Skin Trade (2 page)

London is low-lying, so when you ride in a taxi you can look right into apartments and houses, some of them out of magazines with drop-dead chic stainless-steel kitchens., Others, with dusty plants on the window sills and sheer white curtains gray with age, could be set pieces out of my Moscow childhood. And all of it spread out below us now, the detail invisible, the outlines sharply etched – I can see the dome on St Paul's – as we rise into the night sky.

Almost at the top, four hundred and fifty feet up into the New Year's sky, the almost imperceptible motion of
the wheel seems soothing, makes me feel secure. This is lovely, or should be.

Under my breath I hum “Moonlight in Vermont”, a tune I'm crazy for. Sinatra's version. And Stan Getz. Most of all, Stan Getz. Sometimes I ask myself, usually around New Year's when I've had too much to drink, what I'd trade to be Stan Getz. Would I trade it all in? Lily? New York? How would it feel to be able to make his kind of a noise?

Lily wants me to love London so I'm loving it. I got a job working a paper chase for Keyes Security that would keep me in London for a couple of weeks. London and Paris. A missing persons deal, a bank account that had gone unclaimed, nothing special, but the job pays well. And it's in Europe.

The London she shows me is a boom town, streets crammed with people, bars full, restaurants packed, parties all the time. The hot young girls who crowd the sidewalks around Soho at night have bare legs and tiny skirts even in the middle of winter. There's money, but not much public violence, not like America, not yet. It's coming, though; you can smell it in the alleyways, under the bridges, the sleazier clubs. You can hear the rumble, the subterranean noise it makes before it surfaces full force, and there are the signs – the racist episodes, the bad cops, the hopeless refugees and the resentment towards them. Hospitals are short of beds and old people freeze to death in miserable apartments.

On the surface, though, it's fabulous, surprising, giddy-making. Crowds eddy up out of the ancient
buildings, cling to the narrow sidewalks, drive fast cars down streets where there was only horseshit the day before yesterday, they jam into pubs and clubs in little buildings hundreds of years old. Thrilling. Over-ripe. Sometimes I wonder if it will burst suddenly. It almost happened a few years ago. I remember. I was here. The infection is spreading.

Looking down, I see the crowds like a single heaving body. Out of the dark mass of people, hands stick up with lighters, with sparklers, like a rock concert going on far below.

Somewhere I read even if the wheel fails, even if something goes wrong, the bubble is safe, the glass can't break. I'm not crazy about heights, but Lily wanted this, so I want it. A light buzz hits the back of my neck, anxiety opens a small cold pit in my stomach, but it's only Lily's nerves I'm catching. It's safe. We're safe.

She holds on to me so hard I can feel her straining through her thin silk shirt. She raises her arms to pull the heavy red hair off her pale, freckled neck the way she always does when she's nervous, scrapes it up, pushes it onto the top of her head, then lets it fall back. The pale-green silk on her arms looks almost white against the glass and the lights. She smells of Chanel and Swiss honey soap. Pressing against the glass wall, her face reflected in it, Lily blinks her eyes. “I want to go home.” “As soon as we're down. We can skip the party.” I still have her Champagne glass in my hand. “Of course, sweetheart. We'll go right back to the apartment.”

“I want to go home,” she says again and I know she means New York.

As we reach the top of the wheel, the glass pod shifts up into place, stands proud of the wheel and I hold Lily as hard as I can. London spreads out for miles, the river a silver-black snake of water, the sky dappled with fireworks, the skyline, and beyond it the dark country-side, foreign places, alien places.

I say, “Happy New Year.”

She leans against me and looks out.

Slowly, we begin the descent, the bubble slides down, hanging to the side of the wheel now. “Happy New Year, Lily.”

Whispering, her voice so tense it makes the hairs on my neck prickle, she says, “I hope so.”

Then the wheel stops moving.

Ten minutes later we're still hanging in the air on the rim of the white steel wheel. Lily's face is wet with cold sweat. She's shaking, the muscles working under the pale skin of her face, like frogs jumping. She whispers, “What's going to happen to Beth?”

It's the first time she's left Beth since the adoption, the first time she's been away. Beth is safe with friends in New York. “She's safe, sweetheart,” I say, over and over. “Lily? You hear me? Listen to me!”

