by Jeff Abbott
I dust and think Nelly would do a better job. Nelly the sunny one, Nelly the smiler, Nelly the adventurer. Nelly had shown me the brochure six months ago—the employment agency, based out of Bucharest in neighboring Romania, happy women in drab uniforms making military covers on hotel beds, serving food to smiling diners, filing papers behind a spotless desk with a computer resting on it, its plastics unyellowed by age.
“See, they need secretaries and waitresses and maids and nannies,” Nelly tells me. “You could get a job with a computer that’s new.”
I glanced at the marketing brochure. Moldova is the poorest country in Europe. These places all look better, sunnier, more hopeful. “I don’t want to move to Italy or Turkey or Israel. I don’t speak their languages.”
“But your English is good. They’ll always pay extra for English.” Nelly bites the eraser on her pencil. “At a hotel I might meet a traveling businessman from the West. Maybe America. A nice guy with a good job. Americans like eastern European girls. The supermodels have done at least that for us.”
“Americans don’t talk to maids,” I say. I better spoil her dreams right away, yes? That’s what a good sister does. I hand her back the brochure. A hot beat of fear probes my chest at the thought of Nelly hundreds or thousands of kilometers away, working a job that gives her no time to come home.
“I could send money back to you and Aunt and Uncle,” Nelly said.
“No.”
“Well, I am not asking for permission.”
“Why start now?” I say and do a sister’s roll of the eyes.
“Natalia went to Turkey and got a good job. There are no jobs here.”
“School teaching? Remember?”
“You better teach them well because they’ll have to leave Moldova to get a job,” Nelly said.
And three weeks later, Nelly is gone. Teary hugs at the train station. She is taking a train to Chiinu, then on to Bucharest. Then a plane to Tel Aviv.
“I’ll write every day,” Nelly says, hugging Aunt and Uncle at once and looking over their heavy shoulders at me.
“No you won’t,” I say. Nelly has always been the crier, not me. I am not about to start. But my heart shreds so much it turns into confetti.
“I will!” Nelly promises. “I’ll be bored. And I’ll have to write to send you money.”
“Borrow the traveling businessman’s BlackBerry,” I joke. “And send us an email.” I have seen BlackBerries in movies. No one in Harp owns one.
And then Nelly hugs me, smelling a bit of milk and goodbye cake, and is gone.
When I am done dusting the classroom I stop for a moment. The boys are playing football in the scrappy yard. My favorite student is the goalie. I watch the boys and remember playing on the scrubby grass with Nelly when they were young. Nelly complained I kicked the ball too hard, as though Nelly’s legs were fashioned from porcelain. I did kick the ball hard. I was a good athlete, one of the best at our school.
Nelly’s letters arrive regularly but there is no money in them, just brief words that she is well, in jagged handwriting that looks unhappy.
Nelly feels guilty about not sending money, I decide. But Nelly won’t say so.
The classroom door behind me opens. I don’t know the man standing there. He is tall, head shaved bald, a thick lacing of tattoo crawling out of the collar of his shirt. His eyes are brown and hard. He is the sort of man who makes you hold your breath for a moment. Not in a good, fluttering way.
He smiles. I know he is not a parent, not an administrator from the district. His clothes are too good, the suit Italian, the sweater underneath it silk, the watch ostentatious, a slash of steel on his gorilla’s wrist.
He calls my name, like a question. I nod a yes.
“I’m a friend of Nelly’s,” he says. “You can call me Vadim.”
And my teacher’s brain, used to the carefully built lies of children, notes he didn’t say it was his name. It was what I could call him. What has Nelly gotten herself into, I think. What trouble?
A feeling of dread pierces my stomach. Vadim smiles. He steps inside the classroom. He shuts the door. The click is like a hammer hitting me in the silence.
“I bring you a message from Nelly,” he says.
Oh. All right, I think. Maybe he works with her in Israel. Maybe she actually met a traveling businessman, and here he is.
