Skin Trade (18 page)

“That is different.”

“Why?”

“It just is. You've never been to whores?”

“No.”

She got up and, naked, went to the video and slipped a tape in. “You like to watch something?” She had me picked for a soft-porn guy. The picture was a blur of romantic narrative and naked bodies.

I said, “Who goes to whores? Who are the men?”

“Everyone. Your friends. Men think we do things wives don't do, girlfriends don't do.”

“What do you do?”

She whispered in my ear for a while longer. She smiled. “Guys need this. East. West. Some daddies, nice guys, wife, two kids, they stop on way home. Nice guys like you. People who got everything and want to buy other thing. Exotic piece of ass.” She grinned and turned her own smooth, tight, lovely ass towards me.

“Why not? Some guys like sex, no relationships. Too messy. Check it out. Buy it. Fuck it. Stock market up,
people rich, happy, spending, shopping. This is nice thing, like drug, you know?” She giggled and offered me her wonderful tits. “No one admits this, but is true. Tell me what you like.”

“I don't have any money.”

“I said I was not asking for your money.”

“What? For what?”

“I told you.”

“You want me to kill him?”

“Yes.”

“So this is a trade arrangement.”

“Something like that. US, Mexico, European Union, yes, is trade.”

“Put your clothes on.”

“No,” she said and started unbuttoning my shirt.

An hour later, I put my clothes on. I said “Thank you” because I didn't know what to say.

“I thank you, Artemy,” Katya said. “Was very nice.”

“So who the hell owns this place?”

“Don't you know?”

“Not Zhaba?”

“You think I would be here if it was him, this piece of garbage from underneath earth?”

“Then who?”

“Guess.”

“I can't.”

“Try. One try.” She was laughing.

“OK, Eric fucking Levesque.”

“I don't know who is Levesque.”

“I give up.” I was impatient.

She laughed as if my not knowing was part of the game.

“But you know this, of course,” she said. “The owner is your friend Anatoly Sverdloff. Bye bye, Artie.”

I didn't go to my hotel. It was freezing out, but dry, and the moon was white and cold like a fluorescent bulb that lit up the empty streets. The hairs in my nose froze as I left the club, but I walked anyway, even when the wind blew, stinging my face like an infection. I needed the air. I felt lousy about what I did with Katya and the cold sobered me up fast.

If Tolya Sverdloff owned a club where Katya Slobodkin worked, who could I trust? Paris was an alien place where everyone I met was foreign, like me, where you slid on the surface, looking for a foothold. I could never get under the surface in this city that flirted with you, teased you, trashed your sanity with its beauty, then pulled its shutters down.

I kept walking. It was three in the morning by the time I crossed the river. A cloud skittered across the moon; it felt like snow again. I was losing Lily. The creep who attacked her had been in the club, and all Katya wanted from me was to kill for her.

On Boulevard Saint-Germaine there were still lights in a café; through its windows, I saw people talking, drinking, laughing, animated, distant as people on the moon.

All my life I wanted to come to Paris. People love Paris, I thought, walking faster. Musicians came and played great jazz here when they couldn't get work at
home. People write songs about Paris, and novels, they love the buildings, the food, the style, the language, the way the city fits together. But it was too beautiful and too cold, and it had fucked me over and swallowed me up. A lone taxi passed and I flagged it down. It was very late when I got to Martha Burnham's. I leaned on the buzzer.

“What?” Through the crackle of the intercom, she sounded pissed off.

“I have to see you.”

“Phone me.”

“You don't answer your phone.”

“It's the middle of the night.”

I lied. “Lily asked me to come.”

The door clicked open and I went in and took the elevator to the top floor.

Martha had a studio apartment with Indian bedspreads for curtains, a futon to sleep on and a set of wind-chimes in the window. It felt solitary and somehow lonely. There was a stick of incense in a jam jar.

Wearing a huge red-plaid flannel bathrobe, Martha bolted the door, gestured to an orange beanbag chair, then sat cross-legged on the futon.

