by Kate Raphael
“It’s almost time to meet Avi,” she said. “We probably only have time for one more house. Let’s hurry.”
“I don’t want to go to any more brothels,” Tina said. “They give me the creeps.”
“They give you the creeps?” Chloe snapped. “You’re not the one who… we can’t quit now.” Despite her fear, raging like Niagara Falls through her blood, she didn’t want to stop looking. She had forged a stronger connection with Nadya through her experience. She had to find out what had happened to her now, and she knew this next place held the answer.
She marched faster, leaving Tina panting a little to keep up.
“Well, I’m not leaving you alone again,” Tina said as Chloe headed up the stone stairs of the next house. “Wherever we go, we go together.”
“You’ll get no argument from me,” Chloe said, ringing the bell.
“Vicki yesh?” she boldly asked the young woman who opened the door.
“Ken,” the woman answered, opening the door wide. “Vicki!” she yelled.
Chloe’s head reeled. After all that had happened, could it be so easy? But maybe it wasn’t the same Vicki. She had no idea how common a name it was among Eastern Europeans.
“At makirah otam?” The woman who had answered the door was asking a woman with frizzy blonde hair if she knew them. After some quick eye contact with Tina and Chloe, Vicki gave a little nod.
“Tov.” The other woman walked away. Chloe looked around the large living room. Several small groups of young women sat around, playing cards or doing each other’s hair and nails. The windows were covered with heavy curtains, but one of the women was perched so she could just see through the slit from which a tiny gleam of light penetrated. A lone man sat in a corner, smoking and watching everyone. Vicki led them to a sofa across the room from him. Chloe deliberately positioned herself so she couldn’t see him. Let Vicki worry about discretion.
“At hachaverah shel Nadya?” Chloe asked immediately. Are you Nadya’s friend? She didn’t want to waste time if this wasn’t the right Vicki.
“Nadya?” Vicki looked startled. “Ayfo Nadya?”
“Do you speak English?” Chloe asked hopefully. Vicki shook her head. Chloe wasn’t able to manage much finesse in Hebrew, but she scraped up the words for “Nadya is dead.” Vicki looked sad, but not surprised.
“Nadya made big trouble,” Chloe understood her to say.
“Trouble for whom?” Chloe asked.
“The man who…,” but Chloe didn’t understand the rest of the sentence. This wasn’t going to work.
“Does anyone here speak English?” she asked Vicki. Vicki shook her head vigorously, and cast a nervous look around the room. Great move, Chloe told herself. Probably Vicki didn’t want anyone else to know what they were talking about. The girl by the window called out something in Russian, and suddenly everyone was putting away their nail polish and straightening up the magazines lying all over the room.
“You must go,” Vicki told them.
“Do you have a telephone?” Chloe asked breathlessly.
“No.” Vicki was pushing them toward the door.
“But we have to talk more,” Chloe insisted. She would not go without a way to get hold of Vicki. Tina pulled a scrap of paper from her purse, scribbled on it, and thrust it into Vicki’s hands. “Bye,” she said brightly in English. “Good seeing you,” and she dragged Chloe out the door. Just in time, it turned out. A minute later, they watched a burly man in a leather jacket open the front door with a key.
“I need a drink,” she told Avi when they met at the beachfront. They ducked into a café. Chloe ordered red wine for herself and Tina, casting a defensive look at Avi, who prided himself on being straight-edge.
“I found out one thing,” he said, sipping a lemonade. “No one I met knew Vicki, but one guy knew Nadya. He wired money to Uzbekistan for her. She wired fifty dollars home every two weeks. But the week before she left Eilat, she sent a thousand.”
The jingle of Tina’s cellphone interrupted Chloe’s musing about where Nadya would have gotten a sum like that. Tina looked at the number quizzically, then punched talk.
“It’s Vicki,” she whispered, handing Chloe the phone.
“What do I tell her?” Chloe whispered back. Tina shrugged.
