Chapter Fifteen: HOT KISS AT THE END OF A WET FIST

I pushed the intercom’s SPEAK button, said, “Yes?”

I pressed LISTEN and heard street noises, then a woman’s voice asking, “Payton Sherwood?”

I pressed SPEAK again.

“Yes, who is it?”

LISTEN.

“Sayre Rauth.”

SPEAK.

“What do you want?”

LISTEN.

“I thought more about…hiring you. May I come in?”

“Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”

SPEAK.

“Come on up.”

I buzzed her in. And waited.

I breathed in and out, and braced myself for setting eyes on her again. I’d be cool, reserved, not betray with a single look or gesture the effect she illicit—no—elicited from me. Standard operating procedure was to never show how you really felt. Unfortunately, I’ve never been good at concealing my feelings. Easier not to feel at all.

Two short raps. I opened my door.

As soon as I saw her, I started bleeding again. She stood before me dressed in an airy, chocolate-brown silk blouse, a short pleated black skirt, and tasseled calf-high calfskin boots. She smiled at me and gave me a hungry look, and the cut in my forehead started to trickle. A droplet ran down and around my brow, then continued to descend along my left temple like a rivulet of sweat.

She must’ve seen it, but she didn’t say anything. She must’ve seen even more, but if she did, she didn’t give it away.

I excused myself, turned, and headed for the bathroom. Over my shoulder, I invited her in. “Be right with you.”

I splashed cold water on my face and dried it. The cut had already stopped bleeding, wasn’t very deep. To be on the safe side, I put on a Band-Aid. It made me look tough, in a cartoonish sort of way, like Sluggo from the comic strip Nancy.

When I returned, Sayre Rauth was still standing on the threshold, hadn’t come in yet.

She raised both her arms up over her head.

“Want to frisk me? I might be armed.”

“Skip it. I’ve softened my stance on deadly force. Come in, nunchucks, machetes, grenades, and all.”

She looked disappointed, or at least she didn’t put her arms down right away.

What the hell, I knew she didn’t have her gun on her, it was in my back pocket. And I didn’t need to pat her down to pinpoint her other lethal weapons.

She finally walked in and stopped in the center of the room and surveyed it.

“This is your office?”

“I also live here.”

“Alone?” She cocked an eyebrow.

I nodded.

“You aren’t married, then?”

“Not then, not now.”

“Perhaps you are in a… relationship?”

“If so, no one’s told me. Let’s stick to business, Miss Rauth. Have a seat,” I said. “But I gotta tell you up front, we’re all out of toasters.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” I sat behind my desk. “It’s just…you’re like my fifth or sixth client today. Hell, I’ve lost count.”

She crossed her legs. I watched the occasion; parts of me celebrated it. She said, calling my attention back up to her eyes, “Business must be good.”

I lifted up my hand in mid-air and tilted it side-to-side like a life raft on choppy waters.

“It fluctuates. And there’s the mortality rate to consider. Hiring me could be hazardous to your health, by the way.”

“I’ll risk it. Do you mind if I smoke?”

“I insist.”

She smiled and shook some of her hair out of place.

“Half the time, I don’t understand you.”

I lit a match for her cigarette but a breeze from the window blew it out. She used her own lighter and exhaled a steady stream of smoke through her nose.

“The other half of the time, I think you make fun of me because my English is not always so good. When I am nervous.”

“Sorry, it’s nothing personal really. Just my own private syntax.”

“Sin tax?”

“That too. Mind if I bum a smoke?”

She offered me her pack of cigarettes. Foreign label, brand I never heard of. I lit up. Its dark-brown tobacco tasted like something that’d been scraped off of someone’s cleats. I coughed, but only to the point of tears, no blackouts or brain aneurysms to speak of.

“So. You want to hire me. For what?”

“To find my sister.”

“Your sister. She’s lost?”

“We’ve lost touch. But…I believe you are in contact with her. Her name is Elena.”

“Ah, yes, your sister, Elena. How come you want to find her?”

“It’s complicated. She may be responsible for a robbery the other day. I think she stole property belonging to me, and some…sensitive data involving clients’ personal information stored in my computer. Data I’d very much like to recover.”

“Is that why you sent your associate Windmann to hire me?”

“Paul?” She didn’t try to deny it. “I knew nothing about that until after he came to see you. Paul was listening over the intercom while you and I were talking earlier. He thought he was helping me by coming to speak to you. He thought you might be, well, Elena’s…”

“Elena’s Paul? Yeh, well, he did more than check me out. He hired me to do a job.”

