Skin Trade (21 page)

“Yes.”

“If I don't find him, he'll come for Lily again?”

“Like today at hospital.”

“You heard?”

“Yes.”

“And he'll come back?”

“Yes.”

“Where am I going, Katya?”

Katya's robe fell open in front and she gathered it up and pulled the belt tight, then looked at me.

“You're blushing, Artemy,” she said. I shook my head.

She said, “You remember I said I would ask around about some girl I heard got beat up like Lily?”

“Yes.”

“I heard about girls that work the border. Czech. German.”

“I heard something like that, too,” I said. “Where?”

She sipped her tea. Then, switching from English to Russian and back again, said, “I have heard there is shit-hole on Czech-German border. You cross at Raitzenhaim. On the Czech side, you look for signs to Teplice. This is European Highway 55.”

“You've been there? You know this place?”

Katya withdrew; she didn't talk about herself much. “It doesn't matter how I know,” she said. “You have what you need?”

I knew she meant a weapon and I nodded.

“How is Lily?”

“She's a little better.”

“But she still doesn't know who you are.”

“No.”

The phone rang and Katya picked it up quickly. She listened, then hung up.

She put her hand on my arm then, and said, “Go, Artie. Please, get out of here now.”

“Who was it?”

“Just please go.”

“Who?”

“Momo's boss. He's looking for you.”

“Why?”

She didn't answer.

“Tell me.”

“Some people start to think maybe you are involved.”

“That I hurt Lily? That's fucking insane.”

She reached for her bag, a large yellow Hermès sack made of expensive reptiles, and pulled something out of it. “Here is something else.”

“What is it?”

She spoke in Russian now, very softly. “It is a picture of Zhaba.”

I held the picture up to the light.

“He changes his looks sometimes, sometimes a mustache, but you'll know him. You saw him at the club. You have picture now. You'll know from the smell, very sweet, very specific, and from tattoos on knuckles. You talked to your friend Anatoly Sverdloff?”

“What's there to talk about?”

“He's your friend, but you think he is some pimp,” Katya said. “Look, the plane is faster, but it's snowing pretty bad, so the train to Dresden may be better, also no metal detectors.”

“Thank you. Can I kiss you goodbye?”

“Sure. Yes.” Katya wound her arms around my neck and kissed me on the cheek. “Be careful.”

“Thanks.”

I looked at the bedroom door and she said, “I'll tell Momo you were here.”

“If you want.”

“You don't trust Momo?”

“I trust him,” I said. “I don't want to make trouble for him. He's still official. This is my business. You take care of Momo, OK. And Katya?”

“Yes?”

“How did you get the picture? Of Zhaba?”

She smiled slightly. “Why do you care? I give you this picture. It is enough.”

“I want to know.”

“I slept with someone.”

From the street, after I left Katya's apartment, I tried Martha Burnham. There was no answer. At the hotel, I shoved some of Tolya's money across the desk and asked the manager to check the trains and planes. Berlin. Dresden. Prague. Anywhere I could make a connection.

The door opened and Momo appeared. He was out of breath.

“What's the matter?”

“I followed you from Katya's.” His coat was heavy with snow. He took it off and shook it out.

“I have to go,” I said.

“Where are you going?”

“The hospital.”

“I'm all you've got, Artie, you know that? So don't come around Katya's because you want to look at her.”

“You wanted me to meet Katya. I don't know what your game is.”

“There's no game. I thought she could feel comfortable with you.”

“Russian to Russian?”

“Yes. To talk. Who is Stuart Larkin?”

“What?”

“A bank in Puteaux put in a call. Some crazy American running around talking to Larkin, who worked for them.”

“Worked?”

“He went on leave Friday night. The bank asked him to go. What is this?”

“Nothing, honestly, it's just a paper case. This case I've been working for Keyes, it's a security firm.”

“I know what is Keyes. Come on.”

“Where to?”

“I want to show you something.”

I followed Momo out to his car.

“Get in.”

“What?”

