Skin Trade Read online

  “How do you know when you meet a bad guy?” Lily said. “You think he looks like Harry Lyme?”

  “Genghis Khan. Hannibal Lecter. Richard Nixon. Joe Stalin. I don’t know.” Just keep talking, I think. Come on. Yackety-yack, come on, Lily, please. Talk to me.

  Without any warning, suddenly, like a plane losing altitude, the bubble bounces once. It stops. Bounces again. My heart pounds. We’re four hundred feet up. I hold her and keep chattering.

  “We’re talking Dr Evil here?” I strike a pose, try to make her laugh. Make her pay attention. “We talking Henry Kissinger? Goldfinger? Mussolini? David Duke? Who? Come on, help me here, Lily, who’s your number one bad guy, real, fictional, whatever.”

  “I think most of the bad guys look like everyone else. No horns, no tail.” But she’s not interested in the game; her speech is slow, frozen, dry.

  “Forget the bad guys, then, OK Lily? Come on.” I’m holding her as hard as I can.

  The wheel seems to sigh in the wind now. Lily begins to weep. “I want to get off this fucking thing.”

  A few more minutes pass. Clouds are scudding across the sky, stars disappear, rain starts to fall. Little drops of rain, like wet marbles, tinkle against the exterior of the glass wall, pop open, run down its sides.

  “It’s a power cut, Lily. Look at me.”

  “How come the lights are on if it’s just a power cut?” she says. “It’s something bad, I’ve covered these stories, I know how this works, you end up sprayed over London in a million pieces.” She puts her hands against the door. It’s sealed from outside. “Make them stop it,” she begs. “There’s a hatch somewhere, I read about it, for emergencies. Where’s your phone?”

  I try the phone, but the signal cuts out. It’s New Year’s Eve, people are calling each other, tying up the networks. Happy New Year.

  There’s a bench in the middle of the capsule, and I tug at her. “Let’s sit for a minute.”

  The rain sluices down the side of the bubble. Lily, who won’t sit, who stays glued against the glass, is silent. I try the phone again; there’s no signal, or maybe the battery’s dead.

  “You don’t know anything,” Lily says. “Last year four people killed themselves jumping into the river New Year’s Eve. Maybe others they didn’t report. I swear to you, Artie. They set up a morgue last week. I know about this stuff. I hear about it. I saw the fucking morgue.” Staring out, she clutches my arm hard enough to bruise.

  She disappears into her own paranoia where I can’t reach her. I’m stranded hundreds of feet over London in a ferris wheel that isn’t working with someone I love who’s maybe cracking up.

  “My God.”

  “What?”

  “My God.”

  “What is it?”

  “Someone’s falling. Look.”

  “No.”

  “Someone fell.” Lily is yelling. “Someone. A woman. I saw her, Artie. I saw, out there, from the capsule below. A hatch opened, someone pushed her, it’s why we stopped. This is why we stopped. Get me out of here.”

  But there’s no one. I’m next to Lily, looking out, and there’s no one falling. Lily is shouting. She’s seen it, she says, a woman who tipped over and fell, into the river, into the dark heaving crowds, onto the road. She saw it in the light of a spill of fireworks that has already faded.

  “There’s nothing, sweetheart.”

  Lily resists; she pushes away from me, wants out, but I hold on to her. Over and over, she plays through the scene, repeating herself: a woman, she mumbles, falling. She’s hallucinating and the rain falls and breaks on the glass. Crying, Lily shakes. I hold her.

  For half an hour we float over London in our glass bubble. The rain comes down harder. I feel adrift, too, helpless, aimless, while Lily tries not to claw the walls. I can hear my own heart.

  An hour later we’re on the ground. A few emergency vehicles, a few medics, firemen. People are milling, laughing from relief. Some adventure! Some New Year’s Eve! Never forget it. Cheers.

  As each glass pod comes down, passengers climb out, some shaky, others full of bravado or excited because a television crew has arrived. There’s no crime here, just the aftermath of a freak accident that left us stranded for an hour. No terrorism, either, not even a whisper. I can tell by the lack of special forces, or chaos or fear on the faces of the cops. My arm around Lily, who’s tense enough to explode, I find a cop and say, “What happened?”

