Skin Trade (14 page)

“You see,” he said to me, “it was right for her to stay here with us.”

“What?”

“You might have trusted me all along,” he mumbled under his breath, then added, “now, she needs rest. We must let her rest.”

In the hall outside Lily's room, Lariot told me it was common, this memory loss.

“Will she get it back?”

“In time. Perhaps. Let her rest now.”

For now, it was enough she was alive. I went out into the street with Tolya. He lit my cigarette because I couldn't keep my hands still.

“Let me help, Artyom. Please.”

“I can do it. I'll take her home and I'll take care of her.” I looked at Tolya. “What the hell are you doing here, anyhow?”

“I flew as soon as I heard. I wish you'd called me, I wish I didn't have to hear it from Sonny Lippert. I'm Lily's friend too.”

I thought about the bitter argument we'd had, a stupid fight about money. Tolya didn't fight me fair, so we stopped talking, but I was glad to see the bastard. I was happy to see him. But I didn't want his money.

“I can manage. I can take care of her.”

“Artyom, I love you for this, but you can't do it alone. She needs professional care. Also,” he lowered his voice, leaning over me – I'm a big guy but Tolya's six-six at least – “also she needs to be safe. And Beth. It's better
you spend your time finding the creeps who did this to Lily.” He tossed the butt he held into the gutter and moved aside while a trio of nurses passed. “Before they do it to anyone else.”

Tolya has a paranoid streak. In his New York apartment once, he had a steel-lined room built, a “safety room”. When the banker Edmund Safra died in a fire in his steel shelter in Monte Carlo, incinerated, literally, like a piece of meat, Tolya had his own room ripped out. “I'd rather have a good dog,” he said.

I said to him now, “I'm taking her home. She'll be safe in New York.”

“Don't be crazy, you can't move her yet, OK? We'll fix something for her. I talked to the doctor. I'll get her a private nurse. Also security. It's not good to move her now. This is a good hospital, I checked. Look, Artyom, they took a hammer to her. They smashed her knee, her elbow, fingers, they tried to smash her face.” He was talking his own corrupt mixture of fast Russian and English, like he mostly does with me, and holding my shoulder hard. “You know what they are, people who do this. You know what they can do. Can your friends in New York keep Beth?”

“For a while. But not for ever. And I don't want your money.”

“Good,” he said. “Fine.” He paused. “Who is she, this friend where Beth stays? She's OK?” Tolya doesn't trust anyone he doesn't know since a million years, or hasn't shared a sack of salt with as they say, some Russian bullshit proverb. I'm different. Tolya's cousin Svetlana had loved me. This made us related.

“She's Lily's oldest friend in New York, and her husband.”

“I didn't ask about friendship. I asked do you trust her?”

“They're not the same?”

“No.”

I met Anatoly Sverdloff maybe five, six years ago when he helped me out of a jam on a case in New York that eventually took me back to Moscow. I almost married his cousin, before she got blown up by a bomb intended for me. In Moscow, after my time, but still in the old days when they called rock music “musical AIDS”, Tolya was a rock hero, a famous underground DJ.

Things changed; he became a businessman, he got rich fast. He buys and sells property, minerals, stocks, and, for all I know, people.

Tolya is divorced, his kids are grown up except for the little one who lives with his second ex-wife in Florida. Tolya likes strippers for company. He keeps a small apartment in Moscow and there's his parents' big dacha in the countryside where they still live; otherwise, he's pretty much quit Russia.

I don't look too close at Tolya's business. He got roughed up pretty bad, financially, physically, when he got out of line helping me. Sverdloff covers my ass when I'm in trouble. I step in it, he bails me out. He has the contacts and the dough. I was never sure who he was or how he moves so easily between what's legit and what's illegal. I never knew how he made the money and I don't care. He's crazy about Lily and Beth.

As we left the hospital, I could smell the brandy on his clothes. In spite of the black overcoat, his teeth chattered.

“You're cold? You want to rest?”

He said, “Shower first.”

“How did you get here?”

“I got a ride.” Tolya doesn't often fly commercial; he always knows someone with a plane. “I only heard last night.”

