Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2)

by Giles O'Bryen

  ‘Whatever you say.’

  His face leered at me from his rear-view mirror. ‘You American, boss? English?’

  I stared out of the window. Maybe I should tell him to turn round and take me back to my apartment. But another image I hadn’t succeeded in obliterating yet was of the young woman at the house, the triangle of soft, rosy skin between the lapels of her dressing gown, her dyed blonde hair and languid eyes. I did want a girl. I wanted her. But any girl would do. You’re an off-duty soldier, I told myself, and this is how it goes: you get rat-arsed, fuck a whore, then go home. If you still can.

  The Vegas Lounge was a low-built box with a flat roof sprouting a satellite dish and a pair of air-conditioning units. The windows were whitewashed over and covered with chicken wire. As I got out of the taxi, a man in a puffa jacket strolled over and gave the driver a banknote. The Vegas Lounge might be the best club in town, I thought, or it might just be the one that tipped taxi drivers the most for bringing punters to their door.

  Two big, slope-shouldered men in tight suits stood either side of the entrance, their no-nonsense faces illuminated by a green and pink neon sign over the door. Immediately I was planning how to fight them. One was a gym bunny who spent too much time working on his arms and shoulders – he had the skinny legs of a man forty pounds lighter. Snap the ligaments of his knee with a kick from the side, draw the other one away and watch for a weapon. They looked me over as I approached, no doubt making the same kind of calculation.

  I passed between them into an anteroom formed by heavy swags of ruby red curtain hanging from the ceiling. Several more doormen stood in the shadows. A sharp-faced woman wearing a green evening dress and a necklace of jade beads greeted me with a perfunctory smile, then led me over to a table bearing a vase of white lilies with spotted throats.

  ‘Entrance to Vegas Lounge is thirty dollars,’ she said.

  ‘That’s a fancy price for a garage with a bit of neon stuck on the front,’ I said.

  She shrugged, causing the skin beneath her necklace to stretch over her ribcage.

  I paid her the money and she pulled a section of curtain aside to let me through. There were twenty or thirty low tables, each with a glass-shaded lamp that gave off a corona of dim, pinkish light. Groups of men lounged in sofas and armchairs. A few of them raised their heads, then looked away when they saw that I was ready to meet their eyes. The light gave their faces a peculiar appearance, swollen and a little effeminate. A tired-looking girl dressed in tight white shorts and a sequinned halter-neck bikini top showed me to an empty sofa opposite two men of about fifty. A bottle of brandy was set on a side table between them. Neither of them looked up when I sat down. One was reclining in his chair with his head thrown back, taking long pulls on a thin cigar while the other leaned in and talked.

  I ordered whisky. The walls were bare brick painted with thick black paint and decorated with photos of movie starlets from the forties and fifties, all tilted chins and undulating hair. The bar was a long table draped in red baize, manned by two men in black trousers and ridiculous frilled shirts.

  The girl brought my drink. As she leaned over to place the glass on the table, the cigar-smoking man behind her ran his fingers up the inside of her thigh, causing her to shy away and slop my drink on the table.

  ‘Be careful! Your new guest does not want whisky in his lap.’

  He slapped her on the leg and grinned at me.

  ‘Macedonian girls. They look OK, but they don’t know how to behave. They have to be taught. You are English, I think. From London?’

  He had an oval of neatly clipped beard around his chin and upper lip, a narrow nose and sunken eyes. I shook my head and looked away.

  ‘Silent type, huh?’

  I felt him staring at me and turned to meet his eye. The expression of lascivious entitlement was so repulsive that I looked at his companion instead, a small man whose demeanour was full of furtive hostility. After a moment, the two of them turned back to each other and continued their conversation.

  I took a long swig of my whisky and tried to relax. I’d never set foot inside a brothel before, so what was I expecting? Raucous soldiers and buxom girls, tickles and squeezes and hearts of gold? None of that here. These johns were all rich and middle-aged. Their eyes flicked greedily over the bare limbs on parade, while their desires crouched in the shadows, biding their time.

  Get out, I told myself. This place is all wrong.

