An Image of Death

by Libby Fischer Hellmann

  The man with the gun barked out a command. The woman looked doubtfully at me at first, as if she wanted to argue, but then reconsidered. Stuffing the wallet back in my bag, she tossed it on the floor and retreated. A door slammed. It was quiet again.

  My heart kicked in my chest. Where was Davis?

  “Now stand,” he ordered.

  I struggled to my feet, still unable to see my assailant. But I felt him. A rough hand patted me down, fumbling with my sweater, jeans, even my boots. Apparently satisfied I didn’t have a weapon, he grabbed my arm and shoved me forward. “Move! But keep head down.”

  I couldn’t tell for sure, but I thought we were heading back across the stage. The important thing was I wasn’t dead, and that fueled me with hope. Then his fingers dug into my arm, and I stopped and looked up. A huge face, too close to register features, leaned into mine. A greasy, almost chalky odor came out of his mouth. Almost as if he’d been eating fries. From McDonald’s.

  “Talk now,” he growled. “What you doing here?”

  I felt the gun prodding my temple. “We were looking for the man who just—”

  He cut me off. “We?”

  Shit. Me and my big mouth. I’d just tipped him about Davis. His grip tightened, and the gun inched closer to my skull.

  “Who is ‘we’?”

  Sweat dripped from my neck. I squeezed my eyes shut, fully expecting a white light to explode any second.

  Suddenly, the sounds of a scuffle broke through behind us. Footsteps raced across the stage, and several voices shouted at once. Then a clear female voice rang out. “Police. Drop the gun. Now!”

  The gun remained wedged against my temple, but I thought I felt a slight release in pressure. I saw a pair of boots, police issue, on the floor in the middle of the stage. Behind them was a pair of fuzzy pink slippers. Two pairs of socks appeared behind them.

  “I said, drop it. Now!” Davis shouted. “And keep your hands where I can see them.”

  Nothing happened. The gun was still against my forehead. His other hand still clutched my arm. No one moved or spoke. Even the wind was silent. It crossed my mind that the last face I’d ever see might not be Rachel’s or Dad’s or even David’s, but the face of a man with French-fry breath in a strip joint in Des Plaines.

  Then the man took in a breath, and blew it out slowly. He grunted, and the gun clattered to the floor.

  I sucked in a ragged breath. Davis was crouched in a shooter’s stance, both hands gripping her automatic, which was leveled at my attacker. Sofiya and the other two women huddled behind her. I hurried over. The women opened up a space and let me into their midst. The man’s hands shot up in the air.

  “That was a smart decision,” Davis said to him. “Now move away from the gun.”

  The man glowered but did what she said. Davis inched forward, and keeping her gun on him, picked his up and stuffed it into her waistband.

  “Well, now, it looks like we’re all gonna live another day.” She edged to the back of the stage, where the women formed a tight knot around me. “Let’s go. We’re done here.” Keeping the gun trained on the man, she lifted her chin. “You. Don’t move until we’re gone.”

  The man tilted his head, a quizzical expression passing over his face. But whether that was because he didn’t understand English, or because he expected more trouble, an arrest maybe, or a trip to the station, I didn’t know. Frankly, I didn’t care.

  Davis motioned for me to move. I crept across the stage, dropped to the floor, and headed for the front door. Davis followed, slowly backing away. When she reached the door, she lowered her gun.

  “I’ll be sure to note how cooperative you were in my report.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  If it wasn’t on the North Shore, Solyst’s, our village watering hole, would be a seedy place. But up here, nothing is “seedy”—it’s “casual.” Solyst’s is further redeemed by a stone chimney and fireplace which, tonight, was blazing cheerfully. Because of the storm we had our pick of tables. Within minutes we were well into a pitcher of beer.

  Davis took a long swig. “The asshole’s got to be wondering why I didn’t run him in.”

  “Why didn’t you?” I wolfed down a fried mushroom. They were greasy and not at all filling, but I was hungrier than I’d ever been in my life.

  She stared into her beer as if the answer to my question was in the hops and foam. “Because I screwed up.”

  “How?”

  “I shouldn’t have been there.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It wasn’t my turf. I barged in like a frigging rookie. No backup. No heads-up to the locals. And with a civilian, for Christ’s sake.” She hunched her shoulders. Worry lines pinched her brow.

  “Why didn’t you call for help?”

  “I didn’t think we would need it. I mean, hell. There was a blizzard outside. Who’s gonna be out in that? And then, well, things happened so fast.…” She shook her head.

  “You’re forgetting one thing. You saved my life. That was no screwup.”

  She poured more beer into her glass. “I know you’re trying to make me feel better, but that’s not the way it works.”

  I tilted my glass toward her. She refilled it. “How does it work?”

  “If it gets out, Olson might not let me out on patrol. Hell, I’ll probably be bounced back to the desk.”

  “But don’t you have to write some kind of report?”

  She nodded. “I have to send his gun in to property, too.”

  “Huh?”

