by By Jon Land
“Relax, Superintendent.”
“I’ve never been this close to Al Safah before!”
“I hope you don’t expect to find him in that car.”
“No, but that car is going to him, one way or another.”
Ben maintained a safe distance, the Volvo lapsing from sight only around bends and curves in the road, each one of which left Faustin breathing a little faster.
“You think I’m ready to hear what this is really about now?”
“No, but I’ll tell you anyway: those girls belong to Al Safah now . . . just as I once did.”
Ben turned toward Faustin, saw that her expression seemed to have lost its focus, becoming glazed and distant.
“You want to know why I joined Interpol? You want to know why I spent years mastering the skills that saved your life three nights ago? . . . Because I was once much like those girls are now.” Her voice sank, drifted. “Because someday I knew I would get my chance to destroy Al Safah. You know all about vengeance, don’t you, Inspector?”
“Yes.”
“When you shot the man who had murdered your family, what did it feel like?”
Ben recalled that night back in Detroit when he had come home on the verge of a major break in pursuit of a killer who preyed on entire families as they slept.
“I didn’t want him to die, so I could keep killing him.”
Halfway to the steps, he had seen the front door was cracked open. He remembered how hard it had been to breathe as he drew his Glock nine-millimeter pistol and charged up the stairs, screaming his wife’s name.
He smelled the blood when he reached the top, just before a blur whirled at him in the darkness wielding a blade that glinted in the naked light emanating from the open door downstairs. The Sandman held the knife overhead as he charged, and Ben started firing.
It took a whole clip to bring him down, the final bullet blowing away the top of the killer’s head. Ben then checked the rooms slowly, without turning on the lights; he didn’t need to see death to know it.
It was a while before he broke down, weeks that were numbed by the pain. Time had stopped passing and didn’t start again until he returned to his homeland. Then it had seemed to stop again when he lost Danielle eighteen months before.
“You do know how I feel,” Faustin was saying. “I can see it in your eyes.”
“What I don’t know is why.”
“You know enough.” Her eyes returned to the windshield.
“We’re in this together now. I want to hear everything.”
Faustin kept her eyes fixed on the lights before them. “You asked if I was French.”
“You didn’t answer me; not directly, anyway.”
“I didn’t answer you because I can’t. I don’t know what I am, Inspector. Oh, I’ve developed some ideas over the years, but none of that matters. I don’t remember where I was born. I don’t remember my parents. I don’t even remember my real name.”
She finally turned toward Ben from the passenger seat and their eyes met.
“You see, I was stolen.”
* * * *
CHAPTER 52
W
hite slavery,” Faustin continued.
Ben felt as though a cold blast of air had struck him. He shivered slightly.
“That’s what happened to the young girls you’re looking for, just as it happened to me. . . .”
Faustin went on to explain that she did have some memories of her “original” childhood, as she called it, but they were vague and muted. So much like dreams that she could not honestly distinguish any concrete reality. Her earliest continuous memories were of a great house and grounds she was never allowed to leave. There were other children there too, all of them girls of varying ages. She was well fed, clothed and schooled; looked after and raised by the people she would later realize were her captors.
“You were kidnapped,” Ben said, shaking off his shock, “just like Leila Fatuk.”
“I hope I was kidnapped.”
“What do you mean?”
“The fact is that a great number of children involved in the white-slave trade are actually sold to traffickers by their parents.”
Ben swallowed hard, thinking of the woman in Nablus, Arra Rensi, who he felt quite certain had sold her daughter to a man like Ibrahim Mudhil.
“You thought such a practice was limited to places like Nepal, Bangkok, the Third World.”
“I used to. Not anymore.”
“Actually, forcible abduction accounts for a relatively small percentage of trafficking. The girls who aren’t sold into the trade often volunteer. Procurers, recruiters more or less, seek out the poor with promises of better lives for the children away from their homes. These are children and young women who have nothing, so it can be difficult for them to resist such overtures.”
“The girls from the refugee camps,” Ben realized.
Faustin didn’t bother to nod. “Once they agree, they become totally dependent on these procurers for their very survival. By the time the girls realize the truth, it’s too late. They’re prisoners.”
“Like you.”
“I was too young to realize it. At first.”
“Go on,” Ben urged.
Faustin didn’t mince words. “By the time I was in my early teens, I could speak four languages fluently and was ready to be taught the trade they had stolen me for.”
“Prostitution.”
