Skin Trade (25 page)

Was it him or was it only one of the hoods in the restaurant who had seen me with the women? Did they know him?

He shoved me onto the ground. I tried to say the name, but he kicked me and mumbled – Czech, Serbo-Croat, I couldn't figure it out. I was dizzy. He ran the blade along my neck, not cutting deep, just playing games. No pain, only the terror and stink of the guy pulling my arms back hard enough to break them. He was going to snap my arms like toothpicks.

In Russian, I swore at him and, from behind, I felt his muscled body tense up with rage. Through the bushes, I
could see the headlights. Cars passed. A few yards away, there were cars. Lights.

Without any warning, still holding my arms, he shoved me onto the ground, face in a drift of fresh snow. He pulled me up, shoved me back on the ground again. I could feel the big squat body, the force like an ox, a bull. It was what he had done to Lily. She would have smelled him before he raped her. She was conscious. Conscious enough to bang on the floor of the apartment near the rue de Rivoli.

He jerked me up a third time. In the snow in the muffled light from a passing car, I saw his knife. From the road came the sound of voices, someone arguing; a hooker and a potential client were drunk. There was snow in my eyes. I thought about Lily. I was frantic. I grabbed for the knife.

I got it. I got the knife. I stabbed at his leg. Then I cut him hard. Deep. I could feel bone. He whimpered. He moved away. I lunged at him again. He ran and I followed him, sliding on black ice under the new snow, crashing through bushes, following the noise, his stink. I ran towards the village where the restaurant was, but he vanished between the buildings. Maybe he went for cover in one of the houses. Maybe in the restaurant with the men. He was one of them.

The muscles in my shoulder had been ripped, my face was burning, my feet were numb. I got back to the car, felt in my pocket for the cell phone; it was gone. On my hands and knees, I scrabbled in the snow and dirt; the phone wasn't there. I trudged up to the supermarket where a young guy was reading a Vietnamese martial arts
comic book. He took some cash off me and went out with cables to jump start the car while I tried Momo from the pay-phone.

At his station house the line crackled with static. I finally got him on his cell phone. I was panting, out of breath, terrified.

“Artie? You hear me? The phones are fucked all over France. You there?”

“I'm here.”

“You anywhere near Vienna?”

“Near enough. Why?”

“Someone saw him check into a hotel in Vienna.”

“Who?”

“What?”

“Who checked in?”

“I can't hear you?”

“It wasn't fucking Zhaba who checked in, Momo. He was here. What hotel?”

“Not Zhaba,” he said.

“What?”

“It was Levesque. The guy who checked in. He registered as Eric Levesque. He had the passport,” Momo said, then the line went dead.

I went to Vienna because of Momo. There was no point hanging around after I cut Zhaba. Almost from the beginning I'd set myself up as a decoy. Now I figured he'd follow me to Vienna the way he'd followed me so far. I was a threat now. Amber had told me he worked out of the Black and Blue in Vienna. Or maybe she was lying. But I went because there was no
place else to go. I moved forward because I couldn't go back.

The airports in Germany were still closed, according to the radio. Prague, too. My phone was gone. Some blind momentum pushed me down the empty road.

On the road, I followed the tracks a snowplow left. I tried not to drive off the road. My shoulder was killing me, but I followed the plow, driving snowblind, trying to make out the news on the radio, in Czech or German, not understanding. There was nothing outside except the endless flat road and the snow.

My eyes closed. I jerked myself awake over and over and when I saw a turn-off, I managed to drive down it. There was a road-side café with a crummy hotel. I banged on the door until a woman in a hairnet let me in. In the room where I dragged my suitcase, I fell onto the bed in my clothes and slept. The nightmares lasted until I woke up in a room that was too hot. The radiator belched; grit mixed with snow on the window sill.

In the morning, in the dull half light, I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, felt a sharp pain in my shoulder when I sat up, looked at my watch, saw it was Thursday. Wednesday morning I was in Paris, then last night the border. It was Thursday. I felt like a tourist on a bad trip; it was as if some travel agent on acid had booked all the wrong places, but I had paid and there was no way out.

