Bitter Remedy (10 page)

‘You can try. I do nothing bad now,’ said Niki. ‘Taxes, maybe not all declared, not fully compliant with health and safety, I turn a blind eye to some stuff, pay a few people. Yes, drugs do get consumed on my premises; no, I do not sell them. Yes, I have been investigated in the past for this. No, not convicted.’

‘Not to worry, Niki. I am on holiday,’ said Blume. ‘See?’ He waved an arm around the room. ‘This is me, on holiday, unwinding. I won’t be staying. So you can take your little self, your man bag, and all your small-minded criminal fears and fuck off out of this room, and leave me in
peace
!’

Blume surprised himself by shouting the last word. He never roared like that. He had had no idea he was losing his cool until he did.

Niki clutched at his bag as if to save it from a gust of wind, and retreated to the door. ‘You need different pills, Blume.’

Blume was over at the door in two strides. ‘
E sparisci, stronzetto
,’ said Blume, swatting the door closed.

Niki’s muffled voice said something, and Blume, again surprising himself with his own rage, yanked open the door. ‘What did you say?’

Niki leapt back. ‘I said Alina. Her name is Alina. She does exist.’

Chapter 9

Alina, too, was learning. Scarcely had she even registered the shock of being taken from Nadia’s company to be brought to another club when, after two days in which no one even spoke to her or asked her to do anything, she was shipped onwards to a different quarter of the city.

Her new owners liked to have her on the street. They communicated to her through an intermediary hardly any older than her, who was always dressed in yellow and red, the colours of Galatasaray, and was something of a linguist. In passable Romanian, he explained to her that the Scimitar Niteclub, where her bosses worked and behind which she was accommodated in a half-finished building with cement floors, was like a stake in the ground to which she was tied by an invisible chain. ‘Like a dog in garden, yes. You are a dog. A bitch in heat.’

The young man found the simile very amusing, though he must have used it before. He threw back his head and opened his mouth in mirth, displaying a row of rotting back teeth. He explained that she was expected to wander within a certain radius of 1 kilometre, but no farther. She was to bring clients back to the hostel two doors from the club, and book them into room 17. The client had to pay the 55 Turkish Liras for the room, and she was expected to use it at least three times a day. On no account was she to leave the district.

She was hardly ever left on her own. A silky, sulky Belarusian blonde went everywhere with her, until one of them was picked up. They were under instructions not to agree to threesomes. Sometimes, Alina was followed by an older dark-skinned woman whose name and nationality simply did not interest her.

Gradually, her geographical scope was extended, and the streets around the Scimitar became as familiar as the back of her hand. Being out on the streets had improved her Turkish, too. She was building up a mental map of the city, and she would have been capable of explaining to a taxi driver where she wanted to go. But taxi drivers wanted money, and while it was easy enough to get a few extra liras from clients, it was impossible to hide it anywhere. Every nook and cranny of the rooms and every part of her anatomy was subject to frequent and brutal searches day after day. One girl, who had saved quite a stash and managed to keep it hidden in a plastic bag secured by a string attached to the inside of the overflow slit on the bathroom washbasin, had had her face literally kicked in. For weeks, her face, which had been pretty and plump and gave her a well-fed and satisfied look that made many of the others dislike her, was such a mass of bruising and purple that it was impossible to say what sex she was. When the swelling went down, her face had caved in. Her cheeks now formed concave hollows and her nose had been pushed back. Her eyes lost their colour, and her lips were thin and bluish. She stopped eating, walked with a limp, and held her ribs all the time. In two months she aged 20 years. Then she disappeared.

It was a wet evening in November, the air heavy with diesel fumes and salt, when Alina found her tree. It grew on a traffic island on which she happened to find herself momentarily trapped. The road was less busy than usual, and so the cars heading towards the port were fast and the surface was slick with recent rain. Her Belarusian companion had teetered up the middle of the road, then made a hobbling high-heeled dash to the other side. Alina remained on the central divider, which was wide enough for the council to have turned it into a triangle of urban park with crab grass and a bench no one in their right mind would ever want to sit on. In the middle was a dying tree with a grey trunk that looked like it was made of cement. The traffic did not let up. Alina, bored by waiting, looked down at her golden sandals and painted toenails, and glanced at the tree. At about knee height, the smooth grey of the trunk seemed to fold over itself, like a flap of skin over a healing cut. As three heavy trucks went thundering by nose to bumper, she let her hand absently stroke the slight bulge in the bark. Her small hand found a fissure behind. Interested now, she pushed her fingers in the gap, accidentally trapping her hand for a few seconds, then with another twist, she found she could get her whole hand and wrist inside. The wood inside was bone dry. She pulled her hand out of the cavity, and almost immediately lost sight of the fissure. The traffic relented, and she skipped across the road. Her Belarusian companion was walking down the pavement towards her, muttering something obscene in Russian, the language of persecution.

Two days passed before Alina put her first money into her hidden hollow. She simply balled up 30 Turkish liras and shoved them in on the off-chance, expecting them to drop as if down a shaft into the ground. It rained solidly for three days after that, and when she came back the grey bark was slick and smooth like sealskin. But her hand quickly found the money, and it was dry. The next time she visited, it was with 50 euros, for which she had had to do something that had made her retch. This time, she brought a small plastic bag of the type they used to put hashish in. She took out the liras and put them and the euros into the bag, and the bag into the cavity. On both sides of her, the traffic flowed obliviously by.

