The Guest Room (11 page)

“Well, those two girls have considerably more to worry about than I do. Or, I guess, than Spencer does. Or you do.”

“They killed people. That's kind of obvious.”

“They might have been sex slaves.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I'm serious.”

“They were high-class escorts if they were anything,” his brother said. “Well paid. Gym memberships. Have a little Pink Wink in their medicine cabinets.”

“What in the name of God is Pink Wink?”

“Intimate bleach cream. Are you really that naive?”

“So it would seem. How do you know such things? Nicole?”

“I wish! I know because I'm a hotelier. We're paid to know such things. It's what we do.”

“Please. I can't believe your hotelier bosses are going to be happy when they read about this.”

“They'll be fine. It is what it is.”

“I don't even know what that expression really means. I think it means nothing.”

“I'm telling you, they'll be okay. But your bosses? That might be another story, right?”

“Sadly, yes. I think you're right. Franklin McCoy will not be pleased.”

“Spencer might get a little grief from management for booking the girls,” Philip said. “Well, not for booking the girls—but for booking the girls from someplace sketchy. He didn't use the service we usually use.”

“There's such a thing as a service you usually use?”

“I love how innocent you are, my older brother,” Philip said, stressing the word
older
in a way that was both loving and condescending. “Yes, we do have our go-to girls for this sort of thing.”

“Okay, then: Why didn't Spencer use them?”

“He was trying something new. Not completely new. He'd used the service that offers girls like Sonja and whatever-her-name-was—the one you did—once before, and it was awesome. The girls were wild—but wild in a yeah-I'll-do-that sort of way. Not wild in a I'm-going-to-jump-on-your-back-and-cut-your-head-off sort of way. And he wanted something wild for me. For you. For us.”

“His heart was in the right place.”

“It really was. How was he to know they'd send over two batshit crazy strippers? How was he to know you'd wind up with a couple of dead guys in your living room and front hall?”

“I gotta go,” Richard said suddenly, surprising even himself. He'd dreaded talking to his younger brother, and the few minutes on the phone had been worse than he had expected. “Kris will be back any second.”

“Say hi for me.”

“I will,” Richard lied. “I will.”

Melissa sat on the plush carpet in her grandmother's living room and matched up her new tights with her new skirts. Her grandmother sat in the yellow easy chair beside the fireplace and read a biography of Amelia Earhart. Cassandra, unused to this new environment, was gazing down at the world a little warily from the top of the back of the couch. Occasionally her grandmother would speak, sharing something about the aviator's life that she had just read or commenting yet again on how unusual or clever the tights were, and Melissa had figured out the pattern: her grandmother spoke the second after they had heard her mother sobbing or her father raising his voice in desperation. Not anger; more like panic. Incredulity. Disbelief. Her parents were down the corridor and behind the closed door of the guest bedroom, but still the sound traveled. Melissa thought of the girls and boys she knew whose parents had gotten divorced. Sometimes the children had moved away; sometimes not. They lived in multiple homes, spending some nights with one parent and some nights with the other. Occasionally they fell behind in their schoolwork. The boys “acted out.” (That was the expression her teachers used; her own mother had used it on occasion, too.) The girls grew quiet.

She ate one of the chocolates her father had brought her and looked at the tights with the face cards. Kings and queens and jacks. A harlequin. She thought of fairy tales and wondered why there wasn't a card with a princess. There should have been. It didn't make sense. It was always the princesses that people cared about. She couldn't name a single Disney prince, but instantly she could count on her fingers seven or eight of the princesses. She had met three of them at Disney World a couple of years ago, and now she rolled her eyes when she recalled how she had actually believed at the time that she was meeting Cinderella, Belle, and Snow White.

“This biographer thinks she and her copilot crash-landed on a reef and survived,” her grandmother was saying. “They were on this little island for weeks and could have been rescued. Can you imagine?”

