Skin Trade (30 page)

For an instant, I was paralysed, lost in this surreal place, up a mountain in Bosnia, and there was a disconnect between my brain and my body. Then I focused on him, what he'd done, and I moved.

I was fast. Everything that happened in the last couple weeks welled up in me and I was on him with the knife. It caught him on the cheek; I pulled the blade down over his fleshy face to his neck until I heard the skin rip. Blood poured out. There was blood on my jacket, my shoes, my hands. He stumbled and I grabbed the gun. Then he scuttled away from me on his hands and knees until he got to the pond. He tried to skirt it but he tumbled on it and he was heavy. The ice cracked.

“He got off easy.” Eva spit it out.

She had followed me. She was waiting outside the main building. I went in and got the plastic box with the hair and without a word she opened the trunk of the Skoda, put it in and pulled out a bundle of clothing, then handed it to me. She gave me a bottle of water and a towel and I washed the blood off my shoes and hands as best I could.

The heavy army sweater and corduroy pants had belonged to her father. I peeled off my own stuff, pants,
the leather jacket, the fleece shirt I bought in Vienna. Eva stuffed them in a dark-blue plastic shopping bag then gave it to me. She was silent all the way back to Sarajevo in the dark.

It was late, I'd missed all the flights out and the first plane to Vienna was at seven the next morning. Eva took me into town. The city felt convalescent, buildings still pocked with bullet holes stood next to the Gap and Armani. People strolled home from the movies or restaurants. A group of foreigners spilled out of a white UN vehicle, men and women, tall, well fed, handsome. They started up the street towards a club where a neon sign flashed. On the pavement, a pair of old men leaned on each other and laughed and laughed.

Eva dropped me at a cheap hotel that looked like an alpine chalet; she said it belonged to friends, I'd be OK there. She would pick me up in the morning.

The ceiling of my room sloped and I had to crouch to get to the bed. The wooden walls and ceiling were painted green. The owner fixed me a meat sandwich that I ate but didn't taste. The adrenalin wore off and I realized how crazy I'd been, chasing Zhaba into his own country, driven by fury. It would be a while before anyone found Zhaba's body in the pond, and I'd tossed the knife after him. His people wouldn't come for the cops on this side of the border.

Most of the night, I sat up. Outside, on the street opposite the hotel, was a club and all night I heard the foreign voices as men went in and came out. I heard women laughing. There was music.

I had never killed with a knife. For a minute, by the
pond, I felt triumphant, now there was no pleasure, no victory; it was thin stuff. After I cut him, when he was helpless, I let him sink into the pond. Let him drown. I watched him sink under the ice.

Could I have dragged him out? Sitting on the bed under the ceiling the color of grass, I didn't know.

“He got off easy,” Eva had said. She was right. It was over. I was done.

At five the next morning, like she promised, Eva picked me up in the Skoda. I left the plastic carton of hair with her to give to some international court, some UN committee, someone who dealt with justice. I had the shopping bag she gave me and I told her I'd send her father's clothes back. She said, “Keep them.” Then I went into the airport and looked in my pocket for change to buy a cup of coffee.

The change was gone. My passport, my ticket, the francs and dollars were in my pants pocket, but the loose change I'd had in my jacket was gone.

The flight was a couple of hours late and I was in the air, the “Blue Danube” playing, the flight attendants in their little suits fussing over some businessmen, when I remembered. We were nearly in Vienna and I remembered that when I was running on the road to Zhaba's camp, loose change had fallen out of my jacket pocket; so had Momo's business card. I looked everywhere, I went through all my pockets, I couldn't find them. They were somewhere on the mountain.

Momo yawned and looked at his watch. It was eight in the morning, Sunday, and still dark, but he couldn't sleep. He splashed some cold water on his face, yanked on his jeans and a thick sweater and left his cousin's hotel where Stalin once slept. The cousin was there; he told me later.

“Mo?”

“Shh, I'm just going out for coffee.”

“I'll make the coffee. It's Sunday. It's freezing,” his cousin said, but Momo just smiled. He needed the air. He wanted to talk to Katya and the signal on his phone was lousy indoors. His cousin watched him go. He stood in the door and watched.