He holds up a DVD. He walks to the old machine and presses the power button, turns on the television. He ejects the DVD that’s in there, a bootlegged PBS video with a bad Moldovan voiceover, a science show about the universe. I have been teaching the children about stars and planets. He glances at the bootleg, as if curious as to what useful lessons I might be teaching today’s children.
He slides his disc into the machine and presses PLAY.
I stand, pierced, as my sister’s face appears on the screen. Nelly is crying. Shivering. I have not seen Nelly cry this way since our parents died seven years ago. Her hair is different, dyed blonder, and bigger, as though a harsh wind has breathed it into place. A too-bright lipstick smears her mouth. Her eyes look dulled.
Nelly says my name like it’s a foreign word. Then, on the tape, I hear a deep voice. Vadim’s. Saying, “Tell her what you wanted to say.”
“I want to come home,” Nelly says. “Help me come home.”
She’s been a problem, Vadim says, in the detached tone of a mechanic discussing a faulty carburetor or a leaking gas line. She’s a bit uglier than we thought she would be. The customers don’t like her, she’s not getting picked enough, she’s just sitting on the couch.
“The customers?” I say. It’s not a question, it’s horror, bright in my heart.
Then a man’s hand pushes Nelly back. Onto an unmade bed. The sheets are a bright, eye-burning aqua blue. The camera jars slightly. A man, heavy-shouldered, pale skinned, climbs on top of Nelly and begins after a moment, to thrust his hips. A thin, blond anemic mohawk tops his head. Nelly doesn’t scream, she doesn’t fight. She simply endures.
The mohawk smiles back over his shoulder at the camera. Then he hits Nelly, a slap, and continues.
Vadim watches me for a reaction. Then he smiles. “My boss, you see he likes her fine, but the customers are the ones who matter. I can arrange for Nelly to come home, if you like.”
If you like. If you like. I go hot and cold again. My throat feels broken. The searing feeling in my chest subsides. A fist of ice forms in its place.
My mind goes blank, for all of five seconds. Blank in a way it never has before.
It is all the shock I allow myself. There is no time for dismay or horror.
“What do you want?” I ask Vadim. “Money?”
“I want a thousand euros. And I want three more.”
“Three more what?” I say. “Euros?”
“Three more girls.”
The silence hurts like a knife sliding between my ribs.
“Recruit three more girls for me, to take your sister’s place.”
I don’t move, I don’t speak.
“You’re a schoolteacher. People trust you. You can do this easily. I prefer eighteen-year-olds.”
Sell three innocent girls into… that. To save my sister.
My voice stays steady. How, I don’t know because the shock is quickly fading in favor of another feeling I cannot describe, a heat in the heart that is beyond rage and fury. The heat of a decision, made. I shake. He smiles, like he thinks it is fear that makes me tremble.
“And if I can’t find three girls? Please, could I just pay you more money back to get Nelly?”
“I don’t need money, schoolteacher. I need product.”
Product.
“All right,” I say. Too quickly.
He gives me a scowl. “Don’t bother going to the police. We own them. And you can hardly recruit girls if the cops know what you’re doing.”
I believe him. I have no intention of going to the police. Right now I’m wondering if I murder him right here if I can clean up the bl
ood so thoroughly that the children will not notice it tomorrow. Kids notice everything.
I swallow hard. Just to give a visible reaction beyond the overwhelming bitter, freezing hatred I feel for this man.
“How does this work?” My voice doesn’t quite sound like mine.
“I’ll be back in two months. You bring the three girls. They need to be no older than twenty-five. No older. You will send me their names and photos in two weeks and I’ll arrange their passports. If they already have passports that’s even better. You say nothing to them except that Nelly is really happy in her job working at a very nice hotel in Tel Aviv.”
“What if I can’t recruit three girls?”
“Then little Nelly stays put. The brothel owner might sell her down the chain, to the cheaper houses. Either in Israel or over to northern Africa. Or”—he shrugs—“he might kill her and dump her worthless ass in the Med. This is your one chance to get your sister back. Take it.”
“I’ll do it. I’ll do what you ask.” A shivery moan escapes my lips.
