“The guy that was on duty before, he said another cop was nosing around earlier.”
“Listen, please, man, I’m sorry I came on so heavy.” I said. “Just please tell me whatever you can.” I had almost lost him by sounding aggressive, and now I changed my tone. You get a lot more that way, and now Dravic offered me the chair, and switched on a fan. It was a tight fit, me, him, the little office piled with crates of booze.
“Masha was here a lot,” he said. “A few weeks ago, she starts pestering me for a job, says she has some fucking bartending certificate, I tell her, it’s not for a kid serving hundreds of crazy people at midnight when they’re already soused and high, you have to scrape teenagers off the floor when they OD on Midori shots and E.”
“She stopped bugging you?”
“I told her I’d give her a tryout. I tried her out, a couple of weeks ago, Tuesday night, easy crowd. She wasn’t bad, but I didn’t like it, I wasn’t sure she was even twenty-one, I wasn’t sure she was eighteen, tell you the truth, she dressed up older and wore a lot of make-up and she had a real grown-up body, but I thought she was a kid, something about her, so I told her, you have to get some real ID if I’m gonna keep you. She was using fake stuff, driver’s license, social security card, but crap, the kind you can buy for sixty bucks. She left. I didn’t hear back.”
“Any rough stuff in the club?”
“We get mostly Russians, but the kind with money, they come to party, show off their moves. No fights. Some tension once in a while, especially when there’s a Ukrainian bunch.”
“Masha got involved?”
“She could work both crowds, she was very good-looking, and sweet. She was a great dancer. I probably have a video someplace from a dance contest.”
“Where?”
“The main office is on the next block over, there’s a house where they keep most of the stuff. I put it there. I might have something else for you.”
“What’s that?”
“She had this little résumé, you know, not much but a couple places she had worked, a few bars, I put it in a file, that any use to you?”
“Plenty.”
“Can you stop back Sunday? It’s quiet Sunday. I could go over to the office and get you the stuff.”
“What’s wrong now?” I said.
“I have to do this when nobody else is around.”
“I need it.”
“Look, please, man, if I try to get anything out of there now, it’ll be a problem, trust me, okay, please?”
He looked frightened. Dravic glanced at the door of the little office. I figured if I pushed him too hard, he’d balk, or somebody else would get in the way, so I pulled back.
“Right,” I said. So, you were pretty nice to her, you gave her a tryout as a bartender, even if she was underage-you had something with her?”
“No,” he said, hesitating just a split second. “She was just a nice girl.”
“And the husband?”
“I didn’t get the feeling he would be happy if she was even talking to other guys, it was like he owned her, she had a tat with his name on it.”
“You saw it?”
“She told me. It was not, you know, visible exactly.”
“You’re Russian?”
“Serbian dad, Russian grandma on his side. My Mom’s a hippie from upstate New York.”
“You speak Russian?”
“My grandmother taught me some.”
“Right. So what else?”
“The Russian girls, they look great, but they can be really chilly, peevish, you know, petulant, like they’d rather be doing some other thing really important, you know, like smoking cigarettes, you know that look? It’s the same everywhere, I met some of them in England when I worked there, just the same fucking thing. Masha was different. She was nice to everyone.”
“How nice? You think Masha was hooking?”
“I don’t know.”
“She wore expensive clothes?”
“Yeah, so what?”
His face tightened up. I wondered if he had been in love with Masha.
I started to go. He put a hand on my sleeve, put it there too hard, clutched the fabric too tight. He was furious, pissed off at me for asking if the girl was a hooker. He kept hold of my arm, and he was solid, muscled, built like a bull.
“Let go of me, man,” I said. “Fucking let go.”
“Yeah, sorry,” said Dravic. “There’s guys, I don’t know, Rumanians, Albanians, whatever, they come in with these girls who are really frightened and you can see the bastard owns them.”
“Serbs?” I wanted to get him riled up, I wanted him to hit me if he had to. It would tell me something about him and the dead girl. He didn’t. He lowered his voice. He understood that I was now a threat to him.
“What else?” I said.
“I mean they keep the girls’ passports. The girls are like slaves. Man, if I have kids and they’re girls, I’m sending them someplace else.”
“Where’s that?”
“Yeah, where?” said Dravic. “Where on earth?”
CHAPTER NINE
After I let Tito Dravic go back to work, I called Gloria and told her the dead girl’s name, I told her about the tattoo, and then I started for the street. I’d had enough of the club, the drunks, the heated-up flesh, the bad music. I was going back into the city, but there was something I had to do first.
As I passed the girls who had greeted Valentina on the street, one of them followed me. Her name was Janna, she said, she had carrot hair and a clinging little blue silk dress that was tight on her ripe burnished body. She was maybe twenty.
“Can we go out for a smoke?” she said. “Would you mind, Mr Cohen?” She was polite, and we went out to the street and over to the canal where the fishing boats were. Crowds of people sauntered up and down, cars honked, people waved American flags. The fourth of July.
Janna offered me her pack of cigarettes, and I took one. I figured if we smoked together she’d relax. She was tense, coiled up.
“You were in because of the girl that died, right?” she said.
“You knew that?”
“Oh, in these clubs talk goes around faster than the ecstasy goes down,” she said. “And Tito has a big mouth. He retails gossip as a way to hang out with us.”
“You don’t like him?”
“He’s okay. He’s just kind of low-class, you know?”
I showed her the picture.
“Masha Panchuk,” she said. “We liked her. We tried to help her.”
“Help how?” I said, and I saw this girl, this Janna, wanted in on the case, that she was curious, nosey maybe. Maybe like Dravic, she wanted to retail the story.
“We knew she needed a job. She didn’t have any family, only a grandma someplace in, I don’t know, Kiev, or somewhere,” said Janna. “There was a guy, a husband? She wanted out. She was just a good kid.”
“You Russian?”
Janna said she had grown up in London, and her parents were both Russian. Her friends in the club had Russian parents, but had been born in Brooklyn. They were at NYU, studying business.
“I don’t want the others to know about this, they’re American girls, they don’t know how anything works, and I don’t want to scare them. You know, I said to one of them, Don’t you long to travel, and she said, well, yes, but I couldn’t go anywhere I don’t feel safe. They’re frightened.”
“Listen, you want to help?”
“Yes.”
“You need to go back in the club?”
She couldn’t tell what I was after. I could see it in her unformed pretty little face.
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Where did Masha buy her clothes, where do girls out here get stuff? Show me.”
“There’s shops around Brighton Beach. Masha liked a lot of glitz.”
“Okay, you want to help, show me. My car’s around the corner.”
She hesitated, and then, rising to the challenge, to what she saw as a dare, she put her smokes in the little purse that dangled from a sparkly chain on her shoulder.
“Sure,” she said and she followed me to my car and got in, and jabbered while I drove back to Brighton Beach, jabbered half frightened, half excited. I could smell the excitement, especially when I hit the gas hard. She lit up another cigarette.