Skin Trade (29 page)

The market was about two blocks by five. There were makeshift stalls selling clothes, parity hose, sneakers, shoes, crackers, plastic bottles of Coke, cosmetics, towels. Other stalls were laden with sides of beef and buckets of produce – potatoes, carrots, turnips, apples. The lanes between the stalls were ankle-deep in mud and slush; kids ran around everywhere. Somewhere, from a boombox, loud music played.

“We call it Balkan rock,” Al said.

I followed him to a café. Outside were white plastic chairs. Inside, a hunk of meat turned on a spit. Three toothless old men sat around a table drinking coffee. Al ordered sandwiches and beer.

“So what's your business here?”

“We patrol the markets, make sure no one gets a knife in the back.”

“It's that bad?”

“Sometimes.”

“So they're not just selling lipstick and vegetables here.”

“Very perceptive, Artie. You can get pretty much anything here.”

I lowered my voice. “Drugs?”

“Sure. You want something?”

“No thanks. What else?”

“Knives, brass knuckles.”

“Guns?”

“Anything.”

“Women, too?”

He perked up. “I knew you were interested. I had a sense of that.”

“How's that?”

“Stuff you were mentioning on the plane, you had a look.” He tossed some money on the table. “German marks,” he said. “It's all they want, but not for long. They'll have to make do with fucking Euros.”

In the muddy market I followed him for a hundred yards, then again as he turned and made his way to a shack with a porch and some more white plastic chairs. Outside were a couple of guys in leather coats. One of them let me see the pistol he had in his belt. It was obvious they knew Al; they stood aside and let us through. A kind of dull dread was what I felt. I hesitated, then followed him in.

There was only one room, homemade curtains on the windows, a rug on the floor, a man in a suit in an armchair, an old woman making coffee. There was a woman in her twenties on a kitchen chair. She had crinkly hair dyed gold and a scared, sullen expression. Her eyes darted around as if she wanted to escape. She wore hot pants, an angora sweater and thigh-high, high-heeled boots. She was pretty except her skin was raw as if she'd been left out in the bad weather too long. The
man in the chair barked something at her and she got up and paraded slowly around the little room. Her sweater was baby blue and it sparkled.

Al whispered, “You like this one?”

I could feel rage take over. “How do you mean?”

“You can touch her if you want. You can look at her teeth if you want even. She has great legs. Look at those legs, man.” His tone was confidential. “She was supposed to be for me, but, listen, if you want her, she's yours, man. Honest. There's plenty more.”

I looked at Al, a small, neat Canadian with an open face and a Chicago accent. I said, “How much?”

Al leaned down and talked to the man in the suit. He said to me, “Three thousand German marks.”

“For how long?”

“Whatever you want.” He sighed. “Of course, there's one price for locals, a different price for foreigners, but that's what makes the market. Foreigners make the market. So it's expensive, but you get the best goods. For three thousand you can have her for your property for six months.”

“Where's she from?”

“Ukraine, I think.” He looked up at the girl. “Where are you from, hon?”

She didn't answer and the old man slapped her lightly on the ass. She mumbled, “Kiev.”

Al said to me, “You like her? You want her?”

I wanted to kill him, but all I said was, “Listen, I'll think about it, OK? I'm going for a little walk, get a drink, you know?” I faked the excuse as best I could.

When I left, Al was still talking to the man in the
chair. The woman glanced at me helplessly, but there wasn't much I could do.

On my way out of the market, I passed a stall selling hardware. I picked up a tire iron and a crummy hunting knife. There were a couple more white vehicles parked at the entrance, but I wanted a local. I wanted a local who knew about the women. I asked three or four drivers; no one wanted to go to Visno.

“I can take you.” A thick-set woman eating a sandwich, she overheard me. “You need taxi?”

I nodded.

“For Visno?”

“First Visno. After, I'm not sure.” I told her I'd pay her double for the whole day.

“What are you?”

“Reporter,” I said this time. I didn't think she'd buy the travel-agent bit.

