Skin Trade (9 page)

I could hear the music from a couple of stalls; I could smell the sugar-coated peanuts they sold. To one side of the fair's entrance, I saw the bar.

I was here to meet Larkin. He'd called after I got back from the bank and asked me to meet him at a bar. “The bar is next to a fun-fair,” he said. “Christmas fun-fair. Porte de Vanves. Take the Metro and I'll meet you.”

A few people, dragging kids by the hand, hurried through the gate. Music played in the distance. Christmas was over; the weather was lousy. I went into the bar and looked around for Larkin. He wasn't there.

In the bar I ordered a beer, then a brandy. The guy with the Mickey head was moonlighting behind the bar, or maybe this was his real job and he did Mickey part-time. I was edgy. There were about half a dozen people in the bar, most of them watching soccer on a big TV. Most drinking beer. I drank the brandy, then another one. Larkin was late. I called the number he'd given me, but there was no answer. I waited another hour.

Finally, I asked Mickey if he knew Stuart Larkin and he said, sure, he was a regular. “Don't worry about him,” he said in French. “Stuart is famous for losing track of time. It could be tomorrow night when he shows up.”

“Someone mentioned my name?” Larkin was coming through the door. He wore a green fleece shirt and a thick tweed jacket. There was a video tape sticking out of the pocket and Larkin was drunk.

“You have something for me?” I gestured at the tape while Larkin ordered a double whisky and tossed it back.

“Sure.” He plucked it out of his pocket and held it up for me. “Let's go for a walk,” he said. “I need some air.”

Somewhere inside the amusement park, “Yesterday' was playing from a boom-box. The snow fell in soft fat flakes as I followed Larkin through the park. Most of the rides were shut. A couple of men stretched tarps over the stalls.

The fair took up about five acres of ground. We walked until we came to a rickety roller-coaster, Larkin watching me warily the way a drunk watches you when he wants another drink and you have the bottle. I wanted the video tape.

I said, “Can we just do this? I'm in a hurry.”

Larkin glanced at me then looked up at the roller-coaster. The wooden struts, painted white, looked like pick-up sticks in the dark. The guy who worked the thing wanted to go home, but Larkin stuffed some money in his hand.

“Give us a ride,” he said. “Give us a roller-coaster ride.”

“We're wasting time,” I said, but Larkin patted the tape in his pocket and climbed into the front car of the roller-coaster.

The ground was slippery and as I followed him I tripped over an empty beer bottle, skidded to my knees, pushed myself up and kept going.

In the distance I could still hear the music, fainter now, “Michelle”, with Paul McCartney singing the jingly music that could go around in your head until it drove you nuts. I was going nuts. I'd had some booze and nothing to eat and not much sleep. I was crammed into a roller-coaster on the edge of Paris with a drunk who had a tape I was desperate for.

I said to Larkin, “You're going to give me the tape when we get off this fucking thing?”

“Sure, Artie. Certainly I am. That's why I brought it.”

I didn't see the guy on the ground pull the lever to start the roller-coaster. Somehow I knew, in that split second before it began, that there were two of them. Two men. I knew I wanted to get off, and I reached for the bar to pull myself up.

Something was wrong. I felt it the way you feel it when you board an airplane and you know something is wrong.

Something, someone, threw me back against the seat. At first I thought I was drunk. Then I heard it. The switch. The gears grinding, as the car bumped me down again, and shunted forward before I could get out. I jammed down the safety bar and gripped it hard. Larkin, who had pulled a can of beer out of his pocket, was laughing.

The car rattled up the first incline, the empty cars behind us shaking. Slowly, it climbed up until it reached the top and began to fall. Next to me in the dark, Larkin's face was pale, like a clown's, and he was laughing and laughing. There was snow on his head.

Then the cars rattled up again and fell. My hands were clenched over the cold metal bar. Finally we coasted down the last hill. I could see the ground a few yards away. But the roller-coaster didn't stop.

Again, it started to climb. It dropped, climbed again, faster now, or it seemed faster. It went on and on. In my head, I saw it break, saw the wood struts fall down like sticks, the car falling off the rails like a toy, crashing into the ground. I felt this thing would keep going until my head broke open and the brains flew out. When I looked at Stuart Larkin next to me, he was out cold.

