Skin Trade

by Reggie Nadelson

  Momo nodded. “The muscle, the kind of thug that does women, they can be anything.”

  “The kid behind the billboard?”

  “Who knows? There was one that was Albanian. This one tonight, who the fuck knows?” Gourad added, “Someone’s been asking after Lily.”

  “What kind of someone?”

  “Pompous little prick from your embassy.”

  “What the fuck for?”

  “Lily’s an American. An American gets beat up bad in Paris, the embassy takes an interest. Didn’t they call you?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t get a message. You told them what, exactly?”

  “It’s freezing out here, let’s get in the car,” he said.

  We got back in the green Golf. Momo slammed the door. “So you want to come along while I do my idiotic shift?”

  “Sure. You told the embassy prick what?”

  He drove into the night. “Me? I didn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know.”

  “The other guys working her case, you know them?”

  “Sure I know them.”

  “What kind of cops are they?”

  “They’re OK. I mean they’re what they are, some of them are smart cops, a couple are idiots. They’ll do the case right if the boss leaves them be.” He was defensive. “So what do you think Lily was doing in Paris in the first place? How come she gets to Paris and gets herself cracked up with a hammer the first night she’s in town?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Momo was silent as he stepped on the gas. He adjusted his belly behind the steering wheel and squinted out the window, a cigarette hanging off his lip. On the dashboard was a photograph of a smiling man in a baseball cap.

  “Who’s that?”

  “That is the most wanted man in France. A serial killer who murders women on the train between Marseille and Paris. We don’t get a lot of serial killers in France. Not officially. We call them terrorists.” He laughed. “Or foreigners.”

  “He looks harmless.”

  “Look, Art, I don’t want to get brutal or nothing, but if you’re going to work this, you need to get your brain in shape. You need to reconstruct the last days, you, Lily, what’s been going on.”

  “Did the attack have a signature?”

  “Maybe. You want to share anything with me that you found in Lily’s stuff? She must have left things in London, papers, whatever.”

  “I got a quick look before I left London. There’s nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  I said, “It’s weird, she cleaned up her desk before she left like you do if you’re leaving for a while, no credit-card receipts, nothing. I think she didn’t want me to know what she was doing.”

  “You working some kind of case? Something that could concern people who don’t want you nosing around and think Lily’s in on it?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m mostly on a bank thing for a security outfit. Bullshit stuff, but I make a buck. Most of it’s in America. There’s a couple loose ends I have to pick up here.”

  He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Where were you last night, Artie? I tried to get hold of you. I came by the hotel.”

  “I don’t know, out eating.”

  “The hotel clerk said you went over to the Portes de Vanves. You asked directions.”

  “I was meeting a guy.”

  “What guy?”

  “Someone from the bank.”

  “About your case?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything else?”

  If I told him about the roller-coaster, there would be questions, officials, forms to fill out, time wasted. I said, “No, really.”

  Gourad knew I was lying, but he let it go.

  Outside, the city sped by in a wet blur. My hands shook when I lit a cigarette. “You said Lily was raped.” The words came out flat, harsh.

  “It looks that way. I’m sorry. You want the details?”

  “No.” Don’t think about it, I said to myself. Just keep moving.

  “What?”

  I was talking to myself out loud. Momo looked at me sympathetically.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Take it easy.”

  “Your guys are nowhere on Lily’s case, isn’t that right?

  Gourad, angry, said, “You got it.”

  “Where we going?”

  “My shift, like I said.”

  If I stayed with Gourad, he might open up. He wanted to talk. He was angry with the brass and I knew how that was, so I’d keep with him. “You from Paris, Momo?”

  “Sure.”

  “Parents?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Hey, I’m just making polite conversation. No one gives a shit where your parents came from.”

  “You think that?” he said. “You’re from New York where no one gives a shit. It matters in France. You’re not French unless you’ve been here five hundred years. I’m part Moroccan. My father’s parents came over when he was a kid.”

  I kept my mouth shut.

  “I wish to God I could spend all my time on Lily’s case, but we waste our time on small shit. Last night we had to shake down some West African guys for swiping fake Vuitton handbags, then we picked up some Algerians for selling an ounce of hash. I could be working on the fucks who beat up Lily, who killed that little girl and stuffed her body behind the billboard. But we have to make Paris nice.”

  Gourad’s fury spurted up out of him, it made him tick, it made him ambitious.

  I said, “You got kids?”

  “Sure. Nice wife, two nice kids, nice house in the suburbs. You’d like Monique. You’ll come for dinner, she’ll make her cheese soufflé. You like a cheese soufflé, Artie?”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  “One more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You carrying, Artie? You have a weapon? It’s not allowed in France. This is not the Wild West, OK? We’re not in Texas.”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t have a gun, not yet.

  “Momo?”

  “What?”

  “Lily’s hair. When you found her, how was her hair?”

  “Short,” he said. “Her hair was short.”

  “There was hair at the scene? Her hair?” He didn’t answer.

  “Tell me.”

