The Tattooed Heart

  But to my amazement the pickup truck drove slowly through nearly abandoned streets until it reached a church. There the bearded man helped Graciella down and walked her to a side door.

  An elderly black woman with a bird’s nest of gray hair and the wiry energy of healthy old age shook the man’s hand and guided Graciella inside. The man with the beard slipped the old woman a twenty-dollar bill, the only contents of his wallet.

  By the time Graciella had turned in the doorway to thank them, they were tooling away down the street.

  “Okay, I admit, I am surprised,” Haarm said.

  “Christians behaving like Christians,” I said.

  “Probably decided they’d get caught,” Haarm said, and his tone was condescending, as though I were younger than he and foolish to boot.

  “It does not do to become cynical,” Messenger said.

  “How can you not, given what we see?” Haarm shot back. I was shocked at the easy way he had of challenging Messenger. I half expected Messenger to deliver a smack down.

  “If there is no good in the world, then there is no hope and we are accomplishing nothing,” Messenger said. “If we lose sight of good, we are lost.”

  Haarm rolled his eyes, but at me, with a conspiratorial wink, as though I would join him in laughing at Messenger.

  “This could be . . . could have been . . . a turning point,” I said, reminding myself that I had seen where Graciella’s life led.

  “The turning point,” Messenger said, and without further warning the world sped by and the sun rose and a rested and a fed and washed Graciella snuck from the back door of the mission. Her guitar was slung over her back, and she had a loaf of bread clutched in her hand.

  We followed her through the bright streets, hoping, I suppose, at least I was, that some more good would come her way. She came to a place called the New Daisy Theater. It was a plainer, sterner-looking building than the theater in Austin. It looked as if it should have been an armory, except for the green, red, and white marquee.

  Of course I knew what name I would find on that marquee.

  Nicolet.

  “Here we go again,” I muttered.

  There were alleys beside the theater, but they were closed off with tall steel gates. Beale Street is narrow, just two lanes of traffic, a long line of bars and music venues, including the original Daisy right across the street. During the day it was dead, the only activity coming from early morning delivery trucks dropping off flats of bottled beer and kegs, shrink-wrapped pallets of cans and number ten jugs, all the things that keep a bar or restaurant going.

  Just a block away was the FedExForum, a massive sports arena decorated in banners for the Memphis Tigers, the basketball team of the University of Memphis. Here Graciella found short flights of stairs and stunted dividers to lean against. She sat down and began to nibble from the loaf of bread.

  She was a pathetic sight there with her guitar and her loaf of bread. Time sped forward. The sun rose high in the sky. People came by in increasing numbers. People glanced at her, but I suppose she was not the first guitar-toting kid to be seen in Memphis. They probably figured she was a hopeful, looking to play some guitar, gather a crowd, maybe collect a few dollars, and catch the eye of some important music executive.

  And part of that, she did. As the lunchtime crowd grew she took out her guitar. And she sang. She sang songs I had never heard, and some that I knew she had given to Nicolet.

  Someone handed her a dollar and she seemed surprised and grateful. She opened her guitar case and as she sang, dimes and quarters, dollar bills, and even a five-dollar bill appeared.

  Even knowing how her story ended, I was caught up in her joy at being able to perform music that people liked enough to acknowledge it with cash and applause. She had touched people. She had moved people. I saw a woman cry, unashamed, tears on her cheeks.

  The afternoon wore on and the crowd disappeared. Graciella sat counting her money. It looked like twenty, maybe thirty dollars.

  She stood up, bones cracking, and made her way to a coffee shop and bought herself an iced sweet tea and a ham and cheese.

  As she was walking back toward the New Daisy down a narrow alley, three men followed her into the alley. Halfway down, they rushed her, grabbed her, one with a hand over her mouth, as a white van came speeding up.

  Graciella tried to scream, did scream, but it was cut short and I doubted anyone had heard it.

