Skin Trade (11 page)

Gourad turned the car around.

“Burnham makes you plenty nervous, doesn't she?” I said. “Doesn't she?”

“I'll get you something tomorrow. I swear to God, Artie, I'll help you on this case.” Momo sized me up, figuring if he should part with information. “I'm going to give you someone to meet. Somebody who might know about this type of beating, this signature.” He scribbled a name and address on one of his cards. “Call her tomorrow. Say I told you.”

“A cop?”

“No.”

“Personal?”

“Yes.”

“Show me Lily's paperwork.”

“I can't.”

“Then forget it.”

Gourad was walking some kind of tightrope and it was stretched very thin.

“Listen, I appreciate your help, Momo. I really do. So we'll talk. OK?”

He maneuvered the car into an empty space outside McDonald's. I opened the car door. He put out his hand and I shook it. Something made him hesitate.

I said, “What is it?”

“There was someone.”

“Who?”

“Someone who maybe had a piece of the action, or we heard anyhow, and maybe his outfit was a front. A model agency that was a front for whores. Part of a network. They moved girls that way, a lot of them, sometimes they could do it legally, get them visas. But we could never prove it. Maybe it's connected, the little girl that got murdered. Lily.”

“What was his name?”

“It's classified information. The model agency looked legit on the surface. We're legally restrained from making it public. There's no decent evidence at all. You can't use what I'm telling you. Ever.”

“Fine.”

“I only mention it because he was American. He was part French, he had a French name, but he lived in America most of the time. It was a long-distance relationship.”

“Where in America?”

“California,” he said.

“Tell me his name.”

“This is my ass, Artie, I mean we're talking my fat ass on the line if this gets out. You met my boss. He's a pompous putz, as you say in New York, who wants to hang me out to dry very very slow.”

“It won't get out. Tell me his fucking name, please,
for Chrissake. Lily's lying there in that hospital. She could be dying.”

He didn't answer and I got out of the car again. I was sick of the games. Gourad got out too, and leaned on the roof.

“His name,” Gourad said slowly, “his name was Levesque.”

I was halfway to McDonald's. As offhand as I could manage, I turned around and walked back to Gourad's car and leaned on it, facing him. I pretended my interest was casual.

“So where is this Levesque? It's a common name?”

He said, “What's that have to do with it?”

“Is it a common name?”

“He's dead. Levesque is dead. It's just a hunch.”

“How long's he been dead?”

“That's where the problem is. He's been dead a long time. Around four years.”

“He had a wife?”

“What?”

It was a woman who had tried to cash Levesque's check, so I asked Gourad, “Did Levesque have a wife?”

“How the fuck should I know if he had a wife?”

“Find out for me, OK? Just do it. Please. OK, Momo? Get me this information.” I was leaning over the car roof. The snow made it cold and slick. “What was his first name?”

“Who?”

“Levesque.”

“His first name was Eric. He was Eric Levesque,” he said. “I have to go.”

Trying to light a cigarette, I stood on the pavement where Gourad dropped me and he leaned out of the car and called, “Hey, Artie, you OK, man?” but I just waved and tossed the match into the gutter.

Eric Levesque. My head was pounding with the information. The attack on Lily had been my fault. Because of my case. Somehow, it was connected.

Outside McDonald's, a couple of kids waited. Black, Arab, I couldn't tell the difference. I was a fish out of water here, where tourists never came. You could buy dope at McDonald's and there were no monuments.

I went inside, ordered coffee and drank it from the paper carton. How was Levesque connected to Lily? Did something in the case get her interest? The model agency? Was that enough? Did she put two and two together and assume it was a front for prostitutes? There was a note about a model agency in Levesque's file. But when did Lily see the file? Why was she looking? Then I remembered.

It was London, in the apartment Lily's friend lent us.

*

We're kidding around in the London apartment, eating a huge chocolate cake, drinking Champagne and laughing, and Lily's telling me about Paris. She's going the next day.

