The cottage had a minaret and two man-made ponds that we could see from the windows. We never swam in them; they were for show. They went with the gardens. The bathrooms had faucets and bidet handles made of pretend gold. We each had our own bedroom with windows and velvet drapes. This was so we would feel a little pampered when we were not entertaining and so we would have our own space to bring clients when it was time. We ate together in a dining room with a white marble floor and an Oriental carpet with Noah’s ark animals. (My favorite creatures were the rug’s two giraffes.) We used silver. We all spoke different dialects of Russian, and only Sonja and I spoke Armenian. Only I spoke English. But we figured out how to talk to each other. The girls picked up English pretty quick.
So, that was the carrot: a nice house with nice bedrooms and nice food. Glamorous, yes?
Here was the stick: we couldn’t leave the property, we couldn’t talk to anyone beyond the gates, and we had to fuck whatever guys they brought to the house. And we were isolated. Totally isolated. We had no computers and no phones. There was not even an old-fashioned telephone in the house with one of those dials you spin that we saw all the time in old movies. It’s funny how fast you miss the Internet when it’s gone. We had no passports or credit cards or money. We depended on them for all our food and our clothes and our toothbrushes and our makeup and our medicines when we got sick.
And we were locked in our rooms at night—except when we were working. There were men with Makarov pistols in their belts or in shoulder holsters watching us. They had shifts, and they came and went; we were not allowed to become friends with them. Most of the time they spoke to us only when they were yelling at us to return to the terrace when we took our one hour of sunlight outside. Sometimes they’d threaten to lock us away if Inga or Catherine complained about us. Other times they’d make jokes about us to entertain themselves. They called us “little flaps” and “little twats.” But usually they just watched us in silence.
And most nights, it seems, we worked: that means we fucked what one of the girls from Volgograd called the “black and whites.” (Her name was Crystal and later she would come to America with Sonja and me.) The black and whites were men who almost always wore black suits and white shirts. They never wore neckties. They always had stubble—so much stubble that sometimes Catherine or Inga would talk to them about not abrading our skin. They seemed to be rich, and sometimes they were old enough to be our grandfathers, which does not necessarily mean they were really that old; after all, we were all between thirteen and sixteen years old. The clients were Russian and Georgian and Ukrainian and—and you get the point. Very international, it seemed to us. Many worked in “spirits.” Brandy and cognac and vodka. Even, in some cases, beer and wine.
None of them had any interest in us as more than sex toys.
None of them ever paid us; they left the money with Inga or Catherine, or they had paid ahead of time.
And none of them ever complained. We fucked like our lives depended on it—because, we realized, they did.
…
Approval is a funny thing. I needed it from Madame as an aspiring ballerina. I needed it from my schoolteachers as a student poet.
And, eventually, I needed it as a prostitute.
…
I did not view the other five girls as sisters, but we were more than friends. Sonja and I were very close, maybe because we both were Armenian. I looked up to her because she was older. Her family was originally from Gyumri, like mine, and only moved to Volgograd after the earthquake. Much to the annoyance of Inga and Catherine, the two of us were very protective of one another. Sonja also looked after Crystal, since Crystal was also from Volgograd and she was only thirteen.
Sonja was much crazier with the men than I was; she was probably crazier than all of us. I know she did things with them all the time that I only did when I had to. It wasn’t that she was getting any pleasure from the business. But she channeled her anger into her work. She was (and I really understood this use of the word fucking the first time I heard it) “fucking mad.” She was capable of scaring the men—even intimidating them—which meant that once in a while she would get in very serious trouble. The men would complain, though only sometimes would they suggest that she was more girl than they could handle. They would simply say she was difficult. Or disobedient.
That was the worst thing we could be: disobedient.
One time, to punish her for looking Daddy in the eyes—we were never to look Daddy or Mikhail in the eyes—they burned off the hair on one side of her head. I will never forget that smell. Her hair had been regular but beautiful blond.
When it grew back, Inga had her dye it so it was almost white, and then cut it into a bob. Her eyes were sky blue and would grow wide when she was angry inside. Like me, she could dance, and so sometimes the two of us would be ordered to get little parties started. (Mostly that meant stripping to some pop song and then grinding against the men’s pants until the men brought us to our rooms.) Sonja and I sometimes talked about what our lives had been like before: hers in Volgograd and mine in Yerevan. She would tell me the little she recalled of her parents, and I would tell her all about my mother and my grandmother.
And with all of us girls there was some competitiveness in our relationships. Even Sonja, crazy as she was, had to have her share of approval—from us and from Inga and Catherine. That’s just how it is. You lick the hand that feeds you.
And then, of course, there was Daddy.
Daddy appeared every few days. He was a former Soviet army colonel, probably sixty back then. He had the sort of good looks we saw in older male models in Western magazines. I think of Ralph Lauren ads when I think of him. He wanted us to call him Daddy, and he wanted the six of us to view ourselves as wives, like we were harem people, though there was no single man we were attached to. And he never fucked us. I think he would have viewed that as shoplifting, maybe, or stealing from his own company. And if he really did view himself as a father figure, I think sleeping with us would have complicated whatever excuse he had made up in his head to explain why it was okay to kidnap and imprison us.
