Skin Trade (3 page)

The dark tangle of London roads took me across the Thames, where I passed the big wheel, a dark shape now against the wet sky. There were no boats on the river and it was raining. I got lost, chasing myself in circles until I found the motorway south to the coast. The rain froze and turned to sleet. It made the road hard to see, the
distances between cars tough to judge. Hands sweating, I gripped the wheel tight and leaned forward, unable to lose the feeling someone was following me.

There wasn't any evidence; the night, the lights, the reflections on the road were playing tricks. In my rear-view mirror all I saw were the headlights of cars. But it wouldn't go away, this sense of someone there. The muscles in the back of my neck locked up. Then, in the distance, the tunnel itself.

Hard white overheads lit up the border like the railway spur into a concentration camp. The truck lanes were jammed with big rigs, the kind you see on interstates at home. The whole complex, roads, buildings, weigh stations, were drenched with that relentless light.

In the windows of the cars were the faces of drivers who looked beat, faces with a greenish cast from the lights. A woman, a red silk scarf on her head, leaned out of the car in front of me and emptied an ashtray into the road so the butts fell into a pool of diesel dripping from a truck.

It looked like some sci-fi construct at the edge of the world, the drivers heading across the border, traveling to some other planet. Planet Europe; it reminded me of New Jersey, its tangled borderlands, the smell of trucks.

Twenty minutes later, I drove into a two-story car train. It shunted forward into the tunnel. Someone came through, checked my passport, then we were in France. For a couple of minutes I got out of the car, stood in the train and stretched my legs, but it was cold and my gut turned over. I hate borders, even now. I never cross one without thinking of how we left Moscow by train when I was sixteen, heading for Rome first, then Israel.

After I got to New York a few years later, I felt I never wanted to leave again. For years, I never spoke Russian or saw the friends from home who called once in a while. I took my mother's name and Artemy Ostalsky became Artie Cohen. I never wanted to come back to Europe or Russia. I was an obsessive New Yorker. If I traveled, I went west if I could. I stayed in America. I got over it eventually, but now in the middle of the night, crossing the border into France, I felt for my passport over and over. For me, Europe was just a place where I had to keep moving.

Lily lay silently on the gurney, her face messed up bad. She was covered with a hospital sheet. Her eyes were shut, bruised and swollen. Her red hair showed at the rim of a plastic cap. Around her, doctors and nurses moved briskly. Rubber soles squealed on the hospital floor. People snapped out orders.

At the hospital, a hulking old building opposite Notre Dame, I lied and told them I was her husband and they let me stay with Lily before they took her into the operating room. Stabilize her, someone said. Someone beat her up bad, they wanted a look, internal injuries. I can speak some French, but I was lost in the rapid-fire talk, medical stuff, opinions, orders, information, even jokes. I resented the joking. Lily was sedated. She didn't know me. Her eyes were so swollen I could hardly look at her.

In the crowded corridor that smelled of antiseptic, I listened to the doctor who tried to explain, talking at me, telling me how bad she was. They wanted to put her shattered knee back together and set the fingers on her right hand. The fingers were smashed.

It came at me like gunshot, pieces of information peppered with advice, warnings, queries. When they wheeled her away down the corridor, I ran alongside until one of the nurses pushed open a swing door and they disappeared inside, Lily with them, leaving me alone.

My adrenalin gave out, then my legs. I sat down hard on a blue plastic chair. It was six in the morning. Someone gave me a cup of coffee.

They'd used some kind of a hammer on Lily, on the hard surfaces, her knee, an elbow, her fingers. They'd punched her in the face. They must have punched her over and over.

Her right hand they'd worked over with real attention, breaking every finger. Lily is vain about her hands, long, elegant hands with slim fingers. In New York, sometimes at night, I would stop by her place and find her with Charlene, the manicurist who makes house calls. They'd be crouched over the coffee table in the living room and Lily would look up at me and hold out the nail polish. Choose a color, Artie. Come on. Choose. Red. Pink. Black. Brown. Rouge Noir. I said Rouge Noir looked like blood, like a vampire had sucked your fingers. She laughed at me because I always chose bright red. She said it was the kind of color hookers like. I love watching her get her nails done.

