A Walk Across the Sun (42 page)

She waited until the first group of dancers returned to the dressing room and a new wave emerged to take their place. She kissed Hanuman on the forehead and placed him back in her coat. Then she took the deepest breath of her life and cracked the access door.

She saw the profiles of male faces, lit by the reflected glow from the stage. All alike seemed enraptured by the performance. She glanced through the legs of the patrons toward the exit, but she couldn't see well enough to know if the door was guarded. She had to take the risk.

She pushed the door open wider. No one noticed her. She crawled out and looked toward the door. Her heart leaped. The exit was clear. A man at the nearest table glanced at her and stared. She ignored him and moved quickly toward the exit. No one blocked her way. She reached the door and pushed the lever. The latch disengaged. An alarm sounded as soon as she opened the door, but she didn't care.

She ran into the parking lot and headed for the nearby motel. She listened for footsteps behind her but heard nothing over the sound of the alarm. She threw open the door to the motel lobby and looked around wildly. The desk was unoccupied and a television blared from a room in the back. A sign above the desk read, RING BELL FOR SERVICE.

Sita rang the bell until a woman emerged. She had pale, unhealthy skin and wore a crew cut and a frown.

“What do you want?”

“Please help me,” Sita began, struggling to catch her breath. “The men at the club are holding me against my will. Please call the police.”

The woman looked at her strangely. “You're saying you're a prisoner or something?”

“Please help me. They'll try to find me.”

“Come on back,” she said, eyeing Sita carefully. “I'll call the cops.”

The woman showed Sita into the back room and left to make the phone call. Sita heard the lock on the door engage. She looked at the television and saw that the woman was watching a show about extraterrestrials. The room was filled with candy wrappers, pizza boxes, and potato chip bags.

She stood in the middle of the room, waiting. She had no idea what to expect from the police, but she was ready to trust anyone who would rescue her from Alexi and Igor and the threat of Dietrich.

Finally, the lock disengaged and the woman walked into the room, trailed by Alexi. Sita froze in shock when she saw her captor. She had been duped.

Alexi waved for the woman to leave them, and the woman nodded and closed the door.

Sita stood still while Alexi approached her. He shook his head from side to side with mock sadness. “I am disappointed in you, Sita,” he said. “I thought you learned your lesson from Dmitri.” He circled her and stood behind her, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Now you will understand the consequences.”

Suddenly, she felt a sharp pain at the base of her neck. She gasped and instantly felt light-headed. Her vision blurred and her consciousness retreated even as she fell to the ground.

She woke again in a chamber of darkness, her head spinning and aching at the same time. She blinked and saw stars. She blinked again and saw nothing. She reached out with her hand and touched metal. The surface was cold. She heard a sound in the distance—like wind or water, she couldn't tell. She listened carefully and heard a low rumble. As time passed, the rumble faded and disappeared.

Suddenly, she heard a popping sound and the roof of her chamber elevated ever so slightly. At once she understood. She was in the trunk of a car. She waited for someone to raise the lid of the trunk, but no one came. Seconds turned into a minute, then two. Finally, she summoned the courage to lift the lid herself.

She did so slowly, until she could see what was beyond the trunk. Across an expanse of black water was a vast city shining in the night. The lights shimmered on the surface of the water and reached up to the heavens, blocking out the stars.
New York
, she thought.

She pushed the lid of the trunk higher until she could look out the sides. There were lights all around her—the lights of shipyards, docks, and quays. She lifted the lid to its stop and glanced around. The car was at the end of an empty pier. She heard the sound of waves lapping against the pylons. The air was damp and cool. She tried to make sense of the moment. Why was she here? Where was Alexi?

She heard the sound of a man clearing his throat. It came from beside her. She jumped with fright and swiveled her head around. He was standing in the darkness, only two feet away. How he had appeared so silently, she had no idea.

He looked down at her, his expression as distant as the sky. “You know,” he said softly, “in Russia we would do things differently. In Russia, we would feed you to the fishes. But this is America, and you are worth too much to kill.”

He lifted his hand and showed her a rope connected to a net filled with large rocks.

“If you try to run again, I will give you to Igor. Then I will throw you in the river.”

He placed the net in the trunk beside her and closed the lid. The rocks carried the briny smell of saltwater. She pushed them away in fright and felt the vibrations of the engine as Alexi engaged the ignition. With a lurch, the car started off down the pier, back to the sex club.

The pain of her failure fell upon her like an avalanche. She had gambled and she had lost.
Again!
She felt something inside her give way. It was as if all the happiness she had known had vanished in an instant, leaving behind only the vaguest impression of a better day. She tried to picture Ahalya's face but could only make out traces of her shadow. Her sister was gone. The past no longer existed. This was her karma.

Sita rested her head on her hands and listened to the steady hum of the wheels on the surface of the road. It crossed her mind that there was a way out of the madness. For the first time since the waves came, she contemplated suicide. She allowed the thought only briefly, then chased it away with a surge of resolve. But the idea lingered in the corners of her mind.

