…
I woke up around nine in the morning on Tuesday and could not fall back to sleep, even though I had only been in bed a few hours. I went outside and walked around the Times Square. I was just about to light a cigarette when I saw two men looking at me, and I was sure they were Russian. I was standing in front of a beautiful Broadway theater. Maybe this was crazy paranoia, but I still wrapped my hand around the Makarov I had tucked into my skirt and hidden behind my jacket. And then, when I saw a yellow taxicab with its white light on near me, I waved to the man and jumped inside. I told him to go to Thirteenth Street. I just made that up. I had no reason to go to that street. When we got there, I told him to go to the Second Avenue. When we got to the Second Avenue, I told him to go to the Central Park. I kept looking out the back window like I was in one of the movies we used to watch back in Russia, but I never saw a car following me.
“What did you do?” the man asked me when we got to the Second Avenue. He was from India.
“Nothing.”
He didn’t believe me, and he asked me to pay him for the trip so far. He didn’t make me get out, but he wanted to be sure I had money. So I paid him and he started his meter all over again, and he drove to the First Avenue and turned his taxi so it was going north.
I finally got out near the Hudson River. Then I walked back to my hotel, past one of the two clubs where I had been stripping over the weekend.
I decided Sonja and I couldn’t get out of New York City fast enough, but I really wasn’t sure why Los Angeles would be better. I had a feeling I was going to be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life.
And I remember wishing I spoke French. If I did, I thought, maybe we could go to Paris. Sure there were Russians in Paris. But maybe not ones who wanted to kill me.
…
In my hotel room, I waited. I would have been so happy to watch an episode of The Bachelor on the TV, but there wasn’t one on.
So I just kept pressing the channels on the remote control, smoking more cigarettes, and thinking of how I wished Sonja had not knifed Pavel. How I wished Crystal had not talked to police guy. How I wished we had not come to America. I looked out at the bricks of the air shaft and the dirt on the walls, and I wondered if my mother in heaven could see what had happened to me. I wondered if my grandmother could. I wondered what Nayiri was doing. And I thought of Richard Chapman. I guessed he was back at his beautiful office in a sunny skyscraper somewhere, surrounded by other big-deal executives like him, and their secretaries and super fast computers—not like me, all alone in a room and very scared, with only stupid TV for company.
…
And then two o’clock in the afternoon came. And then three o’clock. I waited there all afternoon for my phone to ring that one time and then stop. It never did.
I kept flicking the safety on the gun off and on, off and on.
Finally at five o’clock I called Sonja’s number, let it ring once, and then hung up. But she didn’t ring back. Not at five or six or seven. Never.
And while I didn’t know what had happened to her, I knew in my heart I was never going to see my Sonja again. I prayed she was alive, but I was not confident. I was not confident at all. I had been in bad trouble before. I had been in bad trouble plenty of times. But this? I had never before felt so cornered and so scared for my life. They were coming for me—they had to be—and I had no idea how or where I could run.
Chapter Eleven
As lunchtime neared Thursday, Melissa walked between Emiko and Claudia back toward the brick school building after gym. Their class had just played soccer…yet again. Neither Melissa nor Emiko was a fan of the sport, but they certainly preferred the soccer unit to flag football. Claudia said she didn’t enjoy it either, but she brought the same feral energy to soccer that she brought to skiing and dancing and Xbox games. Still, even Claudia agreed that she would be happier in a few weeks when they were inside doing gymnastics.
Abruptly Claudia said, “I think we all know what it means.”
Melissa turned to her. Her friend had dirt all over her hands and arms and her chin. Claudia ran hard and kicked hard, and the girl had taken a couple of tumbles that morning. Melissa didn’t have to ask Claudia what she meant by it. Neither did Emiko. They all knew because they had all been thinking about it ever since Melissa had asked them that morning what they thought the term sex slave meant.
“I mean, we know about the slaves and we know what sex is,” Claudia went on.
“There were slaves who were men. Does that mean that a sex slave can be a man?” Emiko asked.
“I guess. But I bet they’re mostly girls. I mean, it’s an expression. Sex slave. Someone who is ordered to have sex.”