Jess

Jess

The girl steps forward into the light of the streetlamp. She appears totally different from how she did in her act. She wears a cheap-looking fake-leather jacket and jeans with a hoodie underneath—but it’s also that she’s taken off all that thick makeup. She looks a lot less glamorous and at the same time much more beautiful. And younger. A lot younger. I didn’t get a proper look at her in the darkness near the cemetery that time—if you’d asked me I might have guessed late twenties. But now I’d say somewhere closer to eighteen or nineteen, the same sort of age as Mimi Meunier.

“Why did you come?” she hisses at us, in that thick accent. “To the club?”

I remember how she turned and sprinted away the first time we met. I know I have to tread very carefully here, not spook her.

“We’re still looking for Ben,” I say, gently. “And I feel like you might know something that could help us. Am I right?”

She mutters something under her breath, the word that sounds like “koorvah.” For a moment I think she might be about to turn and sprint away again, like she did the first time we met. But she stays put—even steps a little closer.

“Not here,” she whispers. She looks behind her, nervous as a cat. “We must go somewhere else. Away from this place.”

At her lead we walk away from the posh streets with the fancy cars and the glitzy shop windows. We walk through avenues with red-and-gold-fronted cafés with wicker seats outside, like the one I met Theo in, signs advertising Prix Fixe menus, groups of tourists still mooching about aimlessly. We leave them behind too. We walk through streets with bars and loud techno, past some sort of club with a long queue snaking around the corner. We enter a new neighborhood where the restaurants have names written in Arabic, in Chinese, other languages I don’t even recognize. We pass vape shops, phone shops that all look exactly the same, windows of mannequins wearing different style wigs, stores selling cheap furniture. This is not tourist Paris. We cross a traffic intersection with a bristle of flimsy-looking tents on the small patch of grass in the middle, a group of guys cooking stuff on a little makeshift stove, hands in their pockets, standing close to keep warm.

The girl leads us into an all-night kebab place with a flickering sign over the door and a couple of small metal tables at the back, rows of strip lights in the ceiling. We sit down at a greasy little Formica table in the corner. It’s hard to imagine anywhere more different from the low-lit glamor of the club we’ve just left. Maybe that’s exactly why she’s chosen it. Theo orders us each a carton of chips. The girl takes a huge handful of hers and dunks them, all together, into one of the pots of garlic sauce then somehow crams the whole lot hungrily into her mouth.

“Who’s he?” she mumbles through her mouthful, nodding at Theo.

“This is Theo,” I say. “He works with Ben. He’s helping me. I’m Jess. What’s your name?”

A brief pause. “Irina.”

Irina. The name is familiar. I remember what Ben had scribbled on that sheet of wine accounts I found in his dictionary. Ask Irina.

“Ben said he would come back,” she says suddenly, urgently. “He said he would come back for me.” There’s something in her expression I recognize. Aha. Someone else who has fallen in love with my brother. “He said he would get me away from that place. Help find a new job for me.”

“I’m sure he was working on it,” I say cautiously. It sounds quite like Ben, I think. Promising things he can’t necessarily deliver. “But like I said before, he’s disappeared.”

“What has happened?” she asks. “What do you think has happened to him?”

“We don’t know,” I tell her. “But I found a card for the club in his stuff. Irina, if there’s anything you can tell us, anything at all, it might help us find him.”

She sizes both of us up. She seems confused by being in this unfamiliar position of power. And frightened, too. Glancing over her shoulder every few seconds.

“We can pay you,” I say. I look across at Theo. He rolls his eyes, pulls out his wallet.

When we’ve agreed on an amount of cash Irina is happy with—depressingly small, actually—and after she’s finished the chips and used up both of our pots of garlic sauce, she draws one leg up against the table protectively, the skin of her knee pale and bruised in one spot through the ripped denim. For some reason this makes me think of playground scrapes, the child she was not so long ago.

“You have a cigarette?” she asks Theo. He passes her one and she lights up. Her knee is juddering against the table, so hard that the little salt and pepper shakers are leaping up and down.

“You were really good by the way,” I say, trying to think of something safe to begin with. “Your dancing.”

“I know,” she says, seriously, nodding her head. “I’m very good. The best at La Petite Mort. I trained as a dancer, before, where I come from. When I came for the job, they said it was for dancing.”

“It seemed like the audience really enjoyed it,” I say. “The show. I thought your performance was very . . .” I try and think of the right word. “Sophisticated.”

She raises her eyebrows, then makes a kind of ha sound without any humor in it.

“The show,” she mutters. “That’s what Ben wanted to know about. It seemed like he knew some things already. I think someone told him some of it, maybe.”

“Told him some of what?” I prompt.

She takes a long drag on her cigarette. I notice that her hand is shaking. “That the show, all of it: it’s just—” She seems to be searching for the right words. “Window . . . looking. No. Window shopping. Not what that place is really about. Because afterward they come downstairs. The special guests.”

“What do you mean?” Theo says, sitting forward. “Special guests?”

A nervous glance out through the windows at the street. Then suddenly she’s fumbling the roll of notes Theo gave her back out of her jacket pocket, thrusting it at him.

“I can’t do this—”

“Irina,” I say, quickly, carefully, “we’re not trying to get you in any trouble. Trust me. We won’t go blabbing to anyone. We’re just trying to find out what Ben knew, because I think that might help us find him. Anything you can tell us might be useful in some way. I’m . . . really scared for him.” As I say it my voice breaks: it’s no act. I lean forward, begging her. “Please. Please help us.”

