Bought and Sold (Part 3 of 3)

by Stephens, Megan

  ‘You’re going to have to stay here until the police are off our trail,’ Christoph told me. He pushed the girl nearest to him with his foot, and she quickly shuffled sideways to make space for me to sit down. The stench in the room was overpowering. The window had been boarded up, but there were slivers of light seeping in around the edges. As my eyes gradually adjusted to the gloom, I could see the faces of some of the girls. Most of them had barely glanced up when we walked into the room.

  One of the girls was crying and as she lifted her head to look at me, I saw that her face was swollen and covered with dark bruises. Christoph noticed her too, and suddenly bent down and started punching her. The first time his fist made contact with the girl’s cheek, she cried out. Then she just sat there silently, one arm raised in front of her face almost casually, as if she was trying to block the sun from her eyes, and her head jerked violently from one side to the other with every blow.

  When Christoph stopped punching her and turned back towards me, I flinched involuntarily. But he didn’t hit me. He snatched my bag and threw it across the room so that its contents spilled out over the floor. Then he picked up my passport and phone, put them in his pocket and, bending down again, shouted into my face, ‘You’ve still got a few years’ work left in you and you belong to me now. Do you understand?’ I nodded my head.

  ‘And you.’ He looked round at the other frightened, cowering girls. ‘You’re nothing more than little whores. Instead of sitting there snivelling, you should be thanking me. You’re lucky to have someone like me to protect you. If the police find you, you’ll go to prison and then you’ll be sent back to where you came from with a criminal record. And don’t get any stupid ideas. The neighbours are watching you and I have many friends in the police force. You know what will happen to you if you try to escape.’

  It was obvious that the girls understood what he was shouting at them in Greek, so they must have been in the country for at least as long as I had. And they must have felt the same sense of crushing, defeated hopelessness I felt when Christoph turned and walked out of the room, locking the door behind him.

  During all the months I had been in Athens, I had learned a lot about fear, including the fact that it comes in many forms – fear of violence, of the unknown, of making a wrong decision when you know your life might depend on it, and when you know there is nothing you can do to help yourself. For a long time after Christoph had left, none of the girls moved or spoke. I didn’t dare say anything to any of them because I was convinced that we really were being watched and listened to. And I was afraid because I thought Christoph had lied and that he might never come back for us. Even now when I think about it, I get a tight knot in my stomach.

  For a while, I just sat there, staring blindly ahead of me with my mind almost completely blank. Then I began to look more closely at the other girls. Most of them seemed to be about my age or a bit older. But there was one very small girl who was curled up on the floor crying silently and who, I suddenly realised with a sickening sense of shock, was probably no more than eight years old. She seemed to be alone, without her mother, and no one made any move to try to comfort her.

  I don’t know how long I had been sitting with my back against the wall when I finally plucked up the courage to whisper, ‘Is there water? Are we allowed to get a drink?’

  ‘Yeah, there’s a tap,’ one of the girls answered, without looking at me.

  I didn’t get up immediately: I waited until my thirst outweighed my fear before tiptoeing across the narrow hallway to the tiny kitchen. I had always drunk bottled water since coming to Greece. Even in Athens, where the tap water is supposed to be safe, I didn’t risk drinking it in the sort of hotels I was used to staying in. But by that time I was so thirsty I think I would have drunk whatever had trickled out of the single grimy tap in the kitchen of the apartment.

  When I went back into the other room, I asked one of the girls if she knew where the child’s mother was. She looked at me for a moment, as if trying to decide whether to answer, and then just shrugged her shoulders. All the other girls were equally unresponsive. Later, when two of them had a brief, whispered conversation, I thought the language they were speaking was Russian. For most of the time, though, we all sat there in silence, thinking our own thoughts, or trying not to think at all.

  As the light around the boarded-up window began to fade into darkness, I got up again, took a chipped glass out of the cupboard in the kitchen, filled it with water and took it back into the room, where I gave it to the little girl. Then I lifted her on to my knees and stroked her dirty, tangled hair until she fell asleep.