  “Nothing much,” he says. “A power cut. A real bugger, though. Best go home now,” he adds.

  “Someone got pushed, isn’t that it?” Lily says to him. He thinks she’s drunk. He humors her. “Those capsules are sealed, dear.” He calls her “dear’ as if she’s a crazy old woman. I want to punch him in the nose because I’m worried for her.

  Lily’s voice is pleading. “Just take me home, Artie. Please.”

  “We’re going.”

  She covers her face with her hands.

  “Everything’s going to be OK. It will. I promise.” “Artie?”

  “Yes, sweetheart?”

  “The woman who got pushed from the wheel, you don’t believe me.”

  “Tell me what you think you saw.”

  “I think it was supposed to be me.”

  PART ONE

  1

  They found Lily two days later in an empty apartment in Paris. The apartment near the rue de Rivoli had high ceilings, gold-colored curtains streaked with filth, and a distant view of the Louvre Museum with the weird, alluring glass pyramid out front.

  Before I got there, I didn’t know if she was dead or alive. On the phone, they told me she was alive, she was critical. I didn’t believe it. She was at a public hospital, Hotel Dieu; they couldn’t move her. They seemed to know what the hell they were doing, or maybe they were lying, the way everybody lies when there’s bad stuff. Keep the family calm. Keep them out. Let the pros do the job. I’d said and done it plenty when I was on the job, when I was a cop and a family would come to the hospital, pleading: How bad? And I’d say: We don’t know yet.

  We were supposed to go to Paris together that week, Lily and me. Out of the blue she said, I’ll go on ahead of you, OK? She said it New Year’s Day, the morning after the wheel. I’ll go tomorrow, she said.

  There was plenty on the news about the power cut; it was a freak accident. And Lily was fine, she was herself, she said she was sorry she had acted crazy as a bedbug the night before. She’d been feeling tired, paranoid, too much to drink, too many cold pills she took when she felt flu coming on. She was fine, great, she said. Then she told me she was going to Paris early. An old friend, she said. OK, Artie? You don’t mind, do you?

  “Some French guy with loads of dough and a funny accent?”

  She laughed. “Don’t be an asshole. There’s only you.”

  It took me half the night to get there. In the borrowed apartment in London, I threw whatever I could put my hands on into a suitcase – my clothes, Lily’s – and picked up her laptop. I barely knew what I took. The phone call from some Paris cop came after the trains and planes stopped, but I got a cab, found an all-night car rental and drove. I had to keep moving.

  The car, which had a metallic odor of chrome, also stank of fake leather, cigarettes and the cherry air-freshener used to kill the stink of smoke. On the way to Paris, listening to someone babbling through the night on the radio, I smoked two packs.

  The dark tangle of London roads took me across the Thames, where I passed the big wheel, a dark shape now against the wet sky. There were no boats on the river and it was raining. I got lost, chasing myself in circles until I found the motorway south to the coast. The rain froze and turned to sleet. It made the road hard to see, the distances between cars tough to judge. Hands sweating, I gripped the wheel tight and leaned forward, unable to lose the feeling someone was following me.

  There wasn’t any evidence; the night, the lights, the reflections on the road were playing tricks. In my rear-view mirror all I saw were the headlights of ca
rs. But it wouldn’t go away, this sense of someone there. The muscles in the back of my neck locked up. Then, in the distance, the tunnel itself.

  Hard white overheads lit up the border like the railway spur into a concentration camp. The truck lanes were jammed with big rigs, the kind you see on interstates at home. The whole complex, roads, buildings, weigh stations, were drenched with that relentless light.

  In the windows of the cars were the faces of drivers who looked beat, faces with a greenish cast from the lights. A woman, a red silk scarf on her head, leaned out of the car in front of me and emptied an ashtray into the road so the butts fell into a pool of diesel dripping from a truck.

  It looked like some sci-fi construct at the edge of the world, the drivers heading across the border, traveling to some other planet. Planet Europe; it reminded me of New Jersey, its tangled borderlands, the smell of trucks.

