Skin Trade

by Reggie Nadelson

  Her soup arrived and Martha spooned it up carefully. Her honeyed voice still had vestiges of a southern childhood. “I always missed her,” she said.

  “I can understand that.”

  “You’ve been together a long time, you and Lily?”

  “A while.”

  “Will you tell me what’s wrong with her?”

  “She’s in a fucking coma in a hospital. Someone attacked her.” I stopped myself yelling. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too.”

  “I’m crazy with this. Someone beat her up.” I showed Martha the police picture of Lily. She winced and I said, “Tell me what happened with the two of you.”

  “I don’t know. Nothing happened. Lily called me from London.”

  “When?”

  “Last week. She said she wanted to see me, she was coming to Paris and she wanted to meet up.”

  Lily had decided to come to Paris without me even before New Year’s Eve. She didn’t tell me until afterwards. Maybe something about the trip on the wheel convinced her.

  I thought about Lily on the wheel, her terror, her flickering eyes, then shut it away and focused on Martha who was looking expectant, as if I could tell her why Lily canceled their date. But I had to know who this Martha was and what she meant to Lily.

  I said sofly, “So what do you do, Martha?”

  She smiled. “I’m a social worker.”

  She ate in silence for a few minutes. She let me take my time and I was grateful. Martha Burnham was an intuitive woman.

  Finally I said, “Look, Lily’s hurt really bad, and I don’t know why or who did this, or if they’re coming back again, so I need to know everything you can tell me.”

  “You’re a cop.”

  “Was.”

  “A good cop. Lily told me you were one of the good guys.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Did she say anything about me?” Martha was eager.

  “We were coming to Paris together this week and all of a sudden she says she’s leaving ahead of me. She says she has a friend she wants to see. You were the friend, I guess. You don’t remember the exact day she called you?”

  Martha was disappointed Lily hadn’t talked to me about her, but she ate some more soup. “The twenty-ninth,” she said. “I’m pretty sure. Two days before New Year’s Eve. I can check. She said she was thinking of coming. I was thrilled.”

  She looked at the picture again. “My God.” She was upset but not shocked. She’d seen worse. She was holding out on me, but she was good at holding out.

  I said, “Help me.”

  “How?”

  “I can work this case. But I need you to tell me everything you know about Lily’s visit to Paris, or anything you can think of. When’s the last time you heard from her before the other week?”

  “Years. I don’t know. We exchanged Christmas cards, a phone call once in a while. That was it.”

  “You were close? Once?”

  “Yeah, though I was too much of a hippie for Lily’s taste.” She ordered coffee. “I was heavily into windchimes back when. Communes. Sandals. Hairy women. You know.”

  “You have any idea why she suddenly called you?”

  “I told you. She said she was coming to Paris. She said she wanted to meet for dinner. Like that, out of the blue. I said fine. I was so thrilled she called and I just said, sure, honey, of course.”

  “She called you when she got here?”

  “Yes. She called me when she got off the train. She checked into some fancy hotel, I forget the name. Over by the rue Saint-Honoré, I think. She said come over. I said, too rich for my blood, honey, come to me. She said, let me take you out, Marti, she used to call me Marti, and I said, no, I want you to see my place, and I’ll make my blanquette de veau for you. She sounded the same as always. She said I’ll come for drinks. I’ll bring wine. She didn’t exactly trust my taste.” Martha laughed. “She knew I was a lousy cook.”

  “She showed up?”

  “She came by around seven and we had a bottle of wine and we talked a lot. I want to see her. Please. Can I go see her?”

  “She’s unconscious. She’s in a coma. They hardly let me in.”

  “Which hospital is she in?”

  I told her. The waiter brought her coffee and I got the check. I scribbled my cell phone number on a piece of paper. “If you think of anything?”

  “Sure.”

  “So you don’t have any idea why Lily suddenly called you?”

