Norma

  “Is there anything new?” Marion asked.

  Alvar didn’t respond. He stopped to light a cigarette.

  “Norma’s going on vacation either way, is that it?”

  Marion couldn’t make out Alvar’s expression in the summer evening light under the rowan trees. But she still recognized his old tells, such as how he concentrated on the dog to avoid answering. He wouldn’t tell her what had happened at his meeting with the girl.

  “Even if she gives up the Ukrainians and even if she makes a deal,” Marion said. “Even if she finds the money Anita borrowed.”

  Marion fell silent. After Norma’s attack of nausea, Alla had asked Marion about Norma’s private life, about whether she had any old boyfriends, whether there might have been an accident, and quipped that fertility was a good sign. The clan was just waiting to get what they needed first. Then she would go on her vacation. It was an unusually simple case. No friends, no family. No one would miss her, and no one would look for her. Revenge on the daughter for the mother’s betrayal—it was a simple settling of accounts. Norma was stupid if she had arranged something with Alvar. It wouldn’t change anything. Suddenly Marion felt a chill—if the girl had in fact made a deal with Alvar, it was doubtful he would have accused his father of complicity in Anita’s death. The blame would have fallen on Marion.

  “Why don’t you go and get some rest,” Alvar said.

  “I’m not tired.”

  “Lambert has a new client. She wants an egg from a woman like Angelina Jolie. That’s your job for the night.”

  “Is Norma on Lambert’s list? Who else?”

  “Lasse isn’t on the list, if that’s what you’re asking,” Alvar said. “You can tell him we have a good surrogate for Pekka and Aaron in Thailand, two actually. One of the women needs money for college and the other one for nail technician training. Both are Vietnamese. They can choose whichever one they want. They are a registered couple, right?”

  “Of course. Is the woman enrolled in a university? In case Aaron goes and checks.”

  “Yes.”

  Alvar didn’t expect the sudden hug. It made them both feel awkward, and the awkwardness brought melancholy. Marion let her arms fall. They didn’t suspect Lasse, that was the most important thing. As he punched in the gate code, Alvar said, “No one doubts Lasse’s loyalty. Not even Lambert. Believe me.”

  “What about mine?”

  The question slipped out and hung spinning in the wind like dry grass. The gate slammed shut.

  Alvar seemed to be telling the truth. Marion would still retrieve the metal box from Lasse, though, just in case. She’d used her last weapon, her murder accusations against Lambert, and now she had to move on to the next stage. She would follow through with the plan.

  —

  Everything had started when she and Anita opened a bottle of white wine after a long day and started flipping through hair magazines and imagining their dream salon. They would call it a “hair studio,” and the customers who came would understand their own worth and never ask the price. Modern fonts on the window, an espresso machine, an assistant who would walk clients’ dogs while Anita wound the hot rollers. It would be in Brooklyn, on Lafayette Avenue. Or in London, on Bond Street or in Covent Garden.

  When Anita brought her the first batch of Ukrainian hair, she took it to Folake, and it started to seem like their fantasy might become a reality. Folake and the other Nigerian braiders discovered how much better the Ukrainian mixed with kinky hair than the Russian they had been using. After the blond craze set off by Nicki Minaj settled down a bit, the braiders came back to the Ukrainian stock and found that it fit perfectly on any head. White-girl flow was never going out of style; black women would always want what you couldn’t do with Afro locks. Folake had sent some of it to her relatives in Nigeria, and new requests began flooding in. Alla got excited, and then Marion. And then Lambert.

  In Nigeria, the hair market had exploded along with the growth in the middle class. Four out of five women had extensions. A mother and daughter might drop fourteen thousand dollars on them. However, kinky hair created strict quality requirements: the hair used in extensions had to be springy. Peruvian and Chinese were too heavy, even Indian lacked the desired flexibility, but the Ukrainian flowed and also conformed naturally to curls from the roots. When Folake told a story of a woman caught out in the rain whose hairdo stayed presentable, Marion knew there was magic in this hair. When wet, the Ukrainian fluffed just enough to be natural, and the ends stayed silky and wavy.

