“I don’t want you to walk away.”
“A part of you does, so you do not have to deal with the difficulties. How can you deny someone you love the experience of children? But how can you parent a child if you lack the will? So you tell me I should think, so you are not forced to choose.”
I didn’t know how to calculate the duration of our relationship, given the months we’d dwelled together platonically beforehand. But by my quick arithmetic, Nara and I had been lovers for all of three weeks. Couples often said, when things worked out, that they’d known it from the first instant, but I suspected there was a lot of retrospective reshaping in those declarations, no matter how clear it all seemed looking back. The wiser part of me knew that even if Nara sent Lewis packing, it would be a long time before the two of us would have a sure view of our future. But on the other hand, as a man who’d flunked out of every relationship before this one, I’d learned that it was never too early to calmly say, This will never work—if you were certain that was the case. Narawanda was right to require me to answer her question, even though a truthful response seemed far more elusive than my feelings about her.
“Do I actually have the right to make that choice?” I asked her. That might have sounded to her like a way to buy time, but to me it felt like the proper order for decision, what my contractor clients liked to call ‘the critical path.’ I would never be able to reach conclusions in the abstract.
“I think you do,” she said. “But I will tell you for sure after the weekend.”
36.
Bad Person—July 11
In Attila’s office, I had seen the pictures of her place in northern Kentucky, but in the height of summer, the farm and the surrounding landscape had a lushness and serenity that photography could never reflect. She lived about an hour from the Cincinnati airport, halfway to Louisville, outside of Carrollton. The site overlooked a tranquil stretch of the Ohio River, closely resembling the River Kindle beside which I’d passed much of my life, a bluish satin ribbon between the low green hills. Following GPS to the address I’d received from Merriwell’s assistant, I found myself at a call box beside yet another set of gold-tipped iron gates.
A woman answered, her accent distinct even as she said hello, and I gave my name, adding I was a friend of Attila’s. I was prepared to be refused—She’s not home, She’s busy, She’s sick, She doesn’t know you, Go way—but the motorized gates swung open, and I proceeded up a drive of fancy French pavers a good quarter of a mile. The house, all white stone but with Georgian looks in the grand McMansion style, was at the top of a knob behind several acres of velvety lawn, amid areas of deep woods.
Attila’s beautiful wife, a stately-looking woman even in her jeans, made her leisurely way from the house to greet me. She had straight black hair, shining like ravens’ wings, halfway down her back, and blue eyes that stood out from fifty feet.
I left the car and introduced myself. She was Valeria.
“Attila at store,” she said. “Back soon.” She sounded Russian or Polish, and not long from the boat. “You funny name. Remember from Attila.”
She offered coffee while I waited, and showed me in, past the stout oak doors at the entry, which were tooled with a coat of arms that I’m sure had nothing to do with Attila or her. The sleek kitchen, with its marble counters and appliances hidden in the sycamore cabinetry, was straight from a design magazine, and rivaled the luxe features I’d seen at Ellen and Howard’s.
Valeria produced a cup of coffee from a chrome device across the room, then seated herself on a black leather stool on one side of the counter and pointed me to another. The air grew a little thicker as I tried to figure out how to start a conversation.
“How did you meet Attila?” I asked.
She smiled thinly. “Bought me,” she said.
It had to be the accent, I figured.
“I’m sorry, but I thought you said she bought you.”
Valeria managed a grimly ironic smile. The story, even as she struggled with language, was riveting. Valeria was from Tiraspol in Moldova, where the post-Communist transition to a market economy had created a desperate time of cascading inflation, no work, and little food.
“Woman, Taja, say ‘Come Italy, be waitress.’” Taja took Valeria’s passport, supposedly in order to obtain Italian work permits. But once Taja had possession of the document, Valeria, along with four other girls, was forced at knifepoint into a horse van, in which they were driven for hours. Eventually, they found themselves on a small boat, making a nighttime passage into Bosnia. There she and approximately twenty other young women were taken to a barn and at gunpoint instructed to remove all their clothing. After inspection, they were sold. The woman who bought Valeria owned a club near Tuzla.
“Very mean, this woman. All the time she say her sons, ‘Bitter, bitter.’” Beat her, I realized. “Still hear when sleep.”
The first time Valeria was told to have sex with a patron, she refused. As it turned out, the bar owner had a customer who paid well for the right to be the first to beat and rape each of the women.
“We live four girls in room behind bar. This also place for meet with customers. Smells? Dirty rubbers on floor. Never wash sheets. Sleep six hours maybe. One time each day food, but four, five man. And she, boss lady, she say, ‘Escape? You got no work paper. I call police, they take you jail.’”
Valeria was told that after six months the debt she supposedly owed the club owner for the cost of bringing her here would be considered repaid and her passport returned. Instead, as the date approached, the owner informed Valeria that she had a new boss, who’d paid 3,000 deutsche marks for her.
“Was Attila. Seen before around bar. Was man, I’m thinking.” She again briefly deployed her taut smile. “Attila take me her house. Give me clothes, food. Say, ‘You want leave, leave. But you so beautiful, I cry.’ I say, ‘Okay, few days.’ Attila good. Very good. Very kind. Love very much. Here now, have everything.” She raised her long hands toward the kitchen and heaven above.
I pondered the obvious question, but after you screwed to stay alive, I would imagine tenderness made a big impression.
“Do you have friends here?”
“Some. Church. But Skype now all day with Moldova. Attila say, ‘How you learn English, talk all day Romanian?’ Understand English good. But can’t speak.”
I told her about my struggles with Dutch in the last several months. The front door slammed then.
“Hey, baby, who’s here?” Attila sang. She sounded lighthearted, but hung on the threshold when she saw me.
“Boom,” she said. She approached very slowly and shook my hand without the usual vigor. Her odd complexion was sunburned and her fashion sense had not improved. She wore plastic flip-flops, jeans cinched with a rope, and a T-shirt that did a good job of obscuring any sign of gender. “What the fuck you doin here, man?”
“I wanted to ask you some questions.”
“I thought you guys couldn’t investigate in the US.”
I had already guessed why Attila had headed for home so suddenly.
“We can’t,” I said. “This is for my own sake.”
“Just you and me?”
“I’ll tell Goos.”
“That’s all? Like it never happened? I just don’t want to get my dumb half-black, half-Hungarian ass in any deep roughage.”
“Did you do something wrong, Attila?”
“Well, fuck yeah, I did. You probably know that by now, don’t you, Boom?”
I wasn’t ready to give her any clues.
“I know you gave me a pretty good line,” I said.
“Not really,” she answered. “Mostly it was about what I didn’t say. I like you, Boom. I told you all along those Gypsies weren’t dead.”
“But you didn’t tell me you hid them.”