“Get the fuck in the car, Artie, and let's stop dancing around this. The bank wants to know where you are. I said I didn't see you since a while.”

“Thank you.” I got in the car and said, “Larkin sent me a copy of a video tape.”

“What kind of tape?” He started the car.

“A surveillance tape, the bank one afternoon, something I've been working on. Nothing.”

“What?”

“You mentioned a guy named Levesque.”

“Go on.” He pulled the car away from the curb.

I told him as much as I knew about Levesque, that he was dead, that someone forged his check, that I figured it was connected to the attack on Lily. I could see he thought I was making connections out of nothing. He was a good guy, this shambling intense cop who was in love with a Russian hooker, but he was a kid.

“How old are you, Momo?”

“What kind of shit is this?”

“How old?”

“Twenty-seven. You want also to know my sign?”

“You started early.”

“I was a boy-genius. Forget it. I've been eight years on the job, including two in America. It's enough.”

“OK.”

“You're thinking of doing some traveling?”

“I don't know.”

“I'm all that can cover our ass. Your embassy wants to know, the bank wants to know, my boss definitely wants to know everything there is to know about you.”

“Your boss looks like a jerk.”

“My boss is a jerk, but I can only keep him off you if you help me.”

He pulled up at an anonymous gray building. I looked at my watch.

“What is it?”

“Come on.”

Inside was a duty officer and a woman mopping the floor. I followed Momo down two flights of stairs to the basement.

It was a morgue. The girl was in a steel drawer he pulled out from the wall.

The first thing I saw was the hair. It was chopped with a knife, or a pair of shears, rough cut, jagged edges, pieces sticking up. The first time when I'd looked at her up on the waste-ground where she was murdered, maybe I didn't notice. After the video Burnham showed me of Lily, I could see the hair for what it was. Whoever attacked Lily had killed this girl. He took hair for a souvenir.

She was tiny and pale. Stored in the cold tray, waiting
for an autopsy, tagged and bagged, as they say, she barely looked fourteen; she could have been ten years old.

Looking down at her, we stood in the cold room. Momo was smoking to keep from weeping. He was a hard-ass cop, but he was a boy, he could still feel stuff. What scared me was I didn't feel anything at all, nothing. I was cold as ice.

The room was lined with steel trays; each tray had a number and a body. I looked at my watch.

“You're in a hurry?” He was angry. “You can't respect this girl for five minutes without thinking about your own misery?”

“What?”

Momo crossed himself.

“You're lucky, Momo, you know that?”

“Why's that?”

“You've got religion.”

“Sure.”

“And Monique and the kids, and the cheese soufflés. You've got Katya,” I said. “I mean that nice, OK, about Katya.”

He kept quiet.

“I'm sorry.”

“It's OK. Are you carrying, Artie?”

I didn't answer.

“Tell me.”

“I'm not doing anything that's going to put you in the shit. I swear to you.”

I looked at the girl some more and all I saw was the hacked hair. Momo pulled back the covering and
showed me where her joints had been smashed, all the hard surfaces, worse than Lily, knees, elbows, fingers, everywhere. With a hammer, someone smashed her up like she was constructed out of sticks and boards.

“Teeth, too,” Momo said.

“What?”

“They smashed her teeth.”

“Who was she?”

“Who knows? Some girl, a kid from nowhere, returning to nowhere, no story-line, no plot, no characters, just one like a million others.”

“Someone will work this officially, give this a story?”

“For a while.”

“Unofficial?”

He shivered. “Only me.”

“You?”

“Yeah.”

“Because it's a pattern?”

“Because of your Lily. Yes, now I have a pattern.”

He closed the drawer and we started out of the cold room where everyone except us was dead.

“I'm getting a divorce,” he said.

“For Katya?”

“Yes,” Momo said. “You know I used to go a lot.”

“Go where?”

“Hookers. Escort services. All the time. You're surprised?”

I was silent.

