The Last Minute

by Jeff Abbott

  I wait. I go out to the abandoned winery—there are too many of them in Moldova now—and Ivan and I practice what I am going to do.

  “I wish you would let me help you,” he says. He is an old gentleman. He lost his leg in Afghanistan during the war, back when Moldova was Soviet. In recent years, when crime kept skyrocketing in Moldova, he taught me and Nelly both how to defend ourselves: how to kick, to punch with a fist, to gouge the most vulnerable areas: groin, throat, eye. Now I am taking everything he taught me before, everything I knew as an athlete, and I am trying to become a soldier in a matter of weeks. He corrects me gently when I aim the gun, when I draw the knife. This is a crash course and he says, more than once: “Girl, I’m only preparing you to get killed. Please don’t do this. You fail, tu mori.” It means you die.

  “What should I do instead?” I say. “Slave up some nice girls?”

  “Go to the police,” Ivan says, but without much fervor.

  I have already been on the computers, searching on the web for options. The United Nations has named Moldova as a critical point in human trade, with officials in the army, the police, and the government suspected of profiting from the slavery. Who am I supposed to turn to?

  There is no one, I tell Ivan. Just me. And I have thought out my plan.

  I was always good at lesson plans, and now I have a lesson for Vadim and the blond mohawk.

  Ivan nods and then he tells me again: “This is how you strike with the knife, forward, lunge, no, not down like that, stay steady…”

  Every time I begin to feel afraid I push the fear down. Nelly and I used to wrestle on the bed, and Nelly was all wriggling knees and elbows, easy to get giggling, and I would have to wrap my arms around Nelly until Nelly stopped laughing and squirming. So I hold my fear the same way, in a calm, sure grip until the fear is silent.

  I hang the sacks two meters high in the dim glow of the abandoned winery. The rough figure of a man lies in black paint on the rough burlap. Light shines in bars through the worn slats. Ivan watches me work. Light begins to shine in the bullet holes I put through the painted men.

  “Group of three,” he says, “that’s good. A triangle in the chest. That will put him down.”

  I don’t tell him I dream about shooting now, I dream about bull’s-eyes, neatly patterned. He gets the ammo from a friend on the black market. I am eating up my savings; I don’t want to waste expensive bullets. I still have to pay for my travel. I think Ivan is paying extra for me to have weapons and I will somehow pay him back. If I live.

  When we finish, we catch the bus back into town. Weapons and targets in knapsacks. We look so harmless. But our time has come to an end.

  “So you will see Vadim tomorrow?” Ivan asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Will I see you again?” His voice wavers. “What will I tell your aunt and uncle?”

  “You tell them I will be back. With Nelly.”

  “I don’t mean once you’ve… left. I mean if he kills you.”

  “Tell them you weren’t such a good teacher, then.”

  I buy Ivan ice cream because he doesn’t drink anymore. We stand in the sunlight, him on his crutch, licking at the chocolate in a wafer cone.

  Ready, I think. Ready.

  66

  Harp, Moldova

  “Where are the girls?” Vadim asks.

  No hello. Vadim is a businessman. He has product to move. He is a busy professional with a jam-packed schedule.

  Vadim and I stand in the quiet of a small café down from the train station. Natalia told me normally Vadim would meet the girls somewhere near the station, buy them a tea or coffee and a roll, be charming, show them their passports, offer an advance on two weeks’ pay, say idle things about the fake hotel in sunny, delightful Greece where their nonexistent jobs awaited. The coffee shop is warm but empty of customers, except for us. Rain hammers down, the sky looks chopped from lead.

  “Olia and Lizaveta are in the ladies’ room. Katerina is not here yet but she will be. She wanted to say goodbye to her grandmother,” I say. The lie is so easy. But I worry that my voice shakes. I cannot betray myself.

  “You did well. The money?”

  I hand him the envelope. He opens it, peels through the bills. The café owner, standing and brewing a fresh pot, does not look at me or Vadim as he refills my coffee and Vadim carefully counts the cash.

  “Nelly,” I say.

  “I’ll bring her when I come back from Israel after delivering these three.”

