Page 40 of Exit Party

A: He was lonely, I think. He was in his sixties, I think never married, I don’t know if he had friends. I’d go over to his apartment and watch TV with him. He never tried anything, by the way. We were friends, kind of, in that uneasy way where there’s an underlying transaction. He would approve any passport application I gave him. I liked him. I thought he maybe liked me, but it’s hard to tell when you’re paying someone.

N: . . .

A: My true friend back then was Ilieva. But I was paying her too. I’d helped her get back into the country after she was deported, and she’d been part of my delivery system. I was trying to limit my exposure, so my rule was, I was never present when the passport or the money changed hands. The transactions only involved Ilieva, and my cousin Anton.

N: . . .

A: It’s a fair question. Friendship’s always been difficult for me. I’m not sure I’ve ever fully understood it. But I paid them a cut and they took the risk. The risk was what I was paying them for. It was a good business, for a while.

N: . . .

A: Well, after some time, a few years, Ilieva got recruited by someone we sold a passport to. A man who often came into the Russian Café, where she worked. The guy looked so gentle, that’s the way I remember him. He had a kind face, and he spoke softly. He looked like a mild-mannered professor, like the absolute last person you’d expect to do anything dangerous or unkind, but that was just a mask. He was Russian organized crime. I got involved, and I was working on a new project with him. Not just supplying passports, but bringing people into the country.

N: . . .

A: Yes, human trafficking. But what you have to understand is, these women desperately wanted in. No one was forcing them.

N: . . .

A: No, of course I can’t be sure of that. But . . . look, I see the way you’re looking at me, but these girls were coming in from places with no jobs, these desolate ex-Soviet republics where the oligarchs had stripped away all the resources. There’s a lot of organized crime, in places like that, and not a lot of options. It wasn’t that there was no economy, in those countries they were from, it’s that they were the economy.

N: . . .

A: Yes, I did use that line on Anton, and yes, I know that I’m justifying a serious crime. I’m not an idiot. But, Nico, the thing you have to understand is that all of these girls wanted out of their home countries. Most of them had been forced into prostitution. They all wanted to come to New York. But we’re getting away from the crime. I couldn’t leave New York for complicated reasons. I needed someone on the ground in Europe to complete the transaction, and Anton was going to Italy on his honeymoon. But then the transaction was delayed, and he ended up having to stay there for weeks, and he started to get anxious. He didn’t want to go through with it. He started calling me and demanding more money. I was afraid he was about to go to the FBI.

N: . . .

A: It’s not that I thought I didn’t deserve punishment. I’m not a psychopath. I don’t think I’m a psychopath. It was more that . . . okay, yes, I didn’t want to go to prison. I was obsessed with the idea of freedom. That was why I’d gotten into a criminal life in the first place, because I knew I was alone in the world and I wanted to be free. The alternative I saw all around me in Brooklyn, the life where you work yourself to the bone and you barely get by, that felt like the opposite of freedom to me. I don’t know, maybe everyone feels that, but I just . . . I wanted something different. So I made an arrangement. It was shocking, actually, how easy it was. I paid someone a very large amount of money to remove Anton from the equation. And then I got the call that the job was done, that Anton was gone.

N: . . .

A: Yes. I mean dead.

N: . . .

A: I left New York that night, and went to California. I used to rent a little house by the beach in Santa Monica. It was the most half-hearted effort at fleeing. I knew anyone could find me if they put a half-hour of work into it. It wasn’t that I wanted to be caught, it was that I knew I would be. It’s hard to explain, but it’s been like that all my life, I sometimes just know what’s coming. I knew I was going to prison.

N: . . .

A: Then time kept passing, and the police kept not coming. Those months were ghostly, that’s how I thought of that time later. I walked to the grocery store, and walked on the beach, I lay awake at night listening to the city. I had this feeling of being in between lives.

N: . . .

A: Yes. Like now.

N: . . .

A: After a while I thought, Maybe I’ll stay free, but I knew that wasn’t a true story. I started making plans to travel, but there was no life in those plans. I don’t know how else to express it. I knew prison was approaching. The delay was confusing. It didn’t matter what I did, because I was always going to go to prison.

N: . . .

A: Until one morning I woke up and I couldn’t stop looking at the door. Like my attention was just drawn to it. I sat there staring at it like it was the most interesting thing in the world, like I was high or something, but I wasn’t. Then in the late morning the FBI broke down that door and swarmed my house. I didn’t resist. I kept not resisting until all the guns and shouting started to seem a little stupid, and the agents kind of looked embarrassed, I remember that. I just lay there pinned to the carpet with my hands behind my back until finally it got a bit quieter, and they took me in. After I confessed, they told me Anton was still alive in Italy. Pass me that controller again.

N: . . .

A: Yeah, it’s terrible. My leg’s shattered in five places and I can feel the metal pins attaching to my bones.

N: . . .