Skin Trade (22 page)

I wanted her to know. I wanted her to remember and I said, “The Seine. And Notre Dame. It's so beautiful. It's as beautiful as you thought, Mom.”

The line went quiet. Someone took the phone away from her, but I kept talking for a while. I couldn't remember the last time I cried. Maybe when Svetlana got blown up in Moscow. Maybe then. I put the receiver carefully back on the hotel phone.

For me it was only Lily, but for Momo Gourad it was war. This business with the women, it was his war and I could hear it in his voice the next morning when he called to tell me Martha Burnham was found dead at her shelter.

“This morning,” Momo said. “The caretaker found her.”

I was on my way to the airport when he called. She had been dead for eight, maybe ten hours, sprawled on the floor in her down vest, hat, skirt, sweater, her bag next to her, the contents dumped on the floor. Shot, Momo said. I had seen her very early Tuesday morning, three, four in the morning. That night they hunted her down at her shelter.

“What about her hair?” I yelled into the phone, but Momo said her hair wasn't touched. They were taking prints and blood to get the DNA, see if it matched what they found with Lily, with the girl behind the billboard. I knew it would match. So did he.

“Momo?”

“What's that?”

“I'll keep you in touch.”

“Good.”

“No, I mean it, I'll call you. Whatever I get, I'll give it to you.”

“Thank you.”

“Is Katya OK?”

“Yes.”

“Is she part of it?”

But all he said was, “I'll give her your regards.”

By the time I got to the terminal that morning, half the flights were late or scratched. There was a blizzard coming in across northern France; freezing weather and floods in Germany over the weekend had turned the country into a skating rink. Air-traffic controllers in Amsterdam were on go-slow.

At seven in the morning, the airport was already jammed with people, yelling, arguing, whining. It was Wednesday. Europe was open for business, but nothing moved, including my flight to Dresden. Katya said take the train, but the plane would be faster. I could be back with Lily that night or the next morning.

At the Hertz counter fifty people were screaming for rentals, even though the highways were jammed with protesting French truckers. A man in the Hertz line told me that the eighteen-wheelers were walled in by the weather. He was a Brit with a bald head and a briefcase and those expensive shoes you get made to measure. He was talking into a phone and when he snapped it shut, he said to me, “I'm getting the train. Would you like a lift? I have a car. I kept a taxi waiting just in case.”

*

The Gare de l'Est was bleak and cold. A wild-eyed kid tried to carry my bag for tips. I yanked it away, gave him some change, waited restlessly in line and got a ticket to Dresden. The train left at 8.20.

The station was packed with people trapped by the storm. They put on extra trains. When I finally climbed on, it had old-fashioned compartments, the kind I hadn't seen since we left Moscow, my mother, her Agatha Christie in her hand, my father staring out of the window, tears on his face.

There was a window seat in smoking. I climbed over five German soldiers so young they had blonde fuzz on their faces. Going home, one said in English.

The train was jammed. Heaving my bag onto the shelf over my seat, I sat down and rubbed mist from the window.

Suddenly I saw a man on the platform who looked like Joe Fallon. His back was to me, he had a heavy suitcase in one hand and a black leather backpack. I couldn't see his face, but it looked like Joe. I stumbled over the Germans, who were too polite to complain. I scrambled to the door where people were piling in luggage and yelling at each other.

“Joe?” I leaned out. “Joe?”

But Joe was sucked up by the chaotic crowds and I never made out if it was him or my imagination. Then the train pushed out of the station.

The snow came down against the window in big, relentless flakes. It was six and a half hours to Frankfurt, where I would change trains. I called Lily a couple of times and got the nurse. On and off, I tried to read a copy
of
The Quiet American
I'd found with Lily's stuff. I used Zhaba's picture as a bookmark; the face was imprinted on my brain, the thick white skin, pale eyes, thin blonde hair, high forehead. The train was hot. I started to sweat.

My German soldiers snored and I stood in the corridor for a while, leaning against the window, holding my book, watching Europe out the window – France, the border, Germany, Saarbrucken, Kaiserslautern. I could have moved nuclear samples or humped cash, guns, drugs, women. I could have brought a ton of Semtex on board. The global economy. Only the weather could shut it down.

