The Guest Room(74)

For a long second, Melissa focused on the way he had said the word girls. At the way a moment earlier he had said girls at the party. She repeated the expression in her mind. Girls at the party. But they weren’t girls. They were sex slaves. And now, it seemed, one of them was dead.





Alexandra


I had lots of American cash, but no idea how far it would go or how useful paper money really was. It wasn’t just that I only knew how much some things cost in New York City. Things like manicures and spray tans and makeup at stores like Sephora. It was that even I understood you couldn’t just buy an airline ticket with dollar bills. They think you’re a terrorist and are going to hijack or blow up the airplane if you try. You need a credit card, which I didn’t have yet. I remembered what Sonja had told me when we were buying our train tickets when we left Bronxville: you could buy bus tickets and train tickets for short trips with cash, but you couldn’t rent cars or fly anywhere on airplanes without what she called “plastic.” Besides, even if I did have a credit card, wouldn’t the police guys find me? Of course they would. And then I would be in that dungeon of a place called the Rikers Island because they thought I was a murderer.

I knew I needed to find someone who could make me a pretend person passport and pretend person credit cards—someone like the Georgian from Tbilisi. But I wasn’t sure where to begin, so that was as far as I got that afternoon with a plan. Still, I took every dollar I had and I left the hotel. I took the gun, which I loaded and tucked inside my leather jacket. And I took the clothing I had bought, which obviously was not very much. It all fit inside the backpack Sonja and I had gotten in the Times Square. It was seven o’clock at night.

I threw my phone into a garbage can on the street. If Sonja hadn’t called me by now, she never would. The only people who had my number were whoever had Sonja’s phone. And I was afraid that somehow they would use our calls—use my number—to track me down.

The main thing was, right that second I had to find a new neighborhood. I had no clue how much Sonja had told them before they killed her or beat her up or put her on a plane and sent her back to Moscow—or someplace worse. I figured I had to stay far away from the two clubs where I had stripped for the men or either of our hotels or anyplace near the Broadway. I knew I had to stay away from the East Village. So that evening I started walking north on the Tenth Avenue, not sure where I was going, when I saw a newspaper in a rack on a newsstand with the headline that some of the Russians had been let out of jail. They had “made bail.” I stared at the headline for a few seconds. It made me a little nauseous. But then I kept walking.

…

Maybe if they hadn’t made bail, I would have gone to police guys and tried to explain what happened. But they did make bail.

And this meant Americans were probably as corrupt as Russians.

Maybe if I knew or could somehow find police guy who had talked to Crystal, I would have gone to him. But that was at least as crazy impossible as finding someone who could get me pretend person passport.

Besides, the police would only see me now as Kirill’s murderer. They would only see me as whore who shot pimp.

And that would mean American prison for sure.

…

The neighborhoods in New York City change as fast as they do anywhere. Yerevan. Moscow. One minute you’re on a block where girls like me sit on men’s laps in clubs, wearing nothing but G-strings and high-heel shoes, and the next minute there are luxury apartment buildings or beautiful brick town houses that look like they belong in another century. There are mothers walking their little girls home from early evening ballet class. (When I saw those girls with their dance bags, I crossed the street. It was like whatever I had could be contagious. Just breathing on them would turn them into courtesans.) I saw a father in a business suit and raincoat holding his daughter’s hand walking in my direction. She was maybe six years old and she was holding a Barbie doll in a red ball gown. I thought of Richard and his little girl. Based on the pictures of her I saw in his house, she was older than this child. But maybe not by much. She still had her Barbies. I had seen the plastic box of them in her bedroom. I saw the rubber the suspender dude had left there after f*cking Sonja.

It seemed to me that Richard was a good father. A good husband. A good provider. At least that was the feeling I got. (And girls like me have to learn to trust our feelings about a person. We have to figure out who the dude is from a first impression. It can help us make our money, and it might help us save our lives.) He was not an oligarch, but he had a nice house. If that plastic tub was all Barbies, then his little girl might have had as many Barbies as me when I’d been a kid back in Yerevan. And I bet Richard had actually paid for those Barbies. That was different from my father. He left me all those Barbies before he died, and he had never paid a single ruble—not one single dram—for any of them. (It’s a long story.)

Anyway, when I thought of Richard, I thought of how he was so worried I was cold that night when I was sitting on the bed. How he wouldn’t f*ck me because he was married. How he had bought his daughter so many Barbies. He was a man—and here was a word I did not normally think of when I thought of men—that a person could trust. It had been a long time since I had thought of a man that way. Mostly men were just animals who had needs. Even the TV Bachelor. Even all of the TV Bachelors. I wanted romance, I wanted a man to kneel and give me a rose, but girls like me do not meet men like that. We just don’t. It’s movie fantasy that we do, even when we are pretty.