Traffyck (31 page)

Janos reached out and grabbed the purple and orange scarf and pulled. “You have what was promised! I want your information now, or there will be blood!”

“Where do I start?” whined Comrade Piper, ignoring Mish, who sat at his feet.

“The recent information you provided Shved! This is about young people taken away as slaves! Do not think you can hold back information now! Shved is dead, and I will know!”

“I … I’m sorry,” he whined. “I was simply trying to make conversation. Here in Kharkiv, there is little intelligent conversation. It was, as you say, about young people, either stolen from the streets or recruited. Parents in Kiev hired Shved to find their children. They range in age from pre-teens to teens. The last information I gave Shved was street rumor from urchins in Kharkiv. They say there is a place southwest of Odessa, near the Romanian border, a marshy peninsula west of Kilija that can be reached only by boat. It is a holding area. The children, mostly teenaged girls, are somehow brainwashed at a compound. They are prepared in unknown ways, perhaps with drugs, but I do not have details. However, it is not the usual rape into submission.

After this preparation, traffickers come across the swamps and take them away.”

Comrade Piper glanced down at Mish, stretched out on the lawn, yawning.

“Continue!” growled Janos.

“They take swamp boats into Romania. Then the usual trafficking routes across Bulgaria to Turkey, or west to Albania where the Mafia takes over. From there, the urchins can end up anywhere in the world. They hope for America, where conditions are better, even for prostitution slaves … The situation … I will donate some of the euros to La Strada in Kharkiv.”

“How old are the ones who gave you this information?”

“Mostly in their late teens. They say the compound near Kilija has older ones who have stayed on. They say the situation is much like trafficked girls who come back to recruit, the ones called she-pimps. Shved searched for an escapee from the compound who lived in Kiev … a grown man. Therefore, the compound has existed many years. Shved asked me to find out if there were religious ties. The street urchins laugh at this, but it is derisive laughter and, therefore, religion or perhaps a cult of some kind may be involved.”

“How did this man in Kiev escape from the compound?”

“The urchins say the peninsula is cut off with no roads leading in. He swam away one night and almost drowned. Perhaps it is legend. It is hard to tell.”

Janos let go of Comrade Piper’s scarf. “Do street urchins know more than they tell you?”

Comrade Piper loosened his scarf, glanced down at his dog. “Not the ones I’ve spoken with. There might have been others who were closer to the Kiev escapee. I was trying to find more when I heard about Shved. Do you take Shved’s place? Should I continue investigating?”

“Yes.”

After they exchanged cell phone numbers, Comrade Piper took Mish’s ball, put it in his pocket, and then picked up the dog. “One more fact before we depart, Comrade Gypsy. To show you can trust me, the last thing Shved asked about was an American, a pornographic cinematographer named Donner, who disappeared.”

“Do you know anything about this?”

“No. But because Shved asked, I thought I should tell you.”

“Do you have any other facts hidden away? Because if you do–”

“That is all. But I have a question. What did Shved eat to make him so large?”

“Hamburgers.”

Comrade Piper said, “Hamburgers. Do you hear, Mish? Hamburgers.”

Janos was putting his phone away after storing Comrade Piper’s number when he saw movement to his right.

The vagrant was back, but moved much more quickly than earlier. The vagrant had a pistol, long-barreled, silenced! Janos swung his arm out as the thud of the silenced pistol exploded. Mish yelped, Comrade Piper fell to the ground, and Janos threw himself onto the vagrant. They went to the ground, the silenced pistol whipping back and forth like a stiffened snake. The pistol fired once into the air, again into the ground. Janos and the vagrant rolled on the ground near Comrade Piper, who gasped for air while blood spurted from his chest.

Janos saw his duffel, managed to free one hand, rolled again, grabbed one end of the duffel, and held it high. When he swung it down with its hidden oak club, the vagrant grunted but did not lose strength. The tattered clothing and stench of the man hid a brute. Janos swung the duffel with its hidden oak club again and again. Finally, after innumerable blows to the head, the brute’s pistol was free and Janos controlled the grip.

But the brute was not finished. With a great gasp of air and a yell of triumph, the brute again whipped the pistol about and struggled with Janos until a shot was fired.

Janos’ face was close to the face of the brute, whose green eyes glared, a face wrinkled in hatred. Janos’ eyes blurred, and he thought he had been shot. But his arms were free, and when he wiped his face with his sleeve, he saw that the shot had gone upward, entering the brute’s chin and exiting his skull. Blood and brains had sprayed onto Janos’ face and into the blue morning sky.

Janos fell onto his back, and the brute, gasping for breath, fell onto Janos’ legs. Then all was silent as Mish, the poodle, having run away, came closer and sniffed Janos’ face.

