In front of the mirror, Alla considered how the top and bottom parts fit. Alla’s lucky bag was also going to Hanoi, a snakeskin Birkin acquired at a luxury purse auction.
“I like that Vietnamese deputy health minister. We need more men like him in politics,” Lambert said. “That nursing analogy was really good.”
Lambert showed Marion the news on his phone. According to this minister, surrogacy should be compared to breastfeeding: there had always been wet nurses, so why couldn’t a woman bear children for those who weren’t able? Fertility had dropped radically in Vietnam, and demand at infertility clinics had multiplied several times in the past decade. The media was reporting on cases of illegal surrogacy in Hanoi.
Marion dropped the phone onto the table. She couldn’t concentrate. “I haven’t seen Alvar all weekend,” she said.
“He has some new fling,” Lambert said, giving a wink. “Let the boy have a little time off. He’s earned it.”
“Let’s focus on Vietnam,” Alla said. “Think about your wardrobe. You’re going to come along to meet the minister of health.”
“You should get a feel for this side of the business,” Lambert said. “We’ll meet with all our old partners and ponder strategy. There’s potential. If husbands are prepared to sell their wives’ hair for twenty dollars, what will they take for a uterus? That’s no small shit.”
Lambert tossed his Panama hat in an arc onto the couch. The black hatband woke the tree frogs in Marion’s mind. “Get a feel for the business,” Marion had told Albino before the Colombia trip. Norma probably gave up her secret, which would explain Lambert’s good mood. But he could walk on sunshine for all she cared—the clan wouldn’t have time to do anything with the girl’s information.
“What do you think, Marion? About Vietnam?”
Marion was startled.
“You didn’t read the whole article,” Lambert said.
Marion picked up the phone and focused her eyes on the screen.
“Clever that the minister focuses on the worries of local couples,” Alla said. “It avoids the image of rich foreigners taking advantage of Vietnamese women.”
Lambert was already looking far into the future. He had an advantage because of the hair trade. Years of experience and relationships would make him king of the Vietnam embryo market. And after that, Japan. Marion would remember that smile forever, the dilated pores around his nose, the eyebrows grown bushy with age, the hand that rattled ice cubes in his glass like the bell of a colonial master calling a servant. Marion would never know whether the decision about her vacation had been made because Lambert knew the truth or simply because she was considered a risk. She would never know if Alvar was gone because he didn’t want to participate in this or because the girl and the information she had given were keeping her brother busy. At this point, Alvar would have called Lambert “Dad” to awaken childhood memories, but Marion didn’t need to grovel anymore. Today was the last time she’d ever see this pair. During this last father-daughter meeting, each had a plan for how to get rid of the other. This time, though, Marion would prevail.
“And we’re leaving Nigeria,” Lambert said. “I fully admit the water bottle factory was a mistake. We’ll liquidate it and forget the whole thing. We can’t sell black kids here anyway, and what the hell are we supposed to do with Nigerian ritual murders or virgins as a treatment for erectile dysfunction? Nothing. At least the Vietnamese are civilized. So get packed, Marion!”
Ljuba was still in the hospital, and Marion was in the kitchen making sandwiches for the kids when she heard Alvar’s car drive up. Alvar made straight for the backyard, where Lambert was sleeping off his Midsummer hangover with his hat over his eyes. Marion set the bread down on the counter and looked out. The yard swing swayed empty. Lambert had jumped up, and Alla had removed her sunglasses. The conversation was audible through the open window.
“It’s confirmed. The Ukrainian hair is coming from Dnipropetrovsk,” Alvar said. “The family Anita talked about lives there. They’ve been fighting with the tax authorities. Apparently the problems have something to do with Oleksandr Yanukovych’s businesses.”
Lambert paced the lawn. The languor and boozy haze had disappeared in an instant.
“Dnipropetrovsk,” he said, savoring the name as he turned his hat in his hands.