“Listen, I'm sorry I woke you up.”

“I figured you'd come. How's Lily?”

“What?”

“You were lying when you said Lily asked you to come.” It wasn't a question.

“You never went to see her.”

“I went.”

“So you saw what they did to her.”

She reached to the low driftwood table, picked up some paper and a plastic bag of grass and started rolling a joint anxiously.

“Yes.”

“When?”

“What's the difference?”

“Help me here.”

“You want to drink something?”

“Coffee would be good.”

Still holding the rough joint she'd rolled, she lumbered to her feet and went around the counter into the open kitchen where she filled a saucepan with water.

“You never told me you put a security guy with Lily. He tried to keep me out.”

“I said I tried to call you.”

“You saw me through the window at McDonald's?”

“Yes. You took one look at me and beat it out of there. I don't get it, Martha. Why? We're on the same side.”

“I was with a girl who was in trouble.”

“Not good enough.”

“I'm scared.”

“What of?”

“Everything.”

“I don't really believe that. You don't scare that easy. You want to tell me some other stuff about Lily's visit? I know there's things you didn't tell me.”

“It was between her and me.”

“Your secret.”

“Fuck you.”

She turned around, her back to the stove, elbows on the
counter between us. She fiddled with the leaves of a plant in a red and yellow pot, looked up at me and said, “This wasn't some girl thing, you know, we were working, we were trying to fix something. I'm still trying.” The water boiled and Martha fixed up mugs of instant. “Milk?”

“Black.”

She brought the mugs, put them on the table, sat down again, rolled a second joint and offered it to me. I shook my head. She lit her own.

Martha said, “Look, this stuff sucks. Girls get beaten up and killed and no one really gives a fuck so long as they don't do it in front of the Louvre.”

“They care if it's an American.”

“Up to a point.”

“What point?”

“She didn't die. She'll go home. The cops will write it all down somewhere and file it and apologize to the embassy.”

I hesitated. Martha was volatile and furious and she smoked the dope like it was going to save her life. If I told her about Zhaba, she might run off the rails.

“How come some thug who normally beats up hookers attacked Lily?”

“Maybe because she came to see me.”

“How would they know?”

“Maybe they got it off a cell phone,” she said. “I don't know how. Maybe I mentioned it to someone at the shelter, that I was seeing her, because I was so excited, and the word got around. Maybe I told a friend on the phone. I feel shitty about that. I feel maybe it was because of me.”

“Or me. How come she really called you, after all those years?”

“I thought she missed me.”

“Bullshit.”

“I wanted to believe the bullshit.”

The coffee tasted like old socks, but I drank some. Martha pushed herself off the floor and went to the window where she stood for a minute, looking out. She fiddled with the wind-chimes that hung from the ceiling over her stove, then said, “It's going to snow again.”

Martha was ready to snap. I clutched the coffee mug and kept my mouth shut.

“She said she wanted to keep this whole business between us,” Martha said. “She said she couldn't tell you. Specifically, she said so.”

“She threw away anything that would connect her to it, right? Air tickets. Receipts. She cleaned her desk like she was hiding something.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I need a drink.” Martha went to the kitchen, pulled a small tray of gray ice cubes out, dumped them in a glass, poured some vodka on top, sat down for the third time.

“She said she made you give up being a cop because she was scared for you, and now she was sticking her own nose in bad stuff and you'd worry. You'd make her stop and she couldn't stop.”

“You saw how Lily is. Whoever did this shit could be anywhere.” I leaned close to Martha's face. “I'm running out of time here, and I need Lily to remember and she can't unless you fucking help me.”

Martha squinted as she sucked up some ice. “I'm so thirsty.”

“Help me.” I was at the end of my rope. “You want them to do you next?” I grabbed her arm.

“You bastard.” Martha twisted her arm out of my grasp, reached behind her and fumbled for a tape, then slid it into the video player. “Lily made me swear not to tell anyone.”

“So what's the tape?”

“I swore.”

“What's on the goddam tape?”

