I often feel a postpartum sadness when I finish a novel—I know how much I’m going to miss the characters and I’m not quite ready to say a final farewell. That was the case with The Guest Room. And so this month I wrote a short story about Alexandra, the young woman at the center of the novel—at the center of the bachelor party that will forever change the lives of suburbanites Kristin and Richard Chapman, and their nine-year-old daughter, Melissa. And while The Guest Room is a literary thriller about human trafficking and that one moment you wish more than anything you could take back, this short story is a little softer. It’s set in Manhattan in the days before The Guest Room begins. It’s called “Nothing Very Bad Could Happen to You There.” Writing “Nothing Very Bad Could Happen to You There” was a little gift to myself and so I am sharing it with all of you to thank you for your faith in my work. Yes, it stands alone as a short story. But perhaps you can view it as a prologue to the novel, as well. Regardless, however, I hope you enjoy it—and meeting Alexandra. Have a happy holiday season. May somehow our world find peace in 2016. — C.B.

Nothing Very Bad Could Happen to You There Chris Bohjalian The young woman stared at the jewelry behind the glass window, a great waterfall of diamond necklaces above a basin of ruby bangles and black and white pearls. She pressed the side of her hand against her forehead like a visor against the midday sun. It was only her third day here, and she was finding the new city—the new country—a little overwhelming. The fellow beside her, a Russian at least twice her age who’d been in America at least as long as she’d been alive, glanced once and shrugged.

“You’ll see better,” he said. “Is it real?” she asked him. “At Tiffany’s? Yes. All real. No fake here.” She guessed this was possible in a place like Manhattan. Neither Moscow nor Yerevan had stores with jewelry displays this ostentatious. They certainly didn’t have any street as crowded as this section of Fifth Avenue. The building itself reminded her of the stone monoliths—great imposing blocks of tufa stone—that once housed important communist officials (and history) in Yerevan. “Come on,” Kirill said, and he placed his hand on her elbow and started guiding her through the crowd and into the lobby of the skyscraper just south of the store, a building she had been told had both offices and apartments. “Next guy’s waiting upstairs. His name is Sergei.” When they were inside, she pulled a compact from her clutch and checked her makeup. It was fine. She almost couldn’t believe how much money Kirill had told her the fellow upstairs was going to give her when they were through.

☾ When she emerged from the apartment an hour later, she saw Kirill waiting for her at the end of the twenty-seventh-floor corridor in almost the exact same spot where she had left him. He was leaning against a wall near the elevator bank, thumbing through—she presumed—either soccer scores or porn on his phone. They’d told her that if she behaved, in a year they might allow her to have a phone of her own. She hadn’t had one since she was fourteen, and that was almost six years ago now. If she had a phone with a camera, she imagined taking a picture of Central Park from the living room. The apartment’s view had felt a bit like the vista from an airplane. Now she handed Kirill the money and he guided her into the elevator. “We take the subway back, yes?” she asked. He shook his head. “You shower?” “Of course.” “Then you do one more. I just got text. They say he want Alexandra. You know the guy.”

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She nodded. As he pocketed the bills, all hundreds and fifties, she wondered whether it was enough for anything at the jewelry store downstairs. It had to be. It was just so much money.

☾ The next morning she awoke to the sound of sirens outside the small window in her small bedroom. It was almost lunchtime, the sunlight casting a lemon haze in the room. She was just sitting up when one of the other girls who had been brought here from Russia with her came in and peered out onto the street. Sonja was wearing only the ratty T-shirt in which she slept. She had worked last night through a bladder infection, and Alexandra was shocked that she was so spry. “Fire trucks,” Sonja said. “They’re at building down the block.” “Is there any smoke?” “No smoke.” “Any police guys?” Sonja left the window and sat down on the edge of the bed. “No.” Alexandra rolled onto her side, relieved. They had told her what the police did to girls like her when they were caught. There was a special prison called the Rikers Island. “I saw the most beautiful jewelry store yesterday,” she said to Sonja. “Tiffany’s.” “I saw catalog once. Everything was blue.” “I saw it for real. It was on the Fifth Avenue.” “You dragged Kirill into a jewelry store? How? My God, he must have been dying.” “We didn’t go in. We just looked in the windows.” The room had a narrow bed and a child’s pink dresser one of the girls had found behind a rack of old clothes at a consignment store. Sonja pushed herself off the mattress and picked up one of Alexandra’s necklaces. It was all costume jewelry. She held up the fake pearls by one end like a worm. Alexandra almost never wore them. “Do you think men really care if it’s pearl or paste? Did the black and whites?” The black and whites were the men back in Russia who almost always wore black suits and white shirts. They never wore neckties. They always had stubble—so much stubble that sometimes Catherine or Inga, the women who ran the top-track girls such as Alexandra