Vadim is happy. Message delivered, relative terrified, action promised.
He grins. “Now you, schoolteacher, you’re much nicer than Nelly. You could turn the money quite well.” He smacks lips at me. “What is that old Van Halen song—‘Hot for Teacher’?” He sings it in his bad broken English, off key. He pulls the DVD out and considerately reloads the bootleg educational DVD and then he is gone. His expensive heels click on the worn tile down the hallway.
I go to the window and watch him walk past the boys playing their impromptu football game. The ball bounds toward him and he stops it with one Armani shoe. Gracefully. He aims a polite, perfect kick not to the closest child but back to the biggest, tallest player on the field. (Of course he would kick it to the biggest. He is that kind of showy jerk.) He walks to an Audi and consults a map and gets into the car and drives off.
A map. He had more places to go along the backwater roads, more people to see, perhaps more families to blackmail.
What will you do for your sister?
I move as if in a dream. I lock my desk. I gather up my lesson plans notebook and my lunchbox and my purse. I walk down the street, ten minutes to home.
At home, Aunt and Uncle cook dinner and watch television, a Romanian soap opera called Only Friends they say they don’t care about but to which they are clearly addicted. I dutifully kiss the tops of their heads—Uncle’s freckled, bald pate and Aunt’s slightly greasy gray mop—and make a cup of black tea. I take it to my room, the one I’d shared with Nelly, and I shut the door.
I sit on the edge of the bed and drink the strong tea and I stare at a water spot above Nelly’s bed. My sister always said the spot was shaped like France and I told her, no, it’s a lion’s head. I lay down on the bed and, well, Nelly, was right, it sort of is like France. And a lion’s head.
And I close my eyes and I think.
I think the problem through, with the care and patience of someone building a house of cards. When I see weakness, I tear the tower down with a flick of my mind and I start again.
The puddle of tea in my cup grows cold. I get up and I walk down to the hallway to the apartment at the end. I knock once and the door opens after a minute. It takes Ivan, with his one leg, a bit longer to get around, and he looks sleepy, as though he has dozed. I can hear an argument on his TV, he’s watching Only Friends, too, the silly old soldier.
He smiles at me. We are only friends, too, but we are old friends. He invites me inside, asks if I would like tea, and I say no thank you.
“What brings you here?”
“Teach me, Ivan.”
“Ha, what can I teach the teacher?” the old soldier says.
I look at him.
He sees the unspeakable seriousness in my eyes and his smile fades.
“Teach me how to fight. Teach me how to kill.”
64
Harp, Moldova
I follow Natalia from the market. Natalia is a petite girl and whenever I turned I could see the prominent heavy swell of her stomach. Pregnant. Natalia lumbers like pregnancy does not agree with her. She has no glow.
As Natalia reaches the edge of the market, I touch her elbow and the young woman turns. Recognizes me. And tries to smile, like smiling is a flexing of the face that she’s forgotten.
“Do I know you?” Natalia says.
“You recruited my sister to be a prostitute for Vadim.” I see no point here in wasting time. She looks like she might explode with baby at any moment.
Every word detonates against the fortress of Natalia’s smile. The woman’s lips waver for barely a moment and the smile stays firm as brick. “I have to go,” Natalia whispers.
I close a hand around Natalia’s arm. I push the woman into a narrow alley between shuttered stores where FOR RENT signs hang in their windows like permanent fixtures. Broken glass from a beer bottle cracks under our shoes. I smell piss in the alley. Natalia tries to pull away but I am so much stronger. I ease Natalia up against the brick wall, where a graffiti artist has written unkind words about a rival football team.
“Where did they take her?” I ask.
“I don’t know. Let me go.”
“Tell me, or I’ll break your arm.”
“But I’m pregnant.” Natalia pales.
“Irrelevant. A broken arm won’t hurt your baby. How does it work when Vadim gets the girls from here?”
Natalia doesn’t answer and so I yank the girl’s arm across my knee, begin to exert pressure on both sides. “Let me assure you, I mean business.”
