It was going to be the case of the century. Not really, no – it was the case that defined the past three years of her life. It drifted with ease past the stacks of blue plastic files and black permanent markers to the cold wooden planks under her bed.

It had taught her a few things though; One- As she had come to realise five years before, there were things between two people that only they would ever know, right down to the grave. The more you tried to unravel, the less you understood. Two- in life, there were two types of actors; the ones caught on film and the ones who read Robert Greene’s Laws of Power, internalised them and applied them religiously. In a character analysis, they would easily rival Judas -the Judas who planted a kiss of death to direct the huntsman’s mark.

This case would undo, some of the very important rules of Greene’s charades- of subtlety, of disguise. Study your master and give him what you think he wants, except, do. not. outshine. him. Play whoever needs to be played. If it gets you what you want. Fortune tastes better when its cunningly outwitted from those who do not deserve it.

So enchanted by the magic of Greene’s exquisite writing, they were unable to realise that the shadows they practiced under had been written for an audience who too were under the same dizzying spell of power or who had the infantile psychological makeup of King Louis XVI – unable to discern the projections of a maneuverer. It was like watching a game – a ridiculous one.

The girlish games had run their purpose- it was no longer as exciting to splash elaborate amounts of money to buy every person in the office a personal gift for the Christmas party except that one person; and to garishly make a display about reading out the gifts so that they would point out an intention which could have been understood by a bystander. It was now more enticing to throw them off the scent of the antelope, only to come back with sweat on their brow and have to share the entire animal.

The street corners had been like running in slow motion in a dream where you could not escape what was chasing you. Carrying arguments and records of things, in an unattended court file registry room with her eye on the door as the staggering clerk with alcohol on his breath leaned towards her and finally watching it all sink right down to the bottom like The Titanic. With every word, the masked messenger had trashed and undone the delicate layers of her preparation in half a minute. It meant absolutely nothing to him. It showed. He reminded her of Scovid, the maid who always bent forward in a show of servitude but in her eyes you could see the self confident assurance of someone who knew exactly what she was doing. She must have studied the Laws of Power too.

What did she expect- the freshly-cut-grass smell of money, carefully stacked reputations, the trembling expectations of what ‘good connections’ might produce, the allure of respect and affluence, a lifelong hunger for expensive tastes and preferences. This profession was a masked ball.