Babylon Sisters (12 page)

He gave a slight shudder, and a small frown appeared between his eyebrows. I could imagine walking into the houses he had been renting in good faith and finding such a mess. He had my sympathies on that. I’ve participated in enough clearing-out and fixing-up of abandoned apartments to know how nasty people can really be when they put their minds to it.

“That’s when I met Miss Mandeville,” he said, his voice a mixture of affection and respect. “I came to her because I needed a crew of maids to come put those hellholes I owned into some kind of order so they’d be fit for human habitation. When I described the situation, she said they could handle it, but the price she quoted was way over my head. When I appealed to her for a reduced rate, because I was about to lose my business, she offered to buy me out and bring me into her operation as a vice president if I would accept her offer immediately. She told me she needed some assistance and she thought we could do business, but if I wasn’t interested, she’d find somebody else. I signed the contract that very day. That was three years ago, and she was right. We’ve been doing great business ever since.”

It was a great story, and it sounded like Ezola. She was not a woman who liked to wait. They seemed well suited: equally determined, equally unapologetic, and equally manipulative. I had never forgotten Ezola’s “sorry black bitches” test question. Or forgiven her for it. Sam hadn’t been that direct, but his calling his former tenants
niggers
was close enough.

“So what are two hard-nosed businesspeople like you and Miss Mandeville doing pulling in a confirmed do-gooder like me?”

“Because you’re the best at what you do,” he said. “You’re tough and opinionated and not easily bullshitted, even by two masters.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“I meant it as one. This is all new territory for us, and we don’t want to stumble. You’ll keep us honest. That means a lot.”

This time, when he smiled, I smiled back. “Should I add that to my job description?”

“No need. We’ll just keep that between us.” And he raised his glass and touched mine lightly.

“Welcome aboard, Catherine. It’s going to be a great ride. I promise you.”

“I’ll fasten my seat belt,” I said, paraphrasing Bette Davis’s famous admonition to her guests at the start of a long, drunken evening where she cusses everybody out and then staggers off to bed.

“Good enough.” Sam laughed and put down his glass. “And now I’m going to get out and leave you to your evening. Uninvited guests should never overstay their welcome, but first I need a favor.”

“What can I do for you?” I put down my glass, too.

“I need a copy of those remarks you did for the ceremony. My copy got away from me.”

“They were pretty well upstaged by Busy Boy, don’t you think? Maybe we should let them just slink away.”

“Not a chance,” he said. “Just because I never said it, doesn’t mean I don’t intend to quote it. ‘The rare and noble sisterhood.’ That was great stuff.”

I refrained from reminding him that that particular gem was his own ad lib and not my genius, and stood up.

“I’ve got a copy in my computer,” I said. “I can print one out if you want to take it with you.”

He stood up, too. “If it’s no trouble that would be perfect, and I would love to see your work space.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that he could come back to my office with me. I was comfortable sitting with him in the living room, but I didn’t really like to have my clients roaming around the rest of the house.

He saw the hesitation and smiled. “Don’t worry, Catherine. It’s not a test. You can just tell so much about a person by how they organize the place where they work. I mean, all you have to see is that throne to get an idea of how Miss Mandeville sees the world. Or at least her place in it. Do you mind?”

I wondered what my office would reveal. “Of course not,” I lied, but what could I do? If I declined to take him to my office now, he would assume I had something to hide. “It won’t take a minute.”

He followed me down the hall, past the posters of Chinese factory women, Nigerian market sellers, and Jamaican secondary-school teachers. They had been part of a misguided campaign encouraging people to enjoy their jobs by using the slogan that defined the Japanese commandant of a prisoner-of-war camp in the movie
Bridge on the River Kwai,
“Be happy in your work.” The woman who designed the poster had never seen the movie, but for anybody who had, the phrase was forever linked to the commandant’s barked order to his dying prisoners to be joyful in their forced labor, and the small organization that commissioned the poster was forced to withdraw it from circulation or risk a media and client backlash that could affect their funding and their reputation.

I felt sorry for them and I loved the campaign. The smiling women on the posters always looked healthy and strong and truly happy in their work. I had lined the hallway with them as sort of a positive blast of female energy and imagery for anybody who made it this far. Sam took it all in without comment. I walked into my office and indicated the chair I kept for visitors.

