AN elegant female figure walked into the room and almost instantly, at least half the male heads in the precincts turned.
She had the vital statistics for what Lazzo considered to be an unmistakable contestant in any beauty pageant contest!
The instant aesthetic glamour was no other than Maria who had spent her childhood in the hood.
Lazzo’s mentor had once intimated that she would make a perfect prima donna of the home for any man.
“But she has a problem with her character,” whispered Lazzo’s mentor as the latter reclined his ear to listen some more.
“Do not make a mistake of taking her anywhere in case you are tempted because you will regret it..”,  the informer continued.
Lazzo was filled in about what happened to some hapless man in the hood who had received his pension.
The man had abandoned his family in the northern town of Kabwe and he set off for Lusaka painting the capital city red!
When he and Maria took sanctuary at a popular guest house in the hood, the beleaguered cassanova was ‘cleaned of all the cash in his clothes’ except for what was left in the bank.
“You know, the best way to deal with characters like that?” Lazzo asked with intent to stir a string of revelations.
His listener adjusted his stool by the counter at the watering hole getting closer eagerly preparing for the outpouring of cassanova secrets!
“Everytime you spend a night with such a stranger, make sure that when she at least shows signs of slumbering into deep sleep, tuck all you cash into one of her shoes!,” he disclosed to an amazed Lazzo.
Deep down his heart, he had never thought of a grand idea such as that one and wondered how much he should have known better!
Countless times, he was duped of cash by several shrewed women he bumped into and this included cell phones whose number he has lost count of.
But she was indeed what the old school would describe as a ‘gorgeous damsel’ but whose diction was astoundingly below average.
One time, Lazzo had greeted here and she answered “Find, and you!” but he figured out that she meant “Fine, and you?”.
She had a knack for attracting especially sophisticated strangers to the hood who often instantly got mesmerised by the grace she emitted!
In fact, her greatest break came when she landed a job as a maid in a low-density area east of the cosmopolitan area.
The enigma of the hood with a perfect set of teeth formed a radiant smile that made the missus of the house jealous.
She had become a product of the ‘live-in maid’ syndrome that had gripped the city like wildfire!
Now, Lazzo had noticed that pieces of quarto paper advertisements pasted on public buildings had spread to the hood which seemed to harbour more than a fair share of the female employment market.
The crunch came after a spell at the low-density bungalow whose owner appeared to toe the line of maintaining a nuclear family as opposed to the extended family system.
There seemed to be very little washing of linen and cooking which she enjoyed as she began to show signs of nutritional balance in the long run.
Even her skin texture had changed before she applied the skin bleaching creams she had been accustomed to in the hood at a modest pace.
She had absolutely no idea that the specious bungalow was fitted with Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras!
It followed that periodically, she was engaged in the art of domestic pilfering and had a penchant for small articles that she could smuggle in her large handbag.
First, the children’s clothes and shoes began to disappear until she graduated into conniving with a taxi driver in the hood who would occasionally visit her when the couple went to their workplaces.
Her employers noticed that a few articles in the house were systematically disappearing.
In her perception, there was so much abundance in the bungalow that her naïve assessment failed to perceive right beyond her nose!
When the cameras were played back for a week, they saw what Maria the maid was engaged in while they were out.
So one unsuspecting evening, they let her knock off and travel home into the hood as usual.
She had smuggled some ornaments that she thought would sell on the black market using the taximan!
Before midnight, the couple planned a raid and drove straight to her home and upon letting them in, the man of the house made it clear to Maria that she had stolen the jewellery and he was there to search her.
Apparently, he worked for a security company and seemed to have had the nerve to conduct the search without a warrant.
He entered the bedroom of the two-roomed dungeon in the hood and right there beside her bed was the jewellery as the missus and Maria waited in the sitting room.
The maid had felt the adrenaline run through her nervous system and she sat still in her worn-out sofa she grabbed from her first marriage three years back..
Barely a minute, the employer emerged from the other room and was clutching necklaces and some earings which she had during the first few hours of that evening tried to sell to some womenfolk in the hood.
He had bought the expensive jewellery while on a trip abroad at the time Maria the maid was married in the hood.
“You see, we have been seeing what you have been up to in the house in our absence and this marks the end of our relationship and we won’t take you to the Police but you  will forfeit your pay and goodbye!,” declared the employer in a stern tone.
He then motioned to his perplexed missus for them to take leave and the maid could not help but stand in the doorway to see them drive away into the night.
The proximity factor helped some curious neighbours to rush to the maid who was still standing   by   the   door as to what had happened.
“That was my boss, they said some things had been lost at home and so they came to ask me because when I knocked off, the man and the wife were not there,” she said in a bid to camouflage the truth.
That marked the end of her spell as a maid and now she was out there to sell her beauty once more to the watering hole…