The Craigslist Murders (18 page)

The restaurant was so silent, even the din of cutlery had died.

“Sorry, sir. I told you. We don’t serve bread here. Our raw vegetables, nuts and seeds are—”

“HA!” Pavel shouted, wheezing with laughter. “Nuts and seeds? This is food for the fucking gulag.”

Charlotte smiled. How did one explain paying eighty bucks a plate for seeds and uncooked fruits and vegetables to a guy whose mother had probably spent thirty years waiting in line to buy a loaf of stale bread? In the meantime, Pavel had lowered his voice and reached for her hand.

“Listen, I apologize, Charlotte. Really. But the first time I came to America eight years ago, I borrowed a friend’s video camera. We went and shot thirty minutes of footage in the meat department at Gristedes. Because I had never seen so
much meat. So you see, it is absurd to me, this idea of …”

“Pavel, it’s OK,” Charlotte replied, squeezing his hand, “I don’t really get it, either.”

“Who are these crazy peoples, anyways?” he asked, turning his head and staring at the packed room.

As the chatter in the restaurant resumed and Charlotte ordered tomato cucumber pâtés and truffle mushroom pasta made from coconut paste, she filled Pavel in with a fast and funny run-down of the local “purists.”

Oh Christ. There was Deena. Charlotte ducked as Pavel gulped from his glass of organic wine.

“See that woman over there, Pavel?” she said, sliding her eyes off towards a remote corner where a group of middle-aged “girls” pecked away at their plates. “The one in the middle of the banquette?”

“Yes …” he replied, taking another healthy gulp. “What about her?”

There was something crow-like about them
, Charlotte thought, forgetting for a moment that she wasn’t alone.
All sleek and beaky in black
.

“Charlotte, hello, Charlotte!” Pavel was plucking at her sleeve.

“I am so, so sorry, Pavel,” she said. “Where was I?”

“You were telling me about that woman on the banquette,” he replied, looking at her curiously.

“Right. Well, she was a client of mine, wife of a hedge fund guy. She used to conduct meetings while doing laps in her pool. I would sit on the edge with my books of swatches and my photos, waiting, and she would be doing these breaststrokes, back and forth, gasping for air before she
reached my end. Then I would flash the swatch and down she’d go, head in, head out.”

Pavel waved the waiters away with his hand.

Encouraged, Charlotte plunged ahead. “Anyway, one afternoon, her husband pulls me aside outside the pool room.

“ ‘I need you to do something for me, Charlotte,’ he says. He’s nervous, I can tell. There’d already been a hundred change orders on the job. ‘Sure, Anthony,’ I tell him. ‘What is it?’

“ ‘My wife, she farts,’ he says. ‘She farts all the time and the smell is unbearable.’ ”

Pavel grinned.

“This is a chic woman, Pavel. I mean, her face is all over the
New York Times
Styles Section every week. So I look at him and I say, ‘Well, listen, Anthony. That’s terrible. But I don’t know what you want me to do about it.’

“ ‘I want you to build her a bathroom that is 100% soundproof and smell-proof,’ he says. ‘If you don’t, we’re going to end up divorced.’ ”

“And how on earth do you do such a thing?” Pavel asked, poking, suspiciously, at his “pâté.”

“We installed a spring-loaded drop seal at the bottom of the door. You close the door, a little pin gets hit by the jam, and down drops the seal. I’d like to say they lived happily ever after, but the husband had an affair with the carpenter and the wife took off with her daughter’s personal trainer.”

Pavel looked perplexed. “The carpenter? Was a man?” he asked.

“Yeah, ends up the husband was gay.”

“Well, at least this story proves your clients are human, Charlotte.”

“Almost human,” she answered.

“So how do you deal with them?” Pavel asked, as he played with the little that was left of his pâté. “Most of the rich I have met here in America are not just wealthy, they are also beautiful and famous.”

Putting down her knife and fork, Charlotte stared into the distance. “A long time ago,” she said, “I empathized with very rich women. Having too much money, like being too beautiful, can be atrociously lonely.”

Pavel snorted.

