Skin Trade by Reggie Nadelson Read Free Book Online

wreckage of the meal. Finally, she pulled out a picture of her and Lily.
    Two girls in Bermuda shorts and sandals, both laughing at the camera, their arms around each other. It was a bright summer’s day; you could see the way the sun made them squint. Lily’s red hair was long. It hung on her shoulders like a curtain.
    â€œWhen was this?”
    â€œTwenty-five ago maybe. We were at some kind of film festival, a woman’s documentary film festival on Woman’s Day, May that year, I think. East Berlin, if you can believe it. Fucking East Berlin what was.” She snorted.
    Without any make-up and the long hair, Lily looked incredibly young and very pretty. In the pink tank top, her shoulders were bony. Martha, who was wearing a green Dashiki over her Bermuda shorts, wasn’t looking at the camera; she was looking at Lily.
    Across the table from me, Martha gnawed the edge of her thumb. “OK, I had a thing for her, OK? I did. I didn’t even know it. I mean it’s not like I’m into women, exactly. I got married, I had kids, you know. Got divorced, too.” She forced a smile. “It was just Lily. She was different. She was so alluring. You’d go to arestaurant or a rally, people would look at her. I mean she turned heads, you know? It’s the way I always thought of it. She turned heads. Also, she’d do anything on a dare. She was physically fearless.” Martha snatched the picture off the table and shoved it back into the pile of pictures, snapped the rubber band on, pushed it back in her bag. “I guess I was sort of in love with her.”
    I reached over and tugged her sleeve. “Aren’t we all?”
    â€œThank you for that, honey.”
    â€œYou call everyone honey?”
    â€œOnly people I like.”
    â€œIt’s OK, you know, about loving Lily. Just talk to me about the other night when you saw her, OK?”
    Martha said, “I’m trying. So you think that’s why she wanted to see me, Artie? It sounds right, doesn’t it? one of her causes?”
    â€œDid Lily know that’s what you do?”
    Martha said, “Sure she knew. She’d heard from a friend in London, a woman on the Guardian I know. She said she wanted to see the shelter I run. See what I was doing. Maybe meet some of the women. I wasn’t at all sure it wasn’t just her being nice about my work, the kind of thing you tell an old friend. I told her she better come wearing jeans or something, or they’d think she was awfully hotsy-totsy, you know?”
    â€œYou made the date?”
    Martha nodded.
    Battered women are one of Lily’s causes. She puts a lot of time into an agency that runs shelters in New York, London, Third World countries. Her battered women are somebody’s cast-offs, someone’s humanjunk: a fourteen-year-old girl so badly burned by her boyfriend she stabs her own baby to death; a grandmother who puts up with a son-of-a-bitch husband who beats her to a pulp because it’s all she knows and thinks she loves him anyhow. Hopeless, sad, ordinary women, but not whores.
    â€œYou think she got involved?” I said.
    â€œHow?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œWhat kind of prostitutes come to your shelter?”
    â€œWhat kind are there?”
    â€œCall-girls? Hookers? French? Foreign?”
    â€œMostly they come off the street. Kids, a lot of them. The pimps bring them into town, the girls hit the streets, I clean up the mess afterwards. Bitches, the French cops call them.” She put on an accent. “Beech.”
    â€œIt’s big business?”
    â€œVery big.”
    â€œRussians?” I knew it was Russians. Whenever I was involved, or anyone close to me, there was usually a Russian connection. I could never completely shake it.
    â€œSome Russians. A lot of them have more ambition now, you know, get a husband, be a supermodel. There’s Russian money around the Champs-Elysées.