by Greg Rucka
"She went out yesterday, before dawn," Vladek Karataev said. "On the boat to Trabzon. She's already in Turkey."
"Why there? Why'd you send her there?"
"She went with the others."
"What others?"
His eyes focused. "What's it to you? Who the fuck are you?"
"A friend of Bakhar's," I said. "What others? Why did you send her to Turkey?"
He began coughing, and it must have hurt like hell to do it with a shattered pelvic girdle, but he didn't stop. After a moment, I realized he was laughing, not coughing, and he was laughing at me. Then pain caught up to the joke, and his noises subsided.
"That shit had it coming," Vladek told me, and he smiled. "He fucking sold us to the police, Bakhar got what he had coming. Gave it to his daughter, too. We all did."
I didn't say anything.
"You won't find her." The smile turned into a grin. One of his incisors was missing, another was gold. "She's pretty and young. She's already been sold. Some fat Arab sheikh already has her wiping his floors and sucking her own shit off his cock."
My arm felt cold where it was covered in blood, like it had been dunked in a bath of ice. My head pulsed with pain, my left ear still ringing sharply. The backs of my thighs and shoulders throbbed, and for the first time I was aware that what I thought was sweat running down my back probably wasn't sweat at all.
He really loved the reaction he got, the look on my face that I couldn't hide, and didn't bother to try to.
"What the fuck you think this is?" he asked, as if assessing me for brain damage. "You fucking think Bakhar was living in that shithole town because he liked the beach? Coward, fucking coward was hiding from us, he knew what he had done. So we paid him back, we paid him in full."
I still didn't speak, but this time it was because I didn't think I could.
"He sold them, too, you understand me? He sold more girls than you've ever seen, and then the fucking Americans leaned on Tbilisi, and Tbilisi leaned on us, and he sold us out. Your friend. Fuck you! That was your friend!"
He was shouting at the end, furious at Bakhar, at me, at his wounds and the injustice of a world that would punish him like this. I watched his chest heave as he tried to replace his spent breath, glaring at me, the hostility as naked as it had been on Bakhar's body.
I moved my foot off his thigh, watched the blood begin to flood out of the wound I'd made, spreading beneath his leg.
"Give me a name," I said. "The captain of the boat, the contact in Turkey, something. I want a name."
The glare stayed as before. He knew the way that I knew that he would never get a tourniquet or the phone. He knew he was done, and he knew that giving me anything more wouldn't change that.
I took out my gun.
"You'll never find her," Vladek Karataev said.
"You'll never know," I told him, and shot him twice in the face.
CHAPTER
Seven Halfway back to Kobuleti, after crossing the Supsa River, I took the Land Cruiser off-road, heading inland, headlights off. It was closing on two in the morning, the moon beginning to move toward setting, but there was more than enough to see by as long as I drove slow. I followed the river-bank for four kilometers, passing farms and their distant houses, before reaching woodlands. Then I turned the nose of the car to the river and parked. When I moved to get out of the car, I realized that my shirt had stuck to the seatback as well as to me, and when it came free I felt my back start bleeding again.
I opened the doors and the rear, then found a rock big enough to weight the accelerator, put the car in gear, and let it go into the water. The Land Cruiser did pretty well for itself, got about six meters into the Supsa before stalling out, and it was already turning slowly in the current, beginning to drift, when I turned away and headed for home on foot. I followed E amp;E procedure as I moved, staying away from the roads and anything that advertised people, going through the woods.
It required concentration, and that was good, because it meant that I didn't think about Bakhar, and who he was, what he had done, what he had been. It meant I didn't think about Tiasa, what had happened to her, what was being done to her right now. It was dawn when I reached home, and Miata came to meet me, licking my hands and following close to heel when I went indoors. Alena hadn't returned yet, and even though that was expected, it was also profoundly disappointing. I needed her.
I checked the security, rearmed the system, then went to the gun locker and reloaded my gun. I put everything I'd gathered on my trip in Bakhar's go-bag-the money, the two knives, and the BlackBerry, along with its battery, which I'd removed before leaving the road. Then I went into the bathroom and started the shower. I stripped down at the mirror, twisting around in an attempt to catalogue my injuries. There were bruises and scrapes acquired from the fistfight and the desperate motion before and after. Most of my blood was from the grenade, minor shrapnel mixed with pebbles and dirt that had carried enough velocity to penetrate cloth and skin, but none too deep. I picked what I could out of my body, got my legs clean, but there was a spot on my upper back that I just couldn't reach. Fresh blood leaked out of me where I reopened my wounds.
