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.