“But you’re a teacher.” Now she remembers me.
“Yes, and I’ll beat you with a ruler if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”
Natalia’s eyes widen. “He’ll kill Nelly if he knows you talked to me. Let me go, and walk away.”
My hands find the girl’s ring finger and twist it savagely. Natalia cries out.
“You need to start taking this conversation seriously. How. Does. It. Work?”
Natalia gasps with pain. “Okay. Vadim takes them to Bucharest. They are taken to a safe house there. They are then taken to Istanbul by car. There’s another safe house. They stay there a while.”
“Why?”
“To… please don’t make me say it.”
“Since you condemned my sister to it, you can say it.”
“Break them in.”
“Define.”
“They give them heroin. They… assault them. For days, until they’re easier to manage.”
I made myself count to ten before I spoke. “And then what?”
“They’re—sold. To houses. Some in Turkey. To Israel, Albania, Italy. The prettiest ones go to Dubai.”
“Do you know where Nelly is?”
“There’s nothing you can do for Nelly, except cooperate with them. They hold all the power.”
“If I can do nothing, then there’s no harm in telling me.”
And then I see Natalia is not quite human anymore. Natalia is not just flesh and blood but she is fear. She is ruled, shaped, made by fear. She is afraid of everything. This is what Vadim’s forge has made.
Good.
“She… she is in Tel Aviv. I saw her there. I was there, too. Lucky Strike Parlor. Above a pizzeria. There are eight girls there. Most from Moldova or Romania.”
“Is Vadim the pimp?”
“No. Trafficker. He just gets the girls to where they have to be.”
“There is a man with a blond mohawk. Who is he?”
“His name is Zviman. He owns the brothel, he inherited them from his father. He owns a whole bunch of them, around Africa, the Middle East, in Russia. You don’t want to mess with him, he’s a cold bastard. He’ll kill Nelly and not blink.”
“Thank you, Natalia. You are keeping the baby?”
The shift in tone rocks Natalia and she blinks. “Yes.”
“They didn’t make you get rid of it?”
“They let me come home.” Now she glances at the floo
r.
“Oh, how generous of them.”
Natalia tries to nod but even that simple motion seems beyond her.
“How many girls did it cost to bring you home?”
She reacts as though I’ve slapped her. I wait. Finally she says: “Five.”
“Including Nelly.”
Natalia can’t look at me; I look at the broken beer bottles on the pavement. “My mother got the replacements. She did it for me.” Now Natalia raises her face.
Replacements. The word twists like a knife in my gut. I realize I have bitten the inside of my cheek and I can taste the copper tinge of my blood.
“You’re just a schoolteacher. You can’t fight Vadim, he’s greased every palm he needs between here and Istanbul. And if you cross him Nelly is dead. Get girls to replace her and forget about them.”
“I know your mother,” I say. “I know where she lives, where she shops, where she likes to drink her wine.”
Natalia blinks, her vapid little mouth works in fright. “Leave Mama alone, please. Please.”
“You keep your mouth shut about our little talk. Or when I see Vadim next, I’ll tell him you told me everything. He will regret his kindness to you then.”
She starts to pull away and I can tell it’s not enough. She will warn Vadim. I grab her arm. “And. If you talk to Vadim? I will kill your mother. I will walk up to her on the street and I will shoot her in the head. It’s more of a kindness than what you and she did to my sister.”
Can you believe I said that, Sam? I said it. Me, the schoolteacher. And you know I meant it.
My voice convinces. Natalia is pale with terror. I let her go and she stumbles away from the alley. I check my watch. Today Ivan is going to practice using the knife with me. We work in an abandoned winery a few kilometers from the ragged edge of town. No one is around to hear the ping of the bullets I put into the targets.
65
Harp, Moldova
I find three photos of American girls on the web that look like ID or passport shots. It is at a website for people arrested for stupid crimes and the girls look attractive but rough, a bit down on luck. I assign three false names to them and email them to Vadim so he can craft fake passports.