by Nevada Barr
“At least he veered,” Anna grumbled. “Surely that means he had some affection for me.” The sneers didn’t waver, and she wondered if they knew what the word “affection” meant, wondered if they’d ever felt it under any name.
The man who’d gotten out of the cab was standing beneath the streetlight watching the drama as if it were being played out onstage. Anna started to raise her hand to holler at him, and then they locked eyes. It was Dougie, the yellow jacket, the man who had pulled a knife on her and Mackie. He was staring at her hard, and she wondered if he recognized her, if he knew she was looking for him. Then she realized that what had him transfixed wasn’t the way she looked but the way she was looking at him, much the way a fox might look at a baby duckling.
Before she could move or shout, he turned and walked rapidly across the street and out of sight down Rampart.
The boys were grinning, and the loose chain they’d made around Anna and Geneva began to tighten.
Geneva leaned her head back and took in a great lungful of air.
She could scream all she wanted to, Anna thought. Nobody was going to hear her.
At least nobody who gave a damn.
THIRTY-THREE
Clare was standing in a narrow alleyway. To one side was a Dumpster, to the other a windowless brick wall. Just enough space remained between the two for a broad-shouldered man to stand without quite touching anything vile. Narrow as her frame was, she kept her arms close to her sides. The expensive leather shoes she’d been worried about looking too new when the evening started out now appeared as if she’d worn them for ten years and never polished them once. Her crisp linen slacks were limp and wrinkled, the cuffs taking on the color of the sidewalks she’d been tramping.
Behind her were three young men, almost boys, high school juniors or seniors probably. They’d been joking and smirking and generally bolstering each other’s courage till one of them had vomited against the wall a few minutes back. Since then they’d been fairly quiet. Ahead of her two more men stood stolidly without much obvious joy. A third was out of sight ahead of them. Now that the boys had quieted she could hear the guy in front groaning like a man in pain.
All of them were in line behind a run-down convenience store, pragmatically named Food Store, on the edge of the Marigny, waiting for a twenty-dollar blow job. Already Clare had seen enough female flesh and enough male assholes to send her into a convent for the rest of her life, but there was no quitting, no calling it a night, no going back. Not ever.
The Jordan who stayed at the high-priced hotel and wore Brooks Brothers clothing had gone somewhere. Not gone, Clare corrected herself, turned his back for a while. The relief at feeling in control was not as great as the fear of being alone, of losing the strength she’d found when Jordan joined her on the train she’d hopped out of Seattle.
The groaning man had recovered and was elbowing his way back out of the crowded alley, not meeting anybody’s eyes. He’d done up his belt, but his fly was still unzipped. Nobody told him.
The next customer vanished from sight around the edge of the Dumpster, and Clare shuffled up a couple feet in line. The alley was paved in brick, clean enough because of the heavy rains this near the Gulf of Mexico; clean enough she could easily see the two cockroaches that ran for cover when she moved. Two months ago she’d have shrieked and run for a can of Raid. Now she simply watched her fellows with mild interest. Cockroaches didn’t bite, didn’t rape, didn’t set houses on fire or sell one another into slavery. The hero of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis might have had it better than he’d thought.
She’d come to join these cockroaches on the recommendation of the bouncer who threw her out of Hustler’s Barely Legal. Time was draining from the world in a palpable way; Clare felt it as if it were blood draining from her veins, the lives of her children dripping away. Pushed by this urgency, she’d taken three different strippers to the private lap dance rooms upstairs and tried to bribe them into getting her somebody younger. A lot younger. To their credit, and her disappointment, they’d all turned her down. One of them had slapped her so hard her ears rang for five minutes. She was probably the one that told the bouncer there was a pervert on the premises, a real one.
Because she was an actor and because she was playing a pedophile, people believed she was a pedophile. This was what she wanted; this was how she might best find her daughters. It didn’t change the fact that the revulsion on the faces of the strippers, and the way the bouncer didn’t want to have to touch her to move her from the club, made her want to scream, “I am not one of them! They have my children!”
