first, surprised that someone so good-looking and, according to her earlier judgment, so narcissistic, could be so attentive and single-mindedly interested in his victim only. Whenever the victim tried to direct the conversation to him, which came naturally to most women, he would deflect it with different pre-rehearsed responses, along the lines of, “But it is you who I am interested in. There is time to talk about me later.”

When they did get around to talking about him, she struggled to prise information out of him and to crack his modesty and self-effacement. Had Rita not seen him before and only listened to the conversation, had she been looking at a man with a face painted in character, not vacuous good looks, she would have been impressed by the conversation she overheard.

It did not take her long to figure out that this was a serial philanderer, and soon her hackles were erect. She almost grudgingly admired his skill the first time she heard it and sometimes wondered whether, if he had suspected that she was eavesdropping, he might be revelling in her listening to the efficiency with which he operated. Displaying his acumen to a writer might give him a perverse thrill, especially when he was passing himself off as one.

It was not long, only the second victim she had observed, before she lost all admiration for him. When she saw that he had so obviously set up the near misses with the motor scooter, she became disgusted. She wondered whether she should warn the women off, but they seemed to be so happy that she almost found herself subscribing to Devian’s ethical contortion. They had a few weeks of happiness which they might not otherwise have had; so where’s the harm?

She was too good a person to fool herself with this faulty logic, and soon chided herself by pointing out that the duplicity stripped the whole scenario of authenticity and should be deplored. That the poor women were not aware of the deception did not lend it any modicum of authenticity, in fact it cheapened it further. The blow they would suffer later would completely poison the experience: and for this he was completely responsible! She began to wonder just how many women he had duped, and felt like castrating him!

By the third poor victim, Rita had begun to plan her revenge, and it did not take her too long to hatch her plan. She had overheard him talking about his website and remembered his bogus name. She could find no evidence of him on any reputable site and when she looked at the bogus one she realised where he would be at his most vulnerable.

She decided that she would approach him one day in the company of one of the poor women and, after a considerable amount of flattery, she would say that she recognised him from Wikipedia, and, on behalf of the Ubud Writers’ Festival, she would like him to address a session at the upcoming event. He would know immediately that he had been sprung as a bogus writer.

She couldn’t wait to see him squirm, and imagined with glee her playing him at the end of her line. It was just a matter of timing. She had even thought about leaving a copy of a specially written poem in his menu when he went to the toilet, but soon thought better of it.

Her revenge would only be between him and her because the victim would not be aware of what was happening. But when she thought about it, that wasn’t enough. She wanted to hit him much harder. Besides, once she’d done this, it would alert him and he might be a devious and dangerous adversary. She would have to follow up this initial thrust with an immediate killer blow: But how? 

It was his latest victim’s final breakfast with him and she was devastated. He had promised that, as soon as his advance for his latest novel came through, he would join her in the States and they could go on the South American trip they had talked about. He wanted, he said, to pay her back for everything she had done for him and, because he loved her so much, to start a new life together somewhere away from her money-grabbing husband.

After a tearful breakfast of their favourite foods and juices and a lingering kiss of desperation, she climbed into the Kijang and, tears streaming down her face, watched as he shrank in the rear window. Once she was out of sight, he no longer had to pretend to wipe his tears with the blue scarf she had bought him, and which brought out the blue of the eyes she loved so much.

He turned and crossed the road into the path of a motor scooter. The rider slammed on his brakes too late to avoid hitting him square in the groin. Rita, who had been sitting at an outside table, rushed to help him. He lay on his back laughing at the irony as she asked him, “Are you alright, Devian?”

“Yeah,” he said in a broad New York accent. “I’m fine, just fine. How about you?”

“Well, let me tell you just how I feel,” she whispered, “over a cup of the best coffee in Bali!”