“It’s true. Some of my clients … hell, lots of the women in this room, go for days touched only by people who are paid to touch them: hairdressers, personal trainers, masseurs, doctors. They never cook a meal, or wash a dish, or bathe a baby. They’ve forgotten there’s no such thing as easy money, Pavel. And they’re paying for it!”

Pavel squirmed in his chair. “Surely, there are worse problems than this, Charlotte?” he asked. “Should I pity them? These people you talk about are why we had a revolution in Russia. They are despicable, selfish. So again, I must ask you. How do you deal with them?”

Charlotte sat there, at a sudden loss for words.
I murder them!
She wanted to blurt out.

“I treat them fearlessly,” she said. “I make fun of them. I show them that I’m not the slightest bit intimated. Or at least that’s what I used to do when I was younger and stronger and less angry. And it worked like a charm,” Charlotte said, touching the tiny Eiffel Tower on her Craigslist
bracelet and digging into her coconut paste pasta. “They were completely seduced.”

“Is this what you do with me?” Pavel asked, tasting his dish, and sitting back in his chair eyeing her.

“I don’t know enough about you to make fun of you,” she replied.

“What would you like to know?” he asked.

Do you kill people?
flashed through her mind. “You scare me,” she said.

“I scare many people, Charlotte. It is a trick I use to survive. But you have no reason to feel that way.”

“Feeling has nothing to do with reason, Pavel. Surely, you realize that?”

“So what else do you feel about me?” he asked, taking a last delicate bite of his mushroom squash. She didn’t know a big man could be so delicate.

“Listen, this is a relationship about work,” she replied. “And I’m very rigid when it comes to my boundaries.” She could feel the flush of heat rising up her neck, thinking of her original plan to seduce and use him. “But I would like to know why your family is safer in Jersey.”

“Ahh, Yes!” said Pavel, pushing his plate away. “It must seem strange. But I am one of six men I know who boards the same Delta flight from Moscow every month. The answer to your question is simple: family makes me an easy target. And I cannot afford to put them at risk. What is it, you say? Better safe than sorry?”

“Yes! So how come they can’t live at the dacha? In the country?”

“I bought my house from the family of a man who was
killed on a Moscow street corner. I was smart enough not to ask why. We Russians can be as pitiless to one another as we are to the earth we once cherished.”

As if to distract her, he reached down into his pocket and pulled out a color photograph. “This is the latest picture of the dacha,” he said, sliding it across the table.

Charlotte picked it up and exhaled. “Whew!” she said. “I bet astronauts can see your wall from space …”

“Russians love walls, Charlotte. When I move into my village, I gave the priest some money for his church. The church was a mess. The peasants had been using it to store feed for their cows and horses. It stank. But the very the first thing the priest built was a wall …”

“If there’s one thing I know all about, Pavel. It’s walls.”

“Yes, Charlotte. I realize that. Now, let me get the bill and you can tell me all about them.”

As Pavel eyed the head waiter, Charlotte wrapped herself up in her velvet shawl. She thought,
I can’t believe I’m talking
. Like John, the homeless man, if she wasn’t talking to clients, Charlotte spent most of her time talking to herself. But tonight, she felt as if Pavel had cast a spell again; as if she were, somehow, enchanted. Pulling the shawl around her like a shroud, she shivered. Talking was dangerous.

Charlotte had been taught to submit gracefully. But the resentment that lay just beneath the surface made each and every act of submission, no matter how trivial, feel like rape.
So when they’d arrived back at the loft, Pavel had sensed her reluctance. Unlike other men, he hadn’t rushed her. He’d sat, sipping a cognac, patiently waiting for her to come to him.

“Would you tell me another fairytale, Pavel?” she asked, moving closer to him on the couch and stretching out her legs. “About your dacha.”

“Ahh! My beloved dacha!” he replied. “I hope you are not another one of those Americans who always think of that ridiculous Egyptian in Dr. Zhivago? What was his name?”

“Sharif. Omar Sharif,” Charlotte said.

“Right. I will tell you about my banya that I built with my own hands,” he said, briefly touching her hair. “But first you must relax. Close your eyes, Charlotte.”

