The Guest Room(68)

“What did you do?” the man asked me when we got to the Second Avenue. He was from India.

“Nothing.”

He didn’t believe me, and he asked me to pay him for the trip so far. He didn’t make me get out, but he wanted to be sure I had money. So I paid him and he started his meter all over again, and he drove to the First Avenue and turned his taxi so it was going north.

I finally got out near the Hudson River. Then I walked back to my hotel, past one of the two clubs where I had been stripping over the weekend.

I decided Sonja and I couldn’t get out of New York City fast enough, but I really wasn’t sure why Los Angeles would be better. I had a feeling I was going to be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life.

And I remember wishing I spoke French. If I did, I thought, maybe we could go to Paris. Sure there were Russians in Paris. But maybe not ones who wanted to kill me.

…

In my hotel room, I waited. I would have been so happy to watch an episode of The Bachelor on the TV, but there wasn’t one on.

So I just kept pressing the channels on the remote control, smoking more cigarettes, and thinking of how I wished Sonja had not knifed Pavel. How I wished Crystal had not talked to police guy. How I wished we had not come to America. I looked out at the bricks of the air shaft and the dirt on the walls, and I wondered if my mother in heaven could see what had happened to me. I wondered if my grandmother could. I wondered what Nayiri was doing. And I thought of Richard Chapman. I guessed he was back at his beautiful office in a sunny skyscraper somewhere, surrounded by other big-deal executives like him, and their secretaries and super fast computers—not like me, all alone in a room and very scared, with only stupid TV for company.

…

And then two o’clock in the afternoon came. And then three o’clock. I waited there all afternoon for my phone to ring that one time and then stop. It never did.

I kept flicking the safety on the gun off and on, off and on.

Finally at five o’clock I called Sonja’s number, let it ring once, and then hung up. But she didn’t ring back. Not at five or six or seven. Never.

And while I didn’t know what had happened to her, I knew in my heart I was never going to see my Sonja again. I prayed she was alive, but I was not confident. I was not confident at all. I had been in bad trouble before. I had been in bad trouble plenty of times. But this? I had never before felt so cornered and so scared for my life. They were coming for me—they had to be—and I had no idea how or where I could run.





Chapter Eleven


As lunchtime neared Thursday, Melissa walked between Emiko and Claudia back toward the brick school building after gym. Their class had just played soccer…yet again. Neither Melissa nor Emiko was a fan of the sport, but they certainly preferred the soccer unit to flag football. Claudia said she didn’t enjoy it either, but she brought the same feral energy to soccer that she brought to skiing and dancing and Xbox games. Still, even Claudia agreed that she would be happier in a few weeks when they were inside doing gymnastics.

Abruptly Claudia said, “I think we all know what it means.”

Melissa turned to her. Her friend had dirt all over her hands and arms and her chin. Claudia ran hard and kicked hard, and the girl had taken a couple of tumbles that morning. Melissa didn’t have to ask Claudia what she meant by it. Neither did Emiko. They all knew because they had all been thinking about it ever since Melissa had asked them that morning what they thought the term sex slave meant.

“I mean, we know about the slaves and we know what sex is,” Claudia went on.

“There were slaves who were men. Does that mean that a sex slave can be a man?” Emiko asked.

“I guess. But I bet they’re mostly girls. I mean, it’s an expression. Sex slave. Someone who is ordered to have sex.”

“But who owns them?” Melissa asked. “Slaves had owners.” They were entering the gymnasium now and crossing the basketball court, and Melissa lowered her voice because it seemed to echo inside here.

“Maybe your uncle?”

“My uncle did not own them. I’ve seen his apartment. It’s small. Where would he even keep a sex slave? Where would he keep two?”

Emiko corrected them both: “It was the men who were killed. They were the ones who owned them. That would make sense, right? The sex slaves killed their masters.”

Melissa could tell that Claudia was about to add something. But then the three girls saw the gym teacher watching them, and they all went silent. Melissa looked down at her sneakers. She thought about her father wanting a sex slave, and grew disgusted.

…

Dina Renzi found Hugh Kirn almost childishly petulant, but decided that any man with eyes that blue—they were cobalt—was probably used to being a jerk and still getting his way. Getting whatever he wanted. Now he sat across from her in one of Franklin McCoy’s smaller conference rooms, though it still had a panoramic view of the East River and Brooklyn.

“Did you know that the only vegetarian option at Harry’s is a four-egg omelet?” she told him soon after arriving at the investment bank, not so much small talk as an attempt to build commonality. The restaurant wasn’t far from the bank’s offices on Water Street, and she had had lunch there two weeks ago. She thought a joke about Harry’s might loosen him up. “Four eggs. Does anyone—especially someone who isn’t going to order the steak sandwich—really want a four-egg omelet?”