She didn't want her parents to get divorced. She wanted only to go home. In her mind she saw a picture from one of her thick books of fairy tales—a book that was so old it had once belonged to her grandmother's mother—of an ominous house in the woods. The second-floor windows were eyes, the French front doors a mouth. In the story, the house was described as brooding. She would have called it hungry.

She told herself she would be brave, if only because she hadn't a choice. But she was scared. She was, she realized, scared for the first time in her life.

A few minutes later her parents emerged from the bedroom. A few minutes after that, her father left for the night. He held her and promised that he would be back in the morning.

So, I became Alexandra. I accepted a life of carrots and sticks. That is not a bad joke; that was just how it was.

For the first year and a half, I lived in the cottage two hours from Moscow by car, but in what direction I couldn't tell you. There were five other girls who had been abducted, three from Volgograd (where Vasily had that second brandy factory) and two from the countryside—from the total middle of nowhere. Those two children made me look like know-it-all college professor. One had never owned a cell phone. One thought babies came from prayer because her male cousins and her uncle had been having sex with her for years and she had never gotten pregnant. So, in her head, a baby arrives when you ask God for one and pray very, very hard. Of course, this had been going on since she was eight. It's hard to get pregnant when you're eight. She was thirteen and was only now getting her period. She was, after a few days, very much like kid sister to me. At fifteen, I was the second oldest. Only Sonja was older—by one year. I would have my sweet-sixteen birthday party in that house. Inga gave me a silver bracelet, which was very pretty, and a dude from Rublyovka with ugly neck scruff pulled my hair while fucking me from behind.

What the six of us had in common was that we were beautiful and our parents were dead or had disappeared. Inga cared for us, as did another mistress or housemother we were told to call Catherine. They were going to teach each of us how to be—Catherine's words—twenty-first-century paramour. That meant learning, basically, to do whatever some guy wants and is willing to pay for. But it also meant learning about makeup and hair and clothes and what to eat (and what not to eat). We ate lots of healthy fruits and vegetables, and we smoked lots of cigarettes. They watched our weight, and soon enough cigarettes were our rewards for staying away from the bird's milk cake or the sugary pastila. We tried on different kinds of sexy underwear and were taught that the panty goes underneath the garter belt, even if that means it's more difficult to go to the bathroom. We played Xbox games. We played Xbox games on a TV set for hours.

The cottage had a minaret and two man-made ponds that we could see from the windows. We never swam in them; they were for show. They went with the gardens. The bathrooms had faucets and bidet handles made of pretend gold. We each had our own bedroom with windows and velvet drapes. This was so we would feel a little pampered when we were not entertaining and so we would have our own space to bring clients when it was time. We ate together in a dining room with a white marble floor and an Oriental carpet with Noah's ark animals. (My favorite creatures were the rug's two giraffes.) We used silver. We all spoke different dialects of Russian, and only Sonja and I spoke Armenian. Only I spoke English. But we figured out how to talk to each other. The girls picked up English pretty quick.

So, that was the carrot: a nice house with nice bedrooms and nice food. Glamorous, yes?

Here was the stick: we couldn't leave the property, we couldn't talk to anyone beyond the gates, and we had to fuck whatever guys they brought to the house. And we were isolated. Totally isolated. We had no computers and no phones. There was not even an old-fashioned telephone in the house with one of those dials you spin that we saw all the time in old movies. It's funny how fast you miss the Internet when it's gone. We had no passports or credit cards or money. We depended on them for all our food and our clothes and our toothbrushes and our makeup and our medicines when we got sick.

And we were locked in our rooms at night—except when we were working. There were men with Makarov pistols in their belts or in shoulder holsters watching us. They had shifts, and they came and went; we were not allowed to become friends with them. Most of the time they spoke to us only when they were yelling at us to return to the terrace when we took our one hour of sunlight outside. Sometimes they'd threaten to lock us away if Inga or Catherine complained about us. Other times they'd make jokes about us to entertain themselves. They called us “little flaps” and “little twats.” But usually they just watched us in silence.