The bouncer, a burly fellow no more than thirty, escorted her to the street and said she might find something more her style behind the Food Store. He didn’t say it nicely. He was probably setting her up to be beaten or killed, but she came anyway. She doubted his promise of something more in her “style” would turn out to be true. Mass-produced fellatio didn’t strike her as having a direct tie-in with child abuse, since she was out of ideas, she stood with the roaches skittering over her three-hundred-dollar loafers, cursed Jordan for his untimely abdication, and listened to another guy getting his rocks off behind the garbage.
Shoving her hands in her pockets to keep them from straying too close to the Dumpster and the effluvia glistening on its sides, she felt the cell phone in her pocket with its one number: Anna Pigeon. Though she’d only been living without contact with others for a couple of weeks, till now it hadn’t crossed her mind to call anyone. She could call Anna now, find out if she’d learned anything. Somehow Clare couldn’t bring herself to drag another woman—even the pigeon, even by wireless—into this alley.
A grunt, a “God damn,” and another man, looking at no one, fumbling with his trouser front, lumbered by, hitting Clare’s shoulder as he passed. Next but one for a blow job, Clare moved ahead, watched the roaches run, and tried not to think too far into the future.
Then it was her turn. The energy of rage and shame and doing something that might by some stretch of a miracle lead to her children had trickled away with the vomit and urine in the alley. Had she not come so far and waited so long, had she anywhere else to go to, Clare would have turned and walked from this sewer where a poor debased creature plied her trade.
As it was she rounded the end of the Dumpster. She’d thought there was a wall there and, maybe, a kneeling pad. The bricks would shred the knees out of anything less than chaps if there wasn’t. What she found was greater darkness, a square in the brick of the wall so devoid of light that it seemed like the entrance to a netherworld.
“Hello, handsome. Let me see what you got for me,” came a voice so sultry it almost managed to make the fetid alleyway seem more mysterious than pathetic. Almost.
Clare stepped toward the darkness, and, as she did, she could see that it was a recessed doorway. In the room beyond, a single candle burned. Between the door and the candle, silhouetted against the feeble light, a woman sat on a low chair, a slipper chair, Clare remembered from the set of The Importance of Being Earnest. The back of the chair curved gracefully up behind its occupant, who sat with long skirts artfully arranged, long-nailed hands drooping languidly over the arms, one holding a burning cigarette. Clare could distinguish little, only that she had a wealth of long blond curls and that, where the candlelight touched her sleeves, the gown looked to be a deep red color. The room smelled of cigarette smoke, perfume, and the slight metallic odor of what had to be nearing quarts of semen.
The woman rearranged her skirts, and Clare saw the bronze flash of the rim of an old-fashioned spittoon. The receptacle of ten thousand unborn babies. Of course she wouldn’t swallow. At the rate she sold favors, if she had, she’d be as big as a garbage truck.
“Don’t just stand there, honey, time is money, and, unless you want trouble, get those pants down on the double.” Low throaty laughter followed this doggerel of house rules.
Clare stepped closer, fished the Bic lighter out of her pants pocket, and struck a light
.
“Fuck, no,” the woman growled and was out of the chair so fast Clare had no time to do anything but freeze in place. The lighter was snatched from her hand as fast, and the woman back in her chair.
“No light, baby. I got sensitive eyes.”
In the brief flash Clare had seen what the intentional gloom hid. Ms. Fellatio was really Mr. Fellatio in a long gold wig and no teeth. An old fag down on his luck, but with a gig that paid for rent and dentures.
“You bring out your business,” the sultry voice suggested. “I got a line outside.”
Jordan came back on a tide of violence. He jerked out his wallet and brought out a hundred-dollar bill. “I wouldn’t put my foot in your mouth, much less my dick,” he said. “Want to talk?” He proffered the bill, and the prostitute took it.
