Selling Out

by Amber Lin

  They leaned against the opposite corners, seemingly deciding to stay, shooting me dirty, desirous looks. Possibly they wondered if I was for hire, but of course I never would be here. It wasn’t even the prices, which were low but not offensive. There was a caste system to these things, and Jade’s house was as low as you could get and still warrant a bed.

  It wasn’t usually an Asian fetish that drew men here. Like a prime-time sitcom, any escort agency offered an assortment of white girls, with a token black and Asian to round out the group. Men usually came here for the convenience—women available without an appointment, location secured.

  Jade stepped out, wearing her usual uniform of a floral-patterned pajama suit cinched at the waist and cheap leather and cardboard sandals. Her hair was sleek black in a crop that would be hip on someone thirty years younger. There was an era of timelessness to her; she was ancient with smooth, pale skin, not a wrinkle or age spot to give her away. Still, no one would mistake her intensity; even the boys straightened under her hawk-like gaze.

  “What you want?” she asked them.

  “Uh…” They hemmed and shuffled, clearly reluctant to reveal any lascivious intentions to a woman who could have been their friend’s mom, but too polite—and horny—to leave now.

  “You want massage? Why you come here if you don’t want massage?”

  “We do, we do.”

  The quieter one stepped forward, not willing to lose his shot at a happy ending over his dumbfounded friend.

  “We just were wondering… I mean, when you say massage… Because we heard…”

  Jade glared at them, her irritation almost palpable. This place was full-service, but everyone knew not to talk about options or anything sexual outside the room. It was part of the way they protected themselves from narcs, but it was obvious these two boneheads weren’t undercover; they were just stupid.

  “Massage only,” she said flatly. “Very relaxing. You like. No refunds.”

  Flustered, they dug around in their pockets to come up with the right amount, thirty-minute sessions for each of them. Watching their reluctance as they handed over the cash, I wondered if they had even kept any back to pay for extras. And yeah, they’d be shitty tippers.

  After Jade led them to the back, she motioned me upstairs into her office, which was arranged more like a regular sitting room. Out of courtesy, I accepted her offer of a drink and received a very small glass of flat soda. Here, alone, her accent dwindled to a lilt, her tone still sharp but less abrasive.

  “So, you in trouble. It was going to happen. Just matter of time with that one.”

  “With…” Henri?

  “You know Jenny? Pretty girl. Stoner.”

  The girl at the party, the one we’d left behind in the hotel room. The reporter had made no mention of a dead hooker, which was certainly newsworthy if only for the salacious appeal. She had probably bailed shortly after we did, I assured myself. “Is she okay?” I asked.

  Jade snorted. “How should I know? Maybe, maybe not. Henri knows it was you, and she makes him money, so why would he hurt her?”

  “Great,” I said faintly.

  “She start maybe three years before you.”

  “Jenny? I guess. She was pretty far in when I started, but she isn’t the type to pull rank.”

  She seemed not to hear me. “Her mother was a nurse, gone during the day. Jenny started getting high, so her mom kicked her out. Tough love, they say. Jenny quit school and moved in with her boyfriend. A common story.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” It was a common story. The kind that made Jade’s business possible. So I wasn’t sure why Jade was telling me this, but conversations with her were often circuitous. Once she had talked for fifteen minutes about her kidney stones before segueing into telling me about Marguerite and the women’s shelter she ran, concluding they were both a pain in her side. At least this seemed more relevant.

  Jade flipped through a Vogue magazine and pulled out a yellowed newspaper clipping. She slid it across the glass coffee table toward me. It appeared to be a small inner-page article titled “Dead End in Drug-Related Shooting.” The piece explained that a twenty-three-year-old male had been found shot dead in his apartment. Due to his previous history of dealing charges and the circumstances of the break-in, police assumed the hit was drug related. Rumors indicated that the victim had poached the territory of a well-known dealer in the city, Henri Denikin, but there was insufficient evidence to link him to the shooting. A chill ran through me.

