Marcel called again a week later. He was preparing to fly to Saint Petersburg, he said, and wanted me to pick him up at the airport. I told him that was impossible, that he had to stay home with his therapy and let nature heal him slowly while he rested. We had a ferocious argument, then, which ended when Marcel reminded me there was really nothing I could do to prevent him from flying here. The only question was, did I want him to contact me while he went to visit the FSB? That settled it. I would collect him from Pulkovo airport at nine tomorrow night. There was just no arguing with him. Besides, I had done everything I could think of to do and was still nowhere. Maybe he could help.
Essine lived with her boyfriend in a one-bedroom flat. It wasn’t a nice place: she had no connection with the government so she lived like 99% of Russians, meaning apartments were always old, run-down, too-small, and overpriced times three. I surfed the sofa, which made into a double bed. Thoughts of Marcel occupying the other half all but ruined my day. But it was likely to happen, so I bucked up. We would do whatever it took.
Essine told me a bit about herself. She was thirty-one, divorced, no kids, and worked at an office supply store running the copiers for its customers. They did custom copying and binding and she was responsible for all of that. Her boyfriend was Dukvakha Hamidov, whom she called “Ducky.” Ducky was a Chechen transplant who, I imagined, was making firebombs in the basement of the building but, when I actually got down there at his invitation I discovered he really was building wooden baby beds for newborns. Handcrafted baby beds—apparently very popular in Saint Petersburg.
Marcel arrived the following night just after seven. His flight was late due to area thunderstorms. But there was no hurry left inside me as I waited in the gate area. Then Marcel came walking into the arrivals hall, looking twenty pounds lighter but grinning ear-to-ear when he saw me.
We did a man-hug and I wrested his pull-along away from him. He was already exhausted and I didn’t want him having to deal with his bag. Outside was a long line of Lada taxis. We got the next in line and headed for Essine’s flat. Marcel would join me with Verona’s niece and Ducky. On the taxi ride, I brought him up to date on my efforts. He didn’t say much about my time there. Plus, he asked no questions about my visits to the Big House, which told me what I already knew: I was being jerked around by the FSB. They had no reason to cooperate with a U.S. citizen and went out of their way to ignore me. But, Marcel said he had his methods and that it was time for me to let him take over. He promised me we’d know tomorrow where Verona was being held. We’d also be allowed to visit with her. I could’ve hugged him again.
It was great to have my muscle with me.
Chapter 27: Chloe Constance
A week passed. Reno started bringing men for Chloe. He tried to convince her she had always liked a variety of husbands that weren’t her own. It made him very happy to see her with them, and he made movies of them and got money for the film. His films were MILF movies, and she would be the MILF. He told her she was helping to support them, and it might take away the pressure to sell quilts, especially since Chloe couldn’t remember how to sew. With his trust fund and the movie money, they could finally get that computer they wanted.
At first, Chloe refused, but Maddy said she would do it for her. She made it out to be as if she was helpful, but Chloe knew it was for selfish reasons. Maddy enjoyed the sex, enjoyed the different partners, the alcohol and, at times, drugs they would bring in with them. It was one big party Chloe wanted no part of, so she set Maddy to it.
Who was she before? Honestly, she didn’t know, but most days she was sure the woman in the diary was not her, not since the stuff with all these men began. But she had nothing to compare it to since she had no memories of what was in the diary. She had read a stranger's journal for all she knew. She had become an eavesdropper.
The days were long on movie days, but those were only on Sundays when the local studios were shut down for the day, and the crews came to their house on their days off. Afterward, they served ham sandwiches and egg salad sandwiches, and everyone ate and laughed. It was rather fun and light. It was probably good for her to have other people around. Then they would say goodnight, and she would go to her bathroom and bathe, sometimes for an hour until the hot water ran out.
Then there was the day Reno forced her to make a porno with two dirty old men. It would be a laugh; he kept saying. He badgered until she relented and Maddy took over. Reno had gone to the local theater group for these men. They were both guys who had only been able to get grandfather roles in the plays put on by their theater group. Reno told her the old guys were at first put-off by the whole idea of making a porno film, but they jumped at the chance to make five-hundred a day fucking Chloe.
Well, she’d put up with that crap all weekend—two solid days of old farts chewing Viagra like M&Ms. She vowed when it was over not to give into Maddy again.
But the truth was, she struggled to keep her thoughts her thoughts. Maddy sometimes insisted on having her way. As it happened, Chloe would agree and sometimes went away. That's when she would wake up with a strange man beside her, telling her how wonderful she was. Or how she was the best he'd ever had.
Sometimes there would be two men.
Maddy was insatiable. Chloe hated her for it, but Reno was happy.
It was difficult being a good wife. There were days when she thought about running away. But Chloe remembered the accident, remembered what happened before.
So she didn’t run.
She gave in to Reno, gave in to Maddy, and gave up on herself.
Chapter 28: Chloe Constance
Reno was back home, but the door to his bedroom had been closed when Chloe had used the bathroom. Chloe could hear a female talking and laughing inside his room. Whatever. She crept back down the hall to her room where she locked the door and climbed back into bed.
