Skin Trade (6 page)

“Most nights.”

“Show me.”

Martha pulled her bag off the floor and got up. I followed her out of the restaurant and we stood on the sidewalk.

“Why?” she asked.

“Lily wanted to see your shelter. You said that.”

“I said I'd take her right then, that night, Tuesday, but she said no, she had a date to meet someone at the Ritz bar, she'd come the next day. She never showed. I'll call you, OK, hon? I'm really late.”

Martha held out her hand, shook mine quickly, walked to the curb, plucked a parking ticket from under the wiper of a beat-up yellow Renault, tossed it in the gutter and climbed in. I ran. I banged on the hood of the car, but she only looked up, waved, and turned the ignition.

I yelled, “Who was she meeting at the Ritz?”

Through the window of her car I could see Martha's mouth make the words, “I'll call you later.”

I tried running, but Martha Burnham pulled into traffic and lost me.

At the bar of the Ritz I drank a Coke and talked to the manager. Who did Lily meet at the Ritz for a drink after she left Martha Burnham? I didn't believe it was the thug who attacked her, you didn't meet guys like that for drinks at the Ritz Hotel. It was someone else, someone who set her up, maybe, who got her to go to the empty apartment.

The manager was friendly enough, and he introduced me to the bartender who was on duty Tuesday night. I showed him the good picture of Lily. He remembered her.

“Who was she with?”

“I don't really look at the men.” He laughed.

“But you remember her?”

“Yes. I remember the hair. I love redheads.”

“How's that?”

“It was fantastic. Very red, very beautiful.”

“Long?”

“Yes. To her shoulders. It was long.”

I stared at the picture Gourad gave me. In the picture it was definitely short. When she left London it was down to her shoulders. At the train station she'd pulled it off her neck like she always does when she's edgy. At the Ritz it was still long. Martha Burnham had given me her cell phone number; I called her.

“I can't talk,” she said. “I'm working.”

“When you saw Lily, how was her hair?”

“What?”

“Her hair.”

“Look, Artie, I'm in a meeting, I can't talk now. I don't remember anything special about Lily's hair. I'll call you,” she said and hung up.

But I didn't believe her. Martha was crazy about Lily. She would have noticed her hair if it was chopped up ugly. I tried Martha again but the phone was switched off.

In the hospital waiting room a TV set droned on in French. What I could make out, there was an ice storm predicted, bad weather, a strike by French truckers. I couldn't sit still. The cop, Gourad, was probably doing what he could but he had a boss who didn't like me, and Martha Burnham had her own agenda.

I worked the phone as best I could. Tolya Sverdloff would come if I called him, but we'd had a fight and I couldn't ask. I felt I was hanging on to the surface of a frozen pond where the ice was cracking and if I didn't crawl forward, I'd fall through or freeze to death.

After a while, I went back to the hotel, got some sleep. I tried the phone again, looking for a contact in New York who had a line to the French police. I wanted someone with clout. The system here crackled with bureaucracy: there were heads and sub-heads and officials and sub-officials, and all of them had spokesmen and press officers, and I couldn't get anything at all.

The coffee in my hand was cold. I drank it anyway for the caffeine and sat on the edge of the chair looking at
the wall where the wallpaper ended. There was a section of peeling paint. It made me think of Moscow. It made me think of our apartment. My father, when I was young, was in the KGB. He was a star. He was handsome and charming and very good at what he did. He believed; he was a true believer in the Soviet enterprise. His father had fought the Nazis.

My pop wasn't stupid. He knew there were problems, but for him the ideology was such a shining idea he clung to it. And we had privileges. A car. We had a decent apartment. We had some nice furniture. We got a paint job every few years. Then it changed. My mother, who's Jewish, turned angry. She saw the cracks in the Soviet fairy tale. She understood about the lies and the corruption, and she couldn't keep quiet. She knew we would have to leave some day; she made me learn English. She made me understand the West and gave me a craving for it with books like
Catcher in the Rye
and Louis Armstrong records. Then my father lost his job.