Marion shook the tree frogs away. In two days she would never have to hear them again. Alvar was Lambert’s golden boy again. And this time maybe hers, too. She wouldn’t go to Frankfurt. She would go to Dnipropetrovsk. She would find the Ukrainian supplier. She was sure of that. Once Alla and Lambert were out of the way, she would have time to turn over every stone in the city.
“Guns, nuclear weapons, the arms industry,” Alla said. “The mafia is mostly interested in dividing up state property. That region practically breeds politicians. Even Tymoshenko, the one with the braids, started her career there.” Alla made her hand into a pistol and cocked her thumb. “That’s how they handle things. But we have good contacts. I should have heard about this.”
Lambert placed his fingers against each other and nodded. “It is strange. So do we have a secret competitor in Dnipropetrovsk? Why do I have the feeling we’re still missing a piece of this puzzle?”
“All Norma knows is that the hair comes from there,” Alvar said. “She goes to the bus terminal and picks up the deliveries, and the money moves through a dummy account. I sent the boys to look for the woman whose name is on the account. The middleman is probably on the take. Norma believes that’s who’s behind Anita’s accident—I think the same person must be trying to muscle in on our territory. But we can contact the supplier in Dnipropetrovsk directly and try to cut a deal. We make it clear that without us they won’t be able to operate here, and that we play by our own rules. No one elbows out the Lamberts.”
Her brother’s voice was normal, but something was off. Marion just couldn’t put her finger on what. She couldn’t see his pupils. But his voice was clear, and he wasn’t twitching.
“I’m sending you right now the address in Dnipropetrovsk I got from Norma,” Alvar said, then started typing on his phone.
“We’ll go there directly after Hanoi,” Lambert said.
“And let’s get the girl’s auction out of the way before then. Alla can make her look presentable. Shiguto can’t resist blondes. Or do we need more time? Her face is still okay, isn’t it?”
“Should we get her out of the country now?” Alla asked.
“Maybe not right this instant,” Alvar said.
“So she does need to heal up. We can wait awhile, then.”
Her brother was effective and competent, a perfect member of the clan. She didn’t have anything in common with him anymore, and he would never reveal where he was keeping Norma. At that exact moment, Marion knew what the name of her hair salon would be:
Thelma and Louise.
Marion pushed across the table a nondescript folder containing ultrasound images and information about the progress of the pregnancy. Alvar had left her in charge of the meeting with the Down syndrome client. Marion guessed that he was avoiding her because he was afraid she would quiz him about Norma.
“My luck can’t be so bad that the same thing is happening again,” the woman said.
“No, of course not.”
Marion patted the woman’s arm consolingly, then continued delivering her standard litany, all the while wondering what this woman would do when she read about the Lambert clan’s businesses at her breakfast table. The media would start calling and whispers would follow her at work as her bosses wondered how to get rid of her legally. The neighbors would stop saying hello. Soon the whole country would want to know what happened to her first child. The headlines would suggest an orphanage, and if things went according to plan, questions about organ smuggling would surface. Marion had no clue about the child’s current location, but the key piece of evidence was in the memory sticks stored in the metal box: a recorded conversation demonstrating the woma
n’s disgust with her Down syndrome baby.
Marion smiled. She was smiling more all the time, and her smile was already borne aloft on airplane wings. She would leave. She would go to Dnipropetrovsk and find the Ukrainian supplier. Vogue. Harper’s Bazaar. Cosmopolitan. The covers of the hair magazines, styling for Paris Fashion Week! The next generation of supermodels! Nicki Minaj’s wig master, Terrence Davidson, would become a regular customer, and Ursula Stephen would order hair from them to do Rihanna. Madonna was a foregone conclusion. How many nights had Marion and Anita spent browsing glossy magazines and planning their future conquests? And now the future was here. She’d been able to finish everything herself after all. Without Anita, without a partner. She’d already emptied the accounts, and she no longer regretted withholding the remaining money from Norma. Norma didn’t have a use for it anyway; she wouldn’t need anything anymore.