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or Sonja, would talk to them about not abrading the young girls’ skin. They seemed to Alexandra to be rich, and sometimes they were old enough to be her grandfather, which really didn’t mean they were all that old; Alexandra was a teenager then. She hadn’t yet turned twenty. The black and whites were Russian and Georgian and Ukrainian. Very international, it seemed to Alexandra. Many worked in “spirits.” Brandy and cognac and vodka. None of them had any interest in her or in any of the girls as anything more than a sex toy. “It’s different here,” she reminded Sonja. “As Catherine said: Americans are more sophisticated. They expect us to be arm candy. They expect us to watch more TV than just Bachelor.” Sonja looked a little feverish to Alexandra, but she pushed her bottle-blond hair back behind her ears and raised a single eyebrow. “Arm candy? I think the last thing they think of is arms.” “You know what I mean.” “So now you want jewelry? A sugar papa giving you real jewelry? Kirill and Catherine would never let you keep it.” “No. I just thought it was pretty. But I do want something nice.” “In another life maybe you get something nice. In this one? Now you just get dressed.” “Have you taken your pill?” “The antibiotic? Yes.” She smiled a little mordantly. “I am always happy to take pills.”

☾ The town house where the girls were kept was near Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. They only left the town house with one of their handlers, and they knew their handlers—even Catherine—always carried a gun. And so it was in her second week in the city, on a day when it was raining and she did not have to work until the evening, that Alexandra asked Catherine if she would take her to Tiffany’s.

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“What for?” asked Catherine. The woman was peculiarly ageless. Sometimes Alexandra thought she was thirty-five, only fifteen years older than she was. Other times, she speculated that Catherine might be flirting with fifty but simply knew makeup and face care well from her own years as a high-end courtesan. “I want to go inside. I want to see the jewelry.” “Not today.” “Maybe someday?” “Maybe.” She could tell that Catherine thought she was up to something. But she wasn’t. Why would she try and escape here and now? The deal was two years in the city and she’d be free. And she knew no one. She had no passport, no credit cards, no phone. All she had was these older women and men who fed her, provided her with makeup and clothes, and pimped her out. “Can I ask you again in a week maybe?” “Ask me again in a month.”

☾ But only a week later she was back on the twenty-seventh floor of the residential and office complex on Fifth Avenue on the same block as Tiffany’s. She was again with Sergei, the Russian businessman she had met the day she had first peered curiously into the windows of the jewelry store. Again it was lunchtime. When they were done and he had rolled off of her, she climbed on top of his stomach and pressed her hands on his chest and looked down at him. He was nearing sixty, but he was one of those Russian bears who still had the thick gray hair of a commissar on his head and a barrel for a chest. The mattress gave a little beneath her knees. “Can I ask you something?” she began. She had won him over and clearly he liked her, but she couldn’t risk his saying something negative to Kirill or Catherine. It had been a long time since she had been disciplined, but a girl never forgot the ways they could punish you without ever leaving a bruise on your skin or damaging the merchandise. (The worst for her had always been the times they would hold her head beneath the water in the bathtub.

