Skin Trade (24 page)

The three of us got in the Mercedes, the two women in back, and they directed me up a muddy track off the side of the road. The car slid for a few feet on the ice, then came to a stop.

“You can park there.” She gestured to a short stretch of road near some bushes.

“Where'd you learn the English?”

“In school,” she said.

Up a sloping path, about a hundred yards away, was a building. It was a Soviet-style apartment house, three stories, holes in some of the windows, rough boards nailed over them. The ground was frozen and there were dirty crusts of snow. Garbage cans overflowed and there were slabs of wood and concrete blocks in a random heap; it looked like a war zone.

She called herself Amber, she said, because most of the girls took “professional' names. She came from a provincial town in Bosnia, had spent some time in Vienna where she worked as a nurse's aid; the Austrians despised the Balkan refugees and let them know it. Jobs were hard to get, she added as we went into the building.

She led me down a long corridor smeared with graffiti. Half the light bulbs were burned out. From outside you could hear the wind scream.

Chanelle, the younger girl, followed us down the hall, but when Amber opened a door she continued walking. I figured she had a room of her own.

Two straight chairs, a table, a small window draped with some faded fabric, a couch covered with a dirty spread, a single bed. Amber's room also contained a dripping sink. Above it was a bottle of purple schnapps. Amber found two glasses, then poured the stuff in them and offered me one. I gulped it down. It was thick, sweet, strong.

Amber, who talked a mix of bad English and bad Russian to me, finished her drink, tossed off her thick jacket and made to take off the crocheted black sweater she wore underneath it. I shook my head and sat on the chair and asked her to sit down.

She said, “You look healthy. You have money. You don't like me? You want someone else? Younger? Different color?”

“I'm healthy,” I said. “But I didn't come for that.” I put Zhaba's picture on the table. I put the police picture of Lily next to it. “This is what I came for.”

Amber, who told me she had a couple kids of her own in Bosnia with her mother, poured herself another glass full of the thick purple liqueur; she held it up to the light, made a face, knocked it back, then peered at the photograph. “Someone you know?”

“Yes. A friend.”

“I would like to help.”

“Why's that?”

“I'm garbage, but I'm my own garbage most of the time. The pimps don't bother with me so much now.” She added, “I'm too old and too cheap.”

She thought Lily was one of them, but I let it go.

“What do they bother with?”

I needed her to trust me. If she knew Zhaba, she wouldn't talk unless there was something in it for her, unless she trusted me. Maybe not even then.

Amber gestured at her sweater again. “You paid. You're welcome. They don't usually look so nice, so polite, these guys, as you.” She looked around. “We could go into Teplice. Nice hotel.” It was a diversion. The picture of Zhaba scared her.

“It's OK. Who do they bother with, the pimps?”

She wandered around the room now, moving heavily, tugging at her sweater, then sitting down on the bed.

Softly, I said again, “Who do they bother with?”

“Young. They like fresh girls, young, that wants to get out of shitty life, Albanian, Bosnia, Ukraine, doesn't matter, so they promise them jobs in West, take passports, move girls to Paris, London, Middle East. This is big traffic,” she said. “Once, it makes me very angry. Now I think, what can I do? Vienna is big town for trade of whores.” She spat when she said it.

“Is that where the pimps work out of?”

“They move around.”

“Russians?”

“Russians at top. Also Albanian gangs. Serbs, especially.” She winced. “Especially if they can find Bosnian girls. They continue the war only now they got girls instead of guns.”

It was what Katya had told me.

“You?”

She nodded. “The little one you met also is from Bosnia. You want to talk? You have more lovely dollars?”

“Sure.”

“She could use help.” Amber went to the door. “She has baby. She takes care of her kid, not like whores who abandon children. In Czechia near German border are child-homes full of kids left by whores.”

Amber left me alone in the dismal room. There was an electric heater and I switched it on, but the bars that turned red were cold. From the road I heard traffic heading south to Prague, then Vienna.