So instead he fucked Inga and Catherine. He fucked them whenever he came to the cottage.
He was, we were told, much more powerful than Mikhail or even Vasily. Dudes like Mikhail and Vasily were scared to death of the man we called Daddy.
…
One week I was not allowed to use the bathroom. They gave me a tin coffee pot I was supposed to use for everything. I was not allowed to leave my bedroom. I was not allowed my one hour outside each day, because they wanted to be sure I used only the tin coffee pot. Inga checked it to make sure I was filling it up.
What had I done? What was my crime? I was in trouble because a man had said I was not clean there. He was lying. He only said that because he was not clean there and I told him we should shower before we fucked.
…
One day Crystal and I were smoking outside the cottage. We were standing in the middle of the big oval in the driveway where cars turned around and watching ducks in one of the ponds. She always looked like little girl who had stolen Mom’s cigarettes. She had crazy big eyes and no tits. She was so beautiful at thirteen and fourteen. Out of nowhere she asked me, “You think any of the guys would help us?”
I thought she was talking about the guards, and I motioned with my cigarette at the dude who was watching us from the front steps. “Him? You crazy?”
She shook her head. “Of course not. I hate him. I hate all of them. I meant the black and whites.” Her voice was even smaller than usual, because what we were talking about was so dangerous.
“And by help, you mean escape?”
“Yes.”
“No way. It’s too risky for them. Besides, why would any of them want to do that? Anyone who comes here wants us here. We’re nothing but pussy to them. We’re nothing but pussy to anyone.”
She took a long puff. “What if I made one fall in love with me?”
&nbs
p; “You’re dreaming. These guys? Never happen.”
“But what if? He could take me with him. We could go and get help.”
“How would he take you with him? Put you in his briefcase?”
“Well, maybe I could ask him to tell someone about us. Tell someone we’re here.”
“Yeah, the police guys care lots about girls like us. I’m sure every week one of us is fucking a police guy.”
She nodded because I was right and she knew it. “They’re just so evil,” she said after a moment, and we both went quiet because the truth was so sad. When she finally spoke again her voice was totally flat. Sometimes we all sounded totally flat. Like zombie people. “So there’s no one to help us,” she said.
I stepped on my cigarette and put my arm around her. “At least we have beds and food and cigarettes—and each other. We even have the Bachelor on TV!” I told her, trying to cheer her up with a silly joke. But now she was in one of the moods that we all got in once in a while, and the only way out was to flatline. It’s why some girls like us do drugs. Sometimes it’s the only way through.
…
How different were all of us? Another afternoon a girl named Elena and I were sitting on the terrace under a beautiful warm sky. The sun was always like drug after so many hours indoors.
“This is kind of a weird fairy tale,” she said. We were wearing the miniskirts they made us wear like uniform. They only let us wear underwear when we were working. Other times, such as during the day, they always made us wear short skirts and no panties. We were sitting on the stones, and they were warm on my bottom. It felt perfect. “We’re like those princesses in castles who are waiting to be rescued.”
“Don’t hold your breath for a prince,” I told her. I closed my eyes and turned my face toward the sun. “I don’t think a prince would come to a joint like this.”
“But I like Inga,” she said. “I really do. And I think I like Catherine. I mean, do we really want to be rescued?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you do. But this is, in some ways, a lot better than the life I was leading.”
I knew Elena’s history. She was the third of the three girls from Volgograd. While she was there, she was living with her stepfather, who worked in the large brandy factory. She had been brought to the cottage two days before me. Her mother was dead, and her father had run off years ago; her stepfather recently had been laid off. Suddenly his boss offers to buy his stepdaughter to help him make ends meet. Only an idiot would think this was a coincidence. They knew what Elena looked like. They knew her value. And, of course, they knew her stepfather. He was despicable. He’d been a very big jerk to her, even before he sold her like cow at the market.
“I can do this,” she went on. “And if we do our jobs, they take really good care of us. And everyone has to work, yes? Everyone has to do something.”
Two years later when I was working in Moscow—more like courtesan now—I spent two nights as arm candy for a very fat but very nice economist from Saint Petersburg. He would use the expression “Stockholm syndrome.” He used it on our second night together, when we were having a little pillow talk. I would often tell men stories. Capture-bonding, he said. I knew just what he meant. I thought of Elena and that day in the sun back at the mansion.
Of course, not all our life would be Stockholm syndrome.
Look what happened when I got older and they brought me to America. Land of the free and the home of the brave? Nope. Not in my case. For girls like me, it was nothing more than the home of the disgusting. Perverts and sad men. There were confusing exceptions, such as guys like Richard Chapman. Guys like that could haunt you. But you get the point. And nothing was free—just like in Russia.
…
Sonja and Crystal had faith in hatred. They were good at it. They believed the world is filled with evil and people are devils, and you can only fight evil and devils with hatred.
Me? I was never good at hatred. I felt it. I knew it. But it did not live inside me the way it did inside them. Maybe things would have turned out better if it did. If I had been better at hatred.
