Inhuman Trafficking

by Mike Papantonio

  The girl was even younger than Karina had imagined. “How old?” she asked.

  The question seemed to catch the American off guard, but then something approaching a small smile came over her face. “What’s today’s date?”

  It took Karina a few moments to remember. “I think twenty-two.”

  “The twenty-second,” the girl mused. “If you’re right, in two days, I’ll be sixteen.” And then she whispered, “Feels like seventy.”

  “Tak.”

  “What’s your story?”

  “Story?”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Came from Ukraine on H2B visa. Supposed to be one year. Vicky now try to extend for all of us. She say might be three year.”

  “Do you want to stay?”

  Karina shook her head. “Want home.”

  “Me too.” Her sad voice sounded like a little girl’s. “Do you have a phone?”

  “No phone.”

  “Can you borrow one from somebody at the strip club?”

  “They watch.” Karina pointed to a nearby security camera to make sure the girl understood what she was saying. “At club, eyes always watch.”

  “I need to call my mom. I need help.”

  Karina shrugged. For the likes of them, there was no help, and little hope, but she didn’t have the English to say that.

  “Where are we?”

  “Florida.”

  “Where in Florida?”

  The question wasn’t an easy one for Karina to answer. She couldn’t really say where the compound was. It wasn’t near any city she could name, but was off by itself on a private road.

  “Here I no know. But hotel I work in Destin. Strip club Panama City. Hour drive from here to each.”

  The American seemed excited by that news. “My mom’s house is outside Tallahassee. That’s like a three-hour drive from Panama City. She’ll help. She’s probably going crazy. I need to get ahold of her.”

  The girl looked expectantly—and beseechingly—at Karina. It was almost like Nataliya was looking at her.

  “Your eyes like Nataliya, best friend of me. She gone. Taken, I think. Don’t know where is now.”

  The girl was still looking at her, hoping she would agree to help. That made it hard for Karina to say no.

  The words came reluctantly out of her mouth. “I try help you.”

  Karina would have said more, but a loud voice yelled, “You!”

  Andrei had awakened from his nap and was angrily gesturing to the American. “Here! Now!”

  As big as Andrei was, the girl didn’t look intimidated by him. In her short time sitting with Karina, she seemed to have gotten some of the fight back into her. The American inhaled the last of the cigarette and then tossed the butt to the ground.

  Blowing out a plume of smoke, she said, “About time you woke up. Spare me your roid rage and give me my codeine.”

  “Not time yet,” Andrei said.

  “Is that so? Tell me that while you’re cleaning up my puke, because that’s what’s going to happen if I don’t get my dose.”

  The prospect of doing that kind of cleanup clearly didn’t appeal to Andrei. “Come here for pills.”

  As the girl got to her feet, Karina was treated to the green flash of her eyes. “Later, gator,” she said, and began walking away before stopping to turn around.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Karina. What yours?”

  One last glance, a glimpse of green, and a single word: “Lily.”

  IX

  Gina Romano came running into Deke’s office, waving her phone and interrupting a meeting he was having with Carol. “Sorry for the interruption, but this is something Deke needs to see. Social media is blowing up.”

  Holding her phone in front of Deke, Gina began playing a video. An African American woman wearing a platinum-blond wig and sunglasses was addressing a roomful of cameras and reporters.

  “I’ve always tried to be real with my fans,” the woman said. “But there was one period of my life I never talked about. I was just too ashamed. But the more I tried to put what happened behind me, the more it kept hurting. I couldn’t bottle it up no more. It had to come out. Chains is raw, and ugly, and real.”

  Reporters started yelling questions, and Gina paused the video. “Could we have asked for better timing?”

  Gina was one of the most talented lawyers at Bergman/Deketomis, but she was as mercurial as she was brilliant. For her, upsetting the apple cart sometimes wasn’t enough; blowing it up was more her style.

  Deke tried to understand Gina’s excitement. “What am I missing here?”

  “You know who’s doing the talking, right?”

