The Devil You Know Page 36

  Damjohn told Rich that he had plans for the secret rooms. He was always in need of places where some of his girls could be lodged for a few days or weeks when they first arrived in London, before they were moved out to his various premises elsewhere around the country. Damjohn owned some London properties himself, obviously—a lot of them—but he preferred to keep Chinese walls up between the legal and illegal aspects of his business life. The rooms at the Bonnington would make a great place for “breaking in” new girls for the flats.

  Rich didn’t think so, and he pleaded with Damjohn to change his mind. He didn’t much mind about the girls, but Jesus, the risk to him—if it was found out, he’d lose his job. He’d probably go to jail. “And where do you imagine you’d go if it came out that you’d been involved in people trafficking, Mr. Clitheroe?” Damjohn had asked him mildly. “Sex slavery? Grooming of underage girls for prostitution?” Rich had almost broken down at that point. He hadn’t even known that one of the girls he’d helped to reel in was under age. She’d lied to him and used a fake ID to get her passport. Now he saw the legal parameters of what he’d done and realized how bad it might look to an unsympathetic eye. He begged Damjohn to let him off the hook—to drop him from the books. He wanted to go back to what he knew and forget this other world, with its hidden depths and reefs.

  He could have saved his breath. Damjohn had made up his mind, and it came to pass exactly as he’d said. It’s a nasty feeling to discover that you’re in over your head when you thought you were only paddling. Rich had cried himself to sleep that night. My heart pumped lumpy custard for him.

  He’d made stipulations, of course—insisted that the rooms were only to be visited at night, and that only one girl at a time could stay there. And when Scrub and a couple of silent men with toolboxes had come in one night to refit the place, Rich had asserted the right to be there and look over their shoulders, bugging them with suggestions while they worked. The restraint ring cemented to the floor was his idea; all the soundproofing in the world wouldn’t do a damn bit of good if one of the girls got into the upstairs room and started banging on the street door.

  The room went into regular use a month or two after that. Rich was only told afterward, when the first girl—a Croatian recruited by one of Damjohn’s other talent scouts—had already been installed. He’d suffered terribly at first just from knowing she was there. The fear had lessened a little with time, but he still found himself finding excuses to wander close to the inner wall that corresponded to the basement room on the Bonnington side (that was the blind corridor where I’d found such a thick, fetid concentration of unhappiness) and straining his ears to check that the soundproofing was working okay. He slept fitfully, woken often by gut-wrenching dreams of being arrested and thrown into a police cell that somehow became the basement room, with its bare mattress.

  But the girl had only stayed for two weeks before being moved on to one of the flats. Damjohn had continued to send Rich off on new Eastern European jaunts. A second and then a third girl had been rotated through the secret rooms, and the sheer relentlessness of the routine took the edge off his unease, gradually acclimated him to the new setup.

  It was the fourth time that brought the problems. It was the fourth time that had made everything unravel. If three times is a charm, four is a curse. Rich fell silent again, his mind pulling almost tangibly against the undertow of memory. His breathing became fast and shallow, and he started to shake worse than ever.

  “What was her name?” I asked him softly. He didn’t answer, but at that moment I felt her arrival at the edges of my perception. Not in the room, not yet. But close, and getting closer. “What was her name, Rich?”

  “There were two of them,” he mumbled, shrinking in on himself. “Sisters. Snezhna and Rosa. Two at once! I couldn’t believe my fucking luck. Oh God, I wish I’d never seen them! I wish to Christ—”

  He’d been working for Damjohn for almost two years by this time. He was an old hand and such an integral part of the operation that he had his own bank accounts to draw on—one at a Czech bank, another at a Russian one. He’d honed his skills in Moscow, Vilnius, and St. Petersburg, and he’d learned by experience that country mice were easier to catch than town mice. So this time he’d gone farther afield than ever, to Vladivostok, home of the Siberian fleet and of the Far Eastern National University. He’d read about how the economy there was imploding, and he was expecting to find and tap rich seams of desperation.

