Babylon Sisters Read online

  “I used to be in the real estate business,” he said. “This house is in the half-million-dollar range.”

  “It’s not for sale,” I said, easing the cork out of the bottle and wondering what he was doing here.

  “I’m sorry for dropping in unannounced,” he said while I poured us each a glass of wine. “But I thought it was time for us to get to know each other a little better.”

  I put down my glass. “Is that the apology or the explanation?”

  “Okay, cards on the table.” He smiled. “Look, Catherine, I’m not a bad guy, but I’m probably not the kind of person you’re used to working with, am I right?”

  If our conversation after the ceremony was any indication, he should get an award for understatement.

  “Yes, I guess you are.”

  “And you know what’s the main difference between me and them? I’m a businessman. Making money is not a crime in my book, and I intend to make as much of it as I can, as fast as I can, before the bottom falls out or somebody blows up the world.”

  “Is that why you went to work for Miss Mandeville? To make money?”

  He sat back and grinned at me. “See how you said that? ‘To make money,’ like I was doing something sinful because I want to be well paid for what I do.”

  I took a sip of my wine. “Maybe we should start there. What do you do?”

  “That would be the explanation part, but I hadn’t finished my apology.”

  “I’m sorry. Go on.”

  “Here’s the thing.” He put his glass down and leaned toward me. “I’m sorry if what I said the other day offended you. I don’t have anything against those girls. . . .”

  He must have felt my objection, since the graduates ranged in age from early twenties to mid-forties.

  “Those women,” he corrected himself smoothly. “I want the best for them, in every possible way, but I’m realistic about what they are to me.”

  “Don’t you mean who they are?”

  “No, because they’re not a who. They’re a what. Cheap, available labor to do the jobs nobody else wants to do. That’s the only reason I’m interested in immigrants, because they’re more of the same, except they’ll work cheaper, be more grateful to get it, and not make waves. So I’m sorry if that offends you, but that’s where I stand, and the sooner you know it, the more productive our working together is going to be.”

  I wondered how Ezola could stand to have him around. “How do you figure that?”

  He leaned forward suddenly like he was anxious for me to understand. “Because I’m honest. I’m not trying to pretend to be one of those do-gooders you’re used to working for who are so busy begging for money they don’t know how to make any, but that’s what I do. I’m in the business of amassing capital, gathering resources, and if I can help somebody along the way, or seem to, that’s all right with me. But that’s never the goal. It’s only a by-product of the process.”

  I couldn’t argue with what he was saying, and as I thought about it, there was no need to. Hiring the women I was helping target for Ezola was going to help somebody along the way. Rewarding a handful of women for earning a GED was helping somebody along the way. And even holding out the carrot of college scholarships would help if anybody took him up on it. What made me mad was his attitude. He seemed so callous toward the women, which is, I guess, the way of the world. Maybe I had just been working around do-gooders too long to admit it.

  “That may be the most unrepentant apology I’ve ever heard,” I said. “I can hardly wait for the explanation part.”

  He sat back then and took a swallow of his wine, smiled appreciatively, and swirled it delicately around in my doomed goblet like he was sampling the best of the harvest at a Napa Valley wine tasting. “I’m a failed romantic,” he said, and his beautiful lingering over the word shot down my recent irritation with his worldview and replaced it with renewed curiosity about what sort of person he really was. He wasn’t what I’d call likable, but he was very interesting. Plus, we failed romantics are a very exclusive club, despite our tremendous membership numbers, and we usually recognize one of our own. As a failed romantic, Sam was about as convincing as Michael Jackson is pretending to be a guy who really loves kids.

  “You don’t strike me as a romantic, failed or otherwise,” I said. “You’re a pragmatist if I ever saw one.”

  “Maybe you’re right, Catherine, but I used to be a lot like you. I was still in business, but I believed in the people.” His voice put quotation marks around the words to show what he thought of those who still felt that way. “I inherited a real estate company from my father and I embraced the challenge of running it with real passion. My father was old-school, but I had new ideas about how to encourage home ownership in renters. I wanted to use the rehabbing of houses to revitalize poor neighborhoods and energize their residents. I wanted to use home ownership to positively impact everything from health care to public safety.”

  Those ideas—the ones I endorse so completely—sounded so right coming out of Sam’s mouth, spoken in that mellifluous voice, that I couldn’t believe he didn’t still believe them. “What happened?”

  He shrugged, his well-padded shoulders and his perfectly tailored jacket making the gesture look graceful in a self-deprecating sort of way. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. My tenants weren’t interested in anything except drugs and watching TV. Their children tore up everything they touched, and you couldn’t fix it up more times than they could tear it back down. Their rent checks bounced, and the crews I hired from the neighborhood sold the tools I gave them and disappeared.”

  His story sounded like a nightmare. Trying to change poor people’s lives is never as glamorous or inspirational as they make it when some do-gooders get the central role in a Hollywood movie. In real life, Sam’s experience is probably closer to the truth, a long series of unrewarded sacrifices and thankless tasks that rarely impact the lives of the people you want to rescue. It sounded like Sam had suffered a classic case of burnout. I refilled our glasses, and he took a sip before he continued his story.