  Deke shook his head.

  “It’s Storm!”

  Gina turned to Carol, who was also shaking her head in disbelief. Even though Carol was a few years older than Deke, she gave him her “you’ve got to be kidding” look.

  “All right, tell me who this Storm is, and tell me why you’re so excited.”

  Almost as if she were explaining to a child, Gina said, “Storm is the hottest hip hop singer on the planet, and at her press conference today, she came out and said she was sexually trafficked as a teenager. She was, and I quote, ‘Used, abused, bruised, and utterly confused,’ and peddled from one man to another at truck stops and motels. Storm said that what she endured wasn’t human trafficking, but inhuman trafficking.”

  “She said that?”

  “More than said it. She sang it on her single ‘Inhuman Trafficking.’ They even teased a couple of lyrics at the press conference. Her album Chains comes out next week. I’m all for beating the drums and making it our anthem for the trial.”

  “Tomorrow’s hearing suddenly got more interesting,” Deke said.

  “My thoughts exactly,” Gina said.

  The two lawyers were going to appear in federal court in Atlanta. When they had filed their human trafficking suit against Welcome Mat Hospitality earlier in the year, the media had been remarkably disinterested in reporting on what Deke called the “invisible epidemic.” With Storm’s new revelation, that would probably no longer be the case.

  Deke said, “Try to reach out to Storm’s people to see if she might be willing to talk to us. Short of that, try and determine if she has gone on record as saying she was trafficked at any of the Welcome Mat properties.”

  “Will do,” Gina said, and with a wave to the others hurried out of the office.

  Deke turned his attention back to Carol. “Let’s get back to Tío Leo.”

  “I wish we had better news, but he’s fallen off our radar. We know he doesn’t have any shortage of false identities, so he’s probably using a new name.”

  “I want to turn the heat up on him. Give me your best guess as to where he’s likely to be, and I’ll saturate the area with billboards that have his name and picture, and most of all, the promise of a reward for his capture.”

  “I’d target the corridor between Tallahassee and Jacksonville. That’s where he grew up, but there’s no guarantee that’s where he is. In the past six months, we know he’s done his trafficking from Mobile to Miami.”

  “Were the girls we freed able to tell us anything about Lily?”

  “The sixteen-year-old, a girl named Guadalupe, saw two big white guys carrying Lily out to a large van. She said Rodríguez was expecting them, and thinks he gave Lily enough drugs to be out of it. Guadalupe said the two men spoke English to Rodríguez, so she couldn’t understand what was being said, but judging by their accents, she said they weren’t Americans.”

  “She wasn’t more specific than that?”

  “Afraid not. Before coming to America, she’d never been out of her village.”

  “How long were the girls with Rodríguez?”

  “He’s been trafficking them for almost two months. They came into the country on a classic bait and switch, believing they’d be working as housekeepers. Rodríguez manipulated them through all kinds of threats and coercion.
They feared not only for their lives but the lives of their families. In fact, he had the girls convinced that he was a brujo—a male witch. Rodríguez cut a lock of hair from each of them and said that were they to cross him, he would use their hair to cast a spell on them, and they would waste away. I guess Lily wondered why the girls were so scared of Rodríguez. She only spoke a little Spanish, though, so it took her a while to figure out what was going on. Lily assured the girls that Tío Leo was full of bullshit—está lleno de mierda—which I guess was one of the few phrases she knew in Spanish. Guadalupe said Lily was protective of them.”

  “What’s the current status of the three girls?” Deke asked.

  “They want to go home, and the sooner the better.”

  “I would too,” Deke said.

  X

  “Stinking rednecks on table nine,” Oksana said. She spoke in English. Vicky didn’t like it when the girls spoke Ukrainian. “They think they should get hand jobs with their drinks.”

  Even though dawn was less than four hours away, the Pussy Cat Palace was still half full.