The door opened. Amber came back with Chanelle. She pulled her sweater tight around her little body and looked at me warily. Amber spoke to her. I offered Chanelle a cigarette and cash. She took both, then sat on the bed, legs crossed. Her legs, in her tight jeans, were thin as sticks.

“What do you want?” she said in English.

I pointed at the pictures of Lily and Zhaba. “I'm looking for a man who beats up women like this. He beats them, he breaks their fingers, and sometimes he rapes them, and cuts their hair off for a trophy. Do you understand?”

She nodded.

“Is this him? Your friend said you knew.”

Slowly, Chanelle rolled up the sleeves of her pink sweater and showed me the bruises on her elbows. One of them had been badly set and the bone stuck out at an awkward angle. She said softly, “I know who does this beating.”

“Who? Is it him, this Zhaba?”

“If I tell you, they'll come again and break my head this time.”

“I'll find a way to protect you.” I lied to her because of Lily.

The girl helped herself to the purple liqueur. She lifted the bottle to her lips and sucked some out. It left a smear on her lips. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, then lit the cigarette and glanced out of the window into the night. She patted the bed beside her. I went and sat next to her. I could smell her. She had on plenty of perfume but she was just a kid. I wondered what she thought about, how she was inside. If she had any insides left.

“There are ways to protect you,” I said again. “I could help you.”

“I will take more cash instead,” she said. “Also I want to eat.”

There was a greasy plastic menu and I ordered the two most expensive bottles of wine on the list and steak for all of us, though Chanelle wanted fish. There wasn't any fish, except the herring that passed for an appetizer. It came out of a jar.

The restaurant was up a back road from the building where the women lived. The village consisted of a couple of farm houses, a derelict gas station, a shuttered shop and, in a low, stained stucco building, the restaurant. Lights were in the windows, there was a Pils sign on the door, and Streisand was singing “Send in the Clowns”.

Another day had gone by and I still had no hard information about Zhaba. It made me impatient and crazy, but I knew I had to take it easy now or Chanelle would back off. She wore a white knitted cap with a yellow pom pom.

The half-dozen tables in the restaurant were all occupied by men. There was a stuffed fish on the wall. The bartender, a man with a pencil mustache and not much hair, worked frantically serving up the booze, and there was, from a kitchen somewhere, the heavy smell of meat frying. It was night in the middle of Europe in a village whose name I didn't know, and I was eating herring with a couple of hookers called Amber and Chanelle. I scanned the men in the room. Zhaba wasn't there.

Amber drank a couple of glasses of red wine. Chanelle drank steadily but left her food untouched. The older woman reached over and stabbed Chanelle's herring up with her fork and ate it. A tall man I recognized from the Vietnamese supermarket glanced at me and Amber saw me stare back.

“Leave it,” she said. “He's nothing.” She went back to her food, but added, “Like he thinks he is in movie.”

“So what's your movie?”

“
Terminator.
” She paused for effect and flexed her arms, though there wasn't much muscle. “Some day, I say to myself, I'm going to get money and come back and …” She looked around at the creeps hunkered down in the dim room, the smoke rising, Streisand singing, the stink of fried food. Amber chortled and dragged my cigarettes across the table.

I looked at Chanelle. “You want to talk here?”

Her voice was low. “Here is OK. Nobody speaks English, also there is noise. No one thinks you are talking except for sex.” She put my hand on her thigh. “Fake it like this is business, OK?”

Her flesh was warm through the jeans. It was hot in the restaurant. She pushed her plate aside, leaned her arms on the table, leaned her chin on them. In one hand she clutched the glass of vodka she was drinking now. I leaned forward.

“This woman you show us who gets hurt, she's also whore?”

She meant Lily. I said, “No.”

“So why?”

“She tried to help girls who got hurt.”

Chanelle snorted. “She's crazy. What's to help?”

I kept quiet.

Amber leaned over and put her arm around the girl. “If she's not whore, somebody big is very angry, because is not normal to mess around other women.”

“Who?”

“I don't know.”

“What about him?” I held up the picture. “This one they call Zhaba.”

They looked at each other. Chanelle shook her head. “We don't know.”