  Yet I too was entranced by the depravity of the Vegas Lounge. My eyes dwelt on creases and clefts. Lust pawed impatiently inside me. Then, serving a table on the far side of the room, I saw the sleepy-eyed girl from the troll’s house. At least, I thought it was her – by this time I wasn’t focusing so well. Her blonde hair was pinned into a loose knot at the back of her neck and she wore the regulation shorts and bikini top – an altogether different girl from the one who’d allowed her dressing gown to slip open and smiled at me in the doorway of the house on Syrna Street.

  It would be better if she didn’t know I was here – she no doubt despised the clientele of the Vegas Lounge. I could find her another day, now that I knew where she worked. I lowered my head and watched her discreetly, but in any case she was too busy serving – and fending off – the circle of laughing men at her table to notice me.

  Then my befuddled mind caught hold of another thought: she lived in the house of a man who had tried to dent my skull with an iron bar. The troll might even now be waiting in the yard with a troupe of outsized doormen. Cautiously, I scanned the faces around me. The troll wasn’t among them. Anyway, how could he have known that I’d end up here? None of the bouncers seemed to be taking a particular interest in me.

  After a while, I allowed myself to think that I might not be in danger after all. That’s how drunk I was. Before long, the woman with the jade necklace came over, put another whisky down in front of me, and perched her angular bottom on the arm of my sofa.

  ‘You like a nice girl, sir?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said casually.

  The man opposite watched me with a smirk on his face, then waved his cigar at the woman. ‘Show your new guest to room sixteen,’ he told her.

  ‘Nice young girl for you,’ she said. ‘Is that what you like?’

  I nodded, thinking that she wasn’t making much sense. Why would I want a not-nice old girl?

  ‘Price is two hundred,’ she said. ‘You come with me.’

  She stood up and I followed her to a door at the back of the lounge. Beyond was a waiting area with candles set out on shelves along one wall, their scent doing little to mask the high, salty smell of human bodies. Two hundred dollars was a lot more than I’d been expecting, but she had a card reader to hand.

  ‘For champagne, you see?’

  She handed me the receipt, went to a cupboard stacked with linen and took out two white towels, then beckoned me along a narrow corridor with rooms on one side that were little more than plasterboard partitions. I heard a grunt and a slap from one of them as we passed. Even then I could have turned round and walked away, written off the two hundred dollars and saved myself from the corrupting embrace of the Vegas Lounge. We reached the last door. Room 16. She handed me the towels, unlocked the door and ushered me inside.

  More candles, flushing the thin walls with a sickly orange cast. A bedside table with an ashtray and a table lamp that gave no light. A low bed with a white sheet stretched over it. The door shut behind me. Where was the girl? I stepped further into the room and heard an intake of breath. My eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and I caught sight of a figure squatting on the far side of the bed, out of reach of the candlelight. I dropped the towels on the bed, sat down with my back to her and turned on the lamp, thinking that she would come to me when she was ready. After a moment, I felt her climb onto the bed and tap me on the shoulder.

  I turned and there was a small girl kneeling beside me. I mean, a child. A child dressed in a flimsy nightdress, hands stretching the hem over her bony knees, eye
s cast down. She’s been sent in to prepare the room, I thought stupidly. The real girl will be here in a moment. No one came and the truth crept over me. This is what I had bought with my two hundred dollars: the right to take my turn with this child, then pass her on to another of the guests of the Vegas Lounge. Shock gave way to fury. The girl looked up at me in alarm. I ran to the door. The woman with the jade necklace was watching from the waiting area, a cellphone held to her ear.

  ‘Come with me,’ I said to the girl. ‘I’ll get you out of here.’

  She shrank away. I took her arm and she started to cry. The door opened behind me: the bony woman, pointing above my head. I looked up and saw a camera.

  ‘All on video. You and this little girl. Let go now, you are hurting her.’

  I looked into the girl’s face and saw it was true. I released my grip on her slim wrist and the woman pulled her away. One of the doormen loomed in the doorway. The gym bunny with the skinny calves. I already knew what to do with him. My kick took him on the side of the knee and the joint buckled. He reached for something to steady himself but there was nothing and he toppled to the floor, hampering the man behind him so that he stumbled as he rushed me. I dropped my forehead into the bridge of his nose and the impact was so violent it almost knocked me out, too. I hurdled his body and sprinted along the corridor, then burst through the door into the bar.