And most nights, it seems, we worked: that means we fucked what one of the girls from Volgograd called the “black and whites.” (Her name was Crystal and later she would come to America with Sonja and me.) The black and whites were men who almost always wore black suits and white shirts. They never wore neckties. They always had stubble—so much stubble that sometimes Catherine or Inga would talk to them about not abrading our skin. They seemed to be rich, and sometimes they were old enough to be our grandfathers, which does not necessarily mean they were really that old; after all, we were all between thirteen and sixteen years old. The clients were Russian and Georgian and Ukrainian and—and you get the point. Very international, it seemed to us. Many worked in “spirits.” Brandy and cognac and vodka. Even, in some cases, beer and wine.

None of them had any interest in us as more than sex toys.

None of them ever paid us; they left the money with Inga or Catherine, or they had paid ahead of time.

And none of them ever complained. We fucked like our lives depended on it—because, we realized, they did.

Approval is a funny thing. I needed it from Madame as an aspiring ballerina. I needed it from my schoolteachers as a student poet.

And, eventually, I needed it as a prostitute.

I did not view the other five girls as sisters, but we were more than friends. Sonja and I were very close, maybe because we both were Armenian. I looked up to her because she was older. Her family was originally from Gyumri, like mine, and only moved to Volgograd after the earthquake. Much to the annoyance of Inga and Catherine, the two of us were very protective of one another. Sonja also looked after Crystal, since Crystal was also from Volgograd and she was only thirteen.

Sonja was much crazier with the men than I was; she was probably crazier than all of us. I know she did things with them all the time that I only did when I had to. It wasn't that she was getting any pleasure from the business. But she channeled her anger into her work. She was (and I really understood this use of the word
fucking
the first time I heard it) “fucking mad.” She was capable of scaring the men—even intimidating them—which meant that once in a while she would get in very serious trouble. The men would complain, though only sometimes would they suggest that she was more girl than they could handle. They would simply say she was difficult. Or disobedient.

That was the worst thing we could be: disobedient.

One time, to punish her for looking Daddy in the eyes—we were never to look Daddy or Mikhail in the eyes—they burned off the hair on one side of her head. I will never forget that smell. Her hair had been regular but beautiful blond.

When it grew back, Inga had her dye it so it was almost white, and then cut it into a bob. Her eyes were sky blue and would grow wide when she was angry inside. Like me, she could dance, and so sometimes the two of us would be ordered to get little parties started. (Mostly that meant stripping to some pop song and then grinding against the men's pants until the men brought us to our rooms.) Sonja and I sometimes talked about what our lives had been like before: hers in Volgograd and mine in Yerevan. She would tell me the little she recalled of her parents, and I would tell her all about my mother and my grandmother.

And with all of us girls there was some competitiveness in our relationships. Even Sonja, crazy as she was, had to have her share of approval—from us and from Inga and Catherine. That's just how it is. You lick the hand that feeds you.

And then, of course, there was Daddy.

Daddy appeared every few days. He was a former Soviet army colonel, probably sixty back then. He had the sort of good looks we saw in older male models in Western magazines. I think of Ralph Lauren ads when I think of him. He wanted us to call him Daddy, and he wanted the six of us to view ourselves as wives, like we were harem people, though there was no single man we were attached to. And he never fucked us. I think he would have viewed that as shoplifting, maybe, or stealing from his own company. And if he really did view himself as a father figure, I think sleeping with us would have complicated whatever excuse he had made up in his head to explain why it was okay to kidnap and imprison us.

So instead he fucked Inga and Catherine. He fucked them whenever he came to the cottage.

He was, we were told, much more powerful than Mikhail or even Vasily. Dudes like Mikhail and Vasily were scared to death of the man we called Daddy.

One week I was not allowed to use the bathroom. They gave me a tin coffee pot I was supposed to use for everything. I was not allowed to leave my bedroom. I was not allowed my one hour outside each day, because they wanted to be sure I used only the tin coffee pot. Inga checked it to make sure I was filling it up.

What had I done? What was my crime? I was in trouble because a man had said I was not clean there. He was lying. He only said that because
he
was not clean there and I told him we should shower before we fucked.

