The Guest Room

“Might they?”

  “I told you, I think it’s unlikely. It would be groundless. You didn’t bring the girls into your home or call the escort service. You said you didn’t even know for sure there would be a stripper.”

  “Quite true.”

  “Okay then. Maybe you should just view the twenty-five grand as a fine for your indiscretions and move on.”

  It seemed that his initial reaction on the street—the video would devastate Kristin—was the correct one. Dina was female. It was pure fantasy to think that he could diffuse the threat by telling Spencer that Kristin already knew about Alexandra and he should fund his war chest elsewhere. Something about the way Dina had caved so quickly—help ensure marital harmony—made clear that the images on Spencer’s phone might be a last straw in ways that he couldn’t fathom as a male.

  And, of course, there was always the reaction of Franklin McCoy to consider. If it got into the tabloids that a managing director was being blackmailed, he’d surely be finished.

  Now he went to the guest room, where he had brought Alexandra, and breathed in the smell of the room. Unlike the TV and music room downstairs, the cat would have noticed nothing new here. It smelled fine—which meant it smelled not at all. He stared at the spot on the bedspread where Alexandra had sat. Where they had sat together. He wondered where her father was. Her mother. He tried to imagine how a nice kid like Alexandra wound up in a foreign country, sitting naked in a strange man’s house. He took a deep breath, wondering how long it would be before his memories of this nightmare turned to steam.

  …

  Much later, he would wander the first floor of his house, noctivagant as his cat. Then he would sit alone at the kitchen table, unable to sleep. Unwelcome in his own bed. He sat there drinking herbal tea, even though he hated herbal tea. He hated all tea. But he still hoped he might somehow get some sleep. Besides, drinking this tea was rather like wearing a hair shirt. He was punishing himself.

  Upstairs, Melissa was sleeping in the master bedroom with Kristin. It was Kristin who had insisted. It was Kristin who had somehow kept it together when she surveyed the living room and the kitchen and the front hallway—when she, too, had watched in fascination as the cleaning crew had tried to wash away the stigmas of madness and degradation—and it was Kristin who had then brought Melissa up to her bedroom, the child still carrying her school backpack over her shoulder.

  And that meant it was Kristin who had been with Melissa that afternoon when their daughter had found—there it was, right atop the plastic Tucker Tote filled with Barbie dolls, but somehow he had managed to miss it—what the child had mistaken at first for a jellyfish. A sick jellyfish. A dead jellyfish. Something she might have found washed ashore at the beach that summer.

  It seemed that Spencer had taken Sonja to his daughter’s bedroom. That’s where he’d gone on the second floor. And when he was done with her—on his way back downstairs, perhaps just before pulling his iPhone from his pants pocket and peering through the camera lens into the guest room—he’d tossed his used condom onto a child’s plastic carton of Barbies.

  Alexandra

  How I changed. How much I changed. I could see I was the same girl in the mirror, even if now I looked like courtesan instead of regular girl going to dance class. But inside I was different. So different. It wasn’t just that I knew things about people. I knew things about me.

  …

  I said I was a better dancer than my friend Nayiri back in Yerevan, which probably makes you think I am a very ambitious person. Maybe once. And maybe Nayiri and I were competitive. But we were also friends. I would say we were as close as sisters, but I was an only child so I don’t know. Once I read an Armenian translation of Little Women, and those girls were very different from Nayiri and her two sisters. Nayiri and her sisters seemed to fight like wolves day after day. Nayiri was always angry with one or the other. They stole each other’s clothes and bangles, they argued over chores. So, I have no idea what having a sister is really like. But Nayiri and me? We never fought. We had played together as little girls, and then we danced together as we grew up. I would watch her in the studio mirror and she would watch me, so there was a little tension. She perfected her adagios before I did, but I got my toe shoes first. I could pirouette the length of the stage before she could, but she mastered her tours en l’air like boy: full rotations. Maybe she has mastered two rotations by now. It’s possible. It’s been a long time.

