Skin Trade

by Reggie Nadelson

  “Anything. Always.” I start kissing her and she tastes of chocolate and she curls up in my lap.

  “What’s the job you’re on?”

  There’s no guile at all in her face, not so far as I can tell, and all I say is, “You’re interested?”

  “Sure. Tell me about it.”

  “I want another glass of wine. Just one last one.”

  Lily giggles. “You always say that, just one more, and the waiter doesn’t care, and I don’t care if you have one more or seventeen, you know that. So tell me.” She reaches for the bottle.

  Normally Lily stays clear of my stuff, so I’m pleased as a four-year-old she’s so interested. “No big deal,” I say. “An old bank account. No one’s touched it, suddenly there’s some activity. Someone writes a check. The signature looks phony. Maybe it was forged. Paper trails. The usual.”

  She says, “Is it a lot of money?”

  “Some. A few hundred thousand. Enough to wake someone up.”

  “And there’s some connection here, in London?”

  “Keyes is running the case here. But it’s a branch bank in the suburbs of Paris. It’s how I worked the gig. Made them think it was important I came to Europe.”

  “You did it for me. The trip, I mean. Didn’t you? You hate paperwork.”

  “I don’t mind it.”

  “But you did it for me. Didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  She winds her long arms around my neck and says in my ear, “You’re a doll.”

  I grin at her like a fool. “I know.”

  “Let’s go to bed.”

  Late at night, McDonald’s smelled of rancid fat; the torpor of the druggy kids weighed on me too, and I drank coffee and thought about Lily. Something I told her in London, something she saw in the file, had made her interested in the Levesque case. Was that why she came to Paris ahead of me? So I wouldn’t know, wouldn’t stop her?

  When I thought about her, I felt short on oxygen, like someone delivered a sucker punch. I’d been around hospitals plenty in the last few years. You learned to deal with the dead. Dealing with the coma victims, the half dead, the people out of reach, was harder. Like Lily, they were physically present; you could see them, even touch their flesh, but you couldn’t make contact.

  In McDonald’s, watching some kids deal drugs, the others slumped over the tables, I felt if I let go for a second, if I stopped concentrating on Lily’s case, she’d slip away. Just go. Never get back.

  I’ve known Lily Hanes for almost six years, and she drives me crazy. She won’t move in with me permanently, won’t marry me. She’s scared it will wreck things with us.

  There have been great times. Not so great times when I pretty much gave up on her and went somewhere else, with someone else. I always came back.

  I hate bullshit words like “brave’ and “courageous”, but Lily is both. She does nutty things; she takes jobs in some crap-hole because she thinks there’s a good story. She goes out in the middle of the night because a friend is hurting or someone’s kid is sick.

  I’ve managed to pass forty without a wife or kids, my father’s dead, my mother is in the nursing home in Haifa where she inhabits her Alzheimer’s half life. I love Lily because she really is brave and she’s straight with me. She knows who I am. In the middle of the night, it makes me less lonely. With Lily, it’s been mostly good.

  I drank the rest of my sour coffee. Her. New York. The only place I can get my feet down, stop skimming the surface. If I could pull us out of this, I’d try again to get her to marry me.

  At the table next to mine, a woman coughed until she spat up into a paper napkin. Her face was pasty. She stared straight ahead.

  I leaned over and said in bad French, “You OK?”

  “Fine.”

  “I’m looking for the American woman named Martha Burnham, you know who I mean?”

  “No.”

  No one else in McDonald’s knew, or wanted to, and I went outside and re-traced my way, remembering where Momo took me. Up the hill, I found the shelter with the bare white lights over the entrance. A heavy door led into a courtyard that stank of piss. The cobble-stones were slick. I skidded, then turned left and banged on a door. Someone pulled it open from inside.

  Framed in the lighted doorway was a girl with a thin, old face, though she wasn’t more than eighteen. She had a cigarette in her hand. “What do you want?”

  Again in my lousy French, I said, “I’m looking for a woman named Martha. An American.”

  “She’s not here.”

  “Where is she?”

  The girl turned away. I put my hand on her arm, she yanked it back as if I’d hit her. I said, “I’m sorry. I just need to see her.”

