Babylon Sisters Page 16

  Louis and Amelia and I took her to the train station and handed her over to the smiling attendant, who assured us he would deliver her safely to her destination and agreed to take our picture to commemorate the occasion. We are all smiling like maniacs, and in the middle Phoebe stands with her arms around me and Louis, holding up her fingers in two pairs of rabbit ears behind our heads. I didn’t know it until I got the pictures back, and it still makes me smile. I took that one down, too, and then carted the whole lot upstairs with the others and laid them gently on the bed.

  Okay, I thought, closing the door behind me like the minute I turned my back they might rise up and follow me back downstairs. Weird mission accomplished.

  36

  By the time I pulled together the things I’d promised B.J.before our dinner chitchat took a wrong turn, and made some tea to share, it was five minutes to four. I put the pot of peppermint tea and a couple of mugs on the coffee table and scanned the room for any signs of Phoebe. There were none. I glanced out the front window to be sure B.J. wasn’t already heading up the front walk, and when I determined the coast was clear, I dashed down the hall to pee before he got there.

  Good thing I did. What greeted me when I walked into the downstairs bathroom, which was always the one to which I directed company, was my daughter’s smiling face sitting on Little Blackie, the sweet-tempered black horse with three white feet who helped her fall in love with riding. Framed and placed over the commode, it would be simply a backdrop for a woman using the facilities, but an eye-to-eye experience for a man once he assumed the required stance.

  Jesus! I thought, taking it down immediately. Have I missed any more?

  There was no time to consider the question. While I stood there, wondering where to stash Phoebe and Little Blackie, the doorbell rang like Big Ben precisely at four o’clock. There was no way to get upstairs unseen to place this photo among the others in a respectful pile on my bed, and it was too big for the medicine chest. The only thing to do was to prop it under the sink in the small cabinet that held extra toilet paper and a can of Comet. I hated to do it, but B.J. was standing on the front porch, so I slid the photograph carefully between two rolls of Charmin, closed the cabinet’s double doors gently, and turned out the light behind me, not realizing until I came down the hallway that I had forgotten to pee.

  He greeted me with a hug that didn’t linger too long and stepped inside. He had been here many times before. My mother always liked B.J., and before he got an apartment our junior year, he spent as much time at our house as Louis did, which was considerable.

  “This place never changes,” he said, “except for the better.”

  “Thanks,” I said, leading him into the living room. “Come on in.”

  I sat beside him on the couch, telling myself it wasn’t to get closer, but just to make it easier for me to pour the tea. He looked more relaxed than he had Wednesday night. He was wearing a creamy white sweater, a brown leather jacket, and a pair of perfectly distressed jeans that had gotten that way in the real world, not by being bleached by a designer.

  B.J. wasn’t handsome in a conventional way. If you took his face apart, none of the pieces would seem to fit together, but I think that’s why he was so strangely appealing. His beauty is so unexpected that by the time you realize what a rare and lovely creature he is, you have already fallen in love with him. At least, that’s how I think it happened to me. Lord knows where we’d be today if I had taken him to a Sweet Honey concert.

  “I’m really happy that you called me,” B.J. said. “I spent all night trying to figure out a way to call you.”

  “Nothing’s changed about that,” I said quickly, like I hadn’t been obsessing about it ever since; rethinking my position, rewriting my exit line, looking for a way around the truth and not finding it. “But I wanted to tell you about an exchange I had with one of my clients yesterday afternoon.”

  “All right,” he said, leaning over to pour his own tea and a cup for me. “Tell me everything.”

  Funny how when you’re in the midst of a lie, everything sounds like an accusation. I took a sip of the steaming tea and tried to pull my thoughts together. “I told you I was doing some work for Mandeville Maids.”

  He nodded. When I had mentioned Ezola the other night, he was familiar with her work. Seemed Miss M. was already nationwide.

  “I had a meeting over there yesterday. What I thought was going to be a routine exchange turned out to be an intensely weird session with the big boss that focused on somebody seeing us at dinner and reporting to her that I was fraternizing with a well-known pimp.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what I said, too. Seems that one of her spies identified you as Mr. Big in a thriving underground trade in women for sex. She accused me of being your mole inside the organization to recruit women.”

  He groaned. “These guys are unbelievable.”

  “I don’t know what guys you’re talking about, but I told them you were a respected journalist and an old friend.”

  “Did they believe you?”

  “Of course. It’s the truth. She even apologized, after a fashion, but she was so aggressive when she came in, I thought we were going to come to blows.”

  He looked at me and shook his head. “I can’t believe she would accuse you like that. She must have had people making end runs before.”

  “She said she had.”

  “How’d you get hooked up with them in the first place?”

  “They called me out of the blue. Admired my work and needed some help reaching out to the international community, especially women. She’s strange, and her top guy is pretty weird, too, but her program is great.”

  “Who’s the guy?”

  “His name’s Sam Hall. His father was a terrible slumlord back in the sixties. He had a really awful reputation.”

  “I remember the father,” B.J. said slowly. “He was pretty old by the time I got here, but one election there was a story about him in the Voice because he was so notorious none of the candidates would take his money.”