She obeyed.

“In the big house, I did nothing but pay people to spend my money. It has a swimming pool and fancy Finnish sauna. This is for business. But the banya, this small wooden cabin, is only for me and my closest friends.”

Pavel’s voice was so deep, so mellifluous, she felt as if she were being carried away. As his hands slowly massaged her neck, she purred.

“Good! You are getting relaxed, Charlotte. The banya is made of cedarwood. Inside, I have made a simple room for drinking vodka and hot tea with jam. There are pegs nailed into the wall for hanging my robes and towels. They are all white and soft. From Sweden. You cannot imagine what luxury these towels are for me, Charlotte. You are asleep?” he asked, gently pinching her arm.

“No, just dreaming, Pavel. Tell me more,” Charlotte said.

“When I sit in my sauna, I like it very, very hot. So I dip
a big wooden spoon into a bucket filled with water from my river.”

Charlotte smiled.
“Your
river, Pavel?”

“That is correct. Before it was the people’s river. But now it is on my property. So it is
my
river,” Pavel replied. “I throw this water on hot rocks. You can hear the hiss, the sizzle of heat. I slap my back with a broom of birch twigs. It stings. The soap and the slap of leaves. But it feels good. Then I climb wooden steps and soak in a deep wooden tub with cool river water.”

Pavel’s hands had now slipped discreetly beneath her shirt. He was gently kneading the muscles in the small of her back. How did he know exactly where she ached? Charlotte sighed.

“Are you still here, Charlotte?” he asked.

“I’m melting.”

“After the banya, I go out and plunge into my river. I put my head under this ice-cold still clean rushing river. I hold onto a rusty old ring on the dock because the river flow is so strong. The river is also full of weeds. Weeds that can strangle people who are drunk.”

Pavel gently squeezed the flesh above her buttocks. She was so relaxed, he could have strangled her right then and she wouldn’t have even bothered to struggle.

“I come up from the river, naked. I am dripping wet and reborn. Clean and pure like a baby after baptism. This is how we Russian men get clean after another day of hurting or cheating other people. People who are sometimes friends. We must do this or we drown ourselves.”

Languid with the heat from the fireplace and the strength
of his stroking hands, Charlotte touched his face.

“I will tell you one more thing about the banya. And then we will move onto other things. It is in the banya where a Russian man is
almost
vulnerable. We do not even have a word for vulnerable in our language, Charlotte. But with the steam and the heat and the sweat, secrets are revealed, souls are swindled, lies are uncovered.”

Pavel sighed. “There are millions who have returned to the church in Russia. They have bumps on their foreheads from kissing the cold stone and praying. But me? I will always return to my banya.”

During his story, Pavel’s hands had navigated their way, slowly, so slowly, through her layers of clothing, moving in a series of slow-motion fits and starts.

“Please, hurry,” Charlotte finally said, arms over her head and legs sprawled open on the couch. “I want you to hurry.”

“There is no hurry,” he said, fingers fluttering like a moth’s wings over the hollow space between her shoulder blades. “Just breathe, Charlotte. Breathe.”

She closed her eyes and obeyed.

With other men, Charlotte had also always insisted on keeping some piece of clothing on, even if it was only a lacy French bra. It comforted her, somehow. It made her feel less exposed. But Pavel had understood her need for darkness and her fear of being naked. By the time they had gone into her bedroom and he had brought her to a second climax, it was she who had snapped the light on.

“I want to see you,” she’d said. “I want to see where you like to be touched.” And he’d shown her.

Before Pavel had drifted off to sleep, Charlotte ran her
hands over her own body, amazed at the smoothness of the curves, at the sensitivity of areas like the nape of her neck and the inside of her calves.

As he began to snore, her eyes traveled over his taut muscles; his knotted arms and long, delicate fingers. Even his toenails were buffed. When he abruptly shifted position, stretching out his arms, she wriggled away. It was then that she saw the tattoo. It was the silhouette of a sailing ship, hidden in the crook of his left arm. Her heart leapt as he turned over and she closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep.