She dances for the oil workers and fishermen during the week, and in exchange, the owner lets her sing with her clothes on over the weekend. She lives in a small one-room cabin that she built herself. She has electricity, but uses an outhouse. The first time I approach her in the club parking lot, she pulls a little 9mm Chief’s Special out of her bag and stabs it into my ribs.
“You ever use that?” I ask.
“You’re goddamn right,” she tells me.
I buy the men’s club and shut it down. It still takes me two weeks to convince her I am for real.
Finally I pack her into my G-V and take her to a flat I have in Knightsbridge in London. It takes four weeks before she realizes that she’s really safe.
She starts to take walks with me and look me in the eye, and when I take her to a Nathan Lane show near Piccadilly Circus, I catch her smiling halfway through the first act. After the show, when she gets out of the limousine and we walk through the alley into Shepherd’s Market, she holds my hand. We have a drink at Ye Grapes, then go around the corner to a Turkish restaurant called Sofra. We sit in a table by the window and eat hummus and skewers of grilled lamb and vegetables.
Her eyes are dark and liquid and deep, framed by long thick lashes that shadow her cheeks when she looks away. Her nose is narrow and straight, long without being big. Her lips are full. She isn’t a tall girl, but her figure is curved and her stomach flat. I lean across the table and let my lips brush gently against hers. She looks down and brushes her dark silky hair back out of her face. A tear falls, spattering the rim of her plate.
“If you could have anything in the world,” I say, “what would it be?”
“Like, really anything?”
“Really.”
Her eyelids flutter as she looks away and out the window at a passing punk with tall spiked hair, leather, and chains.
She sighs and looks down and says, “A singer. A diva.”
“Like Jennifer Lopez?” I ask.
“Like that,” she says, looking back at me.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll take care of it.”
Her eyes stare into mine. One corner of her mouth curls up and in a quiet voice she says, “I think you mean that. I can sing, you know.”
I nod that I know and say, “I wasn’t just watching your body.”
“But it takes more than that,” she says, staring at the small candle that burns in its glass by the salt.
“Just money,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says. “I love the way you say that.”
“I mean it,” I say.
“I know you do,” she says.
“No one will hurt you again,” I tell her, reaching out and holding her hand in mine. “No one will touch you. I swear to God they won’t.”
That night I am awaked to find her standing beside my bed. She is touching my cheek with the back of her fingers. I draw back the sheets and she slips inside and clings to me tight. I hold her and stroke the back of her head, drifting back into sleep.
In the morning, I lock myself up alone in my wood-paneled study to make some serious phone calls. I raise my voice and the price often enough to get my point across for some immediate results regarding Helena’s career. Then we go for a walk.
The sky is bright blue between the tall white clouds. We pass Buckingham Palace with its sea of red and yellow tulips, gold gilt statues, cascading fountains, and high wrought iron fence. We walk under the towering London plane trees along the lake in St. James’s Park. Ducks dip and splash in the green grasses poking up out of the dark water. The breeze is warm and cinders crunch under our feet. We cross the gritty Horse Guards Parade, and Helena clings to my arm while we stop to watch the Royal Horse Guards change posts in their blue tunics and red plumed helmets.
Soon we’re passing by the bronze lions beneath Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. I reach out and run my fingers along a cold metal mane. The big black cabs swirl around us like miniature bread trucks. When we mount the steps of the National Gallery, I hurry through the columns and go right to the room where van Gogh’s A Wheatfield, with Cypresses takes center stage. I stand in the doorway and freeze. The trees burning like green flames and the brilliant yellow of the wheatfield fill my mind with thoughts of Lester. He would want me to be here, enjoying this painting, helping this girl. I see his smile and the glint in those magnified eyes.
“Are you okay?” Helena asks.
She reaches up and touches the corner of my eye, and I feel the dampness on my skin.
“Just thinking,” I say.
“Can I tell you what happened?” she asks.
“With you?”
“How he got me.”
“Of course,” I say. I take her hand and start to move through the rooms of paintings.
“I was supposed to be with my mother,” she says. “She was an actress from Montreal. She left my father when I was eight and we went back to Canada. I didn’t see him much, but she got a part in an off-Broadway show, so I was staying with him. I didn’t find out until a lot later, after I ran away, but she died in a car accident on that same tour in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I was ten.
“My father was a bookie. I didn’t know that when I was a kid, just that he was on the phone all the time talking about games and he always had money around the house and a gun. Actually, when I went to look for my grandmother and found out that she was dead, I also found out about her brother-my dad’s uncle. He had something to do with the casinos down in New Jersey.”
She looks up at me, and I give her hand a squeeze. We stop in front of Monet’s Houses of Parliament, Sunset, dark and forbidding.
“Anyway, I was walking home one night from a friend’s,” she says. “It was winter and raining little pieces of ice. I heard a gunshot half a block from my house and saw people running. By the time I got there, a police car came around the corner and ran into the snowbank. A cop got out and ran into the house.
“At first I couldn’t move,” she says. “I actually wet myself. The cop, he went in with his gun. He was big and he had on a black leather coat with his badge on his hip. It all happened fast.”
We move from the Monet into a room with a special exhibit on Joseph Turner. I see The Slave Ship on loan from Boston and move toward it. It’s the original of the print Lester had hung over my bunk in A block. Carnage and horror in an angry sea. The sun going out on the horizon like the last tail of a gas flame.
“I think I know who he was,” I say.
“I’ll never forget his face,” she says. “My father was on the floor. He was bleeding and there was a gun. That cop, he picked it up and he and my father started to argue. They knew each other. I knew that because they were talking about being partners. And then they started shouting and he shot him. He just put the gun right up to my father’s head. I tried to scream.”
I look from the painting to Helena. Her eyes are shiny and brimming. She wipes them with the back of her hand and her voice breaks.
“Then he took me,” she says. “I didn’t move. I couldn’t. He just picked me up under his arm like some ogre. He dumped me into the trunk of that police car. He said, ‘Pretty little thing.’ Smiling like I was a doll or something, and do you know what I said?”
She laughs. A harsh grating sound like the cries of the ravens at the Tower of London.
She looks at the painting, nods, and says, “‘Policemen are my friends.’ That’s what I said.
“I learned it in school.”
35
I’VE SEEN AN OCCASIONAL TEAR from Helena before, but nothing like this. She starts sobbing loud and hard. People move away from us in ripples. I hug her tight and sit her down on a bench, stroking her hair until she stops shuddering. During it all, a white-haired guard clears his throat and starts toward us, but I back him down with a glare.