The girl steps forward into the light of the streetlamp. She appears totally different from how she did in her act. She wears a cheap-looking fake-leather jacket and jeans with a hoodie underneath—but it’s also that she’s taken off all that thick makeup. She looks a lot less glamorous and at the same time much more beautiful. And younger. A lot younger. I didn’t get a proper look at her in the darkness near the cemetery that time—if you’d asked me I might have guessed late twenties. But now I’d say somewhere closer to eighteen or nineteen, the same sort of age as Mimi Meunier.
“Why did you come?” she hisses at us, in that thick accent. “To the club?”
I remember how she turned and sprinted away the first time we met. I know I have to tread very carefully here, not spook her.
“We’re still looking for Ben,” I say, gently. “And I feel like you might know something that could help us. Am I right?”
She mutters something under her breath, the word that sounds like “koorvah.” For a moment I think she might be about to turn and sprint away again, like she did the first time we met. But she stays put—even steps a little closer.
“Not here,” she whispers. She looks behind her, nervous as a cat. “We must go somewhere else. Away from this place.”
At her lead we walk away from the posh streets with the fancy cars and the glitzy shop windows. We walk through avenues with red-and-gold-fronted cafés with wicker seats outside, like the one I met Theo in, signs advertising Prix Fixe menus, groups of tourists still mooching about aimlessly. We leave them behind too. We walk through streets with bars and loud techno, past some sort of club with a long queue snaking around the corner. We enter a new neighborhood where the restaurants have names written in Arabic, in Chinese, other languages I don’t even recognize. We pass vape shops, phone shops that all look exactly the same, windows of mannequins wearing different style wigs, stores selling cheap furniture. This is not tourist Paris. We cross a traffic intersection with a bristle of flimsy-looking tents on the small patch of grass in the middle, a group of guys cooking stuff on a little makeshift stove, hands in their pockets, standing close to keep warm.
The girl leads us into an all-night kebab place with a flickering sign over the door and a couple of small metal tables at the back, rows of strip lights in the ceiling. We sit down at a greasy little Formica table in the corner. It’s hard to imagine anywhere more different from the low-lit glamor of the club we’ve just left. Maybe that’s exactly why she’s chosen it. Theo orders us each a carton of chips. The girl takes a huge handful of hers and dunks them, all together, into one of the pots of garlic sauce then somehow crams the whole lot hungrily into her mouth.
“Who’s he?” she mumbles through her mouthful, nodding at Theo.
“This is Theo,” I say. “He works with Ben. He’s helping me. I’m Jess. What’s your name?”
A brief pause. “Irina.”
Irina. The name is familiar. I remember what Ben had scribbled on that sheet of wine accounts I found in his dictionary. Ask Irina.
“Ben said he would come back,” she says suddenly, urgently. “He said he would come back for me.” There’s something in her expression I recognize. Aha. Someone else who has fallen in love with my brother. “He said he would get me away from that place. Help find a new job for me.”
“I’m sure he was working on it,” I say cautiously. It sounds quite like Ben, I think. Promising things he can’t necessarily deliver. “But like I said before, he’s disappeared.”
“What has happened?” she asks. “What do you think has happened to him?”
“We don’t know,” I tell her. “But I found a card for the club in his stuff. Irina, if there’s anything you can tell us, anything at all, it might help us find him.”
She sizes both of us up. She seems confused by being in this unfamiliar position of power. And frightened, too. Glancing over her shoulder every few seconds.
“We can pay you,” I say. I look across at Theo. He rolls his eyes, pulls out his wallet.
When we’ve agreed on an amount of cash Irina is happy with—depressingly small, actually—and after she’s finished the chips and used up both of our pots of garlic sauce, she draws one leg up against the table protectively, the skin of her knee pale and bruised in one spot through the ripped denim. For some reason this makes me think of playground scrapes, the child she was not so long ago.
“You have a cigarette?” she asks Theo. He passes her one and she lights up. Her knee is juddering against the table, so hard that the little salt and pepper shakers are leaping up and down.
“You were really good by the way,” I say, trying to think of something safe to begin with. “Your dancing.”
“I know,” she says, seriously, nodding her head. “I’m very good. The best at La Petite Mort. I trained as a dancer, before, where I come from. When I came for the job, they said it was for dancing.”
“It seemed like the audience really enjoyed it,” I say. “The show. I thought your performance was very . . .” I try and think of the right word. “Sophisticated.”
She raises her eyebrows, then makes a kind of ha sound without any humor in it.
“The show,” she mutters. “That’s what Ben wanted to know about. It seemed like he knew some things already. I think someone told him some of it, maybe.”
“Told him some of what?” I prompt.
She takes a long drag on her cigarette. I notice that her hand is shaking. “That the show, all of it: it’s just—” She seems to be searching for the right words. “Window . . . looking. No. Window shopping. Not what that place is really about. Because afterward they come downstairs. The special guests.”
“What do you mean?” Theo says, sitting forward. “Special guests?”
A nervous glance out through the windows at the street. Then suddenly she’s fumbling the roll of notes Theo gave her back out of her jacket pocket, thrusting it at him.
“I can’t do this—”
“Irina,” I say, quickly, carefully, “we’re not trying to get you in any trouble. Trust me. We won’t go blabbing to anyone. We’re just trying to find out what Ben knew, because I think that might help us find him. Anything you can tell us might be useful in some way. I’m . . . really scared for him.” As I say it my voice breaks: it’s no act. I lean forward, begging her. “Please. Please help us.”
She seems to be absorbing all this, deciding. I watch her take a long breath. Then, in a low voice, she begins to talk.
“The special guests pay for a different kind of ticket. Rich men. Important men. Married men.” She holds up her hand for emphasis, touches her ring finger. “We don’t know names. But we know they are important. With—” she rubs her thumb and forefinger together: money. “They come downstairs. To the other rooms, below. We make them feel good. We tell them how handsome they are, how sexy.”
“And do they,” Theo coughs, “buy . . . anything?”