Maybe I was dreaming. I looked out over the fair and there seemed to be more people in Mickey Mouse outfits and little Euro-cars in bright colors and I knew I was hallucinating. Cracking up. The roller-coaster started another ascent. Larkin's body rolled against me. We slammed down again.

Then it stopped.

The roller-coaster stopped so hard it threw me back
against the seat, against Larkin, and then came to a dead halt. I grabbed the tape out of his pocket. A small crowd had gathered on the ground. People were yelling. In the distance I heard a police car. I stuffed the tape inside my jacket, climbed out of the roller-coaster and ran. Looking over my shoulder, I ran until I couldn't breathe; the air in my lungs was frozen.

At the hotel the guy at the desk unplugged his video machine and dragged it up to my room. My head hurt. The roller-coaster ride scared me bad, but I had the tape.

I got a ham sandwich and some lukewarm beer. Next door someone was listening to a TV so loud I couldn't think. I banged on the wall. I put the tape into the TV and switched it on.

What was I looking for? I was looking for someone who could have forged Levesque's check, someone who could have had access to his checkbook, someone who was in the bank that day at the right time.

The teller had stamped the time on the check: 3.10 p.m. The tape ran from about 3 to 3.20. It was a lousy tape. After a few minutes, I slid onto the floor and put my face close to the TV. As if they were walking in water, customers moved languorously in and out of the bank, in and out of camera range. It was a quiet afternoon; there were only a few dozen people.

I played the tape again. There was only one interesting thing. During the period between 3 and 3.20 that day, there were no male customers, only women. It was a woman who knew Eric Levesque well enough to get his checkbook, to imitate his signature. It was a woman
who, if she knew he was dead, and she would have known, didn't want the money. She wanted to stir things up, make someone pay attention to Levesque, someone like me. I played the tape one more time. It was definitely a woman. There were only women.

The girl had been beaten to death then stuffed behind the billboard when they found her. On the billboard was a sunny landscape with a pair of teenagers in fifties beach clothes on bikes, toasting each other with orange soda, smiling cartoon smiles. There were blue cartoon waves, a yellow cartoon sun.

It was dark and the cops had rigged up temporary lights. People hurrying home turned their heads away. Others stopped to look. It had happened before. In Paris, people were blasé; in other words, they didn't give a shit, Momo told me. A foreign whore murdered and stuffed behind a billboard? They'd seen it before. The snow kept falling.

I'd spent part of the day looking for Stuart Larkin. It was Saturday and the bank was shut. I found an S. Larkin in Neuilly. I found his apartment; he was gone. The concierge told me he'd left that morning for a vacation and I knew they'd got to him. I knew someone didn't want me to have the surveillance tape, someone who got to Larkin, got him drunk, persuaded him to take me for a ride on the roller-coaster.

The billboard stood on a piece of waste ground in the middle of an intersection somewhere in the north of Paris. Snow fell on the garbage, empty McDonald's cartons, smashed cigarette packs, used needles, split condoms, dogshit.

The area, hard up against the ramps of an overpass, was cordoned off. Make-shift barricades were up. Police cars and vans, lights flashing, were parked everywhere and a clutch of men in overcoats and uniforms, heads bent, talked to each other and into phones. The body on the ground was covered with a gray plastic sheet; next to it was a bunch of carnations, hard, small, pink flowers on a gray crust of ice.

From behind the billboard, Gourad emerged sideways, dragging his big body out of the narrow space. His shirt was hanging out of his jeans, flapping in the wind. He shoved it back, lit a cigarette and saw me.

“Fuck. Fuck them, it's always the same,” he said. “It's always the kids they go after.”

“Who was she?”

“Some street girl. No one. They truck them in from the East. Fresh truckloads every week. Sometimes the pimps snatch them off the streets at home. Sometimes they leave them on the trucks, park a load of them under some overpass where people go to take a piss. The men pull up in their cars for a quick one. Sometimes they do it on the trucks. Jesus fucking Christ.”