  Lambert couldn’t resist a combination like that. Girls and children were so cheap in Nigeria, and the hair business created a perfect front, a credible reason to travel around the country, to meet women and enter their homes, to investigate clients’ finances. Wherever Boko Haram was a threat, more and more women wanted house calls from their hairdressers.

  Lambert wanted a stylist’s eye on the ground, and Marion was given an opportunity to demonstrate her abilities. The Ukrainian hair had come through her, and everyone else was busy, so she received permission to go alone. Marion immediately called Anita. This would be their chance. This would be the beginning of the end for Lambert.

  They took different flights, stayed in different hotels, and met up only to take a car to Lambert’s water bottle factory. No one in the clan had ever visited before—everything was handled through local agents and straw men—so Anita had no trouble posing as the agency’s new coordinator. Really Lambert owned the factory by accident: a doctor he knew had fled to Nigeria after being caught, and contacted Lambert with a new client requesting an egg from Scandinavia. Lambert approached Nigeria with suspicion, but because he needed to decentralize the agency’s activities anyway, he decided to take a risk. The doctor would run the operation, and on paper it would look like a water bottle factory.

  The place had been burned in a police raid three weeks earlier. There was no sign of cameras, only guards, old junk cars, and ashes. Marion’s back hurt from the bumpy journey, and her gums were bleeding where a water bottle had jammed into them at one particularly deep pothole. Another raid shouldn’t have come, at least not immediately. Yet come it did, just as they were talking to the head of the facility, a woman everyone called Mama. Chaos ensued—screaming women, wailing infants, overturned cribs—but amid it all Mama maintained her stoic calm, certain that money could quell any raid.

  As soon as the hullabaloo started, Marion and Anita slipped over to the women’s area and followed one girl in the final weeks of her pregnancy as she ran into the backyard. There was a gate and a rusty lock, which Marion kicked open. A police officer stood by their car. Anita pulled out a wad of dollars, and they sped off.

  Anita kept her new camera running and did her best to interview the girl as they drove to a regular hospital. On the recording, the girl said she had originally gone to the hospital for an abortion, but they wouldn’t let her leave, and the abortion never happened. When the baby was born, they took it away and brought some young men to her. She became pregnant again and was moved to the water bottle factory, where she’d been a prisoner ever since. She didn’t even know how many babies some of the girls at the factory had borne. Some of them were surrogates, and some had ended up at the farm after getting pregnant by accident, like her. As she told of the tiny bones the dogs unearthed in the backyard, the girl wept.

  That night they ate roasted plantains and jollof rice with Folake’s family and heard about the growing popularity of salons that specialized in unstraightened natural hair. Marion wrote down everything for Lambert and Alla but also studied the market with an eye toward her new business. The beauty industry had an innocent reputation, unlike the baby trade. No one would pay any more attention to Lambert’s hair trading network after her takeover than they had before. Then the Lagos elite would be hers, and she could move in on all the clan’s other hair areas.

  As the evening passed, Anita’s gaze grew empty. They didn’t have any airtight evidence against Lambert, only a baby farm
that had been raided repeatedly, which would simply change location if it were exposed to the public. The pregnant girl hadn’t known anything about the Source Agency, neither where the customers came from nor where the children were taken. She could say only that some of the girls were rewarded with a new phone.

  As Marion toured the salons and met the hair agents, Anita pretended to be a Swedish woman hoping for a baby and tried to find any incriminating traces of Lambert. He owned the water bottle factory through a front, so acquiring evidence of ownership would be difficult, but Anita wouldn’t give up. She began visiting every country where the Source Agency operated. Marion tried to hold her back. They needed only to point the police in the right direction. Anita didn’t listen. She wanted to visit each clinic herself, in every country and every location.

  —

  The clan was satisfied with Marion’s report about Nigeria. She was assigned more responsibility and sent on more trips alone. No one guessed that Anita was traveling with her. Anita became increasingly brazen, and it wasn’t until she was preparing for that last trip to Thailand that she began to feel she had seen enough.

