Traffyck (2 page)

Eventually, after the vehicles were gone, the deer wandered back out to the side of the road, where fresh greens had emerged in soil irrigated by the mountain’s runoff. With the coming of spring, new life emerges for all species, except the one taking over the world with its tricks, its so-called businesses, and its impatience.

His was a terrible business, and Ivan Babii found himself asking God’s forgiveness for faking blindness. When his mother was alive, she insisted God forgave even the most abhorrent sins. He had been able to live with murder, even when forced to kill his feeble-minded and loose-tongued uncle. He had been able to live with arranging Moldavian sex holidays, pairing teenaged girls from poverty-stricken families with foreign middle-aged men. Unfortunately, guilt piled on as he aged, and he wondered if
he
was becoming feeble-minded. Would he have felt guilt if he had stayed married to Elena? Would a wife have allowed such things?

Boys will be boys
, the saying goes. But then they become men, some of them like him.

And women? A woman would never allow his current business to exist. Never!

During his younger years, Ivan Babii had been proficient at faking blindness. This afternoon he made an attempt to recapture blindness by resting his eyes. He kept his eyes closed even as he stood up from his desk. He kept them closed as he laughed, thinking of words rather than images, recalling how Andropov—Pyotr not Yuri—long ago at the beginning of the Internet age suggested the sequence T-R-A-F-F-Y-C-K instead of T-R-A-F-F-I-C-K so parental controls would not block Web sites registered in various countries.

Ivan Babii’s eyes burned as he squeezed them tightly shut the way he sometimes did at the monitor when pretending to watch the handiwork of video crews. During this session he was especially nervous, unable to sleep last night. Was sleeplessness due to his boyhood dreams of brutal treatment? Or was it due to the brutal treatment of children by the pornographers? Babii opened his eyes slowly and turned from his desk to the window.

At one thousand meters, on the slopes of the northern Carpathians, it began snowing. Gypsy winds elbowed gray-white clouds through valleys, and ancient peaks worn to the shapes of pencil erasers began to whiten. Perhaps the winds originated at Pietrosu Summit, a hundred kilometers to the west, or even Mount Hoverla over the border in Ukraine. Someone had placed Orthodox crucifixes on both summits; therefore, this unusual late-spring snow could be God’s work.

Sunlight shining through ice crystals put on a kaleidoscopic show. The forest needed moisture, but the snow evaporated in the mountain air. It was an earthly metaphor. In order to evolve life from ice crystals and cosmic crumbs, countless beginnings would have taken place, all but a select few sacrificed, leading to the formation of life and, ultimately, the babe in the woods called man, who immediately began wondering about the architect of it all.

In the 1970s, when Ivan was a babe in the Moldavian woods, he attended a single-room school run by a predatory male teacher named Master Ceausescu, whose claim to fame was having the same name as the brutal president of Moldova’s neighbor, Romania. While Master Ceausescu prowled from girl to girl in class, stooping low to look beneath dresses, Ivan suffered barbs from older boys who discovered the similarity of his surname to the English word
baby
. “Ivan Babii, the baby,” they whispered each year, until the day Uncle Iosif drove him to school and unsmilingly displayed various pistols and automatic rifles during Ivan’s show-and-tell assignment. Apparently his uncle was also aware of Master Ceausescu’s leanings, and several of Uncle Iosif’s glances his way had a lasting effect. From then on, not only did the other boys leave Ivan’s name alone, but Master Ceausescu’s hobby, peering beneath girls’ dresses and calling a certain one inside while others were in the play yard, also ended.

Because of torment caused by his name, Ivan fought back by learning words. These days, variations in spelling, especially using the Greek rather than the Cyrillic alphabet, fascinated him. He followed trends in publications and on the Internet. After the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, use of Ukrainian versus Russian became contentious. The capital could be
Kiev
or
Kyiv
or
Kyiw
or even
Kyyiv;
the river could be
Dnepr
or
Dniepr
or
Dnipro
.