  The last paragraph remarked that the only possible witness, the victim’s seventeen-year-old live-in girlfriend, had been missing since the shooting. Her name was Jennifer Ponds. There was a grainy black-and-white photograph of a girl who looked about nine years old, dressed up for her school picture. A younger, happier version of the Jenny I knew, one who couldn’t imagine the indignities that would be visited on her body.

  Beneath the photo was a number for the missing-persons hotline. With a jerky motion, I threw the clipping back on the coffee table, but it caught on the air and floated to my feet. My fingers had black smudges left from the ink.

  “What is this?” I asked. “What does this have to do with me?”

  Jade shrugged. “Maybe nothing.”

  Unaccountably, I felt angry. “This is from the original paper, not a printout. So you knew about this at the time. Did you call this number? Did Jenny even have a chance?”

  “Call them?” she asked scornfully. “What for, call them?”

  I shook my head, throat tight. Her words replayed in my head: “What for, call them?” That wasn’t how this worked; I knew that. Every one of these girls had a story. Every one of us had a story, and it didn’t matter. I had a story. Don’t think about it. What for?

  “Hey,” Jade chastised. “Did the rich bastard fuck you so hard your brains are broken, huh? You want to save your skin, or the girl you have, then pay attention.”

  I looked down, feeling properly chastised. Of course Jade was helping me. My gut told me this was important, and I would never have found it without her.

  Focus on Jenny. On Ella. This wasn’t about me.

  I picked up the clipping again and stared at her bright smile. Was this the most recent picture her mother had owned of her daughter?

  “Yesterday Henri had those men shot in retaliation. The same thing he did before, with her dealer boyfriend.”

  Jade shook her head. “You are determined not to see truth.”

  “It could be a pattern,” I said more gently. “Maybe those guys at the party had done something to Henri. Cheated him.”

  She gave me a look not unlike the one she’d used on the customers earlier. Idiot.

  Okay, then. “So if it’s not that… That’s how he acquired Jenny. It wasn’t random. Maybe it was even a little bit of revenge, to whore out the girlfriend of a man who screwed him over.”

  She looked approving, if that was what the retreat of her scowl meant.

  I continued, “And if that’s how he acquired Ella too, then it explains why she was so clueless about it. It also explains why he doesn’t want to give her up.”

  “Face,” Jade said curtly.

  Everything was face with her. Face meant a man’s reputation, his respect, his ruthlessness. If Ella represented some sort of revenge to Henri, he wouldn’t let her slip away so easily. Killing the men and framing her for the murder might have been the most convenient way of finding her in the large city.

  “So what do we do?” I asked.

  “If you hand over the girl, Henri will owe you.” At my shocked look, she raised her eyebrow. “Maybe owe you enough to let you go.”

  My freedom or the girl. Oh, she was good. Maybe she had been sent by Henri after all.

  “No,” I said, my voice just a little too loud to be confident.

  She didn’t look overly perturbed by my refusal. “I assume you won’t send the girl away to live on the run and turn tricks for her money. Otherwise you would have already let her go. The l
ast option is look to the source. If you restore face in some other way, maybe Henri will be happy. He will make cops look somewhere else. You both free.”

  I was skeptical. “Did Henri tell you that?”

  “He tells me nothing. I hear things. You know this.” Her surprise looked genuine. “So don’t listen to me. What do I know?”

  “No, no. I’m sorry. I’ve been messed up from this whole thing. How can I find out what happened? Please tell me.”

  “I should make you ask girl for that.” Then she seemed to reconsider. “I tell you what I know. I always like you. Henri is scared of the girl, because she is only one who can put him away.”

  “No.” The word slipped out of my mouth, the thought of Henri afraid so preposterous. Though he was hands-on, he still had his men do the dirty work. If the heat for one of his employees became too much, that person disappeared. And on the rare occasion that failed, he had his hands in CPD’s pockets and the best lawyers dirty money could buy.