We walked to my hotel, and I could see his mountain of a body slump.

“Lily will be fine,” he said. “She will, you hear me, Artyom?”

“Yeah.”

He clutched my jacket and said, “She'll be fine!”

I opened the door of my hotel.

Tolya looked at the lobby. “Jesus, Artie, I can't stay here. This place is a dump.”

“Fine. Stay where you want.”

“I ask you one more time, why you didn't call me?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know? You're still mad about that deal I did in Havana.”

“No, I'm not mad. So, thanks for coming. Thanks.” I switched to Russian. “Thank you.” We got to my room and I went in. He followed and sat heavily on my bed. He dragged off his coat and then his jacket. The black silk shirt was creased. Automatically he emptied his jacket pockets onto the bedside table: wads of money held together with a platinum clip; keys; a lighter; a pack of little Havana cigars; cigarettes; a silver cell phone; a dog-eared paperback copy of
1984
that he always carries.
He once told me it was his first act of sedition as a kid, reading
1984.
The broken orange-and-white Penguin paperback, the same copy he had as a schoolboy, was held together with Scotch tape.

“What happened?” he said.

“Take a shower first.”

“No, tell me what happened.”

I told him. I told him about Lily's moods, about New Year's Eve, her trip to Paris, the beating, the fact she'd canceled out her life – no credit-card stuff, no phone bills. I told him about Levesque and Momo Gourad and the roller-coaster.

“Who was this guy you went to see?”

“Larkin? He was a guy at a bank. A case I've been working. He was a drunk.”

“You never talked to him after?”

“I couldn't find him. His concierge said he went on vacation.”

“So someone got to him.”

“Yes.”

“Someone who wanted to scare you.”

“Yeah.”

Tolya said, “What else?”

“A thug who threatened me in a bar.”

“You left it alone?”

“For the time being.”

“Good.”

“Why?”

“You kill one of these guys out in the open, you bring a shit-storm on your head. This cop, this Gourad, you trust him? You believe him?”

I told him what I knew.

He said, “You think I'm going to believe a French cop?”

“You're saying he has his own agenda?”

“That's what I'm saying. What else?”

“He likes to eat a lot.”

“Fantastic,” Tolya's sarcasm was thick.

“Like you.”

“Fuck you. You have a picture of Lily? From the scene?”

I went and got the picture of Lily and put it on the table. He stared at the police picture very hard and very, very softly said, “I'm going to kill them.”

“Who the hell are you going to kill? We don't know who did this or why they did it, so calm the fuck down, will you and let's try to figure it out. OK? I'm sorry, I'm crazy, so go take a shower and we'll go get some food and talk. You look like shit.” I smiled at him. “OK?”

Sverdloff nodded, picked up his overnight bag and went into the bathroom. I could hear the water run hard for a long time.

He reappeared in leather pants, a gray cashmere sweat-shirt and a brown suede jacket. On his feet were bright-green Gucci loafers; he gets them custom-made with solid gold buckles.

Tolya ran his fingers through his wet black hair and said, “You're right. I need food. First, we can visit your roller-coaster, also Mr Stuart Larkin.”

The black Mercedes left us near the bar where I'd met Stuart Larkin. The bar was half empty. I didn't recognize
the bartender. I asked the guy who was on if he knew Stuart Larkin.

“Who?”

I gave him the details.

“Never saw him,” he said.

The amusement park, the little Christmas fair near the Porte de Vanves, was gone. There was no music, the sign was gone, the lights were gone, the stalls, rides, everything.

“Where is it?” Tolya was impatient.

“It's gone. Gimme a smoke if you have one, Toi, OK?”

Snow had been falling. I started walking, kicking at the snow and ice, but there was nothing, no tarps, no boards. It was as if I'd imagined the whole thing. It shook me. I felt I was hallucinating. I began to run, searching the empty lot.

“Stop it,” Tolya called out to me. “Stop this.”

“I don't understand.”

“So maybe the season was over. Maybe the fair is finished,” he said. “This happens. It's nothing,” he added, but I could see he thought I was cracking up.