  For a while, Inga made up lies I could e-mail Nayiri, too. But I think Nayiri could see we were growing apart. My pretend life must have seemed too glamorous to her. We stopped e-mailing when I was still at the cottage.

  Sometimes I lost track of how I had wound up where I was. Who I was. I would hate myself when, sometimes, the sex would feel good. I would hate myself when, other times, the men were lower than pigs. I would hate myself for being too weak to kill myself. Why, I would wonder, had I not thrown myself out that ninth-floor window those first days in Moscow? I would think of my ancestors who had chosen to die rather than be dishonored. In 1915, after their men had been slaughtered by the Turkish gendarmes and the Kurdish killing parties and they had seen their children die of starvation or terrible diseases, many Armenian women would throw themselves into the Euphrates River to drown. Or they would throw themselves off the mountains on the way to desert killing fields like Der-el-Zor. It was, they knew, better than being raped. Better than being nothing but harem girl or the wife of one of the men who had murdered your husband and your father and your brothers and your children.

  But I hadn’t killed myself in Moscow, and I didn’t later at the cottage. I would try and make myself feel better by telling myself I still could.

  Anyway, the girls at the cottage were nothing like Nayiri. I probably wouldn’t have been friends with any of them except maybe Sonja and Crystal if we’d been classmates in Yerevan or had lived in the same building. But when you are in the same boat, you make the best of the situation. Just like Nayiri and her two sisters, we fought over clothes—even though Inga picked them out specially for each of us—and we snapped about who was better with the black and whites. We even climbed over each other like kittens to get attention and those sometimes smiles from Inga and Catherine.

  This is what I mean about capture-bonding. I know it seems strange that we wanted the approval of people who kept us prisoner. But if you are a person who needs no one’s approval, you are probably crazy and live alone on an island or the top of a mountain somewhere. We all need to be appreciated, even if it’s just because we are taught to spread our legs and smile for a man like this was something we wanted.

  And I’ll bet there is no one who needs approval more than teen girl.

  …

  Most of time, I did feel safe—at least when it came to the black and whites who came to the cottage, and then to the Europeans and Americans who came to Moscow. The two times I was beaten by clients, those men were beaten far worse by my captors. One of the men, they told me, was going to walk with a limp for the rest of his life. The other lost a big handful of teeth.

  I was far more scared of our guards and our bosses. Of Inga and Catherine. They were geniuses when it came to torture. They knew just what to give and just what to take, and their moods could change like the sky in December. They knew how to keep us on edge—and, if we ever were disobedient, the things they could do that would hurt us the most.

  …

  In Moscow, I met two girls from Syria. Refugees of civil war there. Tell me, who’s worse? Someone who sells young girl or someone who buys one?

  …

  We did not perform for webcams when we were in Moscow. Inga said there was some discussion among the men about what they called the “risks and rewards,” because Daddy thought it was worth exploring. On the one hand, they thought it might be a way to make more money during the day, when most of the time we were killing time in our hotel rooms, smoking and watching TV. She said it was like McDonald’s. They started opening for breakfa
st years and years ago. They already had the griddles, so it was crazy not to use them to cook eggs instead of hamburgers. Inga said Daddy talked about the time difference between Moscow and Los Angeles. When it is eleven a.m. in Moscow, which is downtime for girls like us, it is eleven p.m. in Los Angeles, which is perfect time for men to sit before their computers with their pants off.

  But there were problems.

  First of all, it would allow us girls more access to computers. Second, it would allow us to meet customers our bosses didn’t know. Third, it would mean an online money trail. The computers could be traced.

  So, Daddy and the men who ran us thought we might find a way to cry out for help. And then it might be possible for the police guys to find us.

  Make no mistake: We were not escorts. We were not prostitutes. We were just slaves.

  …

  But still they would use this word around us: freedom.

  They would dangle it before us like rattle before baby. Like piece of yarn before kitten.

