I resist the urge to kick in the door. Instead, I open it like anyone else and step inside the parlor. The room is cool and smells of salt, of heavy perfume, of beer. I hear a whiny voice say, ‘C’mon, baby, smile for me.’ The voice has a New York crawl to it, like I have heard in movies and TV.
It is as if I have entered a stained dream. The lights in here are, yes indeed, a shade of red. A dim, bitter crimson. Low-grade electronica trance music plays in the background. I see a reception desk, an old man sitting there. He eats a cookie, with his mouth open. Behind him is what looks like a raised platform, two women sitting under sallow spotlights. They wear see-through clothing. Neither of them is Nelly. If they have heard the young man’s plea they give no sign, no reaction. They sit very straight, and they do not smile. They could be mannequins.
I think: they are just waiting for the next bad thing to happen.
Lounging on a nearby couch are two college-age men, swigging Goldstar beers, wearing jeans, one in an American football jersey, the other sporting a sweatshirt that has a store name on it. The shirt is blood-red under the glow of the lights.
They are telling stupid jokes, in English, trying to get the girls to smile, like I know now tourists do in London with the British guards at Buckingham Palace. Either the girls are forbidden to laugh, like the guards, or they cannot. It strikes me that it might be dangerous for a girl here to laugh at a man.
Bubbles of hate rise in my chest. Bubbles, no, too soft a word, Sam. I must be honest: the hate fills me like a flooding river. I hate everything about them.
‘Excuse me, miss?’ the old man says in Hebrew. He is unsure – maybe I wandered in, he must think. He talks to me around the crumbs of his big cookie.
‘Hello, there, you showing up for a shift, baby?’ the boy in the store-name shirt calls. He raises the beer bottle toward me, like a welcoming toast.
‘I am here to apply for a job,’ I say to the old man, in English.
The old man is speechless, brow furrowing. He stands up, which is all I want him to do now that I see his hands are empty except for that fucking cookie.
I pull the gun out from the back of my leather pants and the bullet barks over the soft thrum of the bad disco music. The old man drops, wordless, his chewing jaw gone. Him eating that cookie while those poor girls sit there waiting to be bought pisses me off.
The two Americans freeze in shock. The women on the platform stare, one of them stands, her chair tottering back to the floor.
‘You’re paying to rape,’ I say to the guys. ‘My sister is here and you are paying to rape her.’
‘Now wait a minute, honey, wait-’
‘We’re Americans-’
I shoot them both, and, because they are stupid, thoughtless children, I fire into their legs. They jerk into screaming spasms on the floor. The blossoms of blood on their clothes are bright in the red lights. Their howls fill the room, broken by gasps of air.
‘Go. Run,’ I say to the tired, dull-eyed women. They run, in scanty lingerie, out and down the stairwell. But the fear on their faces, I think, it doesn’t tell me that they’re free.
Off the entrance parlor there’s a hallway and in its curve I see a door open. A fortyish man, stumbling out, trying to pull up his pants, panic in his eyes. I see a glint of wedding ring on his hand. He charges toward me and I shoot him in both knees. He can explain that to his wife. He thunders to the floor, mewling and screeching. Behind him a woman screams.
I stop, yell at the woman in English, ‘Get out! Run!’ The woman doesn’t. I repeat myself, but in Russian then Romanian. The young woman – younger than Nelly, bloodless with fright – hugs the wall, naked, too terrified to move.
Where is the guard?
Then I see a door yank open, two down and across the hall from the scared girl’s room. The college boys keep shrieking and I hear one call out for his mama. Like Mama wants to see this.
No one exits the door.
I want to believe that it’s Nelly, or some other girl too frightened by the gunfire, cowering in the doorway, unsure of what to do.
Too much hope in my heart. I calclass="underline" ‘Nelly? Nelly, it’s me… ’
Silence. Then a bear of a man charges around the open doorway toward me, a shotgun in his hands, leveled at me, and when he sees me – slip of a girl in black leather – a naked wave of surprise passes over his face. He hesitates.
I fire and a splinter of drywall explodes by his shoulder and I shoot again. He falls and fires as he ducks back and the pellets mist my doorframe into shreds. I throw a hand over my face and the adrenaline masks the pain, but I feel flesh pierced: ear, shoulders, back of the neck, by the flying debris.
I lie halfway in the room, my legs prone in the hallway and I freeze, my mind telling me to be still, I have baited a trap by lying here where he can’t see I am conscious. Every fiber telling me to run, hide.
I stay still.
Wait. I steady my gun up at the shattered doorway. Waiting for him to creep into view. Playing dead. He can’t see my gun until he’s risked a glance around the peppered wall.
The man with the shotgun inches down the hallway. I hear the shuffle of his feet; weirdly, it sounds like Boris struggling to breathe. The Americans and the married man have either stopped fussing or have died. He sees my legs, I imagine, lying deathly still.
He turns into the doorway and I fire into his stomach. He screams and staggers back, the pain overriding his trigger finger. I stand and I kick the shotgun out of his hands. I think I break a toe. He screams and he falls, blind with pain. I pick up the shotgun.
What is strange now is my calm. The calm is a heaviness inside me, smothering the pain, the fear.
I leave him gut-shot. On his belt I see a baton of some sort. I pull it from his belt. There is a thumb control and it telescopes into a length. Cool. I like the weight of it in my hand so I take it, like a trophy. What is wrong with me? He has a knife, too. I tuck that inside my boot. Taking his weapons was like hoarding small treasures I had earned, Sam, isn’t that odd?
No one else is rushing out to shoot me. I kick in the other doors. Mostly empty. No more men.
But none of the women are Nelly.
When the woman in the last room yells please don’t hurt us in Moldovan, I lower my gun.
‘Where is Nelly?’
‘Working a party – for Zviman.’
Zviman. The mohawk. The owner. Smiling at me on the video, over his shoulder, raping and slapping my sister. I must pay my respects.
‘Where is this party?’
‘His house, I think, I don’t know, I swear, please don’t kill me.’
‘What is the address?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’
I believe her. ‘Run. This is your chance to get out. Now. Run.’
There are six women in the hallway and four of them flee immediately, hurrying down the stairs in their frilly lingerie. The other two stay, as though frozen by the prospect of freedom as much as the certainty of peril.
‘Run! What’s wrong with you?’ I know the police will be here in minutes and I don’t have much time. I jab the gun into the face of the gut-shot man.
‘Zviman! Where is he? Tell me and I’ll call an ambulance for you.’
The man whispers an address and I whip him unconscious with his own telescoping baton.
‘There’s your ambulance. Consider it called,’ I say. I shove the edge of the baton – it’s a little bloody – against the wall to close it.
I herd the two reluctant women out, past the married client who has passed out from the agony of his broken kneecaps, past the mewling college boys. They’re still alive, just quieter in their suffering. They try and crawl and hide from me, behind the couch, the little darlings. I am their lesson they will never forget.
Out on the street now, me and a gang of fugitive women.
‘Are you stealing us?’ one asks.