They were supposed to open the metal box together. They’d planned to pack the flash drives into envelopes and mail them on Marion’s birthday, the fourth of August. They settled on the date before leaving for Thailand. That should have been the start of her new life. Marion opened a bottle of sparkling wine and poured two glasses.
The eggshell-white envelopes waited on the table. She had already put stamps on them and was starting to write the addresses. One was meant for the National Bureau of Investigation, another for an activist who specialized in leaks, a third for a news organization she hadn’t chosen yet. Anita had jumped in front of a train before they could decide. A tabloid or a newspaper? A magazine or a local rag? Maybe somewhere in Denmark? Or Sweden? They’d tried to look for Finnish-language search results, but even baby factory was such an obscure term that articles put it in quotation marks. A few of the raids on Nigerian and Thai baby farms had been mentioned as column filler with no mention of how many Finns had acquired children from these countries. The Danes and Swedes would take up the story more eagerly.
Marion decided to play it safe. She would send one envelope to the Expressen in Sweden and another to one of the Danish papers.
She would get more memory sticks in Kiev, make more copies, and send them to every country where the agency had operations. Lambert would soon become the public face of rent-a-womb tourism.
—
When everything was ready and her bag was packed, the doorbell rang. Through the peephole, Marion saw Alvar, who didn’t take his finger off the bell until she opened the door. Marion remained unconcerned. She had pushed the envelopes and suitcase into the closet, and otherwise nothing else in the apartment revealed her intentions, so she simply let him in and began giving a detailed report on the meeting with the Down syndrome client. Her brother said nothing. Marion continued her speech until his silence made a familiar stiffness spread through her limbs, and she trailed off.
“Are you finished now? You didn’t really think your plan would succeed, did you?”
—
Two of Alvar’s men came in and began tossing Marion’s apartment shelf by shelf. Her life was turned upside down one drawer at a time. They even cut open the mattress. Feathers cascaded from pillows like snow, coins rained from pockets, glasses smashed on the tiles, flour and sugar frosted the kitchen, and powder dusted the bathroom mirror as the men opened jars and tins and poured their contents on the floor. Marion stood against the wall, like a tongue frozen to a metal railing, and watched. Alvar sat in front of her and went through the envelopes they found in her suitcase. Then he inserted the memory sticks into a laptop, and the recordings began to play.
“You can go.”
Marion didn’t understand.
“You can have ten hours’ head start. I’ll take these to Lambert in the morning.”
One of Alvar’s men brought him some papers: Marion’s tickets to Kiev. Alvar glanced at them and dropped them onto the floor.
“Go wherever you want.”
Marion peeled herself off the wall and picked up the tickets.
“Make sure she doesn’t take anything with her,” Alvar told one man. “Passport, phone, and credit card, but that’s it. Take her to the airport, then check her pockets and hair again.”
On the screen in front of Alvar, a Mexican girl cried about the abortion she’d been forced to have at seven months. Alvar jumped to the next video, the next cascade of tears, and then to the next girl, who said she’d received a passport and a trip across the border as payment.
Marion shook the pillow feathers from her skirt and took another step toward the entryway, then a third.
“I sent you that address in Dnipropetrovsk,” Alvar said as Marion reached the door. “There’s no point going there, but you will anyway.”
Epilogue
The weather had decimated the service station’s selection of ice cream. Norma stood in front of the freezer, leaving the door open until the tongue of sweat on her back cooled a bit. At the checkout she cast a passing glance at the headlines. Heatstroke deaths, thunderstorms and silicone implants, divorces and weddings.
“Anything else, ma’am?”
A moment passed before Norma realized the clerk, face turned toward the ineffectual fan, was talking to her, and she smiled. Nothing else. This is all. Coffee for two. Water for two, one sparkling, one still. Cigarettes for two, with menthol and without. Everything for two. Plus pig ears from the pet aisle for the dog—who was standing outside on the asphalt lifting each paw in turn.