“Can I look around?” he said.

This guy was shameless. It was like asking if it was okay to poke through somebody’s medicine cabinet. If you’re going to analyze somebody’s stuff, it’s not fair to make them give you permission.

“Feel free,” I said, feeling more boxed by the second, as I sat down behind my desk, opened the Mandeville file, and scrolled down quickly.

Sam was walking slowly around the small room, checking the titles on the bookshelf, noting the CD case and the Keith Jarrett that had been playing softly all day on repeat.

He strolled over to my bulletin board as my printer hummed into action. The two photos I’d pinned up earlier smiled out at him: one of Etienne’s sweet, round, open face and the other of the Mandeville graduates surrounding Busy Boy with all that unrequited love.

“I’ll bet that picture is up on refrigerators all over town,” he said. “At least in the kitchens of anybody who was there, or said they were.”

I just smiled.

“This is a lovely girl. Is she your daughter?”

“No,” I said, “she’s the sister of a Haitian friend of mine. They’ve lost track of each other.”

He was still looking at Etienne. “How do you lose track of a beautiful kid like that?”

Men act like beauty is some kind of safe passage through life. Ask a pretty woman if that’s true, and most of them will tell you how much of their girlhood they spent dodging the attention of every man they met, including priests, uncles, cousins, and sometimes dads.

“There’s a lot of sexual exploitation of refugee women and children,” I said. “Forced prostitution is a real problem.”

“That’s an important distinction,” he said, looking down at the newspaper clippings, photographs, and magazine articles that were part of my educating myself about the problem. A recent story in the
New York Times Magazine
called “Sex Slaves on Main Street” featured a cover shot of a young girl in knee socks and a school uniform. The implications were clear, but the shot was exploitive and creepy. Sam picked it up to look closer as I took the last page from the printer, clipped them all together, and slipped them into a folder. His energy was always weird, but in a space this size, it made me uncomfortable.

“What do you mean?” I switched off the computer, but he was still eyeballing my research: e-mails from colleagues, possible leads on missing girls, horror stories of searches that turned up bodies or nothing at all.

He turned away and seemed surprised to see me standing at the door, but he followed me out while he explained. “Just that prostitution is a complicated issue. Some women are forced into it, but some women see it as the best available option.”

He said it like choosing to have random sex for money could be evaluated right along with being a waitress or a teacher’s aide in a day-care center, but I wasn’t in the mood to argue prostitution with him. The wine was sitting in my empty stomach, making me feel as queasy as the company. “Which is why we have to offer other options,” I said.

He smiled back. “Spoken like a dyed-in-the-wool do-gooder if I ever heard one.”

“Guilty as charged,” I said, handing him the folder with his speech in it. “Thanks for coming by.”

“Thanks for letting me in,” he said, “and for hearing me out. We don’t have to agree on everything to be a damn good team.”

I wasn’t sure I believed that at all, but at least now I knew where we stood, and clarity is always power.

“Good night,” I said.

“You, too.” And he climbed into the silver Lexus that was parked in my driveway and eased off into the deepening twilight. Of one thing I was certain: he thought he was leaving with more information than he offered, but that was only if I hadn’t been paying attention, and like I told Ezola, that’s not my style. Sam had come offering an olive branch, but something told me it probably had more thorns than a rose and none of the sweetness.

28

The next day Miriam came over to bring me some information that had really upset her. She was very agitated, and it took her a minute to tell me what was going on. The strange wig was practically trembling on top of her head. Amelia explained that Miriam was terrified of being kidnapped by the people she’d run away from, and her wig was part of her disguise. In theory, that was a good idea, but it looked so terrible, it drew more attention than it deflected.

When she calmed down a little, she told me she had met a woman at her citizenship class who lived at a residence hotel and had seen some guys bring in two vans of women a few weeks ago and put them up in adjoining rooms. Almost immediately, the woman said, guys started going in and out at all hours of the day and night. They never stayed long and they didn’t make much noise, so nobody bothered them. The women never came out at all.

Except one time when one of them who seemed about fifteen or sixteen came out and begged her to call the police because they were being held against their will. Before she could say any more, one of the other women came out and grabbed her and made her shut up. The older one was really mad, and she kept saying, “You’re going to get us all sent back.”

