“I have to do this when nobody else is around.”
“I need it.”
“Look, please, man, if I try to get anything out of there now, it’ll be a problem, trust me, okay, please?”
He looked frightened. Dravic glanced at the door of the little office. I figured if I pushed him too hard, he’d balk, or somebody else would get in the way, so I pulled back.
“Right,” I said. So, you were pretty nice to her, you gave her a tryout as a bartender, even if she was underage-you had something with her?”
“No,” he said, hesitating just a split second. “She was just a nice girl.”
“And the husband?”
“I didn’t get the feeling he would be happy if she was even talking to other guys, it was like he owned her, she had a tat with his name on it.”
“You saw it?”
“She told me. It was not, you know, visible exactly.”
“You’re Russian?”
“Serbian dad, Russian grandma on his side. My Mom’s a hippie from upstate New York.”
“You speak Russian?”
“My grandmother taught me some.”
“Right. So what else?”
“The Russian girls, they look great, but they can be really chilly, peevish, you know, petulant, like they’d rather be doing some other thing really important, you know, like smoking cigarettes, you know that look? It’s the same everywhere, I met some of them in England when I worked there, just the same fucking thing. Masha was different. She was nice to everyone.”
“How nice? You think Masha was hooking?”
“I don’t know.”
“She wore expensive clothes?”
“Yeah, so what?”
His face tightened up. I wondered if he had been in love with Masha.
I started to go. He put a hand on my sleeve, put it there too hard, clutched the fabric too tight. He was furious, pissed off at me for asking if the girl was a hooker. He kept hold of my arm, and he was solid, muscled, built like a bull.
“Let go of me, man,” I said. “Fucking let go.”
“Yeah, sorry,” said Dravic. “There’s guys, I don’t know, Rumanians, Albanians, whatever, they come in with these girls who are really frightened and you can see the bastard owns them.”
“Serbs?” I wanted to get him riled up, I wanted him to hit me if he had to. It would tell me something about him and the dead girl. He didn’t. He lowered his voice. He understood that I was now a threat to him.
“What else?” I said.
“I mean they keep the girls’ passports. The girls are like slaves. Man, if I have kids and they’re girls, I’m sending them someplace else.”
“Where’s that?”
“Yeah, where?” said Dravic. “Where on earth?”
CHAPTER NINE
After I let Tito Dravic go back to work, I called Gloria and told her the dead girl’s name, I told her about the tattoo, and then I started for the street. I’d had enough of the club, the drunks, the heated-up flesh, the bad music. I was going back into the city, but there was something I had to do first.
As I passed the girls who had greeted Valentina on the street, one of them followed me. Her name was Janna, she said, she had carrot hair and a clinging little blue silk dress that was tight on her ripe burnished body. She was maybe twenty.
“Can we go out for a smoke?” she said. “Would you mind, Mr Cohen?” She was polite, and we went out to the street and over to the canal where the fishing boats were. Crowds of people sauntered up and down, cars honked, people waved American flags. The fourth of July.
Janna offered me her pack of cigarettes, and I took one. I figured if we smoked together she’d relax. She was tense, coiled up.
“You were in because of the girl that died, right?” she said.
“You knew that?”
“Oh, in these clubs talk goes around faster than the ecstasy goes down,” she said. “And Tito has a big mouth. He retails gossip as a way to hang out with us.”
“You don’t like him?”
“He’s okay. He’s just kind of low-class, you know?”
I showed her the picture.
“Masha Panchuk,” she said. “We liked her. We tried to help her.”
“Help how?” I said, and I saw this girl, this Janna, wanted in on the case, that she was curious, nosey maybe. Maybe like Dravic, she wanted to retail the story.
“We knew she needed a job. She didn’t have any family, only a grandma someplace in, I don’t know, Kiev, or somewhere,” said Janna. “There was a guy, a husband? She wanted out. She was just a good kid.”
“You Russian?”
Janna said she had grown up in London, and her parents were both Russian. Her friends in the club had Russian parents, but had been born in Brooklyn. They were at NYU, studying business.
“I don’t want the others to know about this, they’re American girls, they don’t know how anything works, and I don’t want to scare them. You know, I said to one of them, Don’t you long to travel, and she said, well, yes, but I couldn’t go anywhere I don’t feel safe. They’re frightened.”
“Listen, you want to help?”
“Yes.”
“You need to go back in the club?”
She couldn’t tell what I was after. I could see it in her unformed pretty little face.
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Where did Masha buy her clothes, where do girls out here get stuff? Show me.”
“There’s shops around Brighton Beach. Masha liked a lot of glitz.”
“Okay, you want to help, show me. My car’s around the corner.”
She hesitated, and then, rising to the challenge, to what she saw as a dare, she put her smokes in the little purse that dangled from a sparkly chain on her shoulder.
“Sure,” she said and she followed me to my car and got in, and jabbered while I drove back to Brighton Beach, jabbered half frightened, half excited. I could smell the excitement, especially when I hit the gas hard. She lit up another cigarette.
“I knew something was wrong,” said Janna. “She tried so hard to get it right, to dress right, she told me she had lived outside London, as if it gave her some kind of qualification, some kind of status is the word I want. Maybe because my accent is sort of English.” Janna looked up at me. “Everybody loved this girl, boys, girls, everybody, I don’t just mean in a friends way, I mean loved as in wanted, but also liked. She slept with a lot of people.”
“Was she hooking?”
“Probably. But there was this air about her that drew you in,” said Janna. “She said she was twenty-two, I think she was a lot younger, I mean like seventeen, and I’m pretty sure she was illegal. I saw her in the city at some club. You could talk to my dad.”
“You said your dad’s Russian?”
“Yes. Should I call you Detective? I’m sorry, I don’t know what to call you.” She pointed at a side street in Brighton Beach and I pulled into it, and she got out and I followed her to a shop. Even at this hour it was open, but it was a holiday and people shopped late.