Panting for breath, I stopped, put my hands on my knees. “I'm glad you're here.”

“Good.”

“Don't worry. I don't want to fuck you or anything.”

“Also good. You think maybe, Artyom, you think this whole business, this attack on Lily, everything, was a message to you? A warning?”

“That's what scares the shit out of me. This Levesque thing is connected and I don't know how or why. I go
to talk to some jerk at a bank, some boring bank guy and I ask for a surveillance tape, and next thing I know someone wants to fucking scare me to death on a roller-coaster. It was a paper trail. Lily gets interested. She goes to Paris, the next thing I know she's on the floor of an apartment with her face smashed and her bones broken.”

“Whose apartment?”

“I asked. No one knows. It's empty. The cops are trying to trace the landlord. I've been calling them every couple hours. Nothing. Nada.”

“Why Paris?”

“She told me she was going to Paris to see a friend, do some shopping. I was going to meet her. Then I got the call. I told you.”

“What kind of friend?”

“Martha Burnham. A woman she went to college with.”

“Someone we ought to visit?”

“I visited her. She doesn't give much away. She works with prostitutes.”

“So we'll visit her again.” He peered into the dark, looking for the fun-fair.

“It's all gone,” I said.

“Let's get out of here.”

We got to the car and climbed in. “Where we going?”

“I'll get a room at the Raphael,” he said. “You know this hotel?”

“I've heard of it.”

“You want me to get you a room?”

“No.”

“Listen, I'll check in and make some calls, then I want to see Lily again. OK? Meet me.”

“Tolya?”

“What?”

“You ever heard of this thing with the hammer, the way they broke Lily's fingers? Someone told me it's a signature.”

“I don't know. But there's plenty of whores in Paris, so you got to figure there's plenty of pimps to smash them up. Europe is jammed with whores; they're spilling out over the continent. Good business, Artyom. Guys are not satisfied with stocks, you can't fuck a stock, though they try. They want women, deserve women. Remember, it was Miliken, I think, who said after a hard day making money, it's company's job to see they get laid. You can't get a blow job from computer. You get me? This is bigger than drugs.” He paused. “Who told you about the signature?”

I told him about Katya Slobodkin.

Tolya snorted. “You believe what you heard from a Russian hooker? What else you aren't telling me?”

“They raped Lily.”

“My God,” he said.

The car pulled up at his hotel and I followed him into the lobby.

“What?”

“I want to see these bastards with their brains on the floor.”

Six days. It was six days since Lily was smashed up and I had pieces but no picture, no way to fit the puzzle together. Monday, when I woke up, I felt numb.

When Lily was unconscious, when I thought she was dying, I hurt all the time; it seemed that my skin would peel off and leave me without any protection. She woke up, I went numb.

I sat with her Monday morning. I was happy to hear her breath, happy when she opened her eyes. But I felt sedated, like the patients they rolled down the hall to the operating rooms.

Around eleven, there was a knock on her door, and an old man put his head in and introduced himself. I got up. Bernard Alpert, he said, how do you do, and put out his left hand for me to shake. The right hand was so crippled by arthritis it was clenched up like an animal's paw. He gestured to the empty chair near the bed where I'd been sitting.

“May I?” he said in English.

“Please.”

He examined Lily. He spoke sweetly to her and she opened her eyes. I stood by the window watching them. After a while, leaning on his cane, Alpert got up. “I'll be in my office,” he said and told me the room number.

I kissed Lily and followed Alpert. In his tiny office, where he sat dwarfed behind a desk piled with papers and books, he gestured for me to sit in the armchair. It was covered with an old bedspread.

“I had heard from Dr Lariot that you wanted another opinion. He asked me to look in on your wife.”

“Thank you.”

He was speaking English with a heavy French accent. “I do not know if you will thank me.”

“Why?”

“In my opinion, it is not good. I must tell you.” He was a handsome old man, but he had the lugubrious jowls of a hound dog. Maybe he got them from decades of delivering bad news. “I think her memory-loss is severe.”