Skin Trade (33 page)

Joey's sister, with her ardent face, the pale, serious little Communist with the studious pallor, the blonde braids wound around her head, could sniff out dissent in the school hallway. When she sang Party songs, her eyes shone with religious fervor.

My parents used to laugh about the Fialkovs, but we loved Joey. Joey always knew there was something better out there and he made us all love him for seeing it.

“This is ancient history, Joe, it's bullshit, no one cares, not me, not anyone. If it's eating you up, go see a fucking shrink.”

“You didn't know my life,” he said.

“Lucky me.”

“Then I met you in Paris and you were just another miserable fucker like the rest of us with a plateful of trouble, and I could help you.”

“Like you always did.”

“Something like that.”

He was scanning the West Side Highway for a cab,
but none passed. I grabbed Joe Fallon's arm and kept hold of him.

He jerked out of my grasp. “Listen, I'm going. Come or don't come.” Fallon started across the West Side Highway against the light. “If you shoot me it won't help Lily, though, will it?”

There was no sign of Sonny Lippert when we got to Staple Street. It was a narrow alley and Fallon stopped in front of a squat nineteenth-century house. He turned the key in the lock. “Come on in.”

A light came on inside Fallon's front door.

I said, “Who's in there?”

“It's on a timer.”

“After you.”

“I'm glad you came, Artie,” he said, and I followed him.

The living room had white walls, a high ceiling, pale floors with silky kilims on them, high windows, sky-lights. A Steinway piano stood in one corner. There was a pair of pale-green silk sofas, a red leather Barcelona chair, a low glass coffee table.

Fallon shucked his jacket onto a chair, went to a table in the corner, got a bottle of a single malt I never heard of, and poured the whiskey into two heavy glasses. He perched on the arm of the sofa.

“So what's this about, Artie? I mean what the fuck are you carrying on like Dirty Harry or something? What's on your mind?”

On the wall were a Diebenkorn, a Hockney drawing, a couple of Cartier Bresson photographs. Fallon saw me
look at them, smiled, kicked off his shoes. He pulled off the socks that were too big for him.

I said, “You ever have any dealings with Yugoslavia?”

“What?”

“You heard me. You do business with Bosnia, Serbia, the rest of them?”

“I went to Belgrade when I was a kid. My mother had cousins, they got me some gig at a summer camp, two weeks, the only two decent weeks in my fucking life.”

“You held onto that?”

“What?”

“Maybe you had a thing for the Serbs?”

“You think I'm a warlord, check out the gold chains.” He burst out laughing, that rolling merry laugh, then poured himself another drink.

“Maybe you were doing funny money in the early nineties, maybe you wanted to keep some of it in different accounts, maybe you put some in Levesque's account, then decided it was a pain in the ass, it wouldn't look kosher, a good guy like you with a wife who wanted you to clean up your act.”

“Very smart.”

“It got screwed up because you decided to let it lie but someone tried to forge a check on it.”

“Who's that?”

“Martha Burnham.”

He finished the drink. “You spin a good little tale, Artemy Maximovich Ostalsky, but you don't believe it.” He used my Russian name ironically. There was a pale wood desk opposite one of the green sofas and he went towards it.

I said, “Sit down.”

Fallon sat on a chair. “I'll tell you what, Art, give me your gun and I'll tell you everything.”

“What?”

“I'll trade you. Information for the gun.” He bunched his shoulders as if they ached. “You said Lily could recover if she had the information. Her memory, I mean. Didn't you say that?”

I waited.

“I'll trade you Lily's memory for your gun. Fair trade?”

“It depends.”

“What on? You don't think I killed Levesque, do you?”

“What?”

“Christ, you don't think I'm that good, do you? I mean I couldn't crash a plane with 167 people on it, could I? I mean I'm not such a big bastard.”

“You could get Levesque's name on the list. That's what I'd do. I'd find someone who could fix the passenger list. He didn't have any family, the bodies were trapped in the fuselage, so who knew or saw?”