  There was a narrow, metal-framed bed in one corner of the room, but no one slept on its misshapen mattress. They just lay down on the hard wooden floor, pulled their knees up to their chests like children do, and shut their eyes. I sat with my back against the wall and my arms wrapped tightly around the little girl, and I must have dozed off too, for a while. When I woke up and remembered where I was, I thought for a moment about shouting for help. There were no sounds from the street below to stifle my voice, so someone in one of the other apartments would be bound to hear me, and then they would call the police. But every time I had almost summoned the courage to open my mouth, I heard Christoph’s voice in my head saying, ‘You know what will happen to you if you try to escape.’

  I slept fitfully after that, for maybe a couple of hours, before being woken up by the sound of voices. I was still half-asleep when the two men who had come into the apartment pulled the little girl out of my arms and took her away. I wished at the time that I had been awake enough to have reacted. In reality though, I knew that even if I had been, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything to stop them.

  I could hear the little girl crying outside the door of the apartment; then the sound became muffled, as if someone had put their hand over her mouth. Still none of the girls said anything and I wondered if, like me, they were trying not to think about where the little girl might be taken. I didn’t ever see her again. I often prayed that she hadn’t been used for sex and that she was reunited with her mother. At the very least, I hope someone looked after her.

  Chapter 10

  When I was in the kitchen earlier in the night getting water, I had seen a loaf of bread on the work surface. It was hard and stale and splattered with blue patches of mould. But there was nothing else to eat and at intervals throughout the rest of the following day we went into the kitchen one by one and picked bits off it. It didn’t make any difference to how hungry I was, but at least it gave me a reason to stand up and move around.

  It was starting to get dark on the second night when the door of the apartment opened again. This time, it was Christoph who came in, followed by a short, heavily built man wearing a crumpled shirt and oily jeans. No one said anything; the man just looked at us and then he pointed at me.

  ‘Right, get up,’ Christoph said. ‘This is a job for you.’ Even when he nodded towards the narrow bed in the corner, I didn’t understand what he meant. Then the man began to unzip his jeans and it finally dawned on me that Christoph expected me to have sex with him right there, in the room where all the other girls were sitting.

  Bizarrely, one of the first thoughts that came to me was that I hadn’t had a shower for two days. It wasn’t something I needed to worry about on the man’s behalf, however. I think I could have been caked in mud from a pigpen before he’d have noticed, or cared, as he climbed on top of me, had sex with me – without using a condom – and then zipped up his jeans and followed Christoph out of the apartment.

  I had long ago lost count of the disgusting things I had done – and that had been done to me – since I had been in Athens. Many of them were things I hadn’t previously known anyone did, and that I wouldn’t have believed I would ever do. By comparison with some of them, having sex with a man in a room full of people was relatively mundane, but it still made me feel physically sick.

  Christoph came back again that evening, thi
s time with a different man who chose a different girl. And then no one came at all.

  I had been in the room for four days, without any food and surviving only on water from the tap, by the time Christoph did come back. In just those four days I seemed to have gone from thin to emaciated, so that the dirty, creased skirt I was wearing was falling off me, and there was a persistent throbbing pain in my head that felt as if someone was beating the inside of it with a hammer.

  According to the clock in Christoph’s car, it was mid-morning when he drove me to a hotel, where he told me to have a shower, get dressed and do my make-up. ‘Make yourself look really nice,’ he said, in his old friendly voice. ‘I’ve got an important job for you.’ All I wanted to do was fall on the bed and sleep. But there were no choices in the world I was living in. Perhaps that’s why I sometimes react badly today when people tell me what to do: after all those years of being controlled, the anger builds up inside me like steam in a pressure cooker and if I don’t release it from time to time, I’m afraid it might explode.

