Gant remembered other things as well, things that happened during his time as a soldier for the United States of America, but he pushed them aside for now. He sighed, just a little. This girl was probably too young to know the history, or even care. She didn’t know she was a trophy taken from a defeated people. Well anyway, she was here, and he was here, so he might as well put her to her intended use. To the victor go the spoils, after all.
‘Wine?’ he said.
‘Yes, please. Red, with ice.’
He grimaced at the thought of it, but uncorked the bottle and poured it for her. She drank it fast and he poured her another. She downed it and he poured yet another. If she needed to numb up, so be it. From her perspective, this could hardly be the ideal romantic encounter. She drank about half of her third glass then put it aside on the table. She removed her top and her sarong. Her body coming free reminded Gant of wild horses galloping on a high plateau. He sipped his whiskey.
‘Who are you available to?’ he said.
She stared at him, her head slightly to the side, her pretty mouth open just a bit. She didn’t understand. For a moment, Gant tried to think of another delicate way to put it, then decided he couldn’t be bothered.
‘Do you have to fuck everybody?’
‘Oh. No, only guests. You. The fat politician. People like that.’
‘The gunmen?’
She shook her head. ‘Uh-uh. I stay far away from them. They are animals.’
‘Do you ever see a doctor?’
‘Every month. The old man’s doctor himself sees me.’
He joined her on the bed. She’d been with the fat politician, and recently – Harting, Hartley, whatever his name was – that wasn’t great news, but it could have been worse. She could have been servicing the goon squad every day, too. Gant ran a hand along her leg, and soon forgot about the guards, and the good representative, and even Fielding himself. He took his time, even though he knew it was all about him, and not about her at all. Once, he looked into her face and saw that her mind was elsewhere, maybe running on that high green field with all those beautiful horses. Afterward, they lay on top of the sheets, not tangled, not even touching. Gant picked up his drink where he’d left off.
He looked at the girl and her sad face. An artist could make a painting of her – Tragic Girl. Gant was nothing if not curious – he could attribute his success to several factors, including luck, but certainly one of the factors was that he had a voracious appetite for knowing things.
‘OK Moldova, how did you wind up here?’
She polished off the last of her wine, then stood on unsteady legs and fixed herself another one. ‘I was poor, but men always liked me from the time I am young.’ She shrugged, probably at the self-evident truth of her statement. ‘I was dancer in club. A woman came to my village and told me about good jobs abroad. I could be cleaner in hotel, or work as hostess. I sign up, pay some money, and they bring me here. I owe more money, of course. And so maybe I can never leave.’
Gant thought maybe the whiskey, combined with the travel and his tiredness, had given him a buzz. He wasn’t sure he had the girl’s responsibilities down pat just yet. ‘Do you also clean up around here?’ he said.
She gave him a baleful look. ‘Island women come and clean. They have to be searched every time they come. I don’t know how to clean. I fuck instead.’
‘Do you hate it?’
‘It bores me. I fuck, I eat, and I watch the satellite TV from America. Stupid reality shows, people shouting at each other, and then crying, and giving hugs. We read The Great Gatsby in school in Moldova. It is the best story. I owned a poster of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I hung this on the wall in my room. The great American writer. But they don’t show these things on the TV. The greatness is over. I think all Americans must be stupid now.’
She was on to something, but Gant didn’t want to get into it. What to do or say about an entire nation of overweight, lazy people so addled by junk television and junk food and prescription drugs that they had only recently begun to notice they were systematically lied to, and robbed blind and left to sink in quicksand? Only now, long after the cheese had been moved, were some of the mice starting to wake up to that fact.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘at least you probably don’t have to fuck all that much. I mean, there can’t be that many guests.’
‘Howe. The assistant. I have to fuck him, too.’
Gant felt a knife twist in his heart. He didn’t even have to examine the feeling – it was a visceral response. ‘I wish you had mentioned that earlier. I don’t like Howe.’
‘I don’t, either.’
‘Is there anything you do like about this place?’
She didn’t hesitate. ‘The view.’
Gant nodded. ‘It’s a great view. Anything else?’
It took her a moment to come up with something more. ‘Howe’s wife and daughter live on the grounds here in guest house, so I never have to spend whole night with him.’
The conversation made Gant sleepy. He lay back with his glass propped on his chest and closed his eyes. He could sip his Scotch with only the slightest movement of his hand and his chin. His mind drifted from its moorings and began to scan through the past, settling here and there on various memories. It was a pleasant sensation. He smiled.
Gant was nobody to mess with.
It was back in Philadelphia where Gant wished he could still be. Young again, cruising the mean streets. Not the Philadelphia of Market and Broad Street, the corporate towers, not the place the rich yuppies had once commuted to from the suburbs, not the weekday morning traffic jam brought to you by BMW and Mercedes and Lexus. Gant’s part of town was North Philadelphia. It was the drug deals going down in the shadows of burnt-out row houses. It was the homeless men sleeping under highway overpasses. It was the emaciated crack whores plying their trade in the alleys and vacant lots. It was chalk outlines on bloody sidewalks. It was booming hip-hop from tricked-out lowriders and the night he caught two carjackers single-handed.
He savored that night like he savored fine whiskey.
1990, or thereabouts – a long time ago now. A couple of gangbangers took a new Toyota at gunpoint near the bombed-out Amtrak station, but they didn’t know there was an infant in the back seat. The daddy lost his car OK, but went hysterical when he realized he lost his baby too. It became a wild all units call. The bad boys broke a hundred miles an hour on the wide lanes of North Broad, hung a turn and disappeared like smoke. Gant in an unmarked car heard it on the radio and made a guess. He was four blocks away. He roared the wrong way down a one-way, headlights off through the low-slung housing projects, engine screaming and here came a car burning up the street toward him. He guessed again – it had to be them. He hit the flashers and jammed the brakes, skidding sideways, blocking the whole street.
They plowed into a parked sedan, heavy metal crunch at high speed. He leaped out ahead of them, a gun in each hand, running crazy on fear and adrenaline. One move, one funny twitch, and he would kill them both.
‘Freeze motherfuckers! Out of the car! Down on the ground!’
He had guessed right both times. Back-up units showed a minute later, and Gant already had both suspects cuffed and in custody. The baby was fine, still strapped into the child restraint, goggling at all the curious onlookers.