  The van took off and of course we had no difficulty keeping pace. It stopped at a grubby brick building with a faded auto-body repair sign. A steel shutter was rolled up and the van went inside.

  We stood on the street, the three of us, staring at the steel door as it came down.

  “The manager,” I said. “Mr. Joshua. He did this.”

  Messenger’s silence was confirmation.

  “Aren’t we going in?” Haarm asked.

  “I don’t want to see,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “I do,” Haarm said. Then, realizing how that sounded, he added, “I mean, that’s what we do, isn’t it? That’s what Messenger—my messenger, my master—taught me, anyway. We are to witness and understand. Right?”

  I saw that Messenger was looking to me as though it was my decision. “I don’t want to see this,” I said, not as firmly as I meant to say it, but meaning it just the same.

  “There are worse things,” Haarm said, though not flippantly.

  “Not many,” I snapped.

  Messenger decided the issue by rolling us forward in time. Judging by the lengthening of the shadows, hours had passed. Without a word, Messenger passed through the steel door, and we followed.

  13

  IT WAS DARK INSIDE, DARK IN THAT WAY THAT places that never truly see daylight are dark. Old and musty darkness. Darkness smelling of grease and dust and abandonment.

  The three men sat on a stuffing-busted couch and a rickety wooden rocker watching a television, which supplied the only light. They were surrounded by beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays.

  We found Graciella lying on bare concrete, beside an old steel tool bench. She had been badly beaten. Her clothing was shredded. But the detail I focused on was her guitar, which lay in splinters.

  I closed my eyes.

  I stood there refusing to open my eyes again, swaying slightly, feeling as if the ground was moving beneath me.

  “She should get out of this place,” Haarm said.

  “They aren’t done with her,” I said. I don’t know how I knew that. Maybe it was something in the men’s voices, the loud way they cheered the game on TV, the aggressive way they slammed their bottles down when their team scored. I don’t know. I only knew that they had not finished with her.

  “I don’t want to see,” I said.

  “You better toughen up, sweetie,” Haarm said.

  I did not plan what happened next. I’m not proud of it.

  But I’m not ashamed either.

  I turned and punched the blond boy in the stomach. It wasn’t a very hard punch, I’m not very big, and I’ve never punched anyone before.

  Haarm yelled something in Dutch, then switched back to English, and tried to laugh it off. He shot a look at Messenger as if expecting Messenger to discipline me.

  Messenger might almost not have noticed, except that Messenger notices everything. He did not smile, but neither did he frown or show any concern.

  I don’t think he liked Haarm very much. And just then, neither did I.

  “Sorry,” I lied.

  Time sped forward and now we were outside the shop as Graciella stepped out onto the street, holding her clothing together with her hands, shuffling like a very old woman, makeup a black smear running from her eyes, blood caked in her hair.

  I hoped she would go to the police. I was disappointed when she did not. She borrowed a woman’s cell phone to call her parents and I listened to only one side of the conversation with her mother. Her useless, blind, clueless mother who had done nothing to save her from the dem
on that was her father.

  “It’s me. I need to come home. I really need to come home.”

  A pause.

  “I spent all the money I had. Mom, I need to come home. I really, really need to come home, okay?”

  A longer pause. Graciella was weeping, sobbing into the phone.

  “No, I don’t want to talk to Dad. No, no, Mom, no, I—”

  She swallowed hard and squeezed her eyes shut. Her voice was cold now. Emotionless.

  “Dad, I need money to come home.”

  Pause.

  “Will I behave myself? I . . . What do you mean? What do you mean by that?”

  The woman who had loaned her the phone was looking sympathetic but also impatient. She stood a few feet away, trying to give Graciella privacy, but also obviously worried that this damaged young woman would steal her phone.

  “Dad, I . . . I just need enough money to . . .”

  This time the pause went on for a long time. Only slowly did I realize that her father had hung up on her.

