by Ana Medeiros
“Why didn’t you—”
“Tatiana, you came to see me,” Hazel said from the kitchen door, interrupting Julian. Her attention fell on Tatiana.
Between Hazel’s mental state and Tatiana’s temperament, Julian couldn’t predict what might unfold next.
“You’re looking better than I thought you would,” Tatiana replied, her voice clipped.
“Must be all the rest I get.” Hazel slowly made her way to the table, pulled out the empty chair and lowered herself into it. “I don’t want to fall asleep. Not yet. Julian will come to see me.”
Tatiana frowned at him. He gave a small shake of his head, warning her not to comment on what Hazel had just said.
“I see that you’ve eaten something.” Hazel reached for the empty bowl in front of Tatiana. “That’s not enough. No wonder you’re skin and bones. There are burgers in the freezer. Carla picks them up at the butcher. I get these cravings for burgers, you know, not all the time but sometimes. They’re good. Go make one.”
“I only eat fruit and vegetables,” Tatiana said.
“Not the last time you were here,” Hazel replied.
Julian turned to Tatiana. “When were you here?”
“Who are you?” Hazel asked Julian. She sounded irritated by his interruption.
He didn’t acknowledge Hazel’s question. “When were you here?” he persisted.
“She just asked you who you were,” Tatiana replied. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
He turned on his chair and took hold of Hazel’s hand. “I’m a friend of your son, Julian. Remember me? I come to see you almost every day and bring you messages from him. I tell you how he’s doing.”
“Oh, yes, I remember,” Hazel smiled. “Is he coming to see me?”
“Not tonight.” Julian caressed her hand. “When was the last time Tatiana was here to see you? Julian would like to know.”
He glanced at Tatiana from the corner of his eye. She muttered something under her breath but he ignored it.
“Julian was in med school…I don’t remember what month it was but I know it was summer. He had gone up north with his friend, what’s his name?” Hazel paused, “Pete, that’s it,” she continued. “Nice young man. They were at his cottage. Pretty place. Never been but I’ve seen pictures.”
He was about to dismiss Hazel’s story as mere delusion but Tatiana’s dismayed expression encouraged him to pursue it. “What did she want?”
“Food, a place to stay. But what she really wanted was Julian. She came looking for him. I let her stay, you know.” Hazel faced Tatiana, who in turn stared at her own nails. “I liked having you around. You had plans, goals, and that told me you were a girl after my own heart. I never touched the money you sent me. I gave you that money. It wasn’t a loan. I still have it and I want to give it back to you.”
Julian wanted to press Hazel for answers but she wasn’t the person from whom he wanted to hear them. “Speak to me, Tatiana. What happened?”
“When I called the restaurant they told me you had left,” Hazel persisted. “You didn’t like it there?”
“Got a serving job in the Loop.” Tatiana didn’t raise her eyes from her nails. “Good tips.”
“C’mon, Tatiana,” Julian continued. “Tell me. I’ll find out eventually. Hazel here can be very talkative when she feels like it, but I’d rather you to be the one to tell me.”
“I got Hazel’s address from a letter she had sent to my aunt.” Tatiana started to scrape drops of dried soup from the tabletop with her fingers. “She wanted to know how Sofia and I were doing. I had had enough of Lawrence so I got on a bus and showed up at her doorstep. I expected her to tell me to turn around and drag my sorry ass back to my aunt’s. But, she didn’t and for that, she had my immediate respect. That’s when I found out she had adopted you. It sounded like you were doing really well for yourself.”
Julian couldn’t find his voice.
“And, that’s the thing. When I got here I was sure I wouldn’t be going anywhere until I saw you but, after talking to Hazel, I realized I needed to leave. You were no longer a druggie getting in shit with the cops and turning tricks for money. You had a good future ahead of you, all the things you and I never had.”
Julian watched her as she continued to scrape the tabletop, even after the stain was gone.
“I wanted that for you,” she said. “I still do.”
Julian felt a tightening in his chest.
“I made a choice,” she continued. “I packed up my things, said goodbye to Hazel, and took everything she offered me. That same day I rented an apartment here in Chicago. I stocked up my fridge, bought new clothes. I have no regrets.”
“You shouldn’t have regrets,” Julian had to clear his throat before he could continue. “That was brave of you, though.”
“It comes with being eighteen.”
He let go of Hazel and approached Tatiana. He waited for her to look up at him. She took her time. At first, it was a suspicious glance through the corner of her eye but then she lifted her head and met his stare.
He kneeled beside Tatiana. He wrapped his arms around her shoulders and brought her closer to his chest. She didn’t hug him back but she didn’t try to push him away either.
“Thank you for coming back for me,” he whispered into her ear.
Chapter 32
Vincent watched her sleeping peacefully, her body sprawled out between the sheets. It always impressed him how she could take up almost an entire king-sized bed.
He leaned down and caressed her hair. “I have to leave.”
The woman opened her eyes and looked up at him. “Already? What time is it?”
“Four in the morning. I wasn’t going to wake you, but I know you don’t like it when I leave and don’t say goodbye.”
“I hate it.”