“OK. Other reporters been there. Good story, right?” She finished her sandwich, held open the passenger door of the old Skoda for me, and got into the driver's seat. We set off.

Her name was Eva. She had a placid smile but angry eyes, and she spoke good English. She was a dentist.

Eva never asked me what I was doing. I didn't show her Zhaba's picture. I didn't want to scare her off. Finally I said, “Do you live around here?”

“Yes.”

“You know the market?”

She nodded.

“You know about the women?”

She turned and looked at me. “Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“They are selling women,” she said.

“How does it work?”

“I hear stories,” she said. “I hear they take women from Ukraine, Russia, other places, they take them to Belgrade, then across the border to this market you saw. They take their passports. They sell the women. They sell them again. The women can never buy their way out. Like slavery.”

“Christ!”

“Yes.”

“And there are foreigners involved?”

“Sure, one price for Bosnians,” she said, “one price for foreigners.”

It was what Al had said. I was betting Zhaba was involved.

“Are you cold?” Eva asked. “Heater stinks in this car.”

As we climbed higher, the sleet stopped. It turned colder, but the sky was blue and the bare landscape was beautiful where the land had been terraced and there were remnants of vineyards.

Eva turned off the highway onto a back road, the blacktop cracked up from ice and snow, then, a few miles further, swerved onto a dirt track through a forest. She turned off the radio.

There was no one around. No sound. Just the rattle of the old car, a light wind, a few icicles that popped off the trees onto the roof and broken tree limbs that snapped as we drove over them.

“What do you know about Visno?” I said to Eva and my words, breaking the quiet, seemed crude and noisy.

“It was a spa town once. Twenty thousand people, more in summertime, right on the border. The border was in the middle of the town, one side Serb, one side Bosnian. It was famous for this. Also famous for the most beautiful women in Yugoslavia.” She looked nervous. “Do you want me to drive you into the town center when we get there?”

“No.” I was looking for trouble, but I wanted Eva safe. Also, she was my only means of transportation out of this silent place. “You can wait on the outskirts, if you want.”

“I was in Visno for holidays once,” she said suddenly. “Very pretty. It's a dead town now. After Serbs besieged this place and the Bosnian gangs killed some of them for revenge, Serbs slaughtered all men and boys. Some women walked away, some not. Some women are put in the rape camps.”

“Rape camps?”

“Where Serbs put women after they kill the men. I meet a little girl one time, they make her have sex with her own father, they make her watch while they slit her brother's throat. Worse stuff. Stuff I don't repeat or think about. There was no work, no men, nothing. The place dies.”

It was completely silent that winter afternoon, brilliant sunshine, no sounds. Eva drove along the dirt track for another mile until she reached a clearing, pulled up, kept the engine running. Broken chunks of whitewashed masonry littered the ground. Something
was written on one large stone that stuck up out of the still snowy earth.

“What's it say?”

Eva peered out of the window. “It says ‘Welcome to Visno'.”

The town had been picked clean. Like a pile of chicken bones tossed on a platter. The walls left standing, the skins of buildings without roofs, were pocked with bullet holes. Burned-out skeletons of cars littered the streets, the street lamps were twisted metal. This was a dead place.

It was cold and silent. The only sound was my own footsteps as I turned into what had been the main street. There were fragments of hotels, vacation houses, cafés. Over a doorway with no door was a sign for Dr Pepper.

In my right hand I had the plastic bag with the knife and tire iron. I wouldn't kill him if I found him. There was nothing in killing him, I suddenly knew. I would take him back to face the women; they could parade him in front of his victims, including Katya, especially Katya. Or Lily if she was OK for it. In my fantasy, he'd sit in the courts for years, then in prison, prosecuted and tried and locked up until he was old, until he was dead. I wasn't scared, just numb and very calm.

Somewhere from up in the mountain I thought I
heard the rumble of a convoy. If someone saw me, I had no excuse. I had no business here.

At the end of the street was what had been the spa. A few mock-Roman pillars still stood and there were some crumbling marble steps. I was climbing over a pile of broken sinks, trying to get a better look at the town, when I heard a car.