“What was this job?”

“He wanted me to get back something he claimed had been stolen from him.”

“And did you…did you get it back?”

I slid the stack of printed spreadsheet pages across the desk to her. She only looked at the top one, didn’t pick up a single page or bother asking what it was.

I said, “Why don’t we cut out the missing sister story and start from scratch.”

“Scratch?”

“Starting with the modeling agency you were a part of back in the Ukraine.”

“You know about that?” She shrugged her right shoulder. “Okay, but I warn you, my story still may shock you.”

“I’ll risk it.”

“You won’t look at me the same way.”

“I’ll risk that, too.”

She told me her story. It was much the same as what Elena had told me, and told in the same matter-of-fact way. At least this time I didn’t have to fake a heard-it-all-before reaction.

She tried hard to explain to my western sensibilities how something like Tweensland could’ve come into existence and lasted so long.

“We answered an ad in the newspaper. Many girls came with their parents. The day you arrived you saw a clean establishment, a big studio with expensive equipment. A dozen men and women working there. It all looked very legitimate, and the money they promised, they delivered. They paid us by the hour, as much as twenty, thirty dollars an hour. It was a fortune, and no one questioned how they could afford to pay that much. They didn’t want the money to stop coming.

“In the beginning they photographed you in dresses, pajamas, bathing suits. It wasn’t until a couple of days later—once they’d gotten you comfortable—that they started saying now how about one more with it off?

“We were told to keep quiet and, in return for our silence, we got money, too—nearly as much as our parents were receiving, and all our own. Plus clothes and make-up, and food of course. It was heaven for a twelve-year-old girl—except for the fucking.”

“Elena said most girls just posed naked,” I said, “they didn’t have sex.”

Sayre drew on her cigarette, let the smoke out slowly.

“I’m sure she’d prefer to remember it that way. Maybe she does remember it that way. I’ve got a hundred hours of video says otherwise. Maybe I’ll show it to you sometime.”

“No thanks,” I said.

“The secret was well kept,” she went on. “The girls knew, the owners knew, and the customers, of course. The parents knew or should have known, but if any of them ever complained, they were bought off. Or else blackmailed. They’d signed releases to have their daughters photographed; they could go to prison, too, lose their jobs, their families.

“But it rarely came to that. People took the money and kept quiet. It was a bad time for everyone.”

I said, “Mostly for the girls.”

She shrugged. “We weren’t digging ditches or shoveling coal. There were worse things. I knew girls my age who made money having sex with their older brothers’ friends. Less money, less clean, more dangerous.”

“You almost make it sound like the agency was a good thing,” I said.

“No, it was not a good thing. But there were no good things for us. Just bad and worse.”

“How did you get out?”

“I enjoyed the camera, knew what it wanted. By the time I was thirteen, I was working behind it. I’d become the lover of the website’s designer, Raphe. I assisted him, helped pick out photos, decide on themes, coach the other girls. At the same time, I learned as much as I could about the financial side of the operation, the startup fees and monthly charges; how the money came in and where it went.

“It was very profitable, but I knew it couldn’t go on forever. Problems started when some of the girls they’d used earlier on but were too old now began complaining. Word got around. There was talk of an investigation. The official in charge was contacted. It was decided a girl should go over to him and give a thorough and satisfactory… report. On her experiences with the modeling agency, you understand. I was that girl. And I was very thorough. More than satisfactory.

“It bought the agency a little more time. But only a little. More officials were becoming aware of what was really going on. Tweensland was an international enterprise and pressure was being applied by other countries. I didn’t want to be around when it came crashing down, so I made certain preparations. A good thing, too. Because—”

“Because the shit hit the fan,” I said. “When Elena helped that American girl, Cristy, to get out.”

“Yes. That was a big mistake.”

“Whose? Elena’s or Cristy’s?”

“Tweensland’s. They shouldn’t have used Cristy. An American? People care about Americans. You can fuck Ukranian girls, Georgians, Latvians, Albanians, Kazakh, Serbs, Poles, no problem. But you put one American girl in front of the camera, you’ve dug your own grave. She was pretty, she was popular with subscribers—but it was a big, big mistake.”

“But you don’t consider what happened Elena’s fault.”

“Her fault? Of course not.”

“She thinks you’re angry at her.”

“I’m not.”

“She thinks you hate her. That you want to hurt her.”

She smiled sadly.

