Slave Girl (13 page)

And at the top of the pile were ‘the Yugoslavs’ – the group of pimps Sally had warned me about on my very first night in Holland. They weren’t, in fact, all from Yugoslavia – or whatever was left of it by then; they were a small group – some Serbs, some Croatians, some Albanians – all of whom had been involved in organised crime in the Balkans before, during and after the civil wars that had smashed Yugoslavia into pieces. And in Amsterdam they weren’t just pimps. All had expanded into what you might call ‘complementary’ lines of business. The Albanians tended to be hired by other groups as ‘rent-a-muscle’ – brutal, violent enforcers who would cut or kill you if you broke the rules.

The others had business interests throughout the Red Light District: porno shops, brothels and – above all – drugs. Some of them ran hash cafés – outwardly respectable (at least by the standards of the area) and catering to the hordes of tourists seeking a quick drug thrill in ‘safe’ surroundings. But behind these public fronts they also supplied the essential commodity that kept women like me trapped in our glass prisons: cocaine.

‘Coke’, ‘Charlie’, ‘Toot’, ‘Stuff’ – call it what you like, it was everywhere. Sally did a line as soon as she got up in the morning and kept snorting it throughout the day. She said it helped her get through the pain: ‘I don’t know what I’d do without my stuff. It sort of numbs my mind and gives me the strength to do the punters. I don’t know how you do them without it.’

But, of course, I didn’t do them without it. Not by then. I’d fallen – in fact I’d fallen all too quickly.

On the second day in the window, Sally had said, ‘Just a line, just a little line. Just to take the edge off.’ And I’d thought, ‘Yeah, just a little line, just this once. Get me through the next punter.’ And so it did. Took the edge away and helped me service the next faceless, walking penis that rented my body. But then it helped with the one that followed, and the one after that, all the way up to the last one of the day. And that was me hooked.

The thing about coke – that sort of coke, anyway – is that you don’t get addicted in the way you do to heroin, say; a physical dependency in which your body becomes reliant on the drug just to keep functioning in any way normally. Coke worked differently, for me at least.

From the first line of powder that went up my nostrils I felt like I’d been plugged into a sort of mental
battery-charger
. I felt stronger and more confident, and I looked out at the world with a sort of ‘fuck you’ attitude that made it easier not to think about the punters and what they were doing to me. I think I even stopped feeling it when they pushed themselves inside me. That’s what was so addictive about it: the power it gave me to switch off my senses. And soon I was relying on it more and more. Of course you can’t snort that much coke without getting so hyper that you’re bouncing off the walls. That’s where the hash came in. Too high? Get a load of this and bring yourself down a bit. Oh – too low now? Another little line sorts that out. Each day, every day, the same tawdry, sordid routine: ‘Mr Charlie’ and a bit of the old ‘Bob Hope’ – Sarah’s little helpers.

There’s a price to pay, of course. Your nose runs constantly, your eyes are bloodshot, you lose weight just as you lose interest in eating. Within a few weeks I looked like shit. Not that the punters ever gave a damn; just made me look even younger, I suppose.

But that wasn’t the only price. All that coke and hash had to be paid for. Nothing’s ever for free – and certainly not in the Rosse Buurt. Sure, there are plenty of people ready, willing and able to ‘sort you out’ – but they don’t do it out of charity. It was the Yugoslavs who made it all run smoothly. They dealt coke to the hookers just as happily as they sold hash and marijuana to the tourists. And of course – this being Amsterdam – they had it all organised to the hilt.

We called them ‘running boys’: lads – young lads, generally, none of them more than teenagers. They provided a regular service to the girls stuck in the windows, bringing round fresh supplies of tissues and condoms. And with them, the drugs: coke and hash constantly on tap. Just to take the edge off, of course.

How did we pay? If we’d got tips that Reece didn’t know about we’d use them. Some of them also gave us credit, letting us run up a tidy bill before turning up and demanding instant payment. Sometimes a blow-job or a quick fuck in the back room would wipe the slate clean. If not, we knew they’d look to Reece to pay off the tab. And that, in turn, meant a beating. But even that didn’t stop us; nothing mattered more than getting hold of our stuff.

And then one night everything changed. I was sold.

T
here were three of them at the table. Three big men, burly with shaven heads and leather coats, talking intently while drinking espresso and smoking. It was a drug café, but they weren’t smoking hash: a packet of ordinary cigarettes – Marlboro Reds – was on the table between them. It’s strange what you notice when you’re scared.

They looked up as I walked in. One of them pointed at a table next to theirs.

‘Sit. Wait.’

Then he turned back to his companions and resumed their conversation. I sat, and I waited.

It was around eight o’clock in the evening when the running boy had come for me. I had been working for Reece for about a month – I think. By then I had lost all track of days or weeks, lost in a private hell where my only real interest was in the next line of coke or the next comforting hit of hash.

I had lost all connection with the world I used to know, the normal world of friends and family. From time to time, thoughts of my mum would suddenly pierce the fog of my dazed state and I would be racked by sharp pangs of terrible sadness.

