I unlocked my street door and stepped in. Nobody jumped me in the vestibule. It was a good start. How I meant to go on.
The stairwell was empty. I climbed up. Eye-level with the upper floor, I peered through the railing, but no one was there either. I went the rest of the way up. My office door was locked. I opened it, looked in. There was no one inside. I entered and—
Jumped a foot as the downstairs doorbuzzer buzzed.
Shit. Couldn’t even sit down.
Chapter Fifteen: HOT KISS AT THE END OF A WET FIST
I pushed the intercom’s SPEAK button, said, “Yes?”
I pressed LISTEN and heard street noises, then a woman’s voice asking, “Payton Sherwood?”
I pressed SPEAK again.
“Yes, who is it?”
LISTEN.
“Sayre Rauth.”
SPEAK.
“What do you want?”
LISTEN.
“I thought more about…hiring you. May I come in?”
“Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”
SPEAK.
“Come on up.”
I buzzed her in. And waited.
I breathed in and out, and braced myself for setting eyes on her again. I’d be cool, reserved, not betray with a single look or gesture the effect she illicit—no—elicited from me. Standard operating procedure was to never show how you really felt. Unfortunately, I’ve never been good at concealing my feelings. Easier not to feel at all.
Two short raps. I opened my door.
As soon as I saw her, I started bleeding again. She stood before me dressed in an airy, chocolate-brown silk blouse, a short pleated black skirt, and tasseled calf-high calfskin boots. She smiled at me and gave me a hungry look, and the cut in my forehead started to trickle. A droplet ran down and around my brow, then continued to descend along my left temple like a rivulet of sweat.
She must’ve seen it, but she didn’t say anything. She must’ve seen even more, but if she did, she didn’t give it away.
I excused myself, turned, and headed for the bathroom. Over my shoulder, I invited her in. “Be right with you.”
I splashed cold water on my face and dried it. The cut had already stopped bleeding, wasn’t very deep. To be on the safe side, I put on a Band-Aid. It made me look tough, in a cartoonish sort of way, like Sluggo from the comic strip Nancy.
When I returned, Sayre Rauth was still standing on the threshold, hadn’t come in yet.
She raised both her arms up over her head.
“Want to frisk me? I might be armed.”
“Skip it. I’ve softened my stance on deadly force. Come in, nunchucks, machetes, grenades, and all.”
She looked disappointed, or at least she didn’t put her arms down right away.
What the hell, I knew she didn’t have her gun on her, it was in my back pocket. And I didn’t need to pat her down to pinpoint her other lethal weapons.
She finally walked in and stopped in the center of the room and surveyed it.
“This is your office?”
“I also live here.”
“Alone?” She cocked an eyebrow.
I nodded.
“You aren’t married, then?”
“Not then, not now.”
“Perhaps you are in a… relationship?”
“If so, no one’s told me. Let’s stick to business, Miss Rauth. Have a seat,” I said. “But I gotta tell you up front, we’re all out of toasters.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” I sat behind my desk. “It’s just…you’re like my fifth or sixth client today. Hell, I’ve lost count.”
She crossed her legs. I watched the occasion; parts of me celebrated it. She said, calling my attention back up to her eyes, “Business must be good.”
I lifted up my hand in mid-air and tilted it side-to-side like a life raft on choppy waters.
“It fluctuates. And there’s the mortality rate to consider. Hiring me could be hazardous to your health, by the way.”
“I’ll risk it. Do you mind if I smoke?”
“I insist.”
She smiled and shook some of her hair out of place.
“Half the time, I don’t understand you.”
I lit a match for her cigarette but a breeze from the window blew it out. She used her own lighter and exhaled a steady stream of smoke through her nose.
“The other half of the time, I think you make fun of me because my English is not always so good. When I am nervous.”
“Sorry, it’s nothing personal really. Just my own private syntax.”
“Sin tax?”
“That too. Mind if I bum a smoke?”
She offered me her pack of cigarettes. Foreign label, brand I never heard of. I lit up. Its dark-brown tobacco tasted like something that’d been scraped off of someone’s cleats. I coughed, but only to the point of tears, no blackouts or brain aneurysms to speak of.
“So. You want to hire me. For what?”
“To find my sister.”
“Your sister. She’s lost?”
“We’ve lost touch. But…I believe you are in contact with her. Her name is Elena.”
“Ah, yes, your sister, Elena. How come you want to find her?”
“It’s complicated. She may be responsible for a robbery the other day. I think she stole property belonging to me, and some…sensitive data involving clients’ personal information stored in my computer. Data I’d very much like to recover.”
“Is that why you sent your associate Windmann to hire me?”
“Paul?” She didn’t try to deny it. “I knew nothing about that until after he came to see you. Paul was listening over the intercom while you and I were talking earlier. He thought he was helping me by coming to speak to you. He thought you might be, well, Elena’s…”
“Elena’s Paul? Yeh, well, he did more than check me out. He hired me to do a job.”
“What was this job?”
“He wanted me to get back something he claimed had been stolen from him.”
“And did you…did you get it back?”
I slid the stack of printed spreadsheet pages across the desk to her. She only looked at the top one, didn’t pick up a single page or bother asking what it was.
I said, “Why don’t we cut out the missing sister story and start from scratch.”
“Scratch?”
“Starting with the modeling agency you were a part of back in the Ukraine.”
“You know about that?” She shrugged her right shoulder. “Okay, but I warn you, my story still may shock you.”
“I’ll risk it.”
“You won’t look at me the same way.”
“I’ll risk that, too.”
She told me her story. It was much the same as what Elena had told me, and told in the same matter-of-fact way. At least this time I didn’t have to fake a heard-it-all-before reaction.
She tried hard to explain to my western sensibilities how something like Tweensland could’ve come into existence and lasted so long.
“We answered an ad in the newspaper. Many girls came with their parents. The day you arrived you saw a clean establishment, a big studio with expensive equipment. A dozen men and women working there. It all looked very legitimate, and the money they promised, they delivered. They paid us by the hour, as much as twenty, thirty dollars an hour. It was a fortune, and no one questioned how they could afford to pay that much. They didn’t want the money to stop coming.
“In the beginning they photographed you in dresses, pajamas, bathing suits. It wasn’t until a couple of days later—once they’d gotten you comfortable—that they started saying now how about one more with it off?
“We were told to keep quiet and, in return for our silence, we got money, too—nearly as much as our parents were receiving, and all our own. Plus clothes and make-up, and food of course. It was heaven for a twelve-year-old girl—except for the fucking.”