The Guest Room(41)

“Are you crazy?” he asked me.

And I was yelling at him to let me go, begging and crying that I had to get away, but he just shook his head and laughed. So I spat at him. It was the first time that I had ever spat on a person. I think growing up I had figured I would go through life without ever spitting on a person. I guess not.

It was right about then that Inga returned. She had not had to go downstairs to a drugstore for condoms, after all. She found one in her purse while she was waiting for the elevator.

She looked as mad as I would see her for a long time, her eyes wide like insane person.

Rad tried to take the bullet for me. That’s what I mean about how he might have been just too nice for this line of work. Here I had just spat on him and tried to hit him on the head with a lamp, and still he wanted to protect me. He said he had gotten overanxious and I was trying to stop him so I didn’t get pregnant. But Inga believed this like she believed in Santa Claus or communism.

I thought they would beat me.

But beating is just not good for the product. Makes it less attractive. Less valuable. They try not to beat a girl if they can help it. (Sometimes, at first, I made it so they couldn’t help it.) Usually they drug you or hold you underwater or take away your food.

That night would be the first time they drugged me.

…

I should have kicked Rad in the crotch. I know that now. I did not know that then.

…

There was a new girl on the hotel room floor. I would discover that the next night, when I woke from my drug sleep and heard her banging on walls. At first I thought the banging was a dream. I had had a whole ballet of very strange dreams: exotic flowers (always cut), tropical fish (always plump), and men in black suits (always in need of a shave). But then I knew. I knew exactly what the pounding was. I had pounded just like that myself.





Chapter Seven


Kristin wasn’t wild about this reverse commute to Bronxville on Monday morning, but it was clear that Melissa rather enjoyed it. The girl didn’t like having to get up so early—the two of them awoke at Grandmother’s apartment at five-thirty so that they could catch a six-forty-five train—but once they were seated and the conductor had scanned their tickets, Melissa admitted that there was something glamorous about the experience.

“Well, we’ll get to do it again tomorrow,” Kristin had told her. Twenty minutes later, they were walking from the station to the school—a long, magisterial, Gothic edifice that looked like it should be anchoring an Ivy League college. All of Bronxville’s children went there, whether they were seven or seventeen. It had been built in the early 1920s, and now sixteen hundred students were crammed into it between their arrival for kindergarten and their departure for colleges with (Kristin sometimes joked) nationally ranked lacrosse and soccer teams. Every school day Melissa would go to the elementary school wing, and Kristin would dive into the hormonal, seemingly primeval ooze that marked the high school section. The same architect, Harry Leslie Walker, designed three of the four buildings at the corner of Pondfield and Midland: the school, the library, and the church. When she and Richard were first showing her mother the home they were buying and what would become their neighborhood, her mother had stood at this corner and said, her tone somewhere between judgmental and bemused, “It’s pretty: Disneyland for WASPs.” But it was pretty, and the school was supposed to be very good, Kristin remembered thinking defensively. A year later, she would be teaching there. A year and a half after that, Melissa would be enrolled in the kindergarten.

Richard had managed to reach Patricia Bryant on Sunday afternoon, and the detective believed that the crime lab would be finished sometime on Monday. But to be safe, she had suggested that Richard not schedule the cleaning crew until Tuesday. That meant, he had told Kristin, that they should plan to spend Monday night at her mother’s and move back home on Tuesday—after school. After, he hoped, the cleaning crew had left. He had said he would spend Monday night at the hotel, but he hoped that she would allow him to move back home on Tuesday. She had been evasive on the phone, though she knew that in the end she would say yes. After all, he would have been at the house all Tuesday anyway, supervising whatever it was these cleaners were doing. (For reasons she couldn’t fathom, she saw the crew working in white hazmat suits, as if they were cleaning up a nuclear plant meltdown.) But she agreed that he should spend Monday evening at the Millennium: one last night of penance.

“Mommy?”

Kristin looked down at her daughter. They were waiting for the traffic light to change so they could cross the street. “Yes, sweetie?”

“Nothing happened in my room, right?”

The child was not looking at her. She seemed to be gazing at a squirrel that was about to shimmy up one of the trees in the small copse by the French bistro. Still, even without being able to see the girl’s face, Kristin understood the unease that festered beneath the question. What precisely was Melissa imagining might have occurred there?

“No,” she answered, forcing a firmness into her voice that she did not feel in her heart, but determined to provide the reassurance the child craved. “Absolutely nothing happened in your room.”

And if she was mistaken? She didn’t want to go there. It was already proving too painful and too difficult to move forward.

…

That day the police arrested five men in two separate raids, one in Brooklyn and one in Manhattan, all of whom were linked in some fashion with the escort service that Spencer Doherty used. They were all Russian, though some were now American citizens. Three were charged with, among other felonies, the recruitment, provision, and obtaining of people for the purposes of commercial sex acts. Two were charged with kidnapping. All five were charged with procurement of prostitution. There was the likelihood that some of them would be charged with laundering money as well.