by Rizer, Bibi
And as I blink away the disorienting lights and smoke, I can see that quite a few guests are having sex right there in the room. A big guy is leaning on the wall, drink in hand, while a naked girl sucks his cock. Two guys are doing something with a girl on one of the sofas. With the dark and smoke and the way she’s twisted up, I can’t quite see what. There are lines of white powder laid out neatly on the table in front of them. Another girl is rough-riding a guy on a chair. His jeans are around his ankles, and he’s smoking a long curved pipe like Gandalf.
“This is a bit too New Orleans, even for me,” Charlotte says.
No one else seems concerned with what’s going on. While we stand there, dumbstruck, a server casually hands the blowjob guy another drink.
“Let’s find the guys and get the hell out of here. This is demented.”
Charlotte clings to me as we push through the crowd. I wave smoke from my eyes as we come upon a circle of men sharing a hookah pipe; each one of them has a drowsy girl in his lap.
“They looked really young,” Charlotte says as we pass. I glance back to take a better look. One of the girls makes eye contact with me. She’s tiny, wasted, and can’t be more than fifteen, if that.
“Drinks? Drinks?” The server is wearing nothing but green satin panties and nipple clamps with flashing LED lights hanging off them. Her pupils are so dilated, she looks possessed.
“No, thank you.” I try to wave her away.
“Wanna fuck me, mister?” she says.
“No! No, thanks.”
The girl props her tray on her hip and wipes her sweaty brow with the back of her hand. I notice the word “Virtue” tattooed on her wrist. Ironic. “Fuck your girl?” she says, her eyes unfocussed. “You can watch.”
Charlotte drags me away before I can answer. “Okay, first…holy shit,” she says. “And second…holy shit. What is going on here?”
“This isn’t normal?”
“No! Jesus, what do you think we are?”
We slither through the crowd, getting jostled by teetering drunks and tiny, dazed women in sparkly lingerie. Most of them seem to be Asian or Middle Eastern, though a few are white. They all look like zombies with sunken cheeks and vacant staring eyes. I feel like I’ve stepped into an X-rated horror movie. When I nearly trip, I look down to see a skinny naked girl crawling along the floor, gathering damp and crumbled dollar bills in her dirty fingers.
Charlotte jumps, suddenly yelping. “Someone just grabbed my crotch,” she says.
“What?” I pull her into my chest, looking around for the offender, but the crowd just swims around us, moving to the music.
Charlotte yelps again and looks up at me, helpless.
“I’ll give you five thousand dollars for her,” a sweaty bald guy says, leering. He reaches for her hair. I whack his hand away, bending down and scooping Charlotte up. She wraps her legs around me as I push away.
“We’re going to leave,” I say. “This is fucking crazy. Omar and Buck will have to fend for themselves.” I spin around with her. Through the smoke and lights and crowd, I can no longer see where we came in. Everything is just a sea of sweat and debauchery and drugs and money. After what seems like an hour of dodging hands and bodies, we reach a wall. My arms ache from carrying Charlotte, but I don’t want to put her down.
“Which way?” I yell in her ear. The music seems to be louder here, though I can’t see any speakers. She searches frantically from side to side, trying to see over the heads of the crowd.
“That way, I think!” she says, pointing.
I edge along the wall, stepping over unconscious people, empty bottles, shapeless unknown blobs of discarded clothes and other debris. My foot catches on something, and we go crashing down. I narrowly avoid dropping Charlotte into a pile of broken glass. When I stand with her still wrapped around me, I feel blood dripping down from one knee.
Mom was right about that tetanus booster.
“There!” Charlotte says. “There’s the door!”
In my rush to reach it, I walk right into a low table. A half-comatose kid, barely old enough to shave, moans and rolls off the table onto the floor.
“Is he dead?” Charlotte asks as I step over the kid.
“I don’t think so. He made a noise.”
When I reach the door, Charlotte slides down, mercifully. Despite the pins and needles in my hands, I manage to find the door handle and turn it. Before I can even open the door, someone on the other side opens it for us.