The cold air blasted him as soon as he opened the door. It was snowing again. He pulled his wool scarf tight around his neck and over his mouth, then dialed Katya's number. Except for an elderly couple on their way to early mass, the street was deserted.

Momo held the phone to his ear and walked down the front steps of the house to the sidewalk and then
towards the street, which is when he probably saw them. He was preoccupied with the phone.

“Katya? Are you there? Darling?”

There wasn't time to run or duck back into the house, he barely realized what was happening, and he was still talking into the phone with Katya when he fell onto a bed of fresh fallen snow.

Momo's cousin was weeping when I called from the airport in Vienna. His face was still wet when I got to his hotel and he told me how it all happened, how a man got out of a car at the curb, pulled out a gun, shot Momo. It all happened as if in slow motion, Momo's cousin said. He tried to run out to stop them. He saw the blood on the snow.

“I told Momo I'd make the coffee,” his cousin said over and over. “He wanted some air.”

In front of the hotel were three police cars. A group of cops was examining the place where Momo had fallen but the body had been removed by the time I got there. His body left a heavy imprint in the snow that was stained red.

It happened around the time I was leaving Sarajevo. Someone was waiting for him. Someone who picked up his business cards in Visno, maybe, or discovered Zhaba's body. Or maybe they wanted Momo Gourad all along.

There was nothing I could do. I went back to my own hotel and called Katya Slobodkin. She knew. She knew when Momo called her that morning and he suddenly stopped talking.

She knew when she heard my voice.

She said, “He's dead, isn't he?”

I was finished here. There was a flight to Paris that evening. If it didn't go, I'd drive or get a train or a bus. If Dr Alpert in Paris was right about confronting Lily with what happened, I knew enough: I knew it was Zhaba who threatened her in London, who attacked her in France. I knew about Martha Burnham. The only thing I didn't know was who Lily met at the Ritz that night she was attacked, but I didn't need it. Zhaba was dead and there was a story I could tell Lily.

Packing up to leave Vienna, adrenalin gone, shuffling around the hotel room, I felt old and scared. I didn't know if the thugs who got Momo would come for me. I stood in the shower, let it run hot, couldn't tell if it was the water or tears on my face, but I had frightened myself with my rage in Paris and the Bosnian market, and with chilly determination in Visno. I couldn't shake it, the way it felt when the knife connected with Zhaba's face.

Wrapped in a towel, a cigarette in my hand, I watched the weather on CNN and listened to the garbage trucks outside. The garbage strike was over in Vienna. I stuffed the shirt I'd worn in Visno into the bottom of my bag, put on a clean one with jeans and Eva's father's sweater.

For days I'd been skidding across Europe, jittery, in a hurry, like a nervous skater, hunting down Zhaba, intent on my own desperate needs. Bring Lily the story. Hurry hurry.

But what if Alpert was wrong? What if, like people said, he was just an old crackpot looking to make good on his theories? What if all I ever wanted was revenge? If I told Lily what happened to her, she would have to
live with those images the rest of her life: Zhaba, the meaty white face coming at her; his clammy feel; the stink.

What if I told her and she couldn't shake the memory ever, couldn't wake up from the nightmare? As long as she got better, it would be OK. Even if she didn't know who I was, I'd live with it. I'd be with her.

Some of the phone lines were still down in France, but finally I got through to the hospital. It was Tolya on the other end.

“How is she?” I asked. “Tell me!”

He said she was getting stronger, she was amazing physically, everyone said.

“I'll hold the phone for her so you can talk,” he said.

“Lily? Are you there?”

There was time to kill until my flight out of Vienna. In a café I sat in the window, drank coffee and thought about Momo Gourad, who was crazy about the movies and Katya Slobodkin and who popped up his plaid umbrella when it rained in Paris. They killed him because he was an obsessive. He tried to make things better. He wanted to stop the trade where women were moved like cattle or slaves, but it was a tidal wave and it caught him.

I sat, killing time.

“I've been looking all over for you, man.” Joe Fallon walked into the café, pumped my hand eagerly and added, “You said Vienna, right?” Fallon shed his overcoat, brushed snow off it, then hung it on a peg on the wall.

