by Lisa Unger
“Skyrocket, yes,” she repeated softly.
“You’ll have lots of money, live in a beautiful house.”
“With a pool?”
“Anything you want,” he said, the slightest hint of impatience creeping into the practiced veneer of his smooth and seductive voice. “You just have to do what I say. Now close your eyes and get comfortable.”
The girl stared uneasily at the camera, or the man behind it, seeming to detect the change in his tone, but she closed her eyes.
“Now, touch yourself.”
She opened her eyes a bit, then started to touch one of her thighs tentatively.
“Not there,” he snapped.
“Where, Sasa?” she asked, genuinely confused, fear starting to warp the features of her face.
Lydia paused the DVD. “Did you hear that?” Jeffrey nodded, then restarted it.
It was then that two large men in leather masks stepped into view, one on either side of the girl. The girl’s face dissolved into tears as she scrambled to all fours and began crawling away. A tiny yelp escaped her as she was pulled back by one of the men, naked except for tight black briefs.
Lydia reached out to pause the DVD player on her laptop and the image, in all its horror, froze on the screen, dominated by the girl’s terrified face. Lydia lowered her head into her hands. The blood rushed in her ears, and anxiety made her throat dry and tight. Jeffrey had turned away from the screen, as well.
“We have to watch it,” Lydia said after a minute, and pressed the play icon on her computer screen.
One of the men produced a syringe and stuck it into the girl’s arm, causing her to shriek. It was the last sound she made for a while. She went limp after a moment but was still conscious, moving her limbs slowly, slapping weakly at the men as they raped her repeatedly. She was like a half-conscious rag doll, trapped in misery and horror, unable to fight as they moaned and roared over her. Then she started to cry, deep, rasping sobs that would have been screams if she’d had any strength. When the men had each ejaculated on her small body, her cheap negligee ripped and lying next to her, they waited, pacing.
“Wait until she’s a little more lively,” said another voice from offscreen. They hadn’t heard this voice before on the tape, but they recognized it.
“Let’s get a fresh one,” came a muffled suggestion from behind one of the masks.
“You only paid for one, gentlemen,” said the voice sternly. “And there are other patrons waiting their turn this evening.”
“But this one didn’t have enough fight in her,” complained the masked figure.
“If you want to discuss this, let’s turn off the camera.”
The screen went blue for a minute, and Lydia was hopeful that it was over. But in a second, a horrible wail, the sound of unspeakable pain and terror, jarred Lydia and Jeffrey, both of them jumping. One of the men held what looked like a Taser gun and was sticking the girl with it as she tried to crawl away from him on the floor. The screen fluttered and then suddenly the girl was back on the bed, her arms and legs spread wide and tied to posts that hadn’t been there before. She had stopped screaming, and her head lolled back and forth as she mumbled something in another language that had the measured rhythm of a prayer or a nursery rhyme.
Lydia put her head back in her hands, unable to watch as the men proceeded to burn her with cigarettes. The screaming started again, this time weaker, more desperate wails.
Jeffrey distracted himself by examining the men, looking for identifying marks. Both of them wore matching thick gold rings on their right hands, though he couldn’t make out the insignia, and they both wore gold wedding bands on their left. The heavier man had a tattoo on his left forearm that had been blacked out in postproduction. The thinner man, with a mass of gray hair on his chest, had a large black mole on his right shoulder blade. Jeffrey had ceased to see the video, despite paying attention to every detail. It was a skill he had learned when he’d hunted a child murderer in New York, the case that had ended on a darkened rooftop in the Bronx, with Jeffrey taking the only bullet of his career. The crime scenes had been heart-wrenching, little boys murdered and violated in ways he chose to block from the personal memory of his life. But professionally, he remembered every detail. You had to be like that in this business; otherwise, the demons ate your life whole.
He looked over at Lydia, who had raised her head from her hands and wore an expression of horror. In the light of the screen, her face was pale, and dark circles shadowed her eyes.
“Wait,” she said, reaching over to the laptop and pausing it. “Look at their right hands.”
“The rings? I noticed them.”
“Is that the same ring Nathan Quinn was wearing?”
“It’s hard to tell,” said Jeffrey, reaching over to freeze the image and zooming in on one of the rings. The image was fuzzy and the features of the ring hard to distinguish.
“I wouldn’t rule it out,” said Jeffrey.
“I think it is.… Look,” she said, putting her finger on the screen. “You can see the scroll and the letters, and the shape of the sword.”
“It could be,” said Jeff, zooming out and pressing play.
When the DVD started again, the screaming grew louder. They watched as the heavier man opened the girl’s tiny body with a serrated knife. Jeffrey managed to turn it off again quickly, but not before the blood began to rush from the wound.
Lydia got up and ran to the bathroom, her two-day battle with nausea finally lost. When she returned, her eyes were red and she sat on the chair across from the bed. They locked eyes.
“What the fuck was that?” asked Lydia, coughing weakly.
“That was one of the snuff films Detective Ignacio was talking about. He was right,” said Jeffrey.
“Was it real?” asked Lydia. “Could it have been fake?”
“It looked real. I’ve never seen anything like that. The camera work was pretty unsophisticated; the angle never shifted. It felt real.”