Another bouncer – this one looks like a James Bond villain. He looks me up and down before turning his eyes down to Charlotte, who clings to my waist, her face pressed into my chest.
“Want company?” he says to me.
“What?”
“You want other girl? Or just this one?”
“Just this one, we’re going –”
“Downstairs. Seventeen.” He hands me something, which I take without looking at because I’m so desperate to get out of this. “Down,” he says again pointing across to another door. “Ring when done.”
Charlotte and I practically run across the small room to the door on the other side. I have a twinge of unease as I open the door, as though I’ve forgotten something important. But when the door opens and I see the stairs going down, I nearly cry with relief. Only when I’m halfway down the stairs do I look at the object the bouncer gave me. It’s a key.
“What’s that for?” Charlotte asks.
“I don’t know.”
We reach the first landing, one floor below the party. The door, which should be boarded up, is just a regular fire door.
We skid to a stop.
“Shit.”
“This is the wrong stairway,” Charlotte says.
“Shit!” At this point I don’t really care about this one not being for decent people. I just want to get Charlotte out of here. “Let’s just go down. There must be another door.”
We dive down the second stairway two steps at a time. On the bottom landing, the door clearly reads FIRE ESCAPE – DO NOT BLOCK.
It’s bolted shut.
“Fuck!” I take Charlotte’s hand and pull her back upstairs, past the second floor landing, back to the door into the party. “We’ll have to go through. Find the other door. We’ll stay by the wall and only go in one direction.”
I try the door at the top of the stairs. It’s locked.
“Oh, come on,” Charlotte says with a sigh.
I bang on the door with my fist.
Nothing happens.
“Hey, come on, let us back in! We’re done!”
There’s no answer.
“Wait!” Charlotte says. “The key!” She steps back and examines the door. “But there’s no lock. No keyhole.”
I look at the key. There doesn’t seem to be anything special about it. Just an ordinary key on a small red keychain. The number seventeen is written on it in black marker. On the other side of the key chain, also scribbled in ink, are the words, ring when done.
“There’s a bell somewhere. A bell to get back in?”
We look around the landing, around the door, along the bottom of the wall. Nothing.
Charlotte tries banging on the door again. “Let us in! We want to leave!”
Still nothing.
“What about the door on the second floor?”
Charlotte shrugs. “We could try it.”
I take her hand as we head back down to the second floor. This door doesn’t have a lock or a keyhole either, but when I try it, it just opens. I peek through, recognizing what I see easily enough. I push the door so Charlotte can see. “It’s self-storage. Look.”
“Weird”
I step through the door.
“Wait!” Charlotte digs through her bag and pulls out one of her cute little fuck-me shoes. She wedges it under the door to keep it from swinging closed.
“Good thinking.”
My parents have a self-storage locker in Portland. It’s also in a huge labyrinthine complex. To find it
, you have to be able to hold large numbers and the position of Mars in your head. I’m not too keen on venturing into a similar place at this moment, but what choice do I have?
“Stay with me,” I say.
Charlotte squeezes my hand.
The rows of lockers are lit by flickering, insipid lights, their buzzing the only sound apart from the faint thump of the music upstairs and the soft padding of our shoes. We practically run down to the end of the middle row, where it branches off in a T to either side of us. I pull Charlotte left, now actually running, until we reach another T.
“Okay, wait.” I’m thinking of myths and Minotaurs, and Hansel and Gretel, and that scene in the fourth Harry Potter movie just before all hell breaks loose. “Let’s go back.”
“We could follow the numbers.”
“What?”
Charlotte points to the doors. “The numbers of the lockers. They’re in order. If we follow them, we can search the whole floor.”
I pull her into a hug. “You’re a genius!”
“Engineering brain,” she says.
We go back the way we came and sure enough, just by the door, we find locker 001. Charlotte looks around the walls by the door.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for a bell. Remember? There’s some kind of bell that will let us off this floor.”
