Charles Jardin took the cage from his Soho gallery and walked it up to Times Square. Like a man with a crucifix in a Good Friday procession, he it carried on his back along 5th Avenue, attracting stares as he did. The strangeness of his burden meant that his fellow pedestrians gave him a wide berth.
When Charles arrived at Times Square he first found one of the police officers there. He provided his papers and explained what he’d be doing. While the officer scratched her head, everything appeared to be in order so she showed Charles to the area designated for his “art exhibition.” Only then did Charles set his cage down and began to assemble it. Tourists stared while the natives passed by, pretending not to notice.
The cage, when completed, was only four feet by four feet, the largest Charles’ permit allowed. He climbed into it, taking the bucket he had brought with him, and locked himself in. For the month that he was allowed to remain there, his only real contact would be his an assistant who would come to bring him food and water, and empty the bucket.
And a long month it was, sweating in New York’s famous June humidity, protected from the sun only by the concrete canyon’s shadows. Most people ignored Charles, while a few benign ogled him or posed in front of his cage for pictures. A few taunted him, some throwing their garbage at him. Charles only watched it all.
Eventually, a reported at the Village Voice got word about a man that had been sitting in a cage, permits and sundries paid for by government grant. Smelling an odd story with a possible hint of scandal, he headed to midtown and asked Charles, “So why are you doing this?”
Charles, battered and dirty, replied without guile. “I’m hoping to go mad.”
“Why on Earth would you want that?”
Charles stared out of his cage and the parade of humanity he had been observing for weeks. “I’m hoping it will make sense of all this.”
To start at the beginning go here. To hear an audio reading of the chapter, hit the play button below.
Sophie asked Natalia, “Do you wish to be here?”
Natalia searched Sophie’s face then reflexively glanced over her shoulder in the manner of the constantly observed. Afraid to speak should someone be listening, she shook her head. She gestured toward the shuttered window and said, almost too quietly to be heard, “We cannot leave.” She paused for so long I wasn’t sure she was going to say anything else, but Sophie waited patiently.
Eventually Sophie coaxed her with, “Why do they keep you?”
Natalia laughed, a bitter version to its earlier cousin that came out as much more honest. It blasted whatever caution she might have felt. “To work with men. You saw – they take the money, we bring them up here and get them out.”
Sophie nodded, indicating this only confirmed her suspicions. “How do they keep you?”
“They watch constantly and we have no money.” Natalia shrugged with resignation. “Even if we get out there is nowhere to go. No one has passports. We are here illegally. To go to the police is to be sent back.”
“Back?”
Natalia fanned her fingers as if indicating something far away that couldn’t or shouldn’t be touched, “Ukraine. Many of the girls are from there. There is the war, and no authority, only chaos in the east. The Russians, they work with the separatists, and come in to villages and towns.” She shrugged, “And take what they want.” A shadow fell over Natalia at this last pronouncement and a part of me wished I could put together a fireteam and kill my way out of the house and all the way to Crimea.
“They move us through Lviv, then out to Europe to work.” Natalia shrugged. “It is still better than the war.”
I stood there thinking about Ukrainian separatists, the Russian army and spies, and gangsters. We had only seen the tip of the this operation, the rest of it sunk into Eastern Europe like an iron spike. That cooled the rage growing in me, thinking about the futility of action. I hadn’t been able to help Sophie and protect my wife when facing off against Verdicchio’s much smaller operation. How far would I get here? Judging by how things had gone at Mitnick’s party? Not far.
Even with the cold certainty of that knowledge in place, I still felt my anger threatening to burn out of it. Watching Natalia tell her story with almost no emotion I realized how deeply traumatized she must be, the shock of everything that’s happened to her buried under miles and mountains of abuse, taken from everything she knew and forced into bondage. She had probably begged a hundred times, only to be told to shut up by her captors, or beaten if she had cried with a customer, or raped if someone felt like it. And if she escaped there was only a system waiting that would treat her as a criminal. She’d be shipped back to a country that was being cut up by men like Mitnick and Sartre, each trying to get a bigger piece of the pie while men like Atwell enabled them. And then there was me.
I decided I needed a gun.
I realized I hadn’t been listening to the women for awhile, the growing noise of my own angry machinery grinding out all other sound. Sophie was hugging Natalia, nearly enfolding the smaller woman to her bosom. When they parted, to my surprise Sophie was quietly shedding a tear or two, which Natalia wiped away with a, “You should go.”
