The Devil You Know

On the other side of the door there was a staircase, and at the top of the staircase there was another bar. Nobody was dancing up here, or at least not vertically and not anywhere I could see. About a dozen women in unfeasible underwear sat at the bar in small groups, talking in low voices. They all looked me over as I walked in, but seeing that I was with Scrub, they lost whatever interest they’d had in turning a trick and went back to their conversations.

“The members’ lounge,” Scrub rumbled.

Some old jokes rise from the dead often enough to arouse my professional concern, but there was nothing in Scrub’s imperturbable grimace to suggest that he saw the funny side of that phrase. I looked from him to the little clusters of working girls, then back again.

“How does Damjohn want me to do this?” I demanded. The thought of looking under the beds while these good ladies were earning their keep on top of them didn’t delight me.

“Check the knobs,” said Scrub.

Oh lord. I looked at him with pained interest, deciding that there had to be more.

He held his hand out in front of my face, fingers together, palm vertical—the “paper” position from rock/paper/scissors. “If the knob’s like that, the room’s empty. If it’s like this”—he rotated his hand through ninety degrees—“then there’s someone in there.”

“And what do I do with the occupied ones?”

“Miss them out,” rumbled Scrub. “Unless you want to look through the keyholes.”

I let that pass and started on my rounds. I’d been in three brothels in my life—one in Karachi (looking for beer), one on the Mile End Road (in my professional capacity), and the third in Nevada in a moment of weakness I regretted afterward and even during. All three had had a lot of things in common, and this one was cut from the same cloth. The rooms were all one degree more desolate even than hotel rooms. Each one just had the bed, the functional center of the room, a table with a few girly magazines strewn across it like holiday brochures (“you’re going to Brighton again this year, but would you like to see Paris, Rome, and the Algarve?”) and a small pedal bin with a thick plastic bag as a liner. There were no pictures on the walls and no ornaments on the bedside tables. No Gideon Bibles, either—this wasn’t the sort of place where either clients or employees let the distant prospect of salvation get in the way of the job in hand.

They were all clean, too. Not physically clean (although in fact they were that, too), but metaphysically clean. To tell the truth, I was a little spooked by it. It wasn’t just that there were no ghosts—a lot of places get away without being actively haunted. But any place that’s lived in ought to have a few psychic fingerprints on it: echoes of old emotions held in the stones or the air or the dust on the windowsill. This place had nothing. It felt like it had been scrubbed clean.

In other words, it didn’t need an exorcist because one had been through there already and done an immaculate job.

The rooms were on two floors, thirty-eight in all and twenty-one that were empty—still early, I suppose. I was as thorough as I know how to be. I even ventured into the bathrooms, which being the backstage area, so to speak, were a fair bit less polished than the bedrooms. But here too there was nothing to make my antennae quiver, unless the absence of anything suspicious is suspicious in its own right.

I reported back to Scrub. He was leaning against the bar at one end, and all of the whores had casually gravitated to the other end. It wasn’t just me who found the big man’s presence unsettling. When he saw me coming, he stood up, straightened his jacket with a shrug, and led the way back down the stairs.

“Felix!” Damjohn exclaimed, as if I’d been gone for hours and he’d started to get worried about me. He laid down his pen and closed his ledger, gesturing me once again to sit down facing him, but this time I didn’t bother.

“You’re spotless,” I told him. “Whiter than white. Under the circumstances, I’ll be happy to settle for half of what we agreed, since I didn’t have to do anything besides—”

He waved me silent.

“Nonsense,” he said. “Nonsense, Felix. I’m only too grateful you were able to come.” This was overlooking the fact that he’d sent Scrub along to make sure that I did. “Scrub, please take Mr. Castor through to the front desk and tell Arnold to pay him out of petty cash. Felix, a pleasure.”

He held out his hand, and reflexively I took it. That was a mistake.

FLASH. They’re all lined up on the concrete apron behind the factory’s loading bay. Men in green overalls, almost like those that doctors wear in the west, but darker; women in dirty smocks, their hair bound up in scarves. They all smell faintly of vinegar, because what the factory does, in the autumn months at least, is bottle pickles. The captain is happy and strokes my hair. He has to lean down, because even for my age, I’m small. “Which one is Bozin?” he murmurs, and I show him just by looking. He nods. Bozin evidently looks as the captain thinks he should. He gestures to the soldiers, who haul the man out of the line. A middle-age man like all the others, his face stolid and stupid. The captain puts away his pistol, which he has been waving, and borrows a rifle from one of the soldiers. Then he drives the butt of the rifle three times into that stupid, belligerent face while two of the soldiers hold Bozin upright. The blows are hard. The man’s nose is smashed, his teeth driven into his throat, one eye caved in. But when he falls to the ground, he isn’t yet dead. He’s still making liquid gurgling noises in his throat. The captain turns to me, makes a gesture that means “help yourself.” I kick Bozin in the balls.

FLASH. The woman, Mercedes, has become a point of pride with me, a badge that I wear when I go out at night. Her beauty, her sophistication, the expensive gloss that covers her like a sheath, these are the signs that I’m not a boy anymore. They say to everyone who sees us “Look at me and respect me.” Her very name is the name of a luxury car, a possession that screams out your status to the world. I’m sorry, sometimes, that I have to treat her with such cold contempt, but that’s the very heart of the matter. For me to win respect, I have to show that she needs and merits none. The more I belittle her, the greater I am. At first this is hard. But then one night we quarrel. She tries to leave me, and I beat her. That beating—the inflicting of terrible and unnecessary pain on someone who has brought me so much pleasure—is an annunciation. It’s so hard to stop.

FLASH. The houses that still stand are burning. I walk through the streets at my leisure, because no more shells will fall. I had property here, but nothing that I couldn’t afford to lose; I may even be compensated when the United Nations arrives with all its democratic fanfares and its bureaucratic paraphernalia. I contemplate a house that is about to fall, and I draw this moral. Yugoslavia itself was a house, precariously built and supported by only one beam. When that beam—Tito’s Communist party—was kicked away, it was inevitable that the boisterous children fighting and playing inside would bring the house down on their heads. Their heads, not mine. The house collapses in a shower of sparks and a billowing gust of ash and smoke that envelops me and blinds me for a moment. In the wreckage, a slender hand and arm, burned black—a child’s arm, perhaps, or the arm of a woman of slender build. Of course. That was what I was smelling. I wipe a smut of ash from my alpaca coat and am annoyed to find that it smears greasily rather than flaking off. This has become an uncivilized and tainted place. I walk on, but without hurry. There’s twelve hours yet before the plane leaves.

I jerked my hand away fast, my teeth coming together with an audible clack. That touch—that subliminal data-squirt of impressions—had taken less than a second.

Damjohn stared at me for a long, wordless moment. He knew from my face that something had just happened; he wasn’t sure what. He considered asking, weighing curiosity against the loss of authority he might suffer. I saw him make up his mind.

“I’m sure we’ll meet again,” he said at last, smiling a bland, meaningless smile. Just as he’d done before, he signaled that I was dismissed by lowering his eyes to his book. Scrub, who had missed the whole thing, was already lumbering back across the stage area toward the street door. A new blonde was dancing her way through a new set of lingerie, and the ranks of the mug punters had grown mighty.

Snatching up my coat, I crossed the room in Scrub’s broad wake. I had to fight against the bitter bile that was coming up in my throat. I kept it down. I wished I could do the same with the crawling tide of images and impressions that was still washing around inside my brain. I swore to myself that I was never coming here again, even if that hairy-eyed bastard sent the French Foreign Legion to pick me up.