  “I don’t know where she is, OK? She came earlier, then someone showed up and she left with him. That’s all. I’m not her warden.”

  “Who’s in charge here?”

  “I am.”

  “Do you know where she went?”

  “I wouldn’t tell you if I did.” She shut the door on me and I backed into the courtyard. I started walking towards McDonald’s but I was lost.

  I got my phone out and tried Martha Burnham’s number; there was only a machine. There was no one on the street and I didn’t know where I was. I walked faster.

  Levesque, I thought. If Levesque ran the whores and gave the orders, then whoever beat Lily up was taking orders from a dead man.

  Footsteps seemed to follow me, the hollow ring of heavy boots on the cobblestones, but when I turned there was no one. I was spooked. I started to trot. It was being in an alien place that scared me. I didn’t know anyone. Jogging, I saw a lighted shop-front fifty yards away. As I got closer, like an oasis in a dark desert, the lights turned into a bar.

  There were six tables and a bar and it was empty except for me and the bartender, who was listening to a Highlife track on a radio. I climbed on a stool and leaned on the bar.

  “Bad weather,” he said in French.

  I nodded and asked for a beer. I was relieved to get indoors.

  Over the bar was a long mirror and in it I saw my reflection. I looked lousy. The bartender put a cold bottle in front of me along with a glass, then disappeared behind a curtain next to the bar. I was by myself. I drank and watched the mirror. Behind me was the door.

  I saw him in the mirror first. He filled it up. Behind him in the doorway were two other guys. I couldn’t move forward because of the bar. I couldn’t move back. The men in the doorway cut me off. I was trapped.

  He wore sunglasses. The body was squat with sloping shoulders. The face was doughy and white and he had thin blonde hair that fell over his forehead. Around his neck was a gold cross on a chain and he had on a brown leather jacket. Black leather gloves.

  I waited. I tensed up, waiting for them to attack. Nothing happened. The bartender didn’t come back. The men barred the door. Blondie stared at me in the mirror. He took off his gloves.

  Suddenly he grabbed my shoulder with the force of an ox and spun me around hard. Then he slapped my face with his open hand. The feel of flesh on flesh made him elated, I could tell; it revved him, humiliating me, and I thought: this is what he does to women. He would want them to know that, for him, they were only whores. He liked the feel.

  Was this the creep who attacked Lily? Was his putrid stink of aftershave the odor I thought I smelled on Lily’s clothes at the station house?

  He’d hit me so hard, I stumbled and fell on the floor. Instinctively, my hand went to my face. Getting up, I slipped. By the time I was on my feet, the men were outside. They climbed into a car outside the bar. I saw it go. I ran into the street. The car turned a corner and disappeared. The street was deserted.

  I was halfway down the hill. A hundred yards away, I could see a wide street. Traffic, lights, people walking fast, heads down against the wind and the snow. Somewhere I heard the wah-wah of a French cop car and maybe I should have waited, but I’d had enough of French cops.

  I scramble
d down to the main road. Outside McDonald’s, I got a cab. I told the driver to take me to the hotel. He looked over his shoulder.

  “Just take me, OK. I fell down,” I said in French and he raised an eyebrow. He let me know he figured I was some hopeless American looking to buy cheap drugs. He offered advice on the subject. I closed my eyes.

  When we pulled up in front of the hotel, there was a patrol car outside. Someone was looking for me, maybe Momo, maybe his chief. And Carol Browne might show. The last thing I wanted was an encounter with the garden gnome.

  I crouched low in the backseat. The driver looked over his shoulder. I shoved some money in his face and told him to keep moving.

  “Just go. Drive around for a while.”

  The driver went. We got to the Champs-Elysées which was still lit up for Christmas.

  “Where to?”

  I called Joe Fallon because I didn’t know who else to call. I wanted to see someone from home. It was midnight, but he picked up. He was at the office, he said, working late, great to hear you, Artie. Come on over.

  His office was off Avenue Montaigne. It was a cold impersonal suite of rooms, except for the family pictures and the loafers that lay on the bleached white wood floor where he had stepped out of them. A pair of mis-matched socks were crumpled on top of the shoes. Behind the glass desk, Joe was massaging his bare feet.