”But I was one of the lucky ones,” she said, a trace of irony creeping into her voice. “Most girls and women who become part of the white-slave trade end up in cheap brothels or whorehouses where they are literally chained to the bed to make sure they don’t escape. As for the few that manage to escape and then go to the police, their efforts are rewarded with a ride back and a beating, because the police almost invariably have been paid off.”
Ben felt a heaviness building in his throat. “Here? In the West Bank?”
Faustin didn’t answer, which was answer enough,
”What about the Israelis?”
Faustin flirted with a smile. “Israeli traffickers have become rather adept at importing Slavic women solely for the purposes of prostitution. The women are desperate. By the time they reach Tel Aviv they have no money, no place to live, and no choice.”
“We were talking about Palestinian children, not Slavic women.”
”Do you know something, Inspector?” Faustin asked, instead of responding. “In some countries, including Israel, there is not even a specific law against the sale of human beings. It goes on right in front of the authorities. Even the thousands they manage to deport every year are swiftly replaced.”
“Two of the Palestinian girls who disappeared were both enrolled in a student exchange program with Israel,” Ben persisted. “Someone there could have sold the enrollment files.”
Faustin kept her eyes focused on the car ahead of them, but Ben could tell her focus had changed. To the pain and heartache which, more than anything, had drawn her to Palestine in the first place. “Yes, they could have.”
“You don’t care.”
“I care about Al Safah.”
“And Ibrahim Mudhil is linked to him as a trafficker.”
“The lowest man on the ladder. Little more than a delivery boy. Each time a connection is made, we climb another rung.”
“And at the top?”
“Al Safah.”
“You’re saying he’s in chargeeverywhere across the world? One man running the entire white-slave trade?”
Mathilde Faustin hesitated. “I haven’t been able to prove that to anyone’s satisfaction at Interpol yet.”
“It’s no wonder. That’s a lot of countries, and brothels, to keep under control.”
“I believe that he seized control of the trade in those countries, and the white-slave trade has gone way beyond brothels in modern times. Interpol estimates two hundred million people are currently victims of contemporary forms of white slavery and most have nothing to do with
prostitution. They could be deaf Mexicans selling pencils in New York City, or children in Indonesian sweatshops, or Nepalese children begging on the streets of Paris and London, or Chinese peasants being exported by the thousands to work in slave labor camps without anyone knowing, or Guatemalan babies stolen from their mothers, or beautiful women who answer ads from Third World countries that sound too good to be true because they are—women who are later drugged, imprisoned, forced into prostitution, and often never seen again. I have files on these things and more. It happens in civilized countries, often among respectable people. The trade could never have reached the level it has unless one force was responsible for it all.”
Ben considered Faustin’s assertions, wished he could refute them. Undeniably, though, she was providing an explanation for exactly what his investigation had turned up in Palestine:
Two girls kidnapped.
A third runs away from a refugee camp and is never seen again.
The existence of a fourth is denied by a mother who may have sold her so she could afford a better house.
“And Al Safah is here now,” Ben said finally. “You’re sure of that.”
“I’m sure he was. I’m sure I’m closer to him than anyone’s ever been before. I’m sure . . .”
Ben listened to Faustin’s voice tail off. “What?”
She wouldn’t look at him. “Nothing.”
“How did you get away from him, Superintendent?”
Mathilde Faustin turned toward him again tentatively and began to speak.
* * * *
CHAPTER 53
B
y the age of fifteen, she related, she had been placed in an exclusive Paris bordello that discreetly served a wealthy clientele. She knew little of what went on in the rooms other than her own, but sometimes when she lay quietly she heard sounds that terrified her. She had been introduced to sex at an age and in a way that reduced it purely to the base act she was practicing. Her skills were undeniable, but performed without any passion. “Servicing” was all she knew, and while she could contemplate escape, the unknown world beyond frightened her much more than the Paris house or the others she would come to know.
Still, the muffled screams she often heard, and the girls who appeared the next morning beaten (and occasionally did not appear at all) forewarned her enough of what was coming. She tried to escape three times, succeeding in her third attempt only to be brought back to a house in Geneva by the police. Her punishment was being relocated to a Hamburg, Germany, brothel where the furnishings were equally nice but the clientele considerably less subtle. One of these tied her to the bed, gagged her, and then beat and whipped her for hours. She was taken from the bordello and left half-dead along Hamburg’s notorious Reeperbahn where she had plenty of company in the gutter.