Keep moving, I thought. Hurry. I hobbled into the bathroom with its cracked tiles and stood under the thin trickle of warm water. I saw my right shoulder was swollen and I poked around for broken bones. It was so tender I yelled out loud. Then I remembered my phone
was gone, lost in the snow, stolen off me by the thug with the knife.

In the café, the woman in the hairnet was making coffee. She offered me some stale cake – no deliveries had come through for two days, she said. An old TV stood on the bar. I switched it to CNN while I drank the coffee and ate a Danish.

Three fishermen in Russia had fallen through the ice the night before. In Holland, people went to work on skates; there were icicles a foot long as far south as Budapest; the only European airport east of Paris that was open was Zurich.

The pay-phone was broken too, but the woman let me use her phone. While I watched the TV, I called the hospital over and over; I couldn't get through. I swallowed the last piece of sticky Danish and paid; I was using Tolya's cash up fast.

Then I was back on the road and there were signs for Prague now. Prague. The fabulous little city like a Disney construct that I only knew from the movies, movies about Mozart, movies about tanks rolling down the beautiful streets in 1968. The Czechs really took it up the ass from the system that destroyed them. Long time ago.

That morning, the snowplows were still on the roads. I kept driving. There was no place to go now except Vienna.

In Vienna, the hotel manager, obviously glad for a customer, sidled out of his office. He smiled with his long teeth showing, led me into the bar off the lobby and offered me coffee and a slice of
sacher torte,
a flat black chocolate cake with jam inside so sweet it would rot those teeth. When I thanked him, he said, “We Austrians live to serve.”

It's about two hundred miles past Prague to Vienna, and I'd stopped at every gas station to call Lily. Once, I got through to her; she whispered into the phone. She didn't say my name, but it was her voice. As soon as I got Zhaba, I'd go back to Paris and take Lily home. Home. It was like a mantra now. I got to Vienna, I checked into a modern hotel near the center of town. Later I dumped the car at Hertz.

The snow had stopped, but the temperature was down; everything had turned to ice. The garbage workers in Vienna were on strike and black plastic bags poked up through the frozen snowdrifts like weird sculptures.

The hotel manager sat opposite me, still smiling. I pushed some of Tolya's money discreetly into his hand and got him to reserve a seat for me on the first flight to Paris the next morning if there was anything going, or a train if there wasn't. He helped me cancel my cell phone, then called a friend of a friend who sold phones. For cash, inside an hour, I had a new cell.

I went upstairs, unpacked my bag and left the hospital my new number. I left it for Momo, along with the name of the hotel. God knew if he was getting the messages. All I got were answering machines or over-worked cops at his station house or lines that filled up with static. I didn't know if he was getting the messages. I didn't know if he was even alive from one day to the next.

Sitting on the velvet bedspread that was the color of puke, I worked the phone, running down local hotels, looking for Eric Levesque because Momo said he was here. I went through the motions. I didn't have much luck, but Levesque was a side-show now; I was in Vienna for Zhaba.

Zhaba had been chasing me down the road, playing cat and mouse; I wanted him out of his hole, but I was running out of Tolya's cash, so I made a stink about my room which the manager agreed to change, then I persuaded him to cash a check for me. I wasn't sure if I had anything in my account, but I didn't care. I'd get it back to him later. Some other time. I asked him where the main police station was. He gave me directions.

Outside, there was the clang of shovels on cement as
workers tried to chip away ice. Women in dark-green loden coats and high-heeled fur-lined ankle boots minced carefully along the icy streets. The men wore the same green coats, with brushes in their small-brimmed hats. Through the window of an old coffee house – the window filled with cakes and marzipan – I watched a couple meet. Both of them wore the green coats. The man removed his hat, she took off her glove and held out her hand and he kissed it.

Vienna was built to show off an empire: the buildings were big, grandiose and dark, all Baroque curlicues and grime under the frozen snow. The boulevards were big, too, like Paris, but with more bombast.

It weighed you down, Vienna; it was probably full of Nazis. You couldn't tell them from the rest of the people in the street unless you figured every guy with a brush in his hat for one of them.