KGB creeps in bad raincoats watched our building. We moved to a smaller apartment and there was never any paint. I remembered. I remembered how the paint began to peel, the cracks grew in the plaster and my mother tried to paper them over with pages from a magazine. By the time we got out, by the time we left Moscow, half the paint on the kitchen wall had peeled off.

The phone beeped me now, but it was only a message from Keyes. I knew I better pay some attention to the case I was supposed to be working in the first place. I needed the money. I needed money if I was going to
take care of Lily. It was a decent job and Keyes was a good firm. I liked the security work they put my way, it paid the rent.

After they threw me out of the hospital I went back to the hotel and sat up most of the night re-reading the case.

Keyes Security is based in New York, but it has branches in LA and in London, where they run the European business. They're always looking for ex-cops with some education who can do a couple of languages. Me, I do Russian, Hebrew, some French.

The private security business is big – it's been getting bigger ever since those freaks hit the World Trade Center last year. People are scared of everything and they're probably right. You can't go anywhere without people talking about bombs and nukes, terrorism, black-mail, money scams and the shit-for-brains thugs who'll do anyone for a quick buck. There's always a creep who just invented some new form of craziness.

Europe is easy pickings. With Nato getting bigger and borders down, you could travel from Vladivostok right over to London without anyone bothering you. And the more wired up we get, the less anyone pays attention to the little guys on the ground. You can stare at your computer and miss the point. Sometimes you have to get into the street. Anyhow, thugs like the creep who beat up Lily live under the radar.

When we were still at home, thinking of taking a vacation in London, I asked around if there was something going where I could earn vacation money, buy me and Lily ten days away in Europe. All Keyes had was a
paper case. A dead man's bank account. His name was Eric Levesque. The plan was, after New Year's in London we'd go to Paris together where Levesque's account was so I could finish the case. Lily would hang out and show me around.

But she left me in London and the next time I saw her she was in the hospital in Paris. I didn't care about the Levesque case now. I didn't care about anything except Lily. But I was in Paris and I needed the money Keyes was paying me.

The case involved a long-term high-interest account at a big New York bank that has branches all over the world, including Paris. A couple hundred thousand was in the account, a lot of money by my standards but nothing, as someone said, that would turn the head of a twenty-five-year-old
dot.com
exec, even one who crashed in the bear market last year. Two-hundred-forty thou, roughly, the account opened in 1994 and untouched after that. Three years later, Levesque was killed in an air crash off the coast of Santa Catalina Island. The plane went down, most of the bodies were trapped in the broken fuselage. Levesque was dead, divorced, no kids, no family. Poor bastard, I thought, when I originally put together the file in New York. There was no one who seemed to know him. All that remained was the bank account no one claimed.

The account could have gone unnoticed for a lot longer. If you have a couple of bucks in an account and it's costing the bank more to process it than you're worth, they might pay some attention. But a quarter mill? The interest piles up, the statements go out, no one
returns them, the bank assumes everything's fine. It could sit around growing interest for a long time. Which is what happened with Levesque.

His statements went to a PO box in LA, the box got paid for, the bank didn't even know Levesque was dead. No one at the bank was sitting around reading airline lists of dead passengers. Levesque wasn't famous. Who would care?

The trouble started a couple months back when someone tried to withdraw money from Levesque's account from a branch of the American bank in a Paris suburb. Someone went into the bank, wrote out one of Levesque's checks for the equivalent of twenty grand in French francs and forged the signature. Twenty grand was enough so that the teller went to her boss to verify the signature, but by the time she got back to the window, the customer had vanished. The signature looked OK at first, but the bank checked it. It was a forgery. The bank took a look into Levesque's business and found out he was dead.

So who the hell wrote the check? What kind of asshole goes around writing big checks on a dead man's account?

Someone called in Keyes – the bank I figured – and Keyes gave me the job. I ran the case in New York and LA, did the paperwork and followed up the trail as best I could. I tracked down a couple dozen possible but remote relatives; they were the wrong Levesques.

