by Greg Rucka
She slipped off me, immediately moving to the opposite end of the couch. Arzu waited while I got to my feet, then led the way. He took the stairs as before, two, three at a time, full of energy. Another two women were in the hall when we came off the landing, smoking cigarettes, and both looked down when Arzu passed, followed me with their eyes when I did. They looked as wasted and tired as the girl who'd taken my lap, and I didn't want to guess how young they were, or how long they'd been here, and found that I couldn't help myself.
We went into one of the rooms, a small shoebox of a space that had been turned into a private lounge, with a television, a couch, a couple of chairs. The television was on, broadcasting local news that I didn't understand. Arzu indicated the couch, offering it to me, and I thanked him and sat. A Nokia phone was sitting on one of the chairs, and he picked it up, checking it, and I saw the frown flash across his face for an instant before he tucked it into a pocket of his own. Then he maneuvered the chair around to face me before taking a seat.
“You talked to Vladek?” I asked.
He grinned. “Don't worry about that. You wanted to talk about some girls. Two hundred euros.”
“Two hundred for two girls. But that's not what I really want to talk about.”
“No?”
“I'm looking to buy, to set something up further south.”
“How far south?”
“Gulf region. Depends on what my partners come back with. Can you help me?”
“How many?”
“Four to start. More later if it goes well. But the girls have to be young, and I'll want to see them myself.”
“Of course, sure. How young?”
“Sixteen. Maybe younger.”
Arzu cracked his grin again. “That's more expensive.”
“I know. That's why I need to see them. But we'll pay what they're worth.”
“So you understand.”
“Vladek made it clear,” I said.
He did the teeth bit once more, then nodded. “Okay, you're staying in town?”
“At the Zorlu. I'm supposed to leave the day after tomorrow, but I can stretch it until the end of the week if I have to.”
“You'll hear from me tomorrow. David Mercer, right?”
“That's right.”
He got up, offering me his hand, and I got up and took it. The shake was firm and professional, as cleanly executed as any boardroom deal-closing. He walked me to the door, but paused after he opened it, his expression brightening.
“That natasha” he asked. “You liked her?”
The thought of what might happen to the woman if I said I didn't flashed in my mind's eye. “Sure.”
“Take her with you, back to the Zorlu. Keep her all night, whatever you want to do to her, that's fine.”
“That's very generous,” I said to him, and Arzu's smile faltered, hinted at the offense he would take if I refused his gift. “But it's like with the drugs. I never use the product.”
For a moment, I was sure I'd lost him. Then he got happy again and clapped me on the shoulder. “You're married?”
“Yeah.”
“I'm the same! Why get this when you've got it at home, right?”
“Pretty much.”
“I'll call you tomorrow, David,” he said, ushering me out the door.
As soon as I was downstairs, I put the battery back in the BlackBerry. I wasn't halfway back to the Zorlu when the phone began vibrating again.
I let it go to voicemail.
It had been just before nine the previous morning when I'd brought the Dnepr's engine to life, and by ten I'd been heading down the coast. Shortly after I'd left Batumi, heading south, I'd passed a billboard, stark and out of place, a PSA put together by the Interior Ministry, most likely with American funds. It showed a grayscale image of a woman, profile shot, framed from the mid-bicep of her right arm to the top of her head, cropped so that she was faceless, but clearly feminine. On the exposed bicep had been tattooed a barcode. The Georgian script, in bright red letters, translated to the phrase You are not for sale.
Like she didn't know that already.
It had done nothing for my mood.
By the time I'd finished with my meager packing, Alena still hadn't come back into the house. I'd gone out after her, found her in the studio, music blaring, trying to dance. Her left calf had been badly injured several years ago, hit with a blast from a shotgun that destroyed the anterior cruciate ligament and severed tendons. While the ligament had been replaced by a prosthetic, nothing could be done for the rest, and though physical therapy had brought back much of the agility and balance she'd had before, she didn't have all of it, and was supposed to go easy on her left.
She was not, as far as I could see, going easy on her left.
Both Miata and I had watched for a while, and Alena had ignored us both. Finally I'd shut off the music, and that had forced her to stop. When I'd turned to face her again, she was already on me, and while the kiss was wonderful, it wasn't what I'd come looking for at all. When I tried to explain that to her, she'd told me to shut up, and then clothes had started coming off. She'd pulled me to the floor, and the sex we had reminded me of the first times we made love, when passion had made our hands tremble, and desire and need had been the same things.
After, we'd made our way to bed and slept, and in the morning there had been nothing, it seemed, she could say. That hadn't been the case for me.
“I'm coming back,” I told her.
She'd nodded, once, as if believing my sincerity, if not the promise.
The drive itself from Kobuleti to Sarp, at the border with Turkey, was only forty kilometers, but it took me the better part of two hours. I crossed on the David Mercer ID, which was the only one I'd brought along, something I was certain would become a problem for me later. While I had other IDs, they'd stayed behind, in my go-bag where they belonged. In my backpack was a change of clothes, Bakhar's address book, Vladek Karataev's BlackBerry, a smattering of toiletries, and my laptop. The only weapon I carried was a small flip knife, thinking that would be easier to explain if I found myself searched at a checkpoint or the border.
