I waited until we were somewhat settled into the journey to bring it up. Her eyesight had improved. She’d slept a little. It was a question I’d been saving and as soon as she looked over at me, she saw how serious I was about to get.
She sat up. She seemed ready for it. “Before you ask me . . .” she said, “you should know that I want things to be okay for you . . . so I’m going to tell you whatever you want to know . . . but you should understand . . . that once you hear my answer . . .”
I might not be able to walk away legally.
That’s what she meant. She knew where I was going with it. I’d aided and abetted a potential criminal and I’d done it unwittingly until now, until, enlightened by whatever she was about to say to answer my question, I’d be irrevocably liable for any awareness obtained. She watched me as I processed her little caveat. It’s staggering how gorgeous she was—the awe she struck in me. To look at someone like her. To be looked at by someone like her.
“Why do you need my help?” I said.
She waited for the rest of it.
“Why me?” I said.
She seemed perplexed. That’s your question?
“Do you really know nobody else in Amsterdam?” I said. “Girls you worked with? Past girls? No, that’s not my question. Who else can help you?”
She shrugged. She shook her head.
“No one?”
“No one I trust,” she said.
I made her describe her most recent contacts. She hardly remembered anyone, and when she did, it’d be a one-word stage name of a fellow prostitute—Astral—or the vague title of a place she used to work—Decadent Splash—Pleasure House—some club before that—a rear unit of a shitty apartment building with the big, burly bodyguards who checked in on her.
“I think you should know,” I said, “I’m not trying to walk away. I’m not trying to get out of it. What I’m doing is . . . I’m taking a stand. Which sounds overblown. But right now, today, in Amsterdam, the heads of every bank will be at a big table and they will finalize, finalize, a $4.8 billion stimulus loan, and if I can expose a piece of the corruption . . .” I pointed to my USB flash drive. “I mean, can you imag . . . ?”
I quieted down.
A guy in a knit cap had come into our train car at the Brussels stop and sat down across the aisle from us. He had other open seats to choose from, several that would have meant decent spacing, but, for some reason, he took the one in a crowd of three overweight Nordic guys and their equally overweight backpacks, across the aisle from us. I didn’t notice him until he stood up again on the pretense of going to the bathroom. I didn’t know if Katarina noticed either. She and I talked more quietly, more intimately. I leaned in. She leaned in. Her knee pressing against mine. Our faces just inches apart.
“Now,” she said, “why don’t you ask me what you really need to ask me?”
I had to breathe for a bit before crossing my own faintly drawn line of morality. “Da Vinci . . . When you find him . . . when you’re in front of him . . . what exactly . . . ? What exactly . . . ?”
“. . . am I going to do to him?”
I nodded.
She didn’t speak immediately but she also didn’t take as long as I thought.
“Save him,” she said.
“Save him.”
“Yeah.”
“You mean that in some kind of poetic . . . poetic sense of . . .?”
“If you ever met Morgan da Vinci, I doubt you’d think of him the way I do.”
“Okay. Well, yeah, okay, that makes sense. The thing is . . .” I had my rebuttal to this, built up, rehearsed, revised, for hours. “You want me to penetrate some ultrasecret, dangerous prostitute club, but how? Me? What is this club? The Society? All I know is there’s our convention in Amsterdam. That’s it. That’s all I know.”
“Are you in love?”
“Excuse me?”
“Are you in love?”
“Am I? What?”
She wasn’t joking.
“With Jennifer,” she said.
“Jennifer?” It wasn’t simply that the question came out of nowhere, it was the way she asked it, with no animation, no inflection, no emotion.
“Are you in love with her?”
“What does that have . . . ?”
“Is she in love with you?”
“No.”
“You are fucking her?”
“No.”
“You are not fucking her?”
“We’ve had the opposite of sex. For eight years. We’re best friends. She says this to me. ‘Best friends.’”
“She says what you expect to hear.”
“No.”
“She is waiting for you.”
“No. For me? No. To do what?”
“I don’t know.”
“No. Why in the world do you care?!”
“Tell me how we can get to her.”
“What do you mean?”
“Tell me how she is vulnerable.”
She didn’t want gossip, she didn’t want the details of a schoolyard crush. What she was asking for was intel.
“What leverage do you have over her?”
“None,” I said firmly.
“She has a weakness.”
“Not her.”
“Everyone has a weakness.”
The guy in the knit cap had gotten up to get something from his luggage. It occurred to me that anyone around us in any direction could be part of the convention in some auxiliary way, even the old couple in front of us. The husband could be a tax attorney. So could his wife. What my company did in Paris was lay the groundwork for the much larger nest of transactions that would get inked in Amsterdam. This involved hundreds and hundreds of people all over Europe.
“I will propose something to you,” said Katarina, undeterred by the threat—leaning closer, her leg incidentally pressing even deeper now into mine, with part of our upper bodies now touching, the gorgeous warm pale-gold skin of her forearm feeling shamefully sensual. “If you help me meet him, I will stop hiding. I will let the police know whatever you need them to know to clear your name.”
“You’d do that?”
She nodded yes.
I couldn’t tell if she was lying. I couldn’t tell if she was telling the truth. I couldn’t read her. I’d analyzed a thousand people in a thousand high-stress situations, negotiating countless price points. She was one of the few human beings I had no gauge on. Could I trust this? I barely agreed with the principles involved yet even if I did, I still had several very fundamental unanswered questions. Even if she responded to me openly, how could I know she wasn’t just telling me what I needed to hear? I had no objectivity. All I had was a sickening feeling she was going to be dead soon, perhaps by the end of the week, and what was starting to haunt me, I mean haunt me to the core, was that she seemed so alone. Even her close friend—that lady—Mathilde—as hard as Mathilde tried, you could see this helplessness in it, this fear that no matter what Mathilde did, she could never hug this girl tight enough. Sure, this was me reading too far into shit I didn’t know, as usual, amplifying it as I amplify everything, but you just felt an overwhelming need to hold this girl, to draw her close and shield her from the bleakness. Because she was the type of female who didn’t get sympathy from very many places. She wasn’t just pretty, she was oppressively so—to the guys who craved her, who recognized they’d never have her, to anyone who resented the infinite privilege they projected on her, and to those who outright wanted her dead. And here she was, next to me, a matter of days or hours away from extinction.
“Look,” she said, speaking to me out of mercy, seeing just what kind of disordered state I was dragging myself further into, “just assume the worst about me. There are questions that don’t have the answers you want, so just assume the worst. That way when the time comes for us to say goodbye, you won’t have any hesitation.”