“Superficial,” Alena said. “Fortunate.”
“Are you finished?”
“Yes. You should drink something, try moving around.”
She took the kit, rising, and I got myself off the bed, feeling muscle-sore but unimpaired. The ringing was gone from my ear but my head still ached, though it might have been dehydration as much as anything else. I pulled on a shirt, feeling the tape on my back pull and flex, then followed after her, down the hall.
In the kitchen, Alena handed me a glass of water, then put the kettle on. She avoided looking at me.
“How was Nicholas?” I asked.
“He was fine. It was a short meeting.”
“No trouble?”
“With him? Is there ever?”
“I meant on the trip.”
“I was stopped on the M1, outside of Gori, by the Russians. They wanted to search the car, but it was a shakedown. I had to pay twice, going and coming.”
“Money.”
“Yes.” She looked up from where she'd been watching the kettle. “You think something else?”
“Nothing you would give them,” I told her. “Doesn't mean they didn't want it.”
She shrugged. “The same everywhere.”
I finished my water, watching her. She was right, it was the same everywhere, all around the world, first to third, and certainly here in the former Soviet states. At almost every border crossing, at almost every checkpoint, someone, always male, had his hand out. Most of the time, money would do it, because most of the time, the people manning such checkpoints and crossings were desperately poor, despite their uniforms. But if you were traveling with a woman, or if you were a woman alone, most of the time it wasn't money they wanted.
“You're thinking about Tiasa.”
“Trabzon's maybe two hundred and fifty kilometers,” I said. “We take the car, leave by midmorning, we should be there before evening, even with all the stops.”
“No.”
“The other option I'm thinking is to go back to Batumi, take a boat. It'll take longer, though, and I don't want to lose the time. And we'll need to arrange transportation on the other end.”
She shook her head. The light in the kitchen turned her copper-colored hair orange, turned her complexion sallow. “I'm not talking about the route. I'm saying no, we're not doing this.”
“Tiasa—”
“I know.” She held her look on me for a fraction longer, then reached for the canister of tea, began digging a spoon out of the utensil drawer.
“If this is because you think the information is—”
She cut me off. “I doubt he lied to you.”
“Then Trabzon—”
“No.”
I tried again. “She's fourteen, she's—”
“I
know,”
Alena said, sharply, spooning too much tea into the pot.
“I can't abandon this,” I said.
The utensil hit the counter with a clatter. “Tiasa is gone. Like her family. We have to forget them.”
“You trying to convince me or yourself?” I asked, after a second.
“Yes, both of us, yes.” She straightened, squared her shoulders, fixing her posture, all her little tells that I knew meant she was struggling with her emotions. When she was ready, she looked at me again. “Those men in Batumi, they will have
friends, friends who found Bakhar. They can find you. They can find us.”
“All the more reason for us to go.”
“This is our home. I will not leave it.”
“You know what's happened to her, what's going to happen,” I said. “Someone has to find her.”
“Then let someone else do it. Not us.”
My frustration finally broke. “I don't understand. You liked Tiasa. Forget about the rest of them for now—Bakhar, who he was, what he did, it doesn't matter. This is about Tiasa. You adored her.”
“I love her.”
She said it softly, without hesitation. Considering that “love” was hardly a word she was ever willing to speak aloud to me, it was surprising.
I said, “There's no one else. You know that. We can't just sit here and hope some NGO is going to discover her, free her, and we both sure as hell know some Good Samaritan won't come to her rescue.”
“I know.”
“I can't forget this,” I insisted. “I have to go after her. I can't let this sit.”
She inhaled, and her eyes shifted aside for a moment, pained. Her eyes were hazel, and beautiful, and since I'd first met her had become more and more expressive. There'd been a time when reading her was next to impossible, quite deliberately so on her part, something she'd been taught that had turned as autonomous as breathing. Survival had hinged on being able to hide not only her thoughts but her feelings. While I'd become better at it, she'd become worse; it was another of the trades we had made by joining our lives.
