by Greg Rucka
“She hates me.”
“She talks a good game.”
“Logan hates me, Atticus. How can I trust her?”
“So maybe she hates you. At least you know where you stand with her. I trust her. She'd never have agreed if she wasn't willing to see this through.”
“Perhaps.” She went silent. It stretched long enough I began to wonder if the call had dropped. Then Alena said, “Did you tell her?”
“Yeah. She was overjoyed for us.”
“You are lying.”
“Yeah, I am,” I said, catching sight of Bridgett returning to the gate, a frighteningly large paper cup in one hand. “I'm gonna go. I'll call you from London, give you her ETA.”
“You're not coming with her?”
“No. Trabzon.”
“Of course. I will wait to hear from you.”
She hung up, and I stowed the phone back in my pocket as Bridgett resumed the seat next to me. She popped the top off the cup, releasing a cloud of steam, took a sip, then sighed.
“Black bean of life,” Bridgett said. “Never used to like coffee, now I drink it all the time.”
“You're off the Altoids?” I asked. When I'd known her, she was always popping one sort of candy or another, always carrying a roll of Life Savers or a tin of some flavor of mint in a pocket. She took them the way smokers took cigarettes, but instead of feeding an addiction, it had been her way of fighting one.
“Couple years ago.”
“No kidding?”
“I went to the dentist, he took one look at my molars and started pricing new cars. I had fractures in three of them, had to get crowns made. That pretty much put an end to that.”
“Ah,” I said.
“Was that her? On the phone?”
“Yeah.”
“She knows I'm coming.”
“She does now.”
“And?”
“She was overjoyed,” I said.
“You're a fucking liar.”
I grinned.
“What's so fucking funny?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
She glared at me, but I wasn't going to add anything more. After a couple seconds, she gave it up, and went back to savoring her coffee.
Somewhere about halfway across the Atlantic, Bridgett woke me with a not-so-gentle punch to my shoulder. The cabin lights had been dimmed, and everyone else in business class was either dozing or hiding behind their sleep masks and noise-canceling headsets. I fumbled my glasses into place, focused on Bridgett, staring at me.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “I just wanted to hit you.”
I took my glasses off, readjusted the inadequate pillow beneath my cheek. “Fine.”
“Dick.”
I nodded, pretended to go back to sleep. She let me maintain the charade for about a minute.
“You know what pisses me off most?” she asked.
“That I'm still breathing,” I said.
“That I missed you.”
I rolled my head to look at her, blurry without my corrective lenses. She had the aisle seat, taken for the slight advantage in leg room she could eke out of it.
“I missed you, too,” I said.
“I don't love you.”
“I didn't say you did.”
“No, I'm saying I don't love you, not anymore. I think I did, once. I thought I did. I tried.”
“I know you did.”
“Maybe you do, but it took me a while to get there.” She shifted in her seat, trying to adjust her hips, wincing. “For a long time—I mean a long fucking time—I thought you'd chosen her over me.”
“I did.”
“Wow,” Bridgett said. “That was cold.”
“You want me to lie to you?”
“No, actually. That's the last thing I want you to do. Seriously.”
I put my glasses on once more, straightened up, remembering. Bridgett and I had tried to be lovers, before I'd ever met Alena. We'd tried very hard at it, in fact. But it hadn't worked, even when it looked like it had, and when Alena entered my life, that had become abundantly clear. Who Alena was had simply provided a convenient, if reasonable, excuse.
“You seeing anyone?” I asked Bridgett.
“Yeah, actually. That surprise you?”
“Not if it's on your terms.”
That got a grin. “He's like me. Doesn't want to settle down. We call each other, email, video chat on the computer. Comes into town for two, three weeks at a time, and we have a good time together, and then he goes off and I go back to my life. I don't have to change anything for him.”
“I'm happy for you.”
She heard the sincerity, and accepted it, and we started talking then, in a way we never had back when we'd pretended we were sharing everything with each other. She had questions, a lot of them, and I discovered that I did, as well. We talked until England rolled out beneath us, our voices low. We remembered friends who had died, and she told me what she knew about the ones who were still living, but of all but one of them, she knew very little, having long since lost touch. Over the one we still shared, a young woman named Erika Wyatt, she scolded me, telling me that I owed her contact.
As the plane began its descent in earnest, we came around to where we started.
“You say you picked her over me.”
“No, you said I picked her over you. I just agreed.”
“It's the same thing, asshole.”
“If you say so.”
“There never really was a choice to make, though, was there?” Bridgett asked.
“I don't think you get to pick who you fall in love with,” I said. “Just what you do once you've fallen.”
“Oh, wow, that's deep.” She reached for the pouch on the seatback by her knees. “I need an airsick bag, I'm going to puke.”
“Let me know when you're done.”
“You believe that?”
“Maybe. Sure sounds good,” I said.
Bridgett Logan shook her head, bemused. “Seven fucking years to turn you all hardcore. And beneath it all, you're still the same.”
“Am I?” I asked, because I sure as hell didn't feel it.