One day Crystal and I were smoking outside the cottage. We were standing in the middle of the big oval in the driveway where cars turned around and watching ducks in one of the ponds. She always looked like little girl who had stolen Mom's cigarettes. She had crazy big eyes and no tits. She was so beautiful at thirteen and fourteen. Out of nowhere she asked me, “You think any of the guys would help us?”

I thought she was talking about the guards, and I motioned with my cigarette at the dude who was watching us from the front steps. “Him? You crazy?”

She shook her head. “Of course not. I hate him. I hate all of them. I meant the black and whites.” Her voice was even smaller than usual, because what we were talking about was so dangerous.

“And by
help,
you mean escape?”

“Yes.”

“No way. It's too risky for them. Besides, why would any of them want to do that? Anyone who comes here wants us here. We're nothing but pussy to them. We're nothing but pussy to anyone.”

She took a long puff. “What if I made one fall in love with me?”

“You're dreaming. These guys? Never happen.”

“But what if? He could take me with him. We could go and get help.”

“How would he take you with him? Put you in his briefcase?”

“Well, maybe I could ask him to tell someone about us. Tell someone we're here.”

“Yeah, the police guys care lots about girls like us. I'm sure every week one of us is fucking a police guy.”

She nodded because I was right and she knew it. “They're just so evil,” she said after a moment, and we both went quiet because the truth was so sad. When she finally spoke again her voice was totally flat. Sometimes we all sounded totally flat. Like zombie people. “So there's no one to help us,” she said.

I stepped on my cigarette and put my arm around her. “At least we have beds and food and cigarettes—and each other. We even have the Bachelor on TV!” I told her, trying to cheer her up with a silly joke. But now she was in one of the moods that we all got in once in a while, and the only way out was to flatline. It's why some girls like us do drugs. Sometimes it's the only way through.

How different were all of us? Another afternoon a girl named Elena and I were sitting on the terrace under a beautiful warm sky. The sun was always like drug after so many hours indoors.

“This is kind of a weird fairy tale,” she said. We were wearing the miniskirts they made us wear like uniform. They only let us wear underwear when we were working. Other times, such as during the day, they always made us wear short skirts and no panties. We were sitting on the stones, and they were warm on my bottom. It felt perfect. “We're like those princesses in castles who are waiting to be rescued.”

“Don't hold your breath for a prince,” I told her. I closed my eyes and turned my face toward the sun. “I don't think a prince would come to a joint like this.”

“But I like Inga,” she said. “I really do. And I think I like Catherine. I mean, do we really want to be rescued?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you do. But this is, in some ways, a lot better than the life I was leading.”

I knew Elena's history. She was the third of the three girls from Volgograd. While she was there, she was living with her stepfather, who worked in the large brandy factory. She had been brought to the cottage two days before me. Her mother was dead, and her father had run off years ago; her stepfather recently had been laid off. Suddenly his boss offers to buy his stepdaughter to help him make ends meet. Only an idiot would think this was a coincidence. They knew what Elena looked like. They knew her value. And, of course, they knew her stepfather. He was despicable. He'd been a very big jerk to her, even before he sold her like cow at the market.

“I can do this,” she went on. “And if we do our jobs, they take really good care of us. And everyone has to work, yes? Everyone has to do something.”

Two years later when I was working in Moscow—more like courtesan now—I spent two nights as arm candy for a very fat but very nice economist from Saint Petersburg. He would use the expression “Stockholm syndrome.” He used it on our second night together, when we were having a little pillow talk. I would often tell men stories. Capture-bonding, he said. I knew just what he meant. I thought of Elena and that day in the sun back at the mansion.

Of course, not all our life would be Stockholm syndrome.

Look what happened when I got older and they brought me to America. Land of the free and the home of the brave? Nope. Not in my case. For girls like me, it was nothing more than the home of the disgusting. Perverts and sad men. There were confusing exceptions, such as guys like Richard Chapman. Guys like that could haunt you. But you get the point. And nothing was free—just like in Russia.