All around me, businessmen yakked into their cell phones and tapped on their computers, then gave up when the phones went dead. The signals were lousy; millions of people trying to get through tied up the networks if they were working at all.

The further we went, the more I felt like a tourist trapped somewhere on the wrong side of the border. But the immigration guy barely glanced at my passport. He didn't know I was on my way east looking to kill a man.

In Frankfurt I changed trains, grabbed a sandwich, stood up in the bar-car to eat it and watched the landscape. Weimar, Leipzig. I finished the sandwich and drank a warm beer, watching the scenery get flatter as we rumbled into the borderlands where the Iron Curtain once ran twelve hundred miles.

Alongside the tracks were parts of broken trains; I could see the rust through the snow. All that remained of the railway sheds were piles of shattered brick. Smoke stacks spewed filth, streams were so polluted you could
see the thick green algae through the ice. I called the hospital, where a night nurse told me Lily was asleep and Tolya was in her room. I got through to my machine in New York to check for messages like I do every day, but all I heard was the voice of a cop I used to know asking me to his stag night at El Teddy's, four hang-ups, and Joe Fallon in Paris, unable to reach me anyplace else, wanting to take me to dinner if I was still in town. More hang-ups. Then Momo Gourad. Where are you? Call me.

For another half hour I tried calling. I left him more messages. He was my only life-line.

In spite of the weather, the train was on time. We hit Dresden at 7.47 and I got a cab to the airport car rental. I thought about the fire bombing in Dresden, about the way people got their feet stuck in hot tar and were burned alive. They couldn't move their feet, so they stood there and burned to death. All I really knew was what I read in Kurt Vonnegut, though. For me, in a way, it was only fiction, more or less.

At Hertz, I signed for the car I'd reserved. Then I slid Zhaba's picture across the counter. The agent looked down. Politely, because all Germans seemed polite, he shook his head. Never saw this one, he said. You are police? I said no and asked for directions. He tugged his earring and spread out a map.

The roads out of town were empty. The snow and ice had scared off the tourists and most of the commuters; people stayed home in bed or hunkered down in airports.

I used some of the cash Tolya gave me for the rented Mercedes, which held the road in spite of the weather. I
drove slowly in the dark, skidding a couple of times. I was heading south for the border, where Katya figured Zhaba worked.

At the gas station where I stopped for a drink, at a roadside café where I got a sandwich, I showed the picture. I made noise. I complained. People would remember me. Someone would talk. I wanted him coming after me. I wanted him out in the open. I wanted it over.

I ran into a Dutch film crew and a famous French actor at the café; they were making a low-budget feature about Albanian refugees. The old Iron Curtain road had become fashionable and the Balkans were Europe's Vietnam all over again.

It was flat borderland here, and I drove, trying to stay awake, fiddling with the radio, listening to news in foreign languages.

No oceans, no mountains, just flat, bleak countryside, easy pickings for the hoards that had run over it, up to the Baltic, down towards the Adriatic. Turks and Swedes, Mongols and Prussians. Most of all, Russians.

Except for the weather that slowed me down, it wasn't far. I saw the signs for the border, and at Raitzenhaim I crossed into the Czech Republic, where I pulled off the road. There was a gas station, a bar and a supermarket where all you could buy were big pieces of Czech cheese, garden gnomes and women.

“Mister.”

A voice called from the side of the road, and through the murky night I could make out women, some standing, others leaning against buildings. It was snowing. Hard to make out their faces. I was out of cigarettes and I needed one really bad.

It snowed on the garden furniture that seemed to be the staple of this gloomy duty-free pit-stop; the dwarfish figures with Santa caps stood near the plastic window boxes along the side of the road. There was soaking wet astro-turf rolled up into three-foot wheels. Some of the hookers leaned against the stuff.

A car in front of me pulled up sharp so I almost rammed it, then parked on the shoulder. A woman in a clear plastic raincoat darted out, inspected the gnomes, picked up a three-foot statuette and struggled with it until a man came out of the shed. They bickered for a while. Then she paid and dragged her prize triumphantly into her car.