“Go on.”

“So Levesque, who maybe knew something about you, who you did business with in Russia, women, models, whores, has this account. Someone writes their name on a check but doesn't wait for the teller to confirm the signature. It's maybe a forgery, so people start paying attention. The bank looks into it and discovers Levesque is dead, otherwise the account could lie around, the bank wouldn't even know he's dead
necessarily. This stirs up attention. People pay attention to Levesque. Is he dead? Isn't he? Who's writing his name? You're connected to this, you feel maybe you're unclean.”

“Yes?”

“Someone who isn't the bank hires Keyes to look into this weird little detail, and I'm looking for a job in Europe, and I'm good at paper trails and there was maybe a Russian connection and I can do the language, so they put me on the job.”

Glass in his hand, face compressed with tension, he listened carefully. “OK.”

“You found out it was me.” I glanced around the room. The skylights were high up, there were no other windows, the door was at the end of the space that was fifty, sixty feet long. I paced up and down, watching him.

He said, “There's no one else, just us, man. You're eating yourself up with paranoia.”

“You were freaked out I was on this job.”

“No, glad.”

“What?”

“I was glad.”

“The meeting in the bookstore wasn't an accident.”

“What do you call an accident? Two Americans in an English bookstore in Paris? So read Henry James. Happens all the time.”

“You wanted to clean up your life.”

“For Dede's sake,” he said.

“And I come along and I find stuff out and you can't really climb out, you need to dump it all, meaning me.”

“You were always my past.”

I said, “What about the trade? The gun for the information, the weapon for Lily's memory.”

There were no other witnesses. Momo Gourad was dead. Martha Burnham was dead. The only person who knew what had really happened was Lily, and she couldn't remember. They did that to her. They hurt her and they took her. I tossed the gun onto the sofa.

Fallon didn't touch it. He settled onto the red chair where he could reach it, but he didn't touch it, just crossed one foot over his knee and massaged his bare foot.

“What do you want, Artie?”

“You know what I want.”

“At least sit down and stop wandering around, will you?”

I said, “Let's start all over again. Let's cancel the bullshit and start over.”

I pulled over a chair, sat near Fallon, found a cigarette, looked around the room again, kept my peripheral vision on the weapon.

He sipped his drink. “Where do you want to start?”

I gulped mine. “With the fact that you were Eric Levesque.”

“You ever been to Denver Airport, Artie? They got these crazy announcements on a loop that keeps calling out names: Mr Cheese, Dick Cheese, Mrs Hard, Hillary Hard, I swear to God, like that, it goes on and on and I was stuck there once on my way to Aspen, for hours, and they keep calling for a Levesque, Leo, or Leon, I don't know, maybe it was Herman. I added the Eric.” Fallon was consumed with the details.

“Go on.”

“You're right, it got to be a pain in the ass, all those accounts and names I couldn't remember. I would have let it be, I wasn't greedy, there was only a few hundred thou in the Levesque account.” He found some cigarettes and played with the cellophane, peeling it, twisting it. “Then someone forged the check. I had someone at the bank who knew someone who kept an eye on those things for me.”

“You figured out it was Martha Burnham.”

“Not right away.”

“You hired Keyes?”

“Yes. Sure. Someone forges my check, does a real sloppy job, the bank finds out Levesque's dead. Whoever's forging a dead man's check must be doing it to call attention to the whole deal. I figure someone's pissed off with me. Someone wants to stir things up a little with me in the middle. Maybe the tax guys found out. I do what everyone else does. I have a good accountant, I don't see why I should give all that money to the government, you know? I'm a Republican.”

“I was an accident?”

“Sure.”

“When did you find out Keyes put me on the job?”

He laughed, the throaty laugh. “I couldn't believe it. It made me laugh so hard I thought I'd bust a gut. Artie Cohen was chasing my other self for a bad check, and I thought, what should I do? I decided I'd let you do the job, then tell you about it and we could have some laughs together.”

“What about Lily?”

