‘Well?’ he asked.
Her eyes darted up from the photo, then back. ‘Why are you asking?’
‘Police business. Come on, you either recognize her or you don’t.’
She took another drag. Her hand, he noticed, was trembling. Maybe she was doing drugs after all.
‘Can’t help you,’ she said, returning the photo.
‘Sure?’
‘Can’t help you,’ she repeated, firmer.
Ben-Roi scanned her face, trying to work out if she was holding something back. She just stood there pulling on her cigarette, hand shaking, not meeting his gaze, and after a moment he accepted he wasn’t going to get anything more and moved on. The blonde’s voice echoed behind him, shrill and taunting.
‘Real young meat if you’re interested, darling. Fresh off the lorry! You come back any time, Mr Policeman!’
He could still hear her laughter as he turned the corner at the bottom of the street.
He wandered around for another hour, stopping into the bars and sex shops and strip joints, talking to the prostitutes and the pimps. A few punters as well – furtive, hunched figures sliding guiltily out of the doors that gave straight off the pavement into dingy, cell-like rooms with a bed and a sink in them. A couple of Eastern Europeans on Fin remembered Maria from when she used to work the area, but could tell him nothing about her, certainly not where she might be now. A doorman outside the VIP Sex Bar on Saloman also recognized her, with the added detail that she had appeared in a couple of internet porn shoots. Other than that, he drew a complete blank. No one else remembered the girl, no one else knew anything about her. Or at least no one was admitting to it, which was the same thing. At eight, having trawled the district from end to end and back again, and aware that he needed to be heading up to Jerusalem for his meet with Dov Zisky, he called time and returned to the car. It had always been a long shot. Hopefully they’d have more luck back at the Armenian compound.
He removed the Toyota’s red police number plates and dumped them in the boot, then got in. For a moment he sat there, worn out suddenly, oppressed by everything he’d heard and seen over the course of the day. Maybe he should cancel the meet, just go home and crash. He was anxious to know what Zisky had found out about Barren and Nemesis, however, and anyway, he could use a cold beer. He gave himself a few seconds. Then, with a roll of the neck, he started the engine and was just putting the car into gear when there was a sharp tap on the window. He tensed, startled, then relaxed as a face loomed beside him. The brunette from Hagdud Haivri. He lowered the window and she bent down, making a show of sticking out her backside, a street-walker propositioning a client.
‘Why are you asking about her?’ Her body language might have been seductive, but her voice was tight, urgent. ‘Maria,’ she hissed. ‘What’s happened to her?’
Ben-Roi neutralled the gears and cut the engine, leaning back slightly and turning in his seat to face her.
‘I thought you said you didn’t—’
‘I know what I said!’ She threw a nervous glance over her shoulder.
‘You think I’m going to let the whole world hear me talking to the police? That sort of thing doesn’t go down too well in this part of town. Now what’s happened to her? I thought she was out of it. In a hostel.’
‘She ran away. A couple of weeks ago. We thought she might have come—’
‘Back here?’ She let out a low throaty sound, part laugh, more disbelieving choke. ‘Are you fucking kidding me? After what she went through? She wouldn’t show her face round here in a million years.’
‘You were friends with her?’
She gave an impatient flick of the hand. ‘No one has friends in this business! It’s as much as you can do to keep your own head above water.’
She looked round again, anxiously scanning the street, then pushed her head further into the car, coming so close Ben-Roi could smell the cigarettes on her breath, see the individual crow’s feet around her eyes.
‘Our paths crossed a few times,’ she said. ‘They had us doing . . . you know . . .’
‘What?’
‘For God’s sake! Films, private shows. You need me to spell it out?’
He didn’t, knew exactly what she was talking about. Mature and young, mother and daughter, teacher’s pet.
‘She was just a child, for God’s sake. It’s bad enough at my age, but for someone like that . . .’
She bit her lip, her luridly painted fingers curling around the doorframe, her face a study in humiliation.
‘I didn’t want to do it. Neither of us did. But if that’s what they tell you to do . . . It’s not like you can just pass on the job. Know what I’m saying?’
Again, he did. Perfectly. This wasn’t a business renowned for respecting the rights of its employees.
‘Do you know who was pimping her?’
She shook her head. ‘They just used to bring her along to wherever we were . . . doing it. Studios, clubs, private houses. She always had a couple of minders with her. She was so scared.
So
scared. I tried to help her, make it a bit easier, but how do you make something like that easier?’
Her eyes flicked up and down again, unable to meet his gaze. Her hands were clenched so tight around the door that her knuckles had turned white.