  It had been so long, I couldn’t imagine. And none of us had been taught to be grown-ups, so freedom was like strange fantasy. We didn’t pay bills or have checking accounts. We didn’t have credit cards. We didn’t know how to do anything but fuck and please people: the people who paid for us and the people who (and Inga and Catherine hated this word, and told us we would feel better about ourselves if we didn’t use it) pimped us.

  If we ever were actually free, what were we supposed to do? Suddenly wake up and be bank tellers? Nurses?

  They said if I gave them two or three years in New York City without any problems—no attempts to escape, all my men happy—I would be allowed to keep a few of my regulars and the apartment they would find for me, assuming I could pay the rent. I would be what they called an entrepreneur, my own boss. It was my body, they said, and we would reach a point where I could do with it whatever I wanted. I would be twenty-one or twenty-two years old and I would be on my own.

  We all would.

  Anyway, that was the plan. Freedom. Or, at least, a life a little bit more like free girl than slave.

  …

  Inga and Yulian were with us 24/7 our first week in New York City. We called Yulian the White Russian, but only behind his back. He had thick hair the color of snow, and the shoulders and chest of a man who, when he was young, I bet could have benched close to three hundred pounds. I guess he was fifty. He always seemed a little bored when he fucked me, as if it was beneath him to relieve his urges on one of the slaves. He had been a young politician when the Soviet Union collapsed. The rumor was that he was married, but we never knew for sure. He may also have been one of Daddy’s cousins, but that may also have been just a rumor. The men kept their lives private. He carried an antique Korovin semiautomatic pistol that he said was a gift from his godfather. Inga told me one time that Yulian’s godfather had been KGB: Soviet secret police. One beautiful sunny day at the cottage, we were forced to watch him shoot birds.

  The plan was for Inga to leave us after a week or two in America. Given our value, she was going to spend a little time to make sure our transition was like butter, but her world was Moscow. Not Manhattan. And she did go home after ten or eleven days with us. But Yulian and Konstantin stayed. They were business guys making things happen.

  I remember the six of us had flown to the U.S. in two groups—two different airplanes. I was with Crystal and Konstantin. But the planes landed within half an hour, and so all of us were met at the JFK airport by two of the men who were going to help run us, Pavel and Kirill. Each was behind the wheel of an identical black Escalade.

  Three weeks later, both of those dudes would be dead.

  …

  They told me that here in America, I was going to have to start watching the news on TV. Not just The Bachelor. I was going to have to start reading the newspaper. I had not been reading much English in Moscow, but I figured I would get it back quickly.

  They said I had to do this because here I would finally be a real Western courtesan. And that meant I had to be able to make conversation. Arm candy in New York City must be smarter than arm candy in Moscow.

  They said when I was “trained,” I would start telling the johns I was an exchange student. I went to a university in Moscow and I was on a “study abroad” program at NYU.

  They said an escort who looked like me would be making one thousand dollars an hour by the spring. (They never told me how much I would get to keep.) I could tell Inga was less sure about how much Sonja and Crystal would be worth. They did not speak English as well as me. And they were unpredictable. Sonja had that temper. And sometimes Crystal would slip and say those things that made them know how badly she wanted out.

  I never told anyone I went to NYU. I never got the chance.

  …

  Sonja and Crystal and I each had a tiny bedroom on the third floor of a town house in New York City. We were in Manhattan. Most people think Russian criminals live in this place called Brighton Beach. Or maybe they think the criminals are out in Queens or Long Island. I guess there are some there. Maybe the dudes who run drugs wind up out in Brooklyn. I know there is a lot of muscle there. For instance, the drivers who met us at the airport lived near Coney Island. And maybe that’s where Sonja and Crystal and I would have ended up if we had gotten addicted to drugs the way some girls did, which meant working a much cheaper track. But that wasn’t us. That wasn’t why they had brought us to America.