  Graciella let her hand drop to her side. The woman who owned the phone gently took it from Graciella’s hand. Then she opened her purse, pulled out a ten dollar bill, and pressed it into Graciella’s hand, mumbled something kind, and walked away, using her sleeve to wipe Graciella’s tears from her cell phone.

  “Yes, there is good in the world,” Haarm said, “but it’s not enough.”

  He looked warily at me like I might punch him again. But honestly, he was right, wasn’t he? The man with the beard, and the old woman at the mission, and now this woman with the phone and the gift, they were powerless to stop the destruction of this young girl.

  Was it partly Graciella’s fault? Had she been foolish? Had she made mistakes and taken wrong turns? Yes. But she was just a kid with talent wanting to find a way to express that talent. She wanted to be someone, someone other than the object of her mother’s guilt and her father’s insidious abuse.

  She wanted to be a musician, a songwriter, a performer, not the bruised and bloodied victim of brutal rape carried out on the orders of a greedy man in the employ of a ruthless Nicolet.

  I felt sick and sad and helpless watching Graciella walk away. Somehow she looked so much less of a person without her guitar. Just another sad street kid.

  I hated the world. I hated what it did to gentle people. Blessed are the meek? Maybe in ancient Israel, not on the streets of Austin or Memphis or the shooting galleries of Nashville.

  “You can’t help people who won’t help themselves,” Haarm said. Maybe if I’d had the energy I would have punched him again. But he wasn’t wrong.

  “Maybe we can’t save her,” I said, “but we can hurt for her.”

  “What?” Haarm seemed to be trying to tone himself down, and tried to make himself sound as if he was concerned for me, but the mockery came through. “Seriously, you have time to feel the pain of everyone you’re going to encounter in this job?”

  “We are meant to feel their pain,” I said. “That’s why we wear the marks.”

  “The marks? What marks?”

  I stopped walking, tilted my head to get a better look at him. “Do you really not know?” I glanced at Messenger, who seemed content to attend passively. Of course he was judging me, it’s what he did, watching his pupil to see whether I had learned the lessons he taught me. I didn’t know if I had or not. I was sure that Haarm either had learned nothing from his master, or learned a very different set of lessons.

  I rolled up my sleeve, and when that didn’t work, I tugged down the neckline of my shirt to reveal a bra strap and the tattoo.

  Haarm stared at it, fascinated. “It . . . I think . . . It almost looks like it’s moving! Where did you get that?”

  “You really don’t know,” I said. “He doesn’t know,” I said to Messenger, seeking some guidance.

  “Teach him,” Messenger said.

  “This is the mark I received for my first case. Derek Grady. He had a deeply buried terror of burning alive. I watched him burn. I smelled him burn.”

  Seeing disbelief in Haarm’s eyes, I did something I probably shouldn’t have done. But he looked smug and so sure of himself. So I reached over and in unconscious imitation of Oriax, laid my palm against his cheek. Flesh to flesh contact.

  I am not to be touched.

  His eyes opened wide, he gasped, sucked in air, batted my hand away, took several stumbling steps back. “What? What? What the hell!”

  “You don’t know that physical contact between our sort causes memory transfer? Didn’t your master teach you—”

  Haarm, for the first time in our brief acquaintance, seemed genuinely horrified. Something had finally penetrated that wall of smugness.

  “He is new to his apprenticeship,” Messenger said blandly. “He has not yet reached beyond the earliest training.” He narrowed his eyes and looked at Haarm as if weighing him up and finding very little of substance there.

  But when I saw the shock in Haarm’s eyes, I admit to feeling a little guilty. I reminded myself that this is a strange world we now inhabit; the messengers and the apprentices and maybe Haarm was just raising defenses against all the pain that comes with the job.

  “Let us witness the final turning point for Graciella,” Messenger said.