“A lot of cops, you know, relieve the tension. Other guys. Your typical guy who goes to hookers may be forty-five, athletic, good-looking, successful, married,
kids, but he likes sex without involvement, and his wife would kill him if she knew. Kill him, maybe literally. You tip over into that world, you discover everyone's doing it, every second guy. There's a million women out there you can fuck, if you want.”

It was what Katya told me.

We got outside, where Momo's car was parked. He opened the door, we got in.

“You're shocked, man, aren't you?” he said. “It's not your scene at all.”

I stared at the floor. “Hey, it's a choice, like they say. Momo, listen, the next twenty-four hours, put someone with Lily. All the time, I mean. Can you do it?”

“Tell me where you're going.”

“OK.”

“Where?”

“You'll do it, for Lily?”

“Yes.”

“I'm going near to a town name of Teplice. The German-Czech border.”

He said, “I'm not going to stop you because you leveled with me, and because I work for a bunch of losers. Be in touch. Keep me up with where you are. Otherwise, it's my ass.”

“I'll be back tomorrow night latest. You have my cell phone. I'll call. I have to go.”

“I know guys everywhere.”

“Can you buy me some hours, Momo? Tonight, maybe? Can you keep your boss off my back until the morning? I can get a plane.”

“Then get out of your hotel now. Don't check out.
Just take what you need. I'll drop you at the airport, you can spend the night in a hotel there.”

From the car, on the way to the hotel, I tried Martha Burnham again, but her machine answered and her cell phone was switched off.

Momo took me back to my hotel. There was a substitute guy on the desk who didn't pay any attention to me, and I went up, stuffed a few things in my bag, put the gun in a drawer. In spite of Katya's advice, I was planning to fly; the metal detectors would screw me up if I took a weapon.

I strolled back out the front door. I knew I had to go east fast. I believed Katya when she told me about the border. This was where Zhaba worked; this was the hole in the ground where I would find him. I had to go before it was too late, for me, for Lily.

Momo drove me to an airport hotel where I got a room and slept. I got up early. I had one more thing to do before I left Paris.

“I'm in Paris, Mom, Paris.” I yelled in Russian into the phone as if the yelling would make her understand. “Paris.”

I heard the call bounce off the satellite, relayed from Paris to Haifa. The phone was OK. It wasn't the phone. It wasn't the phone in Paris or Israel or the satellite that wasn't working right, the silence wasn't technical. It was my mother. She couldn't understand me.

She doesn't ever know me when I call now, doesn't know my voice. She entered a world of her own making years ago, after my father died, after he was blown up by a bomb in Israel where we went to live when we left Moscow. In the good days when he was still in the KGB – he said they were good days – he was a tall, handsome man. Afterwards, after they had to leave because my mother was a noisy dissident Jew, they went to Israel and he got smaller. His only pleasure was hanging out with the generals who sometimes consulted him on intelligence.

My mother survived the bomb. She hated Israel and she wasn't interested in America. All she ever wanted was Europe; Paris was her obsession.

My mother had dreamed about Paris all the time. She had a collection of tattered paperbacks about the city. Sometimes she cooked us French recipes she found in magazines she paid a fortune for in some back-alley shop on the Arbat. She had a large map, too, and most nights she spread it on the kitchen table after supper and worked on her itinerary for the trips she never took.

Now she was in a place where I couldn't reach her and never would. I couldn't reach Lily, but Lily was different. Lily was coming back. I had to believe it.

I sat on the edge of the bed in the airport hotel, holding the phone, wanting so bad for my mother to know I made it to Paris where she wanted to go all her life.

I kept on talking. “I'm in Paris. I've seen the Place de la Concorde. I've seen the Eiffel Tower. The Left Bank. The Louvre. The Impressionists, you know Mom?”

I was lying now. I hadn't seen the things she cared about, the great pictures, the theater, the opera, the Luxembourg Gardens, the famous sewers, the bookshops on the Left Bank, the jazz clubs. She had constructed her Paris out of the pieces of novels and ancient travel guides and the battered map.