“You'd leave me here alone?” she asked.
“It's not like you can't take care of yourself.”
“Don't. Don't go.”
“Come with me.”
“I can't.” Behind her, on the stove, the kettle began to rattle, spilling steam. “I can't.”
“What aren't you telling me?” I asked her. “What's going on?”
She shook her head, brushing past me as she left the room. I heard the back door open, then close, hard.
I stood in the kitchen alone, listening to the chattering kettle.
After a minute, I went to the bedroom and began to pack.
CHAPTER
Eight
My second night in Trabzon I met a man named Arzu
Kaya, who promised me all the pretty girls I could ever want.
“How much?” I asked.
“Two hundred, you get one all night,” he answered.
I stopped myself from laughing. “Maybe for two. Two hundred for two girls.”
“Two
hundred yeni?”
I shook my head. “Euros.”
He bit his lower lip, sucking air through his teeth. “You got my name from Vladek?”
“Last week. In Batumi.”
Arzu went after his lip again, thinking. He was a Turkish
national, possibly even a Trabzon native from the way he spoke his Russian—there was a large Russian expat community in the city, and had been for decades—and younger than I'd expected, only in his early thirties. His clothes and manner were better suited for Istanbul than the more conservative eastern part of the country. There, like here along the northern Black Sea coast, Islam was both omnipresent and traditional. Yet Arzu's clothing didn't particularly mark him as out of the ordinary. I'd seen plenty of similarly Western-attired folks about and around since I'd arrived the day before. Women dressed modestly, at least in public, and the men I'd seen went clean-shaven.
“Wait here a minute, okay?” Arzu sprang from his chair opposite me, grinning. “I'll send one of the girls down, keep you company.”
I checked my watch. “I've got other places to be.”
“Won't take me long.” He was already crossing the lobby, such as it was. “Just wait for me.”
I watched him disappear up a set of stairs, turning out of sight. The hotel we were in was off the northeastern edge of Atatürk Alani, the kind of place that guidebooks charitably listed as “budget,” except that the kind of guidebook that would list this place you'd never find in a bookstore. Like countless other similarly grimy lodgings around the world, the hotel doubled as a brothel.
A handful of seconds after Arzu disappeared, a young woman in a halter top and shorts that were too tight and too short came into view, descending the stairs. She saw me immediately, and started on a beeline. I gave her my don't-fuck-with-me face, and it stopped her in her tracks, but only for a second. Then she glanced over her shoulder, back the way she'd come and Arzu had gone, and resumed crossing to me. When she reached where I was sitting, she tried to sit in my lap.
“No,” I told her, in Russian, pushing her gently away.
“Free,” she said, and tried it again. “For a friend of Arzu Bey.”
She was pale, her hair a filthy blonde, with a face hidden beneath heavy makeup. She might've been pretty once, before she'd come across the Black Sea from Russia or Ukraine or Moldova, the same way she'd had a name. Now she was just another
natasha
, like countless other girls who, one way or another, had been trafficked across the water expressly to be used for sex.
I let her sit in my lap, and when Vladek Karataev's BlackBerry began to vibrate in my pocket, I had a damn good idea who it was who was calling. The girl looked down, feeling the phone shivering against my thigh, then looked at me curiously. I smiled at her.
“What's your name?” I asked.
“Natasha,” she said. There was no irony in it, no humor, and no pause.
“I'm David.” The BlackBerry in my pocket went still again. “I should check that.”
She shifted off my lap so I could get the phone, and I pulled it free, slipped the back cover off and dropped the battery out, then replaced the cover and put both the phone and the battery in my pocket. She watched me with disinterested curiosity.
I'd let her back into my lap when Arzu appeared again, bounding down the stairs.
“Sorry, just had to take care of something,” he said. “Let's go upstairs, we can talk somewhere more private. You like her, huh?”
“She's very nice,” I said.
“Yeah, she's a good girl.” He turned his attention to her, still on my lap. “Get off him.”