Chapter Six
Before falling asleep at the hotel on Saturday night, Richard flipped through the photos on his iPhone. He wanted to see pictures of Kristin and Melissa. He hoped they might calm him. But among the hundreds of images were some scans of shots from his own childhood, and after looking at a dozen photos of his wife and his daughter, he paused on one of Philip and him. There he was at seventeen and Philip at twelve, the two of them in T-shirts on a beach on Grand Cayman. They were on a family vacation. He couldn’t believe how long their hair was. He couldn’t believe his seventh-grade brother was wearing a T-shirt that said “How to pick up chicks.” Granted, the image was of a stick-figure human picking up baby chickens. But still. What were his parents thinking? Sometimes Richard liked to blame his brother’s idiosyncrasies on the friends he had made at college—a bunch of hazing- and party-obsessed frat boys who lived for beer pong and porn—but perhaps it was genetic. Maybe Philip had been born a jerk. But Richard didn’t view their father as especially sexist. He was a management consultant. Their mother was a librarian. And despite the fact that their father made scads more money than their mother, Richard viewed their parents’ marriage as a partnership. It was rather like his own marriage with Kristin. He earned the lion’s share of their joint income, but every decision they made was a joint one.
He remembered taking Philip and two of his frat brother friends to dinner one night between Christmas and New Year’s when Philip was a junior in college. Richard had his MBA by then and had been working at Franklin McCoy for six months. He brought Philip and his pals to a steak restaurant in the gentrifying meat packing district, but the place was a throwback: heavyset waiters with walrus mustaches who frowned at you dismissively if you ordered any salad other than the iceberg wedge. When it was time to consider dessert, the three younger guys thanked him and bolted. They said they had fake IDs and planned to go to a strip club. Richard knew they thought less of him—they viewed him as a little less manly—because he didn’t go with them. But the reality was that he was dating a schoolteacher with hazel eyes and lustrous amber hair that fell to her shoulders. A young woman with a laugh that he loved, and who liked indie rock as much as he did. He didn’t see the point of a strip club. Besides, he was planning to work that night. The fact was, back then he worked every night he wasn’t with Kristin.
He put down his phone and gazed out the window at Times Square. His room was on the eighteenth floor. He decided he would give almost anything to go back in time. Two days. That was all he wanted. Even a day and a half. Down there somewhere were strips clubs, which instantly made him think of Alexandra. Of strippers and escorts and sex slaves. He recalled the girl’s eyes when she kissed him. It was going to be years, he feared, before he would find a way to forgive himself.
He wondered who among the thousands of people out there right now was going to screw up tonight as badly as he had twenty-four hours ago.
…
The next morning was the first time that Richard and Kristin Chapman had been in the newspapers since their wedding announcement had appeared in the Times. Richard read the articles just before sunrise, having slept little the night before. The bed at the Millennium was fine; so were the pillows and the heater’s strangely mellifluous white noise. He tossed and turned because he feared the quiet of the room and the emptiness of the bed were harbingers. He vacillated between anger and despair, a ping-pong ball lobbed back and forth in gentle, transparent arcs. One moment he felt victimized; none of this, especially those dead Russians, was his fault. The next? He would see himself naked and erect at the edge of the guest room bed, a hauntingly beautiful young woman reaching out her hands to him. Her mouth. And he would be overwhelmed with regret. Sure, he had drawn back. But he should never have been in that position in the first place.
And yet in the smallest hours of the night he couldn’t stop thinking about Alex
andra: who she was and how in the name of God she had wound up in that bedroom, too. He tried to imagine her shooting the second Russian later that night, but it was hard. He guessed she had. But she seemed too (and he understood the irony of the word, but that in no way diminished its rightness in his mind) innocent. He knew he would never see her again.
In some ways, he found the New York Times article more painful to read than the ones in the tabloids, because the reporter simply laid out the facts as he understood them. At least the New York Post had alliteration in their front-page headline: STRIPPERS GO PSYCHO. (The accompanying image was a stock photo of a woman’s thighs and seductively bent knees in a garter and stockings.) All of the newspapers ran pictures of the front of his house. The Post described it as the smallest house on a street full of mansions, and Richard took umbrage with the statement, even though he knew it was true. He also knew it was ridiculous to care; he had far greater concerns than the importunate needs of his ego. The Times had quotes from his lawyer, the police, and their neighbors. The Post had these, too, but they had also interviewed a schoolteacher Kristin worked with.
He thought of what his father had said to him last night when, finally, he had returned his parents’ calls: This is what happens when you think with your little head instead of your big one, Richard. Jesus, I expect this sort of thing from your brother. Not from you.
Reflexively he’d snapped back, You expect people to get stabbed and shot around Philip? Seriously? Is that what you expect from Philip?
But his mother, who had been on the line, too, calmly observed that his father was only referring to the generally adolescent lack of judgment that sometimes marked Philip’s decisions.
Occasionally Richard had gotten up in the night and gazed out the window, as he had hours earlier before going to bed. If he stared long enough, the lights would lull him into a momentary stupor. Then the serrated skyline would strike him like a piranha’s open mouth, and he would remember where he was and why he was there.