‘She cried once. Just lay there crying with me on top of her. Stag party it was, soldiers. They loved it. Animals!’
Images and sounds flashed through Ben-Roi’s mind, the sort of stuff he’d seen on the internet. He shook his head, trying to get rid of them.
‘Do you have any idea where she is now?’
‘A long way away, if she knows what’s good for her. Listen, I need to get back, I’ve already been away too long. I just thought you might know something, wanted to make sure she hadn’t been . . .’
‘What?’
‘What do you fucking think? They pulled a girl out of the Yarkon only last week. They’d cut off her ears and tied dumbbells to her feet. That’s what happens to girls who get away. There was a journalist woman down here asking questions a few weeks back, I was frightened the same thing might have happened to Maria. Now I’ve got to go.’
She started to straighten, but Ben-Roi grabbed her wrist.
‘She was fat, this journalist, greying hair?’
She hesitated, then gave a wary half-nod.
‘Her name was Rivka Kleinberg. She was murdered three days ago.
In Jerusalem. In the Armenian Cathedral. We think she was there looking for Maria. Or possibly meeting her. I need to find Maria, urgently. If there’s anything you can tell me, anything at all . . .’
For a moment the woman stood there, her eyes darting back and forth, as though she was processing what she’d just heard, trying to figure out what it meant, how it might affect her. Then, yanking her wrist free, she stepped away from the car.
‘I can’t help you,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anything. Now I’ve got to—’
‘Iris!’
She froze rigid as a voice rang out from across the street. Ben-Roi flicked a look in the side-mirror. A man was approaching along the opposite pavement: burly, flat-cap, leather jacket, some sort of mastiff or pit bull terrier dragging furiously at the dog lead in his hand.
‘Oh God,’ she whispered, her jaw tight, her eyes bulging with fear.
‘Please, go! Go now! If he sees me with a cop . . .’
‘What’s going on, Iris?’ shouted the man. ‘Who are you talking to?’
‘Just trying to drum up some business,’ she called, trying, and failing, to mask the terror in her voice. ‘It’s been a slow night.’
‘So what’s all the chatter? He either wants it or he doesn’t.’
‘Go,’ she hissed under her breath. ‘In the name of God, just go. He’ll kill me!’
The pimp was crossing the road thirty metres back, the dog snarling, its paws clawing furiously at the tarmac in its eagerness to reach her. Ben-Roi wondered if he should get out and flash his badge, tell the man to back off, but he knew it would only bring the woman trouble. If not now, later.
‘At least give me something,’ he growled, starting the engine, his eyes jinking from the woman to the mirror and back again. ‘You must know something.’
‘I don’t! God Almighty, he’s going to—’
‘Is he trying to knock you down, Iris?’ The pimp had speeded his step, was now less than twenty metres away, near enough for Ben-Roi to see the stubble on his face and the individual spikes on the dog’s chunky leather collar. ‘You fucking tell him the price is the price! You hear me? The price is the price!’
‘Please,’ she groaned, her voice now demented with terror, ‘I’m begging you, just—’
‘Not till you give me something!’
For a fraction of a second she remained frozen. Then, with the pimp now only ten metres back, she stepped up to the car, leant in and whispered hurriedly in Ben-Roi’s ear.
‘Now piss off out of here,’ she hissed underneath her breath, backing away again. Then, louder, for the benefit of the pimp:
‘Well fuck you, you bastard!’
Assuming someone had insulted one of his charges, the man let out a furious bellow and made a dash for the car. Ben-Roi’s eyes met the woman’s, only for an instant, then, with a nod, he slammed the Toyota into gear and lurched forward, the whole vehicle shuddering as the dog slammed itself into the rear bumper. He picked up speed, glanced in the rear-view mirror. The dog was scuttling behind him, its lead trailing along the street; the pimp was standing beside the woman, one arm wrapped protectively around her shoulders while with the other he furiously punched the air and yelled insults that Ben-Roi couldn’t make out over the roar of the car’s engine. He looked just long enough to make sure the woman was OK, which she seemed to be – or as OK as was possible, given the world she inhabited – then dropped his eyes forward again. He reached the end of Saloman, turned on to Harkevet and from there on to the Ayalon freeway back towards Jerusalem. He was driving on automatic, barely noticing what he was doing. All he could think of were the words the woman had whispered to him:
Her real name was Vosgi.