I say, “It's a guy. Tell me. It's some debonair European guy with tight buns and loads of money.”

She laughs. “Yeah, and who wears a gold chain around his neck and a diamond earring and keeps a yacht in Monte Carlo. Don't be a jerk,” she adds, “though I think you're pretty cute for thinking everyone has the hots for me. It's friends, you know? Some research. No big deal, Artie. Swear to God.”

“You feel OK?”

“Yeah, I do. I'm sorry about last night. I was crazy on that wheel. I got crazy.”

“Sure?”

“Sure. So it's OK if I go to Paris ahead of you?”

“I can use a day to finish up some paperwork.”

“OK, great.” She always says this to close a conversation; when she figures something is concluded, a piece of work, a phone call, an argument, Lily says, “OK, great.”

I look at her, her mouth smeared with chocolate. She looks happy enough, but her eyelids flutter double-time. A movie director we know at home once told Lily she blinks twice the rate of most people. Lily's brain is always busy.

I said, “You're restless.”

“I'm always restless. I think there are people who are just travellers, who can't really settle, who never really belong any place.”

“Like me.”

“No, you're dying to be domesticated, you found New York, you settled. I like crossing the borders. I get a real buzz out of it, knowing I made it to the other side, you know? That I got there in time.”

“What kind of borders?”

She said, “Whatever. I'd go climb Everest if I could.”

“Push yourself, you mean.”

“Yeah.”

“Can we change the CD?” Elvis was on the CD player.

“Sure.”

She takes it off and puts on some Erroll Garner we both like.
Concert by the Sea.
She gave it to me one Christmas.

“You know what?”

“What, sweetheart?”

“Sometimes when I'm with you, I don't feel anxious about the future anymore.” She paused, then said, “Artie?”

“Mmm?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Anything. Always.” I start kissing her and she tastes of chocolate and she curls up in my lap.

“What's the job you're on?”

There's no guile at all in her face, not so far as I can tell, and all I say is, “You're interested?”

“Sure. Tell me about it.”

“I want another glass of wine. Just one last one.”

Lily giggles. “You always say that, just one more, and the waiter doesn't care, and I don't care if you have one
more or seventeen, you know that. So tell me.” She reaches for the bottle.

Normally Lily stays clear of my stuff, so I'm pleased as a four-year-old she's so interested. “No big deal,” I say. “An old bank account. No one's touched it, suddenly there's some activity. Someone writes a check. The signature looks phony. Maybe it was forged. Paper trails. The usual.”

She says, “Is it a lot of money?”

“Some. A few hundred thousand. Enough to wake someone up.”

“And there's some connection here, in London?”

“Keyes is running the case here. But it's a branch bank in the suburbs of Paris. It's how I worked the gig. Made them think it was important I came to Europe.”

“You did it for me. The trip, I mean. Didn't you? You hate paperwork.”

“I don't mind it.”

“But you did it for me. Didn't you?”

“Yeah.”

She winds her long arms around my neck and says in my ear, “You're a doll.”

I grin at her like a fool. “I know.”

“Let's go to bed.”

Late at night, McDonald's smelled of rancid fat; the torpor of the druggy kids weighed on me too, and I drank coffee and thought about Lily. Something I told her in London, something she saw in the file, had made her interested in the Levesque case. Was that why she came to Paris ahead of me? So I wouldn't know, wouldn't stop her?

When I thought about her, I felt short on oxygen, like someone delivered a sucker punch. I'd been around hospitals plenty in the last few years. You learned to deal with the dead. Dealing with the coma victims, the half dead, the people out of reach, was harder. Like Lily, they were physically present; you could see them, even touch their flesh, but you couldn't make contact.

In McDonald's, watching some kids deal drugs, the others slumped over the tables, I felt if I let go for a second, if I stopped concentrating on Lily's case, she'd slip away. Just go. Never get back.

I've known Lily Hanes for almost six years, and she drives me crazy. She won't move in with me permanently, won't marry me. She's scared it will wreck things with us.