  Once again, I did not know where we were. It was a city. That much I could see around me, but which city, and when? I never did find out. It didn’t matter, I suppose. Maybe it was Nashville, where I had first seen Graciella OD. Maybe not.

  Loud music throbbed from a row house on a street of row houses. It was not a gentrified neighborhood, rather one of those places with serviceable old buildings that might someday attract the young professionals and the retired couples looking for something with an urban edge. Someday all those folks would arrive and begin remodeling kitchens and painting facades and parking their Priuses and BMWs on the street, but that had not begun yet, not on this block.

  Graciella, wearing clothing that marked her as what she had by this time become, approached the door, trying for swagger and achieving only an awkward balance on too-high heels. She knocked on the door, too softly to be heard above the insistent bass. She knocked again, more forcefully this time, then stuck her knuckles in her mouth.

  The door flew open. Inside was an obviously drunk and way too happy boy in a T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. He looked no older than Graciella, but something about him, maybe just the way he carried himself, the confidence that escaped past the blur of drink, marked him as a boy who came from privilege.

  “Hey there, young lady,” he said.

  “I heard there was a party and, and, and you were looking for . . . girls.”

  “There is indeed a party, and we are definitely looking for girls,” though he used a much cruder word. “And you are a fine specimen.”

  “A hundred dollars, up front,” Graciella said.

  It was a phrase she had used before, I heard it in her voice, and it sank my heart in my chest.

  “A hundred dollars?” The boy shook his head as if this was news to him. “That’s a lot of money. What can you do to earn a hundred whole dollars?”

  “I can do whatever you want,” she said defiantly.

  “That’s exactly what I was hoping you’d say,” he answered with a wicked leer.

  A second male appeared, maybe eighteen, maybe not quite. He reached around the first boy and stuck a lit joint in his mouth. “Another hooker?”

  The frat boy took a long drag on the joint, held it, and with smoke seeping out said, “Come on, Tony, we don’t say hooker. We say ‘professional sex worker.’”

  “Uh-huh. Get her in here, because Oliver has some dudes needing some professional sex work.”

  The first boy drew Graciella after him and shut the door. I had a pretty good idea what I would see happen at this party, and though I dreaded it, I felt I had shown weakness earlier, and now that I was established as the more experienced apprentice, I wanted to show Haarm that I was tough enough to see and
do what was necessary.

  I led the way through the door.

  Inside the lights were low, the walls dirty and scrawled with graffiti. Ancient wallpaper hung in tatters in places, and the paint on the ceiling was bubbled and scarred.

  There was a depressing familiarity to the environments in which we saw Graciella now. This room smelled more of mildew and less of grease than the abandoned Memphis garage where Graciella had been raped, but the sense of decay was identical.

  Two battered couches, a coffee table with one leg replaced by cinderblocks, a mattress, four men, two other women, if you could call these dead-eyed young girls “women.”

  There was one difference from the previous scene: on the table was an array of drugs and paraphernalia.

  The boy who had answered the door was not the one in charge. Neither was the second boy. The person in charge was younger than both, but his dominance over the room was expressed in the way he occupied an entire couch by himself, arms spread wide over the back, legs up on the coffee table, laptop open, a small pile of cash resting beside him.

  “Hey,” this boy said. “My name is Oliver. Who are you?”

  “Candy,” Graciella lied. She did it in an easy, practiced way that made me think we had leaped ahead at least a few weeks in time.

  Oliver was handsome and charismatic, with a lush mane of black hair, dark, dreamy eyes, and a body that had spent significant time in a gym, probably with the help of some steroids.

  There was relief on Graciella’s face. This was better than what she had recently endured, it was clear on her face. Her eyes darted to the money and Oliver saw it and smirked.

  “Let’s take one thing off the table between us right now, Candy,” he said. He shuffled through the money, pulled out two twenties, and handed them to Graciella. “You can keep that. That’s just for walking in here. You can walk right back out with those two twenties. Or . . .”

  “Or?”