The Guest Room (9 page)

“Without cause,” he added.

“Or with.”

He tried to look stoic. “I see.”

“I suppose you have a contract with the bank.”

“I do.”

“Send it to me.”

“I will.”

Dina was just starting to elaborate on the employment land mines that were now in the ground before him when his cell phone rang. He pulled it from his suit pocket and saw a number he didn't recognize. He let it ring and the call went to voice mail. When the screen showed that he had a message, he pushed “speaker” and put the phone down on Dina's desk.

“Mr. Chapman, hi. Cynthia Prescott here. I'm with the
New York Post
. You probably know why I'm calling and I am sorry to bother you.” She left her number and asked him to call her back.

“How the hell did she get my cell phone number?” he asked Dina.

“Maybe from someone at the party. Maybe not. There are lots of sites now where you can look up a cell number.”

“Really?”

She nodded.

“Can you call her back for me?” he asked. “Bill told me it would be best if you spoke to the reporters.”

“I will. But I see no reason to call her back right now. You haven't been charged with a crime and probably won't be. You said the girls may have looked barely postpubertal, but—”

“I said they looked young, but they were definitely of age.”

“I understand. That's where I was going. That was going to be my point.”

“Don't I want my side out there?”

She raised an eyebrow and for the first time gazed at him with judgment in her eyes. “And precisely what is your side, Richard?”

He sat there thinking for a moment. He saw the girl Alexandra on the guest room bed, her smile balancing longing and desire without regret. He saw her once more reaching out to him.

He realized that he had absolutely nothing to say.

As Richard was leaving Dina's office, he recalled how he had told the detectives last night that he thought the blond girl—the one who was calling herself Sonja—had killed both of the bodyguards. Abductors. Whatever. But he really had no idea who had fired the handgun. He hadn't seen it. None of the men had.

Just now he told Dina Renzi the same thing: he thought the blonde had killed both of the Russians, the first with that knife and the second with the pistol she had pulled from beneath the dying thug's blazer.

And this was, more or less, what he had told Kristin had happened—though when he thought back on his conversation with his wife, most of his focus had been on what he had done (or not done) with the girl with the raven-dark hair.

He knew the other men who had been at the party were not so sure. Some, in fact, insisted that it had to have been Alexandra who had shot the dude in the front hallway. Chuck Alcott said so. Eric did, too. They both assumed it was her. After all, they recalled hearing the gunshots no more than a second or two after the blonde had left the living room. Somehow Alexandra must have wrestled the second gun from beneath the other guy's jacket and shot him. There had even been some debate about how close to the chest the gun must have been when it was discharged. Blowback. That was the word one of the detectives had used. Blowback. How much of the bodyguard's heart or lungs or bone was up the barrel of the gun? Then he'd made a passing remark about the possibility of powder and soot on the shirt. Fabric in the wound. Someone would check, he assured them.

But, the truth was, all of the men from the party really knew nothing. Or, perhaps, next to nothing. Philip's friends agreed that everything had happened so fast—so quickly—that it was hard to be positive about anything. Certainly none of the men had asked the girls for more details when they'd been getting dressed.

And, unfortunately, both guns were gone. And without them and without an actual witness, it was impossible to say who had twice pulled the trigger.

Late that morning, a few minutes before Kristin and Melissa were going to leave the apartment for lunch and the matinee, Philip's fiancée called. Kristin was sitting on the living room carpet with Melissa, helping her study for a quiz the child had on Monday about prime and composite numbers. When she saw on her phone that Nicole was on the line, she kissed Melissa on the top of her head and adjourned to the kitchen so she could speak to Nicole in private.