  “You could be lying to me.”

  “I could. But I’m not.” He cranes his neck toward the back where the restrooms are. Eager to see the girls face to face, to take their measure of their worth to him, gauge their personalities and beauty, the gleam in their expectant smiles—and see if they’re suspicious. That above all.

  I glance at Vadim’s messenger bag. The flesh trafficker carries a man purse. It doesn’t make me laugh. “Do you still have that DVD of Nelly?”

  “Sure.” He flicks me a smile and I think: you really do have no soul.

  “I’d like it back. I don’t want it showing up on the internet.”

  “Ah, schoolteacher. So proper. Ha. I wouldn’t put it up on the internet.” He laughs. “That stuff is free nowadays.”

  The restroom door opens. He cranes his neck further—past my shoulder. He wants to see what he’s buying. It’s the coffee shop owner’s wife, and Vadim turns back to me.

  I fling the hot coffee, kindly just poured into my cup, into his greasy bastard face. He shrieks and totters back in the leaning chair. Now he’s flat on the tile floor. I stand and I fire the shot down into his knee. I thought long and hard about this in the quiet temple of the winery, discussing with Ivan how best to proceed. About whether I should kill him with the first shot or get him to talk. I decided on the knee.

  A horrid tatter of a scream erupts from Vadim’s throat. The café owner tosses me a roll of tape from behind the counter. I catch it one-handed. The owner’s wife walks to the window, puts on the CLOSED sign, closes all the window blinds, and they both walk out the back, as though they have seen nothing, as though they are deaf to Vadim’s shrieks.

  The owner is Ivan’s cousin, and he and his wife can keep a secret.

  I drag Vadim behind the counter.

  He writhes on the ground, red welling from his leg in hot splatters, black fury and pain in his scalded eyes. Rage and fear, dancing together.

  I push the gun up under his chin.

  “Who do you meet in Bucharest?” I ask.

  “Bitch, I’ll kill you!” he screams.

  “Give me the name.”

  “You shot me! You shot me!”

  “Give me the name.” I slide the gun, like a lover’s hand, from his throat to his crotch.

  “Boris! Boris Chavez!”

  I search his pockets. Cell phone. Passport. Wallet. The train tickets for him and the three girls.

  “You stole my sister.”

  I stare at him, this nothing wrapped in human flesh. For a moment, the fear wins out in his eyes and I feel almost sorry for him. Then the moment vanishes. He made his choices.

  “Tu mori,” I say. You die.

  “You’re dead, bitch! You’re—” and I fire the bullet into his head. I don’t pause. I don’t think about it.

  Do you think I am a bad person, Sam?

  I walk out the back of the little café. I might be trembling. I don’t stop to see if I am. I stroll to the train station. Ivan and his cousin are going to make sure that no one will find Vadim, no one will know.

  I walk fast and I board the train and find a place to sit alone. An old granny perches across the aisle from me and gives me a friendly smile. I nod back. I am such a polite killing machine. I take a deep breath. I will not falter. I cannot.

  As the train pulls out for Chiinu (I will change there for the train to Bucharest), I find Boris’s name in the call log in Vadim’s phone. I go onto MySpace, using the cell phone to connect to the internet. Bo
ris has a page. He is young, biracial, with a broad smile. He doesn’t look like a slaver. But he is and now I know who to look for at the train station.

  Hello, Boris. And, soon enough, goodbye.

  67

  Bucharest, Romania

  Gray smears the sky like spilled paint but the sun has woven its light in patches through the clouds. The air in the train out of Moldova feels stale and cloying. No one else seems uncomfortable, though. People read their newspapers and eat their snacks and spin their gossip. I sit far away from everyone, in a corner, watching the countryside unfurl, watching the rain thin and die.

  Ivan told me killing would make me feel funny. I do. Did it change you, Sam, after you first killed? You seem so normal, like other people, while I feel like the woman who is different, who is marked, who maybe has no shadow. Maybe I breathe differently now. I wanted to throw up about ten minutes after I put the bullets in Vadim. And every rattle and bump of the train feels like God thumping at me. But then the weirdness passes, because I have no choice. I have done this and I will do it again.

