Slave Girl (17 page)

She arrived in our sleeping room one night, scared out of her wits and barely able to speak more than a word or two of English. The next morning she was pushed into the blue van and driven to the District with the rest of us. Her window was next to mine.

I saw in Par something of what I had been all those distant months ago when Reece and Sally had first brought me here. I tried, as best as I could given my need for drugs, to help her as Sally had helped me. But it was no good: she couldn’t get used to standing half-naked in a window as a greedy or indifferent world of people passed by. She earned a little – but nowhere near enough. And at the end of the week Gregor came round with the dogs on big heavy chains.

I knew something was up pretty much straightaway. It was early – a few hours off finishing time – and Gregor never let us finish early. But he came up and told Par she was done for the night. I didn’t have a punter at the time and so I’d been trying to talk to her. He looked at me and told me to come along too. Usually the blue van would be waiting for us, but that night it wasn’t there. Gregor made Par and I walk through the alleys and on to a little street beside one of the canals. Then we kept going, out of the District and on into an area with derelict warehouses.

As we talked he kept the dogs next to us. I could feel their hot wet breath on my skin and see their horrible eyes staring at us as they caught the reflection of an occasional light on the street. Gregor stopped and turned to us.

‘How much you done today? Show me. Give me money now.’

I was wearing a pair of high-heeled boots. I’d tucked the roll of money down the side. I pulled it out and handed it to Gregor; he felt its weight, expertly estimating how many guilders I’d earned him. He grunted.

Par pulled out a sad little pile of notes from somewhere and gave it to Gregor. He went mad.

‘What you fucking do all day? You fucking sit and talk, not do business. You no good. No fucking good.’

And then he pulled on the dog’s chains and gestured at us to start walking again. After a few minutes he grabbed our arms and threw us roughly through a door into the blackness of what felt like a huge industrial space.

Then someone threw a switch and there were lights suddenly blinding us. When my eyes adjusted I could see that we were in a warehouse, empty except for a bed covered in some kind of shiny black material. There were video cameras with little red lights on them. And there were two huge men, naked to the waist but with solid metal chains across their chests.

Par and I were pushed into the light. Someone – was it Gregor? – ordered us to take our clothes off. When we did so the men came up behind us and grabbed us roughly. One of them hit me in the face, pushed me down and began fucking me. I sent my mind into the same space I used with punters and switched off, waiting for it to be over. Then the fucking stopped and I was grabbed by a hard, rough hand. It grabbed my face and twisted my head round. Par was in front of me with the other guy. She was rigid with fear, her eyes wide and staring at me wildly. The man holding her had a gun.

Oh, God. Not this again. Not another Russian Roulette.

But it wasn’t. Not this time. Instead of handing the gun to Par or to me, the man quickly brought it up to her head. And pulled the trigger.

I’ll never forget the noise: it’s not like the popping sound you hear in the films or on television. It was a huge, deafening roar that drowned out everything around me and seemed to suck me in. But that sound – awful as it was – came a split second later. My eyes saw the shot first.

Par’s face just exploded. I stood and I watched as the bullet literally took half her head off her shoulders. And then, just as the noise registered in my ears, she dropped to the floor beside my feet. I wanted to scream, but although my mouth opened, my throat was constricted with terror. I couldn’t make a sound. And then I saw the little red lights on the cameras and heard the soft grinding of the tapes in the machines and I realised that Par’s killing was being filmed.

I’d heard of snuff porn
13
– all of us girls had. Whenever someone disappeared from the windows, rumours used to go around about her being used in a snuff film. But none of us really believed it happened; snuff films were just a sort of ‘collective bogeyman’ – another way of playing with our heads to keep us compliant and working hard in our windows. I believed it now.

Gregor’s voice came to me from out of darkness.

‘You learn lesson. She no fucking good – no get enough money. Now I sell tape for millions; that way she earn money for me. You work hard, or same for you.’

And that was when I knew: I had to escape.

E
scape. The word hammered into my brain. Day and night, stoned or straight, suddenly I had something in my life more potent than drugs: the determination to escape. It was only a little light – miles away and at the end of a long dark road – but it was a light nonetheless and I knew I had to find a way towards it.

But how? In the days and weeks that followed Par’s death – her murder – Gregor and Pavlov seemed to keep me constantly in their sight. Even when they weren’t physically around me I knew that they – or one of their men – would be nearby, keeping a close eye out, watching for any sign that I might try to run.

It didn’t help that rumours of the special police squad were getting stronger. And they weren’t just rumours. I’d had a couple of strange people – one man, one woman – come to my window, trying to get me to talk to them. The man called himself Leon; the woman said her name was Helène. They looked young and tough, dressed in casual street clothes, and I was instantly suspicious of them. I was sure they were
agents provocateurs
– another of Gregor’s little tests for his girls.

It was Leon who made most of the running. He hung around my window a couple of times, peering up at me intently as if my face was familiar. I’d largely stopped bothering to look at the punters who I serviced – what did it matter what they looked like? – but I didn’t think I recognised him.

The third time he came upstairs and told me he was a cop, working on a special team from outside of the District. I wasn’t going to fall for that – pretending to be a policeman from a station halfway across the city was a classic ploy by Gregor’s men. I told him to get lost. But he handed me some money and said he didn’t want sex – just to talk.

‘I want to tell you a story. Because the word going round town is about a young English girl who was brought over to Amsterdam by a conman. The story says that she was an innocent young girl, a good girl, who thought she was coming here to be a nursery nurse. But that didn’t happen. The man who tricked her made her work as a prostitute somewhere else in Holland; then she was passed on to another man. Now, do you know anyone like that?’