Even when Manny had suggested the possibility after Valentina had been killed, Jeffrey hadn’t quite believed it. The FBI had always denied that snuff films were real, just as Agent Bentley had said earlier, had always claimed that there was no market for them, that no one had ever actually seen one, and that there was no way to distribute them without someone getting caught. There was little question that what they had just seen was real. Furthermore, Jeffrey realized that the market was a closed one. The target group was not just the people who wanted to see snuff but also the men who wanted to make snuff. Maybe that was why it had been impossible to prove, until now. Suddenly, what Marianna had told Lydia didn’t seem so far-fetched.
And now that they had seen the film, there was no turning back.
“Is that what happened to Tatiana?” Lydia asked, thinking aloud.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Because that voice, the second offscreen voice, the one doing the negotiating?”
“It was Nathan Quinn.”
“I’d bet money on it.”
“And the other voice, the director—the girl called him Sasa.”
“Sasa Fitore.”
“So Sasa Fitore is making films with Nathan Quinn. Arranging for Quinn’s wealthy contacts to get into the act?” asked Lydia.
“And then probably arranging for closed viewings of the DVD for the men who’d rather watch than do the deed,” said Jeffrey.
“Meanwhile, Sasa Fitore is fucking Jenna Quinn on the side.”
“Things could get very messy.”
“And we’re still no closer to finding out what happened to Tatiana.”
Lydia went over to the minibar and extracted two tiny bottles of Absolut and two of Perrier. She poured them each a cocktail, then stepped out onto the balcony. She took the salt air into her lungs. The large yellow moon hung over the rolling ocean in a sky brilliant with stars; the palms fluttered lazily in the slight breeze. Nature, as usual, was oblivio
us to evil. She chose to take that as a sign, a sign that while man was prone to evil acts, the universe was good; that there was a benevolent God, hoping for the best even in the darkest moments, balancing sin with miracle, and demons with angels.
Jeffrey walked out and placed an arm around her shoulder; she moved into him, wrapping her arms around his waist. She looked up at him and he kissed her gently. They had reached their threshold that evening for witnessing human suffering. But tomorrow was a new day.
part two
But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!
powers and people—
—RAINER MARIA RILKE
chapter twenty
She had made such a mess of her life. And it wasn’t the first time or even the second. Nothing had happened the way they promised her it would. She was ashamed of herself for ever believing that it would be different. No one had ever been honest with her except for Radovan, and he was gone. She felt small and cold inside.
The room was dim, candles burning down low on the dresser, and the hour late—or early, depending on how you looked at it. She could hear him breathing deeply, sound asleep. How he slept at night, she didn’t know, with all that blood on his hands. She wasn’t nearly as guilty, and yet she hadn’t slept in months. His heart was a black, dead place, and she hadn’t seen that until it was too late. Wasn’t that always the way with men—they seemed like a savior until they had you bound and gagged. Then the mask came off and you were stuck with a monster.
She slid out from beneath the cotton and down covers of the king-size bed and walked over to the mirror above the French wood dresser. Lighted from below by the candles, she looked like a hag, with deep black circles and wrinkles etched around her eyes and mouth, the skin loose and pasty. The candlelight illuminated the stray wisps of her hair, and she fought back tears. Her beauty was one of her only commodities, and it was fading fast. Not that, if she was honest with herself, it had ever proved much of an asset. For her or for Tatiana. Beauty had always been her biggest problem. That and a weak heart. But Tatiana was strong, unlike her mother. She wouldn’t grow up to be the pawn in the ugly, dirty games of men. If Jenna could get the two of them out of this new mess she’d gotten them into, there would be no more men. They’d make it on their own somewhere. Women did that in the world; it wasn’t like Albania, where you were little more than a whore and a maid your whole life. They’d have plenty of money when the deal was done. Somehow, they’d make it right, where the money had come from; somehow they would find a way to remove the stain. She pushed the thoughts from her head. It was better not to think on it, on what she had become to save her daughter and herself.
“What are you doing?” he said from the bed, his voice sleepy and impatient.
“I can’t sleep,” she said, her voice taking on the soft and apologetic tone she always used with him. It was the voice her mother had used with her father.
“You worry too much,” he said. “You don’t trust me?”
“Of course I do, darling,” she said, walking over to him and placing a hand on his face. He grabbed her wrist.
“But?”
“It’s just that I wonder whom we can trust.” He released her arm and she sat down on the bed beside him. He touched her breast beneath the cream silk nightgown she wore, and she tried not to shrink away.
“That’s what you don’t understand.” His voice took on the smug and condescending tone so typical of men like him. “We don’t have to trust anyone, because we’re in control of all of this. We have what everyone wants.”
“What do we have, Sasa?”
“Information.”
She was starting to suspect that Sasa Fitore was an idiot. She nodded. “You’re right, of course,” she said sweetly. “But that detective. He found out about your association with Nathan. And now the other two. What if they find out about American Equities and American Beauty?”
“I told you. You worry too much. The detective won’t be sharing any more information with anyone.”