As it turned out, I probably could have brought a rocket launcher with me. Fifty euros seemed to be the going rate for just about anything illegal these days, and in Sarp it bought me a visitor's visa, and papers for the Dnepr. I took the opportunity to refuel the bike, and then it was just a question of following the coast another two hundred kilometers or so until I reached Trabzon.
It had been almost midnight when I'd reached the Zorlu Grand Hotel, the city's finest accommodations, and checked myself into my room. I'd picked the place not out of a desire to live large, but to present a cover if I needed one. The ride had given me plenty of time to think, and thinking had given me the frame for a plan.
Sex was for sale everywhere. It was just a question of knowing where to look.
My first day in Trabzon, the day I met Arzu, I woke early, did yoga for half an hour, then ordered room service. The food arrived just after my shower, and I ate while going through Bakhar's address book, this time looking for numbers with a Trabzon exchange. There weren't any, which left me the BlackBerry, and while I was violently suspicious of the device, or, more precisely, of who might have Vladek's number and be tracking him through it, it gave me a window into his life and his business. All I needed to do was access the information.
The Zorlu had wireless, so I set up the laptop to download the software I needed, then went down to the lobby and got directions from the concierge to the nearest store selling mobile phones. It was a three-minute walk, but they didn't have the USB cable I needed. I bought two prepaid international SIM cards from them, anyway, then got directions to another store, which did carry replacement cables. I bought another two SIMs, and the cable, and headed back to the room. Then I ran the software I'd downloaded, plugged the BlackBerry into my USB port, and cracked open a very disturbing window into Vladek Karataev's life.
His address book
, like Bakhar's, exercised discretion. While this time there were both first and last names to be discerned, there were no addresses provided, only phone numbers. It looked like Vladek had made a point of clearing out his emails and text messages regularly, and I was only able to find a handful of each. It would have been simple enough to recover the deleted communications, I suppose, but all the methods I knew of required additional hardware, none of which I had, and none of which I could think of a way to acquire quickly.
So I worked with what I did have, started searching, and the laptop made that easy; all I had to do was run a find. “Trabzon” didn't kick back any results. “Turkey” got the same negative result. When I tried the country code for Turkey, though, three hits came back, and one of those looked like it was for Trabzon, or at least close by—a man named Arzu Kaya. I checked against Bakhar's book, and lo and behold, he had an Arzu, too.
I skimmed the rest of the BlackBerry entries while considering how to proceed. There were numbers for phones in Georgia, Ukraine, and Russia, and it looked to me like Vladek had kept his business local, though I found two out of Western Europe-one in the Netherlands, the other in Germany.
The mail and text messages got my attention next. Almost all of the emails were in Cyrillic, which was a minor headache, as I could speak Russian much better than I could read it. It took me a while, even though they were universally terse. Vladek had been circumspect, carrying on what little correspondence remained in open code, with references to “deliveries” and “stock” and “items.” It might've referred to anything, guns or drugs as much as people. It might've referred to Georgian wine.
Of the text messages, the most recent had been the one sent by Zviadi at the point of my gun. The only other sequence was a short exchange of messages sent the night Tiasa had been taken, between Vladek and Arzu. The exchange had run in Russian.
BUYING?
HOW MANY
5. 16 16 17 19 AND 14.
WHEN
TOMORROW NIGHT. CALL TO DISCUSS PRICE.
Which meant that Vladek had planned on selling Tiasa even before he and his pals had murdered Bakhar.
For a while, that was the worst the BlackBerry gave me.
Then I found the pictures.
And the video.
The photos had been taken on the phone itself, and the most sinister thing about them was that they were so very mundane. Mostly headshots of different women, different girls, one after another. In a couple, the subject was actually smiling. In a couple, the subject was crying. If I'd seen them in any other place, had known they were taken by any other person than Vladek, it would have meant nothing.
But sitting at the desk in my hotel room at the Zorlu Grand Hotel, looking at them, I could only see them as the record they undoubtedly were. The women he had taken and trafficked, one after another, kept for posterity on his phone.
There were thirty-seven of them, and I made myself look at them all.
The last picture was of Tiasa. She looked at the camera with tears running down her face, snot leaking from her nose, clearly trying to stop crying.
Vladek had taken the picture after he'd raped her. I knew that, because he had the video of it, taken the same way he'd taken the photograph. Some dirty room in a dirty building with a mattress on the floor and four men taking turns with a fourteen-year-old girl who couldn't defend herself and had nowhere to run.
In Batumi, with a puncture in his femoral, Vladek had told me what he'd done to her, and I'd known he was telling the truth, but I had hoped he wasn't. I'd hoped he was throwing spite and hatred at me, trying to deliver wounds with the only weapon he'd had left. That's what I'd hoped.
I turned off the video before I saw more, but I'd already seen too much.
I should've known better than to hope.
The day after I met Arzu, he called me at the hotel. It was twenty-two minutes past four in the afternoon.
“David,” he said, “I think we're in business.”