  “Hey, Artie, come on in. I’m sorry about this. I stubbed my toe so bad it’s killing me.” He reached over the desk, wincing with pain as he put his foot on the floor, shook my hand, sat down hard and groaned.

  “I’m so glad you came. I could use the company. Let me just finish this one thing and we could go out and eat.” He started typing something into a lap-top. “Take a look,” he added, waving at piles of stuff in one corner of the room.

  They were samples from companies Joe owned: vintage wine in bottles with art labels; foie gras and other fancy food in elaborate packaging; boxed sets of Champagne flutes; a rack with fur coats, at least one sable. There was luggage, silver, linen sheets, handbags, watches, there were models of cars and brochures for hotels where the rooms started at a grand a night. Aladdin’s fucking Cave.

  Toys, Joe said, and shut his computer. Most of the money came from the new media companies. “I bought and sold like baseball cards,” he laughed. “’98, “99, you didn’t need any brains, money just fell on your head. I had to put the money some place, I started buying fancy shit.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “I’m giving most of it to my oldest kid now. I’d love for you to meet Billy, he’s a pistol with a really nice streak. He was doing great business, all of a sudden he tells me he wants to take time off to work with refugees. I told him about you and he’s crazy to get a look at someone from the old man’s past.”

  Joe and me. Lily and Martha. The past never lets you go.

  “What’s going on, Artie? You sounded pretty cut up. You want to go out?”

  I shook my head.

  “That’s OK. I’ve got some booze here if you want. Or coffee. I could make coffee?”

  “No thanks.”

  “What’s up?” He came around the glass table, still in bare feet and sat on a brown leather sofa with square edges. There was a chair next to it. I sat down and unzipped my jacket.

  He said, “Maybe I can help.”

  But I didn’t tell him much. I liked Joe Fallon. I could see him as a friend, but I was wary. I told him Lily was sick. I spun some half truths about a car accident.

  “That’s really bad. I’m sorry. What does Lily do?”

  “She’s a journalist.”

  “Artie?”

  “What?”

  “Would you let me get someone on it? I know good people. Doctors. The best.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Will you tell me when?”

  “Thanks.”

  “But are you OK with the doctors here? Because we could get someone in from New York, you know, from Cornell or Sinai.”

  “You’re still fixing things.”

  “I know how it is. I know how it was when Dede was sick, I was trying to fix it, cure her, find someone who knew something, and it didn’t make any difference.”

  I was restless. I had to get out. I had wanted to see Joe, now I wanted to leave. I was drowning in my own craziness. It wasn’t Joe Fallon’s fault.

  “Listen, Joe, thank you. For listening. This helped. Honest.”

  “You want to eat?”

  “No. Not now. I’m going over to the hotel to try to catch some sleep.”

  “I could give you a ride.”

  “Don’t bother. Your feet don’t look so hot.”

  Hobbling, he walked me to the door of the building and let me out. “Call me.”

  “I’ll call you,” I said.

  “Good. Just don’t disappear on me again.”

  9

  The sun was bright the next day, but when I got out of the taxi the wind was cold enough to blow the skin off your face. Digging the card Gourad had given me out of my pocket, I turned the corner of the Champs-Elysées and passed a group of Russians. The women, in fur, were chattering and showing off their purchases; the men stood by, alpaca overcoats with the collars turned up, smoking, talking. At the curb, a couple of drivers waited for them, leaning against big Mercedes. I caught snatches of conversation as I ran by. Should we go to Manray or Barfly, which restaurant, darling, they said to each other, and eyed a Vuitton shop.

  I turned onto rue Pierre 1er de Serbie, a street with handsome houses and fancy stores. I looked for the house number Momo Gourad wrote on the card. It was important for him, I knew, giving me this address.

  There was a silver Mercedes parked outside the house. I checked the apartment number and buzzed. Said my name into an intercom. Mentioned Momo Gourad. The front door clicked open. Inside, I climbed a flight of sleek marble stairs. On the first landing, a heavy door was ajar. I went in. The light in the hallway was soft.