“You didn’t …”
“Don’t worry about what I did and didn’t do,” he said, getting angry now. He sat up on his elbows, his blue eyes blazing and his blond hair falling onto his forehead. He had the Byzantine double-headed eagle of the Albanian flag tattooed in black on his chest.
His cell phone rang on the dresser, and she got up quickly to get it for him, eager to have an excuse to move away from him. Since first Valentina had been killed and then tonight Marianna, she could barely stand to have his hands on her. He hadn’t grieved a moment or shed a tear for his sister or his niece. “They betrayed us,” he’d said to her. And in that statement was an explicit warning to her. She was more afraid of him now than she’d ever been of Nathan Quinn. At least, she thought, they didn’t betray themselves.
“What?” he said into the phone. “All right.”
“Listen,” he said to her as he got out of bed and hung up the phone. “You just handle your end of this and I’ll handle mine. In the end, everyone will be fucked except for you and me. And we’ll be laughing about this in Rio, yes?”
He took her face in his hands and she nodded, feeling tiny and powerless with him so close and so strong.
“Good,” he said, kissing her on the forehead like a child. “Now, go home before you’re missed.”
“Nathan’s in New York, looking for Tatiana.”
Sasa laughed at how well that element of everything had worked out. They’d confused the hell out of the police by sending Boris, having him pretend to be a Greyhound bus driver, and now every free moment Nathan Quinn had, he went to New York to look for his precious Tatiana. As if only he could find her in that sea of junkies and prostitutes. If only Nathan knew how much the girl hated him. All the money and all the powerful men he had at his disposal weren’t going to change that for him. Not that the little bitch cared much for Sasa, either. He’d seen the way she looked at him when she thought he didn’t see. If he didn’t know better, he’d think there was murder in her eyes sometimes.
“Where are you going?” she asked as he pulled on a pair of Calvin Klein jeans and a black ribbed sweater. He checked out his impressive physique in the mirror as he dressed, liking the way the candlelight accentuated the cuts of his muscles.
“I have one more thing to take care of before we leave,” he said, pulling on a pair of work boots.
She hurried to get dressed so that she could leave with him. She didn’t want to be alone in the house where Valentina and Marianna had lived. She couldn’t bear to face their ghosts alone.
chapter twenty-one
Cities that weren’t New York always seemed like they were faking it. When you were in New York, whether it was the elegance of Park Avenue, the seedy cool of the East Village, the ultrachic shops and cafés in Soho, there was no mistaking where you were. The smells: the sweet warm scent of honey-roasted nuts and pretzels from the street vendors’ carts, the acrid stink of urine in the subway on a hot day. The sounds: the cacophony of car horns, the wail of sirens, homeless people arguing with their loud, slurred voices. The stately buildings: the elegance of Grand Central, the Deco Chrysler Building, even the run-down, abandoned structures of Alphabet City were distinguishable from any other place on earth. When Lydia visited another city, she always felt like she was waiting for it to reveal a personality, some little quirk of individuality that identified its character. But in America, she was almost always disappointed. Even San Francisco, which most New Yorkers agreed was acceptable, just seemed like a loosely connected group of passably cool neighborhoods.
Lydia had heard people describe Miami as New York City on the beach. But from what she’d seen, most of the city possessed the hard edge of the urban condition but little of the sophistication. South Beach was a party, no doubt, and the beach was gorgeous, but the rest of the area was a collection of opulent burbs scattered about but separate from the massive highway
s passing through run-down neighborhoods with poorly kept streets. Parts of it just looked neglected to Lydia. But there was definitely no shortage of good coffee. Which was hugely important. Especially at 4:30 A.M., as she and Jeffrey sat in their rented Jeep outside the Fitore residence.
Sleep is like a cat. It doesn’t come when it’s called, only when it wants to. It didn’t want anything from Lydia and Jeffrey as they had lain wide-eyed in the darkness, staring at the ceiling fan, an eerie glow from the yellow moon washing the room.
“The detail that continues to bother me is the surveillance camera,” Jeffrey said suddenly after an hour of silence in which they’d both tried to sleep and failed.
“That’s the detail that continues to bother you?” said Lydia, still struggling with the images that played over and over in her mind: Valentina hitting the grill of the Mercedes; Marianna dying on the dance floor of the G-Spot; the nameless pale wisp of a girl being repeatedly raped by men in black leather masks. Every time Lydia closed her eyes, she was assailed by these images. She had seen too much death in her life. She wondered, not for the first time, if she was some kind of cosmic magnet for mayhem, if it was her fate, and not just her choice, to chase the evil of the world and bear witness to its deeds.
“There were no fingerprints on the inside touch pad; it had been wiped clean. The outside pad had only Nathan Quinn’s fingerprints on it, which means that it had also been wiped clean before the Quinns came home. So that means that someone came in from the outside, from the front door. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have bothered wiping down the outside pad and doorknob.”
“Okay …”
“But the camera would have had to have been turned off from the inside; otherwise, it would have captured at least a second of the person entering the house, or the intruder would have worn a mask, or spray-painted the lens in order to avoid being identified later.”
“So whoever entered wanted it to look like Tatiana had run away? Which rules out a kidnapping for ransom, or for some threat to the Quinns.”