There was the purr of an engine. Crouched behind half a brick wall now, I saw the black Landcruiser traveling ten miles an hour. The car window was open. He leaned back in the driver's seat, puffing on a cigarette, and the bright afternoon sunshine lit him up. Lit up the baby-blonde hair. The doughy skin. Reflected off the sunglasses. He drove slowly as if he were surveying the real estate. The street sloped up slightly and I could follow his car from where I hid. At the top of the hill, he turned left and disappeared. I started to run.

It was a dirt road hidden by the trees. In the snow still on the ground, his tire marks made tracks and I followed them, running hard, branches scratching my face, lungs burning. I followed him through the patch of forest.

A mile further there was a clearing with a large wooden building. Bright-blue paint still showed on its façade and there were ramshackle cottages near by. Down a little hill was a pond with a pile of rowboats stacked alongside it, a wooden dock, the remains of a tennis court. It had been some kind of holiday camp once; there were rolls of barbed wire now in the yard where the Landcruiser was parked next to a rusty pick-up truck.

There was a light on in the main building. I scuttled into the parking lot and hid behind the truck. Then the
door to the building opened and he came out onto the stoop, smoking.

It was him. It was Zhaba. The man I'd seen in the Paris club. The man in the photograph. A man who resembled Putin, the Russian president, on steroids; bland, pale, sloping shoulders, he wore stiff black jeans, loafers, a leather jacket; it was him. The thin hair blew in the sharp wind, and he wore sunglasses. I couldn't see the eyes.

He smoked. I waited. Did he know I was coming? Was he waiting for me? A phone rang, and he tossed his cigarette into the yard, turned and went back inside. I could hear his voice.

The sun was going down now, the sky streaked with color, and I crept around to the side of the building where I grabbed onto the window ledge and pulled myself up so I could see inside.

His back was to me. He was talking on the phone in an office that had an old oak desk, some rickety shelves with a few books, a cross on the wall and storage cartons on the floor. He finished the conversation. I dropped back down on the ground and waited. I thought I could hear my own watch ticking or maybe it was my heart.

It could have been five minutes or fifteen when he walked outside again. I managed to get around the side of the building and I could see him now in the front yard as he loaded some lumber into the pick-up truck. He got in, turned the key, drove towards the pond. After a few minutes, the sound of a hammer rang out.

So long as I could hear the hammer down by the dock, I knew he was busy. I was safe. I ducked into the
building. The boards creaked under my feet. The light outside was almost gone. The dim room made me squint.

I looked at the oak desk. There was an ashtray stuffed with butts, a Sony shortwave radio, and a stack of paper. On the top was a smudged photocopy of a newspaper, and I realized I was looking at my own picture. It was a copy of an old picture from the
Daily News
, the year I solved a big case in Brooklyn. He knew my face. He had been watching me. He had my picture. Then I saw the box.

The storage boxes were piled on the floor. I pulled the lids off three of them, but there were only folders, books, rolls of string, envelopes, junk. The box on the bottom of the pile was made of clear plastic. Inside it was the hair.

There were skeins of blonde hair, hanks of dark hair, short gray curls, all of it tangled up together. I pulled off the lid of the box; I could see the textures now, silky, coarse, curly. Some of the hair was red. There was a tangle of red hair. The color of Lily's hair.

It was dark, but a light he'd rigged at the pond lit up the dock where he was working. Crouched on his haunches, a hammer in one hand, he was intent on his work, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. The truck radio spewed news. From behind the truck where I waited, I could see the semiautomatic on the ground next to him.

As if he'd heard something, suddenly he picked up the gun. He couldn't see me but he was coming in my direction. The tire iron was in my hand and I tossed it at
the pond where it clanged across the ice and skittered to the other side. It startled him. He turned and looked at the ice, then raised the gun and shot at random, at the pond, in my direction, turning in circles, looking for whoever threw a tire iron onto the pond, looking for me. This was what I wanted. Come on, I thought. Come and get me.