  “You asked me before. She was coming to Paris. She said she called on an impulse. I had a feeling there was something else.” Martha pulled her fat silver-colored puffa vest tight around her body. “Poor Lily. You seem like a nice guy, honey, you do, but it was always so hard for her. It always made her guilty. She always had to save the world. It’s why she became a journalist back when we all thought you could save the world by telling the truth.”

  “What was hard?”

  “Being happy.” She looked at her watch. “I ought to get going.”

  “You said you were a social worker.”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of work do you do?”

  “Mostly women.”

  “What kind of women?”

  “It’s not something I talk about much. It’s not conversational.”

  “I’m not making conversation. I’m trying to figure out who hurt Lily so bad she almost died. So bad she doesn’t know who I am. They broke her fingers, Martha. One at a time. They smashed them up slow, they hammered her so you’d hardly recognize her.”

  “I work with prostitutes.”

  “Is that what Lily wanted from you? Is that why she called?”

  “I guess I wanted to think she called because she missed me.” She drank the coffee. “Pretty insane, huh? I mean after twenty years. I mean, like, you don’t call someone up after twenty years because you suddenly miss them, or you see a black and white cookie in a store and you go all Proustian and you think, my God, I wonder how Marti Bumham’s doing, do you?”

  “What?”

  “They were our favorites. You know, the big cookies you get in New York, half vanilla frosting, half chocolate? Never mind. What about the attack? Anything else? Any marks?”

  I told her as best I could. “You’ve seen this kind of thing?”

  “Even if I have, the women I work with are prostitutes.”

  “Maybe Lily had an interest. Maybe she thought there was a good story in it.”

  “It’s possible.” Martha was rueful. “Lily could ignore people for years and then suddenly she’d turn up. Honey, she loved everyone.”

  “Except you.”

  “She needed a bigger canvas. A cause.”

  “What kind?”

  “Whatever was going.” She crossed her arms. “She was fabulous but she was a user. I remembered when I heard her voice. Out of the blue. She just assumed I’d be there for her after all these years.”

  Martha shifted her chair, turned her hands over and stared at them. There were no rings.

  I looked at the big, capable American hands and wondered if she could beat Lily up, but it was only the paranoia eating at me.

  I said, “I don’t think that’s really fair.”

  “I’m sorry. You don’t have to defend her to me.”

  She pulled her heavy brown leather bag into her arms like a baby, dug around inside with one hand and took out a tooled-leather wallet. It was stuffed with cards, money, pictures. From it she extracted a plastic package of photographs. She took off the red rubber band that held the pictures together and, the bag dumped on the floor next to her chair, started playing the photographs out like a deck of cards.

  I waited. Mouth sucked in, Martha concentrated on the pictures as, one at a time, she turned them up on the table in the middle of the wreckage of the meal. Finally, she pulled out a picture of her and Lily.

  Two girls in Bermuda shorts and sandals, both laughing at the camera, their arms around each other. It was a bright su
mmer’s day; you could see the way the sun made them squint. Lily’s red hair was long. It hung on her shoulders like a curtain.

  “When was this?”

  “Twenty-five ago maybe. We were at some kind of film festival, a woman’s documentary film festival on Woman’s Day, May that year, I think. East Berlin, if you can believe it. Fucking East Berlin what was.” She snorted.

  Without any make-up and the long hair, Lily looked incredibly young and very pretty. In the pink tank top, her shoulders were bony. Martha, who was wearing a green Dashiki over her Bermuda shorts, wasn’t looking at the camera; she was looking at Lily.

  Across the table from me, Martha gnawed the edge of her thumb. “OK, I had a thing for her, OK? I did. I didn’t even know it. I mean it’s not like I’m into women, exactly. I got married, I had kids, you know. Got divorced, too.” She forced a smile. “It was just Lily. She was different. She was so alluring. You’d go to a restaurant or a rally, people would look at her. I mean she turned heads, you know? It’s the way I always thought of it. She turned heads. Also, she’d do anything on a dare. She was physically fearless.” Martha snatched the picture off the table and shoved it back into the pile of pictures, snapped the rubber band on, pushed it back in her bag. “I guess I was sort of in love with her.”