Mathilde Faustin was lucky enough to be brought to a hospital where they saved her life and then turned her back to the street, as was the usual practice. But she was determined not to stay there. Fueled by rage, Faustin returned to the Hamburg brothel and set fire to the basement. The entire house burned while she watched the girls, who were as helpless as she had once been, rushing out into the night.
Her teachers had done an extraordinary job of breeding emotion out of her. But they had forgotten about rage, and that was going to cost them.
“You kept the name they gave you, didn’t you?” Ben asked her, inadvertently squeezing the steering wheel a little tighter.
“Because it would stop me from forgetting. Ever. I didn’t want to forget. From that night I burned the house in Hamburg, I saw what I had to do.”
“Did they know it was you?”
“Not that time, no.”
“Other houses ...”
“All of them, all the ones in which they placed me.”
“But you had no passport, no money, you had nothing.”
“I had my rage; it was more than enough. In Hamburg it wasn’t difficult to buy a fake passport.”
“It is without funds.”
”But I had skills, didn’t I? And this time when I put them to use, I did it for me. The whole time I was listening, learning, accumulating a list of who I could contact in other cities for similar favors.”
”That doesn’t explain how you learned to shoot, to fight.”
”Anything can be bought if you’re willing to pay, Inspector, including those types of skills, especially when one is willing to work for them.” Her voice drifted briefly, was not quite as sharp when she resumed. “I saved Paris for last. Would you like to know how I did it?”
Ben swallowed hard.
”I came in the guise of a prospective client! They didn’t even recognize me; I had to remind four of my former watchers who I was before I killed them. Up close this time, which was infinitely more satisfying.”
”But it wasn’t enough,” Ben said, and suddenly realized what had been bothering him about Faustin’s eyes. He had seen that vacant, resigned, mad look once before: in his house, the night his family had been killed, when his gaze locked briefly with the Sandman’s.
”I got the girls and their customers out,” Faustin said as an afterthought. ”Then I burned that house too.”
“I was talking about after.”
Faustin nodded. “No, it wasn’t enough, and it won’t be until what happened to me can’t happen to another child. I was barely twenty years old, fifteen years ago. And I have spent those fifteen years following every lead, collecting and collating information. That’s why I joined Interpol. That’s how I first became aware of Al Safah.”
“He knows you’re here, doesn’t he?”
“I’m counting on that, Inspector.”
“That’s why his operation continues: he wants you to follow him, so he can trap you.”
“I’m counting on that, too.”
“Then if he does exist, you’re a fool for playing right into his hands.”
“And what does that make you, sitting in the same car as I, on the same trail?” Faustin didn’t give Ben long enough to answer, even if he had meant to. “I am going to follow the girls in that car, wherever they are taken, until I find someone who can lead me to Al Safah. Don’t go outside or Al Safah will eat you—that’s what children are told every day all over the world. Well, I am going to make it safe for them to go outside again.” She paused longer this time. “You still don’t believe me, do you?”
“I believe by looking for a single man, it will be impossible for you to ever find what you seek. I believe you have already fallen into their trap.”
“And Al Safah?”
“A spook story. A distraction that works as a net to catch all those who venture too close,” Ben said, and looked across the seat at Faustin.
“Well, it looks like we’re getting close now, Inspector,” Faustin said, tensing a little. “Look.”
Before them, the Volvo had pulled off the road and halted near a black Mercedes. A single man emerged from each car and they conversed briefly. Then the two teenage girls were escorted from one backseat to another.
“All this because a woman called Interpol and claimed she had recognized Al Safah,” Ben said, focusing on the Mercedes now.
“A Palestinian woman, who called the Israeli and Palestinian police actually, to claim she had seen Al Safah in Jerusalem. But they wouldn’t listen, not even when she told them he had stolen her baby fifty years ago. And for her efforts, she was killed.”
Ben’s breath caught in his throat. “The woman who recognized Al Safah,” he stammered. “What was her name?”
“Taji,” Faustin replied, without missing a beat. “Ramira Taji.”
* * * *
CHAPTER 54
S
abi was waiting at the harbor when Danielle arrived in Haifa. It was a misty night and the docks were covered in a blanket of gray that left a wet sheen on the walkways.
As Danielle approached, she counted five men around the bulky figure of Sabi. She recognized two of them from the restaurant that afternoon. She
had never seen the other three before, but they stiffened at her approach, hands creeping inside their jackets.
Sabi edged away from them when she drew close and spoke quietly. “I’m glad you could make it, Pakad Danielle Barnea.”
“I’m glad you called,” Danielle said, taking a closer look at the three men, who had not stopped studying her.