  Boris looks for greasy Vadim and three fooled Moldovan beauties. He stands on the edge of the station, smoking, wearing clothes that slid out of fashion two years ago. Jeans too baggy, a Real Madrid shirt, a cap too big for his head. He’s here to maintain control if the product gets antsy. I assume that he’s armed.

  I walk to a counter and buy a steaming cup of black tea. I make sure to stand near a column, so he can’t see me watching him. Boris checks his watch, digs a phone out of the deep caverns of his pockets, thumbs the keyboard.

  In my pocket Vadim’s phone rings. It chirps a ring tone of a Kanye West song. “Gold Digger.” How appropriate.

  I answer it. “Hello, yes, this is Vadim’s phone.”

  “Um, where is Vadim?”

  “Oh. He is in the bathroom.”

  “He’s supposed to be on a train—”

  “We missed the morning train to Bucharest, we’re coming on the afternoon train.”

  Boris gives an annoyed sigh. “Well, he could have called.”

  “Do you work with Vadim?”

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “Olia. I guess I shouldn’t answer his phone but he left it here on the table. He took us to lunch.”

  Boris is already heading for the exits. I follow. He hangs up without another word and I switch off the phone. He walks to a nearby car park and gets inside a van, older, dusty, that hasn’t been well cared for.

  Of course, a van, I think, the product has to fit inside where no one can see.

  I grab a cab and tell the driver to follow the van.

  “You want me to follow someone? Like in a movie?” the cabdriver asks. I am his most interesting fare all week.

  “Yes, like in a movie.” I make it sound lighthearted. The cabdriver is going to remember me now but that can’t be helped.

  We wind through the crowded streets of Bucharest, the cabdriver running lights a couple of times to keep the van, a few cars ahead of us, in sight. I hope Boris is not going to a movie to kill time until the later train arrives. I have not been to Bucharest in years and the city seems so much bigger, so much more… Western. I remember it was once called the Little Paris of the East, before Ceauescu the maniac nearly destroyed its architectural beauty, its spirit.

  I shiver again and think: I cannot be afraid now. I had Ivan’s cousin to back me up before, I was on my own turf. This is entirely different, this is the dark unknown.

  Boris drives and drives. Finally he wends the van through an older neighborhood on the edge of Bucharest. Cheap houses line the streets here, not apartments. Of course they would need a house. More privacy.

  I shove a fistful of money at the cabbie and I get out, a block away. The tip is enough that the cabbie calls me kind miss and rewards me with a tea-stained smile.

  I walk toward the house. A single light burns. I cut across to the side of the house and creep up to a window.

  I hear the soft hiss of the television—a basketball game, Croatia playing Spain. I hear Boris clomping around in a household symphony: footsteps, refrigerator door, hum of its motor, click of it shutting. I hear the soft pop of a bottle opening. But I hear him. Only him.

  I put my weapon into my hand. I go up to the front door. The doorbell is old and its light warms my finger.

  Moldovan and Romanian are the same language—really the only difference is a political label dependent on borders. As he answers the door, I say: “Yes, hello, I am here today to talk to you about our Lord Jesus Christ,” and then I stop, with a firm, polite smile.

  Boris holds his bottle of Noroc beer and because I am a harmless, petite girl he smiles at me; he hesitates before he would slam the door in my missionary’s face.

  Then I raise the Taser and fire.

  Boris dances back, the needle-tipped wires jolting him, down into a quivering, tongueless heap. I step inside and I hit him again with the charge. He convulses and I close the door with my butt while he dances for me. The beer sprays across the hardwood floor, foaming into an ugly orange throw rug.

  He’s paralyzed, helpless. I pull the plastic restraints out of my purse and I bind him, wrists behind back, ankles together so tight his feet will begin to swell. I gag his mouth with tape.

  Boris has a gun, a sleek Beretta lying on a kitchen counter. I check it. The clip is full, a round loaded. I pocket the gun in the back of my pants.