  Something gleamed in Jade’s eye. “Not only what she sees. She has proof of this.”

  Her accent slipped—not completely absent but not nearly as thick. I had a sudden vision of her playing a part. The most garish representations of her culture propped up like a prostitute’s slutty clothes. This plastic-covered sofa her version of a hotel room bed. Maybe she sold herself as much as any girl down the hall. Maybe she spent every day faking it too.

  “You want Henri brought down,” I said, knowing it to be true.

  She slipped back into her role. “I been waiting long time. This will be return favor enough.”

  I paused, mulling it over. “What does this have to do with Luke?”

  Her deeply lined face split into a smile, showing white, even teeth. “I wonder when you bring him up. Luke should come with you. Alone, you will probably get raped and killed. With him is the only way. He is only one cares enough.”

  “I’m not sure he wants to help me.”

  “Tell him you are looking how Henri acquire girl. He will come.”

  Jade’s awareness of the underground certainly proved useful, but it was disconcerting to think she might have better understanding of those close to me than I did. She seemed to know Ella’s mind, Luke’s motivations, when I could barely manage not to piss them both off.

  Well, it seemed I needed to have a very stern, pointed talk with Ella. If this was true, she had been hiding something that had damn near got us killed, something that might be salvation for us both.

  “You want pay respects?” she asked softly.

  Along the side wall, a small, fragile-looking table held a meditating Buddha—surprisingly, this was the thin, serious-looking version and not a jolly fat one. A thin reed of incense sent smoke into the air. I knelt in front of the table and deposited my two-hundred-dollar tithe into a small tin box in the back.

  After a moment of quiet, I heard the swish of Jade’s clothing as she came closer.

  “Your Luke,” she said. “He searches for someone. Another girl in the life.”

  My breath caught. All this time, Luke had been religiously following the rules. All this time, he had been going after Henri to find some other girl, some other prostitute. Not me. It shouldn’t have mattered. Shouldn’t have been a surprise—since when had I been anyone’s end goal? Since when had I been more than a way to pass the time? A stepping stone to the girl he really wanted. Yes, that was me.

  I stood. “I will do you this favor.” I hardened my voice, infusing it with whatever influence, whatever face I held in my own right. “But don’t go to Allie’s house. Don’t ever bother her again.”

  * * * *

  “I swear I don’t know anything,” Ella insisted, falling back onto the bed.

  She hadn’t strayed from that line the entire time, probably because my interrogation technique amounted to some variation of Come on! Please?

  I sighed. This was getting us nowhere. If Jade had lied, if she’d been wrong… But I didn’t think so. It made too much sense and hurt too damn much to be wrong.

  “It would be easier to believe you,” I said, “if you told me anything useful. Who you are, what your name is. How did you end up in that hotel room?”

  “This is stupid. I didn’t see any crime.”

  But I could feel her relenting. My breath quickened. “Just tell me.” I played my trump card, since I had already figured out she had a weakness for sacrifice. “This is my ass in trouble too, remember?”

  She flung her arm over her eyes—defeat. “Okay. So I’m with some friends, going to this party downtown. You have to be twenty-one to get in, but my friend hooked up with this guy who makes fake IDs. He was the one who told us about it, actually.”

  I sat down cross-legged on the bed beside her. “Go on.”

  “So we get there, and you know, it’s crazy loud. Everyone’s drinking a lot, smoking weed, and other stuff. I’m just standing around, and these guys kind of cornered me. At first I liked it. I guess I was flattered, but then I started to get scared. I didn’t know how to make them leave me alone. People were only a few feet away, but no one looked over, while those men were just…herding me along.”