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There was even a word for this, she would learn: noyade. It meant execution by drowning and was first practiced during the French Revolution.) “You can ask me anything,” Sergei said, and folded his hands behind his head. They were speaking in Russian. “I have never seen a wristwatch as handsome as yours. I love the phases of the moon and the stopwatch. I love the diamonds around the edge.” “It’s called a chronograph.” He hadn’t bothered to take it off. She could see the leather strap and buckle on his wrist. “Is it from America?” “It’s from Switzerland. But I bought it here. Why? I can’t believe there is a man in your life you want to buy a watch for. I can’t imagine Kirill allows for such things.” She leaned into him. “No. You are the man in my life,” she said, which they both knew was a lie, but it was the sort of thing she said playfully all the time. “Then why?” “Could you find such a watch at Tiffany’s?” “Probably.” “It reminds me of my father’s,” she said, which was another lie. This one, however, she expected him to believe. “Yours is nicer—much nicer. My father died when I was a little girl, but my mother kept his watch. Then, after she died, my grandmother kept it.” “How old were you when your mother died?” “Fourteen.” She sensed he was about to ask another question reflexively, but stopped himself. He must have realized that no good could come from knowing the answer to how and when she started doing . . . this. But the idea that he almost had was a good sign, she decided. It meant that she had judged this Russian bear correctly. Somewhere inside Sergei was a streak of tenderness. “So, do you want my watch? Is that what this is about? I promise you, it cost a lot more than you, Little Girl.” She laid her head on his chest. “Maybe I just want to go with you when you go shopping for your next one. Maybe together we go to Tiffany’s.”

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He wrapped his arms around her and hugged her almost tenderly. “It will be years before I buy a new one. Years. But I will keep in mind that you want to be my consultant.” Then he slid out from beneath her and went to the bathroom to clean up.

☾ The girls were expected to read newspapers and fashion magazines, and Alexandra had begun to rip from them the color ads for Tiffany’s. She was especially attracted to the ones where young women and men in love were starting their lives together with engagement rings or—in one case—picking out their china. Sonja told her that of all the things there were to become obsessed with in New York City, it was a little crazy to become fixated on a jewelry store. “Have you seen the building?” Alexandra asked her. “Have you seen the windows?” “No.” And so that afternoon, before going to work, Alexandra convinced Catherine to show Sonja a picture of Tiffany’s on her phone. And then that night, when Kirill brought her to a man at the Plaza Hotel, she asked the fellow if they could stroll outside past the fountain and the hansom cabs and enjoy the night air for a moment. He refused. She had only wanted to glimpse the regal building with its great cascades of emeralds and rubies in its windows—Would they still be there after dark, or did they hide them away at night?—and it fascinated her that she was so close and yet couldn’t see it. It was one more thing in a universe of one more things that she could approach but never quite reach.

☾ In the morning, Kirill threw open her door, allowing the way it slammed into the wall to wake her up. He ripped the sheet off her and grabbed a great rope of her dark hair and pulled her head back so fast and so far that she felt the muscles in her neck stretch and it was impossible to swallow. With his other hand he pressed the tip of a long knife near what she knew—because he had taught her—was the jugular. “What do you think you’re doing?” he whispered into her ear. “Nothing, Kirill, nothing. I promise,” she wheezed.

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“You escape, where do you think you go?” “I’m not. I won’t.” “You can have it all in two years if you don’t screw it up. Don’t you embarrass me. Don’t you embarrass Catherine.” “What have I done?” She felt him press the blade of the knife into her skin. He sliced ever so slightly—the keen pain of a shaving cut, but worse—drawing blood. Then he let go of her hair and pushed her back down onto the mattress. “Sergei called for you,” he said. “But he didn’t want you at his apartment for lunch. He wanted you to meet him at that jewelry store.” “He wants me to help him pick out a watch. That’s all.” She was crying and she wanted nothing more than to press a tissue on her neck. She could feel the blood trickle down her collarbone. She saw the first drops on the bed. “No. We told him you’re sick. We made it clear he can’t have that.” “But you said you want us to be real courtesans here. You said—” “Enough!” She went quiet. “Enough,” he repeated, his voice more controlled. “We have girls who never see light of day. We have girls who never leave their room and do ten, twenty men a day. You want to be one of them?” She shook her head. “Yes, someday you will be ready to be real courtesan. Not yet. Now? Now you are a stupid girl from a stupid country and you know nothing. Nothing. I don’t know what game you think you’re playing, but it stops now. We clear?” “Yes. I’m sorry.” She started to reach for her neck, but Kirill slapped at her hand so hard that she banged it into the wooden bed frame and feared for a moment that one of these men had once again broken one of her fingers.