“She's only six, she'll be all alone, I want to get off this fucking thing.” Lily's looking at the ceiling like she's caged.

“It's probably a power cut.”

“There's an intercom.” Frantically, she's pushing the button.

“Let me.” I lean on the button and yell into the intercom, but it's dead

It's only a power cut, I'm sure. I tell Lily it's a power cut. In the glass pods above and below us we see other people, waving, laughing, holding up Champagne bottles. Along the river, the lights from emergency vehicles flash. Nothing moves. Too many people, heaving bodies, drunks. A wind comes up, it makes us seem to sway. It's an illusion, but the thing feels as if it's swinging.

Distract her, I think. Keep talking, talk her down as if she's a woman on a ledge wanting to jump. Talk to her!

“Remember
The Third Man,”
I say, because it's Lily's favorite movie. She loves this movie, she wanted to come up here because of it. “Remember the scene in the big wheel in Vienna with Harry Lyme and, what was his name, the other guy, the naive American?”

She humors me, but her voice is numb. “I used to think you were the naive American. You were so in love with New York and America. Holly Martins. His name was Holly Martins, Joseph Cotton played him. Orson Welles was Harry Lyme.”

“Yeah, and where Holly gets all sanctimonious and Harry Lyme says, look down at the people, they're just dots, would you really care if the dots down there stopped moving. Remember? What if I gave you twenty thousand for every dot that stopped moving, he says, how many could you afford? Tax-free, old man. Great scene. Right? Lily?”

Come on, I'm thinking. Please. Lily. Talk to me! Talk to me about this movie or about the fireworks or give me a kiss. She doesn't answer. Just stares out at the sky.

“That's one of the two or three million things you did for me, Lil, that movie, remember? You dragged me to
the Film Forum when they released a new print and I said, Oh, God, not another old movie, and you said, be quiet, this is great. It was great.”

“How do you know when you meet a bad guy?” Lily said. “You think he looks like Harry Lyme?”

“Genghis Khan. Hannibal Lecter. Richard Nixon. Joe Stalin. I don't know.” Just keep talking, I think. Come on. Yackety-yack, come on, Lily, please. Talk to me.

Without any warning, suddenly, like a plane losing altitude, the bubble bounces once. It stops. Bounces again. My heart pounds. We're four hundred feet up. I hold her and keep chattering.

“We're talking Dr Evil here?” I strike a pose, try to make her laugh. Make her pay attention. “We talking Henry Kissinger? Goldfinger? Mussolini? David Duke? Who? Come on, help me here, Lily, who's your number one bad guy, real, fictional, whatever.”

“I think most of the bad guys look like everyone else. No horns, no tail.” But she's not interested in the game; her speech is slow, frozen, dry.

“Forget the bad guys, then, OK Lily? Come on.” I'm holding her as hard as I can.

The wheel seems to sigh in the wind now. Lily begins to weep. “I want to get off this fucking thing.”

A few more minutes pass. Clouds are scudding across the sky, stars disappear, rain starts to fall. Little drops of rain, like wet marbles, tinkle against the exterior of the glass wall, pop open, run down its sides.

“It's a power cut, Lily. Look at me.”

“How come the lights are on if it's just a power cut?” she says. “It's something bad, I've covered these stories,
I know how this works, you end up sprayed over London in a million pieces.” She puts her hands against the door. It's sealed from outside. “Make them stop it,” she begs. “There's a hatch somewhere, I read about it, for emergencies. Where's your phone?”

I try the phone, but the signal cuts out. It's New Year's Eve, people are calling each other, tying up the networks. Happy New Year.

There's a bench in the middle of the capsule, and I tug at her. “Let's sit for a minute.”

The rain sluices down the side of the bubble. Lily, who won't sit, who stays glued against the glass, is silent. I try the phone again; there's no signal, or maybe the battery's dead.

“You don't know anything,” Lily says. “Last year four people killed themselves jumping into the river New Year's Eve. Maybe others they didn't report. I swear to you, Artie. They set up a morgue last week. I know about this stuff. I hear about it. I saw the fucking morgue.” Staring out, she clutches my arm hard enough to bruise.