“Not at all. I’d like to help her if she’d let me. But instead she steals from me. Steals information I need that’s very private. Very, very private. Information that’s worth a lot of money, but only if it remains private.”

She sat a minute not saying anything, then stood and walked around to my side of the desk. Leaning over me, she asked, “Do you know why I’ve told you this, Payton? All my dark secrets?”

I hazarded a guess. “Because you’re going to kill me?”

She laughed huskily and shook her head. The sound filtered through the blades of her hair, languid and low.

“I don’t kill men. I have other means.” She leaned closer, including me within her silky aperture of hair. My immersion in her fragrance was a sweet asphyxiation.

“There are better ways,” she whispered. “Ways more favorable to both parties, more… agreeable. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“I wooden. I mean, I wood. I—” I shut up. She had eyes.

She had more than eyes. Her lips on my lips.

Coming up for breath, she smiled down on me with that kinked-up joker’s grin I’d just been tasting. Strands of her hair caught in my chin stubble like Velcro.

She said, “I’m sure that together, you and I, we can come to terms of mutual, mutual—”

I pulled her back down before she went reaching for my Roget’s Thesaurus.

She might’ve just been auditioning me to take the place so recently vacated by Paul Windmann. A new front man for her operation, another not-quite-honest someone, maybe less ambitious than the last one, who’d apparently struck out on his own before getting struck down. She might have been fitting me for a suit of stripes or a burial suit. But right at that moment I didn’t care.

She’d seduced Eastern Bloc government officials at age fourteen—what chance did I stand at resisting her at twenty-two? So why fight it? Make love, not war. And how.

She raised her arms and I lifted her blouse up and over her head. I had her turn around. I placed one hand on the back of her neck where her silky hair grew low, starting at the top nub of her vertebra.

My hands traveled forward and my fingers traced along the edge of her breasts, down her ribs, across her belly, around her back. Her buttocks tensed and she rolled round. Her face was flushed.

She laid her hands on my shoulders and shoved me down like I was the plunger of a detonator wired to high explosives.

My mouth slid along her belly while my hands went beneath her skirt and felt her thighs and her bare buttocks. She wasn’t wearing panties. She’d come prepared, if that was the right word for it. Screw it, I was beyond words.

My fingers and mouth found her and we were lost in our separate and joint pursuit.

In a few minutes, I knew she liked me at least a little. Much of it could’ve been faked for motives of her own, or maybe just out of habit. But some things couldn’t be faked. I was sopping wet with her.

She raised my head by the hair and looked me in the eyes.

“I want to see you.”

And she did.

And so did the neighbors across the street because we never got around to drawing the curtains.

Naked on my daybed a quarter-hour later, sticky and sweaty and sated, she finally told me how she’d gotten out of her country.

“I blackmailed one of the officials I’d met with and convinced him it was in his best interest to rush through a student visa for me. I came to America, bringing with me a laptop I’d stolen from Raphe. It had copies of all his files, all the business information about Tweensland. That’s when I decided to start my own company, Rauth Realty—and for capital I contacted some of the website’s former customers to request their help.”

It was the strangest pillow talk I’d ever been party to. She told me how she’d started shaking down the website’s former customers. It wasn’t so easy. She had to research them first, find the ones with the most to lose, updating their records with current addresses by going through their local newspapers in the library or online. Then she’d had to contact them.

“My English was not very good, so it was hard. But in time, it got better. And it was even a little fun,” she said, and laughed to herself, her pert breasts jiggling. “The fear in their voices when it hits them what I’m calling about. These men. The stammering, the limp threats, and finally the pleading. They all end up sounding like little girls themselves.

“Soon I had enough money in an online bank account to start going to classes to learn the language better and reduce my accent. I was in America now. Here surface is everything. I came up with the name ‘Sayre Rauth.’ I hired Paul Windmann. I rented the townhouse.”

“Sounds like everything was going peachy. So what went wrong?”

“Elena,” she said.

“What about Elena?”

“I saw her. Just one day on the street. I was surprised —I look very different than I used to, but she…she looks the same. I followed her. She was living on First Street then; the place she is now on Avenue C is new. I found the name she was using and the name of the man she was living with. I ran a credit check on them and what do you think I found?”

“Lots of debt?”

“The opposite. A joint savings account they had totaling over seventy thousand dollars.”

I whistled.

She nodded.

I said, “So naturally you wondered where that money had come from. Were you afraid she was running the same set-up as you, shaking down former customers?”

“It crossed my mind.”