Alvar’s smile knotted her stomach in a good way, and as she crossed the parking lot to where he was smoking next to the car, Norma imagined herself as any woman leaving on a summer vacation with her lover. The station wagon that pulled in behind them interrupted the daydream. A sudden nausea forced her to crawl into the front seat and fumble for a motion sickness pill. It was caused by the woman who got out of the wagon to walk while the children bounced inside with her husband.
“That woman is sick.”
Then Norma snapped her mouth shut and turned the air conditioner on high. Alvar had climbed into the car and put his arm around her waist. The heat of July was melting her head. Or maybe Alvar was to blame. Water for two, beer for two, coffee for two, rooms for two—her hungry heart was prepared to reveal everything.
“She won’t see next summer,” Norma said.
The children ran to show their mother their juice boxes, but she was busy arguing with her husband in Russian. The woman wanted to fill the tank now, the man didn’t, and the woman asked whether he really intended to drive around looking for the cheapest gas in Finland or if he’d try to make it all the way home without filling up in order to get a better price on the other side of the border. Years later the children would remember their parents’ constant arguing through their mother’s final summer, and they would come to hate the stepmother who would enter the picture before long.
“Do you remember the heat wave in 2010? I was drunk practically the whole summer. Heat makes everything stronger. Death, alcohol, sex. Winter is better for me.” Norma instinctively clapped a hand to her mouth and glanced at Alvar. He wasn’t looking at the family—he was looking at Norma.
“So you can smell diseases from people’s hair?”
“I’m not making it up.”
“You shouldn’t tell that to anyone, kitten.”
Alvar made everything sound normal. Norma told the story of how, when she was a little girl, she’d seen the fatal illness in the store clerk and kept it to herself. Just as she was staying silent now, looking at this family about to lose a wife and mother. She could intervene. The woman might recover if she went to the doctor in time. Norma could get out of the car and tell her now.
“You aren’t going anywhere,” Alvar said.
“You don’t care at all.”
Alvar shrugged. “I care selectively.”
Coffee cups in hand, they watched the family squabble as if it were a spectator sport. Alvar would never judge Norma for not rushing to the woman and ordering her to the doctor. He wouldn’t harp on how much good she could do. She could walk
right past people she knew were doomed; she could also ignore the ones whose problems would be solved by a change in diet. With Alvar, she could be indifferent without the guilt, and that made her feel weightless. Before, she’d always feared seeing a disease in someone she was close to. It happened sometimes: she’d remained silent, and it had always been pure torture.
—
The pond at the farm was exactly how Norma remembered. More than ten years had passed since her last visit. Now there were more waterlilies and reeds—the shore hadn’t been dredged in decades. The pond was still swimmable, though. After Alvar and the dog splashed into the water, Norma tried the car radio again, but it just continued its frivolity; nothing about a Finnish businessman found dead in Ukraine, his wife, or his daughter, or a violent gunfight involving Finnish citizens. The radio went silent, perhaps because of the approaching thunderclouds, and Norma walked to the beach. She dug a cigarette out of her pocket. It controlled the fear that occasionally burst its restraints. If Lambert had survived after all, or Alla, they would come after her. After them. Eva encouraged her to trust Alvar. He was one of those men who knew how to handle things.
Norma stubbed out her cigarette when the dog climbed onto the shore to shake off her coat, and Alvar followed.
“You have that look again,” he said. “But Lambert isn’t coming back.”
“You haven’t seen the body.”
“I trust my men.”
“What if Lambert paid more than you did?”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“How does it then?”
Alvar dropped his towel to the ground and began to dress. Norma realized this wasn’t a conversation worth continuing. Alvar wouldn’t tell her everything. But Norma wanted to be able to sleep alone. She didn’t want to worry every time he went out of the room. She didn’t want to listen for sirens constantly, to flinch at the sight of every police cruiser their car happened to pass. The certainty that Alvar would be arrested sometimes made her heart burn with rage, and it wouldn’t relent until she felt the familiar ribs of that stray dog under her fingers.