She disappears into her own paranoia where I can't reach her. I'm stranded hundreds of feet over London in a ferris wheel that isn't working with someone I love who's maybe cracking up.

“My God.”

“What?”

“My God.”

“What is it?”

“Someone's falling. Look.”

“No.”

“Someone fell.” Lily is yelling. “Someone. A woman. I saw her, Artie. I saw, out there, from the capsule below. A hatch opened, someone pushed her, it's why we stopped. This is why we stopped. Get me out of here.”

But there's no one. I'm next to Lily, looking out, and there's no one falling. Lily is shouting. She's seen it, she says, a woman who tipped over and fell, into the river, into the dark heaving crowds, onto the road. She saw it in the light of a spill of fireworks that has already faded.

“There's nothing, sweetheart.”

Lily resists; she pushes away from me, wants out, but I hold on to her. Over and over, she plays through the scene, repeating herself: a woman, she mumbles, falling. She's hallucinating and the rain falls and breaks on the glass. Crying, Lily shakes. I hold her.

For half an hour we float over London in our glass bubble. The rain comes down harder. I feel adrift, too, helpless, aimless, while Lily tries not to claw the walls. I can hear my own heart.

An hour later we're on the ground. A few emergency vehicles, a few medics, firemen. People are milling, laughing from relief. Some adventure! Some New Year's Eve! Never forget it. Cheers.

As each glass pod comes down, passengers climb out, some shaky, others full of bravado or excited because a television crew has arrived. There's no crime here, just the aftermath of a freak accident that left us stranded for an hour. No terrorism, either, not even a whisper. I can tell by the lack of special forces, or chaos or fear on the
faces of the cops. My arm around Lily, who's tense enough to explode, I find a cop and say, “What happened?”

“Nothing much,” he says. “A power cut. A real bugger, though. Best go home now,” he adds.

“Someone got pushed, isn't that it?” Lily says to him. He thinks she's drunk. He humors her. “Those capsules are sealed, dear.” He calls her “dear' as if she's a crazy old woman. I want to punch him in the nose because I'm worried for her.

Lily's voice is pleading. “Just take me home, Artie. Please.”

“We're going.”

She covers her face with her hands.

“Everything's going to be OK. It will. I promise.” “Artie?”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“The woman who got pushed from the wheel, you don't believe me.”

“Tell me what you think you saw.”

“I think it was supposed to be me.”

They found Lily two days later in an empty apartment in Paris. The apartment near the rue de Rivoli had high ceilings, gold-colored curtains streaked with filth, and a distant view of the Louvre Museum with the weird, alluring glass pyramid out front.

Before I got there, I didn't know if she was dead or alive. On the phone, they told me she was alive, she was critical. I didn't believe it. She was at a public hospital, Hotel Dieu; they couldn't move her. They seemed to know what the hell they were doing, or maybe they were lying, the way everybody lies when there's bad stuff. Keep the family calm. Keep them out. Let the pros do the job. I'd said and done it plenty when I was on the job, when I was a cop and a family would come to the hospital, pleading: How bad? And I'd say: We don't know yet.

We were supposed to go to Paris together that week, Lily and me. Out of the blue she said, I'll go on ahead of you, OK? She said it New Year's Day, the morning after the wheel. I'll go tomorrow, she said.

There was plenty on the news about the power cut; it was a freak accident. And Lily was fine, she was herself, she said she was sorry she had acted crazy as a bedbug the night before. She'd been feeling tired, paranoid, too much to drink, too many cold pills she took when she felt flu coming on. She was fine, great, she said. Then she told me she was going to Paris early. An old friend, she said. OK, Artie? You don't mind, do you?

“Some French guy with loads of dough and a funny accent?”

She laughed. “Don't be an asshole. There's only you.”

It took me half the night to get there. In the borrowed apartment in London, I threw whatever I could put my hands on into a suitcase – my clothes, Lily's – and picked up her laptop. I barely knew what I took. The phone call from some Paris cop came after the trains and planes stopped, but I got a cab, found an all-night car rental and drove. I had to keep moving.

The car, which had a metallic odor of chrome, also stank of fake leather, cigarettes and the cherry air-freshener used to kill the stink of smoke. On the way to Paris, listening to someone babbling through the night on the radio, I smoked two packs.