I was supposed to have phoned her within a few days of arriving in Holland; she had no way of contacting me, no idea where I was supposed to be living or working and must have been out of her mind with worry. But I was powerless to do anything about it – and another line or a few hits on a joint would soon muffle the pain.

Sally and I were finishing our shift when the running boy arrived. We knew him well from the regular deliveries of condoms, tissues and drugs he brought to our window, but it was unusual to see him at the end of our working day. He pointed at me.

‘You come with me. Gregor want you. It’s okay. John Reece know this and say okay. Come now.’

I looked at Sally; she shrugged. Neither of us knew what was going on, but then again neither of us really cared that much by then either. We were just lumps of meat to be moved around at the pleasure of men; the running boy was just another man. And so I followed him out into the night.

We made our way through the maze of alleys and up alongside one of the canals, picking our way along the dirty street under the rival glow of street lamps and the ever-present neon lights. Neither of us spoke. I’d rarely been allowed to walk anywhere without Sally or Reece beside me, close enough to grab hold of me if I looked like making a break for freedom. But even though this running boy kept his distance and gave me enough space to have made a run for it, the thought of escape never crossed my mind. Not all prisons have bars and walls – some are in the mind.

We stopped outside a drug café and the boy gestured me inside. I pushed open the heavy door. The three heavy-set men were the only people inside. I sat there while they finished whatever business they were conducting, toying with the ‘skins’ (cigarette papers) neatly stacked in a little glass, ready for customers to roll up their joints. Eventually, one of the men got up and left; the other two turned and looked at me.

They were both much older than me: the bigger of the two was in his late thirties; the older one mid-forties. It was somehow instantly clear that he was the boss. He had a heavy east-European accent but spoke English well, if brusquely – evidently indifferent to anything I might have to say.

‘You belong to me now. Your friend Mr Reece failed to make the payments on a little business deal between us. I am taking you instead of that payment. Reece has been helped to understand this.

‘I am Gregor. This is my café. And this –’ he pointed to the younger, heavier-set man – ‘is Pavlov.
9
. He will help you also understand our way of working.’

One quick look at Pavlov was enough to convince me that I wouldn’t need – or want – much in the way of his ‘help’. He was around 6’2”, with a broad, muscular body. I could see the butt of a gun poking out from inside his leather coat. But it was his eyes that were the worst: set deep beneath his shaven head, they were vicious and hard, and it felt as if he was staring right through me. I may have been half-stupefied with drugs but I wasn’t so far gone that I couldn’t recognise evil.

Gregor and Pavlov finished their coffee, ground out their Marlboros, and the three of us walked calmly out of the café. There was a blue van parked around the corner. Pavlov opened the doors and pushed me in the back, then he fired up the engine and set off up the street. Looking back, it seems a surreal moment. I had just been bought and sold – a living, breathing human being traded in settlement of a debt like a car or a piece of property – and yet it had seemed completely normal. Such was ‘life’ in the Rosse Buurt.

I could see that we were heading out of the Red Light District itself and into the anonymous inner-city industrial district that surrounds it. We pulled up at a tall, gloomy warehouse. Wordlessly, Pavlov pulled me out of the van and in through a heavy iron door. As soon as I stepped inside I heard them: a vicious, deep and feral howling – the sound of huge animals, angry and eager to get at this intruder in their territory.

And then I saw them: two muscular, brindle-coloured dogs – each about two feet tall – with dark, slobbering jaws and hard piggy eyes. When they registered the sight of me, as well as my smell, their howls dropped to a guttural and terrifying growling. A barked command from Gregor and they fell silent; but I could still hear them panting and could smell the rank odour of their breath.

I was led – Pavlov in front, Gregor behind – up a bare wooden staircase to a narrow corridor lit by a single bare bulb. We stopped at a wooden door on the left. Pavlov unlocked a solid padlock and drew a pair of rusted iron bolts. I barely had time to register that these were on the outside before he pushed me inside and slammed the door behind me.

Two girls sat on a single grubby mattress, jammed up against the wall on the other side of the room. They were young, probably my age, and wearing dirty T-shirts over scruffy jeans. As I stumbled in, they looked up, assessed me briefly and then turned away and slouched back against the wall, seemingly indifferent to my presence. I stumbled across and sat down heavily next to them. For what seemed like an age we sat there in silence. Finally, one or other of us broke the ice and began the slow process of communication, testing each other out to see how much it would be safe to give away.

It turned out that they were from Czechoslovakia. Both had been trafficked from Prague and sold to Gregor by the gang that brought them to Amsterdam. They were friendly enough, spoke English quite well and – although plainly scared out of their wits by Pavlov – eventually filled me in on my new ‘employer’.

Gregor – he never had another name that I ever discovered – was one of the Mr Bigs of the sex business in Amsterdam. He was Yugoslavian – a pimp, a pornographer and a major drug dealer. He owned the hash café where I had been taken and used it as the base for all his operations. It was, the Czech girls told me, not too far from a police station, yet no policemen ever set foot in it. Gregor was, apparently, very well connected.