The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

endlessly long minutes, this man seemed to have disintegrated right before her eyes, and she saw clearly what he would look like in his old age—if, of course, he lived that long. She could smell his fear as one smells the odor of a long-unwashed body. No, this is not a mistake, there’s been no mistake; she understood everything correctly—what kind of “a different agency” it was, and from where the profits were planned to come.
    “So, we’re retraining into slave traders?”
    “What are you talking about?” Eyes skittering, gathering his face back into a fist, “I haven’t told you anything.”
    “And will you tell the girls? Will you tell them what kind of show they’re being invited to?”
    “Oh please, give me a break,” he snarled, happy to find himself on solid ground again, on well-trodden territory. “What, you think those girls are all unspoiled goods? Half of them are turning the same tricks for free in their shithole towns and can only dream of being paid for it. They’re the ones signing up in droves in response to those ads for dancers in Europe. You think they don’t know what kind of dancing they’ll be doing? Those floozies’ll be thrilled to get out of their pig farms...”
    She didn’t listen after that, something clicked in her ears like when the reel gets chewed up in a tape recorder. He sounded as if he’d memorized this text in advance and had only been waiting for a chance to unload it on someone—after all, one always needsto justify one’s own actions, and blaming the victim is always the murderer’s simplest excuse.
    Yurko once managed to interview a professional hit man; they ran the footage with the man’s face hidden, but the killer was unexpectedly articulate, and when Yurko asked what it was like to murder people—what it feels like in action—the man responded with the same memorized preparedness, took it straight out of the gate: “I am not a killer; I am a weapon; I am simply a gun in other people’s hands.” She was astonished, then, to learn that a killer, too, could have his own brand of morality. Did Yurko know what role he’d been assigned? Or, would he repeat, when he found out, his usual joke about “Sergeant Petrenko, father of four”?
    They say this legendary Petrenko does, in fact, exist, and appears every so often, like a ghost, on the Boryspil highway where he actually introduces himself that way to the drivers he pulls over: “Sergeant Petrenko, father of four!” Looking on, expectantly, as his victim opens his wallet.
    Yurko actually has four kids from three (Isn’t it?) previous marriages, and supports all of them as a decent man should—always looking for side gigs. So does she really have the right to pin him against the wall and force him to choose by revealing the origins of the windfall that’s about to drench him? She tried to remember how many of Yurko’s kids were girls—three, or all four—but for some reason could only recall one of them, the fifteen-year old Nadiyka, who once came to the studio—perfect age for the sex trade, and also with braids, a blonde little thing...a sweet child.
    Easy for you to say, Daryna, Yurko might reply, and if he didn’t say it, he’d still think it: you’ve got nothing tying you down; you do with your life as you please; you can slam those doors behind you whenever and wherever you want—and he’d have a point, of course; they’re far from being in the same boat. Still, something has to be done—not police, perhaps, but she’s got to find some resources to publicize this information—to make sure that the fifteen-year-old twits who’ll rush in herds from Zhmerinka andKonotop tomorrow to send their bikini shots into the contest on TV will know what kind of show, damn it, is planned for them!
    The boss repeated again that their conversation had to stay inside the office. “And that is something I cannot promise you,” she said—still compelled by her team instinct, her atavistic reflexes, a recurrence of a partner’s duty: cards down, fair play.
    “I would not advise you to make a fuss,” the boss answered, with unconcealed hostility. “I rather strongly would advise you not to. Trust me at my word.”
    “Or else what?” she said cheerfully. (Looking him straight in the eye, straight in the eye just like dog trainers tell you not to do—as if for seventeen years she’d been spurred on by that captain’s elusive look, which hemmed her in, stitch by quick stitch,