  I reached over and tugged her sleeve. “Aren’t we all?”

  “Thank you for that, honey.”

  “You call everyone honey?”

  “Only people I like.”

  “It’s OK, you know, about loving Lily. Just talk to me about the other night when you saw her, OK?”

  Martha said, “I’m trying. So you think that’s why she wanted to see me, Artie? It sounds right, doesn’t it? one of her causes?”

  “Did Lily know that’s what you do?”

  Martha said, “Sure she knew. She’d heard from a friend in London, a woman on the Guardian I know. She said she wanted to see the shelter I run. See what I was doing. Maybe meet some of the women. I wasn’t at all sure it wasn’t just her being nice about my work, the kind of thing you tell an old friend. I told her she better come wearing jeans or something, or they’d think she was awfully hotsy-totsy, you know?”

  “You made the date?”

  Martha nodded.

  Battered women are one of Lily’s causes. She puts a lot of time into an agency that runs shelters in New York, London, Third World countries. Her battered women are somebody’s cast-offs, someone’s human junk: a fourteen-year-old girl so badly burned by her boyfriend she stabs her own baby to death; a grandmother who puts up with a son-of-a-bitch husband who beats her to a pulp because it’s all she knows and thinks she loves him anyhow. Hopeless, sad, ordinary women, but not whores.

  “You think she got involved?” I said.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What kind of prostitutes come to your shelter?”

  “What kind are there?”

  “Call-girls? Hookers? French? Foreign?”

  “Mostly they come off the street. Kids, a lot of them. The pimps bring them into town, the girls hit the streets, I clean up the mess afterwards. Bitches, the French cops call them.” She put on an accent. “Beech.”

  “It’s big business?”

  “Very big.”

  “Russians?” I knew it was Russians. Whenever I was involved, or anyone close to me, there was usually a Russian connection. I could never completely shake it.

  “Some Russians. A lot of them have more ambition now, you know, get a husband, be a supermodel. There’s Russian money around the Champs-Elysées. Clubs. Restaurants. Vuitton. Most of the rich Russians are in Biarritz or the South of France.”

  “How come?”

  “What do I know? Maybe they don’t like the cold. Maybe they don’t like the Parisians.”

  “Who’s running the show?”

  “You think I know? If I knew who ran it, I’d do something. I wouldn’t sit here, would I? I’d do something.” She was furious. “No one knows. No one talks. The girls are my job. Sometimes I get a look at the smalltime pimps. They come in to pick up their girls. That’s it. Nobody gives a shit so long as they stay out of the center of town, you know? They just shuffle them around. Get them out of the way of the tourists.”

  “The tourists don’t go for hookers?”

  “Depends which tourists. Sex shows in Pigalle, maybe. The more expensive tarts around the rue de Rivoli. There’s this myth about Paris, the fancy brothels, what was it, Mme Claude’s? We ain’t talking Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour here, it’s just girls getting raped for money in some crappy underpass at the edge of the city. What the fuck, it’s a living, hon, and I’m a jaded old feminist cunt.” She looked at her watch. “I have to get going.”

  “You work at the shelter all the time?”

  “I teach English during the day.”

  “You like it here?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Paris is great.”

  “How come?”

  “You trying to soften me up, honey?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Paris is great because we’re all expats here. All us foreigners. Unless you’re French, you’re never at home. I like it. I like the feeling of skimming the surface.” She paused, then said, “I have to go.”

  “You work at your shelter every night?”

  “Most nights.”

  “Show me.”

  Martha pulled her bag off the floor and got up. I followed her out of the restaurant and we stood on the sidewalk.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Lily wanted to see your shelter. You said that.”

  “I said I’d take her right then, that night, Tuesday, but she said no, she had a date to meet someone at the Ritz bar, she’d come the next day. She never showed. I’ll call you, OK, hon? I’m really late.”