  I didn’t ever feel angry then, though. I was too exhausted – both mentally and physically – to summon up the energy that would have been required. So while Christoph sat in my hotel room, chatting in the way he used to do in the days before I had seen him punch a girl repeatedly in the face, I had a shower, got dressed and made myself look, if not nice, at least presentable.

  When I was ready, he took me to a fast-food restaurant and ordered chicken souvlaki, saying, ‘It’s what you like, isn’t it?’ But despite having had nothing to eat for four days, I barely managed more than a few mouthfuls. Then Christoph drove me to one of the wealthiest suburbs of the city, where he said I was going to see a ‘very special client’.

  While we were in the car, he told me what had happened to precipitate the need to ‘lie low’ for a few days. Apparently, a girl had escaped and gone to the police. ‘People are already on the way to Albania to sort out her family,’ Christoph said. ‘She’s a dead woman.’ He held out two fingers and mimed the firing of a gun. And although I tried to look as though I was shocked by the unknown girl’s treacherous behaviour, what I was actually thinking was that I was never going to get away from the unbearable life I had become trapped in.

  Christoph stopped the car outside a smart hotel and phoned the client to say we had arrived. Then he told me the room number and said he would be back for me in an hour. It was the sort of hotel where, even if I hadn’t been scrawny and had dark rings under my eyes, my cheap clothes would make me look very obviously out of place. So my heart was racing as I walked through the lobby towards the lift, and I was amazed, as well as relieved, when no one stopped me; the receptionist barely even seemed to notice me.

  When I knocked on the door of the hotel room, it was opened almost immediately by a pleasant-looking man, who greeted me politely. For some reason, he made me feel safe and I remember hoping that he might decide to book me for longer than the hour, so that I could postpone the moment when I had to go back out into the real world again.

  I always showered before and after every client. In good hotels like this one, it was a pleasure to stand under the powerful jet of warm water for a few minutes before wrapping myself in a soft, freshly laundered towel. When I walked out into the bedroom, the man smiled and said, ‘Come here.’ Then he gently unhooked the towel and let it drop on to the floor.

  ‘You’re one of the best he’s ever sent,’ he told me, smiling again as he looked me up and down. ‘It’s okay. You can put the towel back on now.’ He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket, pulled out his wallet and handed me some money. I had just turned away from him to put the notes in my bag when he said, ‘You’re under arrest.’

  It took a moment for his words to sink in, and then I started to cry. ‘Please don’t hurt me,’ I begged him. ‘Here, take the money back.’ I tried to push the notes into his hand.

  ‘It’s too late,’ he said. ‘You’ve already taken it. Put it in your bag and get dressed.’

  After I had pulled on my skirt and top, I asked him, tearfully, ‘What’s going to happen to me?’

  ‘Listen to me,’ the man said, grasping my arm and pushing me out of the room ahead of him. ‘Just tell the truth and you’ll be okay. We’re not interested in you. All we want from you is to tell us about the man who brought you here. Do you understand?’ I nodded miserably. ‘So, are you going to tell the truth?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course,’ I said.

  ‘Well, in that case, you’ll be fine.’

  I still didn’t understand what had happened. Christoph had spoken to this man on the phone from the car. Did that mean that Christoph had set me up? It didn’t make any sense, particularly if what the policeman had just said about not being interested in me was true. But if Christoph hadn’t set me up and I said something to the police that enabled them to get to him through me … I heard his voice in my head saying, ‘People are already on the way to Albania to sort out her family. She’s a dead woman.’ And suddenly, although I was very afraid of what the police might do to me, I knew I had far more reason to be afraid of Christoph.

  On the way out of the hotel, the policeman nodded to the receptionist as if to say thank you, and I realised why she had only glanced at me when I came in and then looked away again without questioning me. It hadn’t been because I didn’t stick out like a sore thumb among all the well-dressed hotel guests; it was because she had known what I was and what was about to happen to me. Despite the very serious trouble I was in and the fact that I was being led, handcuffed, through the lobby of an expensive hotel, it was that thought as much as any other that made me blush with embarrassment and humiliation.