  From somewhere inside there were voices, chattering, someone laughing, a puppy barking. A voice called out, “Come in,” and I followed the sound through the heavy door.

  As soon as I went into the room, the lush smells washed over me. Two women were playing cards at a little gilt table in front of the fireplace where a fake fire blazed. Two more sat on a sofa yakking, one with a King Charles spaniel in her lap. The women were all young, in their late teens and twenties, all perfectly dressed in skirts and little sweaters, Gucci, Hermès – I sometimes read Lily’s fashion magazines in the can so I know about this stuff. These were babes and they were expensive. Hair done, make-up perfect, nails manicured.

  The bodies were also perfect, some natural, some surgical, take your pick. In a bar once I heard a guy say he liked fake tits better. I don’t get it; they look and feel pumped up, hard and round, like sports equipment. But I don’t like little girls, either.

  Lily is always shifty about her age. She was past forty when I met her, but I think she’s nuts to care and she knows it. I always tell her she’s nuts. Who wants some dim model? It would be like doing it with an unformed child. I don’t know, maybe I’m the one that’s crazy.

  The women looked up from their cards and smiled at me. I could shut my eyes and see the babes transformed into elderly women. Like the inmates of my mother’s nursing home where they play cards all day, bent over the games, hairpins falling out of their thin white hair.

  “I am Katya.” She was older than the others, thirty, maybe, and as she strolled towards me, hand out, a big diamond glittered on her finger. Everything about her glittered, hair, eyes, diamonds. “Katya Strogonoff,” she said in English with a Russian accent.

  “Sure. And I’m Bobby Borscht.”

  “Very nice.” She grinned. It was playful, this disarming grin, and seductive. She added, “Well, not precisely my real name, but is OK. Sometimes they are calling me Kate. Hello to you.” The voice oozed attention. She wasn’t tall, but the posture was perfect, as if she’d been to ballet class
as a child.

  I told her Momo Gourad gave me her address. She knew Momo, of course. He came to her parties, sometimes he took her to dinner, last time to Fouquet for oysters. It made me wonder where Momo got the kind of dough it would take for oysters at Fouquet, a restaurant I’d just passed on the Champs-Elysées. Where did he get the dough for Katya?

  I took off my leather jacket and gave it to her, and she led me into an office, where she poured tea out of a samovar into glasses set in fancy silver holders. The office had black leather furniture and a black teak breakfront with smoked glass doors. Pastel silk flowers were arranged in Chinese vases.

  Katya sat behind a large black glass desk. Under the desk lamp her hair was like hot copper, the eyes too green, the lashes too long. The pearls were real, though, and big as cherries. She looked me over tactfully. “Business,” she said, “or pleasure?”

  When the Soviet Union started breaking up and Russian women began crossing borders for business, it was the Turks who labeled the hookers “Natashas”. It was rough trade for these girls; they were the spill-out from the USSR, the debris.

  The business exploded. The old Soviet Empire seemed to have an endless supply of gorgeous women. For the young ones with great looks – the mile-long legs, the Slavic cheekbones that could cut glass, the beestung lips – there were always guys, the men with money who wanted the right accessory. The Super Natashas, they were called, and they were thick on the ground wherever there was money; anywhere you could use a platinum credit card or buy a magnum of Cristal, these girls flocked, to New York, London, the Riviera, the Hamptons, like fabulous birds of prey.

  They were seductive as hell, but not for me. I have a different fix on the Russkis given I grew up there. I was even offered a freebee one night in New York. The girl said I resembled a poet she once knew. Hip hop, she said, I resembled a hip-hop poet, a white guy, but cool. She was wired. I bought her a glass of Champagne and went home.

  Clearly, Katya “Strogonoff” was one of them, a deluxe Super Natasha.

  “Hello?” Katya was waiting.

  “Sorry. I was thinking about something.”

  “Surely.”

  I offered her a pack of smokes. Instead, she picked up her own, shook the expensive box of exotic cigarettes lightly until one fell into her hand. I felt she could shake me down like one of her smokes if she wanted. She lit it with a Dunhill solid-gold quarter pounder, leaned back slightly, inhaled deep and smiled. The perfect tits tilted up nicely under the snug black cashmere sweater.