It felt like she’d had only been asleep moments when Maddy shook her awake. Do something, she commanded. Chloe rolled over and checked the clock on the nightstand: 2:14 a.m. Then she heard it—the sound of crying again, a woman, or women, maybe three, maybe more.
Their voices were youthful. They spoke through the walls in a foreign language, one she didn’t recognize. Then the sound grew angry; a man’s voice—not her husband’s—shouted down the female voices. Then she heard Reno—loud, commanding. He sounded terribly angry. He had sounded that way when he caught her in the hallway and hurt her wrist when she was looking inside his office. It made her stomach clench just to hear him like this. She felt nauseous, fearful she might vomit. Then someone was slapped, and a sharp scream pierced the wall and then more crying.
She rolled over in bed and pulled her pillow over her ears. It muffled the sound a little, but she could still hear the voices, the weeping. Minutes passed. House doors slammed, car doors slammed, and engines started up outside in the driveway. Then at the front door of the house, there was the sound of more frightened female voices coming inside. They passed right outside her bedroom door, down the hallway, into the room where the other girls were kept: the spare room next to her own. Cries of familiarity erupted, joy and happiness mixed with crying and anguish. She pulled her pillow away from her head and listened. Some good sounds, some bad sounds, all mixed.
But they didn’t last. The voices of two men shouted commands to the girls in that foreign language again, followed by howls of distress and more anger from the men. As the anger flooded the walls again, she heard slaps and thuds and then more crying followed by the sound of muted weeping. But no more angry voices, neither male nor female.
When the house was quiet, Chloe gathered food from the kitchen and stole down the hallway to the girls’ room. She snuck in and passed around bread and ham slices. While they were wolfing it down, one of the girls who knew some English told Chloe her story.
Chapter 29: Michael Gresham
A week later we still had no word out of the Saint Petersburg FSB. Verona was still being held, nobody seemed to know where. M
arcel had made a contact at the Big House, the FSB, a woman he’d known from his days at Interpol. They had lunch and she remembered how much she liked him. She’d agreed to go back to the office and look for Verona Gresham on her computer. But when Marcel called her that night, she was just as puzzled as we were.
“She doesn’t exist in our computers,” said the FSB clerk, whose name was Darya.
“Is there a terrorist investigator you might be able to ask?”
“No. I’m just a clerk here, Marcel. Nobody can know I’m looking for a specific individual.”
“What’s your job there?”
“I supervise database entries. All events, people, places, items, dates—I do them.”
“And your database contains no Verona, no Gresham, no Verona Sakharov?”
“None of those searches return data.”
“Is there some place else I should look?”
“Not that—wait. If your friend suffered from a medical problem, she might be in a hospital or convalescent center.”
“That sounds way humane for Russia. Seriously? Russian FSB would take a prisoner to the hospital?”
“Please think of it like this. If the prisoner is someone we need something from, then, yes, they would get medical care. But if they have no useful information, not so. They would remain in jail and either get well or die there. The system is very pragmatic. But also very Russian.”
“I can see that,” Marcel said. “Now, how do I check hospitals? Is there a database for that in FSB?”
“No. You would need to go to the hospitals directly.”
“All right, Darya. Thank you. I owe you big.”
“You have friends at Interpol. I just might take you up on your offer when I need something.”
“I’ll be there for you. Thanks again.”
Marcel hung up. The phone had been on speaker. Essine, Ducky, and I heard the whole thing.
“Well?” I said to Marcel.
“Tomorrow we begin with the hospitals. Have you noticed how much like the Chloe case this is? We’re back to looking for a missing person by contacting hospitals?”
“This is nothing like the Chloe case, Marcel. This is my wife, not the wife of a client.”
“This is my aunt,” said Essine.
Marcel smiled. “Consider me corrected.”
I added, “But yes, the investigation is much the same. One thing I wonder. If she’s in a hospital, wouldn’t they allow her to contact me?”
“Only if she wasn’t being held there by the FSB,” Essine said. “I know this from the newspapers.”
Marcel coaxed the couch into becoming a bed just after nightfall. He was tired from the flight and jet-lagged, he said. I turned on the TV without sound and lay next to him in the bed. He was off and snoring within minutes. I loved that man and would do anything for him. But my feelings were mixed. One part of me wished he’d stayed home and recuperated. But another part of me was extremely grateful he’d come.
I fell asleep at nine, just as Marcel was getting up to use the restroom. Minutes later, I came awake. Marcel was throwing up in the bathroom. He had the water running, maybe to disguise his distress, I didn’t know.
He wasn’t better, he was sick. I knew it wouldn’t do to have an ex-Interpol agent come down sick and need medical care in Russia. It became my goal to pry him loose from Verona’s plight and send him home.
If only I had the right words.
But with Marcel there wasn’t enough words. There was only his loyalty.
