Walking dead ak-7

by Greg Rucka

  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 Ataturk 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.

&n
bsp; "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 wallet, 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 Celik, 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 Celik?"

  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.

  "What is it I can do for you, Mr. Shephard?"

  "You're holding a friend of a friend of mine. His name is Arzu Kaya."

  Celik pursed his lips, then took a sip of his beer. "We have this man."

  "My friend is very worried about Arzu. I hate seeing him like this, I really do, and I was hoping I could discuss with you some means of getting them together, if only for a few hours. Maybe by making a donation to a charity you support, something along those lines."

  With absolute seriousness, he remarked, "It would need to be a large donation."

  "I was thinking around ten thousand euros," I said.

  "That would be an acceptable amount."

  "The thing is," I said, "I want to surprise them both, Arzu and my friend. I want it to be a gift."

  "A gift?"

  "Yeah. Maybe I could even get it wrapped."

  Celik didn't blink. "Gift-wrapping is extra."

  "I'd expect it would be." I took out the piece of paper I'd been carrying folded in my pocket, handing it over. "If I could get him delivered to this address."

  He took the paper, opening it one-handed. "Not a very busy location."

  "I want the reunion to be private."

  Captain Celik nodded sagely, drank some more of his beer, looking past me, at the clientele. "He couldn't be away for more than two or three hours."

  "I think that'll be more than enough time for them to discuss what they need to," I said.

  He checked the address on the paper I'd given him again, then folded it and tucked it into his breast pocket, beneath his badge. "Also it would need to be at the right time."

  "Of course. Wouldn't be a surprise otherwise. I was thinking around two in the morning."

  "Then he will be dropped off at two, and picked up no later than five." He looked at me impassively. "Half of the donation will be expected when he arrives. The rest of it when he is picked up."

  "That'll be fine. There's one other thing."

  He fixed me with his dead brown eyes, bored.

  "I'm wondering if someone could provide me with some information about his family," I said. "My friend wanted me to speak to his wife, and I don't know where I can find her."

  "I'm sure we have that information," Celik said. "In fact, I'm sure I could get that for you now. But I would have to see some sort of gesture on your part, that my charity will actually be rewarded."

  "Would five hundred euros be enough?"

  "No. A thousand." He finished his beer, then rose. "I will make a call, see if I can find out about his family for you."

  He walked back into the clubhouse, and I took out my wallet. I'd restocked it since meeting Vasylyna, but was going to have to restock it again. I put ten one-hundred-euro bills in a stack, and then slipped the stack into a paper napkin. I moved the napkin over to where Celik had been seated.

  After six minutes, he returned, sat, and put the napkin on his lap. He kept his head down for a few seconds, counting the money, then shifted in such a way I knew he was pocketing the bills. From the same pocket that he'd stowed my little piece of paper with the delivery address on it, he produced a new one, handing it to me.

  Then, with no other word, he rose and left me with the address of Arzu Kaya's family. Two in the morning meant I had ten hours before I'd be seeing Arzu, and there was a fair amount I needed to do between now and then. First, I found a bank and withdrew the cash I was going to need. Next, I did some shopping. Finally, with the aid of a map, I found the address Celik had given me. That took the most time, and I was there for nearly three hours before I had what I needed and could depart.

  It was already dark when I returned to the hotel I was staying at on Gencoglu Street, a place called the Otel Horon. One of the two women manning the front desk called out to me as I came through the lobby, saying that a package had arrived for Anthony Shephard. I thanked her and took the UPS pack back to my room, then dumped the new papers Nicholas Sargenti had sent out on the bed.

  There were two sets of documents, a fresh set for me, in the name of Matthew Twigg, a citizen of the United States who lived in Tukwila, Washington, just south of Seattle. Along with the passport and the Washington State driver's license was an Amex and a Visa. The second set of documents were all Ukrainian, two passports-one for domestic travel, the other for international. I checked these carefully, using the lamp at the desk to verify the laser imprinting on the photographs, and was impressed that everything looked perfectly in order. Then I flipped through the two documents, noting the stamps.

  Nicholas had outdone himself.

  I moved my new set of papers to my bag, then took the Ukrainian on
es with me down the hall, to the room where Vasylyna had spent much of the last two days. I knocked on the door twice, identifying myself, and after a few seconds she let me inside, cautiously backing away as I shut the door behind me. I showed her the documents, each of them in her full name, Vasylyna Pavlina Kozyar. She took them with wide eyes, opening each in turn, gazing at the photographs of herself. I'd taken the pictures of her with the camera on the BlackBerry, using the shower curtain in the bathroom as a backdrop. Then I'd emailed the pictures to Sargenti.

  "The stamps say you came to Turkey two weeks ago," I told her. "This room is paid for until tomorrow morning. You could be in Kiev by tomorrow afternoon, if that's what you want."

  She looked up from the documents in her hand, bewildered. Bathed, wearing garments that she had picked herself, clothes that fit, with two safe nights of sleep behind her, she looked better, but, sadly, younger.

  "I didn't believe you," Vasylyna said.

  "I know."

  She was holding the passports as if afraid they might sprout wings and fly away from her. I headed to the door.

  "Good luck," I told her.

  At 10:43 that night I did a SIM shuffle on the BlackBerry and called Alena for the second time since leaving New York. We were back onto our convoluted schedule, and she was expecting me.

  "Still in Trabzon?" she asked.

  "All goes well I should be leaving early tomorrow."

  "You received what you were waiting for?"

  "Got it this afternoon. Had to make a large withdrawal, too."

  "There's enough money. Don't worry about that."

  "How are you?"

  "Miata is doing better."

  "Good," I said, aware that she hadn't answered my question. Then I heard Bridgett in the background, saying that she wanted to talk to me. "Put her on."

  "I know what she's going to say to you," Alena said. "She wants you to agree with her."

  "About what?"

  "I'll let her explain."

  There was a rustle over the speaker as the telephone changed hands on their end, and then Bridgett came on the line, saying, "She's being stubborn."

  "I'm pretty sure that's not how she sees it. Stubborn about what?"