She closed her eyes and tried not to think about what tomorrow would bring.

Chapter 25

The world is a mirror of infinite Beauty, yet no man sees it.
—T
HOMAS
T
RAHERNE

Paris, France

At six fifteen in the morning on the first day of March, Thomas took a taxi from his hotel in the Fifth to Gare Montparnasse to meet Julia as she had instructed. The taxi driver deposited him beside the glass terminus. He entered the station and saw Julia standing beside a ticket dispenser, holding an attaché case. Her red coat looked magenta in the amber light. She greeted him with a look that betrayed her nervousness. She handed him a ticket. He glanced at it and saw their destination—Quimper.

“A safe house in Brittany,” he said. “I never would have guessed.”

“That's only the first of the surprises,” she replied. “I'm crazy to be doing this.”

“Why
are
you doing this?” he asked, searching her face.

“I don't know.” At once she smiled, and her anxiety seemed to retreat. “I think you've inspired me. Are you hungry?”

“Starving.”

“I brought a couple of croissants.”

They walked through the lobby to the terminal. Six sleek silver-andblue TGV trains stood before them on parallel tracks. They took seats on metal benches and ate their croissants as the station swelled with departing passengers.

They boarded the train a few minutes before seven o'clock and found their compartment. Soon after, the train glided out of the station. It maintained a slow pace through the city and then accelerated dramatically when it reached the countryside.

Julia removed her laptop from her briefcase and then remembered something.

“I meant to tell you, our guy at the BRP finally heard from the embassy in Mumbai. It seems the CBI tried to contact the French police, but they were bogged down in red tape. The embassy people said it happens all the time. The CBI shared the intel they got from Navin, and the French police are working on tracking down his uncle. They also opened an inquiry into Navin's activities. They think he lives in France under a pseudonym.”

“It's amazing to me how criminals can be completely invisible to the authorities,” Thomas remarked. “The shadow world is just as extensive as the real world.”

“Everything is the same,” Julia confirmed, “except the rules of the game.” She opened her laptop and typed in a password. “You mind if I get some work done? I promised my boss I'd have a report on the Petroviches on his desk tomorrow morning.”

“Does he know what we're doing?”

Julia smiled conspiratorially. “I told him the BRP wants us in on the investigation, which is true. The Petroviches have probably already left the country, and our network is better than theirs. In exchange, I convinced our guy at the BRP that we would need access to the girls.”

“What about the people in Brittany?”

“I told them about Sita, and they're on board. They promised to be discreet.”

Thomas whistled. “That's impressive. I owe you one.”

“Yes, you do,” Julia replied. “But now I need to get some work done.”

“Be my guest,” he said, retrieving his own laptop from his backpack.

The night before, he had downloaded a few articles on human trafficking in Eastern Europe from the Justice Project's website. He wanted to arrive at the safe house at least minimally educated about the experience of the Petrovich girls. The stories reported in the press and in the academic journals horrified him. It seemed that the former Soviet bloc was hemorrhaging young women, many of whom were trafficked into the sex trade. The phenomenon was so thoroughly documented that the women were even given a name—the Natashas. They were from Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, and Russia. To the customers, however, they were all Russian.

After an hour of depressing reading, he walked to the café car, where he purchased an espresso and a sandwich. He returned to his seat and watched the passing landscape. In time, he opened up a new document on his laptop, thinking to type a few travel notes for Priya. It was a tradition they had started in their courtship and carried into marriage. But like everything else that had bound them together, it had been lost in the two-year whirlwind of the Wharton case.

He thought for a moment, fingers poised over the keyboard, and then he started to write. To his surprise, the words that came to him sounded more like verse than travelogue, but he figured that Priya, a lover of poetry, would like it better anyway.

On the TGV. The thrill of near flight. Fields out the window, overlooked by a quarter moon. A river of glass. Squat farmhouses, shutters half-open, half-closed. Outbuildings of stone brimming with hay. Garden plots, freshly hoed, ready to plant. Tallest sky, uncluttered, swimming in blue. Spring close at hand. Buds on a tree, then two, then half a glade. A shipyard by a wide river signaling the approach of the sea. A stallion cantering in an open field. Gulls in flight. Hills rising as we close in on Quimper. Then we are there.

They rented a car at the station and drove west into Brittany. Julia placed a call on her mobile and confirmed their appointment in French. Her nervousness returned when she dialed the number, but the man on the other end of the line seemed to have a calming effect on her. She hung up and took a deep breath.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Father Gérard is very kind. He's looking forward to meeting us.”

“Father? Is the safe house affiliated with the Church?”

“You'll see.”

Twenty minutes later, Julia turned off the road onto a pebbled driveway framed by stone walls and old-growth trees. They wound through a pasture rimmed with forest and came upon a wrought-iron gate with a guard post. The sentry checked their identification and waved them through. They entered a circular drive and stopped in front of a grand twelfth-century French château framed by manicured gardens.

“This is the safe house?” Thomas asked. “It's a mansion.”