“That would really screw everything up, wouldn’t it?” I said. “After all, the whole point of blackmail is exclusivity, the promise that no one else in the world knows. If more than one person knows the secret, why pay up?”

A quote from Benjamin Franklin popped into my head: Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

Sayre nodded. “As you say, if it was true. I needed to know. So I contacted her. Politely, I swear to you. But she was spooked, started making threats. And then the robbery.”

She propped herself up on an elbow and pulled some strands of hair out of her mouth.

She asked, “How much money would you need to live on for the rest of your life?”

“The rest of my life? Darlin’, the way today is shaping up, probably what I got in my pockets right now.”

“I’m being serious.”

So was I, but I’d play her game of what-if if she wanted. Only problem was: all far-reaching numbers are relative, all currencies in flux; to have given her a truly honest answer, I would’ve had to project a figure phrased in gold ingots.

In my experience, money wasn’t everything. For instance, I always got a much better return when I bartered in information. It provided a higher yield.

But she wanted a number, so I said, “Five million.”

She huffed. “Dollars?” She frowned. She blew hair out of her eyes. “That’s a lot of money. Too much, I’m afraid.”

I stretched out, airing my matted armpit hair. “Sorry, but at least now you know what you’re working for.”

“Why so much? I would think from the way you live that—”

“Look, I never haggle. It’s part of my charm.”

“I only asked—”

“And I answered. Now let me ask you one: Did you kill Paul Windmann?”

“What?” Her mouth formed a moue. “Paul is—”

“Paul was,” I corrected her.

“When…when did this happen?” She dug an elbow into my chest, raising herself to look down at me. “I saw him at one.”

“Uh-uh-uh, answer my question first.”

“What question—did I kill him? Payton, you think I—ha! Funny time to be asking me that, don’t you think?”

I could think of a funnier time to have asked it, but then again I wasn’t in it just for laughs anymore.

“Answer the question.”

“No. I didn’t kill Paul. Are you satisfied?”

“I was satisfied before you answered the question.”

“Was he shot?”

“Why, missing any bullets?”

She turned her head away, so all I saw was her long dark hair. With her face averted, her voice sounded thick.

“I loaned Paul my gun this afternoon.”

“You did what?”

“He said he needed it for protection. His keys were taken in the robbery. He was arranging to have all his locks changed, but until then…I gave him my gun.” She turned back to me. “Now tell me, was he shot?”

“Yes.”

I didn’t know a word of her native tongue, but just then I learned about half a dozen of the worst ones you could say in it. When she simmered down, she asked, “Was my gun still there?”

“Yep. Looks like there was a struggle for it and it went off in his face.”

She grimaced, but her voice held a note of resignation.

“And you thought it was me?”

I thought a lot of things. I thought she had a motive: Windmann wanted those files on the iPod for himself, either to take over her operation or, more likely, to blackmail her, threatening to expose her to some of those men on her list. A good enough reason enough to kill. I thought she was capable of killing anyone she set her sights on. But I didn’t think she was stupid.

I said, “Nope.”

I wriggled out from underneath. I stood and walked over to where my pants had ended up. I fished her gun out of my back pocket and tossed it to her. She caught it one-handed.

I said, “If you shot him, you wouldn’t have left that behind.”

She sniffed the barrel and reared back, her nose wrinkled.

She looked at me. “I… Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

She grabbed the daybed’s quilt and hugged it to her, laying the gun on top of it.

“It is very…considerate of you,” she said.

“Stop. You’ll make me blush.”

“Why did you take it from the scene?”

I shrugged. “I wanted something to hold over you.”

“But not anymore?”

I shook my head. “If I were you, I’d get rid of it right away. It’s better than even money that’s the gun killed Windmann.”

She asked, “Do you know who did kill him?”

Maybe the woman who stole his keys and used them to steal the data. Elena. Though she’d seemed to be more of a knife woman.

“Not yet,” I said. “But it’s nothing for you to worry about. I, on the other hand…”

“What are you doing?”

I was putting on my pants.

“What’s it look like?” I said.

“Where are you going?”

I shook floor dust off my shirt, put it on again and started buttoning.

“Sorry—but I’m on the clock. Got one more lead to check out.” She had, god help me, a hurt expression on her face. “I wasn’t expecting anyone…” I started. “Look, I’ll be back in a couple hours. Stay. Help yourself to…uhm, there’s water in the sink.”

She held up her gun and pointed it at me, while pointing out to me, in a voice as dark and velvety as moonshadow, “I could make you stay.”

She would have been doing me a favor.