  May 4, 2013

  Lambert delayed his decision about the loan for more than a month. When I finally received the order to go speak to him, he savored the moment. He enjoyed the humiliation. At first he pretended not to notice me and made me stand in the middle of the room while he read his papers and let the torturous minutes tick by. Then he feigned surprise at finding me there and began chatting about the weather. I was sure he wasn’t going to give me the money. Just then he slapped his hand on the table and said that of course he would give a loan to a friend in her time of need and ordered Alvar to bring the bag. It was full of small bills as I had requested.

  —

  After that there was no turning back. I owe Lambert, and now even the friendliest-seeming gesture is a reminder of that fact. Alla keeps suggesting we take a trip to Ukraine together. She says she wants to meet my friends and help with the problems an innocent person can so easily run into with the tax authorities there. Alla’s local resources would be at my fingertips. I can’t refuse directly, so I’ve been saying we should go in the fall.

  —

  Claiming that your hair was from Ukraine was a thoughtless move, and making up distant relatives there was even worse. I had just started at Shear Magic and thought my choice of country was a plausible basis for the high price. At the time I didn’t know that Lambert had significant business interests there. I’m sure Alla is already making inquiries about the hair and probably cooing in Lambert’s ear right now that this miracle will soon be in their grasp. They didn’t even suggest the Ukrainians’ contact information as payment for the loan, which I’d been afraid of since it would have been difficult to turn down if I’d really had relatives in dire financial straits. But no, Lambert wanted to make me dependent on him. He wanted a way to blackmail me. He understood I wouldn’t have any other way to pay him back, and it won’t be long before he moves beyond soft tactics.

  May 10, 2013

  At first, Marion thought it was an impossible dream. Then she understood it would be within reach if the clan weren’t in the way. I had only to feed her bitterness and remind her how the Lamberts treated her as if she were beneath them. I just had to encourage her. So I used the clan’s own playbook and plied her with visions of supplying hair for Ursula Stephen, Rihanna walking around wearing her products. Then she would land Paris Hilton’s wig master, and every door would swing wide open. Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Cosmopolitan—her clients would grace every cover. Not Alla’s, not Lambert’s—hers.

  —

  First we just had to get rid of Lambert.

  —

  Marion had the means: Thelma and Louise style, send the whole clan to jail. The Big Bang.

  May 11, 2013

  Every day for twenty years I’ve regretted sending Helena that batch of your hair. Maybe for the next twenty years I’ll regret destroying Marion’s dreams. I was the one who did it, not Lambert. I led Marion on with the intention of betraying her. I took greater advantage of her than Lambert ever did.

  —

  But it was unavoidable. I needed money and connections to people in the industry. Without Marion, I couldn’t have collected evidence for the Big Bang, and without that, I couldn’t get rid of my creditor—to carry out my plan, I needed money I wouldn’t have to pay back. I needed to win her over, and that meant supporting her goals.

  —

  She doesn’t suspect anything. She just keeps planning our wonderful future. It’s hard to watch. There won’t be any money left, and Marion won’t get her fancy salon. I won’t be selling her any more of your hair. That will end when you and I reach Bangkok and begin our new life.

  Norma browsed the flights departing Helsinki-Vantaa International Airport and tried to digest what her mother had said. She still didn’t know where the money was, but her mother mentioned a loan she wouldn’t have to pay back. The only way to accomplish that was through blackmail, and Kristian’s videos and information were the perfect bait. If her mother had already taken action, the clan would have had ample reason to get rid of her, which lined up with Marion’s murder accusations. But one fact didn’t fit. At the Playful Pike, as soon as Marion started talking about Lambert, the temperature of her scalp rose. She had been lying when she accused Lambert of murder. Maybe there was a reason for the lie. If Marion had discovered Norma’s mother’s betrayal, she must have been furious. She herself would have had a motive for murder. Maybe she was trying to shift the blame to someone else. Lambert was a credible alternative, but he was hardly the only one with the means to make a murder look like suicide.

  Norma let the recordings continue to play and scrolled to Alvar’s number in her phone. But she didn’t call. The due date of the loan was approaching, nurses mixed up in baby trafficking were running around in her stairwell, people were dying under strange circumstances, and her mother had betrayed numerous people, including Norma. Despair surged like milk boiling over.

  She should leave now. She should flee like Eva to America. This would be her last chance.

