Mask Market (34 page)

I looked away.

“Now I made you mad,” she said, reaching down and pulling the hem of her skirt high over her thighs. “You think I should be punished?”

“Give it a rest, Beryl.”

“Why? You’re not much of a conversationalist, but it’s been a while, and I could always use the practice.”

I looked away.

“Makes you mad, that I’m such a little whore?”

“That’s your business,” I said.

“Exactly,” she retorted, sticking out her tongue in a deliberately cold parody of a sassy brat.

“D
id you ever tell him?”

“Who? My father?”

“Yeah. You said you
tried
to tell people, but you never said you actually did it.”

“He knew,” she said, with a sociopath’s unshakable certainty.

“Just like that? You said your mother had a special—”

“Just because he was a coward doesn’t mean he was a stupid one.”

“But you couldn’t be—”

“Yes, I could,” she snapped. “I
could
be sure. I’m sure he would have just closed his eyes, no matter what I showed him. You know why?”

“No.”

“Because my mother had the
power,
” she said, licking her lips as if the very word was caressing her under her skirt. “If you have power, you can do anything you want, go anywhere you want, get away with anything. It’s all yours. Everything. And you know what makes power? Money. If you have enough money—”

“It’s not that simple.”

“You’re right; it’s not,” she snapped. “If you’d let me finish what I was going to say, you would have heard this: If you have enough money,
and
the spine to use it, every door opens. The whole world is nothing but a market. And humans are just another commodity.”

“In some places—”

“In
every
place! You think it’s not a market just because the buyers wear masks when they shop? If you have the price, you can have whatever you want—it’s
just
that simple.”

“Not all prices are money,” I said, thinking of Galina’s cousin.

“I don’t like word games. They’re just another way for liars to lie. I don’t care what you call it. Some say money; some say God. Some call it a button—a button you push to make people do what you want. Everybody’s got one; you just have to look for it.

“And if you don’t know where to look, there’s tricks to make it come to the surface, where you can see it. I learned something from everyone who ever had me. And I
took
something from them, too. Like a vampire does. It all comes down to the same thing. Power. That’s all that counts.”

“If that’s all that counts, then most people don’t.”

“Good boy!” she said, rewarding a dog.

“W
hy do you want to know?” she asked me, a few more miles down the road.

“So I can learn.”

“How
bad
do you want to know?”

“I don’t know how to measure that.”

“Did you ever fuck a girl outdoors? Like in a park, where anyone might come along and see you?”

“What diff—?”

“We’re trading,” she said. “You tell me, I tell you.”

“And me first, right?”

“Money in front,” Beryl said, giving me a whore’s wink.

“T
hose so-called feminists make me retch,” she said, lighting another cigarette. We were sitting at a wooden picnic bench at a rest stop. We were the only customers. “They say they’re all about choice—like abortion, how they
adore
abortion—but you’re only allowed the choices
they
say are okay. They whine about ‘empowerment,’ but you can only be empowered if you lap up every word they say, like a tame dog.”

“You’re talking about—?”

“You know what the great buzzword is now? The high-concept plot for the movie they all think they’re starring in? ‘Trafficking.’ This great evil that’s been set loose on the world. It’s all those kind of people can talk about.”

“It’s not worth talking about?”

“Why? Because, if enough people talk about it, someday they’ll actually
do
something about it? That was my parents’ line. All that ‘consciousness raising’ they wrote checks for.”

“What’s your answer, then?”

“My answer?” she said, twisting her lips to show teeth, not smiling. “I don’t even have a question. Because this ‘trafficking’ thing, it’s all just another mask. Read the papers. Watch TV. Go to a cocktail party. Nobody cares about trafficking in children so long as you’re going to use them the way they’re
supposed
to be used,” she said, planting the barb and twisting to make sure it hooked deep. “You know, like making them work in diamond mines, or sewing soccer balls, or plowing fields.”

She turned to me full-face, her own beautiful mask crumbling against the acid of her hate.

“Every kid’s nothing but property, anyway. If you want to sell your own property, who cares? The only time anyone bitches about it is when they get sold a lemon, like when some yuppies adopt one of those Russian babies with fetal alcohol syndrome.

“And the media? The only time
those
whores get excited is when they can do a story on ‘sex slaves,’ because that’s what
sells,
okay? And you know what? Most of those girls, they’re not slaves at all. They’re just women who made a deal. A
choice,
okay?”

“You mean, like to be hookers?”

“You think that’s
never
a choice?” she said, mockingly. “You think every stripper is a domestic-violence victim? You think every girl who acts in a porno movie is a drug addict? You think every escort was sexually abused as a child? You think Linda Lovelace didn’t
like
fucking and sucking?”

“I wasn’t saying—”

“That’s right,” she said, making a brushing-crumbs gesture. “You weren’t saying
anything.
All that ‘trafficking’ hysteria is just so much political bullshit, a good way for thieves to get grants. A woman grows up in a country where there isn’t enough food to eat. She makes a decision to come to a place where she can make more money on her back in an hour than her whole family could earn in a month—what’s wrong with that? She’s a whore to you, fine. But she’s a hero to her family.”