CHAPTER
Nine
There were three women in the room, and if you added all their ages together, you could probably break fifty years old.
Barely.
None of them was Tiasa. Two sat on a couch, at opposite ends from each other, strangers bound by common fear. The third one sat on a rickety chair in the opposite corner, almost in profile, watching me without turning her head. All of them wore clean, if worn and used, clothes, and all of them looked fed, and all of them looked bewildered and haunted by their circumstance.
“What do you think?” Arzu asked.
I forced my eyes to linger on the women, and in doing so absorbed more details. A broken fingernail. A bruise around one wrist. A clenched jaw. Finally, I looked at Arzu, and showed him a grin to demonstrate my pleasure. Then I put the grin away, so he could see that, too.
“They're all older than I was hoping,” I told him.
He looked sincerely apologetic. “These are the youngest I could get. Give me another week or two, maybe I can find others.”
“And I asked for four, not three.”
“Yes, you did, my friend. And here are three of them less than twenty-four hours after you asked me, all of them ready to start work. Give me until tomorrow night, the day after at the latest, I'll get you a fourth, I promise.”
I considered, or pretended to, looking back at the women. The one in the corner had shifted her head slightly to watch me and, when she caught me looking, turned it back again. She was the smallest of them, and perhaps the eldest, black hair and an olive complexion, and I caught sight of the swelling at her lip before she hid her face. Her eyes were as dark as her hair, and she couldn't conceal the hatred in them.
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“You know how they are,” Arzu said. “Sometimes they need it explained to them.”
I nodded, because I didn't trust myself to speak.
“Let's go.” Arzu put a hand on my shoulder. “We can talk business someplace more comfortable.”
He guided me out of the room and into the next, where two partners or acquaintances or brothers or who the hell knew were sitting around a small table, eating their dinner. Each one of them had a pistol resting next to his plate of mezes. The one nearest us got to his feet and locked the door we'd just exited. Arzu said something in Turkish, without breaking stride, and the response followed us out of the apartment and into the early evening. Arzu took the lead, down the flight of stairs to the street. It wasn't quite evening yet, but the apartment was close enough to the mountains that the sun had dipped out of sight behind them, and the shadows were growing long as the air grew cooler.
“You talk to Vladek?” Arzu asked me.
“Recently?”
“In the last day or so.”
“He's not one for chatting unless it's about business, and right now my business is with you.”
Since I'd last seen Arzu, he'd left four voicemails on Vladek's phone, and sent two texts, the most recent just after nine this morning. I'd reviewed the lot, and they'd all been pretty much the same, with Arzu asking about David Mercer, trying to confirm the contact. The last one this morning had added, at the end, ALSO, ANOTHER 14?
I'd considered responding to the texts, but had discarded the idea as quickly as I'd found it as one that would only make trouble for me. If Vladek was capable of responding to a text message, after all, why wasn't he answering his phone? Best to let it lie.
“That's true. That's very true.” Arzu motioned toward a black Honda CRV parked nearby. “Let me drive you back to your hotel, David.”
I waited for him to unlock the car, climbed into the front passenger seat. He snapped his seatbelt into place, started the car, then immediately reached for the radio, silencing the blast of hip-hop suddenly pouring forth. I made a mental note of the street we were on, the number of the apartment block, then put my attention on Arzu. It might have been his mention of Vladek, but I was having trouble reading him, suddenly. There was no doubt that, by now, Vl
adek Karataev and his friends had been discovered in Batumi, which meant there was no reason not to assume that Arzu had learned that Vladek Karataev was dead. It would certainly explain why the calls and messages had stopped.
Whether or not Arzu suspected me for it was something I couldn't hazard. Based on what I'd just seen, combined with the last text he'd sent, I was sure that Tiasa was long gone, that Vladek had been correct and that Arzu had already trafficked her someplace else.
Just like in Batumi, I had lost time, and Tiasa was gone. Unlike in Batumi, I didn't have the first idea as to where.
Showing Arzu a picture of Tiasa Lagidze and asking him what he'd done with her, asking him where she was, wasn't going to work. Even questioning him about her in the most general terms would be problematic. The women Arzu dealt with weren't people, they were merchandise. Any assertion on my part to the contrary wouldn't just raise suspicion, it would mark me as his enemy. Right now, he believed we were alike.
I needed him to believe that. Unless I was willing to do to him what I'd done to Vladek, it was the only way I would get a lead on Tiasa. I needed Arzu to believe that I was willing to be his friend, rather than someone who wanted to use his head to shatter all the windows on his car.
But dammit if I wasn't thinking about doing it anyway.
We'd gone all of a kilometer, winding down out of the mountain terraces that faced the Black Sea, when I asked him if he had paper for the women.
“We have their passports,” Arzu said, almost absently. “Took them when they arrived, you know.”
“If I'm going to move them, I'm going to need clean paper. Can you arrange that?”
“I'll give you their passports.”
“You're not hearing me,” I said. “Clean paper. I don't want some customs official in Rome wondering why a sixteen-year-old girl from Romania has entry stamps for Ukraine and Turkey in her passport, each of them less than a month apart. They're cracking down on this stuff, you know that.”