There was a single low-wattage lamp on the counter of the shop.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “You do understand why I could not bring you here with your police escort?”
“Yes.”
They had paused in the middle of the shop. Iris smelled an almost dizzying array of tobaccos. She had ceased smoking fourteen years ago while her father was dying from what he called “the last whacks of the Marlboro coffin nails.”
“Good,” Daniel said, and moved to a door at the rear of the small shop.
The door wasn’t locked. She followed him through it and into another room not much larger than a closet. Still another door, but when this one opened there was a flow, not a rush, of light and the light was a golden haze. Inside the room, eight girls stood or sat talking and smoking. When the door opened, they looked at Daniel and Iris and stopped talking. It was not the first time Daniel had brought a female client. All the girls welcomed female clients. The risks of disease were diminished, and extra money could be earned from voyeurs at peepholes or watching on television monitors. One wealthy customer had a video hookup to all three rooms in the back. The girls knew that the price of such a selection in one’s own home was enormous.
None of the girls were scantily clad. Most wore skirts and blouses or sweaters that accented their breasts. Others had the lean, slick, boyish look of models.
“You may talk to whichever one of the girls you wish,” Daniel said. “But I suggest Svetlana. She is the best educated and probably the smartest.”
He was looking at one of the svelte boyish girls. Svetlana paused in talking to another girl and looked at Iris openly with a smile.
Daniel motioned for Svetlana to come closer. When she did, her brown eyes were wide and fixed on Iris.
“Miss Templeton is not a client,” he said. “She is a reporter from England. You will answer her questions and Miss Templeton will compensate you for your time.”
Svetlana nodded.
“Room Two,” he said.
As Svetlana led her through yet another door, Iris looked back at Daniel, who met her gaze and grinned, a dinosauric grin that Iris definitely did not like. She followed the prostitute to a dark hallway and into an unmarked room. The room had a bed, a comfortable chair, a hat rack, and a small painting of an early-nineteenth-century Russian village street on the wall. The yellowish light in the painting was the same as that in the room from which they had come.
“You’re sure you don’t. .?” the girl asked, touching her red lips.
“Certain,” Iris said. “No offense.”
The girl looked puzzled.
“It means ‘please do not be offended.’ ”
“Your Russian is quite good. I wish I could speak English that well. I am learning.”
She motioned to the chair. Iris sat. The girl moved to the bed and sat facing her.
Iris looked around the room.
“Yes,” said the girl. “We are being watched and listened to. What do you want to know?”
Iris took out a small pad of paper and a click pen.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty.”
“Are you ever seen by a doctor?”
“We are all seen every two weeks by a doctor to inspect us for AIDS and other diseases. We urge our clients to wear condoms, and they almost always do if we put it to them correctly. You know, we say, ‘I’m much more stimulated by a man with a condom,’ or some nonsense like that.”
“Why are you a prostitute?”
“Money. I am from a very small town where there are few jobs and those that exist pay little and usually require that a girl please a boss or a foreman. I can make in one month here what it would take me a year to make in my town.”
“Do you plan to stop being a prostitute someday?”
The girl shrugged.
“I do not know. I may save enough in three years to go to school here in Moscow and become a hotel manager or a pastry chef.”
“Do you have any goals while you continue to work as a prostitute?”
“To move up.”
The girl lifted her hand gracefully with palm down and wrist bent, reminding Iris of a swan. She made a note of the movement.
“Up?”
“We are above the lowest level, the girls who line up in tunnels, maybe twenty of them, in rain, cold, standing all night, hoping to catch the eye of a customer brought by one of the men whose job it is to bring them.”
“And where. .?” Iris began.
“Do they take the customers? To reserved rooms in nearby hotels.”
“So what is ‘up’ for you?”
“To be one of the women with their own hotel room or one who goes to hotel rooms of visiting businessmen from all over the world. We get double what the tunnel girls get, but the hotel room girls get more than double what we get.”
“How would you get to be a hotel girl?”
“By being selected for looks and a certain sophistication and acting ability. Much of what we do is acting.”
“I would guess that you have a very good chance at going up. Who do you work for?”
“Daniel.”
“No, I mean who else? What is this operation called? Who runs it?”
“That I do not know,” said the girl with an apologetic smile.
“You are acting now?”
“Perhaps. I do not know anyone involved but Daniel and the other girls. I do not wish to know. If you talk to any of the other girls, you will get less from them than you have gotten from me.”
“Do you have regular customers?”
“A few.”
“Do you know their names?”
“Only first names. Never last names. Just Sergei, Boris, Igor, never a Pavel Petrov or-”
“Pavel Petrov?” Iris jumped in.
“Random example of the anonymous names of my clients,” Svetlana said, nervously glancing up at an air vent on the wall.
“I see,” said Iris, displaying nothing and not writing the name in her notebook.
Pavel Petrov, unless this was a different Pavel Petrov, was a deputy director of Gasprom. Government-owned Gasprom was the largest provider of natural gas in the world, and possibly the largest corporation in the world. It was the economic razor that could be and had been held to the neck of Ukraine and Western Europe, and Pavel Petrov was one of Gasprom’s principal spokesmen, a family man with a loving wife and three beautiful children. Iris knew this because she had interviewed Pavel Petrov the last time she had come to Russia for a story.
The dropping of Petrov’s name was news on which Iris Templeton might be able to hang a scandal.
She wanted to place the name into the conversation, though she really had no more questions.
“Are you fed well?”
“We are not prisoners,” Svetlana said. “We go out. We pay for our own food.”
“You have friends among the other girls?”
“Not really. It does not pay. They move up or down or out quickly. It does not pay to have friends.”
The door opened and Daniel Volkovich came in smiling.
“Time is up,” he said. “You have one last question?”
“No,” said Iris, rising but keeping her eyes on Svetlana, who was looking at Daniel with apprehension.
“Then we will thank our little Svetlana,” he said. “And perhaps reward her for her valuable time.”
“How much of a reward?” Iris asked.
“I would say two hundred euros would be sufficient. You agree, Svetlana?”
The girl said, “Yes,” and tried to hide the quiver in her voice.
“If you don’t have-” Daniel began.
“I have it,” Iris said, opening her purse, putting the notebook inside, and removing her wallet.
When she finished handing the girl the money, Iris followed Daniel Volkovich toward the door. Daniel paused in the corridor just outside Svetlana’s room.
“So,” he said. “You have what you need?”
“I have what you want me to have,” she said.
“I do not understand.”
“Svetlana’s a fine actress,” Iris said, facing him.
“Yes, but I do not understand.”
“Pavel Petrov,” she said.
His grin turned into a nervous laugh.
“How did you know?”