Skin Trade

by Reggie Nadelson

  “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.”

  34

  “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 whis
key.

  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.

  “What about the roller-coaster?” I said.

  “What roller-coaster?” He laughed. “We could have settled it all in New York, here at home, over dinner. I told you when we met in Paris. You wouldn’t let me help. You didn’t believe me. I didn’t attack your Lily,” he said. “It was an accident. The Serb prick who did it is bottom of that pond.”

  “You knew.”

  He laughed. “More than that.”

  “You wanted him dead.”

  “I let you have him. You did me a favor. Zhaba was getting crazy. He was selling the dolls on the side.”

  “Dolls?”

  “The Natashas. The whores.”

  I could feel the other gun in my waistband under my sweater.

  “You wanted me to kill him.”

  “It was only fair. You got your revenge. I let you have it. So now it’s over.”

  “Tell me something.”

  “What?”

  “How did you connect me and Lily? I didn’t tell you about her until we met at the bookstore.”

  Joe Fallon got up and went to the desk. I followed him.

  “Take it easy. I’m just going to show you something.” He pulled open a drawer, took out a picture and tossed it on the desk. “Go on, take a look.”

  I picked it up. On New Year’s Eve, before we got on the London wheel, we had had our picture taken along with everyone else. In the chaos afterwards, I forgot about it. In the picture were Lily and me and, behind us, another couple. At the edge of the frame, wearing a wig and a New Year’s party hat, was Zhaba.

  *

  I couldn’t tell what time it was when Sonny arrived; my watch had stopped. When I heard the car pull up outside Fallon’s place, I was ready to turn Fallon over, let the system take him, make it hard for him. Let his kids see him for what he was.

  Fallon heard the car too. He was watching me, his eye on the gun. I didn’t move. People Time played on the stereo.

  Fallon said, “I think it’s the most sublime album, you know, and Getz was dead a few months later. What would you trade to make a sound like that, Artie?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Another drink?”

  I looked at Fallon and saw the pale handsome kid I once knew. He would always get off easy. If I turned him over to the system, there would be the lawyers, the friends, the appeals. And all the time he’d be in New York, near me, watching; he would be a few blocks away from me and Lily.

  There was no hard evidence; the only person who could put Fallon in the picture was Lily, who couldn’t remember. But I knew it was Fallon she’d met at the Ritz that night she was attacked, I knew.

  Maybe he called her in Paris and said he was a friend of Martha’s. Shall we have a drink? I’d like to help. And Lily, in love with the idea that you could help other people, would have said, sure. He was charming. Maybe they had a couple of martinis and he said, there’s a woman I’d like you to meet, one of the women who got hurt. She doesn’t like going out in public. Lily, already obsessed with the cause, would have agreed. I’ll meet you, he might have said. Lily would have gone to the empty apartment near the rue de Rivoli where Zhaba was waiting for her. He beat her up. Raped her. Hacked off her hair. Fallon made it happen. He did that to her.

  “Been to the Ritz Hotel in Paris recently, Joe?”

  Distracted, he looked at me and, without thinking, said, “Sure. All the time. Why?”

  35

  Fallon was dead when Sonny Lippert came through the door. Enveloped in his camel-hair coat, his face withered from fatigue, Sonny hurried in, looked at Fallon, then me, went over to the stereo and turned off the music.

  “So he went for you. The son-of-a-bitch came after you. Art? Isn’t that right? Look at me, man, look at me.”

  He shook me, put his hand on my shoulder where I was sitting on the floor, back to Fallon, head down. “Come on,” he said and helped me up. “Isn’t that right?”

  I nodded.

  “Say it. He pulled a gun and he was going to fire, he threatened you, and you had to do it. It was self-defense, no question. Isn’t that right?”

  Already Sonny was rummaging in Fallon’s desk drawer, shuffling papers, looking for a weapon. He found a gun and tossed it on top of the table.

  “Say it.” He poured out a big drink, shoved it in my hand, watched me drink it.

  “Yes. Self-defense. He pulled a gun on me,” I said.

  Without missing a beat, Sonny said “son-of-a-bitch” again, then told me he had the information I wanted.

  One of his cronies had traced the Paris apartment where Lily was attacked to a real-estate agent who, when the cops finally got to him and leaned on him hard, revealed he managed it for Eric Levesque.

  Sonny picked up the phone on Fallon’s desk now and called 911, called his office, talked to guys he knew, guys which, as he said, owed him plenty. His voice was hard and certain; he cut through the bureaucratic bullshit. I sat on the edge of Fallon’s green silk sofa which seemed like the edge of the world, and waited for the cops to come.

  They took Fallon’s body away. Sonny went down to his office in the Special Prosecutor’s division to fix the paperwork, I went home, slept a few hours and got cleaned up. Then I went back to Lily’s clinic and waited in the hallway until she woke up.

  I sat on the side of her bed and told her everything as best I could. London, Paris, the Czech border, Vienna, Bosnia. I told her all of it: how I started on the Levesque case and it caught her up, and how they hurt her because of it. I told her about the women.

  I told her nobody was pushed from the glass pod on the big wheel in London on New Year’s Eve. As gently as I could, I told her it was a hallucination. Not knowing if she was taking it all in, I held her hand. She kept her eyes shut and listened to me.

  When I was done, she opened her eyes, raised a hand to her head and felt her hair where it stuck out around the bandages.

  �
�It’s too short,” she said.

  “I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”

  Slowly, she said, “It’s OK, you can stop now Artie.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Artie?”

  “What’s that, sweetheart?”

  “You smell nice.”

  “Good.”

  “I think I know who you are.”

  So I shut up. I wasn’t sure if she was faking it or someone had told her or she really knew who I was, but I wasn’t in this for the philosophy, I didn’t care so long as I was with her. I put my arms around Lily and said, “I know you do.”