  “Yes. I don’t know why. I don’t know what the fuck this means, but something happened to her hair. We found chunks of her hair where they beat her up, like someone hacked it off.”

  *

  Momo Gourad drove like a crazy man. He drove me around the parts of Paris he worked on his shift and kept up a stream of chatter. He was up-front about his own boss and the way, like most cops, he hated the system. He was also holding back, feeling me out, wary. He had some kind of personal investment in the case that I didn’t understand. He had the gray binder with Lily’s case file in his desk drawer and I wanted it bad enough to sit alongside him in the car and listen to him however long it took.

  “It won’t help, calling again,” Gourad said as I started dialing the hospital for the third time. “Give it a break. Please.”

  I called anyway. There was no news.

  Snow kept falling as Gourad drove. Everywhere, I clocked the streets, memorizing what I could, figuring out the city. Rue Saint-Denis where there were sex shops and peep shows and clubs marked cuirs, like they were selling leather goods. “Salons de Lingeries”, “Show Lesbiennes”. There were fast-food joints, fake English pubs, kebab stalls where huge lumps of meat turned on a spit.

  A van pulled up next to Gourad’s car. Through the windows I could see three cops in uniform, young guys in dark-blue jumpsuits. The driver had gelled hair and the focused prettiness of a storm-trooper in a Fascist recruiting poster. He saluted Gourad and pulled away. We turned into rue Blondel, where there were hookers old enough to be my mother.

  We pulled up for a red light. Enormous breasts popping out of her white leather coat, one of them leaned against the car. S
he had on war-paint an inch thick.

  In front of an ancient church, five or six guys loitered.

  “Prescription drugs,” Gourad said. “They get free meds on the national health service, sell them at three bucks a pop. Good business.”

  “It’s organized?”

  “No. This is small stuff.”

  I made conversation. “What about the big stuff? Heroin? Cocaine?”

  “Other districts. Not so much on the street here. You see that McDonald’s, man, the other side of the place Clichy?” He nodded in the direction of the restaurant. “It’s a supermarket. You want to see? You can get anything. Dope. Ecstasy. Hash. What the kids call Mitsubishi.”

  He stepped on the gas, put on the siren, then drove me the wrong way around the square and pulled up in front of the lighted glass box that was McDonald’s. Inside, people were slumped at tables, picking over their burgers, slurping up the Coke and coffee.

  “You want something, Artie?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “I wasn’t talking about food.”

  I took it like a joke, but he was already out of the car into the street, looking through the window, working the pavement.

  A couple of teenagers leaned against the window, cigarettes hanging out of their surly faces. One talked into a phone. The other watched him. Gourad came back to the car, mumbling about the Arabs.

  “I thought you were Moroccan,” I said and wished I’d kept my mouth shut.

  “What’s that got to do with it?” he said. “I’m not some fucking Arab.”

  “Lighten up.”

  “You know all us cops are racists, right, Artie? Everyone, good cops, bad cops, black, white, we’re all fucking racist pigs, don’t you agree? Isn’t that the sociology? Isn’t it?”

  “Sure, Momo. Whatever.”

  I said, “Show me where the girls work off the trucks. The prostitutes. Show me where I can find the American. Burnham. Her shelter.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to see.”

  “Whoever ordered the attack on Lily didn’t come from around here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They don’t mess with Americans. They don’t go off-turf like that. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “You must have some fucking idea who did Lily?”

  He didn’t answer. He drove on, out of the square, away from the neon lights and sex clubs and tourists traps. The streets were darker here, wherever the hell we were, and it was hilly. It was snowing harder. People slipped in and out of doorways like ghosts.

  This wasn’t Paris the way I had imagined it; dismal, hopeless, the ugly walls pitted with holes, scratched with graffiti, the streets slimy with garbage, this was another place. At the end of a narrow street, a ramshackle building was lit up by a couple of bare bulbs over the doorway.

  “Burnham’s shelter?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was for the homeless. She took it over for the bitches. Sorry, prostitutes. I should be politically correct with you around.”

  I didn’t answer. I needed some air.

  “There’s nothing here, Artie.”

  “Let me off, OK?” I put my hand on the car door. “I’ll be fine. Drop me at the McDonald’s. What the fuck can happen to you at a McDonald’s, right?”

  Gourad turned the car around.

  “Burnham makes you plenty nervous, doesn’t she?” I said. “Doesn’t she?”

  “I’ll get you something tomorrow. I swear to God, Artie, I’ll help you on this case.” Momo sized me up, figuring if he should part with information. “I’m going to give you someone to meet. Somebody who might know about this type of beating, this signature.” He scribbled a name and address on one of his cards. “Call her tomorrow. Say I told you.”

  “A cop?”

  “No.”

  “Personal?”

  “Yes.”

  “Show me Lily’s paperwork.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Then forget it.”

  Gourad was walking some kind of tightrope and it was stretched very thin.

  “Listen, I appreciate your help, Momo. I really do. So we’ll talk. OK?”

  He maneuvered the car into an empty space outside McDonald’s. I opened the car door. He put out his hand and I shook it. Something made him hesitate.

