Skin Trade

by Reggie Nadelson

  As we climbed higher, the sleet stopped. It turned colder, but the sky was blue and the bare landscape was beautiful where the land had been terraced and there were remnants of vineyards.

  Eva turned off the highway onto a back road, the blacktop cracked up from ice and snow, then, a few miles further, swerved onto a dirt track through a forest. She turned off the radio.

  There was no one around. No sound. Just the rattle of the old car, a light wind, a few icicles that popped off the trees onto the roof and broken tree limbs that snapped as we drove over them.

  “What do you know about Visno?” I said to Eva and my words, breaking the quiet, seemed crude and noisy.

  “It was a spa town once. Twenty thousand people, more in summertime, right on the border. The border was in the middle of the town, one side Serb, one side Bosnian. It was famous for this. Also famous for the most beautiful women in Yugoslavia.” She looked nervous. “Do you want me to drive you into the town center when we get there?”

  “No.” I was looking for trouble, but I wanted Eva safe. Also, she was my only means of transportation out of this silent place. “You can wait on the outskirts, if you want.”

  “I was in Visno for holidays once,” she said suddenly. “Very pretty. It’s a dead town now. After Serbs besieged this place and the Bosnian gangs killed some of them for revenge, Serbs slaughtered all men and boys. Some women walked away, some not. Some women are put in the rape camps.”

  “Rape camps?”

  “Where Serbs put women after they kill the men. I meet a little girl one time, they make her have sex with her own father, they make her watch while they slit her brother’s throat. Worse stuff. Stuff I don’t repeat or think about. There was no work, no men, nothing. The place dies.”

  It was completely silent that winter afternoon, brilliant sunshine, no sounds. Eva drove along the dirt track for another mile until she reached a clearing, pulled up, kept the engine running. Broken chunks of whitewashed masonry littered the ground. Something was written on one large stone that stuck up out of the still snowy earth.

  “What’s it say?”

  Eva peered out of the window. “It says ‘Welcome to Visno’.”

  29

  The town had been picked clean. Like a pile of chicken bones tossed on a platter. The walls left standing, the skins of buildings without roofs, were pocked with bullet holes. Burned-out skeletons of cars littered the streets, the street lamps were twisted metal. This was a dead place.

  It was cold and silent. The only sound was my own footsteps as I turned into what had been the main street. There were fragments of hotels, vacation houses, cafés. Over a doorway with no door was a sign for Dr Pepper.

  In my right hand I had the plastic bag with the knife and tire iron. I wouldn’t kill him if I found him. There was nothing in killing him, I suddenly knew. I would take him back to face the women; they could parade him in front of his victims, including Katya, especially Katya. Or Lily if she was OK for it. In my fantasy, he’d sit in the courts for years, then in prison, prosecuted and tried and locked up until he was old, until he was dead. I wasn’t scared, just numb and very calm.

  Somewhere from up in the mountain I thought I heard the rumble of a convoy. If someone saw me, I had no excuse. I had no business here.

  At the end of the street was what had been the spa. A few mock-Roman pillars still stood and there were some crumbling marble steps. I was climbing over a pile of broken sinks, trying to get a better look at the town, when I heard a car.

  There was the purr of an engine. Crouched behind half a brick wall now, I saw the black Landcruiser traveling ten miles an hour. The car window was open. He leaned back in the driver’s seat, puffing on a cigarette, and the bright afternoon sunshine lit him up. Lit up the baby-blonde hair. The doughy skin. Reflected off the sunglasses. He drove slowly as if he were surveying the real estate. The street sloped up slightly and I could follow his car from where I hid. At the top of the hill, he turned left and disappeared. I started to run.

  It was a dirt road hidden by the trees. In the snow still on the ground, his tire marks made tracks and I followed them, running hard, branches scratching my face, lungs burning. I followed him through the patch of forest.

  A mile further there was a clearing with a large wooden building. Bright-blue paint still showed on its façade and there were ramshackle cottages near by. Down a little hill was a pond with a pile of rowboats stacked alongside it, a wooden dock, the remains of a tennis court. It had been some kind of holiday camp once; there were rolls of barbed wire now in the yard where the Landcruiser was parked next to a rusty pick-up truck.

  There was a light on in the main building. I scuttled into the parking lot and hid behind the truck. Then the door to the building opened and he came out onto the stoop, smoking.

  It was him. It was Zhaba. The man I’d seen in the Paris club. The man in the photograph. A man who resembled Putin, the Russian president, on steroids; bland, pale, sloping shoulders, he wore stiff black jeans, loafers, a leather jacket; it was him. The thin hair blew in the sharp wind, and he wore sunglasses. I couldn’t see the eyes.

  He smoked. I waited. Did he know I was coming? Was he waiting for me? A phone rang, and he tossed his cigarette into the yard, turned and went back inside. I could hear his voice.

  The sun was going down now, the sky streaked with color, and I crept around to the side of the building where I grabbed onto the window ledge and pulled myself up so I could see inside.

  His back was to me. He was talking on the phone in an office that had an old oak desk, some rickety shelves with a few books, a cross on the wall and storage cartons on the floor. He finished the conversation. I dropped back down on the ground and waited. I thought I could hear my own watch ticking or maybe it was my heart.

  It could have been five minutes or fifteen when he walked outside again. I managed to get around the side of the building and I could see him now in the front yard as he loaded some lumber into the pick-up truck. He got in, turned the key, drove towards the pond. After a few minutes, the sound of a hammer rang out.

  So long as I could hear the hammer down by the dock, I knew he was busy. I was safe. I ducked into the building. The boards creaked under my feet. The light outside was almost gone. The dim room made me squint.

  I looked at the oak desk. There was an ashtray stuffed with butts, a Sony shortwave radio, and a stack of paper. On the top was a smudged photocopy of a newspaper, and I realized I was looking at my own picture. It was a copy of an old picture from the Daily News, the year I solved a big case in Brooklyn. He knew my face. He had been watching me. He had my picture. Then I saw the box.

  The storage boxes were piled on the floor. I pulled the lids off three of them, but there were only folders, books, rolls of string, envelopes, junk. The box on the bottom of the pile was made of clear plastic. Inside it was the hair.

  There were skeins of blonde hair, hanks of dark hair, short gray curls, all of it tangled up together. I pulled off the lid of the box; I could see the textures now, silky, coarse, curly. Some of the hair was red. There was a tangle of red hair. The color of Lily’s hair.

  It was dark, but a light he’d rigged at the pond lit up the dock where he was working. Crouched on his haunches, a hammer in one hand, he was intent on his work, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. The truck radio spewed news. From behind the truck where I waited, I could see the semiautomatic on the ground next to him.

  As if he’d heard something, suddenly he picked up the gun. He couldn’t see me but he was coming in my direction. The tire iron was in my hand and I tossed it at the pond where it clanged across the ice and skittered to the other side. It startled him. He turned and looked at the ice, then raised the gun and shot at random, at the pond, in my direction, turning in circles, looking for whoever threw a tire iron onto the pond, looking for me. This was what I wanted. Come on, I thought. Come and get me.

  For an instant, I was paralysed, lost in this surreal place, up a mo
untain 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.

  30

  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?”