  As we were walking out through the main entrance of the hotel, I heard what I thought was the sound of a car backfiring and then people shouting. I froze and pulled back from the doorway and the policeman tightened his grip on my arm. The street outside the hotel seemed to be full of police. Christoph’s car was still parked where it had been when I left him, but now all its doors were wide open. And then I saw Christoph, shouting and spitting at the three policemen who were half-dragging him down the road back towards the hotel. Stepping out of the hotel into the scene that was unfolding outside seemed unreal, like walking on to a film set or watching yourself in a dream.

  Apparently, it had taken several men – including some construction workers on a building site next to the hotel – to catch Christoph when he jumped out of his car and tried to escape. Shots had been fired and it took three policemen to manhandle him, struggling and swearing, into a police car. I was put into another car parked next to the one he was in, and when I looked up, he shook his head, winked at me and mouthed, ‘Everything will be fine.’ But I didn’t see how that could possibly be true.

  The police station they took us to, separately, was about a ten-minute drive from the hotel. They left us in a waiting room there, sitting side by side for about an hour, while they went off to do whatever it was they had to do. The police officer at a desk on the other side of the room didn’t seem to be interested in anything we might say to each other.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Christoph asked me.

  When I lied and told him that I was, he held my gaze and said, more loudly, ‘I don’t understand what’s going on. What have you done? Why have the police arrested you? I’m sorry if you’re in some kind of trouble. But I don’t know you. All I did was give you a lift to the hotel because my friend asked me to do it.’

  I made a small movement with my head to show him I had understood what he was telling me: that he expected me to take the rap and to say that we didn’t know each other. He seemed quite relaxed, almost as if he was enjoying playing the role of injured innocent. If he was concerned about what I might say to the police, he didn’t show any signs of it. And he didn’t need to worry: I had got the message and I would do what I was told, whatever the consequences might be for me.

  After we had been at the police station for about half an hour, Christoph’
s wife arrived with an oxygen cylinder and a face mask. I didn’t understand most of the explanation she gave the police officer. Whatever it was, she must have been convincing, because he let her give the cylinder and mask to Christoph. Perhaps Christoph really did have some sort of heart or lung condition. Or maybe it was an elaborate excuse to give his wife access to him in the police station. Whatever the truth of it was, she kept glaring at me in a way that suggested she would quite happily have cut off my oxygen supply given half the chance. After she’d gone, Christoph and I were led away to separate cells.

  There were 12 women in the cell I was taken to. I could feel the eyes of every one of them looking me up and down as the policeman unlocked the metal-barred gate. I was so frightened and so completely out of my depth it felt like I imagine an out-of-body experience must feel. However, most of the women were friendly and happy to talk to me. It was ironic that, having longed for someone to talk to, I had finally got my wish in the cell of a police station.

  Some of the women were prostitutes, and when one of them asked me why I had been arrested, I told her, very briefly, what had happened. ‘Whatever you do,’ she said, her voice low and earnest, ‘don’t ever say anything. Don’t tell the police what you’ve just told me. Believe me, I know this business. The only way to survive is to keep your mouth shut.’ And I knew that she was right.

  Because I was used to Christoph talking to me in a friendly way, I think I had been lulled into believing that he really was fond of me – as he often claimed to be. But after what he had said about the Albanian girl who had run away, and after I had seen him assault the girl in the apartment, my illusions about him had been shaken, if not shattered completely. I knew he would protect himself ruthlessly and that if he got into trouble with the police because of something I said, he would turn on me in exactly the same way he had turned on the other girls. What I was also beginning to understand was that in order to save Christoph’s skin – and ultimately to protect myself from him – I was going to have to take full responsibility for working illegally as an underage prostitute. I didn’t know what that would entail or what the outcome of it all would be, but I was very frightened by the prospect of what lay ahead.