“You should go back to sleep…or be with someone else. I don’t want to tell you what to do.”
“By now the place is probably empty. Anyway, I never book anyone else after I see you. Why don’t you come back to bed?”
“I have work to do.”
The woman reached for Vincent’s hand and brought it to her lips. She kissed his palm. “You should quit. We could go somewhere together. I’ve been ready to leave Chicago since the day I got here.”
There was a small part of Vincent that wanted to do just that—quit, go somewhere far away and forget the club with all its troubles, but he knew such a thing was impossible. “I love what I do.”
“Liar.”
Vincent smiled. “Yes, well, like they say, no rest for the wicked.” He turned his back on the woman and grabbed his black blazer from the chair.
The woman sat up on the bed. “Vincent?”
Already by the door, he turned.
“There’s been talk…”
“About?”
“That some of us are disappearing…showing up dead. Is it true?”
Vincent could hear the fear in her voice. “We do everything within our power to protect all of you. I do everything within my power to protect you.”
“What if that’s not enough?”
“No one will hurt you here.”
“I’ve heard someone’s using the club to target us. People are freaking out, Vincent.”
“You don’t need to worry.”
“I might be into satisfying rich people’s fantasies. Sometimes I might even enjoy it, but I don’t have a death wish. I’d have to leave.”
“Where would you work?”
“I’d figure something out.”
“Go back to working the streets?”
“Maybe work out of my place. Develop my own client list. I’m not the same person you met eight years ago, Vincent. I can do better now.”
“Are you happy working for us?”
“I’m happy working for you.”
“And you’ll continue to be. I promise you.”
Vincent left the room and headed straight to the bar upstairs. It was eith
er too early or too late for a drink—depending on one’s point of view—but he needed the booze to help collect his thoughts before the day ahead of him.
“An Old Fashioned,” he said to Ben. The phone in his pocket started to vibrate, and even if he hadn’t been standing in a member-frequented area where no cell phones were allowed, he would have ignored it. “How’s it going?” he asked as Ben placed the glass in front of him.
“Tuesday night, you know.”
Vincent glanced throughout the room. On weeknights, the club resembled more of a social club than a sex club, especially the upper floors. Like Ben, he would rather be surrounded by elitists fucking than elitists discussing business.
“Two more hours and then you can tell them to go drink somewhere else. I’ll make sure security helps get the point across.”
Ben tried to suppress a yawn. “If we were open twenty-four hours I wonder if they’d ever go home.”
“For some, this place is their home.”
“That’s a shame.”
Vincent took his drink and, as he walked up to the third floor, the cigar smoke grew thicker. He wished he could ban the smoking of cigars throughout the club, but knew it wouldn’t be well received by many of the members.
He entered the Black Dragon, which now stood empty. On the far end of the room, he unlocked a door that revealed a claustrophobic, badly lit corridor.
He kept his hand on the wall as he walked. He couldn’t see the wallpaper but he remembered it clearly. When he was a kid, his mother had marched him down that corridor to visit his father. The lush green banana leaves on a gold background had captivated him. Once, his mother had caught him tracing one of the leaves with his fingers and she had asked him if he liked the wallpaper. Even before he could reply, she had told him, “It’s from your grandmother’s time. Your father hasn’t ripped it off because it’s a daily reminder of why he should hate his mother. Don’t let your father know you like it.”
Vincent had been his grandmother’s favorite, the notorious Rose Cheng, who had managed the club until her death. Thanks to his aunt’s defiant behavior, the generation-long tradition of having a woman run the club had been broken, and his father had found himself as the new club manager. Without daughters to pass it on to in his old age, his father appointed his youngest son, Vincent, to the position. Meanwhile, both Vincent’s older brothers had been appointed to higher-ranking roles within the organization.
Ever since he had become the club manager, Vincent ran his hand along the old wallpaper as he walked down the corridor—it was his daily reminder of why he should hate his father.
Vincent opened his office door and crouched down as his dog, Riley, rushed to greet him.
“How’s my beautiful girl doing?” He placed his glass on the large mahogany desk and ran his fingers through her thick, healthy coat. She licked his face. Years ago, one of his brothers had left him with Riley, a mixed-breed puppy, after her owner had run into trouble with the organization. Vincent liked to think that Riley’s previous owner would have felt some consolation in knowing his dog had met a better fate than him.
Vincent sat at his desk and Riley laid down by his feet. He pulled his phone from his pocket and saw he had two missed calls. They were from his boss, demanding answers. As he called the number back, he downed the rest of his drink.
“What took you so long to call me back?”
“I’ve been doing the rounds.” It wasn’t true. He paid others to keep an eye on the club’s day-to-day operations.
“Where are we at on the workers’ situation? How many?”
“So far, four female workers. In the last two years, all of them stopped showing up to work. But, the police aren’t investigating their deaths.”
“Why not?”
“They’ve all been deemed accidental overdoses.”
“I don’t know if I should be disgusted or happy at how incompetent the police are,” the man said. “Still, this is bad. It gives us nothing to go on. What else you got?”