“I'm in shock,” Nicole said, her voice quavering and hushed. “There must have been an hour after Philip told me what happened when I couldn't…I couldn't stop crying.” Nicole was soft-spoken and gentle and kind; she volunteered Tuesday afternoons at BARC—the Brooklyn Animal Resource Coalition—and spent another few hours on Thursday mornings at the assisted living facility where her grandmother was slipping into the confused murk of Alzheimer's, visiting the woman and her friends and helping them paint and play with clay. She was an immensely talented graphic designer, and while her business wasn't large, it was the right size for her; she could work from her home and visit the elderly and the cats that made her happy. She was shy and she was sweet, and neither Richard nor Kristin could understand what in the name of God she saw in Philip. They didn't know Nicole well, but they were confident she was way too good for Richard's younger brother.

“I know,” Kristin agreed. “I know…” She wanted to be careful about what she said; she believed that Philip had fucked one of the girls (both, for all she knew), because Richard had told her. But she had no idea whether Philip had confessed this to Nicole.

“People were killed,” Nicole continued. “I understand those two men might have been criminals. But they're dead now. They're gone. I mean, maybe they had wives or kids. They had moms. They had dads. And they're gone. And those women who killed them?”

“Go on,” said Kristin. Nicole's voice had trailed off before she had answered her own question.

“Whatever happened to them before they murdered those men must have been unspeakable. It must have been horrible. Imagine being so angry or so scared that you could kill people like that.”

Kristin sat down in one of the kitchen chairs. Ever since Richard had said something about how the girls may have been held in their jobs against their will—how they may have been kidnapped—her feelings toward them had been altered ever so slightly. And even if they hadn't been abducted and coerced into the work, the truth was that no one becomes a prostitute because she wants to. It's always the occupation of last resort. You go there because you need money for food or drugs or (the media's favorite explanation, because it suggested simultaneously that the girls were clean and college was too expensive) tuition. And so she understood Nicole's empathy. But this was still her house that had been soiled. This was her marriage that had been desecrated. In her mind, she saw her husband naked with one of the prostitutes in the guest room. “I agree,” she said after a moment. It was just so hard to reconcile Richard with a girl like that.

But then Nicole surprised her by asking rhetorically, “And how could those guys do this to us? How could Richard do it? How could Philip? All the men who were there? I mean, I figured there might be a stripper. I didn't ask. But I figured since it was going to be at your house, it would be harmless. They weren't even going to a strip club. They were going to…they were going to Westchester, for God's sake.”

“What did Philip tell you?” she asked finally. She simply couldn't resist.

“He wasn't going to tell me anything.”

“Probably not.”

“He only told me what really happened because it was so clear he was lying.”

“And what did he say?”

“He confessed. He confessed that he had sex with one of the girls. He actually thought it would make me feel better when he reassured me that he'd used a condom. Some of the men didn't.”

“Have you seen him? Or did you two just talk on the phone?”

“I can't bear to see him. I just can't.”

“I understand.”

“Tell me, how bad does your house look? How awful?”

“I have no idea. It's a crime scene. I'm not allowed to go home.”

“A crime scene? Oh, God, that's terrible.”

“Yup.”

“Where are you?”

“I'm at my mother's—in the city.”

“How mad are you—at Richard?”

“I'm mad. I'm hurt. As you said, I just don't see how he could do this to us. To our family.”

“That's how I feel, too,” Nicole agreed. Then: “Why do you think they did it? Had sex with those girls?”

“Richard didn't.”

“He didn't?”

“No,” she said, though she realized instantly both that Philip had told Nicole his brother was equally guilty and that it was possible Richard had lied to her. Maybe he had fucked the girl he had brought to the guest room. But she wanted to believe her husband, because in the shipwreck that was her life this weekend, that was the only debris floating by she could latch onto. “He went upstairs with one, but he…he resisted her.”

“Resisted her. You make it sound like it was all the girls' fault. It wasn't, you know. I feel bad for them.”

“On some level, I do, too. On some level, I even feel a little bad for Richard. It won't be pretty when he goes in to the office on Monday morning.” She gazed out the window at the overcast skies. “So, what are you going to do?” she asked Nicole.

“About?”

“About the wedding.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “I don't know,” she said finally. “I just don't know if I can marry him anymore.”