“Yeah,” Bridgett Logan said. “You're still a hopeless fucking romantic.”
CHAPTER
Twenty-three
There's an old cop saw, goes like this.
Question: How do you catch a drug dealer for the fiftieth time after he's walked free the other forty-nine?
Answer: You buy drugs from him.
Habits don't change, and even if I'd managed to give Arzu's business a bloody nose two and a half weeks earlier—something I had every reason to doubt—there was no way he'd quit and turned over a new leaf. If he had been rousted when I'd called the police on him, he certainly would have been released quickly enough, once the appropriate palms had been greased. Back on the street, he wasn't going to stop pimping, and he wasn't going to stop trafficking. The way I saw it, in fact, there were only two options. Either Arzu would return to what he'd been doing with a vengeance, eager to make up lost money and lost time, or he would return to what he'd been doing with more caution, for fear of getting burned.
I had no doubt that he knew he'd been burned, and that it'd been I who'd burned him. The attack on the house in Kobuleti guaranteed that. But when my initial searches for him in Trabzon turned up nothing, I assumed—incorrectly—that was because he had gone to ground. Maybe Arzu had heard that Kobuleti hadn't gone as well as he would've liked. Maybe he knew that three more of his and Vladek Karataev's associates were dead. He'd been greedy when I'd met him, but that wasn't the same thing as stupid. Knowing his efforts to punish me had failed, he would have concluded that the trail from Kobuleti would lead straight back to him.
It made sense that he would keep his head down, at least for a while. At least until he felt it was safe enough to raise it again.
My problem was the same as it had been all along. Tiasa didn't have the time to wait,
and for that reason, neither did I.
I lost most of two days trying to locate him. I hit the hotels that weren't hotels, and the brothels that didn't even try to pretend. I went back to the apartment block where Arzu had shown me the three young women, spent twelve hours on a surveillance that turned up nothing. If the location was being used for anything at all, I couldn't tell from the outside.
When I broke in at three in the morning, I found the place abandoned, and nothing that told me where I should look next.
My third morning back, walking past the tiny shops and stalls crammed onto Uzun Sokak, I saw the natasha Arzu had ordered to keep me company the night I'd first met him. I wasn't certain it was the same woman and kept my distance for a few minutes. She was even paler in the sunlight, sickly-looking and visibly shaky. Her shorts and T-shirt, both too tight, were filthy, and I watched while she was verbally abused by one stall owner, then another, each of them shouting her away from their bustling stands on the busy street.
At the third stand she approached she made her move, her hand darting out to snare a plastic sack filled with kuruyemis, dried fruits. Desperation made her foolish, and she timed it badly, and the owner caught her by the wrist before she could draw her arm back. He wasn't a big man, but there was more to him than there was to her, and he yanked her toward him hard enough to nearly take her off her feet, screaming at her in Turkish. She slammed into the side of the stand, and he twisted her arm until she cried in pain.
There were a lot of people around, shoppers and pedestrians, and those who noticed stopped to watch and listen, and seemed mightily amused. They seemed even more amused when, still holding her by her wrist in one hand, still berating her, the owner punched her in the face.
I was there by then. In Russian, I said, “Stop that.”
He looked at me in some surprise. He was clearly a Turk, a local, clean-shaven and middle-aged, and I imagined he worked very hard for his living, to support his family. I could even understand why he would be tired of people stealing from him. But there was more to it, as well. The ultranationalist sentiment in Trabzon is strong, has led to violence against foreigners in the past. I didn't speak Turkish, but I'd picked up enough words here and there to know that, of all the things the man had called her, “whore” and “foreigner” had figured repeatedly and prominently.
The girl stared at me, her arm still trapped. Blood was streaming from her nose.
I took a ten-euro bill from my pocket, then picked up the same bag of kuruyemis the natasha had been trying to steal. I held the bill up for him to see, then dropped it in front of him. I handed the bag of dried fruit to the girl.
“Let her go,” I said.
He let her go.
The second he released her, she ran.
The stall owner's laughter followed us both.
She gave it her best effort, three blocks, cutting through alleys and dodging people. She lost one of her cheap plastic shoes at the square off Atatürk Alani, but kept going anyway, the bag of dried fruit in her hand. I grabbed the shoe without stopping, stuffing it into my windbreaker as I tried to stay with her.
Then she ran into traffic, looking back at me as she did so, and that meant she didn't see the white minibus heading straight for her. The screech of its brakes and the howl of its horn snapped her attention around, and she panicked and stopped dead. The bus came to a halt with perhaps an inch between her and its front fender, and I'd caught up by then. I put a hand on her shoulder and another on her arm, and led her back off the street as more horns called furiously after us for disrupting traffic.
The shock of the near miss let me get her off the road, but the moment we were clear, she tried to yank free from me again. I kept my grip on her, aware that by doing so I was only making matters worse, only scaring her more. I couldn't imagine the number of unwanted hands that had been on her body, and now I was just one more pair of them.
“I'm not going to hurt you!” I told her in Russian. “You have to calm down!”
“Fuck you! Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you let me go!”