  Martha held out her hand, shook mine quickly, walked to the curb, plucked a parking ticket from under the wiper of a beat-up yellow Renault, tossed it in the gutter and climbed in. I ran. I banged on the hood of the car, but she only looked up, waved, and turned the ignition.

  I yelled, “Who was she meeting at the Ritz?”

  Through the window of her car I could see Martha’s mouth make the words, “I’ll call you later.”

  I tried running, but Martha Burnham pulled into traffic and lost me.

  At the bar of the Ritz I drank a Coke and talked to the manager. Who did Lily meet at the Ritz for a drink after she left Martha Burnham? I didn’t believe it was the thug who attacked her, you didn’t meet guys like that for drinks at the Ritz Hotel. It was someone else, someone who set her up, maybe, who got her to go to the empty apartment.

  The manager was friendly enough, and he introduced me to the bartender who was on duty Tuesday night. I showed him the good picture of Lily. He remembered her.

  “Who was she with?”

  “I don’t really look at the men.” He laughed.

  “But you remember her?”

  “Yes. I remember the hair. I love redheads.”

  “How’s that?”

  “It was fantastic. Very red, very beautiful.”

  “Long?”

  “Yes. To her shoulders. It was long.”

  I stared at the picture Gourad gave me. In the picture it was definitely short. When she left London it was down to her shoulders. At the train station she’d pulled it off her neck like she always does when she’s edgy. At the Ritz it was still long. Martha Burnham had given me her cell phone number; I called her.

  “I can’t talk,” she said. “I’m working.”

  “When you saw Lily, how was her hair?”

  “What?”

  “Her hair.”

  “Look, Artie, I’m in a meeting, I can’t talk now. I don’t remember anything special about Lily’s hair. I’ll call you,” she said and hung up.

  But I didn’t believe her. Martha was crazy about Lily. She would have noticed her hair if it was chopped up ugly. I tried Martha again but the phone was switched off.


  4

  In the hospital waiting room a TV set droned on in French. What I could make out, there was an ice storm predicted, bad weather, a strike by French truckers. I couldn’t sit still. The cop, Gourad, was probably doing what he could but he had a boss who didn’t like me, and Martha Burnham had her own agenda.

  I worked the phone as best I could. Tolya Sverdloff would come if I called him, but we’d had a fight and I couldn’t ask. I felt I was hanging on to the surface of a frozen pond where the ice was cracking and if I didn’t crawl forward, I’d fall through or freeze to death.

  After a while, I went back to the hotel, got some sleep. I tried the phone again, looking for a contact in New York who had a line to the French police. I wanted someone with clout. The system here crackled with bureaucracy: there were heads and sub-heads and officials and sub-officials, and all of them had spokesmen and press officers, and I couldn’t get anything at all.

  The coffee in my hand was cold. I drank it anyway for the caffeine and sat on the edge of the chair looking at the wall where the wallpaper ended. There was a section of peeling paint. It made me think of Moscow. It made me think of our apartment. My father, when I was young, was in the KGB. He was a star. He was handsome and charming and very good at what he did. He believed; he was a true believer in the Soviet enterprise. His father had fought the Nazis.

  My pop wasn’t stupid. He knew there were problems, but for him the ideology was such a shining idea he clung to it. And we had privileges. A car. We had a decent apartment. We had some nice furniture. We got a paint job every few years. Then it changed. My mother, who’s Jewish, turned angry. She saw the cracks in the Soviet fairy tale. She understood about the lies and the corruption, and she couldn’t keep quiet. She knew we would have to leave some day; she made me learn English. She made me understand the West and gave me a craving for it with books like Catcher in the Rye and Louis Armstrong records. Then my father lost his job.

  KGB creeps in bad raincoats watched our building. We moved to a smaller apartment and there was never any paint. I remembered. I remembered how the paint began to peel, the cracks grew in the plaster and my mother tried to paper them over with pages from a magazine. By the time we got out, by the time we left Moscow, half the paint on the kitchen wall had peeled off.