While Kristin and Melissa were at the matinee that afternoon, Richard went clothes shopping for the whole family. He had to believe that the police would allow them back into their home by Monday, but that still meant they would need additional clothing. He guessed he could sponge off his suit and press it, but he still needed jeans for tomorrow and shirts for the next two days. He needed a necktie. Kristin said that she and Melissa were fine through Sunday, but they would both need clothing for the start of the week. For school.

Just in case, he bought clothes for Tuesday, too. He spent two hours in Bloomingdale's, shopping as if it were Christmas Eve and he had nothing to place under the tree. He ignored price tags. He bought skirts and dresses and designer jeans and underwear. Then he went around the corner to a special boutique where he bought his daughter two pairs of the strangest tights they had in stock: one pair was nothing but the royalty from a deck of medieval playing cards; the other was covered with doodles of stars and planets and the sorts of spaceships you would see in silent films from the first decades of the twentieth century. He bought them chocolates. He bought his mother-in-law flowers. He bought with the desperate hope that somehow he could buy their forgiveness.

Twice his cell phone buzzed and both times it was Philip. He ignored the calls. He wasn't prepared to talk to his brother and face again what had happened the night before. Twice more there were calls from reporters, neither of which he answered.

The only call he accepted was from a neighbor in Bronxville, a guy he played golf with but who had not been at the party. After all, the people there had been Philip's friends, not his. Perhaps that was why Richard had accepted the call: it was someone who wasn't yet privy to the debacle. He put everything but the flowers down on the sidewalk, and listened. His friend wanted to know why in the name of God there were video trucks from a couple of TV stations parked at the bottom of his driveway and—when he looked closely—a van from the state police. A mobile crime lab. Clearly something was horribly wrong, and he wanted to see what he could do.

“Everyone's okay. At least everyone is in my family,” Richard told him. He was about to explain what had happened—offer a
Reader's Digest
condensed version—when he heard his friend's wife yelling something from the next room. It seemed a version of the story was already online: two people were killed at a bachelor party orgy in a swank Manhattan suburb.

“There was no orgy,” Richard said simply.

“But somebody was killed.”

“Yes. Two people.” He was relieved that in the theater across town his wife's cell phone was off. Thank God. She might turn it on again at intermission, which he guessed would be around three-fifteen. And without a doubt there would be calls waiting for her on her voice mail. They would be from worried neighbors, and they would be from reporters. There might be calls from her brother in Boston and from other teachers at the high school. How had this gotten on the web so quickly? How was it already popping up on newspaper websites?

He realized that he would have to warn Kristin not to answer her phone. As he did, he recalled what he had told Dina Renzi:
I believe our marriage will be fine.
Suddenly he wasn't so sure.

I guess my mother had lovers after my father died. She was young. She was human. I remember two different men who took her to the opera a couple of times, and there was another man who she went to a jazz club with on Friday nights when I was nine- and ten-year-old kid. Maybe even when I was eleven. My grandmother would babysit me. But when I asked my mother if this fellow was her boyfriend, she told me, no, he was just a friend.

One night when I was working at the cottage outside of Moscow, I opened the door to the office on the first floor. (I keep calling it a cottage, but it was once some bigwig party official's dacha for sure—which is maybe why Muscovites liked to call it a cottage. Downplay class difference. Americans would probably call it a mansion.) I was looking for Inga, one of the women who helped train us, because I had a question. And she was in the lap of one of the bosses who ran us, a tall dude with a Stalin mustache named Mikhail. She still had her blouse on, but it was unbuttoned, and her skirt was up around her waist. She started to jump off his lap, but he held her there and smiled at me like this was no big deal. I said I'd come back later and backed away. I closed the door. I knew Inga would punish me for not knocking, and she did.

That night I woke up after a dream and stared up at the ceiling of my bedroom. I couldn't remember the dream. But I remembered something else. After school one day I went to the brandy factory so I could show my mother a painting of tulips I had finished in art class. I was maybe seven years old, and so my grandmother brought me. She was talking to someone in the big reception area, and when I saw my mother was not at her desk, I opened the door to Vasily's office. I didn't think to knock. Did I see my mother try to jump off Vasily's lap just the way Inga did—or did I dream that, too? I still don't know. At least that's what I try and tell myself.