“What about the girls who think they’re coming here to work in factories, not whorehouses?”

“Grow up!” she snapped. “You really think even
they
believe that? You really think they’re going to pay twenty, thirty grand for the chance to earn five bucks an hour?”

“That’s not an investment,” I said, my one good eye scanning her mask, looking for an opening, “that’s debt bondage. They have to work off the cost of their passage. And if they open their mouths, they get deported.”

“Isn’t that a crying shame.”

“Not enough to make
you
cry, I guess.”

“Who cried for me?”

“So that means—?”

“It means
I
found my own way out,” Beryl said, pure self-absorption wafting off her like thick perfume. “You think anyone cares about slavery? There’s people in slavery all over the world, aren’t there? You buy something made in China, it was probably out of some forced-labor camp. Are you going to pretend that makes a difference to you?

“Slavery, my sweet white ass. All anyone pays attention to is the sex part. And here’s a nice irony for you: That
is
a choice, okay? These women, they come here, like you said, they know they have to work off their debt. They can be maids, take them twenty years to get caught up. Or they can gobble some cock for a few months, and end up flush.

“You think if you ‘rescued’ them they’d jump at the chance to be stuffed into some basement, sewing until their fingertips got paralyzed or they went blind from the lousy lighting? Fucking’s not just better paid; it’s easier work, too.”

“Work?” I said, thinking back to how I had dismissed that woman in the blood lab as a “sex worker.” Not liking myself for it now.

“It
is
work,” she said, as hotly composed as a high-school debater. “The higher up the scale you go, the better it’s paid. And safer, too. You know those legalized houses they have in Nevada? When’s the last time you ever heard of a girl being killed in one of them?”

“I don’t think I ever did.”

“Right!” she said, triumphantly. “Those serial killers, they grab girls off the streets, not out of houses.”

“So an escort service is better?”

“You know about that, too, huh? That was when I was still learning. I worked in houses, too. But, really, it’s all the same. You only have yourself. They promise you all the ‘security’ in the world, but when you’re alone in that room, it’s all on you.”

I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t a strategy—her hate had just run me empty.

“And it’s the same when you’re all alone in the world,” she said. Slowly, as if concerned I’d miss something important. “You know where I learned that?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, that’s right, Mr. Knight in Shining Armor. In a little room. A little girl in a little room. All alone. That’s what you brought me back to. My hero.”

W
e stopped one more time, to switch places. The Porsche was supposed to be the lawyer’s car, not the client’s.

I hit my phone. “It’s me,” I said, when it was picked up at the other end.

“She was home an hour and fifteen minutes ago,” Toni said. “I dropped by with an even better offer. She wasn’t any more interested than she was the last time.”

“You’re a doll,” I told her.

She blew a kiss into the phone.

T
he woman who came to the door was dressed in workout clothes, a sweatband around her head, towel around her shoulders.

“What can I—?” she started to say, then froze as her eyes went past me to Beryl.

“Hello, Mother. You’re looking good.”

“I…”

By then we were inside. Beryl closed the door behind us as her mother stood there, mouth half open, as if frozen in the act of speech.

“Good afternoon, Ms. Summerdale,” I said. Oil in my mouth, too-bright smile on my face. “My name is Mestinvah, Roman Mestinvah. I represent your daughter—”

“Represent?” she said, voice hardening. “What do you think you have to ‘represent’ anyone about in
this
house?”

“Let’s all sit down, Mother,” Beryl said, sweetly. “This won’t take long.”

“It will take less than that for me to call the police,” her mother said, standing with her fists clenched at her sides.

“Do it!” Beryl suddenly hissed at her. “Do it, you fucking cunt.

Come on!”

Her mother sagged like she’d been body-punched.

We all sat down in the living room, like the civilized adults we were. Nobody offered coffee.

Beryl lit a cigarette.

“We don’t allow smoking in—”

Beryl blew a puff of smoke in her mother’s direction.

“Ms. Summerdale, I understand this all may be a bit…traumatic for you, seeing your daughter after all these years,” I said. “We came here in the hopes we can settle things without the need to…well, without the need to leave this room, frankly.”

“What ‘things’?” she said, as Beryl flicked the ash from her cigarette into a crystal vase that held a single blood-red rose.

“Reparations,” Beryl said, on cue.

“What are you—?”

“My client,” I said, holding up my hand as if to stop Beryl from saying anything more, “has a number of causes of action she intends to pursue, Ms. Summerdale. You would, needless to say, be the defendant in any such litigation. And please don’t tell me about the statute of limitations,” I went on, as if she’d tried to interrupt. “A team of eminent treatment professionals has already provided sworn affidavits that my client had suppressed all memory of the horrors inflicted on her until very recently. We are quite confident that we could survive any motion to dismiss.”

“I don’t under—”

“I told them everything,
Mother,
” Beryl said, vomiting the last word.

“I have no idea what you think you might have ‘told’ anyone,” the mother said, strength coming back into her voice. “You have a very troubled history, Beryl. Your mental state was never—”