“I love good conversation,” the hooker said, then rose and called into the alley, “Y’all come back in half an hour. Lady Kneepads has got to take a break.” Shutting the door on the groans and shouts of annoyance, he threw a dead bolt that sounded as if it could withstand Mongol hordes and turned to Jordan.
“What you need, baby? You got half an hour.” He draped himself back onto the low chair, leaving Jordan standing. Fine; the less of Jordan’s surface that touched that faggot’s work area, the better.
“I’m looking for something a little younger,” Jordan said and, forgetting Clare’s lighter had been confiscated, shook out a Camel.
“Younger than Lady Kneepads?” the transvestite said as he leaned forward and struck a light for Jordan’s cigarette.
In the glare, Jordan couldn’t but notice the arch look in his eyes and the easy humor around the toothless mouth. He wasn’t as old as Clare’d thought, probably forty, and, with his teeth in, could probably still get laid.
“I know, you thinking, what’s a nice girl like me doin’ in a place like this.”
The light went out on the sexy chuckle.
“Real young,” Jordan said. “Tender flesh.”
“We talkin’ legal tender?” Lady Kneepads asked.
Jordan said nothing. He took a drag and glanced back at the door locking the others out. Locking him in.
“You with vice, baby boy?” Lady Kneepads asked.
“Not a cop,” Jordan said on a stream of smoke. “I just like my women young. And women,” he added.
“No need to be insulting. A lousy hundred bucks don’t buy meanness in my book. But you aren’t talkin’ wimmin, are you, baby? You’re talkin’ girls. Am I right?”
“Tender flesh,” Jordan repeated.
“Now, you talking big girls or little girls? Barely legal high school or Parchman-Farm-here-I-come kindergarteners?”
“By the time they get to high school, they’re all whores,” Jordan said.
“And why do you suppose that is, hmmmm?” Lady Kneepads asked.
“You want another hundred or you want to blow every guy in that alley and still end up with a night’s take worth half that?”
“Lady Kneepads would adore another C-note, but if you insist on being a royal shit, she will demand two.”
The lady held out her hand. Jordan dug out another hundred-dollar bill but didn’t give it to her.
All night Clare’d dragged his butt around the underbelly of a city known for sex and sin and gotten nothing. He’d probably get nothing from this broken-down cocksucker, but at least their transaction was honest: money for information. It beat hell out of hinting to overpaid concierges, lap dancers, and bouncers.
“You got what I want?” Jordan demanded, flicking the bill in her face.
Lady Kneepads lowered her hand. “What you want doesn’t go around advertising. That kind of thing gets the vice boys all hot and bothered, and they come shut down poor hardworking girls like Lady K. So I can’t guarantee you’re going to get what you want where I send you. Hearsay says if you go to the Bonne Chance—that’s chance, c-h-a-n-c-e—you might hear the pitter-patter of little feet, but that’s just what I said, it’s hearsay.”
“Hearsay.” Jordan spat out the word in frustration.
“You keep your money. And why don’t you take yourself off? I don’t have much use for the likes of you anyway. I just took the money—”
“Because you’re a whore.”
“That’s right, baby, and a girl’s got to live. Bye-bye.” Lady K rose effortlessly from her chair and glided to the door with dignity. She threw the bolt and held it open for Jordan. As he passed, she hissed, “You ever come to me for a blow job, I’m goin’ to put my teeth in, you got that?”
Jordan got it.
Clare held tight to the name Bonne Chance.
THIRTY-FOUR
Geneva’s diaphragm swelled, her throat opened, and she began to sing, “Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home,” in her rich contralto voice.
The gang of thugs shuddered as if they’d been hit by a magic spell. Suddenly they were boys again. Whether it was the music/savage beast connection or the shock of having their victim break into song, Anna couldn’t begin to guess.
While they were momentarily human, Anna said, “That guy that got out of the cab. He’s a major pedophile. We’ve been trying to track him down. A hundred bucks to the guy who tells me where he goes.” One of the kids at the end of the arc they’d been tightening around Anna and Geneva forgot they were going to steal all of the money anyway and sprinted off in hopes of earning the hundred dollars. After a brief hesitation, another boy took off after him.