In what might be a gesture of irony, Sophie produced a sizable chunk of Mitnick’s currency and held the roll out to Natalia. “Do you have a place to hide this?” Natalia nodded so quickly I suspected she had already started squirreling away her own funds. I hoped it was enough that she might be able to make a good run for it if she got out of here.
Sophie said, “If we took you, they would only come for you and us as well.” Natalia nodded, disappointed not so much that she wasn’t being rescued, but in that the only good company she had in awhile was leaving. In what was probably the closest thing to a lie that Sophie would say, she told her, “If we can, we will come back for you.”
Sophie stood to leave and there was a pause in which I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. If Sophie had demanded we try to fight our way out of there right then, I might have given it a shot. Instead, she took a careful moment to compose herself, running a finger under her eyes, then applying a lustrous red lipstick. She leaned forward and planted two or three welts on my neck. At any other time I might have gotten some kind of thrill from this, but here it just made me feel complicit.
Stepping outside the door one of the men quickly joined us. He gave us a suspicious stare, then shrugged and led us further down the hall and out an exterior door near the garage. We found a terrified Alon having a quarrel over parking with another guard, but our appearance ended that, and the grateful Frenchman jumped in his car to take us back to the city.
In the back of the car I felt my anger searching for somewhere to go. There was a long silence as the car snaked up the mountain, giving the emotion long enough to find an unwanted foothold. “What was the point of that?”
Painted by the lights of a solitary passing car, Sophie answered, “To men like this Mitnick, women are property. All women.”
“So?” My anger made the word come out as callous and mean and I hated myself for saying it. “If this Nika is a prisoner, she’s in a gilded cage. She’s not a slave like Natalia and the girls in that house.”
“But a slave she is,” in the shadow that covered her I could feel Sophie speaking from some deep well of personal experience. “And she will be asked to do something, marry someone, be something, regardless of what she wishes.”
Out of that dark corner of the car’s back seat, inches away, Sophie could have been at the other end of the galaxy, but I could feel her voice harden. “But if she escapes, if this Mitnick fails his charge, then perhaps he will become undone.” Against the backdrop of the window, I could see Sophie flutter her hands, expanding the fingers, pantomiming the dissolution of all that was Mitnick.
“That’s,” I stopped to think about what she was saying. “That’s pretty fucking thin.”
“Also possible.” As opposed to going in and freeing those girls. Putting aside the physical deterrents, how would we keep them safe afterwards? How would we hide them from police? Who would feed them and shelter them while they sought asylum?
“And,” Sophie added for good measure, “he is a monster.”
I nodded, having at last found common ground in the impossibly expansive interior of the car as it hurtled through the night. I nodded, adding an, “OK.”
Almost leaping out of her corner of the car, Sophie kissed me then, hard. I was surprised enough that I didn’t react at first, pressing my back against the car door behind me as if I had come under surprise attack. She leaned into me, and I felt a passion there I didn’t understand, a blazing star of different elements that made me flush, even as her hands pushed against me, crushing me against the door, keeping me apart from her, the only connection the fusion of that kiss.
Then felt myself harden in an unexpected way: The kiss had its own passion, to be sure, but no joy, that signaled amplified by a tear I felt come from Sophie. It was a kiss and a seal, and it spoke of property, possession, a promise extracted and sealed.
I didn’t like it. I pushed her away from me, and she retreated back to her side of the car. I turned and stared at the lights of the houses dotting the mountain and just repeated, “OK.”
The clatter the accident caused was a magnificent noise, the shattering of the window reverberating throughout the neighborhood. Every child playing stickball in the street groaned, except for Hal. Hal’s mouth hung open in stupefied horror, watching the last few pieces of shattered glass hold onto the window frame that sat in the Becksworth mansion.
The home would only be called a mansion by children, three stories tall and bristling with peaked roofs and dormers. But standing behind its wrought iron fence and neglected brown lawn of scrub and weeds, mansion was the best word the children could use around adults and know that it also meant haunted. Using this coded language the children had established rules around the house. The first and most important was that anyone willing to sneak into it at midnight would automatically be a hero and would go down in legend.
No one had done this.
The second rule, was the person who kicked, hit, or otherwise waled any variety of ball into the scrub-infested yard was the one who had to retrieve it. Bat in hand, Hal watched with growing dread as he realized he was the first to have the dubious honor of crashing through one of the mansion’s windows.