  “I realized that not only was I not going to be able to make the changes I had dreamed about, but I had invested so much money in the possibility that I was about to lose the business.” He shook his head to clear the bad memory. “I needed to evict the deadbeats, fix the rental places up, and get some tenants in who could pay. The sheriff handled the evictions, but the mess those niggers left behind was just unbelievable. Garbage everywhere, diapers, every kind of drug paraphernalia. It was disgusting.”

  He gave a slight shudder, and a small frown appeared between his eyebrows. I could imagine walking into the houses he had been renting in good faith and finding such a mess. He had my sympathies on that. I’ve participated in enough clearing-out and fixing-up of abandoned apartments to know how nasty people can really be when they put their minds to it.

  “That’s when I met Miss Mandeville,” he said, his voice a mixture of affection and respect. “I came to her because I needed a crew of maids to come put those hellholes I owned into some kind of order so they’d be fit for human habitation. When I described the situation, she said they could handle it, but the price she quoted was way over my head. When I appealed to her for a reduced rate, because I was about to lose my business, she offered to buy me out and bring me into her operation as a vice president if I would accept her offer immediately. She told me she needed some assistance and she thought we could do business, but if I wasn’t interested, she’d find somebody else. I signed the contract that very day. That was three years ago, and she was right. We’ve been doing great business ever since.”

  It was a great story, and it sounded like Ezola. She was not a woman who liked to wait. They seemed well suited: equally determined, equally unapologetic, and equally manipulative. I had never forgotten Ezola’s “sorry black bitches” test question. Or forgiven her for it. Sam hadn’t been that direct, but his calling his former tenants niggers was close enough.

 
“So what are two hard-nosed businesspeople like you and Miss Mandeville doing pulling in a confirmed do-gooder like me?”

  “Because you’re the best at what you do,” he said. “You’re tough and opinionated and not easily bullshitted, even by two masters.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “I meant it as one. This is all new territory for us, and we don’t want to stumble. You’ll keep us honest. That means a lot.”

  This time, when he smiled, I smiled back. “Should I add that to my job description?”

  “No need. We’ll just keep that between us.” And he raised his glass and touched mine lightly.

  “Welcome aboard, Catherine. It’s going to be a great ride. I promise you.”

  “I’ll fasten my seat belt,” I said, paraphrasing Bette Davis’s famous admonition to her guests at the start of a long, drunken evening where she cusses everybody out and then staggers off to bed.

  “Good enough.” Sam laughed and put down his glass. “And now I’m going to get out and leave you to your evening. Uninvited guests should never overstay their welcome, but first I need a favor.”

  “What can I do for you?” I put down my glass, too.

  “I need a copy of those remarks you did for the ceremony. My copy got away from me.”

  “They were pretty well upstaged by Busy Boy, don’t you think? Maybe we should let them just slink away.”

  “Not a chance,” he said. “Just because I never said it, doesn’t mean I don’t intend to quote it. ‘The rare and noble sisterhood.’ That was great stuff.”

  I refrained from reminding him that that particular gem was his own ad lib and not my genius, and stood up.

  “I’ve got a copy in my computer,” I said. “I can print one out if you want to take it with you.”

  He stood up, too. “If it’s no trouble that would be perfect, and I would love to see your work space.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that he could come back to my office with me. I was comfortable sitting with him in the living room, but I didn’t really like to have my clients roaming around the rest of the house.

  He saw the hesitation and smiled. “Don’t worry, Catherine. It’s not a test. You can just tell so much about a person by how they organize the place where they work. I mean, all you have to see is that throne to get an idea of how Miss Mandeville sees the world. Or at least her place in it. Do you mind?”

  I wondered what my office would reveal. “Of course not,” I lied, but what could I do? If I declined to take him to my office now, he would assume I had something to hide. “It won’t take a minute.”

  He followed me down the hall, past the posters of Chinese factory women, Nigerian market sellers, and Jamaican secondary-school teachers. They had been part of a misguided campaign encouraging people to enjoy their jobs by using the slogan that defined the Japanese commandant of a prisoner-of-war camp in the movie Bridge on the River Kwai, “Be happy in your work.” The woman who designed the poster had never seen the movie, but for anybody who had, the phrase was forever linked to the commandant’s barked order to his dying prisoners to be joyful in their forced labor, and the small organization that commissioned the poster was forced to withdraw it from circulation or risk a media and client backlash that could affect their funding and their reputation.

  I felt sorry for them and I loved the campaign. The smiling women on the posters always looked healthy and strong and truly happy in their work. I had lined the hallway with them as sort of a positive blast of female energy and imagery for anybody who made it this far. Sam took it all in without comment. I walked into my office and indicated the chair I kept for visitors.

  “Can I look around?” he said.

  This guy was shameless. It was like asking if it was okay to poke through somebody’s medicine cabinet. If you’re going to analyze somebody’s stuff, it’s not fair to make them give you permission.