She slipped off me, immediately moving to the opposite end of the couch. Arzu waited while I got to my feet, then led the way. He took the stairs as before, two, three at a time, full of energy. Another two women were in the hall when we came off the landing, smoking cigarettes, and both looked down when Arzu passed, followed me with their eyes when I did. They looked as wasted and tired as the girl who'd taken my lap, and I didn't want to guess how young they were, or how long they'd been here, and found that I couldn't help myself.
We went into one of the rooms, a small shoebox of a space that had been turned into a private lounge, with a television, a couch, a couple of chairs. The television was on, broadcasting local news that I didn't understand. Arzu indicated the couch, offering it to me, and I thanked him and sat. A Nokia phone was sitting on one of the chairs, and he picked it up, checking it, and I saw the frown flash across his face for an instant before he tucked it into a pocket of his own. Then he maneuvered the chair around to face me before taking a seat.
“You talked to Vladek?” I asked.
He grinned. “Don't worry about that. You wanted to talk about some girls. Two hundred euros.”
“Two hundred for two girls. But that's not what I really want to talk about.”
“No?”
“I'm looking to buy, to set something up further south.”
“How far south?”
“Gulf region. Depends on what my partners come back with. Can you help me?”
“How many?”
“Four to start. More later if it goes well. But the girls have to be young, and I'll want to see them myself.”
“Of course, sure. How young?”
“Sixteen. Maybe younger.”
Arzu cracked his grin again. “That's more expensive.”
“I know. That's why I need to see them. But we'll pay what they're worth.”
“So you understand.”
“Vladek made it clear,” I said.
He did the teeth bit once more, then nodded. “Okay, you're staying in town?”
“At the Zorlu. I'm supposed to leave the day after tomorrow, but I can stretch it until the end of the week if I have to.”
“You'll hear from me tomorrow. David Mercer, right?”
“That's right.”
He got up, offering me his hand, and I got up and took it. The shake was firm and professional, as cleanly executed as any boardroom deal-closing. He walked me to the door, but paused after he opened it, his expression brightening.
“That
natasha”
he asked. “You liked her?”
The thought of what might happen to the woman if I said I didn't flashed in my mind's eye. “Sure.”
“Take her with you, back to the Zorlu. Keep her all night, whatever you want to do to her, that's fine.”
“That's very generous,” I said to him, and Arzu's smile faltered, hinted at the offense he would take if I refused his gift. “But it's like with the drugs. I never use the product.”
For a moment, I was sure I'd lost him. Then he got happy again and clapped me on the shoulder. “You're married?”
“Yeah.”
“I'm the same! Why get this when you've got it at home, right?”
“Pretty much.”
“I'll call you tomorrow, David,” he said, ushering me out the door.
As soon as I was downstairs, I put the battery back in the BlackBerry. I wasn't halfway back to the Zorlu when the phone began vibrating again.
I let it go to voicemail.
It had been just before nine the previous morning when I'd brought the Dnepr's engine to life, and by ten I'd been heading down the coast. Shortly after I'd left Batumi, heading south, I'd passed a billboard, stark and out of place, a PSA put together by the Interior Ministry, most likely with American funds. It showed a grayscale image of a woman, profile shot, framed from the mid-bicep of her right arm to the top of her head, cropped so that she was faceless, but clearly feminine. On the exposed bicep had been tattooed a barcode. The Georgian script, in bright red letters, translated to the phrase
You are not for sale
.
Like she didn't know that already.
It had done nothing for my mood.
By the time I'd finished with my meager packing, Alena still hadn't come back into the house. I'd gone out after her, found her in the studio, music blaring, trying to dance. Her left calf had been badly injured several years ago, hit with a blast from a shotgun that destroyed the anterior cruciate ligament and severed tendons. While the ligament had been replaced by a prosthetic, nothing could be done for the rest, and though physical therapy had brought back much of the agility and balance she'd had before, she didn't have all of it, and was supposed to go easy on her left.
