“What’s not easy?”
He gestures with his head to the casino and auction going on inside. “By the third or fourth time you do it, you’ll be fine.”
“You get used to it?” I ask.
“You get used to the money.”
I could flip him over the railing right now. He’d land in the parking lot or on the roof of one of the limousines.
“Life isn’t fair, Sofia Timurovna. You know this.”
“I do, Pan Kladivo.”
“If we didn’t do it, someone else would. Pack them up in cargo containers, send them to who knows where. Such a waste that would be. What we do is save, we may say rescue, the special ones, the best ones. We rescue them from being fucked by twenty men a night in some shithole roadside brothel. Most of these girls, the girls you see tonight, will eat better than they’ve ever eaten in their lives. Some will have running water for the first time. Not at all the life of a street whore.”
“Rescue them?”
“An expression. Perhaps not the right one.” He puffs thoughtfully, looks at me from the corners of his eyes. “Are you having second thoughts, Sofia Timurovna? Perhaps you are not the devil I imagined?”
I breathe deeply and turn to him. “I’m every bit the devil you imagined, Pan Kladivo,” I say. “Now let us go inside.”
Twenty-Eight
For the after-party, the ten winners are gathered on the third floor of the casino, the private floor, the floor onto which I was never permitted as a mere dealer. It’s a luxurious place, with leather couches soft as a baby’s skin and the heads of dead animals on the walls.
It is filled tonight with the bass-register laughter of men. Their faces glow orange in the light of the stone fireplace. Yet it is also a place of learning, my learning. They are my specimens of Homo horribilis, and I take careful notes on their behavior and social interactions. For example, I learn that when one buys something for hundreds of thousands of euros, a certain amount of courtesy is required of the seller, a certain amount of hospitality as one waits for money transfers to clear. I learn that even the pridefully efficient Swiss can take up to two hours to transfer funds between banks, and if one is of the class of lesser moguls or sheiks who banks in the Seychelles or—a sure sign of Russianness—Cyprus, it can take up to four.
I learn also that despite barriers of language and nationality and culture, men who buy women share many other common interests and have no trouble engaging one another in a spirit of comity and even sincere friendliness. The American natural gas magnate who collects antique aircraft finds a new best friend in the Chinese mobile phone king, and the brother-in-law of the cousin of the Saudi king might be said to be developing a man crush on the army general from Gambia. As for the Russian nickel baron, he’s teaching both the Indian advertising CEO and the British shipping heir how to dance with a bottle balanced on one’s head.
But rich men are impatient men, and all are waiting for the transfers to clear so they can depart to the third floor’s other wing, where their purchases await in opulent bedroom suites provided at no additional charge by tonight’s hosts.
While the accounts are balanced and travel visas for the women arranged through contacts in ten different foreign ministries, Bohdan and Roman serve cocktails and offer cigars they claim come from the personal stash of the late Saddam Hussein, whose sons were customers before the recent, we may say, unpleasantness.
I am at their side playing the role of the learner and eager girlfriend. The American shows me the proper way to clip the end of a cigar and, as he does so, pulls me onto his lap. The Saudi holds his glass of scotch to the light and shows me how to determine its quality by the color alone. The Russian proposes marriage, and I tell him I’ll consider it if things don’t work out with Roman.
Bohdan takes my upper arm. “You are a charming hostess, Sofia Timurovna,” he says under his breath. “You were right to come here tonight.” His face is a little redder now than earlier in the evening, and his voice a little less precise.
“Your clients are looking thirsty, Pan Kladivo. Allow me to bring another round of drinks.”
“Fine,” he says. “But no more for me.”
“Ah, but they’ll think you rude if you don’t join them, Pan Kladivo.” I smile. “One more. Something special.”
Bohdan sighs. “One more, but then only water for me.”
They are, every one of them, drunk and tired and happy. As I make for the exit, the American takes a slap at my ass. Everyone laughs, even me.
I slip away through the door and down the stairs to the bar, where Rozsa has been kept out of sight, making drinks for the winners. The bored bodyguards for the ten men upstairs are here, too, sentenced to a purgatory of mineral water and chitchat with one another. They spread out at the tables, thick men dressed in cheap black suits. Rozsa is frightened within a centimeter of her wits, frightened of them and the men upstairs. For though no women were permitted even as servers for the auction, she knows quite well why they’re here for the after-party.
“A bottle of tequila,” I say quietly, standing next to her behind the bar. “Do you have it?”
“Oh, yes,” she says. “A very good one, too.”
It’s not a common drink outside the Western Hemisphere and is therefore exotic and special. Everyone will have a taste. It’s the polite thing to do.
“Leave the bottle,” I say. “I’ll pour.”
“Are you sure?”
“Rozsa, do you remember my tarot? From the night I spent at your apartment?”
She pulls a handsome crystal bottle from the very highest shelf, standing on her tiptoes to get it. “Six of cups, the fool, and the death card,” she says.
“Rozsa, does anyone know you work here? Close friends in Praha, or family back home you might have told?”
She closes her eyes, ever the Hungarian, knowing somehow what comes next. “Only you are my friend. As for my family, I’ve been alone since I was twelve.”
I place the bottle on the bar and take her hands in mine. “Then you must do two things for me.”
“Yes, Sofia.”
“The first is, leave here. Leave the country. Now. And don’t come back. The second thing you must do, twenty minutes after you’re out the door, is call the police.”
She takes my hands, closes her eyes. “Another idea. We both leave. You and I. We walk out. France—or England. We could.”
When she opens her eyes, I give her a smile and shake my head.
Rozsa inhales, blinks at me. “So it’s as I dreamt, before you came. This is the gift.”
“I suppose it is.”
“And the police. What should I tell them?”
“Tell them—there’s been a massacre.”
*