What did I know about Austria? Vienna?
The Sound of Music!
Freud? Mozart? Cake? It was a border town, everything about it was Western except that it was stuck in the East, further east than Prague even. For a while, after the war, they split it like an orange into four segments. Now it was a neutral nowhere with a lot of UN money. “We live to serve.”

Posters on the walls advertised politicians and opera. I was hungry. Mostly, the restaurants were empty; the tourists were gone, and every tourist restaurant I passed claimed the biggest schnitzel in town at bargain prices. Vienna obviously took its clichés pretty seriously. Maybe it had to. What did it have except tourism, and there weren't any tourists except me as I strolled along,
whistling “My Favorite Things”. The words went around in my head all day (“snowflakes that fall on my nose and eyelashes”), but I switched the lyrics off and listened, in my head, to John Coltrane's miraculous version.

After I got lost walking in circles and wandered away from the Ring Road, I found myself staring at a huge statue of some guy on a horse. Some emperor carved in stone, covered in snow. I looked at the street sign: Josefplatz. I found a taxi.

The driver, an Israeli who talked too much, claimed he was an expert on crime in Vienna so I passed over my picture of Zhaba. He shrugged. I sat back, lit a cigarette and tried my phone.

“Lily? Are you there?”

At the police station, I showed the cop on duty my passport and told him in a loud voice that I was an American businessman. I owned a travel agency.

He barely spoke English. Four sodden Austrians, huddled in heavy coats, waited patiently on a bench to the right, eyeing me while I talked at the cop. New York, I said.

Oh ja, he said. I love New York.

He was a big guy with a sad stupid face, but I didn't care. I bullied him some more. I wanted someone in charge, I said. I had received a threatening phone call at my hotel and I was worried. I was American and I wanted a senior officer to pay attention or I'd call the embassy.

A door on my left opened and an officer in uniform
came out, gave a crisp little bow, shook my hand, welcomed me to Vienna. How could he help? Please come into my office. Please sit down. I told him about the threatening calls. More than one? he asked. At least three, I said. Maybe four. As soon as I'd checked in that morning. The hotel was hopeless. They moved my room. Very short beds, I said. Not really adequate, and the frightening phone calls! I took out the picture of Zhaba and handed it to him. His expression never changed.

This man, I said. I had noticed him in the lobby.

You took his picture? the cop asked. Yes. I had my Polaroid camera, I said. I was photographing the lobby because it was my hobby to take pictures of hotel lobbies. He was watching me, I said, and I was worried, so I took his picture. Smart, huh?

The officer summoned a secretary in a tight turquoise sweater and bright pink lipstick who wrote down my name, my address, my cell phone. I gave them all the information, said how much I admired Vienna, how pleasant the people were, how lovely the women, the pastry. How I planned to send my many clients from my travel agency on vacation to Austria. Then we all shook hands, the officer, the secretary, the cop, me. I fawned, mentioned my aversion to all politics that interfered with international accord and tourism. We wished each other well. He said he'd be in touch. Don't worry, he said, and I thanked him and smiled a businessman's smug smile and he responded with a good cop smile. Vienna seemed like a good place for make-believe. I strolled out of the station and down the stairs to the street.

By the time I got back to the hotel, I figured that half of Vienna would know I was there. It was freezing. I went into a store and bought a blue fleece shirt and a hat, complained about the foreign sizing, then stopped at the Café Mozart because it was packed with tourists. There were models of cakes made out of plastic in the window.

Inside, a small group of Japanese tourists looked pissed off at the weather. I ordered cake with whipped cream and complained about the service. The waiter wasn't interested. I used my new cell phone to check out some more hotels; I was looking for Eric Levesque, but there was no Levesque. No one by that name, not in the last few weeks, no, sorry. Very sorry. I was jittery. Couldn't sit still. Had to move on.

Maybe Momo got it wrong.

I walked some more. I found the American Bar, a tiny box that was all mahogany and mirrors, like the inside of a humidor. There were green leather seats and Tony Bennett and Bill Evans on the sound system. The bartender, an American kid who talked jazz non-stop, made good martinis. I saved the toothpicks from the olives in the martinis. Said I collected them. Who could forget an asshole who collects olive picks?