  “Every gun we recover gets checked to see if it’s been used in other crimes.” She sighed. “The problem is explaining how I got it. Once I lay it out, they’ll—”

  “Do you have to—lay it out for them?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, do you have to tell them exactly what happened out there?”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “I was the one who forced you into the situation. I should never have followed the girl in the first place. I should have told you about her. Let you handle it.”

  “Yeah. But I should never have had you with me in the first place.”

  “Well, then,” I said, “I guess we both screwed up.”

  She eyed me curiously. “You have every right to tell Olson what happened, you know. Even if I get suspended.”

  “I’ll remember that. But I think I lost his number.”

  She shot me another look, then went to the bar. I wondered what she was going to say on her report. I decided not to ask.

  “I gotta hand it to you.” She came back with another pitcher. “You were pretty cool in there.”

  I laughed, grateful that I could. “It was an act.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I was paralyzed. I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to.” I picked the crust off another mushroom and pushed the plate toward her. She took a bite of one, then screwed up her face. I pushed them away. “But I am concerned about one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The woman with the tassels took the license out of my wallet. She knows where I live.”

  She frowned. Then, “They don’t have any reason to come after you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “There’s no guarantee, but, don’t forget, we know where to find them. They know that. They’d be crazy to try anything.”

  “I wish I were as confident.” I paused. “So, what is your take on Natasha and Boris and the others?”

  “Natasha and…?” Her face clouded for a moment, then cleared. “Oh.” She shrugged. “What I’d like to know is what happened to Petrovsky.”

  “I heard a door slam and a car start right before it all happened,” I said. “I was thinking he might have been making a break for it.”

  Davis shrugged again.

  “They could have been protecting him.”

  “Who?”

  “The women. Or some of them. The Buick was gone when we left.”


  “Why would they need to protect him?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “Because he dropped off the tape at your house?”

  It was my turn to shrug. It did seem flimsy. I changed the subject. “Does that mean you think Petrovsky did drop it off?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “Rachel said it was a van. And he was staring at my house a few days later, like he was wondering who I was and what had happened to the tape. And then, when we followed him—well.…”

  “Logic isn’t evidence.”

  “Not even circumstantial?”

  “Not even close.”

  I studied my glass. “I’d sure like to know who Tassel Woman is. The way she looked at me—it was as if she knew me.”

  Davis grimaced. “You sure? The shit they’re on, some of those women wouldn’t recognize themselves in the mirror.”

  “She was straight. I could tell.”

  Davis didn’t say anything.

  “So what happens now?”

  “I’ll file my report. Talk to Olson. With any luck, he’ll send me back out there with another cop. Or maybe he’ll have the Des Plaines cops check it out. Or maybe he’ll tell me to call it a day.”

  “Take you off the case?”

  “You gotta admit it’s looking thin. All we have is a weird look from a guy driving a van. And another weird look from a woman in a strip joint.”

  “And the tattoo. And the location.”

  “Neither of which we know a damn thing about.”

  I scooted my chair closer to the table. “What about the tattoo? You making any headway on that?”

  “I talked to our guys who do gang work, and they told me to call downtown. I have a call in to them. I called the Bureau, too. A guy over there’s looking into it.”

  “The FBI?”

  “Yeah.”

  I recalled my dealings with an FBI agent last fall. I poured more beer into my glass.

  “The guy doesn’t know when he can get to it, though. Other priorities.”

  “Do you think anyone at Celestial Bodies knew the woman on the tape?”

  “No way to tell without more canvassing.”

  “So we’re basically back where we started?”

  She sipped her beer.

  “Which means I nearly got my head blown off for nothing.”

  She looked down.

  “You know, there’s something I don’t get. If everything is so vague, if we really don’t have any solid information, why did the guy pull a gun on me?”

  “You really are from a different world, aren’t you?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She stared into her glass.

  “What are you saying?” I repeated. “That they’re Russian mafia or something?”

  “I don’t know why people dignify them with a name. It’s like giving them an—an honor, a respect they don’t deserve. They’re scumbags.”

  “I don’t know. From what I read, the Russians make the Italians look like nursery school kids.”

  “They’re all assholes,” she said. “But the—the Eastern Europeans, the Russians, have an edge. They’d sooner waste you than reason with you. You look at them wrong, it’s over.”

  I shivered, thinking how close I’d come to being one of the wasted.

  “We were lucky.” Davis nodded, as if she knew what I was thinking. “Why do you think the women didn’t tell us shit? They knew what would happen to them if they did.”

  I recalled Sofiya’s smile, toothy but empty. “All those stories about white slavery, women being forced into prostitution. Is that what we saw tonight?”

  “It’s what they do. They lure girls out of villages and spin all sorts of stories about the life they’re gonna have in the west. They tell ’em they’ll start out as maids or nannies, but then, who knows? Models, movie stars, rich husbands. The girls, all dirt poor and naive, eat it up. They can’t wait. Then they get here, or Germany, or wherever they’re going, and find they’ve been turned into whores.” She sniffed. “They weed out the pretty ones and send them to the strip joint.”

  I thought back to the women who cleaned my neighbor’s house. Their lined faces and rounded shoulders. None of them were young. Or pretty. “So why don’t you bust them—the girls, I mean? Wouldn’t that get them away from these creeps?”