  Redneck. Before coming to Florida, Karina hadn’t known that word, and after hearing it for the first time, she asked her countrywomen what it meant. They told her that redneck pretty much meant the same thing as asshole, unless it was used in a joking way, in which case it meant “good old boy.” Karina hadn’t known what that was either, but had come to learn that good old boys weren’t typically good, or old, but neither were they complete assholes.

  “Mudak,” Oksana said, breaking Vicky’s rule about speaking Ukrainian.

  There was no question about the meaning of that. Mudak meant asshole in Ukrainian.

  Karina suspected Oksana was much more upset about getting a small tip than she was with the table’s suggestion that she be their very own sex toy. Since Vicky appropriated almost all their tip money anyway, Karina wondered why Oksana even cared. She ignored the other woman’s complaints. Karina knew if she agreed with Oksana, word would get back to Vicky of what she had said. Oksana was all about money, complaining, causing trouble, and tattling to Vicky. Behind her back, the other women called her “the vulture,” because she was always waiting for something bad to happen to someone else.

  The bartender finished making Karina’s drinks. After she put them on a tray and gathered cocktail napkins and straws, Karina went to deliver the cocktails to two men sitting at the tip rail at the club stage, or what the girls referred to as “pervert’s row.”

  Sofia was finishing up her set to a Cardi B song, moving up and down suggestively on the dance pole. The two men were staring at her, and ignored Karina as she delivered their drinks. It was just as well, she thought. The men were running a tab, which allowed her an easy escape. For once, she wasn’t required to smile and laugh and pretend what they said was clever.

  The Pussy Cat Palace was located on the outskirts of Panama City, which was halfway between Pensacola and Tallahassee. Karina had heard people refer to Panama City as the capital of the Redneck Riviera.

  Sofia finished with her gyrating, and her efforts were greeted with some applause. Karina was glad that she wouldn’t be dancing any more that night on the stage. Faking happiness, and feigning sexiness, wasn’t something she was good at. She had heard the men describe her performances as “McDance.” Karina didn’t know what they meant, but knew it wasn’t a compliment.

  “Last call,” announced the bar manager.

  The announcement was more for the dancers than it was for the patrons, a signal to hustle the customers not only for drinks, but for a last private dance. It was 3:30 a.m., and the city’s ordinance allowed alcohol to be sold until 4:00 a.m.

  Whenever last call was announced, the Pussy Cat Palace played the Donna Summer song “Last Dance.” There was no disco ball at the so-called gentlemen’s club, but the lighting system allowed for reflective lights to shimmer along the surface of the stage and the surrounding walls beyond. Now was the time for Karina and the other dancers to begin suggestively singing the song’s lyrics in the ears of their marks.

  As usual, Karina didn’t rush to participate in the frantic manhunt. If she was lucky, maybe the man she targeted would be content ending his night doing what Americans called a “dry hump” in one of the private rooms downstairs.

  By that time of night, most of the dancers were as tipsy as the patrons. Vicky allowed all the girls to run a bar tab. That was one of her traps. Much of the money the dancers made went to booze. It was just one of many ways in which Vicky controlled them. She was the company store for the girls to buy their “four Cs” of clothing, cosmetics, chocolate, and cigarettes. At the end of every month, Vicky sent money back to their families in Ukraine, but it never seemed to amount to much.

  The drinks were expensive, but they also seemed like a necessity. “Cope rhyme with hope.” That was what Nataliya would always say when she got buzzed. And after she made that declaration, a sad smile always came to her face, and she would add, “But it really don’t.”

  Karina could feel her own lips transforming into that same sad smile.

  By this time of night, Nataliya would always be shit-faced. That was a favorite expression of hers. “I need to get shit-faced,” she would say.

  Shit-faced, thought Karina. That was another strange American word. There were plenty of words for getting drunk in Ukrainian, but there was no equivalent to shit-faced. Still, Karina could understand Nataliya’s need to drink herself senseless.