“Hello?” Vicki was whispering too. In her disoriented state, Chloe could not remember one word of Hebrew.
“Talk to my friend,” she said in English and thrust the phone into Avi’s hand. He looked doubtful.
“Allo?” He listened for a few seconds, then told Vicki to hold on. “She wants to meet us in two hours,” he reported.
“Where?” Chloe asked. He repeated the question into the phone.
“Somewhere near, but not too near,” came the answer.
“How would we know?” Chloe grumbled. “What about that Friends place? Ask her if she knows where it is.” After a hurried consultation, Avi said goodbye. “She’ll be there,” he said.
“I hope so,” Chloe said. “With luck, Alexandra will be there too.” And then maybe she would be too distracted to think about her near-rape. Her fragile calm might explode any minute.
Friends was a dingy waterfront diner, with six plastic booths and a Formica counter with stools. One lone customer munched a sandwich while reading a Hebrew newspaper in a corner booth. The woman lounging behind the counter more or less matched the description Rania had given of Alexandra Marininova. She looked up from a Russian-language magazine when the three settled themselves on cracked vinyl stools.
“Are you Alexandra?” Chloe asked when the woman approached.
“How do you know me?” the woman demanded in Hebrew.
“Tell her Rania sent us,” Chloe instructed Avi. Alexandra’s eyes scrunched up when Avi mentioned the Palestinian policewoman.
“You are police?” she asked.
“No, no,” Chloe jumped in. “Our friend is in jail,” she struggled in Hebrew. “We need you to help us.”
“I already told the police, I don’t know anything about the girl who used my passport,” Alexandra said to Avi.
“Tell her we don’t believe her,” Chloe snapped. Fortunately, before Avi could speak, Vicki walked through the door, dark lenses covering two thirds of her face while a babushka hid her hair. They relocated to a booth near the back. Alexandra kept her eyes on her little pad when she took their orders. Chloe looked longingly at the pictures of ice cream sundaes on the menu, but she couldn’t face Avi’s disapproval yet again. She ordered two baskets of fries for them all to share. When Alexandra brought them, Chloe looked around the restaurant, now deserted except for them.
“Ask her if she can sit with us a few minutes,” she told Avi. “Tell her we need her to translate from Hebrew to Russian.” She was almost sure Alexandra would refuse, but the woman perched on the edge of the bench, even helping herself from the fries Chloe passed toward her. Everyone likes to be needed, Chloe reflected, plus she must be curious about what we’re doing here.
The conversation was slow, because anything Chloe or Tina said had to be translated first into Hebrew by Avi and then into Russian by Alexandra, and then back.
“The house where you met her was not the first place Nadya worked,” Alexandra translated for Vicki. “They bought her from another house.”
“Bought her?” Tina blurted out.
“Yes,” Vicki said matter-of-factly. “They take all the girls to a big room, naked. There are many men, and they bid on each girl, one by one. Sometimes if a man cannot afford a girl by himself, he will team up with two or three of his friends.”
“Were you sold that way too?” Chloe asked.
“Yes,” Vicki said. “But the man I work for is not so bad. He takes good care of us. We have enough to eat, and we don’t have to work as much as some other places.”
“He must have been upset when Nadya ran away,” Chloe said. When Alexandra finished translating, Vicki shook her head.
“She did not run away,” came the answer
. “The man who sold her came and took her back.”
“Took her back? Why?”
After quite a lot of animated chatter, Alexandra said only, “She doesn’t know.”
“She told us Nadya made trouble,” Chloe said. “Who did she make trouble for?”
“The man who sold her. See, you have to pay back the expenses of your travel out of your earnings. The people who bring you here come to the house where you are working every week and take money from your employer and only give you a few shekels. The rest is to pay them back for your travel. But one time the man who brought Nadya didn’t give her any money,” Vicki said. “He yelled at her that she knew why. She argued with him and he hit her.”
“Does she know where Nadya got a lot of money to wire home before she left Eilat?” Chloe asked. Vicki looked surprised when Alexandra translated the question.