The fingers were broken and I thought about the pain. My head was swimming, my back soaked in ice-cold sweat. I was cold. Sometime that morning, while she was in surgery, I must have dozed on the chair.

“Gourad.” He held out his hand. “Maurice.”

Lily was in a recovery room.

The French cop who saw me coming out of it was a tall ugly young guy with a sprawling body who spoke great English. He did eighteen months on the job in St Paul, Minnesota, he told me, and a year in New York. He loved New York. He had lived in Brooklyn, Park Slope, and he was crazy for the city.

He had a nose like a fingerling potato, small dark sharp eyes, springy black hair and shaggy eyebrows that met in the middle of his face. He was pretty dapper, though; the black jeans fit him perfectly, he had on black Nikes, a sheepskin jacket and a green sweatshirt from the Gap. A little gold cross hung on a chain around his neck.

Sleet was coming down outside. We got into Gourad's green VW Golf and he took me to the apartment where they found her. I told him I'd been a cop, I figured it might make him friendly. He let me look at the apartment. Five minutes, he said, no more. I asked who owned the place. He said it was held by a company, they were working on it.

All I got was the view of the dusty drapes, the marble fireplace, some blood on the parquet floors. Then Gourad hustled me out. He shook hands with the concierge, who had a dour, wrinkled face like a walnut. In the street, Gourad popped open a little red plaid umbrella and held it over us.

We both smoked while we talked. He told me what he knew, which wasn't much. He had arrived at the scene not long after the crime was reported. I asked him how he knew to call me, because the call came from him, not the hospital.

“It was written on her hand. She had a phone number written with a blue ballpoint on her palm. Her fingers were curled over it.”

Oh, Lily, I thought.

Whenever I went on a job, she always wrote the number on her hand. A new job, a new number, a different cell phone, a strange hotel, she wrote it down so she wouldn't forget. The London number was on her hand, but she never called. It was this French cop who phoned me instead.

“Everyone calls me Momo,” he said suddenly, like it would somehow cheer me up. He helped me unload the rental car and found me a cheap hotel room near the hospital. Up two flights. View of a bleak courtyard. Faded green bedspread, hard pillow, TV. I tried to sleep after Gourad left, but I kept seeing Lily's bruised, mute face.

She was so happy being in London. I liked it because London always had a pull on her, even after the case I worked there last year when the corruption leaked into the mainstream like sewage into floodwater.

Lily wants me safe, so I take safe jobs, even though I know I'm less exciting for her, that her old unease about me was always a kind of turn-on. She hates guns, but she's ambivalent about the excitement. Suddenly, I remembered something. That first summer. We were in Sag Harbor.

We went out to eat. I didn't have a jacket. Without asking, she took my gun and slipped it in her big straw bag. She knew it would be embarrassing if someone noticed. Lily hates guns as much as any other New York
liberal. More. That was the point. She did it for me, put the gun in her bag. I think I really fell for her then.

In the drab room in Paris, my cell phone rang. I looked at my watch. It was six. It rang again. It was the hospital. Urgent, the voice said. Hurry. I bolted out of the hotel.

“Mr Cohen.”

A black guy in a white coat, a stethoscope around his neck, shook my hand. His name tag said he was Dr Christian Lariot. He spoke good English and had a pudgy face. West African, I thought, but I was thinking in a fog of anxiety.

I crossed my arms over my chest to keep from shaking. “She's dead.”

“No,” he said. “No.”

He talked to me about a sub-dural hematoma. In recovery earlier, while I was out with the cop, Lily complained of violent headaches. Terrible nausea. She vomited, then she passed out. They took her back into surgery again and drilled a two-inch hole in her head to drain out the blood that was pressing on her brain.

Lariot talked softly, precisely, carefully. I held on to the back of a plastic chair.

“Is she OK? Is she?”

“Give it a few days,” he said.

“How many days?”

“I don't know.”

“How many days?”

“Give it time.”

“Will she die?”

He shook his head, but didn't answer.

Unconscious, Lily was in intensive care, and I watched while she lay there against the hospital bed, hooked up to machines, and seemed to slide deeper into the coma. Her fingers were in splints. Her leg was in a plaster cast. She was bruised and silent. She had closed her eyes and disappeared.