Ivan recalled an especially interesting discussion with his business associate Pyotr Alexeyevich Andropov, a Russianized Ukrainian who enjoyed pointing out that Pyotr Alexeyevich was shared with Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov, Peter I the Great, ruler of the Russian Empire from 1682 to 1725. Andropov, descended from a hard line Marxist-Leninist family, was tall and imposing, as was Peter I. Andropov visited Romania some time back, posing as an Orthodox cleric with a beard grown for the trip, even though Peter I was known to despise beards. During their discussion, Andropov insisted
Chernobyl
be spelled
Chornobyl
because the museum in Kiev
(Kyiv)
was called Ukrainian National Museum “Chornobyl.” During Andropov’s visit, he complained of discipline among young people at his compound. Andropov mentioned a particular resident having the same given name as Babii; the young Ivan lifted weights, and many at the compound referred to him as Ivan the Terrible.

These were Ivan Babii’s thoughts as he stood at his window in the lodge office. The lodge was fifty kilometers from the nearest Romanian mountain village, twenty kilometers from Ukraine’s frontier, and one hundred kilometers from the border of his Moldavian homeland. The phenomenon of snow evaporating before making it to the ground was visible through a clearing cut years earlier west of the lodge to provide a view of the mountains. Although he was alone in the office, Babii said,
“Beau-ti-ful,”
drawing out the pronunciation in English.

Babii had begun using the word after seeing the American
Godfather
films. Even now, staring at this marvel of nature, he thought how
beau-ti-ful
it would have been if, back in the old days in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, Boris Gerlak’s body, with its load of bullets, could have evaporated away to nothing before hitting the marshy ground along the road to Odessa. Bullets traced back to the Makarov auto pistol Uncle Iosif failed to melt down because of his dementia.
Beautiful
.

Although KGB lab evidence had not convinced the drunken Moldavian judge of Babii’s guilt, evidence linking him to sex holiday and drug businesses ruined him during the collapse of the Soviet Union, a time when he could have risen to prosperity in the new Moldova. He had been forced not only into exile but also into finding another business.

It had been called the Moldovenesc Camp when he bought it. Now it was called the Moldovenesc Self-Awareness Sanatorium. Business at the sanatorium was profitable. First came the Turks and their hunger for light-complexioned girls. Next came Arabs, Czechs, and Greeks, taking his girls away via the same Balkan Trail used to smuggle drugs and weapons. Some of the younger ones could be sent back to Ukraine where they originated and be redirected to Russia or Dubai. A few years ago, several U.S. strip clubs made purchases. Then, with prostitution legalized by Germany and Netherlands, the sky was the limit. His original plan had been to turn the sanatorium into a resort for sex holidays, but time and technology had passed him by. Internet filmmakers were lured to his mountain retreat by privacy, the availability of panoramic shots between takes, and, oddly enough, the presence of horseflesh, which apparently enhanced the interest of clients who used their computer monitors and their hands rather than other human beings, or other animals, for sexual satisfaction.

This year business was especially profitable because an American filmmaker named Donner had mysteriously disappeared from his Ukraine mountain retreat. Donner, the fool who’d insisted on calling him
“Baby”
while he was alive, had opened the underground business to Ivan Babii. This season, in the same way young horses are led up from the foothills in spring, sweet young ones had been brought up to his lodge. Three girls who spoke Ukrainian, plus a boy who spoke Russian and Ukrainian. The boy and one of the girls supposedly from Kiev with their showoff haircuts, body piercings, and clothing. Tough street demons until they arrived here.

All four were over sixteen. No more babies for Babii. Ethical standards had not caused the age limit, nor the fact Donner was American and several American law enforcement officials had visited Ukraine and Romania seeking the source of the videos. The reason Babii had moved away from children was a current trend among sexual addicts—a preference for tough teenagers brought to their knees. Babii, the man from Moldova, had become the connection for delivering tough-looking young ones to Romania and getting them out, selling them across several borders and time zones.