  Closing my eyes, I could almost see her uncertain smile, feel her nervous energy, smell the pungent smoke. I had been there myself, the teenager with too much curiosity and money for her own good. I’d been hit on, fended off the drunk and slightly violent, only to scamper away breathless. I had always been lucky on my wild excursions, like some sort of cosmic payment to balance out the unluckiness I found at home. But I already knew the ending to Ella’s story, and whatever had gone down, she hadn’t been blessed with the same unnatural immunity. She was too young, too inexperienced, like a tight bud just bloomed, unknowing of the world around her but more fragile than ever before.

  “We ended up in this room.” She moved restlessly as she spoke. “It was kind of like what happened in the hotel room, except everything was dirtier and… Well, I guess that was the main difference.”

  “There aren’t many differences in fucking men, but that’s an important one. That and tipping, so you can see why I prefer them rich.”

  “I don’t want any sort of guy, rich or poor. Can’t I just stay here? It seems safe. I could…I don’t know, be the maid or something.”

  Boy, what a visual. “I don’t think Philip needs that kind of temptation.”

  “He doesn’t even like me,” she scoffed. Then, aggrieved, “I know, I know, they don’t have to like me to have sex with me.”

  That brought a brief smile to my face. She was learning. “So how’d you end up with Henri?”

  “They took me out the back, where there’s a bunch of men standing around a limo. The guys are pushing me forward, like here, we did it. This scary dude from the limo—I guess that’s Henri—he says, ‘Take her.’ The men pull me inside, but not before I saw them shoot the guys from the club. I was so freaked out, just like half crying and half screaming. Henri is cool as snow, asking me all these questions. What am I doing in a place like this. How have I been. First I thought he was going to take me home. Then when I realized he wasn’t going to help me, I thought he was going to… You know.”

  Yeah, I knew, but it wasn’t like Henri to gangbang underage chicks in a nightclub. Even acquiring a girl that way seemed too lowbrow for him. Most escorts in Chicago would have killed to work with Henri for how much money he would make them. And status, because there was nothing a hooker longed for more than respect. Face, Jade would say.

  I examined Ella, her soft brown hair and smooth, creamy skin. Her nose tipped up, her eyes slanted up, doe-like. She was an attractive girl, no doubt, but there would have been plenty of them at that club, more sexed up than her. And the fact that he hadn’t fucked her before sending her on a job meant he didn’t have a sexual interest in her.

  For the most part, Henri didn’t take seconds on his girls. He fucked them first or not at all.

  Neither did he bother with rape. Henri liked his women willing; it ma
de the girl’s inevitable fall more perverse. I shuddered—a residual reaction, a creak in the shadows of my memory. Only twice had I ever let Henri fuck me. Once upon a time, it was the price of entry to work with him and to gain access to the best clients.

  Later, I’d been desperate to help my friend Allie fight for her daughter. Henri had given me the cash, but the experience had been painful and humiliating. That night I had made a promise to myself. That had been the last day I worked for him—until the night I met Ella.

  Life was about finding the positive, picking the wildflower from a field of brittle grass. At least she didn’t know that pain, and if I could keep her safe, she never would.

  Resolved, I turned back to her story. “Are you sure the guys were bringing you out to him? Maybe they were looking for somewhere private, and you guys saw him doing some deal.”

  “No, I remember one of the guys saying how the rich guy needs to pay up.”

  Shadows flitted across her face, pain and horror and grief for a man she didn’t even know, a man who’d hurt her. This was more than innocence, her instinctive caring for her enemy—it was goodness. No wonder we fought all the time. We were oil and water, destined never to mix.

  “He was the one I saw on the ground as the door closed.”

  I thought back to what Jade had said. “And Henri wasn’t doing any shady business when you got there? Drugs, women, something?”

  “No. He was just standing outside, waiting.”

  “Did he give you anything?”

  She pursed her lips in frustration. “Like what? No, nothing. See, this is pointless.”

  “The point is saving your ungrateful behind,” I said mildly.

  From her position where she reclined on the bed, she suddenly turned onto her belly and rested her forehead on my jeans-clad knee. Her words were muffled when she spoke.