  Karina wished her friend were here. None of the others even mentioned Nataliya’s name anymore. It was almost as if they were afraid to acknowledge her existence. They even seemed annoyed that Karina persisted in asking about Nataliya, and made it clear they thought she should leave things be. But that wasn’t something Karina could do. Only three months ago she had disappeared on a night just like this. Karina heard that Vicky had called her into the office to talk. And then she was never seen again. Without Nataliya around, Karina felt lonelier than ever.

  Over the speakers, Donna Summer sang her last dance anthem.

  Most of the dancers had already disappeared downstairs. By now they were settling into a small room with their john for a so-called private dance. Karina continued to put off finding a mark. She didn’t want to abandon the memory of Nataliya; this was her chance to spend time with her once more.

  Seeing the American earlier in the day had brought back all sorts of memories. It wasn’t only that they had the same eyes. At her core, Karina sensed that the American was feisty like Nataliya. Now that she was coming off the drugs, Karina suspected the girl’s spirit would begin to show itself more and more.

  Lily had said some man had sold her. If that was true, it must have been Vicky who had bought her. But why? Vicky’s only motivation was money. How could she profit from Lily? They were bringing good food to the American and weaning her off drugs. Vicky wanted her out in the sun, to look fit and healthy. There had to be a reason for that, even if Karina didn’t yet know why.

  The American wanted her help, but Karina knew that sticking out her neck could be dangerous. Still, maybe she could do something for her. But Karina didn’t have a cell phone. Vicky had taken all their cell phones away when they’d arrived in America. She said it was for their safekeeping, but everyone knew better. Once a month, Vicky allowed them to make calls back home. There was a script they had to follow, and Vicky listened in on what was being said. Deviating from what was allowed meant suspension of future phone privileges, so they willingly spoke in lies, that they might hear the voices of their loved ones.

  Before Nataliya had disappeared, she had discovered a secret way in which they might make a call. The two of them had even discussed calling the police, but they were too afraid because Vicky frequently dropped hints that she had friends in law enforcement who looked out for her. They were scared of the authorities and knew of no one else who might help them.

  The lights continued to flash, and the disco beat went on. Disco had come and gone before she
was born, thought Karina. It was supposed to be long dead, but its ghost continued to haunt all these years later. In the absence of Nataliya, and in the presence of all these mudaky, she couldn’t help but feel lost.

  As Donna Summer sang, Karina wondered if the singer was still alive. She seemed to recall that the Queen of Disco was now dead, but her song still played in this room of despair. It hadn’t seemed so bad when Nataliya was there, though. Sometimes the two of them danced to this song. Usually Nataliya would be drunk and would yell out, “Last dance, Karina!”

  They didn’t dance for the men, offering them some parody of sex in the hopes of payment. They danced for fun. When the song ended, they would usually go in search of a man to go downstairs, but not always. Sometimes Nataliya would insist that the two of them just keep dancing. Each of them wanted to think that the choice of who they shared their bodies with was their own. But was that ever really the case?

  “Last dance, Nataliya,” she whispered.

  XI

  Those who worked late at the Pussy Cat Palace were allowed to sleep until midmorning. The workers were shuttled to the hotel in two shifts, morning and afternoon. From there, workers were normally either taken back to the compound or to the Pussy Cat Palace.

  A bell rang, calling to those sleeping. The women were slow to appear, and the bell was rung more vigorously until everyone assembled in the open area. Yawning and grumbling, they waited on the day’s announcements.

  “Change of plans for some of you today,” Timofy announced. “There’s a strip trip going out an hour before sunset.”

  Shit, Karina thought. She had never learned to swim and was uncomfortable being on a boat. She didn’t like the conditions, or the lack of security. At least there was a bouncer and manager at the Pussy Cat Palace. On Vicky’s party boat there was only a crew of two, the captain and his first mate. Both men stayed in the wheelhouse and put no limitations on the partying. Karina had heard stories that in addition to doing Vicky’s booze cruises, the crew was also involved in human trafficking. If that was true, she wouldn’t be surprised.