I turned her to look at me. The run had made the bloody nose worse, a flow of crimson that ran off her chin and into her shirt. The T-shirt, I saw now, was pink, with a faded silver star on it, and the word porn printed above it in English. She struggled like a bird against my grip, and maybe weighed as much.
“I'm not going to hurt you,” I said again. “You need money? I have money, I can give you money. Please, calm down.”
She stared at me, furious and hateful, but went still. Then she tried to break my grip again, hoping that I'd bought the change. I hadn't, and I didn't let her go.
“I have money,” I told her. “And you don't have to give me your body to get it. Please. Believe me.”
Then I released my hold on her, stepping back, showing her my palms before dropping my hands to my sides.
She looked horribly unsure then. On either side of us, pedestrian traffic hustled past, barely giving us a glance.
“You'll give me money?”
“Yeah.”
“What do I have to do?”
“Answer a question or two, that's all.”
She tasted the blood running over her lips, wiped at her nose and saw the result on her hand.
“Oh God,” she breathed. “I'm bleeding.”
“Let me take you somewhere. You tell me where.”
The suggestion confused her. “Where?”
“You pick,” I said. “Someplace you'll feel safe.”
“I don't know where that is.”
I looked around, saw a restaurant, a sign in Turkish and English telling me its name was Petek. I pointed to it. “In there? You can use the bathroom. I'll buy you lunch.”
I handed her back her missing shoe.
“Okay?” I asked.
She nodded miserably, still trapped.
Petek wasn't much of a restaurant, but they had a bathroom, and they let her use it. I bought two kebabs and a couple of cans of Fanta, waited for her at a table, trying not to be impatient. I hadn't followed her for obvious reasons, and if there was a rear exit to the restaurant and she wanted to hoof it, I wasn't going to try and stop her.
She was gone for nearly half an hour, but eventually she joined me at my table. She'd cleaned herself as best as she could, dried blood clinging to the inside of her nostrils. Her shirt was still a mess. There was no sign of the bag of dried fruits, and I realized that she must have eaten them all before returning, before someone could take them from her.
“How much will you pay me?”
“How much do you need to get home?” I asked her.
She looked at me incredulously.
“A thousand?” I asked. “Will a thousand be enough?”
“I can't go home.”
“You don't remember me, do you?”
She shook her head.
“We met a couple weeks ago. Arzu told you to keep me company.”
His name made her mouth tighten, her eyes narrow, and she gave me another appraisal. Then she nodded. “The man who didn't answer his phone.”
“That was me.”
“You said… your name is David?”
“Right. And you said your name is Natasha. I couldn't tell if that was a joke.”
“Vasylyna.” She took one of the cans of Fanta, the grape, and cracked the top. “You will give me the money to go back to Kiev?”
“I can't control what you do with it. But I'll give you the money.”
“Just for my help?” Vasylyna asked, then gulped at her soda.
“I'm trying to find Arzu,” I said, deflecting the question. “I need to talk to him. Do you know where he is?”
She set the can down, eyeing the kebabs. I nudged them closer to her.
“The money first,” she bargained, quietly. “You give me the money first.”
“You think I won't give it to you after?”
“What if you don't like what I tell you?”
I brought out my wall
et, emptied it of cash into my hand, then folded over the bills and slid them to her. “You have your passport?”
“Arzu took it. I don't know where it is.”
“I can take care of that, too. We can get you a new one. Tell me where I can find him.”
“You can't.” She choked on a sob, caught herself, staring at the money on the table. “You can't find him.”
“He's dead?”
“In jail. He got arrested a couple of weeks ago, but they let him go, he paid the police. But then he got into a fight last week, with another pimp, and he was arrested again.” She pushed the money back at me, tears shining in her eyes. “You won't let me have it.”
I pushed the money right back.
“Vasylyna,” I said, “you're going home.”
CHAPTER
Twenty-four
The man who ran Trabzon's jail was a Turk named Besim Çelik, in his early forties, average in height and maybe twenty pounds overweight. He carried it well enough, and when we met at the Trabzonspor Club two days after I'd promised Vasylyna a way home, he moved himself with the certainty of a man used to pushing around others. The bar was the clubhouse of Trabzon's football team, and despite the fact that there was no match in the offing, the place was bustling when I arrived, and I was afraid I'd have trouble spotting him, but I needn't have worried. He was the only person in the place wearing a police officer's uniform.
“Anthony Shephard?” He spoke in heavily accented English.
“Captain Çelik?”
He picked up his glass of beer and motioned to the back doors of the clubhouse that opened onto the patio. I nodded and followed him, and we took seats at one of the corners. It was quieter outside, but almost as crowded, patrons enjoying the pleasant July weather.
“I appreciate you coming to meet with me, Captain.”
“The message—yes, message?—my assistant gave me made me curious. You want to talk about a prisoner?”
I nodded. It had taken the rest of the previous day and another five hundred euros to simply get this far, and I was having a hard time controlling my mounting impatience. Every hour that passed seemed to take Tiasa further away from me, not closer.