Vincent opened the envelope on his desk and looked at the police photographs of the four women. He had known them all. “Nothing. The police are a dead end. We can’t rely on them for information. We’ll have to do this ourselves.”
“We offer those rich pervs everything. Now they also need to start killing off our workers?”
“We don’t offer everything. Whoever is killing them has a fetish, a kink the club hasn’t been able to fulfill.”
“Happy workers means happy customers, and happy customers means a profitable business. Listen, I know once in a while accidents happen. When they do, we handle it. But this is different. It’s not on our terms.”
No. Happy customers who we can blackmail mean a very profitable business, Vincent thought to himself. “I believe this is the work of one person. Probably a man. I’ve gone through our records and hours of video surveillance, trying to find out which members these women have been with, who requested their services, who they might appeal to.”
“And?”
“I’ve narrowed it down to twenty people.”
“Twenty? What the fuck, Vincent? That’s still too many.”
“I’m working on narrowing it down further.”
“You need to get control of this situation.”
“I’m doing—”
“Vincent, don’t make me take this to your brother.”
He stood up and Riley jumped to her feet. She looked at him expectantly, her tail wagging. She wanted him to take her for a walk. “I’m handling it.”
“Next time I talk to you I want to hear two things: the name of the fucker and that he’s dead. Got me?”
“I’m doing—”
“Got me?”
“Yes,” Vincent replied.
He ended the call and reached for Riley’s leash. They both needed fresh air. “Let’s go, girl.”
Instead of exiting by the same door he had used earlier, he used the door at the opposite end of his office. After climbing a set of stairs, he and Riley emerged through a heavy metal door into the alley behind the restaurant.
His pre-dawn walks with Riley marked the only time Vincent almost enjoyed Chinatown. The streets, empty of people, loud noises, and overpowering scents, provided a calm space where his worries, for a brief moment, seemed far away and unimportant. But this walk, unlike the others, did not provide the escape he needed. He had too much on his mind. He felt tense.
Vincent reached for his phone. “Get Nolan to meet me by Princeton and Alexander.”
Born and raised in Chicago, at some point Vincent had thought about leaving, maybe for the California coast. Riley would have loved the ocean. But, fully aware of the responsibilities his birth placed on him, he knew both he and Riley would die in Chicago.
Vincent watched Nolan rush down the street. The man possessed the uncanny ability to look as if he belonged in whatever surroundings he found himself in, one of the reasons why he was good at his job. When he reached them, the three walked together toward the alley that ran from South Princeton to South Wentworth Avenue.
“We need to talk about the girl.”
The man nodded. “I did exactly what you told me to do. She got the message.”
Vincent had met Meredith. She was smart but also imprudent. “We might have to go all the away. Both with her and the Tribune guy.”
“When?”
Vincent patted Riley between her ears. “I’ll let you know.”
“Is there a chance for, you know, some fun? She’s smoking hot.”
He stopped and faced the man. “If it happens, it goes down clean. If she has even a button undone I’ll hold you responsible.”
Nolan held his hands up in the air. “No worries. I understand.”
As the three of them continued to walk together, Vincent focused on Riley, making sure she didn’t eat any of the food scraps that littered the ground.
“It’s not my place to ask, but shouldn’t we just get it done now?” The man sounded impatient. “Wh
at are we waiting for? This isn’t how we handle things.”
“We handle things however I say we handle things.”
After dismissing Nolan, Vincent and Riley returned to the club. Since their departure, the club had closed. With no background music and the fluorescent lights on, the club had lost its seductiveness. Only its unique scent remained.
“You got my message,” Vincent said in Mandarin as he removed Riley’s leash.
Julian’s reply was also in Mandarin. “You wanted to see me?”
Throwing his blazer on a stool, Vincent joined Julian by the bar.
“This meeting is a courtesy.”
Julian did not bother to respond, merely shot Vincent a look of contempt.
“We need to discuss Meredith Dalton.”
“What about her?”
“She’s planning to publish an article on the club.”
Vincent saw Julian’s body stiffen.
“I’m giving you a chance to save her life.”
“She’s leaving Chicago.”
Vincent chuckled. “She doesn’t have to be in Chicago to publish her article. If you were anyone else, she’d already be dead. And so would you.”
“When she started to pursue the article, she did it with no idea of the danger she was putting herself in. I was the one who brought her here. When I made her my guest, I was aware of the risks. I knew she was my responsibility. Harm me. Not Meredith.”
Vincent smirked. Julian was trying to protect Meredith, which he had expected. He stood up and while Riley didn’t move, she followed him with her eyes. “You think there’s a chance you’ll walk out of this unscathed? That’s not how it works and you know it.”
“I’m sure there’s something we can do to fix this situation, to reach an agreement. I’ll speak to Meredith. She will—”
“Julian,” Vincent said, glancing at his watch. “It’s seven thirty. You have twenty-four hours to convince me she’s no longer a risk.”
“How?”
“I don’t care. Figure it out. After that, if I even get the slightest inkling she might be going ahead with her little story, she will be dead before she has a chance to type her next word. And as for you and your role in all this, you will never see your sons again.”