“Right!”
We both search around the door again, but there’s nothing.
“Let’s go this way. Start with one.” I take her hand again and we head down the aisle veering right from the door.
After a few seconds, Charlotte pulls me to a stop.
“Look,” she says pointing at a locker.
I have to step closer to see what she’s looking at. The green metal door is locked with a heavy padlock. And painted with a number.
Seventeen.
“Try the key,” Charlotte says.
“What do you think is in there?”
“I have an idea. You’re not going to like it. But I also think there will be a bell in there.”
That sounds good to me. I hold up the key and grab the padlock. The key fits easily, and when I turn it – clunk! The padlock pops open.
“Stand back.” I nudge Charlotte behind me as I roll the door open. I can just make out a bulge on the wall. When I feel around, I find a light switch and flick it on. The locker fills with sickly light. And my stomach rises up into my throat.
On the bare floor are a dirty mattress, a bunch of condom wrappers, and an incongruously granny-ish wicker basket filled with very ungranny-ish sex toys – handcuffs, ropes, and some stuff I don’t even recognize. Like most men, I explored Internet pornography quite extensively in my teens, so that’s saying something.
“Huh,” Charlotte says with a dry laugh. “Don’t get any ideas.”
Truth is, I would love to have sex with her again, only not right now, and literally anywhere on earth rather than in this heartbreaking little room. We stand there, just looking at the mattress, in stunned silence for at least a minute.
“Levi?” Charlotte finally says. “I need a hug.”
I pull her into my chest and just hold her there. I don’t know what she’s feeling – whether she’s scared or sad or horrified – but I’m sure I’m feeling pretty much all the same things. This place is like the dark backward version of Objections – the side of the “sex industry” few people want to talk about. A sweatshop for hookers.
“I wonder where that girl is?” Charlotte says into my shoulder.
“I wonder where Omar and Buck are?” Over the top of her head, on the wall above the bed, I see a grubby doorbell button. Raw wires run up the ceiling in a tangle before disappearing through a rough hole in the metal. “I found the bell.”
Charlotte turns, distastefully leaning over the stained mattress to reach for the bell. When she’s an inch from ringing it, I suddenly think of something.
“Wait!” I pull her hand away. “That guy at the top of the stairs thinks you’re one of the girls who works here.”
“He does?” She thinks for a moment. “So what?”
“So all these locks and doormen are to keep the girls under control. What if he makes a fuss when you try to leave?”
“I’ll make a fuss right back.”
As she reaches for the bell again, there’s a faint noise, like a kitten mewing.
“Did you say something?”
“No.” She presses the bell. Nothing obvious happens. Do we go and wait by the door, or stay here? I wish I had taken the time to talk to that bouncer, but I was so eager to get the hell out.
The kitten, or whatever it is, mews again.
“That! Did you hear that?”
Charlotte turns her head towards the back wall of the locker, pressing her ear onto the metal when another faint noise seeps through.
“Is it a cat?”
She shushes me, listening. “Someone is crying.”
I join her on the wall, my ear to the cold steel. Behind the wall, someone is definitely crying. A girl.
“Okay, fuck. How would we get to the locker behind this one?”
Charlotte looks at me like I’m stupid. “It will be the seventeenth locker down in the next row.”
“Duh. Of course. Come on.”
We run. Since we’ve rung the bell, there’s no telling who is on their way down to spring us. Or me. I’m starting to put together a picture in my head of how this place works, and it’s making me sick. There are girls locked up in here. Girls put to work upstairs. Girls brought down from the party to these fucked up “suites” for whatever kinky shit people are willing to pay for. Underage girls. I fight an urge to puke as we tear down the next aisle.
Charlotte skids to a halt in front of locker 217. It’s bolted with a padlock, just like the other one. I knock gently on the door.
“Hello?”
There’s whimpering from behind the door. I tug at the padlock, as though my outrage might have given me the strength to tear it open with my bare hands. Sadly not. “We’ll get you out. Just wait.”