It was not the first time that a ball in the children’s play had broken any window in the neighborhood, though. So a silence descended on the group as they hoped that, despite the mansion’s seemingly abandoned exterior, that the customary adult would emerge from the home. The angry yelling or plaintive requests for honesty would surely be preferable to the unassuageable silence that emanated from the mansion.
No one emerged from the Becksworth home.
That sealed Hal’s fate. Normally, the other children would have jeered as the offending bat-wielder approached the victim home, but now only a cloud of silence descended on the group. This was replaced by a sharp intake of collective breath as Hal strode to the house’s fence. Laying hands on the gate and opening it to enter the yard would have been enough to gain the respect of his peers, but Hal breathed deep and strode down the walk to the front door. A knock on it produced nothing – no muffled voices or telltale footsteps came from within.
This only made Hal more afraid. The rumor was that the Becksworth family had died in a car crash and now their spirits haunted the mansion. While adults told the children that it was silly to think the home was haunted, no one ever denied that death had occurred. And in all of the hours of their street games, no one saw anyone enter or leave the residence. Which left Hal with the one option of the window.
The ball had taken out a window on the first floor and Hal approached it as if it might grow teeth. Careful of the broken glass, he stood on the tips of his toes to look inside. In the center of the room’s wooden floor sat the ball, in between a fireplace, couch, coffee table and grandfather clock. A breeze through the window caused the ball to roll a bit, but nothing else stirred.
Hal let out a tentative, “Hello?” before reaching up to stand on the sill so he could step through the window. Despite the summer heat, he found himself cold. The yellow rays of the sun that filled the house didn’t touch his skin.
Once his foot hit the floor, he was freed from hesitation, moving to snatch the ball and escape. Only the voices stopped him, drifting from another room, familiar like an old television show. As with all youths, Hal was attuned to the possibilities of the future, and the voices spoke to that, until he uttered another hesitant, “Hello?” and followed the trail of the spectral voices.
Peeking around the door of the adjacent room, Hal first thought he had found an old man watching his shows. A tall-backed leather chair sat in the room with a blanketed figure in it, across from it a glowing image. The details his brain quickly gathered, though, told Hal there was more going on. The blanket lay across legs that left skeletal impressions in it, the light from the glowing picture didn’t emanate from a box of any kind, but leapt back and forth between two metal rods, positioned in a V like some old antenna.
Uncertain and afraid to say anything, Hal’s eyes focused on the moving pictures being rendered in the air, and saw a family going about the business of being a family. Sometimes they were happy, sometimes angry, sometimes stricken, but a family nonetheless, the father often wearing a pair of dock shoes that resembled those on the legs sticking out from the chair’s blanket. Hal felt his eyes widen as he watched, the children in the floating images rapidly cycling through different ages, the parents newly weds and then grandparents, all hinging on a moment when a car trip was decided against.
As Hal watched, though, these faded moments, were replaced with scenes of Hal – he saw himself growing up, doing well in school, doing poorly, his father living to see him graduate, of dying in a cancer ward. There was college, a war, prison, one special girl or many women. All of these dazzled out between the antenna, swirling before him like a kaleidoscope.
Only when Hal dropped the ball he had strived so valiantly to retrieve did the figure in the chair stir. It might have said something, but Hal would never be sure. He ran, he ran faster than he ever had around a baseball’s diamond or through the streets of his town. He ran from the shimmering possibilities that hovered in the Becksworth house. He wasn’t certain who sat in that chair, but after a second of seeing what he beheld, Hal knew what held him there.
And Hal wanted none of it. One future would be enough for him.
To start at the beginning go here. To hear an audio reading of the chapter, hit the play button below.
Sophie smiled warmly and extended a hand, palm downward, as if she was going to lead our new friend out into the garden. Before she could take it, though, the man who brought the women down barked at her, causing everyone to flinch and I thought about making him eat the remote control and a lamp for good measure. Instead, I felt every groaning muscle from the last beating and followed the woman to the stairs, trying to appear as a man who has hit the jack pot. Without taking his eyes off the soccer game, the old man took some money from Sophie and said, “You have hour.”
Upstairs the hallway stretched off in one direction, more wood paneling that led nowhere. There were muffled sounds of talking and other more rhythmic noises that told me not all the girls were downstairs. The room we followed her to was small, barely big enough for the bed and a nightstand. A single lamp on that tiny wooden table lit the room dimly, showing the white of three of the walls. The fourth wall was a cardboard brown, a temporary structure that squeezed her half of the room into something slightly larger than a coffin. Her side had a window, shuttered like the others, and I was willing to bet if I opened that I’d have found the frame nailed shut.
