Sophie asked Natalia, “Do you wish to be here?”
Natalia searched Sophie’s face then reflexively glanced over her shoulder in the manner of the constantly observed. Afraid to speak should someone be listening, she shook her head. She gestured toward the shuttered window and said, almost too quietly to be heard, “We cannot leave.” She paused for so long I wasn’t sure she was going to say anything else, but Sophie waited patiently.
Eventually Sophie coaxed her with, “Why do they keep you?”
Natalia laughed, a bitter version to its earlier cousin that came out as much more honest. It blasted whatever caution she might have felt. “To work with men. You saw – they take the money, we bring them up here and get them out.”
Sophie nodded, indicating this only confirmed her suspicions. “How do they keep you?”
“They watch constantly and we have no money.” Natalia shrugged with resignation. “Even if we get out there is nowhere to go. No one has passports. We are here illegally. To go to the police is to be sent back.”
“Back?”
Natalia fanned her fingers as if indicating something far away that couldn’t or shouldn’t be touched, “Ukraine. Many of the girls are from there. There is the war, and no authority, only chaos in the east. The Russians, they work with the separatists, and come in to villages and towns.” She shrugged, “And take what they want.” A shadow fell over Natalia at this last pronouncement and a part of me wished I could put together a fireteam and kill my way out of the house and all the way to Crimea.
“They move us through Lviv, then out to Europe to work.” Natalia shrugged. “It is still better than the war.”
I stood there thinking about Ukrainian separatists, the Russian army and spies, and gangsters. We had only seen the tip of the this operation, the rest of it sunk into Eastern Europe like an iron spike. That cooled the rage growing in me, thinking about the futility of action. I hadn’t been able to help Sophie and protect my wife when facing off against Verdicchio’s much smaller operation. How far would I get here? Judging by how things had gone at Mitnick’s party? Not far.
Even with the cold certainty of that knowledge in place, I still felt my anger threatening to burn out of it. Watching Natalia tell her story with almost no emotion I realized how deeply traumatized she must be, the shock of everything that’s happened to her buried under miles and mountains of abuse, taken from everything she knew and forced into bondage. She had probably begged a hundred times, only to be told to shut up by her captors, or beaten if she had cried with a customer, or raped if someone felt like it. And if she escaped there was only a system waiting that would treat her as a criminal. She’d be shipped back to a country that was being cut up by men like Mitnick and Sartre, each trying to get a bigger piece of the pie while men like Atwell enabled them. And then there was me.
I decided I needed a gun.
I realized I hadn’t been listening to the women for awhile, the growing noise of my own angry machinery grinding out all other sound. Sophie was hugging Natalia, nearly enfolding the smaller woman to her bosom. When they parted, to my surprise Sophie was quietly shedding a tear or two, which Natalia wiped away with a, “You should go.”
In what might be a gesture of irony, Sophie produced a sizable chunk of Mitnick’s currency and held the roll out to Natalia. “Do you have a place to hide this?” Natalia nodded so quickly I suspected she had already started squirreling away her own funds. I hoped it was enough that she might be able to make a good run for it if she got out of here.
Sophie said, “If we took you, they would only come for you and us as well.” Natalia nodded, disappointed not so much that she wasn’t being rescued, but in that the only good company she had in awhile was leaving. In what was probably the closest thing to a lie that Sophie would say, she told her, “If we can, we will come back for you.”
Sophie stood to leave and there was a pause in which I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. If Sophie had demanded we try to fight our way out of there right then, I might have given it a shot. Instead, she took a careful moment to compose herself, running a finger under her eyes, then applying a lustrous red lipstick. She leaned forward and planted two or three welts on my neck. At any other time I might have gotten some kind of thrill from this, but here it just made me feel complicit.
Stepping outside the door one of the men quickly joined us. He gave us a suspicious stare, then shrugged and led us further down the hall and out an exterior door near the garage. We found a terrified Alon having a quarrel over parking with another guard, but our appearance ended that, and the grateful Frenchman jumped in his car to take us back to the city.
In the back of the car I felt my anger searching for somewhere to go. There was a long silence as the car snaked up the mountain, giving the emotion long enough to find an unwanted foothold. “What was the point of that?”
Painted by the lights of a solitary passing car, Sophie answered, “To men like this Mitnick, women are property. All women.”
“So?” My anger made the word come out as callous and mean and I hated myself for saying it. “If this Nika is a prisoner, she’s in a gilded cage. She’s not a slave like Natalia and the girls in that house.”
“But a slave she is,” in the shadow that covered her I could feel Sophie speaking from some deep well of personal experience. “And she will be asked to do something, marry someone, be something, regardless of what she wishes.”
Out of that dark corner of the car’s back seat, inches away, Sophie could have been at the other end of the galaxy, but I could feel her voice harden. “But if she escapes, if this Mitnick fails his charge, then perhaps he will become undone.” Against the backdrop of the window, I could see Sophie flutter her hands, expanding the fingers, pantomiming the dissolution of all that was Mitnick.
“That’s,” I stopped to think about what she was saying. “That’s pretty fucking thin.”
“Also possible.” As opposed to going in and freeing those girls. Putting aside the physical deterrents, how would we keep them safe afterwards? How would we hide them from police? Who would feed them and shelter them while they sought asylum?
“And,” Sophie added for good measure, “he is a monster.”
I nodded, having at last found common ground in the impossibly expansive interior of the car as it hurtled through the night. I nodded, adding an, “OK.”
Almost leaping out of her corner of the car, Sophie kissed me then, hard. I was surprised enough that I didn’t react at first, pressing my back against the car door behind me as if I had come under surprise attack. She leaned into me, and I felt a passion there I didn’t understand, a blazing star of different elements that made me flush, even as her hands pushed against me, crushing me against the door, keeping me apart from her, the only connection the fusion of that kiss.
Then felt myself harden in an unexpected way: The kiss had its own passion, to be sure, but no joy, that signaled amplified by a tear I felt come from Sophie. It was a kiss and a seal, and it spoke of property, possession, a promise extracted and sealed.
I didn’t like it. I pushed her away from me, and she retreated back to her side of the car. I turned and stared at the lights of the houses dotting the mountain and just repeated, “OK.”
To read the next chapter, go here.
To read the previous chapter, go here.
See the author’s published work here.
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