But, of course, some days I do know. I do.

When I finally had the strength to climb off the bed after I had been raped my first night in Moscow, I went to the bureau with the TV where I had put down my cell phone. That was when I found it was gone. Of course. That was when I looked down and saw that my rollie suitcase was gone, too. At first I was surprised to see that my suitcase had been stolen. Why did they feel the need to take my clothes? Why did they want to take from me my ballet slippers and my toe shoes? Was that really necessary? I guess it was. After all, it was in their nature because they were pricks. A bird has to fly and a lion has to eat gazelle and a Russian mobster has to break what's left of a girl's heart by stealing those things that make her the happiest and feel most like life is worth living after she has been raped.

Over the next few months, I would meet girls who would tell me they got sucked into the life more slowly. Sometimes their pimp was first their boyfriend—at least they thought he was their boyfriend. This was case with those girls who started very young. Eleven, twelve, thirteen years old. Their boyfriends were dudes in their twenties and thirties. They told the girls they loved them, and the girls would do anything for them, even when their boyfriends would beat them. The girls always believed they had done something to deserve the beating.

Other girls thought their boyfriend was their “manager.” They were going to be a model, maybe. One girl told me that after a few weeks, her manager said that he needed her to do him and her career a gigantic favor and sleep with some guy who had very big clout. The guy was what her manager called a “game changer,” and it would just be that one time. So she did. The next thing she knew, she was down the rabbit hole. All she was doing was sleeping with guys who were “game changers.” She never modeled. Not even once.

And so while I did go to Moscow with them when they asked, they did not suck me in slowly. Nope. They made sure I knew right away what I was in for—and what would happen if I did not cooperate.

When I discovered that my phone and my rollie had disappeared, I opened the hotel room door. I nearly screamed because there was a tall guy in the hallway watching it—watching my room. He was just sitting there in the plush chair that was near the elevator, looking at different things on his phone. (Knowing what I know now, he was looking at soccer scores or porn, and probably porn.) When he saw me, he just smiled and motioned me back inside with his fingertips like I was little bug in front of his face. He was bald, too, just like Andrei. To this day, I will never understand why Russian mobsters feel the need to shave themselves so they look like cue-ball-head babies. No girl really likes that look. It's big mystery to me.

It would be hours before they would send up Inga, so I went back inside my room and that's when I saw the blood on the sheet. I didn't remember Andrei pulling the bedspread down. Then it dawned on me: I was still bleeding. Not a lot, but a little. It was pooling in my underwear and dribbling down my leg like raindrops on a windowpane. And suddenly I just went crazy like wild animal. I was pounding on the walls with my fists. Then I was slapping the back of the door with the palms of my hands, and I didn't stop even when my skin felt like it was burning. I'm not sure what I expected. Did I think the corridor thug would set me free? Or did I think he would order me to stop? Did I care? The point was, I was trapped. I was a prisoner. In the end, he didn't set me free or yell at me. He just ignored me. I pounded on the walls and the door until I was so tired I just slid to the floor. I looked at the velvet drapes in front of the window. I was on the ninth floor, but maybe there was a fire escape. There wasn't.

I crawled my way to the bed and fell back onto the mattress, where I cried till I was hyperventilating. I was exhausted. It was like evening a few years earlier when I was babysitting an infant on another floor in my apartment building in Yerevan. I just couldn't stop this poor little girl—she was just over a year old—from crying. I held her, I rocked her, I sang to her. I tried to burp her. I changed her diaper—and changed it again. And then she started to hiccup. Not once, not twice. Not for a couple of minutes. For hours. She didn't stop hiccupping and crying till her mother returned. I was convinced she was going to hiccup herself to death. I would have brought her to my mother or my grandmother, but neither was home. And that night in a Moscow hotel room, abducted and humiliated and alone, I was like that.