  I nodded. “That’s the one. His son is out of the real estate business now and working for Mandeville Maids. He’s overseeing the project they hired me to work on.”

  “Is he a good brother?”

  He was using the term brother to mean someone whose actions defined them on the side of the race. “Can’t tell yet. I think he’s okay. Not my kind of guy, but completely committed to Ezola. Neither one of them has any reason to spy on me. I think somebody’s keeping tabs on you. Any idea who?”

  He stood up and walked over to the window. I took a sip of my tea and waited for him to tell me what he knew.

  “Ever since I started working on this story,” he said, “somebody’s been trying to get me off of it. I’m close to whatever it is that can blow the lid off all these modern-day slave traders who seem to be using Atlanta as their home away from home outside of Miami. At the very least, I can shine some light on what’s happening to these women.”

  “Who do you think it is?” Etienne’s face floated in front of my mind’s eye like a spirit guide or an angel.

  He shrugged and came back to sit beside me. “I’m not sure, but I know nothing happened until I started asking questions about prostitution. Half the leads I had dried up or disappeared. People stopped calling me back, and the ones who did developed amnesia whenever I asked them a direct question.”

  It didn’t make me feel good to realize that whoever was trying to shut down B.J.’s information pipeline had contacts who knew who I was and where I worked. How determined were they, and how far were they prepared to go?

  “Are these guys dangerous?”

  He looked at me, then reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out that ever-present reporter’s notebook, flipped to a blank page, and wrote 10 for 10 at the top.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Ten dollars for ten minutes,” he said. “That’s what they charge.”

  “That’s wha
t who charges for what?”

  “These guys are taking girls as young as twelve or thirteen and charging people a flat rate of ten dollars for ten minutes alone with them. Let’s say they’ve got ten girls who are seeing four customers an hour.”

  “Four an hour?”

  “They give them five minutes in between.”

  This was making me sick. “Five minutes? That’s not even enough time to wash!”

  He looked at me. “They don’t wash.”

  The full magnitude of what he was saying began to dawn on me. I had been looking for contacts to take me into that world and help me find Etienne, but the specifics of what I would find there hadn’t fully taken shape in my mind.

  B.J. was still scribbling numbers. “Ten girls seeing four customers an hour at ten dollars apiece.”

  It sounded like a question on the SAT test from hell. “If they work five hours a day, that’s two hundred dollars a day.”

  “Per woman,” B.J. said. “So it’s two thousand dollars a day. Let’s say they have one day off for traveling to the next stop, so they work an average of six days a week.”

  Six days a week at twenty men a day? How long could they survive it? How long would they want to?

  “That’s twelve thousand dollars a week, at fifty-two weeks a year.”

  He wrote down a figure and turned the notebook in my direction. “They stand to make over a half million dollars a year.”

  The figure sounded unbelievable. “All that from ten women? What if they could find a hundred?”

  B.J. looked at me, closed the notebook, and put it away. “They’re working on it,” he said. “That’s why they’re dangerous. In the meantime, they don’t need me shining a lot of light in their direction, especially here.”

  “Why especially here?”

  “Because black women run this town. From what I hear, they took care of the pimps over on Stewart Avenue, and once they see what’s going on here, they’ll take care of this, too.”

  It had been a long struggle to get it done, but several years ago Atlanta women took on a group of notorious, homegrown pimps who were shamelessly recruiting girls as young as eight and ten years old. Pimping was still a misdemeanor then, and the profits were always high enough to outweigh the risks, or they used to be. But after a while, the pimps got so bold that a black woman judge couldn’t stand it anymore and she started talking publicly about the baby prostitutes who were showing up in her courtroom every week. Politicians got involved; so did mothers, social workers, doctors, feminist activists.

  The pimps, being pimps, refused to take low, and pretty soon, it became all-out warfare for the future of these little kids. Finally, even the state legislature and the churches had to get involved, and when the dust cleared, pimping had been reclassified as a felony and the most notorious lawbreakers had been sent away for twenty-year sentences that left them visibly shaken, and left the women who had taken them on one step closer to reclaiming the streets their daughters walked to school every day.

  “Should I be nervous?”

  “No,” he said. “Just be careful.”

  “How careful?”

  “I’m going to Miami. I’ve got a source down there who’s still willing to talk. By the time I get back, I’ll have a better idea of what I’m up against.”

  It hadn’t really occurred to me that he’d be back so soon. I wondered how long he’d be around then, but couldn’t think of a way to ask him. “Maybe while you’re gone I can get Sam to tell me who Ezola’s source was for the rumor about you.”

  “I don’t want to get you involved in this.”

  “I’m already involved in it,” I said. “Whoever is spying on you is also spying on me.”

  “You’ve got a point there,” he said slowly. “Maybe I’ll ask him myself. You told them I was a hotshot journalist?”

  “The hottest,” I said.

  “Then tell him I’d like to have an interview so he can tell me all about his new project.”

  That made me smile.

  “What?”