“Lily. She made me tape her. She sat there where you are and told me.”

“Why?”

“In case someone killed her.”

Lily's voice: “OK? OK, Marti?”

The picture settles. Lily's smiling at the camera. On the screen, wearing her gray pants suit, her aunt's silver pin in the lapel, the diamond earrings I gave her. Her hair is video orange, but it's long, same as it was when I left her at the train for Paris. She pushes it up off her neck, fixes it with a rubber band, says, “Hold the camera still, Marti, for Chrissake. Hold it on the back of a chair if you have to.” She puts her hands up to her hair again.

Martha's voice: “You ready?”

“Let's go. Marti?”

“I'm with you, honey, I'm all set.”

“I'm Lily Hanes and this is what happened to me in London on December twenty-ninth and thirtieth.”

Martha's voice: “Do you want me to ask you questions?”

“Not unless you think I'm leaving something out.”

“Got it.”

“I'm recording this in Paris at Martha Burnham's apartment on the night of January second. I called
Martha from London and said I wanted to come and see her. I was going to Paris anyway the next day, with Artie, but I told him I was going a day early to see a friend.” She hesitates, then seems to look out from the screen at me. “If you're watching this, Artie, if you are, I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I needed to do this.”

I lit a cigarette and watched Lily.

“I had some bad times: that night in the pub, first of all, then on the wheel on New Year's Eve. Artie knew there was something wrong. It started the day we got to London. The twenty-seventh. I was in the apartment alone, wandering around. I was kind of restless. Artie went over to the Keyes office. I did some unpacking and then I saw this file with his stuff. It didn't have a name. I glanced through it. There were notes about a model agency in Paris, and I thought maybe it was a front for prostitutes, there have been a lot of cases I knew about, so I made a few phone calls.” She grins. “OK, I made a ton of calls. I called everyone I know who works with prostitution, there are a lot of women's groups, journalists. Martha, of course. I couldn't help it. Maybe it was nothing and I was restless, or I'm paranoid, but I couldn't leave it alone, it was like a scab on your nose and you have to pick it.”

“Who did you call?” Crouched on the floor, face almost against the screen, I was talking at Lily. Behind me I could feel Martha watching.

Lily goes on. “A friend at the
Guardian
was working on this stuff. She told me about a string of massage parlors, one especially where there was a lot of activity. So she gives me an address and I end up in north London
somewhere, Walthamstow, some nondescript back street where a few dead trees straggle out of the pavement and women with white legs are pushing strollers. One of the strollers has a broken wheel and it tips over. The woman screams at her kid.” Lily pauses. “Is this OK, Marti? I'm not going too fast?”

Lily, who used to work on TV, is fluent. She tells her story without missing the details, she knows how, she makes you see it. She re-starts her account.

“The place is named Sexy Riviera Tanning Salon. It has a frosted window, and inside there's a creep behind a table with some phones on it, and three girls in bikinis and fake tans, sitting on orange plastic chairs. Another guy is talking to the first one about a delivery. He's a squat man with thick white skin that reminds me of dough, coarse pastry dough, and he has blonde hair like a baby, very thin, that falls over his forehead. He has on sunglasses, and a gold cross around his neck, and when I come in, he says to the guy behind the table, ‘Who the fuck is she?' He's talking something that isn't Russian but sounds like it.”

I knew it was Zhaba in the massage parlor. He was on it even then. It began in London when he saw Lily.

Lily goes on. “I say to the first guy, ‘I want to meet one of your girls.'

“‘Fuck off,' he says.

“‘I'll pay.'

“‘How much?'

“‘A hundred pounds for one girl for fifteen minutes.'

“ It's so outrageous, he probably figures I'm into women or I'm pimping for some man or God knows
what, which is what I want him to think. I realize if the second guy's not Russian, maybe he's Serb. Maybe it's Serbo-Croat he's talking.

“I point at the girl closest to me, and she gets off the chair. I follow her through a door into a back room. She's a kid, really, her ribs are sticking out.