Charlotte is already running back to the end of the aisle, looking around. “Here!” she yells, and disappears for a moment. She comes back with a heavy fire extinguisher. Perfect! I take it from her and whack it down on the padlock. It takes three blows, but finally the lock breaks open. I tear it off and throw it aside. Steeling myself, I pull the door open.
The smell hits me first, and as my eyes adjust to the light, I see the source. A bucket of waste in the far corner. In the other corner, a half-naked girl, chained to a bolt on the wall.
“God, no,” Charlotte says, and pushes past me.
Chapter Ten - Charlotte
I step slowly towards the girl, my hands raised so as not to frighten her. Levi hangs back – a good instinct. This girl probably doesn’t have much trust for men.
“It’s okay,” I say. “We’re here to help you.”
She presses herself into the corner, eyes wide, skinny arms wrapped around her narrow chest. She doesn’t look to be even full grown, much less over eighteen.
“What’s your name?” I say.
The girl shrinks away from me as I crouch in front of her. Her chain scrapes along the concrete floor as she moves.
“Levi, can you break the bolt?”
His shadow disappears out the door and reappears with the fire extinguisher. I shield the girl with my body as he attacks the bolt on the wall. It comes away after one solid whack. Levi sighs and looks down at the girl.
“Do you speak English?” he says. The girl barely reacts. “Ty govoriš' po-russki?”
Her eyes don’t exactly light up, but some life dribbles back into them as she nods.
“Kak vas zovut?” Levi says. “Men'a zovut Levi.” He points to his own chest. “Levi. This is Charlotte. Charlotte. Kak vas zovut?”
“Walentina.”
“Valentina?” Levi says. “Are you named after the astronaut? Valentina Tereshkova? Da? Kosmonashka?”
The girl offers a little smile at last. “Politsiju?”
“Nyet. Nyet. Drugh. Friend.”
Valentina looks at me for confirmation.
“Yes. Friends. We’re friends. It’s okay.” I hold out my hand, and after what feels like forever, Valentina takes it. She gets shakily to her feet as I pull her up. God, she’s skinny. Her rib bones strain against skin so pale it looks transparent. And she’s shivering, wearing nothing but a skimpy bra and panties. Levi slips off his hoodie and puts it around her shoulders. It hangs halfway to her knees. I don’t even think she’s five feet tall. I’m aching to ask her age, but on the whole, I think knowing might just make this nightmare that much worse.
We step out of the storage locker, Valentina blinking in the bright light. Her chain is slung over her arm like a train.
“Now what?” I ask.
Levi pulls out his phone. “I’m calling the police. If Buck and Omar haven’t gotten themselves out of this scene yet, then they deserve to get arrested.”
I hear the distinctive beeps of 911 as he dials. “Come on, come on…” he says, pacing. While he waits, I check Valentina over properly, taking her hands and gently turning her wrists outward so I can check the inside of her elbows her for needle marks. I push up one sleeve of the loose hoodie and the other while she watches me. The skin on her arms is as pale and smooth as the rest of her. Whatever drugs they’ve been giving her, it hasn’t been by injection. Thank god.
I can hear the strain in Levi’s voice as he gives details to the 911 operator – the address, everything we found here. Stuff he probably never thought he’d see in a million years. I don’t know why, but somehow I feel guilty – as though it’s my fault that his stupid friends dragged him out to this party. Maybe I’m just bearing the guilt of the whole of New Orleans right now. All the seedy side anyway. The shady, steamy, and sketchy. I’m as proud of our laissez faire image as the next person, but sometimes I think that image might not be worth it. Maybe the people rolling underneath the cocktails and feathers and beads aren’t having such good times.
“We’re on the second floor,” Levi says into the phone. “It’s like a self-storage type place… No, there’s no one down here but us. We’ll just hide somewhere and wait for the cops….okay…soon okay? This girl is only a child.” He hangs up, turning to us. “We should get out of sight.”