“You said you knew. You showed me your arm.”

“I don't know.” She turned petulant.

“Is he a boss? He collects the dolls?”

“I said I don't know.”

“What do you want?”

“I told you. Give us money.”

“Then tell me where to find him. Tell me where he works. Is he here?” I looked around. “Is he?”

“Wait,” she said, and I knew now it was bullshit. She didn't know. Neither of them knew.

“I can't wait.”

By two in the morning, loud bad Czech rock on the stereo, everyone in the restaurant was stupid drunk. The tables were crammed with empties, beer, vodka, schnapps. The owner took away the piles of dishes. A couple more girls wandered in. You could feel fights brewing up, the men laughing too loud, yelling, joking. One of them looked at the women with me and called out something dirty; the other men laughed harder.

I threw some money on the table, we got up, Amber and Chanelle took my arms.

“Pretend we are threesome,” the older woman said and called out to the men about her good fortune finding this handsome American at the border. I could make out just enough Czech to get the drift. Something in the pit of my stomach lurched.

We went out into the frigid night where the snow was still coming down, piling up, the road frozen solid. Chanelle, in her high-heeled boots, stumbled. In the apartment they offered me more liqueurs, but all I wanted was to know where he was.

I said, “I have to go.”

Amber said, “You want this guy?”

“I want Zhaba, yes.” I leaned forward.

Amber put her mouth against my ear. “Maybe we heard about him. He moves around very fast. We hear the rumors. He has whole set of tools he can use. Hammer. Knives. Serb guy, OK? Probably Serb.” She nodded at Chanelle. “Give her one hundred more dollars.”

I looked in my wallet. “I have mostly French money.”

Amber looked at the girl, who nodded, and the older woman said to me, “OK, give her equal amount.”

“What else?”

“Nothing here.”

“Listen, just tell me the fucking truth. You can keep the money.”

Amber said, “OK, so we don't know this bastard.”

I was angry. I was exhausted. I wanted to sleep and I didn't know if she was lying or not. Chanelle's eyes were shut.

Amber put her hand on my arm. “OK, so go to Vienna. Look in Black and Blue Club, OK? I give you this for free.”

“He's there?”

“Maybe.”

“Thank you.”

“You're welcome.”

“Where are you from?”

“Small town in Bosnia.”

“What's it called?”

“Visno.”

I gestured at the sleeping girl. “Her town, too?”

“Yes.”

“You have family there?”

“There is no one there.”

The car lights were on.

“Momo?” I was talking into the phone, walking down the sloping road, away from the women. Through the dense snow and fog, I could see the lights. Did I leave my car lights on?

I began to run. The signal on the phone was lousy.

“Momo? Where was she from, the little girl behind the billboard in Paris, what was her town?” I was shouting into the phone, but before I finished, the signal went dead.

My feet tried for traction on the icy surface; my whole body was stiff from the effort, from trying not to fall on my ass, trying to stay awake, feeling someone on my back. I knew the car battery was dead. My shoulders clenched up, my gut churned. I got to the car. I climbed in. I turned the key. Nothing.

Someone had jimmied the door, been in the car, turned on the lights. I could smell him. I climbed out again and opened the hood. The snow was falling faster than I could brush it away.

There was a screen of thick bushes between me and the main road and I could hear the traffic pass. No one could see me. My socks were wet, and I thought how much I hated wet socks. Idiotic, but the fatigue made me concentrate on the socks. I was distracted. Then he was there. I could smell him. I smelled the sweet aftershave. Suddenly I knew what the smell was: it was the stink of over-ripe apples, like the disinfectant they used to clean up after the drunks in Moscow buildings in the old days.

He was behind me.

He yanked my arms back behind me so hard my knees buckled. The ice-cold blade of a knife was against the back of my neck.

Knives scare me. Knives are slow and cold. The creeps who use them enjoy it, they like cutting you, the feel of the flesh and bone, the blood, they like doing it slow; all this was running on a loop in my head, even while I felt the cold knife on my neck, my wet socks, the warm trickle of my own blood mixing with the snow.