Then I got under the shower and watched as blood, mine and others', spiraled down the drain. After a couple of minutes I got the shakes, and decided that sitting might be a better idea, so I slumped down in a corner and tried to ride it out. Then I got the dry heaves.
It was to be expected. The only thing that surprised me was that it had taken this long for everything to catch up. I was asleep when Alena returned home, deep in a bone-tired coma, and she woke me with a touch, saying my name. She was sitting beside me on the bed, a hand on my back, and I had a vague sense that she had been there awhile, but perhaps it was only a dream. The lamp was on, but otherwise, the room was dark.
"Welcome home," I said.
"I'll get the kit," Alena told me. "Stay still."
She rose and left the room, and I decided that staying still didn't mean I couldn't reach for my glasses. I had them on when she came back carrying one of the two homemade first aid kits we had in the house. They were closer to the jump bags you'd find on an ambulance than the kind of thing you could buy in a store, filled with bandages and tape and gauze, even two liters of Ringer's solution. Alena opened the kit and came out with a clamp and a set of forceps, set them aside and went to work dumping Betadine on my back.
"Tell me," she said.
I told her.
When I had finished, so had she, smoothing the last of the tape down across the bandage. The three fragments of shrapnel she'd dug out of me sat on the open gauze wrapper, black and sharp. She scooped up the paper, crumpling it before setting it aside, then checked my legs, her fingers careful as she examined the rest of my wounds.
"Superficial," Alena said. "Fortunate."
"Are you finished?"
"Yes. You should drink something, try moving around."
She took the kit, rising, and I got myself off the bed, feeling muscle-sore but unimpaired. The ringing was gone from my ear but my head still ached, though it might have been dehydration as much as anything else. I pulled on a shirt, feeling the tape on my back pull and flex, then followed after her, down the hall.
In the kitchen, Alena handed me a glass of water, then put the kettle on. She avoided looking at me.
"How was Nicholas?" I asked.
"He was fine. It was a short meeting."
"No trouble?"
"With him? Is there ever?"
"I meant on the trip."
"I was stopped on the M1, outside of Gori, by the Russians. They wanted to search the car, but it was a shakedown. I had to pay twice, going and coming."
"Money."
"Yes." She looked up from where she'd been watching the kettle. "You think something else?"
"Nothing you would give them," I told her. "Doesn't mean they didn't want it."
She shrugged. "The same everywhere."
I finished my water, watching her. She w
as right, it was the same everywhere, all around the world, first to third, and certainly here in the former Soviet states. At almost every border crossing, at almost every checkpoint, someone, always male, had his hand out. Most of the time, money would do it, because most of the time, the people manning such checkpoints and crossings were desperately poor, despite their uniforms. But if you were traveling with a woman, or if you were a woman alone, most of the time it wasn't money they wanted.
"You're thinking about Tiasa."
"Trabzon's maybe two hundred and fifty kilometers," I said. "We take the car, leave by midmorning, we should be there before evening, even with all the stops."
"No."
"The other option I'm thinking is to go back to Batumi, take a boat. It'll take longer, though, and I don't want to lose the time. And we'll need to arrange transportation on the other end."
She shook her head. The light in the kitchen turned her copper-colored hair orange, turned her complexion sallow. "I'm not talking about the route. I'm saying no, we're not doing this."
"Tiasa-"
"I know." She held her look on me for a fraction longer, then reached for the canister of tea, began digging a spoon out of the utensil drawer.
"If this is because you think the information is-"
She cut me off. "I doubt he lied to you."
"Then Trabzon-"
"No."
I tried again. "She's fourteen, she's-"
"I know," Alena said, sharply, spooning too much tea into the pot.
"I can't abandon this," I said.
The utensil hit the counter with a clatter. "Tiasa is gone. Like her family. We have to forget them."
"You trying to convince me or yourself?" I asked, after a second.
"Yes, both of us, yes." She straightened, squared her shoulders, fixing her posture, all her little tells that I knew meant she was struggling with her emotions. When she was ready, she looked at me again. "Those men in Batumi, they will have friends, friends who found Bakhar. They can find you. They can find us."
"All the more reason for us to go."
"This is our home. I will not leave it."
"You know what's happened to her, what's going to happen," I said. "Someone has to find her."
"Then let someone else do it. Not us."
My frustration finally broke. "I don't understand. You liked Tiasa. Forget about the rest of them for now-Bakhar, who he was, what he did, it doesn't matter. This is about Tiasa. You adored her."
"I love her."
She said it softly, without hesitation. Considering that "love" was hardly a word she was ever willing to speak aloud to me, it was surprising.
