himself… including cheapening the profession… ¡Dios mío! How do I let myself fall for these corrupt creeps?::::::
She was so ashamed, she had Vladimir let her out a block from her apartment. She didn’t want anyone to see her coming home in this car. Why is that girl wearing last night’s party clothes being returned to this Low-Rent (for Miami Beach) neighborhood this early in the morning in some rich man’s limousine driven by some rich man’s lumpy-bonehead automaton? Do we have to spell it out for you?
It was one of those miserable laundry-ironing-room Miami days. She walks one block and she already feels hot and sweaty and sorry for herself. She tries but can’t hold the tears back. The mascara supposedly adding drama to her eye sockets is running down her cheekbones, which is no more than she deserves, the little whore.
::::::Please, God, don’t let Amélia be home… Don’t let her see me like this!:::::: She can’t even try to fool Amélia… not on this subject. Magdalena barely has the door open and… Amélia is standing right there with her hands on her hips. She takes one look at Magdalena in the night-before black dress she lent her, and a what-have-we-here grin comes sneaking across her lips.
“And where have we been?” she said.
“Oh, you know where I’ve been—” And with that, Magdalena’s leaky eyes opened wide, and her mouth fell ajar… and she burst into tears. Her sobs came out in regular paroxysms. She knew she had to tell Amélia the whole story, down to the most humiliating details… but at this moment that was the least of her concerns. What gripped her was fear.
“Come on,” said Amélia. “Hey!—what’s wrong?” She put her arms around Magdalena—and would never know how grateful her morose roommate was for that little embrace. Even if she were calm and composed, Magdalena would never find the words to express what Amélia’s show of protection meant to her at that moment.
“Oh, my God, I feel so disgusting. That was the worst sob night sob of sob my whole life! sob sob sob sob.” Her words were swimming against waves and waves of sobs.
“Tell me what happened,” said Amélia.
sobbing sobbing sobbing “And I thought he was so sob cool sob and everything… and cultured sob… and like sob European sob and all and sob knew all these things about art sob and had all these good manners… and you wanna know what he really is?… He’s the nastiest pig that ever lived! He sticks his dirty snout here sob and there sob and wherever he likes and then he treats me like mierda!”—a regular bucket of sobs—“I feel so filthy!” sob sob sob sob…
“But what happened?”
“He brings these two… goons of his into the bedroom, right into the bedroom, and I’m still in bed, and he’s mad and yelling at them in Russian about something… and I’m thinking, ‘Like I don’t even exist’—but I exist, all right! sob I’m that piece of used coño sob over there sob in the bed sob sob sob and he’s ordering them to throw the used coño out like the rest of the trash sob before it starts smelling sob sob sob sob. He freaked me out, Amélia… totally freaked me out… but it’s worse than that. He’s scary. All he says to me is ‘Something’s come up. Vladimir will drive you home.’ That’s it!—and we have just spent all night—‘Vladimir will drive you home’! Vladimir is one of those goons… this big tall Russian with a shaved head… shaved right down to the bone… and that bald bone—it has all these lumps and bumps in it and no brains, just video game circuits… He’s a robot, and whatever Sergei tells him to do, he does. He drove me back here without saying one word. He has his orders. Take this piece of used coño out and dump it. So he drives it here and dumps it… There’s something—very wrong—there’s something evil about that whole setup. It’s scary, Amélia!”
She could tell Amélia was already bored by this recitation and couldn’t think of anything cogent to say. Finally she came up with “Well, I don’t really know anything about your Sergei other than—”
Magdalena laughed sourly and muttered, “My Sergei…”
“—what you’ve told me, but it sounds to me that for such a handsome, sophisticated oligarch-I-guess-he-is, he’s got the heart of one of those Russian Cossacks who used to go around cutting off the hands of little children caught stealing bread.”
Magdalena, genuinely startled: “Russian