  I said, “What is it?”

  “There was someone.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone who maybe had a piece of the action, or we heard anyhow, and maybe his outfit was a front. A model agency that was a front for whores. Part of a network. They moved girls that way, a lot of them, sometimes they could do it legally, get them visas. But we could never prove it. Maybe it’s connected, the little girl that got murdered. Lily.”

  “What was his name?”

  “It’s classified information. The model agency looked legit on the surface. We’re legally restrained from making it public. There’s no decent evidence at all. You can’t use what I’m telling you. Ever.”

  “Fine.”

  “I only mention it because he was American. He was part French, he had a French name, but he lived in America most of the time. It was a long-distance relationship.”

  “Where in America?”

  “California,” he said.

  “Tell me his name.”

  “This is my ass, Artie, I mean we’re talking my fat ass on the line if this gets out. You met my boss. He’s a pompous putz, as you say in New York, who wants to hang me out to dry very very slow.”

  “It won’t get out. Tell me his fucking name, please, for Chrissake. Lily’s lying there in that hospital. She could be dying.”

  He didn’t answer and I got out of the car again. I was sick of the games. Gourad got out too, and leaned on the roof.

  “His name,” Gourad said slowly, “his name was Levesque.”

  I was halfway to McDonald’s. As offhand as I could manage, I turned around and walked back to Gourad’s car and leaned on it, facing him. I pretended my interest was casual.

  “So where is this Levesque? It’s a common name?”

  He said, “What’s that have to do with it?”

  “Is it a common name?”

  “He’s dead. Levesque is dead. It’s just a hunch.”

  “How long’s he been dead?”

  “That’s where the problem is. He’s been dead a long time. Around four years.”

  “He had a wife?”

  “What?”

  It was a woman who had tried to cash Levesque’s check, so I asked Gourad, “Did Levesque have a wife?”

  “How the fuck should I know if he had a wife?”

  “Find out for me, OK? Just do it. Please. OK, Momo? Get me this information.” I was leaning over the car roof. The snow made it cold and slick. “What was his first name?”

  “Who?”

  “Levesque.”

  “His first name was Eric. He was Eric Levesque,” he said. “I have to go.”

  8

  Trying to light a cigarette, I stood on the pavement where Gourad dropped me and he leaned out of the car and called, “Hey, Artie, you OK, man?” but I just waved and tossed the match into the gutter.

  Eric Levesque. My head was pounding with the information. The attack on Lily had been my fault. Because of my case. Somehow, it was connected.

  Outside McDonald’s, a couple of kids waited. Black, Arab, I couldn’t tell the difference. I was a fish out of water here, where tourists never came. You could buy dope at McDonald’s and there were no monuments.

  I went inside, ordered coffee and drank it from the paper carton. How was Levesque connected to Lily? Did something in the case get her interest? The model agency? Was that enough? Did she put two and two together and assume it was a front for prostitutes? There was a note about a model agency in Levesque’s file. But when did Lily see the file? Why was she looking? Then I remembered.

  It was London, in the apartment Lily’s friend lent us.

  *

&nbs
p; We’re kidding around in the London apartment, eating a huge chocolate cake, drinking Champagne and laughing, and Lily’s telling me about Paris. She’s going the next day.

  I say, “It’s a guy. Tell me. It’s some debonair European guy with tight buns and loads of money.”

  She laughs. “Yeah, and who wears a gold chain around his neck and a diamond earring and keeps a yacht in Monte Carlo. Don’t be a jerk,” she adds, “though I think you’re pretty cute for thinking everyone has the hots for me. It’s friends, you know? Some research. No big deal, Artie. Swear to God.”

  “You feel OK?”

  “Yeah, I do. I’m sorry about last night. I was crazy on that wheel. I got crazy.”

  “Sure?”

  “Sure. So it’s OK if I go to Paris ahead of you?”

  “I can use a day to finish up some paperwork.”

  “OK, great.” She always says this to close a conversation; when she figures something is concluded, a piece of work, a phone call, an argument, Lily says, “OK, great.”

  I look at her, her mouth smeared with chocolate. She looks happy enough, but her eyelids flutter double-time. A movie director we know at home once told Lily she blinks twice the rate of most people. Lily’s brain is always busy.

  I said, “You’re restless.”

  “I’m always restless. I think there are people who are just travellers, who can’t really settle, who never really belong any place.”

  “Like me.”

  “No, you’re dying to be domesticated, you found New York, you settled. I like crossing the borders. I get a real buzz out of it, knowing I made it to the other side, you know? That I got there in time.”

  “What kind of borders?”

  She said, “Whatever. I’d go climb Everest if I could.”

  “Push yourself, you mean.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can we change the CD?” Elvis was on the CD player.

  “Sure.”

  She takes it off and puts on some Erroll Garner we both like. Concert by the Sea. She gave it to me one Christmas.

  “You know what?”

  “What, sweetheart?”

  “Sometimes when I’m with you, I don’t feel anxious about the future anymore.” She paused, then said, “Artie?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Can I ask you something?”