☾ That night Catherine dressed her in a beaded choker to cover the long, thin scab that had formed at the front of her throat. No man would bother to unclasp it or ask her to take it off; it actually looked pretty hot, Sonja had reassured her.

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She noticed over the next four days that a lower caliber of man was brought to her or she was taken only to clients in the garment district—men who worked far from the jewelry store. She was, for the moment, forbidden from reading Bazaar and Vanity Fair and Elle. One time when she returned with Kirill, she found that all the pictures she had ripped from magazines were gone from her small room.

☾ Catherine pulled her aside and told her that on the following Friday, she and Sonja were going to be taken to a party in Westchester. It was a bachelor party, and it was going to be at a rather elegant home. There would be a lot of wealthy men, and they would all be American. She told Alexandra she should view this as an important test. Beforehand, however, Catherine told her that Sergei had asked for her again, and this time there should be no funny business: she shouldn’t hint about wanting his watch or visiting that jewelry store. She promised she wouldn’t. She was going to be escorted to his apartment that Thursday at lunch and spend the afternoon with him. For reasons Catherine didn’t know, he had paid for three hours, and so Alexandra should expect there would be other men there, too.

☾ When she arrived, she was relieved to find that Sergei was alone. He greeted her in a white terrycloth bathrobe. She expected him to immediately undress her, despite the amount of time they had together. Instead, however, he led her by the hand to the couch in his living room. For a moment she knelt on it so she could look behind her and down at the trees, still rich with foliage, in Central Park. Then she turned around and he was seated on an ottoman, facing her with the remote for his television in his hand. The screen was massive, and she assumed he wanted to watch an adult film as foreplay. (She always felt a little insulted when men did that. Was she not enough? But she had never complained, and she certainly wasn’t about to today.) “I leave for Moscow tomorrow and I won’t be back until after the holidays,” he told her. He sounded grave. “Is everything okay?”

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“Everything is as fine as it can be. This country is trying to suffocate ours with economic sanctions, but we’ll weather the storm.” She was pleased he was viewing her as something of a confidante. This boded well. “It’s just . . . business.” “I’ll miss you,” she said. He smiled. “How’s your English? Good, right?” “I think so.” “You eaten?” She shook her head. “Perfect.” He stood and went to his kitchen. He returned with a silver tray with a coffee service and pastries, and placed it on the coffee table. “I think I got you into trouble the other day,” he said. “I’m sorry.” “No, not at all. Why would you think that?” He smiled a little mordantly. “I am old. Not senile.” He poured her a cup of coffee and without asking put two sugar cubes in it. Then he handed her the cup and the saucer. “You like movies, yes?” he asked. “I do.” “Today we watch one. Sit back.” She did. She was going to be nothing if not obedient right now. He pressed “play” and she heard strings and a piano and she thought a harmonica. She watched an old yellow cab coast to a stop before a building—and there it was, the jewelry store, the one twenty-seven stories below them and on the same block. And then a young woman emerged from the cab in a black evening dress with a Styrofoam cup of coffee and a Danish, and she went right up to one of those exquisite windows of jewelry. She was all alone. The girl wasn’t her, obviously, but suddenly Alexandra felt a lump in her throat. This could be her. Someday. “Is that courtesan?” she asked, unable to hide the quaver in her voice. She understood that even if the girl at the jewelry-store window was a courtesan, this wasn’t an adult film. He shrugged. “We’ll see.” “Does she get inside?” “Not right away.”

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She thought about that: Not right away. But that also meant that eventually she did. She would. Someday. “She’s Audrey Hepburn,” he said. “Pretty girl. But you are prettier.” She was about to ask something more, but he raised his hand, palm flat, to silence her. “No more questions,” Sergei said. He was smiling. “Sit back. Today? Today your only job is be movie critic.” Chris Bohjalian’s “The Guest Room” arrives wherever books are sold on January 5, 2016. You can order it here.

Copyright © 2016 by Chris Bohjalian.

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