She seems to be absorbing all this, deciding. I watch her take a long breath. Then, in a low voice, she begins to talk.

“The special guests pay for a different kind of ticket. Rich men. Important men. Married men.” She holds up her hand for emphasis, touches her ring finger. “We don’t know names. But we know they are important. With—” she rubs her thumb and forefinger together: money. “They come downstairs. To the other rooms, below. We make them feel good. We tell them how handsomethey are, how sexy.”

“And do they,” Theo coughs, “buy . . . anything?”

Irina stares at him blankly.

I think his delicacy might have been lost in translation.

“Do they pay for sex?” I ask, lowering my voice to a murmur—wanting to show we have her back. “That’s what he means.”

Again she glances at the windows, out at the dark street. She’s practically hovering in her seat, looking like she’s ready to leg it at any moment.

“Do you want more money?” I prompt. I kind of want her to ask for more. I’m sure Theo can afford it.

She nods, quickly.

I nudge Theo. “Go on then.”

A little reluctantly he pulls another couple of notes out of his pocket, slides them across the table to her. Then, almost like she’s reading from some sort of script, she says: “No. It is illegal in this country. To pay.”

“Oh.” Theo and I look at each other. I think we must both be thinking the same thing. In that case, then what . . . ?

But she hasn’t finished. “They don’t buy that. It’s clever. They buy wine. They spend big money on wine.” She spreads her hands to demonstrate this. “There’s a code. If they ask for a ‘younger’ vintage that’s the kind of girl they want. If they ask for one of the ‘special’ vintages it means they’d like . . . extras. And we do everything they want us to. We do whatever they ask. We’re theirs for the night. They choose the girl—or girls—they want, and they go to special room with a lock on the door. Or we go somewhere with them. Hotel, apartment—”

“Ah,” Theo says, grimacing.

“The girls at the club. We don’t have family. We don’t have money. Some have run from home. Some—many—are illegal.” She sits forward. “They have our passports, too.”

“So you can’t leave the country,” I say, turning to Theo. “That’s fucking dark.”

“I can’t go back there anyway,” she says, suddenly, fiercely. “To Serbia. It wasn’t—it wasn’t a good situation back home.” She adds, defensively: “But I never thought—I never thought that would be where I’d end up, a place like that. They know we won’t go to the police. One of the clients, some girls say he is police. Important police. Other places get shut down all the time. But not that place.”

“Can you actually prove that?” Theo asks, sitting forward.

At this, she checks over her shoulder and lowers her voice. Then she nods. “I took some photos. Of the one they say is police.”

“You’ve got photos?” Theo leans forward, eagerly.

“They take our phones. But when I started speaking to Ben he gave me a camera. I was going to give this to your brother.” A hesitation. Her eyes dart between us and the window. “More money,” she says.

Both of us turn to Theo, wait as he finds some more cash and puts it on the table between us.

She fumbles her hand into the pocket of her jacket, then takes it back out, fist clenched, knuckles showing white. Very carefully, like she’s handling something explosive, she places a memory card on the table and pushes it toward me. “They’re not such good photos. I had to be so careful. But I think it’s enough.”

“Here,” Theo says, reaching out a hand.

“No,” Irina says, looking at me. “Not him. You.”

“Thank you.” I take it, slide it into my own jacket pocket. “I’m sorry,” I say, because it seems suddenly important to say it. “I’m sorry this has happened to you.”

She shrugs, hunches into herself. “Maybe it’s better than other things. You know? At least you’re not going to end up murdered at the end of an alley or in the Bois de Boulogne, or raped in some guy’s car. We have more control. And sometimes they buy us presents, to make us feel good. Some of the girls get nice clothes, jewelry. Some go on dates, become girlfriends. Everybody’s happy.”

Except she looks anything but happy.

“There’s even a story—” She leans closer, lowers her voice.

“What?” Theo asks.

“That the owner’s wife came from there.”

I stare at her. “What, from the club?”

“Yes. That she was one of the girls. So I guess it worked out OK for some.”

I’m trying to process this. Sophie Meunier? The diamond earrings, the silk shirts, the icy stare, the penthouse apartment, the whole vibe of being better than everyone else . . . she was one of them? A sex worker?

“But it’s not rich husbands for everyone. Some guys—they refuse to wear anything. Or they take it off when you’re not looking. Some girls get, you know . . . sick.”

“You mean STIs?” I ask.

“Yes.” And then in a small voice: “I caught something.” She makes a face, a grimace of disgust and embarrassment. “After that, I knew I had to leave. And some girls get pregnant. It happens, you know? There’s a story too, about a girl a long, long time ago—maybe it’s just a rumor. But they say she got pregnant and wanted to keep it, or maybe it was too late to do something . . . anyway, when she went into—” She mimes doubling over with pain.

“Labor?”

“Yes. When that happened she came to the club; she had no other place to go. When you’re illegal, you’re scared to go to hospital. She had the baby in the club. But they said it was a bad birth. Too much blood. They took her body away, no one ever knows she existed. No problem. Because she wasn’t official.”

Jesus Christ.“And you told all this to Ben?” I ask her.

“Yes. He said he would make sure I was safe. Help me out. A new start. I speak English. I’m clever. I want a normal job. Waitressing, something like that. Because—” Her voice wavers. She puts up a hand to her eyes. I see the shine of tears. She swipes at them with the heel of her hand, almost angrily, like she doesn’t have time for crying. “It’s not what I came to this country for. I came for a new life.”

And even though I never cry I feel my own eyes pricking. I hear her. Every woman deserves that. The chance of a new life.