Lying in bed later, moving in and out of sleep, I thought about what we had planned. I always assumed that Sophie had fell into the orbit of Verdicchio, bad debts or hard times pushing her to the edge of poverty to be rescued by an older man who seemed gentle at first. But thinking about how easily she had befriended them I wondered out loud, “The women, from the other night? We’re you ever one of them?” I tried to keep my voice neutral, only trying to discover something more about a person I was sharing life with. After all this time, Sophie and I still didn’t know much about each other.
Instead of answering me, though, Sophie responded somewhere between teasing and wistful, “What makes you think I’m not now?”
I thought about that probably more than Sophie intended. I didn’t think she was out hooking at night, but anything was possible. I was gone long hours and frequently inattentive when present. After doing some deductive reasoning, I responded in the same tone. “I think I would have smelled it.”
That brought a pillow to my face, Sophie smacking me for my obnoxiousness. I laughed at the play assault, an indication my comment had scored as intended. I grabbed the pillow, holding it hostage against my chest, offering a gentle compulsion of, “Tell me.”
“I wasn’t,” Sophie replied with a surprising amount of something that sounded like regret in her voice. “I could have been, though. I found Verdicchio when I needed him and told myself it was not the same. Had he not found me I might have been forced to provide for myself.”
She looked at me boldly then, “But there were girls in Venice, lucciole I met outside of the Viale Piave, waiting for the train. And they seemed to me very much like everyone else: Some were unhappy, some were glad, others didn’t want to be there, some enjoyed the work.” She shrugged, shoulders moving across the sheets. “So I knew it was an option if it needed to be.”
I smiled, somehow pleased to discover Sophie was as practical as when I found her. “If it’s a job just like any other, why worry about the women?”
She looked at me then, brushing my forehead as if my hair was long enough to be in my face. It was a gentle touch, but her features organized themselves in such a fashion to suggest it was a very stupid question. “It is dangerous work, especially where it is illegal.”
“I thought it was legal here.”
Sophie’s mouth curled at one end into a complaisant smile. “It is, but pandering is not. So a woman perhaps is not in danger from her customer, but almost certainly from her pimp. Sometimes she wishes to be there, sometimes she does not, but a pimp is little better than a slaver, forcing her to the work or to remain.” Her eyes had wandered away from mine as she spoke, becoming something very much like hatred hardening there. That poured away, though, as she came back to me and asked, “You do not care?”
“About the girls?” I had to honestly think about that. There was a part of me that regarded this as simply the way of the world; to pick a fight with every pimp rafficking women would lead to an endless war. I had enough of those.
Fortunately, I was saved from that by Sophie saying, “No, that I was once one of them.”
That was a much easier answer. “Hell no. They used to pay me to kill people. Fucking them seems a lot healthier.”
Sophie’s expression became like so much of what she said, I wasn’t able to translate it. “You did much more than that.”
I thought about the truth of that, but then it swirled in my head around the idolatry that had grown up in my country around soldiers and the demonization that those same people had heaped onto women like Sophie. That might very well be how Atwell rationalized his actions. That line of thinking only produced a whirlpool of questions, doubt that I pulled myself out from by a rope of cynicism. “Yeah,” I acknowledged, “but it’s the killing they pay you for.”
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