I was startled. “What are you doing here? When did you get in?”

“I just got in.” He straightened his suit jacket. “Boy, could I use some coffee.” He signaled the waitress and ordered in German.

“How did you get here?” I didn't know what to make of it, Joe showing up. It felt weird, but he was a guy who traveled and I was not sorry to see him.

“I got the first flight.”

“The airport's open?”

“Thank God. It's been a nightmare. The whole continent is gridlock. My kid was due to meet me here, he never made it out of London. As soon as I got here I checked around the hotels looking for you, I couldn't get you on your cell phone, the signals are mostly fucked.” He looked at some apple cake I had ordered. “Any good? I must have called sixteen different hotels looking for you. I gave up, then I was passing this place and I saw you.” He stared at me. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah.” I felt wary.

“Tell me how Lily is, Art? I wanted to visit but Sverdloff stood there like a guard dog in the doorway, wouldn't let anyone in, so I sent flowers. Yellow roses. That OK?”

“Fine.”

“You want to talk?”

In Paris I had only told him Lily was sick. Now I told him the details, unsure why even as I talked.

“Who would do something like that? It's so horrible. You said you were working some kind of case for Keyes, you think it was related?”

“I don't know.”

“Lily's still in Paris?”

I was wiped out. Joe was a nice guy. I knew he cared, but I didn't want to talk about it anymore and I felt uncomfortable about Zhaba. I said, “You have business in Vienna?”

“One of my companies does some work with the websites for the tourist industry here. Fun, right? Mostly I keep out. But I was in Paris, and someone had to tell them we didn't want their business anymore, and everyone has some bloody flu or other, including my kid, Billy, who's supposed to handle all the new media, and said he'd come, but got held up in London. So I thought, OK, I'll do this and then I'm out of here. God I hate this place. I always hear the bloody Nazis marching in, you know, the populace welcoming them.” He drank some water. “I'm really doing it for Dede,” he said.

“She told me she was going to divorce me if I worked with these bastards,” Joe added. “She was kidding, but she couldn't stand it. She said it made her blood run cold, being in Austria, more than any other place. She hated that I even had a company who worked for them. I said, listen, it's only some tourist stuff, no big deal, and she said, yeah, well, where do you draw the line? She was sexy and gorgeous, but Dede was a straight arrow and I cleaned up my act for her, you know? After this I'm going home.”

The waitress brought his coffee along with a slab of cake. He swallowed his coffee in one gulp. “I needed that.” He ate a piece of the cake, then put some money on the table and looked at his watch. “I've got a couple
of hours before my meeting, Art. You want to get some exercise or something? I could use a walk, I'm stiff as a board from the traveling. You have time? You feel like it?”

“Sure.”

“There's a park.”

For twenty minutes we walked; Fallon kept the pace brisk. We walked for a long time without talking and Fallon was good at it, being there, waiting for the conversation to start up, feeling how you were feeling. He had become a friend.

In the park, we started to jog, trotting past rides called “The Spaceshot” and “The Space Shuttle”, past restaurants and bars, and the ferris wheel. We jogged into an avenue bordered by bare trees. The path had been salted. Fallon was faster. He slowed down to keep pace with me.

I said, “You know Vienna pretty well.”

“I know it.” He sounded bitter.

“How come?”

“I spent some time here. I never told anyone but Dede, I don't know why, but I felt humiliated by what happened. When I first left Moscow, I came here. They sent me here. They put me in a camp for refugees. Traiskirchen. About half an hour from Vienna. They put everyone there, everyone who ever left some shit-hole – Hungarians in '56, Czechs in '72, Ugandan Asians, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Kurds, the whole damn bunch. I hated it. I thought I was too good for it. I was white. I was Russian. You can imagine what an asshole I was.”

“I know how you felt,” I said.

“I know you do.”

“We left Moscow for Rome on a train, second class. No one came to the station. Everyone was scared to come,” I said.

Joe nodded. “I used to pick a few pockets in the camp, get enough money and I'd come into Vienna for the night.” He smiled. “Long time ago.”