  But Vladivostok was scary. As soon as he stepped off the tourist routes, he was surrounded by gangsters and pimps a hell of a lot harder and more serious about their work than he was. It felt like a place where he might accidentally and insensibly toggle from predator to prey.

  Rich debated with himself. He felt vulnerable and exposed, but he didn’t want to go back empty-handed—Damjohn didn’t like paying for trips that brought him no tangible returns. In the end, Rich took a bus ride into the much smaller town of Oktyabrskiy, and that was a different animal altogether. Here was the Siberia he’d been expecting—the shops all boarded up, the damp misery of the people who hadn’t been able to buy or fight or work their way out. True, a tourist blended in here about as well as a candy-striped hippopotamus, but most of the people he was looking at now were whipped dogs rather than sharks. This was a place where he felt it was safe for him to operate.

  Oktyabrskiy was where he’d met Snezhna—not in a club or a bar but behind the counter in an all-night grocery shop. She was very pretty and had a sort of naive grace to her. Definitely the sort of girl who’d bring in the passing trade in one of Damjohn’s flats.

  But at the same time, Rich had an uneasy suspicion that she wasn’t the sort of woman who was likely to fall for his usual spiel. She answered his casual questions with deadpan solemnity, failed to laugh at a single one of his little jokes, and wrapped parcels of groceries with a stolid precision that suggested she wasn’t in the habit of fantasizing about the possibility of doing anything else. Rich started in on the hard sell anyway, because another lesson he’d learned by this time was that you take your opportunities where you find them. Someone like Snezhna was wasted in Siberia, he told her. In the West, she could live a life of luxury, have anything she wanted, never have to worry about money again.

  Surprisingly, she fell for it so enthusiastically that he didn’t even have to try all that hard. She asked him all kinds of questions about the work, the place, the logistics of getting there. She didn’t have a passport, but if she could get one for herself, would Rich be able to give her any advice on the best way to travel to England? She’d perhaps come out just to see, at first, and then make her mind up once she was there.

  Instead of having to hook Snezhna and play her, Rich found himself swept along by her momentum and having to slow her down. He couldn’t ship her out to Stockholm until he’d e-mailed Dieter to tell him she was coming, and sorting out the passport would take a few days at least, even working through channels already lubricated by regular bribes. First things first—he told her to come to the passport office the next morning to get things moving. Then she’d have all the time in the world to wrap up her affairs while the bureaucrats did their stately waltz.

  And then Snezhna had turned up at the passport office with Rosa in tow. Seeing the two of them together—seeing how Snezhna’s arm had stayed protectively around her younger sister’s shoulders the whole time, and how she’d glared at any man who even cast a glance in Rosa’s direction—Rich had understood. Snezhna might lack ambition and imagination on her own behalf, but for Rosa, she wanted the world.

  And he could understand the protectiveness, too. Where Snezhna was fetching, Rosa was beautiful—or at least, she pushed all of Rich’s buttons. He got briefly lyrical as he described her, not knowing that I’d already met her at the strip club. Rosa was gorgeous, he said: improbably huge brown eyes, chestnut hair falling halfway down her back, and understated curves that seemed to have a kind of Platonic perfection about them. As Rich put
it, she was the kind of girl who’d still look like a virgin even while you were screwing her—an absolute must-have, in every sleazy double sense.

  So he carried on promising Snezhna the moon on a silver platter as he booked tickets to Stockholm for the pair of them and dropped Dieter a line with the terse message that this was a two-for-one deal. He saw Snezhna three more times, with no greater intimacy passing between them than a kiss on the cheek. The girl genuinely thought that everything Rich had done was out of disinterested friendship. She wasn’t even cynical enough to conclude that he was trying to buy his way into her pants, let alone to guess at the truth.

  So Rich went back to London feeling slightly frustrated and horny but with the satisfaction of a job well done—and with the happy prospect of having a little more spending money than usual that month. He went back to work in good spirits.