  Twenty minutes later, I drove into a two-story car train. It shunted forward into the tunnel. Someone came through, checked my passport, then we were in France. For a couple of minutes I got out of the car, stood in the train and stretched my legs, but it was cold and my gut turned over. I hate borders, even now. I never cross one without thinking of how we left Moscow by train when I was sixteen, heading for Rome first, then Israel.

  After I got to New York a few years later, I felt I never wanted to leave again. For years, I never spoke Russian or saw the friends from home who called once in a while. I took my mother’s name and Artemy Ostalsky became Artie Cohen. I never wanted to come back to Europe or Russia. I was an obsessive New Yorker. If I traveled, I went west if I could. I stayed in America. I got over it eventually, but now in the middle of the night, crossing the border into France, I felt for my passport over and over. For me, Europe was just a place where I had to keep moving.

  2

  Lily lay silently on the gurney, her face messed up bad. She was covered with a hospital sheet. Her eyes were shut, bruised and swollen. Her red hair showed at the rim of a plastic cap. Around her, doctors and nurses moved briskly. Rubber soles squealed on the hospital floor. People snapped out orders.

  At the hospital, a hulking old building opposite Notre Dame, I lied and told them I was her husband and they let me stay with Lily before they took her into the operating room. Stabilize her, someone said. Someone beat her up bad, they wanted a look, internal injuries. I can speak some French, but I was lost in the rapid-fire talk, medical stuff, opinions, orders, information, even jokes. I resented the joking. Lily was sedated. She didn’t know me. Her eyes were so swollen I could hardly look at her.

  In the crowded corridor that smelled of antiseptic, I listened to the doctor who tried to explain, talking at me, telling me how bad she was. They wanted to put her shattered knee back together and set the fingers on her right hand. The fingers were smashed.

  It came at me like gunshot, pieces of information peppered with advice, warnings, queries. When they wheeled her away down the corridor, I ran alongside until one of the nurses pushed open a swing door and they disappeared inside, Lily with them, leaving me alone.

  My adrenalin gave out, then my legs. I sat down hard on a blue plastic chair. It was six in the morning. Someone gave me a cup of coffee.

  They’d used some kind of a hammer on Lily, on the hard surfaces, her knee, an elbow, her fingers. They’d punched her in the face. They must have punched her over and over.

  Her right hand they’d worked over with real attention, breaking every finger. Lily is vain about her hands, long, elegant hands with slim fingers. In New York, sometimes at night, I would stop by her place and find her with Charlene, the manicurist who makes house calls. They’d be crouched over the coffee table in the living room and Lily would look up at me and hold out the nail polish. Choose a color, Artie. Come on. Choose. Red. Pink. Black. Brown. Rouge Noir. I said Rouge Noir looked like blood, like a vampire had sucked your fingers. She laughed at me because I always chose bright red. She said it was the kind of color hookers like. I love watching her get her nails done.

  The fingers were broken and I thought about the pain. My head was swimming, my back soaked in ice-cold sweat. I was cold. Sometime that morning, while she was in surgery, I must have dozed on the chair.

  “Gourad.” He held out his hand. “Maurice.”

  Lily was in a recovery room.

  The French cop who saw me coming out of it was a tall ugly young guy with a sprawling body who spoke great English. He did eighteen months on the job in St Paul, Minnesota, he told me, and a year in New York. He loved New York. He had lived in Brooklyn, Park Slope, and he was crazy for the city.

  He had a nose like a fingerling potato, small dark sharp eyes, springy black hair and shaggy eyebrows that met in the middle of his face. He was pretty dapper, though; the black jeans fit him perfectly, he had on black Nikes, a sheepskin jacket and a green sweatshirt from the Gap. A little gold cross hung on a chain around his neck.

  Sleet was coming down outside. We got into Gourad’s green VW Golf and he took me to the apartment where they found her. I told him I’d been a cop, I figured it might make him friendly. He let me look at the apartment. Five minutes, he said, no more. I asked who owned the place. He said it was held by a company, they were working on it.