A week ago I was in London feeling happy, now I was
trapped behind a woman buying a gnome. I parked and went inside to get cigarettes.

A few yards further along, the supermarket was run by a Vietnamese couple. North Vietnamese? South? Who can tell the difference these days? Nobody lives where they come from anymore; nobody lives anyplace. They were residents of the Czech Republic now, and they sold cheap make-up, canned fish, chopsticks, plastic toys, stuff only people in the East would have wanted, maybe still did.

This was where the Iron Curtain once ran, three rows of barbed wire, the land between the wire mined, the fence electrified, guards with dogs. All gone now, and there was only the duty-free and the snow.

The big cars swished past: Mercedes, BMWs, snappy Golfs, the stylish Audis, SUVs. People stopped for drinks or gas, then took off again, going somewhere, moving on, heading for home. Inside, a few tourists, stranded by the weather, fingered the lousy goods. Three Czech hoods hung around the duty-free liquor. An American in a pink ski jacket grabbed some Juicy Fruit and a few cans of Coke, looked at the hoods and beat it back to his rental car.

I wanted to get back to the road where the women were, but the creeps, two short, one tall, were watching me. They were big-shouldered men in their twenties, stubble on their faces, gold chains looped around their necks. They looked stupid and pissed-off. Maybe they were friends with Zhaba.

I roamed the aisles, fumbled with cartons of Marlboros. I bought some, then showed the Vietnamese
woman the picture; she shook her head. No, she said. Don't know.

A display of beach towels that featured Siegfried and Roy and Michael Jackson, dripped on a line outside. Banks of dirty snow, a foot high, had frozen over into hedges alongside the road.

I got in my car and called Paris. I left the window open a few inches so I could breathe.

“How is she?” I yelled into the cell phone, trying to hear Tolya's voice. “How's Lily?”

“Sort of –”

“Sort of what?”

“Where are you, man?”

The signal broke up. I shouted. “Tell me you're with her.”

“I'm with her.”

“In her room? Swear on your kids.”

“I can't hear you.”

“Hey, Mister.” The voice came from the side of the road and I squinted into the snow.

“Mister! Over here!”

The phone went dead.

“Mister.”

I punched a button and the window rolled down further; a stinging wind blew snow into the car.

“Mister. Over here. Cheap.”

The girl who lurched to the side of the car was wearing thigh-high white plastic boots with stiletto heels, fishnet stockings with a hole in them, hot pants and a fake zebra jacket. She held a red umbrella over her head.

This was where the hookers worked. Katya said so. Zhaba worked here, she'd said. He was here. Somewhere behind the screen of snow-laden trees there were houses, or hotels, where they took the customers.

The girl signaled me to drive forward a few feet and pull off onto the shoulder, then she leaned through the window.

“Cheap stuff,” she said again in English.

“How much?” I stuck my head out into the snow.

“Hundred dollars,” she said.

“That's not cheap.”

“How much?”

“That depends.”

Two other women materialized as soon as I climbed out of the car and I showed them Zhaba's picture. “I want him.”

“For money?”

“Yes.”

She looked at the picture, but one of the others shook her head as if in warning and said, “We don't know him.”

I looked at the girl in the white plastic boots. “What about you?”

She hesitated. “No.”

“Ask around.” I gave her a twenty.

“Maybe.”

I pointed back to the shop where I bought the cigarettes. There was a bar next door. “I'll wait.”

She held her hand out again. I gave her another twenty, made sure all the women saw me do it, looked at my watch. It was eleven. I pointed at the dial, said I'd
wait until midnight. The word would get around some rich American asshole was spending money. I didn't expect the girls to give Zhaba up, but someone would know him if he was here, if he had been here. I could wait. I headed for the bar.

SEXDOLLS.COM
was his website, though he said he had a second one called “happypoking”. The guy in the bar told me his on-line business was determining the “fuckability' of girls at various bars, hotels and rest stops along Europe's highways, especially here, European Highway 55. Name's Finn, he added, with a matter-of-fact smile, How do you do? He was the kind of guy who made quotation marks in the air with his fingers when he said “fuckability”.