‘What?’
‘Stealing us to work for another brothel?’
Her question makes my heart hurt, Sam. ‘No, honey, you are free.’
There is a hospital a few blocks away and I point them toward it. Police cars, summoned by the pizzeria owner, brake past them with sirens blaring.
I ignore the cars, the cops, the lights. I guess in my leather pants they think I’m one of the fleeing prostitutes. I herd them into the hospital emergency arrival zone and then I’m gone.
I have a man, or something that calls himself a man, to see.
69
Tel Aviv, Israel
The house is grand, overlooking the Mediterranean, sitting atop a flattening hill not far from Hatzok Beach on the city’s north side. Pimping must pay awfully well. I thinks it looks more like the home of a legitimate businessman: perhaps belonging to a software maven, a real-estate investor, a well-regarded lawyer. A wall surrounds the house, with entrance gates. I climb over the gates. From inside the house I hear electronica music playing, the kind Westerners like and that sounds like a pulsing hump. It’s not that different from the music inside the brothel. Are these men so pathetic, I wonder, that they need a dance beat for rape?
I step up onto a cool stretch of stone patio. Half-empty drinks line the table – red wine, empty Maccabee beer bottles, an ice-melted Scotch. The party appears to be over. Perhaps bad news has been received?
I try the door. Unlocked. The den is full of heavy leather couches. The scent of pepperoni pizza hangs kitchen-thick, the sting of marijuana touches my nose. I have only smelled it once, back at a party in Chi inau when I was in school getting my teaching license.
I go down the hallway, gun at the ready.
I go past a darkened doorway and then I feel the cool of a barrel pressing into my hair.
I freeze.
‘Drop the gun,’ a voice says. In Russian.
I obey.
The gun guides me back out into the center of the hallway and a man steps in front of me. Physically big, red-haired, with heavy lips and baggy eyes. ‘I have her,’ he calls in English. From the room down the hallway comes the man with the blond mohawk. It’s not spiky, it’s shaved down. He is as big as the Russian; you think he would have found a bigger bodyguard. His face is unremarkable, his eyes a stone gray. He’s dressed in a nice shirt, untucked, and jeans.
‘Who else is with you?’ he asks me in English.
‘No one. Just me.’
‘If you lying to me my friend will shoot off your ear.’
‘I’m not lying.’
‘Look at me, garbage.’
I look at him and he looks at me, scowling, then smiling. ‘You come with me.’ He takes the gun from the Russian and jabs it in my hair and pushes me along. ‘You, you go check the grounds. See if she’s really stupid enough to come here alone. Call the office, tell them she’s here.’ I hear the Russian huffing away, he’s a mouth-breather.
At the end of the hallway is a slightly open door and in the dim light I see the edge of a bed.
On the bed, a pale, thin arm. My mouth dries. I used to see that arm, hanging from the tumble of sheets on the bed on the other side of the room.
I push open the door with my fingertips.
Nelly lies on the bed, sleepy, blinking like a child roused from dreams.
I forget myself for a moment and step forward.
Zviman shoves me against the bed. I twist, trying to escape and then a fist slams into my face. Once, twice, then a kick sledgehammers into my chest. His mouth is a curl of rage.
Nelly tries to sit up on the bed.
‘You. Who are you?’ Zviman asks me.
‘Her sister.’
‘This bitch is why you shot up my place?’ His accent is heavy. He must have gotten news of the shooting at the Lucky Strike, sent his partygoers home. I wonder how he knows so soon. And then the thought occurs to me: anyone openly running a brothel owns himself some cops.
‘Yes. Don’t call her bitch,’ I say.
He laughs. ‘I apologize, bitch! I didn’t know I hurt your feelings, bitch! Thanks for shooting my customers and releasing my whores, bitch!’ He laughs again. Aiming the gun not at me but now at Nelly.
Nelly cowers, the gun lodged against her temple.
‘The police will be here. I shot up your property. They’ll want to talk to you.’
‘No, they won’t. There’s nothing on paper to tie me to the Lucky Strike. Nothing at all.’ He shrugs. ‘I own the right people on the police force, anyway. All you’ve created is a mess that will take me about five minutes to clean up. But fuck, bitch, you got guts.’
I grit my teeth against the pain from the punches and kicks he gave me.
‘Now. Who sent you?’ he asks. Like we’re going to have a real conversation.
‘No one. I came on my own.’
‘Don’t lie to me. You work for who? Baran? Markov? The Nigerians?’
‘I’m not lying. I’m her sister. Look at our faces, you can tell.’
He laughs, stops, stares hard at me. ‘Tell me who hired you or you die.’
He just cannot believe I am here out of love. It tells me everything I need to know about how to kill him.
‘Did you hear me? You die.’
‘ Tu mori,’ I say back. He blinks at me.
I manage to stand. Grimacing, against the pain. ‘I am her sister and I came for her.’
‘Who do you work for?’
‘No one. I just decided you and your people needed to die.’ It is so simple, Sam, this decision. You know it and I know it.
He laughs at me.
Nelly opens her eyes and they slowly focus on my face. Softly Nelly murmurs: ‘Mila?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m dreaming. I don’t dream any more.’ Nelly’s voice sounds like it lives at the bottom of a well.
‘No dream. I’m here.’
‘Big sister’s going to work with you, Nelly, won’t that be nice? I’m gonna sell you as a pair.’ And I can tell that this Zviman, he thinks he’s won. He thinks he’s won.
I don’t allow myself the smile.
He pushes the gun under my chin. He frisks me along the leather jeans, the tight turtleneck, the leather jacket. He lets his hands linger where he likes. He finds the guard’s knife in my boot and tosses it to the floor. He takes the collapsible baton from my pocket.
‘This is Natan’s.’
‘He loaned it to me,’ I say. He tosses it in the corner.
‘You are a stupid little girl, Mila. Look at me.’
I don’t, not at first, frozen, and he puts the gun right over my shoulder, aimed at Nelly. ‘I’ll kill your sister if you fight me.’
So I look at him, waiting, and he punches me in the face. Once, twice. He kicks me in the stomach. Then he backhands me. I land on his expensive coffee table in the corner of the bedroom, scattering the sports magazines. I tumble into the space between chair and table. He seizes my hair, he hits me again. I stagger and he kicks me in the ribs.
I fall.
‘You stupid Moldovan cow. You think you sweep in here and you ruin my business? What do I care that you shoot up a whorehouse? I have three dozen of them around the world. You can’t even bloody my lip, bitch.’
I wanted to say, I killed Vadim. I killed your people in Bucharest. I set your prisoners free. But I don’t, because I want him to treat me as he does every other woman.
He keeps the gun in my face as he kneels over me. I knew this could happen, I knew it, and I stamp down the terror that rises in me like fire. He unzips my leather pants and orders me to wriggle out of them or he’ll kill Nelly. I obey him and the fear is hot and heavy in my throat.
‘Get out of the jacket. The shirt. Naked, now, bitch.’
Shaking, I obey him. The tile floor is cold against my back.
‘Don’t, Yaakov,’ Nelly murmurs. ‘Please don’t hurt my sister.’
He leans over and he slaps her hard. ‘I’ll do what I like and you keep quiet or she’s dead.’
Nelly snuffles, mouths at me. I’m sorry.
Yaakov Zviman kicks out of his pants. He is a big man, at least 6 feet 2, meaty armed, legs thick from old work, a hard, flat stomach. On the lower part of his arm I see a weird tattoo: a sunburst in the heart of a stylized number nine.