“Lily?”

There was no reply, no sound except the shattered breathing. She was in a coma, they said. Give it a few days, they said.

I couldn't reach her. Except for wanting her better, all I wanted was to kill whoever did this. I wanted to break their fingers and arms and legs and kill them. No one mentioned rape, I didn't ask, not yet, I couldn't. After, after it was over and she was better, I swore to myself, we were going away. Somewhere small and safe. Montana, maybe. To Chico. Nothing bad ever happens in Chico.

“Lily?”

I was tired. I wanted to lie down next to her now and go to sleep. One of the nurses came after a while and asked me to leave. Let her rest, she said. Rest from what? How can she be tired when she's not conscious, I said. The nurse told me to go. She was polite but irritated. There was nothing I could do. I kissed Lily and went back to the hotel. I called New York and left a message for the Millers, who were taking care of Beth. I sat on the bed. Before I got my clothes off, I fell asleep.

“Your first trip to Paris?” the manager of the hotel said the next morning, making conversation as if I were a tourist.

“Yes.”

Cigarette hanging out of his mouth, he leaned over the desk and gave me a map. “You don't look so good,” he said. “It's cold. I hate this weather,” he added, then went back to his newspaper.

My first trip to Paris. It was wet and freezing cold, and the sky hung, the color of rotten oysters, low over the city. The grandiose buildings looked heavy, the monuments I knew by heart from a million pictures were grim and spectral, rain sluiced down the gutters of the stylish houses, and the parks were drenched. I tried the Metro; the platforms were wet with sludge.

The Seine flooded that week. Cars were banned from the roads along the river. It got colder, the roads turned to ice, tiny ice floes drifted on the river surface like pieces of white fat. People, their faces morose and weary, kept their heads down against the bitter wind; their umbrellas blew inside out.

After they put a hole in Lily's head and she fell into a coma, I moved between my hotel room, the hospital and Gourad's station house, stopping for food at whatever café I passed, not tasting anything, stoking up on the coffee, everything a blur. I didn't drink anything except coffee.

I needed to think, if I could. I was scared that Lily was still vulnerable. She was in a public hospital where anyone could walk in and out. Anyone. A guy with a hammer. A creep who didn't get his fill of her. Anyone. The cop I'd met, Gourad, was a kid. I wanted big-time brass on this, I wanted the best guys. I tried to call my sometime boss, Sonny Lippert, but he was in Washington and out of reach. During this time I never really slept, or if I did it was a light, anxious sleep.

Lying on the narrow hotel bed, prickly with anxiety, any noise woke me up and I never stopped thinking how helpless she was. Except for wanting Lily better, and wanting to kill whoever did it, all I wanted was to keep moving. If I kept moving, I could stand it. If I kept moving, I could shake the dread. I knew I was deep inside my own craziness now. Mostly what I did was stare at the green vines on the ugly hotel wallpaper and smoke.

My second day in Paris, I left the hospital and got the subway to Gourad's precinct. The train let me out in an underground shopping center. Forum des Halles. I tried to remember the street names wherever I could. I was an alien in Paris, didn't know my way around, but here, in this underground shopping mall, the smell of butter and
sugar made me hungry. I bought an apple turnover and ate it while I watched two cops hassle a black guy who was hanging out near McDonald's. The pastry was flaky and the flakes littered my jacket.

There were plenty of black guys and plenty of cops. In uniform or in jeans and stuff from the Gap, there were cops all over the place. Two of them followed another black guy into McDonald's. I stood in the doorway and watched them tail him. On the music system, Miles Davis wailed out “So What?” from
Kind of Blue
while people scarfed their fries, gossiped, drank black coffee, examined purchases they'd made in the mall. Like a jingle on a loop, “So What?” stayed in my head the rest of the day.

I climbed the stairs out of the mall and crossed the ugly square to Gourad's station house. On the ground floor, a woman at the desk told me he was out, but I went up anyhow and ran into a cop I'd seen at the hospital with Gourad. She was a pretty woman with short brown hair and dimples. She was sitting at a gray metal desk, writing a report in longhand, drinking something that smelled of cinnamon.