I filed a report. All that was left was running it in France where the check had been written. Sonny Lippert told me not to take the case. It was a dead end,
Sonny said. “Paperwork. And money,” he said. “Just money. It's not for us, Art,” he said. “It's bullshit this kind of work. Paper work. For girls. You'll hate yourself. You'll die of boredom.” Then he tried to get me on a job involving a trip back to Moscow and I ran, so to speak, as fast as possible. I had been back to Moscow. Once was enough.

I didn't care what Sonny Lippert said. It was work. It paid OK, it kept them sweet at Keyes where they like me, my languages, that I have nice suits and I can hold a knife and fork right. Also, the job got me to Europe. It was what Lily wanted.

I fell asleep on top of the Levesque case file. When I woke up, it was Friday. I took a shower, put on clean clothes, picked up the folder and started walking. I walked across Paris where winter fog sat on the buildings and crept under your coat, but I walked anyway, found a café, ordered coffee and re-read the file.

I worked my phone, re-checked my machine and tried Sonny. I drank the creamy brew they brought me, tossed some change onto the table and walked away. I don't know what I was looking for. I couldn't sit still. I crossed the place de la Concorde.

There were homeless on the Paris streets, curled up against the buildings. I passed a long line, mostly men, outside a church with a soup-kitchen serving breakfast. On the rue de Rivoli a middle-aged hooker bargained with a Japanese tourist over a blow job. It was early, a pale film of snow was already on the streets, and from the time I left the café I felt someone on my tail, but this
time I knew it was only the inside of my head. Everything spooked me here.

Paris. City of Light. Christ!

I was out of breath when I found myself in front of a bookstore with English books, maps, magazines. I recognized the name. It was the store where Lily bought the books Gourad found in her hotel room. I needed a map of Paris. I went in. If there was somebody following me, he'd disappear.

A few minutes later I was leaning against a table piled with books when I heard the voice.

“Artie Cohen?”

I backed away, hands in my pockets.

“Artie. My God, it is you, isn't it? That's what they still call you now, Artie?” He hesitated, looked at me as if he'd fumbled it, turned red. “Am I wrong? Oh, God. I'm so sorry, maybe I'm wrong. You don't recognize me.”

I thought: who is this guy? What does he want with me? How the hell does he know who I am? I wanted to lash out at everyone. I had to stop; it was making me panicky and useless. He looked harmless, this guy who wandered into a bookstore early in the morning; it was someone I met at a party once, maybe, or worked a job with a million years ago.

I said, “Excuse me?”

“It's been a really long time. I figured you wouldn't recognize me.” His accent was American. New York, I thought. Like mine. He grinned and held out his hand. “I'm Joe Fallon. Josef Fialkov, I mean.”

“You're kidding.”

He took off his glasses. When I looked at him hard, I could just make out the resemblance to the kid I once knew, a ghost of a memory. Fialkov was bigger, heavier, older. But it was him. Joey Fialkov.

He said, “Can we get a cup of coffee or something?”

There wasn't anything I could do for Lily except sit in the lousy hospital. So I said, “Sure. You really have fucking changed.”

“You still living in New York, Artie?”

“How the hell did you recognize me?”

“I saw a picture of you somewhere. The
Post,
maybe? The
News?
You were some kind of hero cop, weren't you? I don't remember the case.”

“It was the
News.”

“I heard you were in New York. My mom heard. You know I tried to call you once years ago. I left a message.”

“I never got it.” It was a lie. One of those things you forget about. It was a long time back when I didn't want anything to do with Russia. I still don't.

“I looked through the window here, I saw you. Jeez, I can't tell you how happy I was to see you, Art, swear to God. How come you're in Paris? You have business here? You still living in New York?” Fallon talked a lot.

“Sure,” I said again. “Yeah. You?”

“Son-of-a-bitch. Me, too.” He looked out at the snow. “I wish I was home. New York, I mean.”

I peered at him again. “You really are Fialkov, aren't you?”