For a while, every time she got some extra cash, she would plant it in her tree. It was only after she had received a brutal and wordless throttling, which left her gasping for air on the floor, that she realized she was making a dangerous mistake in never having been discovered holding back cash. Trying to hold onto money was brutally punished, but never even trying was a cause of suspicion. If she became the only one never caught with some illicit money, they might start following her, or simply torture the truth from her. From then on, she was careful to let them occasionally discover a few notes hidden here and there, for which she would give weak and unconvincing explanations and receive casual, unconvinced slaps, though what really hurt was that she was depriving her tree of riches. She took up some petty thieving whenever she could, swiping tips from tables, dropping her hand into jacket pockets. Sometimes she got caught, but the important thing was to mix defiance and suffer punishment in a way that made them think they were getting everything from her.

She still wanted to get to Italy. The academy might not exist and the job offer had been a sham, of course, but Italy did exist, and Milan was full of hair salons. She would find Nadia. Together they would leave for Italy as free women. They would arrive poor, but tough and ready. They would be entrepreneurs. Alina knew exactly how much was in the tree, but remained hazy about how much they would need to get away, vanish into Italy, and set up an apartment. She reckoned 6,000 euros ought to do it. After six months she had secreted 615 liras and 350 euros in the tree.

Eighteen months later, Alina had learned quite a lot of Turkish, Russian, a lot of English, and a bit of German. No request or insult was ever completely unexpected. Slaps, punches, and kicks still hurt, but they no longer held the power to shock. She had learned that looks, age, voice, tone, education, physical strength, apparent shyness, or bluster were not reliable guides to how a customer would turn out. People with baby faces did terrible things. People with hard faces, criminal tattoos, metal studs, hairy bellies, bald heads, and little dicks also did evil things. The ones who looked like they wanted to hurt you always did; the ones who didn’t look like it, often would. Her cache was now €2,100.

It was a mixture of Turkish liras, euros, and some dollars from the Arabs. Every day she looked at the exchange rates glowing in red lights at a currency exchange booth near the clubs and recalculated the value in her head. When she squirrelled away Turkish liras, she mentally converted them into euros.

Although the women were not allowed to keep money, there was always talk about their buying their way out. The main purpose of this outrageous falsehood seemed to be to give the girls false hope of freedom, and perhaps that worked with the very dumbest and the youngest. Admittedly, a lot of them were really dumb, and a lot of them were very young. But even the dumbest and the youngest learned eventually – hadn’t she? The Russians told the same lie over and over again in Russian, Romanian, Turkish, English, Italian. ‘You make me back the investment, you will be free woman 18 months, no problem.’

When a girl was nearing the end of the promised period, they sold her onwards again, and the new owner would tell her she had to make good the price he had paid. What Alina did not get was why they almost always sold the girl on – they could simply renege on the promise. But somehow the owners felt the need to sell, as if they were really keeping a bargain, and the bad guy was the new owner. After all else that they did, they were somehow still ashamed of this lie.

Sometimes, a girl did simply get ‘freed’, which meant abandonment, without shelter or food. Sometimes an offer would come through for a ticket home, or a trip onwards to an oil state. Very occasionally, a girl would become a home help. There were stories of some vanishing into the vast plains of Anatolia to work as farmhands. There were even rumours of marriages.

More got murdered than married, of that she had no doubt. Many committed suicide. Then there were overdoses, sexual diseases. She had seen a dead girl lying in the corridor, like something floppy and lazy and thin. Alina’s first reaction was annoyance. She was annoyed with the dead girl before she was afraid of her and what she signified. The fear moved in waves up and down the corridor all day, and it was as if a cold, untouchable spot remained where the body had been, but there was not much hysteria. Sobs, gasps, some mutinous mumblings but the general effect was to harden the girls’ faces, as if they were trying to borrow the blank and uninterested look on the dead girl’s face. Selina, she had been called. It was not until days later, as she fed her tree, that Alina found a moment to feel pity, too.

She had learned to know and not to know at the same time. She knew the job in Italy had never existed, yet she still told herself that she was working towards it. She knew as soon as she tried to use the €2,100 to go somewhere, she would probably be caught, but she liked to think that with Nadia’s help they might make it. It was now two years since she had been able to talk to Nadia, but they had spotted one another three times without having a chance to speak. Nadia was still alive and still in Istanbul. Perhaps she was saving up as well. Nadia had always been the resourceful one. She had probably saved twice as much as Alina. That would make more than €4,000.

When she first asked permission, Fyodor listened to her carefully, an expectant smile on his face as he waited the punchline. As she politely explained that all she wanted to do was get back across the busy road and find Nadia, reassure her, and then come back, his face fell in disappointment. But he did not beat her or even scream at her.

She was learning things. Languages, how to read clients, which women were freer, which owners to fear most. She also learned to her surprise that a lot of women entered semi-legitimate jobs. That some women had come deliberately seeking work in the sex industry somehow surprised her, even though she probably belonged to the same category. She also learned that no matter what they said or how nicely they said it, no owner was ever going to allow you to buy your freedom until you were over 26, or had contracted a visible disease.

‘We are like the old taxis.’ Lyudmila, 28, who looked older but was still very popular among clients, told her. ‘We do not cost so very much. The real gain comes in how far you drive it, how far it goes, how much fuel it needs, and how reliable it is. Even the best investment and the most expensive car is worth nothing in the end, but the taxi driver can make a lot of money.’ Lyudmila suddenly found her own metaphor very funny and laughed throatily. Alina liked the woman. A few days later she approached her again, and asked for advice on how to find Nadia.

Lyudmila’s advice was simplicity itself: walk across the busy intersection to the other part of town, and start looking. If she got caught, they might beat her, but hadn’t she been beaten before? Alina said she was afraid Nadia would have been moved since.

‘It is easy to find out. What was the name of your
pezevenk
when you were together?’

‘Tamer.’

‘Did you have policemen as clients?’

‘No. Mostly foreign tourists.’

‘That’s
Çağdaş
Tamer, then. I’ll bring you there.’

‘Oh, would you?’