Sophie strode in, making the room smaller, and sat down on the bed. She smiled at the girl and patted the sheets next to her. There was a pause, but the woman moved forward and obeyed, keeping her feet under her to accommodate the room’s size, her knees pointed towards Sophie’s.
Sophie gently brushed a few strands away from her cheek and for a moment I thought she was going to kiss her. Instead, I heard her whisper to her, “Où est la caméra?” The woman only shook her head in confusion, though, causing Sophie to repeat herself in a few different languages. English hit understanding and the woman pulled back from Sophie in surprise. Sophie’s response was to widen her eyes and nod, once, emphatically. Slowly and reluctantly the other woman turned to me and pointed to a corner of the ceiling. I followed her finger and found a small, black disk resting in the corner like a spider, hardly noticeable in the pale light.
As small as the room might be, the ceiling was high enough to make me wish for Sophie’s extra inches, but I managed to get ahold of the camera by stretching. Still sore from the beating, that was no mean feat, causing me to grunt with sustained effort, having to try a few times to succeed. Sophie giggled a bit at my strained attempts, and I found myself smiling as I managed to pull it out of its corner. It weighed practically nothing and was only fastened with a bit of adhesive, but hearing Sophie’s mirth, I brought it down, brandishing it like a rabbit from a hat. Seeing this, and encouraged by Sophie’s willingness to laugh at me, the woman laughed as well. It wasn’t a practiced gestured and for a moment I misunderstood it, thinking she was choking.
In the smallness of the room I leaned into the corner next to the door, opposite the bed so I could see their faces, dimly lit as if a confessional. Sophie placed a gentle hand on the other’s knee and asked, “What is your name?”
“Natalia,” she smiled, seemingly back in familiar territory. In the light her make-up seemed garish, something that belonged on a doll, and I wondered if it helped the men who come here think of her as not quite human.
“Natalia,” Sophie paused, and I wonder if she had actually come this far without considering what she was going to say. I was uncertain why we were here or what it had to do with Nika. Judging by the men and Natalia’s accent, it was likely Mitnick’s operation, but that felt tangental to me. “Natalia,” Sophie started again, “we would like to ask you some things.”
The smile disappeared from Natalia replaced with confusion and something that could have been fear or hope. If you’re down long enough and hard enough you can fear to hope.
With a tremulous uncertainty Natalia asked, “Are you police?”
“No,” Sophie murmured, shaking her head. With more honesty than I possessed she added, “We are not here to rescue you.”
There was a knock on the door, breaking the calm Sophie had bestowed on the room and causing Natalia to jump. Having an idea of what to expect I took off my coat and hung it on the door hinge, unbuttoning the top collar of my shirt. Looking suitably rumpled, I opened the door, if only by a crack. Not surprisingly, one of the house men was there, not betraying any great intelligence, but suitably intimidating. Before he said anything I held out the camera between thumb and forefinger. “We’d like some privacy.”
He eyed the camera, gave me a measuring stare, and leaned forward, perhaps contemplating what it would take to get into the room. Instead he said Natalia’s name. Natalia responded with an exasperated tone I’d heard used by the constantly guarded, from prisoners to diplomats. It wasn’t in English, but whatever it was must have been the equivalent of, “I’m fine.” His eyes came back to me. After another considering moment he held out his palm, and I dropped the camera in it and closed the door. It was only then that I realized there was no lock, so I turned to face the bed with my back to it. At least the hinges were on the inside.
Sophie gave another reassuring smile, attempting to restore calm to the room, a gentle hand on Natalia’s knee. Given the situation and what I suspect Natalia had been subjected to, I wasn’t sure the touching was a good idea, but Sophie was running the show, so I just kept quiet.
Sophie spoke quietly, “I worked as you do, for a time. I chose to do it: I made good money and enjoyed it. I chose my client.” I noticed the singular use of the word ‘client,’ and I wondered what name Natalia would give the parade of men she was probably accustomed. “But then something changed and I could not leave.” Leading the witness, Sophie nodded while asking, “It was no longer my choice. Understand?”
Natalia nodded, her body becoming more erect, leaning in towards Sophie with confidentiality. Sophie smiled a bit more, happy at the mutual understanding, then that bloomed into an almost stern seriousness. “Do you wish to be here?”
Nothing held back the slow apocalypse like the supersized buildings, the giant blocks of residential tenements that people squeezed themselves into. And Terry knew to bring them down would be the end of humanity. All it would take would be a bad batch of air filters.