  “As soon as they’re out, they’d go back. Most of ’em are on drugs, anyway. And the ones who aren’t don’t have any money. Or clothes. The pimps even take their passports.” Davis shook her head. “These are men who throw women out of third-story windows. With other people watching.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “True story.” She swilled down more beer. “Guess it does make the Outfit look warm and fuzzy, huh?”

  “So why don’t the police go after the pimps? Or are they too busy going to Dunkin’—” I stopped short. I’d almost forgotten who I was talking to.

  “As a matter of fact,” she said, ignoring my crack, “the pimps’d like nothing better. They love our jails. They get fed, they get clothes, they even get a fucking lawyer. Compared to their country, it’s heaven.”

  I reached for another mushroom, took a bite, and folded what was left into my napkin. “Do you think the woman on the tape was one of them? A prostitute?”

  “And got killed because she said something to the wrong people?”

  I nodded.

  “Beats me.”

  Two men with red cheeks came into the tavern, shaking snow off their jackets and boots. They gave us a once-over, then sat at the bar. Their conversation, louder than it had to be, was filled with bravado about four-wheel drives and antilock brakes.

  Davis drained her glass. She was throwing them down pretty fast. I wondered if she was as looped as I was. Then she set her glass down, leaned back, and squinted at me, as if she’d just noticed I was there. “You don’t like cops much, do you?”

  I thumped my glass on the table.

  “I bet you were one of those protestor types, weren’t you? The ones who called cops pigs. What…did someone beat up on you during a protest march?”

  I shook my head.

  Her eyebrows shot up.

  It was cold and late, and I was too drunk to prevaricate. “I was caught shoplifting once.” I launched into the story. Even though it was five years ago, the disgrace, the humiliation, rolled over me like it was yesterday.

  She listened. Then, “Scared straight, huh?”

  “I guess.” I looked at the floor. You could see how uneven it was. How it sloped down from the middle of the room.

  “Man, I wish there were more like you. The streets would be a whole lot safer.”

  I looked up. She was grinning. I swirled the last of the beer in my glass. “Yeah. That’s me. Citizen of the year.”

  She laughed.

  “What about you? Why’d you become a cop?”

  Her smile faded. After a long moment, she said, “You ever see the movie Monster’s Ball?”

  “The one where Halle Berry has an affair with Billy Bob Thornton?” I paused. “I saw it. But he’s a prison guard, not a cop.”

  “Not that.” She waved her hand. “There’s this one scene, in a bar, I think, or maybe a really small grocery store, and there’s this sign in the window that says: ‘Georgia is peachy.’ You remember that?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Yeah? Well, I always thought that’s where I came from.”

  “I don’t understand. You thought you were from Georgia?”

  “When I was a baby, my mom always used to sing that Ray Charles song, you know, ‘Georgia on My Mind’? Then, afterward, after she split, I thought I’d…well, maybe she went back there, and I’d try to.…” Her voice trailed off. “Hell, what did I know?” She lapsed into silence. Her eyes had a haunted look.

  I kept my mouth shut. She hadn’t answered the question. Then again, maybe she had.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  They knew it was coming. There was plen
ty of warning; the Berlin wall in ’89, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, a more violent one in Romania. Still, no one thought it would spread to the republics. They were intrinsic parts of the whole, not appendages that could be lopped off at will.

  But when the Baltic States started to make noise about independence, a subtle tension came over everything. Arin could feel it on the streets of Tbilisi. Perhaps not a tension, she corrected herself, but a stirring. A subdued energy. She saw it on faces; no longer listless and stoic, but expectant. Even hopeful. As if they were about to cast off a burden.

  At the Vaziani base, though, soldiers still went out on maneuvers, officers ran through drills. Her father-in-law, the major general, kept going to international conferences, bringing back words of reform, not revolution. Everything would settle down, he claimed, when the economy improved. And there were many, he said, Westerners included, who wanted to help with that improvement.

  Arin wasn’t reassured. She heard the hushed talk over bottles of vodka late at night. Saw the uncertainty during the day. She felt as if they were all dangling over a cliff, like those American cartoons where you saw someone’s legs spinning in the air before they fell.

  Then, after a turbulent year during which the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time, there was no more denial. The unthinkable had happened. The Soviet Union had collapsed.

  That first winter, the streets were full of passion and hope and infinite promise. By spring, that sense of possibility spread to the base, when it was announced the Russian army would replace the Soviets. For the Russian officers already in the military, it was an emotional moment. The Red Army, once a proud symbol of Russia’s might, would once again assume its rightful place among the great militaries of the world. What’s more, the new president of Georgia had close ties to Russia, and the two countries had signed a treaty allowing Russia to maintain its bases in Georgia. The future looked bright.

  For Arin life went on in much the same way. She spent her days largely unconcerned about geopolitics and world events. She was still the wife of an important young army officer, with all the attendant privileges. Indeed, she had other matters to occupy her mind. She’d skipped her period twice now, and she was beginning to have nausea in the mornings. A trip to the midwife with Mika confirmed it. Arin was pregnant.