  The town house was in a neighborhood called the East Village, a block and a half from the Tompkins Square Park. It was just off the Avenue C. In my little time there, I really was mistaken a lot for a rich kid from NYU. I am not kidding. When I was outside on the street with one of the men who had brought us to America—dudes like Yulian and Konstantin—people would think the guy was my father. When I was outside with Inga, they would think she was my mother. I always thought it interesting that the students and the shoppers and the police guys we would see on the sidewalks weren’t scared of them. But, of course, only I knew the firepower they carried with them in their belts or their shoulder holsters or—in Inga’s case—a black purse.

  …

  On one of our first days in New York City, Sonja and I were sitting on the floor of her little room playing solitaire and Crystal was lying on the bed. It was raining outside. Sonja’s room still smelled of the man she’d had the night before, so we had opened the little window. Suddenly Crystal got up and went to look outside at the street.

  “I hate it here,” she said. It sounded like she was crying, so I stood up and went to her. I rubbed her shoulder through her T-shirt.

  “You hate New York City, Crystal dear?” I asked. “Or America? Or is it your room?”

  She was just letting the tears run down her beautiful cheeks. She wasn’t wearing any makeup because it was only eleven-thirty in the morning. I pulled her against me.

  “This room. My room. Your room,” she said. Her voice had that zombie tone I have told you about. No emotion. “New York City. Moscow. America. I hate it all.”

  Sonja slapped a couple of cards down on the carpet. “Get used to it,” she said. It was not like Sonja to be short with Crystal, but the sky was so gray outside and we were all getting used to this new world.

  Crystal didn’t turn to Sonja. She just shook her head in slow motion. “No,” she murmured, “I can’t.”

  We heard someone on the stairs, and it sounded like Yulian. So quick like bunny I took a tissue from the box we always had to keep by our beds and wiped her cheeks. “You’re just homesick, baby Crystal,” I whispered. “We’ll talk later.”

  And we did. Sonja and I both talked to her. Sonja even offered to ask Inga about the two of them switching rooms, since Sonja’s room had that window that looked out on the street and Crystal’s just looked out at smelly alleyway. But we couldn’t cheer her up.

  …

  If you had met Crystal, you’d see why Sonja and I always wanted to look out for her. She was thirteen when they
took her. And she was even smaller than the rest of us. Not even four feet and eight inches tall when she started and not even five feet when they killed her. She was the one they sold to the men who wanted the girls that looked like children. Who were shy. She was the one they dressed like she might still be going to school. She had to wear blue jeans or pink corduroy overalls. While they bought us black and red lingerie for work, they bought her white underpants with Disney princesses and Tinkerbell on the front. On the crotch.

  …

  Sonja had blue eyes that always looked a little possessed—even a little demonic—and hair they bleached so white that at first it felt like straw and some even fell out. That was crazy scary two weeks for her. This was my Sonja. It was Sonja and me against the world some days, and it was Sonja and Crystal and me they wanted in America. That’s how much they liked us—and how good we were at what we did.

  And, yes, it was Sonja who, one night in a beautiful house near New York City, went berserk like Xbox demon. We had talked about getting away. We had even fantasized how, but that was usually just to cheer up Crystal. I never thought we would actually do it.

  But then that night Sonja and I learned they had killed Crystal, and that was last straw for my Sonja. Me? I just went a little numb. But some part deep inside Sonja just said no more. No fucking more.

  Besides, she knew things I didn’t. She knew what Crystal had done. And she had overheard Pavel and Kirill that night at the party.

  So while her timing might seem insane, it made sense. It made sense especially if you were Sonja. Yes, she went bitchcakes with that knife when there were witnesses—all those men at the party for the bachelor. But she went crazy in a place where it would be harder for Pavel to defend himself. (Kirill, too.) If she didn’t succeed, would Pavel and Kirill actually kill us with all of those witnesses? Wouldn’t they at least wonder if some of the men would defend us?

  Besides, she believed that Pavel and Kirill were going to murder her and maybe me, too, after the party. She’d heard them talking that night. She couldn’t wait until later. There might not even be a later.