The Guest Room(50)

We all would.

Anyway, that was the plan. Freedom. Or, at least, a life a little bit more like free girl than slave.

…

Inga and Yulian were with us 24/7 our first week in New York City. We called Yulian the White Russian, but only behind his back. He had thick hair the color of snow, and the shoulders and chest of a man who, when he was young, I bet could have benched close to three hundred pounds. I guess he was fifty. He always seemed a little bored when he f*cked me, as if it was beneath him to relieve his urges on one of the slaves. He had been a young politician when the Soviet Union collapsed. The rumor was that he was married, but we never knew for sure. He may also have been one of Daddy’s cousins, but that may also have been just a rumor. The men kept their lives private. He carried an antique Korovin semiautomatic pistol that he said was a gift from his godfather. Inga told me one time that Yulian’s godfather had been KGB: Soviet secret police. One beautiful sunny day at the cottage, we were forced to watch him shoot birds.

The plan was for Inga to leave us after a week or two in America. Given our value, she was going to spend a little time to make sure our transition was like butter, but her world was Moscow. Not Manhattan. And she did go home after ten or eleven days with us. But Yulian and Konstantin stayed. They were business guys making things happen.

I remember the six of us had flown to the U.S. in two groups—two different airplanes. I was with Crystal and Konstantin. But the planes landed within half an hour, and so all of us were met at the JFK airport by two of the men who were going to help run us, Pavel and Kirill. Each was behind the wheel of an identical black Escalade.

Three weeks later, both of those dudes would be dead.

…

They told me that here in America, I was going to have to start watching the news on TV. Not just The Bachelor. I was going to have to start reading the newspaper. I had not been reading much English in Moscow, but I figured I would get it back quickly.

They said I had to do this because here I would finally be a real Western courtesan. And that meant I had to be able to make conversation. Arm candy in New York City must be smarter than arm candy in Moscow.

They said when I was “trained,” I would start telling the johns I was an exchange student. I went to a university in Moscow and I was on a “study abroad” program at NYU.

They said an escort who looked like me would be making one thousand dollars an hour by the spring. (They never told me how much I would get to keep.) I could tell Inga was less sure about how much Sonja and Crystal would be worth. They did not speak English as well as me. And they were unpredictable. Sonja had that temper. And sometimes Crystal would slip and say those things that made them know how badly she wanted out.

I never told anyone I went to NYU. I never got the chance.

…

Sonja and Crystal and I each had a tiny bedroom on the third floor of a town house in New York City. We were in Manhattan. Most people think Russian criminals live in this place called Brighton Beach. Or maybe they think the criminals are out in Queens or Long Island. I guess there are some there. Maybe the dudes who run drugs wind up out in Brooklyn. I know there is a lot of muscle there. For instance, the drivers who met us at the airport lived near Coney Island. And maybe that’s where Sonja and Crystal and I would have ended up if we had gotten addicted to drugs the way some girls did, which meant working a much cheaper track. But that wasn’t us. That wasn’t why they had brought us to America.

The town house was in a neighborhood called the East Village, a block and a half from the Tompkins Square Park. It was just off the Avenue C. In my little time there, I really was mistaken a lot for a rich kid from NYU. I am not kidding. When I was outside on the street with one of the men who had brought us to America—dudes like Yulian and Konstantin—people would think the guy was my father. When I was outside with Inga, they would think she was my mother. I always thought it interesting that the students and the shoppers and the police guys we would see on the sidewalks weren’t scared of them. But, of course, only I knew the firepower they carried with them in their belts or their shoulder holsters or—in Inga’s case—a black purse.

…

On one of our first days in New York City, Sonja and I were sitting on the floor of her little room playing solitaire and Crystal was lying on the bed. It was raining outside. Sonja’s room still smelled of the man she’d had the night before, so we had opened the little window. Suddenly Crystal got up and went to look outside at the street.

“I hate it here,” she said. It sounded like she was crying, so I stood up and went to her. I rubbed her shoulder through her T-shirt.

“You hate New York City, Crystal dear?” I asked. “Or America? Or is it your room?”

She was just letting the tears run down her beautiful cheeks. She wasn’t wearing any makeup because it was only eleven-thirty in the morning. I pulled her against me.

“This room. My room. Your room,” she said. Her voice had that zombie tone I have told you about. No emotion. “New York City. Moscow. America. I hate it all.”

Sonja slapped a couple of cards down on the carpet. “Get used to it,” she said. It was not like Sonja to be short with Crystal, but the sky was so gray outside and we were all getting used to this new world.

Crystal didn’t turn to Sonja. She just shook her head in slow motion. “No,” she murmured, “I can’t.”