Janos, the man who had minutes earlier sat peacefully in the lobby of Hotel Kharkiv, pushed the dead brute aside, wiped the brute’s blood from his face and hands with his scarf, and went to check on Comrade Piper. Piper’s sunglasses were askew, and his eyes were bloodshot, even in death, as Mish sniffed his master and then looked to Janos. Janos reached into the windbreaker and took the envelope containing the euros. He went back to his duffel, stuffed his scarf and the envelope inside, and ran into the concealment of the bushes. Like recited lines of poetry, traffic continued to pass on the boulevard; the battle had taken place behind the massive base of the Shevchenko Monument. Inside Janos’ pocket, his sunglasses were crushed, but the miniature bicyclist’s mirror Mariya had given him to watch his back was undamaged. His cell phone was also undamaged. Down at his feet, Mish looked up to Janos with eyes brown and wide. At noon in Kiev, shortly after leaving church services with his family, SBU Agent Yuri Smirnov received a call from his office. Two men had been shot to death at the Shevchenko Monument in Kharkiv. The reason the office called Smirnov was that the Kiev SBU office had been in contact with the Kiev militia and was aware Janos Nagy had taken the overnight train to Kharkiv. The wet-behind-the-ears Kharkiv SBU agent assigned to follow Nagy had lost him at his destination. One of the dead men was dressed as a vagrant, and Smirnov could only assume this was Nagy. At Sunday brunch with his family, everything tasted rotten and sour, and he wondered if Janos Nagy would still be alive if he had told him everything he knew.

When call after call to Janos’ cell phone failed, Mariya put on a jacket, pulled on a tight-fitting knit cap to hide her hair, and stood with one hand on the doorknob and her other hand in her pocket on her cell phone. She was not certain what she would do or where she would go. If she drove, the militiamen would follow. If she walked away, perhaps they would not recognize her and she would be able to go to the metro station and then the train station. If she carried her bicycle down the stairs and rode away, she could easily lose the militiamen and take the paths to the train station. But at the station, what would she be able to do except wait for incoming trains?

It was shortly after noon, and she ran to the television. She turned it on and tuned to the Kiev news station in time to hear a report that two men were found shot to death behind the Shevchenko Monument in Kharkiv. Nothing more to the story; simply two men shot to death.

As local Kiev news droned on, Mariya went to the window and looked down at the parking lot. The faded orange Skoda was there, still looking like it had been abandoned in the weeds at the back of the parking lot. Janos’ Skoda here because she had driven him to the station. Janos’ Skoda here like a tombstone. Was it because of her? She looked up to the blue sky and shouted. “Was it lack of prayer to you? Please, God! Not Janos! He is so new!”

She held her hands against the window and pushed, hoping the glass would break. But instead of glass breaking, the apartment phone rang.

“Mariya! It’s me!”

“Janos … Janos!”

“It’s fine! I took the express back, and the cell phone refused to work until now!”

“Janos! Where are you?”

“The train is pulling into Kiev. I saw the news broadcast on train television. You also heard about Kharkiv. It was not me, Mariya! I am safe! Can you hear me?”

“Yes, Janos! I hear you! When are you coming to me?”

“I’ll be there soon. But I must meet someone first. I can take the metro to the meeting. It will not take long. It is someone who has further information about Shved. Mariya?”

“Do not do this to me again, Janos! I do not want to lose you!”

“I will be there, Mariya. We will be together tonight. Being with you is—”

“I know, Janos. Come home to me as soon as you can.”

When Janos hung up, Mariya pulled off the knit cap and sat on the sofa. Her bicycle remained against the wall near the door. As she wept, she realized it was the only time in her life she could remember weeping tears of joy.

It was long past the sixteen hundred-hour meeting time near the river terminal, but Comrade Strudel was nowhere in sight. A vagrant napping on a bench was not Comrade Strudel, and a pair of lovers sat at the exact meeting spot on the lower section of concrete at the river’s edge. Janos stepped down to the lower level and approached the couple. He told them he had lost something here in a crack in the concrete and could they please move. The man, a young, stout Russian, bulged his muscles and looked angry for a second until Janos put down his duffel bag and said, “Please. This is important. It is not personal; it is a militia matter, so if you will kindly move over a few meters, you will be doing me and the rest of humanity a large fucking favor.”

As soon as the couple moved and Janos bent down near the water’s edge, he saw it: a note printed in pencil on the corrugated steel cladding of the concrete. The note was in Russian.
“Gyp. #312, Gastinitsa Daroga, Syemdesat Ulitsa.”

Janos was familiar with Hotel Daroga. It was in the poorer area of north Podil, a short walk from a metro station. Rooms rented by day or week or month. The desk clerk was eighty years old and talked with a lisp. It took three repeats of the simple instructions—”Two floors up, then left”—before Janos could understand.

The stairwell smelled of piss. The hallway on the third floor smelled of cheap vodka. A single lighted exit sign at the stairwell and a small window at the far end of the hall gave off enough light to keep him from walking into walls. Radios and televisions boomed behind thin doors. Turning left took Janos nearer the window, and soon he was able to see room numbers. The door stenciled 312 was slightly open. Janos held his duffel bag at the bottom, grasping the oak club sewn inside. Within the room, he saw a foot in a scuffed work shoe hanging over the edge of a bed. He pushed the door open slowly.