Chapter 30: Chloe Constance
Chloe listened to the young English speaker’s story. The girl said her name was Trang Anh Nguyen. She was twelve years old. Trang admitted she still slept with a teddy bear. The bear had traversed the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean to make it to San Diego and then on to St. Louis. From St. Louis, it had come east to Alton for an overnight change of trucks. While the changeover was underway, they herded the human cargo into Reno Rivera’s house and bedded down for the night on sheets of cardboard and newspapers. Trang Anh still had on her jacket, which was serving as her only protection against the chill in the house.
Chloe listened to the short history and watched the girls eat. Trang ate with the rest of them, swallowing large chunks of bread and ham without chewing. They were all ravenous.
As Chloe watched, Trang crawled between her aunt and the wall and closed her eyes. After twenty minutes of tossing and turning, however, she gave it up and instead took to making up stories about what she dreamed of in Vietnam. In the stories, her father was wealthy and owned three oxen and a flock of geese. They had left behind the old thatched home for one made of wood. Stone floors protected the family’s feet from the mud beneath, formed from the rice paddy overflow during the monsoons. They ate fresh fish and warm rice every day and had their choice of attending school or, like their mother, working in the rice paddies. No other family had ever been so wealthy, not that Trang Anh had ever heard about.
But the real truth of her life? The girl could only tell bits and pieces. She was stressed and cried when she went into much detail.
Chloe visited Trang and the other girls the next several nights. They needed food, and they were dying for water. The assholes weren’t giving them water to drink all day.
She could kill Reno and his number two, a brother named Niles.
It was an appealing idea.
Chapter 31: Chloe Constance
Trang was one of those bound for Chicago. She heard Reno and Niles discussing a motel up there. They would take the girls straight to the motel, put three in each room, and then start, as they said, “pushing ass on Michigan Avenue.”
She understood now why the girls were being beaten and assaulted by the driver and his assistant.
At three-thirty in the morning, Chloe opened their bedroom door. Into their room she crept, bringing with her smoked ham, bread, and one sharp knife. She sat down in the middle of the girls and made sandwiches. There was nothing on the bread except the ham, but the girls chewed and chewed without a word, giving off low moans of pleasure as their bellies filled. Seconds were requested and provided.
During all this, they exchanged no words. But she looked into the frightened eyes of Trang Anh and smiled at her without a word. Trang Anh tried to smile back, but her mouth was swollen where Reno had backhanded her when she’d resisted. He had claimed her and marked her—a boundary violation that cruel men used all too well to make women cower. Strike first, strike hard, and take what you wanted. That was the world in which Trang Anh now found herself.
Chloe saw the hurt in the child’s eyes and reached out a hand to touch her on the side of the face. The girl flinched and pulled away. Chloe understood and didn’t repeat her trying to give solace. Instead, she made another sandwich, wrapped it inside a paper towel, and passed it to the girl. That would mean so much more to her than a touch, anyway.
Then she whispered to Trang Anh, “I won’t forget you, never. I will come for you again. Never forget me and never give up hope, for I am coming again to set you free.”
She heard voices coming from the other end of the hallway, so she leaped to her feet and crept back to her room. She still had the ham and the bread with her when she climbed back under her covers. She hid the food under her bed. She would return it to the refrigerator in the morning when she made breakfast for Reno and the drivers.
Then all was still. She fell back asleep.
And then Trang went away. Just after daylight, she heard vehicle doors opening and closing in the driveway. She ran to her small window and looked out. Craning her head far to the left, she could look back over to the right. There were the women—girls being loaded into two white vans that had a logo for carpet cleaning along their sides. Identical signage. Then the vans backed out, turned to the left, and were gone. Just like that.
She opened her door and crept down to the bathroom they had told her to use. She switched on the light and found drawers open in the vanity, water spilled everywhere on t
he floor, and feces floating in her toilet. The toilet was overflowing, and small pieces of feces fell onto the floor bit by bit. She recoiled, but it was too late. Her feet were in it, and there was no backing out, not without tracking it on the hallway carpet.
Which was when she heard Reno’s voice behind her. She turned and found him holding a plumber’s helper. He extended it to her.
“Clean it up in here,” he said, expressionless.
“What happened?” she murmured. “Who was here?”
“That would be none of your concern, my flower,” he said with a smile. “Just some people passing through.”
“It was girls.”
“Yes, there were girls here.”
“But there was crying.”
A stolid look crossed his face. He was scowling. “How much did you hear?”
“Crying, words I didn’t understand. A foreign language.”
“Yes, these were some guests passing through. I’m sorry to leave you with this mess in the bathroom, but they were in a hurry not to be late at the airport.”
She didn’t tell him what she had done upon hearing their cries. Instead, she acted as if nothing had happened.
“Where were they going?”
“My, aren’t we the inquisitive little toadstool this morning?”
She stared at him. “So which am I, a flower or a toadstool?”
He only looked at her. The irony didn’t register. His eyes said he was far away, not thinking about her. So she dropped it.
“I’ll get this cleaned up,” she said, “but then I want to get out of the house.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know. To a restaurant for breakfast.”
The Fifth Justice (Michael Gresham Legal Thrillers Book 10) Page 12