  I move through the house. In one room there are two beds, unmade. They smell of dirty man. One bed has empty Noroc beer bottles by it and an unsettling stain on the sheets. Blood. A crescent of it, halfway down the mattress.

  Heavy construction paper blacks out the windows, like the kind I use back in my classroom. Being a teacher feels like a thousand lifetimes ago. I can never go back.

  I go through the rest of the house. Nothing, no one else.

  But a door off the kitchen is locked. I scramble fingers through Boris’s pockets and find the keys.

  The door opens to stairs that lead down into a basement. The room is coal-dark. I find and flick on the light. Eight beds in the room. Three are occupied.

  “Hello? Are you all right?” I call. First in Moldovan/Romanian, then in Russian.

  Two of the girls moan, stir. On a table stand I see powder, syringe, candle, spoon—equipment for a horrible witchcraft. I hurry over to the young women. Track marks mar their pale, pearly arms; their flesh thrums under my fingertips. Chains bind them to the beds.

  The third girl is dead. Eyes half open, showing a moon-sliver of white, throat choking with bile.

  Another key on Boris’s ring unlocks the chains and I get the two girls to sit up. They shudder and cry, lost in between the high of the cruel drug and the pain of what they’ve suffered. I find their clothes folded in a corner and get them dressed.

  Natalia was wrong, or lied. This is where the women are broken and bent to force, not Istanbul. I wasn’t expecting to lead a rescue mission; I was going to handle Boris like I handled Vadim, get the information on the next stage of the trafficking trail, move on to Istanbul. I lead the women up to the kitchen, reassure them all will be fine.

  I talk to them in what I call my teacher-calm voice. The two girls stare at the dazed and bound Boris. They don’t cry, they just stare at him, like I’ve dragged in the devil in chains to lay at their feet. I want to get them to safety—but I need information from Boris. The girls seem okay for the moment, just relieved to be free. I ask where they are from and both are from small towns in western Moldova. The dead girl was from Ukraine, they say.

  Boris, gagged, stares up at me. I decide to risk more time under this roof. No one else is here. I tear the tape off his mouth.

  “You bitch we will kill you and your whole family you stupid bitch”—and then I seal the tape back over his mouth. They are all so unoriginal in their name-calling. Then I tear off another strip. I play the sticky side of the tape against Boris’s nostrils, like a teasing feather. His eyes widen and he kicks again
st the hard tile floor, trying to get away from me.

  “Did he hurt you?” I ask the two girls.

  One’s too blissed out, riding a narcotic surf, to answer. But the other nods, hair hanging down in her eyes.

  “Then I’m going to hurt him. Keep your seat if you want or go into the other room.”

  The girls stay. The more sober one clutches her friend’s arm.

  I put my face close to Boris’s. “Six months ago. Moldovan girl named Nelly. Blond. Do you remember? Nod yes or shake your head no.”

  Boris nods. Vadim must have told him he was going to work Nelly’s sister to get new recruits.

  “Where is she?” Now I rip the tape free from his lips.

  “Tel Aviv. A massage parlor called Lucky Strike, on Rehov Fin. It’s above a pizzeria.”

  This confirms Natalia’s story. “Who has her? The man with the blond mohawk?”

  Boris hesitates and so I seal the tape back over his mouth. Then I stick the extra strip over his nostrils. I run a finger along its edge. Boris begins to buck. His eyes roll and bulge in panic.

  That’s probably how the girls felt, like they had no control, no help, and they were going to die.

  Boris screams behind the tape.

  “Did you rape my sister? Did you pump heroin into her veins?”

  He writhes, screams his throat raw. Begging now in his eyes as his body craves fresh oxygen.

  I watch his face. I count to forty. He is a smoker and he didn’t get a lungful before I sealed the exits. I tear the tape off.

  Now Boris babbles: “The man who bought her, there is a laptop upstairs…”

  Tape really is the most useful tool around the house, I think. I put the tape back over his mouth but not his nose. I run upstairs. I find a file cabinet, a weathered desk spotted with beer bottle rings. And a laptop. I open it. It awakens from sleep; apparently Boris was web-surfing before he headed to the train station.