Skin Trade by Reggie Nadelson Read Free Book Online Page B

given me her cell phone number; I called her.
    â€œI can’t talk,” she said. “I’m working.”
    â€œWhen you saw Lily, how was her hair?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œHer hair.”
    â€œLook, Artie, I’m in a meeting, I can’t talk now. I don’t remember anything special about Lily’s hair. I’ll call you,” she said and hung up.
    But I didn’t believe her. Martha was crazy about Lily. She would have noticed her hair if it was chopped up ugly. I tried Martha again but the phone was switched off.

4
    In the hospital waiting room a TV set droned on in French. What I could make out, there was an ice storm predicted, bad weather, a strike by French truckers. I couldn’t sit still. The cop, Gourad, was probably doing what he could but he had a boss who didn’t like me, and Martha Burnham had her own agenda.
    I worked the phone as best I could. Tolya Sverdloff would come if I called him, but we’d had a fight and I couldn’t ask. I felt I was hanging on to the surface of a frozen pond where the ice was cracking and if I didn’t crawl forward, I’d fall through or freeze to death.
    After a while, I went back to the hotel, got some sleep. I tried the phone again, looking for a contact in New York who had a line to the French police. I wanted someone with clout. The system here crackled with bureaucracy: there were heads and sub-heads and officials and sub-officials, and all of them had spokesmen and press officers, and I couldn’t get anything at all.
    The coffee in my hand was cold. I drank it anyway for the caffeine and sat on the edge of the chair looking atthe wall where the wallpaper ended. There was a section of peeling paint. It made me think of Moscow. It made me think of our apartment. My father, when I was young, was in the KGB. He was a star. He was handsome and charming and very good at what he did. He believed; he was a true believer in the Soviet enterprise. His father had fought the Nazis.
    My pop wasn’t stupid. He knew there were problems, but for him the ideology was such a shining idea he clung to it. And we had privileges. A car. We had a decent apartment. We had some nice furniture. We got a paint job every few years. Then it changed. My mother, who’s Jewish, turned angry. She saw the cracks in the Soviet fairy tale. She understood about the lies and the corruption, and she couldn’t keep quiet. She knew we would have to leave some day; she made me learn English. She made me understand the West and gave me a craving for it with books like Catcher in the Rye and Louis Armstrong records. Then my father lost his job.
    KGB creeps in bad raincoats watched our building. We moved to a smaller apartment and there was never any paint. I remembered. I remembered how the paint began to peel, the cracks grew in the plaster and my mother tried to paper them over with pages from a magazine. By the time we got out, by the time we left Moscow, half the paint on the kitchen wall had peeled off.
    The phone beeped me now, but it was only a message from Keyes. I knew I better pay some attention to the case I was supposed to be working in the first place. I needed the money. I needed money if I was going totake care of Lily. It was a decent job and Keyes was a good firm. I liked the security work they put my way, it paid the rent.
    After they threw me out of the hospital I went back to the hotel and sat up most of the night re-reading the case.
    Keyes Security is based in New York, but it has branches in LA and in London, where they run the European business. They’re always looking for ex-cops with some education who can do a couple of languages. Me, I do Russian, Hebrew, some French.
    The private security business is big – it’s been getting bigger ever since those freaks hit the World Trade Center last year. People are scared of everything and they’re probably right. You can’t go anywhere without people talking