He looked at me steadily and straight and kept prompting me to say something. But I wouldn’t open my mouth, wouldn’t say a word. How could he have known all this? I’d certainly told my story to other girls who worked in the district – dozens of them, I suppose. Had one of them said something? Surely no one would be stupid enough to talk to the police – and anyway, why would they tell anyone about me?

No, it didn’t add up. This was no real policeman; this was one of Gregor’s stooges, trying to set me up and test me. That’s how he knew about the young English girl tricked into prostitution. And a determination burned into my brain: don’t trust him – or you’ll end up just like Par.

But oh, how I wanted to believe he was a real policeman. I wanted him to be genuine and to tell him the truth so he could grab me and throw open the glass door of my prison and take me away to safety. I wanted that so much that although my lips were set tight and sealed, my eyes must have been pleading with him to make me talk.

In the end he got up to leave – but as he did so he pressed a little slip of thick card into my hand. It was a business card, with his name and phone number on it. And at the top, properly printed in colour and embossed so that it stuck out from the rest of the card, was the emblem of the Dutch police.

After he had gone my mind raced. Could he have been a real policeman after all? Surely even Gregor wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble and expense of making up false business cards? But then even if he was a real cop it didn’t mean I could trust him. Gregor had lots of policemen on his payroll – and I hadn’t forgotten the seven who’d come round and raped me, taken me as their ‘free one’.

And so I said nothing, did nothing – except to take out my lighter and set fire to the little rectangle of card with his name and phone number on it. Leon and Helène still came round after that, still tried to get me talking. Helène seemed to know about Reuben and was very keen to find out if I knew anything about his murder. But I kept my mouth shut and after a few weeks they stopped turning up at my window.

I never stopped dreaming of escape, though. Even though I was now chronically dependent on the drugs Gregor and Pavlov fed me (they claimed I was consuming 500 guilders worth of crack and coke every day), I could still see that little white light of hope shining a long way away, at the end of a long, dark road. It helped that as the winter wore on Gregor and Pavlov relaxed their vigilance a little. Evidently enough time had passed since that terrible night in the warehouse for them to be fairly confident that I wasn’t going to tell anyone about what happened to poor Par.

But the running boys still brought the steady stream of condoms, tissues and drugs to my window, and I knew they would ferry back any little titbit of information – even the slightest hint of anything unusual – to Gregor. And so I kept working, stayed in my glass cage, opening my body for the endless stream of men whose only interest lay between my legs. And at night I was still shut up in the sleeping room with whatever other girls Gregor was keeping there on the mattress next to me – and with the dogs slobbering and panting in the corridor outside the door.

Oh, God, those dogs. To this day I have nightmares about them; I can still see them, hear them, smell them. People ask me why didn’t I try to escape, why didn’t I just make a run for it? But they never saw those dogs or knew the fear they caused in me. And I was certain now of where the warm red meat that Gregor fed them by hand came from: Par wasn’t the only girl who disappeared from the District.

So no, I couldn’t have got away. Not from the punters, not from the running boys, nor from the cops who lived in Gregor’s pocket and fed on the crumbs of his criminal empire. And I couldn’t have got away from the rank and wretched sleeping room, or the dogs that guarded it. Slowly, miserably, the flickering light of hope began to dim. Gradually, but inexorably I was sinking back into the numbing cushion of crack and hash, and using them both to shut out the ridiculous idea that I could ever get away.

Gregor was never going to let me go – not until I had no more value in me and even then he’d find a way of getting one last, final payday out of my wretched body. And anyway, where would I go – and who would want to see me? I was Sarah Forsyth, crack whore. I belonged here in the stinking cesspool of de Rosse Buurt.

And then one morning a miracle happened.

I woke up as usual on the corner of the mattress at the back of the sleeping room – but I was alone. The other girls – they had been there when I crashed out in my drugged stupor – were gone. I staggered over to the door and was astonished to find it unlocked; I inched my head round the corner, expecting to hear the deep, vicious growl of the bull mastiffs. Nothing. What was going on? Where was everyone? Why had they left me alone? Like a zoo animal that one day finds its cage door open to the big, scary outdoors I hung back inside the room, too dazed and too confused to do anything.

And then suddenly I ran. My feet flew across the floor, out through the doorway and down to the big heavy door to the street. It, too, was unlocked and I wrenched it back and flung myself out into the daylight. My mind had shut down and my body – with its few remaining instincts for survival – took over. I had no idea where I should go to, only that I should run – and run as fast as my emaciated legs could carry me.

Run, Sarah, run.

Street after street flew past, doorway after doorway, shop front after shop front. I ran, terrified I’d hear Gregor or Pavlov’s voice, sense the dogs closing in on me, feel the slight tell-tale change in the air around my ankles that warned me their mouths were closing and the game was up.

Run, Sarah, run.

And so I ploughed on, headlong and heedless. And then I stopped dead in my tracks.

I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t suddenly – gratefully – remembered passing a sign:
Politie
– police. Frantically I retraced my steps until I found it once again. I stared at it, willing myself to walk calmly up to it, to push open the door and plead for help. But my feet wouldn’t move; they seemed welded to the street, impossible to lift or move.

How long did I stay there, rooted to the spot? God only knows. But finally I forced myself to make the seemingly endless, leaden walk to the police station.

It was warm inside – despite the huge plate-glass windows which looked out on to the street. At one end of the room was a counter with a little bell next to it, and a few chairs for people to sit in while they waited to be seen. Only one was occupied: a middle-aged woman was sitting reading a book – I noticed the title was in English.

I pressed the bell and waited for what seemed like an age. I glanced continually back over my shoulder, convinced Gregor or Pavlov would see me through the glass windows and rush in to get me. Then I saw a policeman – and I felt it was all over.