Vakhabov, originally from Uzbekistan, was the Kiev connection. Vakhabov insisted teenagers could be found wandering the streets. But with NGOs like La Strada making trouble and the US appointing itself trafficking sheriff in order to work with the SBU, the simple use of “employment” agencies was no longer enough.

“A promise of Odessa sunshine is replaced by a trip through Moldova,” said Vakhabov. “We simply borrow them, while at the same time using opiates to calm them. They forget everything. Even if they wander off and make their way back to Ukraine … even if they find a shepherd hut with supplies and cross the border into the Nature Park, they will have clear heads, remembering nothing. Perhaps a trip to a Kiev clinic and some concern at first, but in the end they blame themselves. It is like fishing. We may even hook them more than once. Back in Kiev, they may decide to return to families. We bring families together, Ivan. Newly adopted families abroad, or the families they left in Ukraine. Catch and release. Fishermen in the Chernobyl region do it because of radiation. As they say in America, it’s win-win.”

Vakhabov was insane. But if Babii did not supply an outlet for Vakhabov’s girls and boys, someone else would, someone in Moldova or Slovakia or Poland or Russia or Albania or here in Romania, where Babii was only one of many. Vakhabov coined the phrase “Chernobyl Trail,” saying this would confuse anti-trafficking agents because no trafficker in his right mind would venture across the Chernobyl Zone. Traffickers used the trails established decades earlier for smuggling drugs and weapons. With lack of jobs, trafficking of individuals was inevitable. If Vakhabov did not grab lost souls wandering the streets, another trafficker would get them. Perhaps a cult would get them, like the one run by Andropov who insisted he had found God.

Babii thought briefly of his mother. When he was a boy she lit enough votive candles at her Orthodox bedroom shrine to heat the house. His mother complained about evils in the world, yet ignored—until the night on her deathbed—the business his father and Uncle Iosif had gotten into after the fall of the Soviet Union.

“They sell drugs, Ivan. I’ve known for years and prayed nightly to the Virgin’s icon. Do not follow them, Ivan. Go to school and stay away. Promise you’ll stay away from it.”

But, of course, he did not stay away from it. At school there was money to be had, and his connections were ready-made. Ivan Babii, the Kiev University connection.

When Babii heard a muffled scream in another part of the lodge, he put a finger to one ear as if to itch himself, but actually to make the sound of today’s business disappear. Outside, the snow-bearing cloud passed and the sun, heading toward the western horizon, shone down through virgin pines. There could not be screams here. It was much too peaceful. He had been assured the new arrivals were sufficiently sedated. He stopped itching his ear and listened carefully. Now he heard only a gentle feminine whimper, much more peaceful, as it should be at the Moldovenesc Self-Awareness Sanatorium, where inquiries on the listed phone line resulted in a message saying the sanatorium was booked in advance and to call the Bucharest number, which was changed regularly and led nowhere.

For the occasional mountain traveler who wandered into the sanatorium, Babii patterned his operation after one he’d visited in Sevastopol years earlier. There, a wide-eyed, bald woman had intoned in a mix of Russian and Ukrainian, “Business exploded after the Chernobyl explosion. When the Union fell, we became part of the new age.” So he was. Isn’t this what new agers and liberals claimed? Nothing is really good or evil? Everything simply is?

The whimpering finally stopped, which meant Belak and his Slovak crew were between takes. Filming would soon be finished, and all four young ones would be given back to Vakhabov. By tomorrow night they would be fed and gone, and Babii could relax instead of pacing his office like a child with his hand stuck in ajar of sweets. A fifty-year-old who feels older than his age because of this idiotic guilt! Perhaps it was time to get out, to run away from this business.

As he stood at his window at the end of the crisp, spring afternoon, the last thing Babii expected to see was a group of young priests emerging from the woods beyond the stables. Not bearded Orthodox priests wearing cassocks. These priests were clean-shaven and wore black tops and Roman collars. They ran quickly in and out of the slanting shade cast by virgin pines, leaping over tree trunks like thin mountain wolves.