  They evaporated a little a week later, when Damjohn told him in passing that there was a new girl coming to stay in the secret rooms. A new girl? Rich asked, getting interested. Maybe he could work off some of the sexual tension he’d been feeling ever since he met Rosa.

  But the girl now locked in the basement under the Bonnington’s strong rooms was Snezhna.

  Rich experienced hugely mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, just thinking about Snezhna made him think about her sister, too, and brought back with those memories a powerful feeling composed of two parts nostalgia to three parts lust. On the other hand, Snezhna must know by now that he had set her up for this—sold her and her sister into prostitution—and he didn’t relish meeting her again. Okay, the whole point of the “breaking in” was to take the fight out of the new girls, to make them docile and pliable. But the thought of looking Snezhna in the eye made him flinch.

  So he begged off. He told Damjohn he’d prefer not to take part in the breaking-in. Damjohn asked him why, and he made up a story about a discharge from his penis that he was having looked at. Obviously Damjohn wouldn’t want the goods soiled at this early stage, so he curtly accepted Rich’s apologies and made other arrangements.

  What about Rosa? Rich asked as casually as he could. “Nothing about Rosa,” Damjohn said. “At least as far as you’re concerned.” She was too good for the flats. After she’d had a few weeks to get used to the idea, he was going to try her out at Kissing the Pink. Possibly he’d take a personal interest in her training.

  Rich dropped the subject and went back to work. But his libido wouldn’t let him rest. He kept thinking about Rosa and wishing he could see her again, perhaps even be the one who taught her her new trade. No use. Damjohn would laugh in his face if he asked, then use the information that he was besotted with the girl against him somehow. That was just how he was. And Rich had too strong a sense of self-preservation to fuck up this nice little earner for the sake of a sexual infatuation.

  But with Rosa out of his reach, Snezhna began to seem like a more and more attractive prospect. He toyed with the idea of paying her a visit down in the basement. Day after day he played out the fantasy, until finally he found himself actually doing it. He stayed behind on a Friday night until everyone else had gone, said good-bye to Frank, and then walked around the block a few times until the light in the reception area had gone out, too. Then he let himself into the secret rooms and went down into the basement.

  Snezhna was asleep. The breaking-in process was physically and psychologically shattering for most of the girls; they slept for a lot of the time when they weren’t being abused or lectured or threatened. Rich climbed in beside her, he told me—on top of her, his memories insisted—and put his lips on hers.

  She woke up in a panic, too cowed to fight but terrified of the whole agonizing process starting up again. She tensed to endure the new ordeal, and then she saw who it was on the mattress with her.

  Instantly her whole manner changed. She went straight from rigid passivity to spitting, cursing frenzy, screaming obscenities as she clawed at him. She went for his eyes and came within a half inch or so of having them, but he was able to grab her arms and use his weight to keep her pinned. Still she yelled and spat into his face: Bastard! Judas! Monster! Liar! Devil!

  Rich got angry in return. All he wanted was sex; it couldn’t be any big deal after what Snezhna had already gone through. He pressed the point, and she fought with everything she had to keep him out. The details became hazy, both in what he was telling me and in what he was remembering. There was pain. His hand was rising and falling, the keys clutched in his fist like a flail, and his wrist jarred with agony every time his arm came down. There was sex, too, and a thrusting, shuddering climax like an epileptic fit, but it was all mixed together in his mind, and there was no clear sense of sequence. He didn’t know—didn’t want to know; wouldn’t let himself know—whether the woman was alive or dead when he finally succeeded in raping her. But if she was still alive then, she died soon after.

  When he realized what he’d done, Rich felt a choking panic that was almost as strong in memory as it must have been at the time. He sat in the room next to Snezhna’s corpse for a long time, unable to form a single coherent idea. He remembered talking to himself and to her. He remembered laughing like a maniac and whimpering like a beaten dog. He kept thinking of what Damjohn would do when he found out. He wondered what sort of death—besides painful—he’d end up being allocated. Then he’d tell himself that it was just a whore—he could make the next run to Eastern Europe for free, find a replacement, and the balance would be right again. Damjohn wouldn’t care; Damjohn would let him off the hook. But after a moment or two, sick terror would set in again, and he’d be back where he started.