I said, "There's no one else. You know that. We can't just sit here and hope some NGO is going to discover her, free her, and we both sure as hell know some Good Samaritan won't come to her rescue."
"I know."
"I can't forget this," I insisted. "I have to go after her. I can't let this sit."
She inhaled, and her eyes shifted aside for a moment, pained. Her eyes were hazel, and beautiful, and since I'd first met her had become more and more expressive. There'd been a time when reading her was next to impossible, quite deliberately so on her part, something she'd been taught that had turned as autonomous as breathing. Survival had hinged on being able to hide not only her thoughts but her feelings. While I'd become better at it, she'd become worse; it was another of the trades we had made by joining our lives.
"You'd leave me here alone?" she asked.
"It's not like you can't take care of yourself."
"Don't. Don't go."
"Come with me."
"I can't." Behind her, on the stove, the kettle began to rattle, spilling steam. "I can't."
"What aren't you telling me?" I asked her. "What's going on?"
She shook her head, brushing past me as she left the room. I heard the back door open, then close, hard.
I stood in the kitchen alone, listening to the chattering kettle.
After a minute, I went to the bedroom and began to pack.
CHAPTER
Eight My second night in Trabzon I met a man named Arzu Kaya, who promised me all the pretty girls I could ever want.
"How much?" I asked.
"Two hundred, you get one all night," he answered.
I stopped myself from laughing. "Maybe for two. Two hundred for two girls."
"Two hundred yeni?"
I shook my head. "Euros."
He bit his lower lip, sucking air through his teeth. "You got my name from Vladek?"
"Last week. In Batumi."
Arzu went after his lip again, thinking. He was a Turkish national, possibly even a Trabzon native from the way he spoke his Russian-there was a large Russian expat community in the city, and had been for decades-and younger than I'd expected, only in his early thirties. His clothes and manner were better suited for Istanbul than the more conservative eastern part of the country. There, like here along the northern Black Sea coast, Islam was both omnipresent and traditional. Yet Arzu's clothing didn't particularly mark him as out of the ordinary. I'd seen plenty of similarly Western-attired folks about and around since I'd arrived the day before. Women dressed modestly, at least in public, and the men I'd seen went clean-shaven.
"Wait here a minute, okay?" Arzu sprang from his chair opposite me, grinning. "I'll send one of the girls down, keep you company."
I checked my watch. "I've got other places to be."
"Won't take me long." He was already crossing the lobby, such as it was. "Just wait for me."
I watched him disappear up a set of stairs, turning out of sight. The hotel we were in was off the northeastern edge of Ataturk Alani, the kind of place that guidebooks charitably listed as "budget," except that the kind of guidebook that would list this place you'd never find in a bookstore. Like countless other similarly grimy lodgings around the world, the hotel doubled as a brothel.
A handful of seconds after Arzu disappeared, a young woman in a halter top and shorts that were too tight and too short came into view, descending the stairs. She saw me immediately, and started on a beeline. I gave her my don't-fuck-with-me face, and it stopped her in her tracks, but only for a second. Then she glanced over her shoulder, back the way she'd come and Arzu had gone, and resumed crossing to me. When she reached where I was sitting, she tried to sit in my lap.
"No," I told her, in Russian, pushing her gently away.
"Free," she said, and tried it again. "For a friend of Arzu Bey."
She was pale, her hair a filthy blonde, with a face hidden beneath heavy makeup. She might've been pretty once, before she'd come across the Black Sea from Russia or Ukraine or Moldova, the same way she'd had a name. Now she was just another natasha, like countless other girls who, one way or another, had been trafficked across the water expressly to be used for sex.
I let her sit in my lap, and when Vladek Karataev's BlackBerry began to vibrate in my pocket, I had a damn good idea who it was who was calling. The girl looked down, feeling the phone shivering against my thigh, then looked at me curiously. I smiled at her.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Natasha," she said. There was no irony in it, no humor, and no pause.
"I'm David." The BlackBerry in my pocket went still again. "I should check that."
She shifted off my lap so I could get the phone, and I pulled it free, slipped the back cover off and dropped the battery out, then replaced the cover and put both the phone and the battery in my pocket. She watched me with disinterested curiosity.
I'd let her back into my lap when Arzu appeared again, bounding down the stairs.
"Sorry, just had to take care of something," he said. "Let's go upstairs, we can talk somewhere more private. You like her, huh?"
"She's very nice," I said.
"Yeah, she's a good girl." He turned his attention to her, still on my lap. "Get off him."
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?"