Gourad crouched down over the body like an animal tending its wounded young and pulled back the plastic sheet gently. I squatted beside him.

The girl looked about fourteen. She had been
murdered the night before, and all day, while traffic droned around her and people crossed the street, no one noticed. A homeless woman, scavenging for cans and loose change, saw something wrapped in a black plastic garbage bag. The girl was wearing a white raincoat and white jeans. Her blonde hair was chopped short and it was matted with blood. What you could see, she was beat up pretty bad. Her feet were bare and one was broken. He showed me her broken fingers gently, like precious evidence.

Momo Gourad covered the girl again, pushed himself off the ground and wiped his big hand across his face. He put some glasses on and peered at me. “You saw the fingers, you're thinking it's related to your friend, to Madame Hanes? Maybe, but I wouldn't bet on it. This is just about the poor fucking bitches. How is Lily Hanes?”

“The same.”

“I'm sorry. Give it a little time.”

“I don't think we have any time.”

“Take it easy,” Gourad said. “What the hell are you doing here anyway?”

“Looking for you.”

“How did you know where to find me?”

“A cop at your station house. Pretty. Brown hair.”

“Victoire?”

“Yes.”

“You know your way around real good now, don't you, even the night shift. Where were you all day? I was looking for you.”

I didn't tell him about the bank or the surveillance
video. It was mine and I needed something for Carol Browne. I wasn't ready to share with Momo Gourad.

“At the hospital,” I said.

“Let's get the fuck out of here, Artie. There's nothing else I can do right now.”

His car was across the street. We climbed in. He was already talking into his phone, looking out the window as more vans pulled up to the site. Gourad was nervous. Maybe the dead girl freaked him out, maybe he wanted to go home to his wife. He pulled the green Golf away from the curb, then drove like a crazy man until we got to a pub. “Le Frog et le Rosbif”, the sign out front said.

It was hot, noisy, raucous, and Springsteen was on the jukebox. Guys Momo knew were at the bar. They shook hands with me. I ordered a beer, Momo a Coke – he was working that night, he said. He shucked his winter jacket, then peered in the mirror behind the bar and flicked his collar into place. I'd seen him do it before, twitch at it, then pick some imaginary lint off his lapel. Satisfied, he turned around and offered me his cigarettes.

“Momo, you ever come across an American woman name of Martha Burnham who works with prostitutes that get beat up, that kind of thing? Says she's a social worker.”

Gourad looked up from his Coke. On his other side was a cop I'd met at the station house. I didn't catch his name but when he heard me mention Martha, he leaned over Momo and put his little pug-dog face close to mine.

“I heard of her,” he said. “She sticks her nose in everywhere. She works around Pigalle a lot, which is my beat some of the time. She's a – how do you say in English? – a pain in the behind.”

“Why's that?”

“Us, we try to clean up the streets. She's one of those bleeding-heart types who wants us to take everybody home and give them hot chocolate, you know? You understand?”

“Yes.”

“There's plenty of girls, and I'm sorry for them, I really am, some of these are kids, twelve, thirteen years old, and they're foreigners, they're alone here. But our hands our tied by the special brigades who take over any of the big cases,” Gourad said, then muttered, “Shit.”

“What?”

“My chief. The boss.”

Coming through the crowded room was the man with the sweaty head I'd met my first day in Paris. “We met,” I said.

“I forgot. Lucky you, you get to meet him again.” He stood up. “I shall salute like a good lieutenant.”

Drumming his fingers on the bar, Gourad's boss asked for cigarettes. Then he shook my hand, but said nothing about Lily – she wasn't a priority. He was the kind of guy who probably thought if a woman got beat up, she asked for it, one way or the other. Anyhow, as he told me – he was talking, Gourad translating – there were truckers blocking every road into Paris protesting the import of British cakes and cookies. The French refused to eat eggs that came from British chickens because certain chickens had been diagnosed with a form of schizophrenia known to induce insanity in the human elderly. The French did not want diseased British pastry on their tables. He was serious.

I lit a cigarette to keep from laughing. I never thought I'd be lonely for Sonny Lippert, but compared to this joker he was a prince.