And I was so tired now. I was so tired.

Eventually I remembered the bloody sheet. I was lying on it. I was lying in my own blood—and then I felt not only violated, I felt ashamed. As angry as I was and as scared as I was, there was still that part of me that wanted to be a good girl. That needed a grown-up's approval. That feared making a bad first impression. I was in a hotel nicer than any hotel I had ever been in before. (In truth, I had never really been to a hotel before. I had been to motels and cabin courts on Lake Sevan, but never anything as luxurious as this.) It seemed to me that I could not allow the maid to see the sheet. I couldn't bear what she would think. I rolled the sheet into the tiniest ball I could and I placed it inside that plastic trash bag. Then I put the plastic trash bag under the bed—at least for now. I told myself that later I would find a way to throw it out.

When I curled up on the bed after that, all I could think of was my mother and my grandmother. I had finally stopped hiccupping, but I was still whimpering. I was crying because my mother was dead and I was crying because my grandmother was far away and I was crying because I had been raped. I was crying because I was terrified. You have no idea what terror is like until you are a teenage girl in bloody panties trapped in a hotel room. It didn't matter that it was an elegant Moscow hotel with a little refrigerator in the room and wineglasses and an ice bucket. It didn't matter that maybe the other rooms on the other floors were filled with oligarchs and tourists.

But what, looking back, seems weirdest to me is this: I remember feeling guilty. I understood this was not my fault: What girl would not want to be ballerina? What girl would not have trusted her dead mother's boss and, with her grandmother's blessing, left with his assistant on an airplane? But all reason was gone with that bloody sheet. All reason was gone when, a few seconds later, I pulled off my panties and put them in the bag with that sheet.

The woman said her name was Inga and she was from Latvia, but I had a feeling she was lying. She went on and on about my name, and how I needed a new one. Anahit would not do. Not European enough. Not glamorous enough. Not seductive enough. She wanted me to become—not kidding—Alexandra. In the last twenty-four hours, I had been fucked for the first time and then filmed with some bastard bodyguard's penis deep in my mouth, and now this strange woman is talking to me about why my new name should sound like imperial Russian tsarina. I was in shock. I remember sitting on the bedspread of the bed where the night before I had been raped, and then turning away from this pretend Inga and wrapping my arms around my ribs. I was cold, even though the hotel room thermostat was set high for hotel sex. She kept talking to me in a very sweet, very calm voice—I guess she was the good cop to Andrei's bad cop—about how things would get better, and how this was a glamorous life I had been given, and the sooner I accepted that the better off we'd all be. Her Armenian was very good, but she had an accent I did not recognize. It might have been Polish, but I was just guessing. I had met many tourists in Yerevan, but none from Poland.

“Alexandra is rather like Anahit,” she was saying. “That's why I proposed it.”

I could have told her that Anahit was the name for a beautiful Armenian goddess not some poor woman who was shot with her family by the Bolsheviks. But I was done speaking that day, because every time I opened mouth, all that came out was either a trapped cat hiss or a sad little cry. She tried to rub my neck and my shoulders through my shirt, but I slapped her hands. It was a reflex.

Finally Inga said that she was going to leave me alone. But she gave me a foil disk with little pills on it and said, “Oh, by the way: if you don't start taking the pill, they will kill your grandmother. It's really simple. And they'll know if you aren't taking the pill, because you'll get pregnant.” Then she smiled like kind aunt. When she closed the hotel room door behind her, I heard her say something to the guard, but I couldn't make out the words.

The next day I was a little more communicative. Not much, but a little. And Inga figured out how well I spoke English. She was surprised that no one had told her, and a little miffed. But she was also pleased with the discovery, even though I spoke English better than she did.

Still, it would be a few more days before I would understand something about me that you probably figured out a long time ago: I was a valuable piece of property and they were investing impressive dram in me. I might be just object, but I was fifteen, I spoke English, and I was hot. I had the potential to make them very serious scratch.