Songs of Innocence

I looked around, noticed the Hispanic guy under the tree again. His sandwich was gone and the Gatorade bottle next to him looked empty, but he was still sitting there, looking in our direction. Enjoying the view, no doubt, and who’s to say that none of the talk about handjobs was audible at forty feet?

I got up, gestured to Julie to get up, too.

“What?” she said.

“Let’s go over there,” I said. “A little more privacy.” She picked up her glove and I led her around the corner to the rear of the building.

When we were seated again, I said to her quietly, “The man who did this to you, Julie, may also have killed Cassandra. And I’m not at all confident that it’s going to stop there. Di could be in danger, Samantha could, and frankly, so could you. I’m trying to be patient, Julie, but please—I need you to answer my questions.”

She pulled her glove back on, fitting each finger carefully and securing the Velcro snugly. It took her a few tries till she got it the way she wanted it. I didn’t say anything. I’d pushed her as hard as I could. She’d talk or she wouldn’t.

“The whole story,” she said finally. “There isn’t much of it, and I’m sure you’ve heard stories like it before. You know I was only seventeen when I came over? Fresh off the plane from London, had a backpack and a copy of Time Out New York, nowhere to stay, needed cash and didn’t much want to work for it. It’s not a very original story, Mr. Blake. Not hardly. But that’s the way it was.”

She looked at me with a challenge in her expression, but I kept mine blank.

“First week I was here, I made an inventory of my skills. Weren’t many I could translate into dollars, especially not without a work permit. But like mother said, a girl with nice tits need never starve. I found my first job at a place on 32nd Street. I know, there’s a surprise—a Korean girl working on 32nd Street. It was a men’s spa called Yi Kun. I bet it’s still there. It was one flight up from a women’s spa owned by the same people. We offered all the same services for the men upstairs and the women downstairs, except for a couple of extras we couldn’t write about on the sign in the entryway. And wouldn’t you just know, every fellow who came there wanted the extras? But I was naive. I remember the first day I was there a man asked how much for a facial and I actually thought he meant the sort you get at Elizabeth Arden. Well, what do you want? I was seventeen.”

“How old are you now?”

“Not seventeen,” she said. “I lasted five months at Yi Kun. That was all I could take. It was the worst sort of place, in a building that should’ve been condemned fifty years ago. As soon as I heard about another job, I took it. It was just down the block, but it was a big step up—I mean, it was this damp basement, like a YMCA, and we worked three to a room, not even curtains between the tables, and each time the subway passed the whole fucking room shook, but at least there weren’t mice in the bathroom, and the place was fairly clean, and the men who came there weren’t quite as awful. I stayed there for nearly a year.”

“And then you went to Sunset?”

“I didn’t ‘go’ to Sunset, I founded Sunset,” she said. “But no, that was later. First I went to Vivacia.”

“Vivacia?”

“Best spa in Little Korea,” she said. “You’d like it. It’s actually a legitimate spa—well, ninety percent, anyway. It’s this little hideaway, open 24 hours, seven days a week. You can sit there all night, nobody bothers you. They’ve got a sauna made entirely out of jade, a glass steam room shaped like a diamond, soaking tubs spiked with ginseng and sake, and a dozen lovely ladies to give you a nice Korean body scrub. Get rid of all that dead skin and then finish you off with a luxurious baby oil massage. And what goes on when no one’s looking, well—that’s none of anyone’s business.

“And it’s upscale like you wouldn’t believe. None of this ‘$60 special’ business. At Vivacia it’s seventy dollars just to walk through the door and then each procedure costs extra.” Her voice dropped, and her guard seemed to drop with it. “I felt lucky to get a job there. Only the best looking girls do. No ajummas at Vivacia.”

“Ajummas?”

“You know, old ladies,” she said. “MIRN’Fs—Mums I’d Rather Not Fuck.”

That was a new one for me.

“Want to know how long I stayed there?” she said. “Three years. Want to know why I left? Because I got bored. And I wanted more money. Thought I’d make more if I set up my own operation. That’s why I started Sunset, about a year ago. And now I suppose you can figure out how old I am, if you really want to.”

I didn’t. I looked around. The guy who’d been watching us had wandered into view again, carrying his garbage to a trash can about thirty yards away. When it was thrown out, he stuck around, doing lazy stretches on the grass like he was getting ready for a run. The only thing was, he didn’t start running.

“I hope you don’t think I’m being impatient,” I said.

“But you want to know what I stole,” Julie said. “All right, Mr. Blake, I’ll tell you, since you’ve waited so nicely. I stole my customers. Not their customers—my customers. If they’d been their customers, they wouldn’t have come with me. Right? If what they liked was the jade sauna and the ginseng tub and the choice of a dozen girls, they’d have kept right on going to Vivacia, and the hell with me. Right? But no. They called me. They sent me e-mail. Even though all I had now was a room with a table on 28th Street. No sauna, no steam room, just me and my two little hands. And eventually a few other hands I brought on to keep up with demand.”

“How could they call you? How did they get your phone number?”

“How do you think? I gave it to them,” she said. “When I knew I was leaving to start my own place, I told all my regulars I was going and I told them where they could reach me. I was a good little entrepreneur. I printed up business cards with a phone number and an e-mail address and a little photo of me, and I made sure every customer left with one.”

“And one of them got back to your old boss,” I said.

She nodded. “Must’ve.”

“And you weren’t supposed to do that.”

“Ah, but no,” Julie said. “That’s the cardinal sin. Rule number one. They tell all the new girls, first day on the job, you must never give your personal contact information to a client you meet at work. Never. Sometimes they say it’s for your safety, like they care about your safety. But of course it’s for their safety. Because if the customers and the girls start making arrangements amongst themselves, the house gets cut out. Get the picture?”

I was starting to. “You left to go off on your own, you took their customers with you, they eventually heard about it, and they had to teach you a lesson.”

She tapped a finger to the side of her nose. “You’re a natural at this, Johnny.”

“So who did it? Who runs Vivacia?”

She cast her eyes downward, started teasing the grass back and forth. I raised her chin with an index finger and she slapped my hand away.

“Don’t touch me.”

She’d raised her voice and I noticed a few people looking in our direction. In the distance over her shoulder, I saw our brawny friend stand up.

“Julie, who runs Vivacia?” I said again.

Julie stood up, too. She shook her gloved hand in my face. “You want to end up like this?”

“Like that? Cassandra is dead. They had her killed, Julie. Do you understand?”

“Keep asking who did it and they’ll have you killed.”

“I’ll take that risk,” I said.

“Fine,” she spat, “you do that. And I’ll strew your ashes—do you prefer the East River or the Hudson?”

“Damn it, Julie, who runs Vivacia?”

“You really want to know? Here’s a name for you. Ardo. The Hungarian. Oh, you’ve heard of him! Good for you. Good for you. Now you know what you’re dealing with. You can go back to your nice little office, Johnny, with your pencils and your poetry and your button-down shirts, and when you go home at night you can get on your knees and thank god your worst problem is what grade you got on an exam, and not dealing with a man like—let go of me! Get your fucking hands off of me!”

But I didn’t. I lifted her bodily and shoved her around the corner of the building and dived after her. She’d