  All I got was the view of the dusty drapes, the marble fireplace, some blood on the parquet floors. Then Gourad hustled me out. He shook hands with the concierge, who had a dour, wrinkled face like a walnut. In the street, Gourad popped open a little red plaid umbrella and held it over us.

  We both smoked while we talked. He told me what he knew, which wasn’t much. He had arrived at the scene not long after the crime was reported. I asked him how he knew to call me, because the call came from him, not the hospital.

  “It was written on her hand. She had a phone number written with a blue ballpoint on her palm. Her fingers were curled over it.”

  Oh, Lily, I thought.

  Whenever I went on a job, she always wrote the number on her hand. A new job, a new number, a different cell phone, a strange hotel, she wrote it down so she wouldn’t forget. The London number was on her hand, but she never called. It was this French cop who phoned me instead.

  “Everyone calls me Momo,” he said suddenly, like it would somehow cheer me up. He helped me unload the rental car and found me a cheap hotel room near the hospital. Up two flights. View of a bleak courtyard. Faded green bedspread, hard pillow, TV. I tried to sleep after Gourad left, but I kept seeing Lily’s bruised, mute face.

  She was so happy being in London. I liked it because London always had a pull on her, even after the case I worked there last year when the corruption leaked into the mainstream like sewage into floodwater.

  Lily wants me safe, so I take safe jobs, even though I know I’m less exciting for her, that her old unease about me was always a kind of turn-on. She hates guns, but she’s ambivalent about the excitement. Suddenly, I remembered something. That first summer. We were in Sag Harbor.

  We went out to eat. I didn’t have a jacket. Without asking, she took my gun and slipped it in her big straw bag. She knew it would be embarrassing if someone noticed. Lily hates guns as much as any other New York liberal. More. That was the point. She did it for me, put the gun in her bag. I think I really fell for her then.

  In the drab room in Paris, my cell phone rang. I looked at my watch. It was six. It rang again. It was the hospital. Urgent, the voice said. Hurry. I bolted out of the hotel.

  “Mr Cohen.”

  A black guy in a white coat, a stethoscope around his neck, shook my hand. His name tag said he was Dr Christian Lariot. He spoke good English and had a pudgy face. West African, I thought, but I was thinking in a fog of anxiety.

  I crossed my arms over my chest to keep from shaking. “She’s dead.”

  “No,” he said. “No.”

  He talked to me about a sub-dural hematoma. In recovery earlier, while I was out with the cop, Lily complained of violent headaches. Terrible nausea. She vomited, then she passed ou
t. They took her back into surgery again and drilled a two-inch hole in her head to drain out the blood that was pressing on her brain.

  Lariot talked softly, precisely, carefully. I held on to the back of a plastic chair.

  “Is she OK? Is she?”

  “Give it a few days,” he said.

  “How many days?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How many days?”

  “Give it time.”

  “Will she die?”

  He shook his head, but didn’t answer.

  Unconscious, Lily was in intensive care, and I watched while she lay there against the hospital bed, hooked up to machines, and seemed to slide deeper into the coma. Her fingers were in splints. Her leg was in a plaster cast. She was bruised and silent. She had closed her eyes and disappeared.

  “Lily?”

  There was no reply, no sound except the shattered breathing. She was in a coma, they said. Give it a few days, they said.

  I couldn’t reach her. Except for wanting her better, all I wanted was to kill whoever did this. I wanted to break their fingers and arms and legs and kill them. No one mentioned rape, I didn’t ask, not yet, I couldn’t. After, after it was over and she was better, I swore to myself, we were going away. Somewhere small and safe. Montana, maybe. To Chico. Nothing bad ever happens in Chico.

  “Lily?”

  I was tired. I wanted to lie down next to her now and go to sleep. One of the nurses came after a while and asked me to leave. Let her rest, she said. Rest from what? How can she be tired when she’s not conscious, I said. The nurse told me to go. She was polite but irritated. There was nothing I could do. I kissed Lily and went back to the hotel. I called New York and left a message for the Millers, who were taking care of Beth. I sat on the bed. Before I got my clothes off, I fell asleep.

  3

  “Your first trip to Paris?” the manager of the hotel said the next morning, making conversation as if I were a tourist.