“Ty!” the most vicious kid, the one who’d threatened rape, shouted after them. The thrill of the chase was as much a draw as the money.
“Fucking pedophile,” the biggest kid, the one Anna’d mistaken for the leader, said. Nobody liked pedophiles but other pedophiles. These kids might be murderers and thieves and God knew what else, but they weren’t sick. He turned and looked—wistfully, Anna thought—after the two younger boys. Knowing the scene could go against her and Geneva in the time it takes to change a mind, Anna grabbed the singer’s hand and started trotting toward the streetlight on the corner as if she’d never expected anything but cooperation.
Geneva, still singing but with a softer, almost lullaby sound, trotted obediently along, trusting Anna not to run her off a cliff or slam her into a wall. Sammy was not so sanguine. He darted around to get ahead of his mistress, woofed to let her know he was there, and then ran slightly ahead of them to make sure there were no incidents on his watch.
Behind them, somebody shouted; then came the thuds of sneakers pounding the sidewalk as the rest of the boys caught up. Or readied to run them down. Either way, Anna was neither slowing nor looking back.
When they reached the corner, the sidewalk was empty, but for the boys who’d chased Dougie. The two of them were standing half a block down, staring at a door in a wall of cinder block, the side of a four-story windowless structure used for storage or parking. Beside the smaller entrance was a closed steel garage door out of sync with the rest of the wall, clearly an addition in the last few years.
Anna slowed to a walk, and she and Geneva headed toward the boys. The runners passed them in a cannonade of rubber soles on pavement. For now, at least, the target had been moved from Anna’s and Geneva’s backs to that of Dougie. Before it could switch back, Anna hailed the one cab rolling down the street and, when it stopped at the curb, helped Geneva in. “Wait for me,” she instructed the driver. “I just need to pay these kids.”
Feeling that she had, if not backup, at least an escape route and a witness, she walked to where all five boys had clustered, staring at a door that was painted the same color as the wall and looked as if it had been built to withstand battering rams.
“Dude went in here,” the first boy to run after Dougie told her. “Door’s locked.” He pounded on it.
“What’s this building?” Anna asked.
“Where’s my money?”
Anna took out her wallet and removed the bills from it, then slipped it back into the front pocket of her pa
nts. Holding the money, she said, “Warehouse? Or what do they do here?”
“I want my hundred bucks,” the kid said belligerently, and Anna realized that the magic of gospel songs and pedophiles was rapidly wearing off and that the kid probably had no idea what the building was and was damned if he was going to admit it.
“Twenty, twenty-five, thirty.” Anna started counting the bills into his outstretched hand, peeling them off slowly, making the count laborious. The quasi-leader of the gang snatched the cash roughly from her hand.
“We’ll take it all.”
“Suit yourself,” Anna said and sprinted for the waiting cab. She hoped to be well away before they got around to counting it. At a guess, there was no more than fifty or sixty dollars. She hadn’t meant to cheat them; she’d just said the first number that came into her head.
When the cab let them out in front of Geneva’s home on Ursulines, Jordan was waiting for them, pacing the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette.
“I phoned,” he accused Anna. “Where the fuck have you been? I must have called sixteen times.”
“Sorry,” Anna said evenly. She seldom turned her cell phone on, certainly not when she was trying to get work done. Old habits die hard, and she hadn’t been in any mood to hurry this one to its death. It was not necessary that she be available to everyone all the time. Answering the phone at the ranger station had been a pain in the ass. Carrying one around to be answered in every conceivable circumstance was odious.
“Jesus fucking—”
“Good evening, Jordan,” Geneva said pointedly.
“Yeah. Right. Open the fu—open the gate, Anna. We got something we got to do.” Leaning down, he snatched up a plastic bag from the shadow of the wall and entrance.
There was no trace of Clare. Not deep in the sunken eyes, not in the knife-thin lips clamping on a smoke and a curse, not in the bowed shoulders, not in the ruined English of the streets.