  Ten

  Do you remember the nightmares that would wake you when you were small? The situations changed, but one element was always the same: your secret was exposed. When you were older, you dreamed about being in an accident that left you in a monthlong coma, returning to consciousness only to find that you were a prisoner in a research institute. You had dreams about getting trapped in the middle of a desert because of a car breakdown and having to gnaw your hair off. In your dreams, you always left your scissors at home.

  April 19, 2013

  The traditional postcard industry landed in trouble after the war. Postage rates went up, and no one sent cards to the front anymore, so the little money Johannes could make came from landscape shots of the homeland that he sold to Finnish immigrants. That was why Johannes decided to return to his old ways after being introduced to the art bootleggers on Fourth Avenue. Because of the indecency laws, they were low on pin-up cards—finding anything up to French standards was impossible. Johannes knew he could do better, especially with an exotic model waiting at home. Counterfeiting the famous studios’ marks on his cards would be easy. He had photographed Eva before, just never for public consumption. When Johannes promised to remove her face before the emulsion dried, Eva agreed to even more risqué poses.

  —

  Johannes’s cards became popular, as men found the mysteriousness of the model stimulating. Sometimes Johannes sent his customers locks of Eva’s hair to prove its authenticity and stir them up even more. The success Johannes enjoyed made life good: they moved into better quarters in a better area, ate lamb chops and stuffed chicken prepared by a cook for dinner, and traded bathtub gin for higher-quality bootleg whiskey.

  —

  When Eva’s morning sickness began and not even jimsonweed helped, she had to admit to herself that she was in trouble. She was out of the ti
nctures of angelica root and wild rosemary she had brought from Finland, so she had to go to a pharmacy. She chose one from a business card that had been shoved at her by a kid working the crowd. The card’s claims that the pharmacy’s “French pills” were sure to restore any woman’s cycle turned out to be wrong. They made Eva feel twice as bad. When Johannes grew concerned, she claimed her condition was just a case of food poisoning and forbade him from calling a doctor. In the morning, she sent the parlor maid to fetch another batch of pills and tansy oil. Betty brought the requested supplies, but in order to ensure that Eva understood the dangers of what she was attempting, she told her a story about a friend who miscalculated a dose of pennyroyal and ended up lying unconscious in her own vomit, bleeding from between her legs and from her eyes. Betty didn’t want to see such a sight. She had a better suggestion.

  April 20, 2013

  The effects of the ether wore off, and Eva regained consciousness. She couldn’t move, and she didn’t understand what had happened. Betty’s reassuring hand squeeze was the last thing she remembered. Now Betty was nowhere to be seen, and no one was in the room. Eva’s hair was everywhere. Then she saw the doctor and the nurse. They lay on the floor, eyes staring lifelessly at the ceiling, hair wrapped around their necks. The doctor still had a curette in his hand. Eva hadn’t just been exposed—she was on her way to the electric chair.

  —

  The receptionist came knocking at the door, waited, knocked again, and called for the doctor, then the nurse. Eva held her breath and tried to keep calm. Straining to reach the scissors on a nearby instrument table, she succeeded in cutting herself free and rushed to shove a chair under the door handle. Then she looked for her clothes. Her handbag was under a toppled screen, as were her shoes, jacket, and dress. Her hat was crushed under a confusion of rubber tubes and bandages. She could find only one of her lace gloves, and her choker was missing. Eva grabbed the doctor’s bag and, after emptying it, began collecting her hair from around the chairs, screen, instruments, towels, and enamel basins, cursing herself for trusting an abortionist over her own abilities, for imagining she could get something for three hundred dollars that she didn’t know how to do herself, for daring to hope that it would be easier, more certain, and that no accidents would happen. That choice could lead to death row now. She cursed Betty, who was the reason she had told the receptionist her real phone number. She had started with a false name, but Betty tugged her sleeve when the receptionist asked her number and looked at her so intently that Eva didn’t dare lie anymore. They’d come to the clinic precisely because of its quality, and that included the doctor calling later to check on the state of the patient. That had been a mistake. She would have to get home before the police and destroy any pictures and negatives there that showed her face.