H
OUSTON
, T
EXAS
William Barren swung his Porsche Carrera GT through the gates of the family estate and let rip a brief, satisfying burst of speed along the tarmac drive. The V10, 612 brake horsepower engine catapulted him up to 100km per hour in a matter of seconds. Almost immediately he eased back, dropping the speed right down as the drive started its curve round to the turreted granite bulk of the family mansion, which even in the morning sunshine still managed to look malign and gloomy. Not for nothing was the place called Darklands.
He checked the dashboard clock – a little before 10.20 – and pulled over, underneath one of the giant bur oaks with which the drive was lined. He’d been summoned for 10.30, and his father didn’t like people arriving early. Didn’t like them arriving late either. Didn’t like them arriving any time other than on the dot, exactly when he’d told them to get there. As a kid William had tried so hard to get it right. Somehow he’d never managed to do it, had always ended up being a few moments to either side of the allotted hour. Sometimes early in his eagerness to prove himself, sometimes late because he’d got so worked up about the whole thing he’d gone into a sort of stress-induced trance and lost track of what he was doing. Never on the nail. And then it would be another scolding. Another growling, finger-wagging lecture on how a child who couldn’t stick to the clock would grow into an adult who couldn’t stick to anything, and an adult who couldn’t stick to anything was destined for failure and ignominy and uselessness. Even now, a grown man, he was still haunted by those lectures.
You’re not what I was hoping for, William. You’ve not got what it takes. Others have, but not you, I’m afraid.
Well, he
did
have what it took. And soon the old man would be finding that out for himself. He might not have been the favoured one, the love and attention might all have gone elsewhere, but William was the one who was going to come out on top in the end. Soon. Very soon.
Not today, though. Today he just wanted to be on time.
He cut himself out a quick line on top of a CD case. He snorted it, then opened the case and slotted the CD into the deck. Eminem,
Bully
. Bumping the volume up, he settled back, banging the base of his fist against the steering wheel in time to the beat, mouthing the words.
I ain’t bowing to no motherfucking bully.
Too right. You’re going to bow to
me
, old man, bow right down on those gross, fat, swollen, elephant knees of yours. Bow, bow, bow. He hammered his fist harder, the whole car shaking to the rhythm of his hatred. Bow, bow, bow.
He threw another glance at the clock.
Delusional Personality Disorder, that had been one shrink’s assessment. There’d been quite a few of them over the years. Shrinks, analysts, counsellors, head-doctors. All had come up with their own variations and interpretations, their own gobbledygook terminologies. The one he’d seen four years back after his mother had died, the woman with the whore’s lips and the big nipples, had come right out and told him he was a borderline sociopath, although that might have had something to do with him following her home after one of their sessions and asking if he could go down on her (to which, funnily enough, she’d said yes – despite, or perhaps because of his demons he’d always been attractive to the opposite sex. That and the fact he hailed from a family of billionaires).
Yes, there’d been a lot of therapy. A lot of sitting around in soothing armchairs in pleasantly decorated offices while Dr this and Dr that questioned him about his childhood and his family and the drugs and the hookers and how he felt about his mum getting charred to a cinder like that.
Her
, they always asked a lot about
her
.
And through all of it, two decades and more of questions and answers and evasions and occasional collapses into hysterical, howling floods of piteous weeping at his inability to live up to his pa’s expectations, to be the heir the old man doted upon and loved – a dozen different shrinks in a dozen different offices and not a one of them had told him anything he didn’t already know. Namely, that his father was the root of all his problems. The poisoned cesspit from which all his troubles exuded. How he loathed him! Worshipped him as well, of course, in the way you worship a wrathful Old Testament deity who scares the living shit out of you and yet at the same time whose beneficence you desperately crave. Loathed him a whole lot more, though. His father had fucked up his life. Had fucked up all their lives (that night in the cupboard, listening,
Please don’t, it hurts, it hurts
) and so long as his father was around, the fuck-up would continue. Just as the moment his father was gone, everything would be OK. Like in that Shakespeare play they’d studied before he’d been kicked out of school, the one about Prince Hal and his father the king, where the prince had been a complete fucking wastrel until the king had got ill and died and Hal had assumed the throne and put all his wild days behind him. Blossomed into a great man.
He
was going to blossom into a great man. Was already a great man, if only his father would get the hell out of the way and let him prove it. Not long now. Soon he’d be settling family business. And unlike Prince Hal he wouldn’t be affecting any touching reconciliations with Daddy before assuming rule of the kingdom. On the contrary, once Daddy was six feet under he’d be putting on his tap shoes and dancing on his fucking grave.