was scars. Even your lips. She’d still do you if your face was like that … even if you gave her the dough?”
“Man, oh, man.”
“What?”
“You are retarded, eh?”
“What?”
“Sure she’d screw you if your face was all burnt!”
“Really?”
“Of course!”
“It’s the same for all of them?”
“Pretty much.”
“How much then … how much it usually cost, you think?”
“For a whore?”
“Yeah.”
“Depends,” Charlie said. “Some cost up to three, four hundred bucks. Some you could even pay, like, five, six grand. There’s this one girl in L.A. costs two million for one night. Two million. But with an older broad like this, I’d say somewhere around —”
“Fifty!” hollered a deep, patient-sounding female voice.
It felt as if the word had been whipped into my mouth and gotten stuck going down my throat, and now there was this awful lump jammed right above my Adam’s apple.
“Fifty dollars,” the woman repeated. Then she turned fully around, and she was Asian, from Korea, maybe, and her breasts were all shoved together and popping out of her bubblegum-pink tube top. You could see right down the dark crevice between them because she was staring up at us from beside the street light, hands pressing against her hips.
“Think I don’t hear you whispering up there?” She made a mouth with her fingers. “Chat, chat, chat, chat, chat. I got ears, right? I could hear you up there. I know what you want, right? Fifty dollars. You don’t get a better deal than that, right? Never. That’s the best price you’ll get. Wait till you —” She glanced over her shoulder as if to make sure nobody was around. Nobody was around. “Wait till you see what I can do for fifty dollars. Come down here and let me show you what I can do. Fifty dollars. You want me or what?”
She stood in the middle of the sidewalk, looking up at us, waiting for a reply.
There was no reply.
“C’mon, you two mutes all of sudden? What’s wrong?”
We were mutes all of a sudden.
“Don’t be afraid, boys. I’m not … I’m not gonna hurt you. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Charlie smacked my arm. “She thinks we’re scared?”
I didn’t answer.
“You think we’re scared?” he blurted down at her, his voice shaky.
She seemed much older and more tired as we got closer. She was leaning against the street light, facing the road, her ankles and arms crossed — the exact way she’d been standing when we were on the roof. Charlie was two steps ahead of me, moving slowly, cautiously, as if he were approaching a growling pit bull. Her cheetah-skin-patterned skirt had a silver zipper going up the side, undone halfway, and you could see part of what she was wearing underneath, something yellow.
We were only a few feet away when she turned and smiled grimly, rolling her eyes, as if one of us had told her a really cheesy joke. “Name’s Martina Hingis.” She took a step forward. Her face was much wider than it appeared from the roof, all powdered and pale save for a smear of turquoise above each eye and her eggplant-purple lips.
“Joe,” Charlie said.
“Well, hello, Joe,” she said, then turned to me. “Let me guess —” she pressed a finger against her chin “— Bob, right? Or wait, no … Bill? Fred? No, it’s Frank, right? You’re Frank. Frank’s your name, isn’t it?”
“Oleg,” I said.
“Oleg …” She seemed impressed. “Well, that’s quite a name. That’s what, Russian? Russian, are you?”
“Yeah.”
“I knew a girl from Russia.” She glanced at an empty Coke can lying on the sidewalk in front of her, re-crossed her arms. “Jumped on the tracks at Osgoode subway station, but the train didn’t kill her. Didn’t even break a leg. She believed in ghosts, the crazy girl. She was a sweetie, though. But ghosts …” She squinted at the label on the Coke can as if she were trying to read the small white print listing the ingredients.
Charlie and I waited for her to say something more, but she didn’t. She stayed like that for a half-minute or so. Then Charlie said, “You okay over there, miss?”
“But I believed her,” Martina said, raising her eyebrows — toothpick-skinny black arcs, painted on. “Ever since she told me about her grandfather, I believed in ghosts.”
Charlie flashed me a funny look.
She turned to me. “You’re Russian, right?” She said that as if the fact should make clear what she was talking about.
“Yeah.”
“Well,” she said. “I knew a Russian girl who believed in ghosts.”
“Oh.”
“Forget it,” she said. “You don’t … forget it.”
Then she walked up to Charlie, bent down to his height (she was about two and a half heads taller), and grinned at him in the same kind of lusty way Oleg’s older brother sometimes grinned at Oleg before he busted him in the face, or grabbed one of his nipples, twisted, then busted him in the face.
“Fifty dollars,” she said, breasts — softball size with freckled leathery tops — right under Charlie’s chin. “We could do whatever you want. I’ll do whatever.”
“Thing is, I only got —”
“Fifty dollars,” she said again, louder this time. “I’ll take you right over there.” She nodded at the alleyway we’d walked out of. “We don’t gotta go anywhere far. I like you. You’re sexy. Your friend, too. Little hunks. I bet you guys know how to —”
“I only got twenty.”
Martina rolled her eyes. “Twenty? That’s it?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s see it.”
“What? Why you need to see it?”
“Listen,” she said, voice suddenly firm, “if you’re gonna act funny, you can scram.”
“What?”
She stood back up, towering over Charlie. “I need the money first. Those are the rules, kid. No money up front and you can hit the road.” She stuck out an open palm.
Charlie