There have been great times. Not so great times when I pretty much gave up on her and went somewhere else, with someone else. I always came back.

I hate bullshit words like “brave' and “courageous”, but Lily is both. She does nutty things; she takes jobs in some crap-hole because she thinks there's a good story. She goes out in the middle of the night because a friend is hurting or someone's kid is sick.

I've managed to pass forty without a wife or kids, my father's dead, my mother is in the nursing home in Haifa where she inhabits her Alzheimer's half life. I love Lily because she really is brave and she's straight with me. She knows who I am. In the middle of the night, it makes me less lonely. With Lily, it's been mostly good.

I drank the rest of my sour coffee. Her. New York.
The only place I can get my feet down, stop skimming the surface. If I could pull us out of this, I'd try again to get her to marry me.

At the table next to mine, a woman coughed until she spat up into a paper napkin. Her face was pasty. She stared straight ahead.

I leaned over and said in bad French, “You OK?”

“Fine.”

“I'm looking for the American woman named Martha Burnham, you know who I mean?”

“No.”

No one else in McDonald's knew, or wanted to, and I went outside and re-traced my way, remembering where Momo took me. Up the hill, I found the shelter with the bare white lights over the entrance. A heavy door led into a courtyard that stank of piss. The cobble-stones were slick. I skidded, then turned left and banged on a door. Someone pulled it open from inside.

Framed in the lighted doorway was a girl with a thin, old face, though she wasn't more than eighteen. She had a cigarette in her hand. “What do you want?”

Again in my lousy French, I said, “I'm looking for a woman named Martha. An American.”

“She's not here.”

“Where is she?”

The girl turned away. I put my hand on her arm, she yanked it back as if I'd hit her. I said, “I'm sorry. I just need to see her.”

“I don't know where she is, OK? She came earlier, then someone showed up and she left with him. That's all. I'm not her warden.”

“Who's in charge here?”

“I am.”

“Do you know where she went?”

“I wouldn't tell you if I did.” She shut the door on me and I backed into the courtyard. I started walking towards McDonald's but I was lost.

I got my phone out and tried Martha Burnham's number; there was only a machine. There was no one on the street and I didn't know where I was. I walked faster.

Levesque, I thought. If Levesque ran the whores and gave the orders, then whoever beat Lily up was taking orders from a dead man.

Footsteps seemed to follow me, the hollow ring of heavy boots on the cobblestones, but when I turned there was no one. I was spooked. I started to trot. It was being in an alien place that scared me. I didn't know anyone. Jogging, I saw a lighted shop-front fifty yards away. As I got closer, like an oasis in a dark desert, the lights turned into a bar.

There were six tables and a bar and it was empty except for me and the bartender, who was listening to a Highlife track on a radio. I climbed on a stool and leaned on the bar.

“Bad weather,” he said in French.

I nodded and asked for a beer. I was relieved to get indoors.

Over the bar was a long mirror and in it I saw my reflection. I looked lousy. The bartender put a cold bottle in front of me along with a glass, then disappeared behind a curtain next to the bar. I was by myself. I drank and watched the mirror. Behind me was the door.

I saw him in the mirror first. He filled it up. Behind him in the doorway were two other guys. I couldn't move forward because of the bar. I couldn't move back. The men in the doorway cut me off. I was trapped.

He wore sunglasses. The body was squat with sloping shoulders. The face was doughy and white and he had thin blonde hair that fell over his forehead. Around his neck was a gold cross on a chain and he had on a brown leather jacket. Black leather gloves.

I waited. I tensed up, waiting for them to attack. Nothing happened. The bartender didn't come back. The men barred the door. Blondie stared at me in the mirror. He took off his gloves.

Suddenly he grabbed my shoulder with the force of an ox and spun me around hard. Then he slapped my face with his open hand. The feel of flesh on flesh made him elated, I could tell; it revved him, humiliating me, and I thought: this is what he does to women. He would want them to know that, for him, they were only whores. He liked the feel.