  “Feel free,” I said, feeling more boxed by the second, as I sat down behind my desk, opened the Mandeville file, and scrolled down quickly.

  Sam was walking slowly around the small room, checking the titles on the bookshelf, noting the CD case and the Keith Jarrett that had been playing softly all day on repeat.

  He strolled over to my bulletin board as my printer hummed into action. The two photos I’d pinned up earlier smiled out at him: one of Etienne’s sweet, round, open face and the other of the Mandeville graduates surrounding Busy Boy with all that unrequited love.

  “I’ll bet that picture is up on refrigerators all over town,” he said. “At least in the kitchens of anybody who was there, or said they were.”

  I just smiled.

  “This is a lovely girl. Is she your daughter?”

  “No,” I said, “she’s the sister of a Haitian friend of mine. They’ve lost track of each other.”

  He was still looking at Etienne. “How do you lose track of a beautiful kid like that?”

  Men act like beauty is some kind of safe passage through life. Ask a pretty woman if that’s true, and most of them will tell you how much of their girlhood they spent dodging the attention of every man they met, including priests, uncles, cousins, and sometimes dads.

  “There’s a lot of sexual exploitation of refugee women and children,” I said. “Forced prostitution is a real problem.”

  “That’s an important distinction,” he said, looking down at the newspaper clippings, photographs, and magazine articles that were part of my educating myself about the problem. A recent story in the New York Times Magazine called “Sex Slaves on Main Street” featured a cover shot of a young girl in knee socks and a school uniform. The implications were clear, but the shot was exploitive and creepy. Sam picked it up to look closer as I took the last page from the printer, clipped them all together, and slipped them into a folder. His energy was always weird, but in a space this size, it made me uncomfortable.

  “What do you mean?” I switched off the computer, but he was still eyeballing my research: e-mails from colleagues, possible leads on missing girls, horror stories of searches that turned up bodies or nothing at all.

  He turned away and seemed surprised to see me standing at the door, but he followed me out while he explained. “Just that prostitution is a complicated issue. Some women are forced into it, but some women see it as the best available option.”

  He said it like choosing to have random sex for money could be evaluated right along with being a waitress or a teacher’s aide in a day-care center, but I wasn’t in the mood to argue prostitution with him. The wine was sitting in my empty stomach, making me feel as queasy as the company. “Which is why we have to offer other options,” I said.

  He smiled back. “Spoken like a dyed-in-the-wool do-gooder if I ever heard one.”

  “Guilty as charged,” I said, handing him the folder with his speech in it. “Thanks for coming by.”

  “Thanks for letting me in,” he said, “and for hearing me out. We don’t have to agree on everything to be a damn good team.”

  I wasn’t sure I believed that at all, but at least now I knew where we stood, and clarity is always power.

  “Good night,” I said.

  “You, too.” And he climbed into the silver Lexus that was parked in my driveway and eased off into the deepening twilight. Of one thing I was certain: he thought he was leaving with more information than he offered, but that was only if I hadn’t been paying attention, and like I told Ezola, that’s not my style. Sam had come offering an olive branch, but something told me it probably had more thorns than a rose and none of the sweetness.

  28

  The next day Miriam came over to bring me some information that had really upset her. She was very agitated, and it took her a minute to tell me what was going on. The strange wig was practically trembling on top of her head. Amelia explained that Miriam was terrified of being kidnapped by the people she’d run away from, and her wig was part of her disguise. In theory, that was a good idea, but it looked so terrible, it
drew more attention than it deflected.

  When she calmed down a little, she told me she had met a woman at her citizenship class who lived at a residence hotel and had seen some guys bring in two vans of women a few weeks ago and put them up in adjoining rooms. Almost immediately, the woman said, guys started going in and out at all hours of the day and night. They never stayed long and they didn’t make much noise, so nobody bothered them. The women never came out at all.

  Except one time when one of them who seemed about fifteen or sixteen came out and begged her to call the police because they were being held against their will. Before she could say any more, one of the other women came out and grabbed her and made her shut up. The older one was really mad, and she kept saying, “You’re going to get us all sent back.”

  Miriam was blinking back tears as she told me that she had asked the woman if she called the police. The woman admitted she had been afraid to, since she didn’t have any papers either. Late that night, the guys with the vans showed up, and by morning everybody was gone.

  “I showed her the picture,” she said, her voice shaky.

  “Of Etienne?”

  She nodded her head. “She said it wasn’t her, but it could have been. What if they have her in a place like that?”

  The tears spilled over now, and I put my arm around Miriam’s shoulders to steady her. This was our first concrete lead, but it was taking us down a terrible path.

  Miriam was clutching the locket around her neck.

  “How long ago was it?” I said gently.

  “A month. Maybe a little more.”

  That was a long time, but if we got right on it, talked to some people who were still at that hotel, maybe we could find something. But if I was going to be out playing private investigator, I needed some help on the home front. My work with Ezola was just going to make it more difficult to stay on top of things, and Babylon Sisters had a reputation to maintain. It was very clear to me that I needed an assistant yesterday, as Sam would say. Suddenly, I had a flash of inspiration.