  Finally, maybe an hour or two hours later, Rich began to pull himself together and think beyond the miasmic terror of the present moment. He had to tell Damjohn. It couldn’t be hidden, and there was nowhere he could run where he wouldn’t be found. Trying not to look at the ruined thing on the bed, he cleaned himself up as best he could with the blanket and then limped up the stairs, so oppressed by fear still that he thought he might faint and go tumbling all the way down again.

  He called Damjohn at the strip club—the ICOE number. Well, if anything qualified as an emergency, this did. He made a halting, stumbling confession, which was met neither by fury nor by indulgence but by a cold, clinical pragmatism. Damjohn wanted the details. Where was the body now? What state was it in? How had the girl actually died? Had Rich remembered to lock the door behind him when he left? Had he ejaculated inside her? Had he used a condom? Had he brought his keys out of the room or left them with the body?

  The catechism had a sobering effect. Rich was able to get a handle on what he’d done by describing it in such objective terms. By the time he’d finished talking, he was calm. Damjohn told him to go home and clean himself up—seriously clean himself up, with special attention to fingernails and what was under them. He should also soak his keys in bleach overnight, then boil them in a saucepan. His clothes had to be burned, but not in the backyard with the neighbors watching. The best option, Damjohn said, was to take them out to some waste ground in the middle of the night, soak them in kerosene, drop a match on them, and stay long enough to make sure that they were entirely reduced to ash.

  Rich did as he was told. Having a program to work to helped, and so did the feeling that someone else was making the decisions now. When he’d raped and murdered Snezhna, it had felt as though he’d jumped the tracks of his life and was hurtling through empty space. Now he felt like he’d landed on the far side of a ravine, and things might be starting to make sense again.

  All the same, the weekend was nastily surreal. He wandered around his flat, afraid to go out, afraid to be seen by anybody, afraid even to use the phone. His hand, which he’d gashed with one of the keys when he was hitting Snezhna, throbbed hypnotically and swelled up to agonizing tautness. He soaked it in antiseptic and popped cocodamol like Smarties.

  There’s a T. S. Eliot poem about a guy who murders a girl, keeps her in his bathroom in a bathful of Ly
sol, and ends up getting confused about whether it’s him or the girl who’s actually dead. That was sort of the way it was for Rich, or so he said—and the anguish that squirmed in his mind as he said it gave some weight to the words.

  Scrub dropped in on the Saturday afternoon to deliver a message from Damjohn: it was all sorted. Rich was by no means to go to the secret rooms. They were out of bounds for him now. But the body was taken care of, so nobody would ever connect it to him. And now he owed Mr. Damjohn a big, big favor, which he could bet his bottom dollar would someday be called in. In the meantime, he should go to work on Monday as if nothing had happened. Mr. Damjohn would take a grim view of it if Rich drew attention to himself by pulling a sickie, bursting into tears in public, failing in his professional duties, or whatever.

  It was ironic, Rich said with a sobbing laugh. He was suddenly like one of the girls in the flats: told what to do and what to say and how to behave; having to choke down his own emotions and put on a performance that he thought might actually tear him apart.

  But he forced himself to do it—to shower, shave, get dressed, go to work. He felt as though he was walking through some kind of fucked-up hallucination based on his own previous life, but nobody looked at him twice or seemed to sense anything odd about him. He went down to the reading room at lunchtime and went through the papers from cover to cover—nothing about a female body with a ruined face being found in Somers Town or anywhere else in London.

  As always, normality began to work its healing spell on Rich. He got through the day with no slipups, no sign that he was anything other than himself. He even managed to enact a fake “accident” with a drawer that would explain his injured hand and allow him to keep it bandaged until it healed. He was keeping it together: riding out the waves of insane discontinuity that the murder had set off in his life.