“No,” she answered, “I didn’t know she did.”
“Ask her to describe the guy who sold Nadya,” Avi told Alexandra. He took out a notebook and created a drawing based on Vicki’s description. She looked over his shoulder and corrected a few things.
“You draw well,” Tina observed.
“Yes, that’s him,” Vicki said finally. As soon as the drawing was finished, Alexandra stood and swept up their dishes along with a half-eaten basket of fries. “I have to close now,” she said.
Vicki departed quickly, not looking back. Chloe approached Alexandra, money outstretched. Alexandra waved her away, shooing them out the door. They stood on the sidewalk, wondering where to go now. It was balmy with evening just starting to fall, and throngs of young people played volleyball on the nearby beach. Several groups of young men in army green, with their guns casually swinging at their sides, passed, laughing raucously at each other’s jokes.
“Well, at least we know what the guy looks like,” Tina said.
“And no idea where to look for him,” Chloe said. “I don’t think we can hang around the brothels waiting for him to come collect his money.”
“Why not?” Tina asked.
“We could show the picture around the bars,” Avi suggested. “Someone is sure to know him.”
“There’s certainly no shortage of them,” Chloe said. They started aimlessly along the beachfront, heading for the nearest set of lights.
“Wait!” Alexandra was hurrying toward them. Behind her, Chloe saw the steel grate pulled down over the restaurant’s door. “I need to tell you something,” she said when she caught up to them. They looked around for somewhere to sit, but nothing presented itself. They stood uncomfortably on the sidewalk.
“I didn’t lie to the police,” Alexandra began. “After they came to see me, I looked through my things. My old passport from Ukraine was not in my house. I never noticed, because I have my Israeli passport now, and I don’t want to go back to Ukraine.”
“You think someone took it, without your knowing?” Avi asked.
“I know who took it,” Alexandra said. She looked around, to the right and to the left. “This man,” she said, pointing to the drawing Avi carried. “He was my boyfriend. His name is Dmitri.”
“Was? But now he isn’t?”
“No. I have not seen him for two years.”
“Did you know he was a trafficker?”
Alexandra shook her head emphatically. “I knew he went back and forth to Uzbekistan,” she said. “But he told me he was importing jewelry. He even brought me things, like this bracelet,” showing them a delicate silver filigree bangle on her left wrist.
“He never talked to you about Nadya or any of the other girls?”
“No. I would never have stayed with him if I knew.”
“Can you call and ask him to meet us?”
“No. No, I don’t want to do that. But I can tell you where to find him.”
Chapter 35
The bar Alexandra directed them to was dark and had the sour smell of beer allowed to seep into the wooden floors. The bouncer sitting on a high stool in the doorway paid no attention to Chloe or Avi, but jumped up when Tina started to walk by him.
“Teudot?” he demanded, blocking her wiry frame with his bulk.
“What?”
Hearing her speak English, he relaxed a hair. “ID? Passport?”
She looked about to say something they would all regret, but stopped herself. She dug the passport out of her knapsack and flashed it at him. He glanced at it and handed it back.
“Thank you,” he said in barely intelligible English. There were no other Israelis in this bar. Rapid-fire Russian engulfed them, while the other patrons, nearly all men, cast them suspicious glances.
It was Tina who recognized Dmitri. He entered flanked by two other leather-jacketed men. He had a certain rugged handsomeness, mixed with a healthy amount of sleaze. Tina caught Avi’s eye and cocked her head toward Dmitri. Avi maneuvered until he stood next to Dmitri at the bar.
“You have something I want to buy,” Avi said in Hebrew.
“I’m not selling anything,” Dmitri answered.
“I hope you will change your mind,” Avi said. He motioned to the bartender to pour Dmitri another drink—vodka straight up. He ordered a beer for himself and clinked Dmitri’s glass with it.
“Skol,” he said. Dmitri didn’t answer, but tossed back the vodka. Avi turned the tall glass in his hands without drinking from it.
