“Twenty.”
“Are you ever seen by a doctor?”
“We are all seen every two weeks by a doctor to inspect us for AIDS and other diseases. We urge our clients to wear condoms, and they almost always do if we put it to them correctly. You know, we say, ‘I’m much more stimulated by a man with a condom,’ or some nonsense like that.”
“Why are you a prostitute?”
“Money. I am from a very small town where there are few jobs and those that exist pay little and usually require that a girl please a boss or a foreman. I can make in one month here what it would take me a year to make in my town.”
“Do you plan to stop being a prostitute someday?”
The girl shrugged.
“I do not know. I may save enough in three years to go to school here in Moscow and become a hotel manager or a pastry chef.”
“Do you have any goals while you continue to work as a prostitute?”
“To move up.”
The girl lifted her hand gracefully with palm down and wrist bent, reminding Iris of a swan. She made a note of the movement.
“Up?”
“We are above the lowest level, the girls who line up in tunnels, maybe twenty of them, in rain, cold, standing all night, hoping to catch the eye of a customer brought by one of the men whose job it is to bring them.”
“And where. .?” Iris began.
“Do they take the customers? To reserved rooms in nearby hotels.”
“So what is ‘up’ for you?”
“To be one of the women with their own hotel room or one who goes to hotel rooms of visiting businessmen from all over the world. We get double what the tunnel girls get, but the hotel room girls get more than double what we get.”
“How would you get to be a hotel girl?”
“By being selected for looks and a certain sophistication and acting ability. Much of what we do is acting.”
“I would guess that you have a very good chance at going up. Who do you work for?”
“Daniel.”
“No, I mean who else? What is this operation called? Who runs it?”
“That I do not know,” said the girl with an apologetic smile.
“You are acting now?”
“Perhaps. I do not know anyone involved but Daniel and the other girls. I do not wish to know. If you talk to any of the other girls, you will get less from them than you have gotten from me.”
“Do you have regular customers?”
“A few.”
“Do you know their names?”
“Only first names. Never last names. Just Sergei, Boris, Igor, never a Pavel Petrov or-”
“Pavel Petrov?” Iris jumped in.
“Random example of the anonymous names of my clients,” Svetlana said, nervously glancing up at an air vent on the wall.
“I see,” said Iris, displaying nothing and not writing the name in her notebook.
Pavel Petrov, unless this was a different Pavel Petrov, was a deputy director of Gasprom. Government- owned Gasprom was the largest provider of natural gas in the world, and possibly the largest corporation in the world. It was the economic razor that could be and had been held to the neck of Ukraine and Western Europe, and Pavel Petrov was one of Gasprom’s principal spokesmen, a family man with a loving wife and three beautiful children. Iris knew this because she had interviewed Pavel Petrov the last time she had come to Russia for a story.
The dropping of Petrov’s name was news on which Iris Templeton might be able to hang a scandal.
She wanted to place the name into the conversation, though she really had no more questions.
“Are you fed well?”
“We are not prisoners,” Svetlana said. “We go out. We pay for our own food.”
“You have friends among the other girls?”
“Not really. It does not pay. They move up or down or out quickly. It does not pay to have friends.”
The door opened and Daniel Volkovich came in smiling.
“Time is up,” he said. “You have one last question?”
“No,” said Iris, rising but keeping her eyes on Svetlana, who was looking at Daniel with apprehension.
“Then we will thank our little Svetlana,” he said. “And perhaps reward her for her valuable time.”
“How much of a reward?” Iris asked.
“I would say two hundred euros would be sufficient. You agree, Svetlana?”
The girl said, “Yes,” and tried to hide the quiver in her voice.
“If you don’t have-” Daniel began.
“I have it,” Iris said, opening her purse, putting the notebook inside, and removing her wallet.
When she finished handing the girl the money, Iris followed Daniel Volkovich toward the door. Daniel paused in the corridor just outside Svetlana’s room.
“So,” he said. “You have what you need?”
“I have what you want me to have,” she said.
“I do not understand.”
“Svetlana’s a fine actress,” Iris said, facing him.
“Yes, but I do not understand.”
“Pavel Petrov,” she said.
His grin turned into a nervous laugh.
“How did you know?”
“She’s too smart to make a mistake like dropping the name of a powerful client. You want me to have Pavel Petrov’s name. Why?”
The man looked at the painting on the wall for about fifteen seconds and then made a decision and spoke after a sigh.
“You will write your story and expose Petrov. I will be left out of your story and emerge as the logical choice as his successor.”
“We use each other,” she said.
“Precisely, and if you want to seal the enterprise in Room Four just down the hall I will be happy to help you do so.”
“A tempting offer,” she said, “but I don’t want to be on tape and get blackmailed as we are trying to do to Pavel Petrov.”
“As you please,” he said, opening the door to where the other prostitutes in the glow of a lamp were looking toward Iris. “I’ll take you to your hotel.”
“Thank you,” she said as he went from the yellow room filled with the smell of women and perfume through a door into darkness and the pungent smell of tobacco.
On the drive to her hotel, Daniel did all of the talking. She absorbed little of it. There had been times in her career when she had been awake for three days and there had been others when she had grown tired and in need of sleep after a few hours. She had anticipated a three-day buzz. It had turned into an eight-hour day that rested heavy within her. But still, she had something she wanted to do.
“Do you still want to pretend to be a prostitute?” he asked as he pulled into the small driveway in front of the Zaray Hotel.
“No,” she said, reaching for the door handle.