  ‘Get out!’ I bellowed. ‘Out, now!’

  The clientele didn’t like that. I picked up a side table and flung it across the room. It crashed into the back of a man who’d stood up from his sofa and was turning for the exit. I saw the cigar-smoking man standing five yards away, so I seized a bottle of champagne and hurled it at his head. He ducked and I ran over and punched him in the mouth, then ploughed on through the lounge.

  I came to the makeshift bar, lifted it off the trestles and rammed the tabletop into the frilled shirts behind. A cohort of doormen had gathered behind me, but none of them wanted to be the first to take me on. The room was emptying fast. The curtain round the lobby got torn down and fell like a net over the crush of retreating men. I got in among them, hammering my fists, elbows, head into every face that came within range. There was such a throng around the exit that the doormen couldn’t get to me now, even if they’d wanted to. A few moments later, I was out through the door.

  I got less than five hundred yards down the street before an unmarked saloon sped past and pulled up. Two men piled out, aimed handguns at me and shouted. I slowed, looked back: a police van parked across the street behind me, uniformed men fanning out. I thought of making a run for it, but I was drunk and worn out and it didn’t seem worth the risk. The Vegas Lounge wasn’t the kind of place to press charges and a police cell was as good a place as any to spend the night.

  I put my hands above my head and waited for them to approach. Two of the uniforms searched and cuffed me, while the men from the saloon holstered their guns and lit up. They locked me in a cage in the back of the van and we set off for the centre of town. At the police station, formalities were kept to a minimum. They didn’t seem interested in me, and I wondered how often they carted troublemakers away from the Vegas Lounge. You can’t keep a brothel in a place like Skopje without reaching some kind of an accommodation with the local police. Five minutes later, I was lying on the floor in a windowless cell, which mercifully I had to myself.

  Connections circled in my head. The sleepy-eyed girl who lived at 77 Syrna Street, where I’d dropped off a twelve-year-old girl after saving her from exposure in a forest in Kosovo, was employed at the Vegas Lounge, where they sold underage girls for sex. Coincidence? Possibly. But when I’d come back to look for her, the troll in charge had tried to kill me. And what of the priest who’d given me the address? He’d told me there was UNHCR paperwork to show the children he sent there were in official hands. He was lying. Or the papers were forged and he’d been duped. I searched desperately for some mistake in the logic, but there was none.

  I rolled around on the cold concrete floor and these speculations rolled with me, pointless and unanswerable. My bruised fists remembered the havoc I’d created among the clients of the Vegas Lounge, but the memory brought with it no satisfaction. There was no redemption to be found in the righteous fury I’d unleashed on the assembled sinners, and no hiding from the truth: I’d laid waste to the Vegas Lounge to exorcise a mood of self-loathing and despair that had got me in its clutches ever since I’d killed the boy in the farmhouse loft. Nor could I unburden myself of the image of the girl on the bed in Room 16. Could I have taken her with me, if I hadn’t flown into a rage instead? Too late now. I remembered how she’d tapped me on the shoulder and held the nightdress over her little girl’s thighs. Another garish memory to add to those I’d accumulated over the last few days, like warts on a once smooth face.

  The alcohol took over and I fell into a fitful sleep – to be woken some hours later by the clang of iron bolts being drawn back. The door swung open and there stood Clive Silk, my MI6 liaison. Behind him were three wingmen, cussed old sergeants with fat fists and small, cold eyes.

  Silk started reading from a document he had ready. ‘You are hereby arrested under Section forty-two of the Armed Forces Act nineteen ninety-six, on suspicion of committing an offence under the Child Abduction Act nineteen eighty-four, namely abduction of a child.’

  ‘Filthy nonce,’ said one of the sergeants.

  There was a gratified expression on Silk’s square, doughy face. We’d never got on. ‘Do you want to make this easy for yourself,’ he said, ‘or shall we do it—’

  ‘The hard way,’ I said, taking him by the throat and driving the top of his head into the chin of the sergeant behind him.

  Just before they took me out, I thought of something else. The girl I had rescued. . . I didn’t even know her name.