“So what is it you want?” Dmitri asked, impatiently tapping his empty glass on the table.
“An Uzbek girl called Nadya. This tall, long hair, pretty.”
“Nadya? She’s trouble, that one,” Dmitri said. “I give you another girl, for a good price, who won’t make so much trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?” Avi asked.
“She’s a liar and a thief. Forget her, I get you a real good girl.”
“What do you mean? Did she steal from you?”
“She tried. I taught her a lesson.”
“I heard you beat her up.”
Dmitri laughed. “You want to see beat up, I show you beat up. The girl played with fire, she got a little burned.”
“What did she try to steal?”
“Money.”
“Are you sure she gave it all back?”
Dmitri looked him up and down, as if wondering if he was all there. “I got it all back. I’m sure.”
“When was that?”
“All these questions. What are you, a cop?”
“If I’m going to shell out money for this girl, I want to know what I’m getting.”
“I’m telling you, you’ll just be getting a no-good whore. I thought about turning her in to the immigration, letting them ship her ass back to Uzbekistan. I should’ve done it.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Dmitri cocked his head. “She was good, you know?” He made a poking gesture with his fingers, a universal sign for intercourse. “Men were crazy for her. Just like you.”
Avi laughed. “Yeah, I get it.” She was good, Dmitri had said. But that could just be a slip of the tongue from a non-native Hebrew speaker.
“Thanks for the warning. So if you didn’t beat her, how did you teach her a lesson?”
Dmitri seemed to be weighing options, some of which Avi was certain he would not like at all. He opted to answer, though the sneer accompanying the answer suggested it might bear scrutinizing.
“I sold her to two big military guys.”
“Two guys?”
“Yeah, they were going to share her, half, half.”
“Well, what was wrong with that? Seems like it would be better than working in a brothel.”
“You don’t know these guys. They like to do things…” Dmitri shook one hand vigorously toward the floor.
“How do you know?”
“From my girls.”
“They were clients?”
“Yeah, asshole, they were clients.”
“And they hurt your girls?”
“One of them, he was okay. Just a little, you know, kinky. But the o
ther one, he’s got a nickname. They call him the Butcher.”
Chapter 36
Rania called Captain Mustafa in the morning to say she was heading to Ariel before coming to work.
The made-up watchdolls at the front desk tried to stop her, but she brushed them aside and took the steps two at a time to Benny’s office.
“Gelenter lied to us,” she stated without preamble.
He was sitting with another policeman, going over some files. The other man let himself out, clearly wondering who on earth this hijab-wearing madwoman was who could barge in and talk to the boss like this and not end up in cuffs. Of course, she could end up in cuffs yet. Benny tipped his chair back, two legs perilously off the floor, and gave her that infuriating, slightly amused smile she remembered well.
“What’s so important, you couldn’t even knock first?” he asked.
She told him what she had learned from Chloe, but not how she’d learned it. Fortunately, he didn’t ask.
“Doesn’t mean anything,” he said.
“It means he’s a pig and a liar.”
“Well, okay, if that’s how you want to put it, but that doesn’t change the fact that someone else confessed to killing the girl.”
“That confession is worthless, you know that.”
“I have my opinion about that, and you’re entitled to yours, but it’ll be good enough for a judge. As far as my bosses are concerned, the case is closed.”
It was the first time he had ever mentioned bosses. She had never thought about who he might have to answer to, but she supposed that in a case like this, he must be subject to pressure too. Maybe she should lighten up on him a little. She didn’t feel like it. But she made an effort to sound less belligerent.
“What about the woman at the employment agency, Galit? Why do you think she told us that whole story about Nadya coming to her in desperation, and Gelenter finding her there?”
She had caught his interest. He humphed and hawed as he flipped through his rolodex. Then he made a long phone call. Whoever was on the other end did most of the talking, but what Benny said, she couldn’t understand. He hung up and turned back to her.