  “He’ll be delighted,” I said. “In fact, I already told him I was going to try to get you interested.”

  B.J. smiled, too. “Can you set it up for when I get back?”

  “Consider it done,” I said. “It really made me feel strange to know we were being watched. I’d like to know who it was.”

  “Me, too.”

  There was a short silence between us, so I filled it. “I’ve pulled some information together for you,” I said quickly. “Would you like to take a look at it?”

  “It’s been a long day. How about if I take it with me?”

  “All right,” I said, wondering if his “long day” comment meant he was getting ready to go, and realizing that I wasn’t ready to let him.

  “This isn’t the part where we have to make chitchat again, is it?” B.J. said, smiling at me as I cast around in my brain for a way to make him linger.

  “No,” I said, suddenly inspired. “This is the part where we go look at the sunset.”

  “That’s the best offer I’ve had in ages,” he said, and his face told me it was true. “As I recall, the top step of your back porch is the best seat in the house.”

  I had been watching sunsets from that top step all my life, almost like a meditation, and B.J. used to like to sit with me sometimes. Louis didn’t have the patience for watching sunsets, but B.J. knew how to enjoy the way the light changes from golden to pale pink at the same moment the sky goes from blue to shades of orange, and you know it’s only a matter of time before the moon appears and changes that same light to silver. If you’ve got a loving friend nearby, that’s when you probably lay your head on his shoulder or touch his hand, just to say, I see it, too.

  “You’ve probably seen some sunsets that put this one to shame,” I said, lifting the hook on the back screen door and stepping outside.

  “I’ve seen some spectacular displays, that’s for sure,” he said, following me out and taking a seat on the step beside me. “Those beaches where rich kids go to spend their parents’ money have some that you can’t believe. They make a whole ritual out of watching it, but it always ends up in some kind of beer-drunk bacchanal, so that takes away from the overall experience.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said, loving the smell of Amelia’s roses and the softness of the breeze that blew by us like a kiss. “Kind of like Mardi Gras at the beach.”

  “Afghanistan has some amazing sunsets, too, especially up in the mountains. The air is so clear that the colors are almost too vibrant. It’s like looking into the sun. You want to, but your eyes can’t stand it.”

  We were sitting close enough to touch, but we didn’t. We had sense enough just to watch the sky for signs and be glad we had stayed alive long enough to find ourselves here again with another chance to get it right, whatever it was, or is, or is gonna be. So we sent out a thank-you to the universe, or at least I did, and the universe sent a sunset worthy of the rich kids, which must have been the sign B.J. was looking for, because he leaned over and touched my hand gently. When I didn’t object, he picked it up and kissed my palm, his lips soft against my skin.

  “I’d better go,” he said.

  “All right.” The silence and the sunset had weakened my defenses to the point where I was afraid that if I started talking, I really would tell him everything.

  The neighborhood was in that quiet moment just before dinnertime, and when I walked him out front, we were the only people on the street. B.J. turned to me, and if he had asked me a direct question, there was no way I wouldn’t have answered, but he didn’t.

  He just leaned down and kissed my cheek. “I’ll call you.”

  “All right.” Just a few more seconds and he’d be gone.

  “Cat?” He had started down the stairs and then doubled back.

  Remain calm! “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  “For whatever I did that kept you away from me
for the last eighteen years.” The pain in his eyes matched the pain I felt when he said it. Eighteen years is a whole lifetime, and for what?

  “I’m so sorry,” he said softly. “And if you let me try to make it right, I swear to you, I will.”

  He didn’t wait for me to answer. He just turned around and walked down my front steps, out onto Peeples Street, and turned right toward the MARTA station. I watched him until he was about to disappear into the shadows of the huge weeping willow that dominates Amelia’s yard and droops its branches over the sidewalk like a lace curtain at your grandmother’s bedroom window. At the very last minute, he turned around, raised his hand, waved once, and was gone.

  37

  I guess I could feel worse, but I don’t know how. I let him apologize like he had done me wrong, when I made my choices all by myself. Back inside, I looked around at all the places where Phoebe’s picture was supposed to be and all I saw were empty spaces. It didn’t even look like my living room, which only reminded me of how deep in this lie I had managed to plant myself and how hard it was going to be to dig myself out. There was no way I could keep lying like this. It was exhausting, and he deserved better. We all did.

  I went upstairs, gathered up all of Phoebe’s pictures, and put them back where they belonged. B.J. would never be able to fulfill that promise to “make it right” if he didn’t even know what was wrong. Every picture I put back in place seemed to accuse me through my daughter’s innocent eyes, and she was right. Her father was a good man, trying to get better. Who was I to deny her a place in his life?

  I replaced the picture in the bathroom last and it made me feel worse. Phoebe didn’t deserve to be stashed away under the sink like a mildew repellent. All the perfect rocking chairs and creative homeschooling in the world couldn’t make that anything but wrong. There was a lump in my throat the size of Stone Mountain, and I realized I was closer to tears than I had been in a long time. There was only one person who could understand. I straightened the picture back into its usual place, sent a mental apology to Baby Doll, and went to call Louis.