  Anna

  12

  My dearest, darling Katarina, my sweet angel, my beautiful child, how could I have lost you? My head seethes, scrabbles, swoons with the loss of you. I cannot think for the loss of you. My heart beats without point. I do not sleep for fear that hope will desert me while my mind is off guard. I am drained out, blinking at emptiness.

  The past rearranges itself in my mind until it seems as if everything colluded in the events of that horrible day. It began with a call from the secretary to Mikhail Ongoric, vice-principal of the University of Pristina, requiring my attendance at a meeting the following Friday 15 January. There would be no school that day and Katarina implored me to let her stay in our apartment on her own. I was worried about the war between the Kosovo Liberation Army and our Serbian masters, but I agreed. There had been bombs and raids and killings in Pristina, but not in our district. A sensible twelve-year-old girl – even a Kosovar girl of mixed Albanian-Roma parentage – would be perfectly safe. Besides, we had good neighbours who would take care of her if anything bad should happen.

  On the Thursday I saw a gang of men dressed in black, with black gloves over their hands and black balaclavas over their faces, marching through the Albi shopping mall and barging people aside as if they did not exist. Specijalna Antiteroristička Jedinica, President Slobodan Milošević’s pet fighting dogs. I lost heart. I couldn’t leave Katya alone with Milosh’s bullies about, so I rang my ex-husband Franz’s mother in Talinic. There has never been any fighting there because it’s a Roma village, and as such regarded with contempt by the KLA and Serbian army alike. I arranged to drop Katya off at one and pick her up by six at the latest. ‘Oh,’ said Grandmama, ‘make an old woman happy, Anna, and leave her with me forever!’ Katya was cross with me, though in truth she loves spending time in Talinic. Her Roma cousins treat her with awe because she is so pretty and clever, and they stage boxing matches and dances in her honour.

  I drove her to Talinic in my Fiat Frikshëm, as we call it, my Fiat Frightful, and arrived in Vice-Principal Ongoric’s office at two. The meeting was to discuss his application to the Serbian Ministry for Further and Higher Education for the funds
required to institute a new course in international relations. It was pointless. Belgrade were never going to fund the course because they don’t know anything about international relations and if they did they would never leave the teaching of it in the hands of a claque of clever-clog Kosovars like us – as Ongoric would have known, had he not been such a gullible clod. Nevertheless, we combed through the proposed curriculum at tedious length, searching for evidence of intellectual imbalance; social, racial, religious, political, gender or cultural bias; and, finally, at just after four-fifteen, deficiencies in relevance to the administrative and/or commercial and/or cultural needs of the greater Serbia.

  On our release, my friend and colleague Eleni rolled her eyes at me and we agreed that our fortitude in the presence of V-P Ongoric’s weary quest for impeccable balance in the matter of doomed funding applications to Belgrade warranted the very best coffee in all of Kosovo. We went to the Italian Café on Novotny Street and had a good grumble. I lingered over the thick swirl of caramel-coloured foam on top of my espresso, then had a second cup because the first was such a delicious luxury.

  At five-twenty, I stood up abruptly and said I must hurry because I’d promised to collect Katarina by six and even though Talinic was only half an hour away by Fiat Frightful, the traffic would be bad. The traffic was bad. My way out of town was blocked by a bus that had got its wheel jammed in a broken drain cover. The policeman who should have been redirecting the traffic stood around flirting with the driver and giving her cigarettes and nudging her until I got out and politely asked him if he might stop the traffic on the other carriageway for long enough for some of us to get by and was told to mind my own business or he’d inspect my vehicle and find some reason to give me a ticket. I got back into the Fiat Frightful and waited.

  A team of mechanics arrived and unloaded a large jack from the back of their rescue truck. Everything will be fine, I told myself. Very soon you’ll be holding Katya tight in your arms. She’ll squirm away because she wants Grandmama to see she’s too grown-up to be hugged and kissed like a little girl. Grandmama will make me sample a spoonful of her revoltingly runny sour-cherry jam while she tells me how adorable Katya is. She would never confess it to me, but she feels guilty that her darling boy Franz ran off and left me shortly before Katya’s second birthday and never comes round to see us nor sends any money.