“I had no idea you two were connected. Someone heard Lily was nosing around in London. Then I find out you're on the case for Keyes. Then I hear she's your lady. I figured maybe you put your girlfriend to work on it.”

“You weren't so sure I'd stop when I found out who forged the check?”

“Something like that.”

“But you thought you could fix everything like you always did?”

“I thought we could fix it together like we used to.”

“You're a real sick guy.”

He said, “I'm the guy the system invented.”

“Oh please. Can the clichés. Your people beat her up. Raped her.”

“You're nuts. I wouldn't hurt her. I didn't even know who she was at first.”

I was silent.

“Lily must have heard something from you that made her suspicious,” he went on. “She calls a million people looking for information about Levesque and the whores, she gets in touch with Marti Burnham who's some kind of expert on prostitution who cranks it all up, and some cretinous enforcer who knows about the Visno thing shows up.”

“Your guy.”

He didn't answer.

“Lily led you back to Martha,” I said.

“Tell you the truth, I'd forgotten all about Marti Burnham, but Lily seeing her, and then you catching on, wised me up, and I remembered. A wallet of mine had disappeared years ago, credit cards, everything. I didn't even know there were blank checks in it. I thought I lost it at some kind of benefit for Marti's shelter, there were hundreds of people, it could have been anyone. I never thought about it again. She must have found it.”

“You killed Martha.”

“I don't kill people, Artie.”

“So he was your creep, the toad, Zhaba.”

He pulled out a cigarette and lit it.

“I bet you never even had to tell him. You just mentioned someone was getting in your way,” I said.

He was silent.

“Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?”

“Something like that.”

“But you knew who he was, you saw he got paid, this monster who killed and raped Katya Slobodkin, Lily, Martha Burnham, the girl behind the billboard. He was the bastard who pimped for the women from Visno.”

“I didn't know about any girls getting beaten up when Lily first called Martha,” he said.

“You don't bother with the details.”

Fallon said, “Martha was a very nice woman, but she was a pain in the ass, she was crazy about me, she had these fantasies after Dede died that I'd marry her. I didn't mean for Marti to get hurt or Lily.”

We sat and talked, two civilized guys in a nice house in New York; in his bare feet, Fallon sipped the whiskey.

What proof did I have? How could I make the case? Where was Sonny? All the time I was listening for Sonny, a taxi, a car. No one came.

“He got off easy,” I remembered Eva saying after Zhaba died. He got off easy. I didn't want Fallon off easy, I wanted it public, I wanted his past to destroy him because it was the only thing that scared him.

“I'm a businessman,” he said. “I make money, sometimes I help other people make money.”

From outside I could hear the scrape of snowplows. Otherwise it was quiet.

“We're really the same guy, Artie. We both made it out of Russia. Did OK in New York. Both Americans. What's the difference between us, really? I mean, honest to God?” He grinned. “Except maybe I can play the sax a little.”

I kept my mouth shut and the silence made him uncomfortable. He said, “Lily should keep her causes simple, you know. What's the point of saving the world when it doesn't want to be saved?”

“What about the women?”

“They're not going to medical school, Art. They're not Americans. What the hell else can they do? You think I'm any different from your friend Sverdloff with his fancy whorehouse? You think we're any different, you and me, or me and any other corporation? You take jobs from people you've never met. You're not a real cop anymore. You take security jobs, you do investigations, who are you working for? You think firms like Keyes don't take jobs from guys like me? They work for anyone who pays them. They protect creeps you can't even imagine. Long as the money flows.”

“Bullshit.”

“Those women, you saw the places they come from, there are millions of them.”

I thought of something: Billy. Fallon's son, Billy, who gave up time to work with refugees. “You had your kid in it too?”

“My kid does what he does. What do you want? You want a big finale with strings? You want an apocalyptic episode? What? Don't be such a Russian. Let's listen to some music,” he said and got up and went to the stereo. “Anything special you want to hear?” He put on a CD, then turned back to me.