“Yes, uh-huh.”
“Don’t worry, Alexandra, we’ll make some quick money at those places before we leave.”
“Leave for where?” I asked.
She tucked a lock of her platinum hair under her cap so you couldn’t see a single strand. Then she adjusted my cap so you couldn’t see any of my hair either.
“Well, we can’t go home,” she said. “Not to Volgograd and not to Yerevan.”
“Too much Vasily,” I agreed. Besides, she had no one left in Volgograd and I had no one left in Yerevan. All we had waiting for us in those places was shame.
“That’s right.”
“So?”
“So, we are going to Los Angeles. Land of the Bachelor. Land of the Kardashians. We are going to disappear into the most glamorous place on earth.”
Chapter Ten
All of the men at Philip Chapman’s bachelor party had described the two girls to the police, but they had agreed there were no photographs. Not a single one. Spencer Doherty swore that he hadn’t taken any pictures. (Did he protest too much? Days later Richard would wonder.)
It wasn’t simply that the men had found Pavel and Kirill utterly terrifying—though they did; as drunk as the men were, they were confident that the Russians with their shaved heads really would (worst case) break their fingers or (best case) break their phones if they tried capturing even a single image of either girl or five or ten seconds of video. No, the men kept their phones in their blazers or pants because none wanted to risk banishment from the party; none wanted to risk missing a moment of the girls’ performances; none wanted to jeopardize their chance to be taken by the talent to one of the other rooms in Philip’s brother-in-law’s house. (After reveler Martin Scofield returned to the living room and the blonde had retreated to the bathroom to—yet again—clean up, he told the men in detail how she had finished him off. She was insane, he’d said, she was ravenous; he’d never felt anything like it. After that? The men viewed the suburban living room—the whole house, really—as their own private seraglio. Each fully expected that he, too, would experience a moment of ineffable carnality with one of the girls, an episode that in memory would outlast the innumerable, inexorable indignities of old age, and offer a fodder for tumescence infinitely more powerful than even the bluest of pills.) And so the police sketch artists did what they could, creating one girl with platinum hair and one whose mane was jet black. They did what they could to bring the girls’ eyes to life, and capture the fullness of their lips. They tried to add the demure pitch to the nose of the girl who may (or may not) have been named Alexandra, and the slight upturn to the nose of the one who may (or may not) have been called Sonja. But the pictures were, in the end, relatively blunt objects; certainly they failed to convey the way each of the girls moved, a winsome fluidity that was lissome and licentious at once.
“Did they have any birthmarks or moles? Any tattoos?”
No, the men agreed—and this was one of the only things about which they were all in complete agreement—they did not. Their skin was flawless. Unsullied by either imperfection or ink.
…
Thursday morning when Richard woke up, he found a text from Spencer waiting for him on his phone.
So, how are you doing, buddy? Want to talk? I’m thinking of you and your family and your future at that bank of yours.
There was not a word in it that would look incriminating in a court of law, or appear even mildly threatening. But Richard understood perfectly well the subtext beneath the text.
…