Miriam was blinking back tears as she told me that she had asked the woman if she called the police. The woman admitted she had been afraid to, since she didn’t have any papers either. Late that night, the guys with the vans showed up, and by morning everybody was gone.

“I showed her the picture,” she said, her voice shaky.

“Of Etienne?”

She nodded her head. “She said it wasn’t her, but it could have been. What if they have her in a place like that?”

The tears spilled over now, and I put my arm around Miriam’s shoulders to steady her. This was our first concrete lead, but it was taking us down a terrible path.

Miriam was clutching the locket around her neck.

“How long ago was it?” I said gently.

“A month. Maybe a little more.”

That was a long time, but if we got right on it, talked to some people who were still at that hotel, maybe we could find something. But if I was going to be out playing private investigator, I needed some help on the home front. My work with Ezola was just going to make it more difficult to stay on top of things, and Babylon Sisters had a reputation to maintain. It was very clear to me that I needed an assistant
yesterday,
as Sam would say. Suddenly, I had a flash of inspiration.

“Miriam,” I said. “I need your help.”

“What can I do?” she said quickly. “I will do anything to find my sister.”

“Will you come and work for me?”

She was surprised, and her eyes opened wide under that ridiculous wig. “Work for you?”

I nodded. “If I’m going to be out and about, I need someone to answer the phones, respond to e-mail. The same kinds of things you’ve been doing for Amelia.”

I knew her internship would be over soon and that Amelia wasn’t going to be able to keep her. This might work out perfectly. Why hadn’t I thought of it before?

“You could start as soon as you’re finished at Amelia’s.”

Her expression told me everything I needed to know, but if it hadn’t, she threw her arms around my neck and hugged me so hard, the wig slid over one eye so she looked like a drunken pirate.

“Yes! I would love to work for you!” she said, grabbing the wig and tugging it down to secure it. “Yes!”

“Good,” I said, “but there’s one thing you have to do for me.”

She was suddenly serious. “Yes?”

“Don’t wear the wig at work.” She looked embarrassed, but I smiled reassuringly. “Amelia told me why you wear it, but most of the time it’ll just be me and you, so you can be yourself.”

“Thank you,” she said with a smile of pure gratitude. “I will.”

29

How did I let Amelia convince me that I could manipulate this ridiculous jumble of fabric without her assistance? She was in a meeting at the Chamber of Commerce with Mr. Tanaka, followed by dinner, and wouldn’t be back for another couple of hours. I was finally forced to admit that without her, this was worse than a losing proposition. It was also a giant stress inducer, confidence buster, and all around reminder that whatever I might have grown up to be, a fashion plate was not among the possibilities. After draping and redraping for the better part of forty-five minutes, I gave up and retreated to the safety of my own clothes. A pair of easy-cut black pants from Chico’s, the busy woman’s boutique of choice, and a brightly embroidered blouse from Guatamala I had found at a tiny shop in Northampton when Phoebe and I first went to look at Smith made me feel better immediately. I added a pair of big silver hoops and five or six bangles, and even broke down and brushed on a tiny bit of blush. Eighteen years is a long time. No harm in putting my best face forward.

The stress had rolled off me in a wave as soon as I stepped out of Amelia’s dress, so I sat down on the side of the bed to buckle on my favorite little Chinese shoes with the red silk dragon on each toe and tried to conjure up an image of B.J.’s face, eighteen years later, but I couldn’t. What changes a face from one thing to another is not just the passage of time, but what’s going on as you’re moving through it. The lines around your mouth are affected by how often you smile, just like your eyes are affected by how often you cry. The face I remembered when I thought about B.J. was lean and brown and young. I wondered what face B.J. remembered when he thought about me.

I took my shawl from the closet, threw it over my shoulder with no need to drape a damn thing, and looked at myself in the mirror. There I was: healthy, happy, a little nervous about the next couple of hours, but relieved of the need to worry about my dress disintegrating during dessert, nothing I couldn’t handle. I had tied my hair up and off my face so there was nothing to hide behind, and that was fine with me. I didn’t want him to respond to me for looking like somebody else. I was prepared to stand or fall in this moment based on who I really
be,
as the jazz guys say. And truth be told? I be just fine, thanks. I think I be just fine.