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.
She was not, as far as I could see, going easy on her left.
Both Miata and I had watched for a while, and Alena had ignored us both. Finally I'd shut off the music, and that had forced her to stop. When I'd turned to face her again, she was already on me, and while the kiss was wonderful, it wasn't what I'd come looking for at all. When I tried to explain that to her, she'd told me to shut up, and then clothes had started coming off. She'd pulled me to the floor, and the sex we had reminded me of the first times we made love, when passion had made our hands tremble, and desire and need had been the same things.
After, we'd made our way to bed and slept, and in the morning there had been nothing, it seemed, she could say. That hadn't been the case for me.
“I'm coming back,” I told her.
She'd nodded, once, as if believing my sincerity, if not the promise.
The drive itself from Kobuleti to Sarp, at the border with Turkey, was only forty kilometers, but it took me the better part of two hours. I crossed on the David Mercer ID, which was the only one I'd brought along, something I was certain would become a problem for me later. While I had other IDs, they'd stayed behind, in my go-bag where they belonged. In my backpack was a change of clothes, Bakhar's address book, Vladek Karataev's BlackBerry, a smattering of toiletries, and my laptop. The only weapon I carried was a small flip knife, thinking that would be easier to explain if I found myself searched at a checkpoint or the border.
As it turned out, I probably could have brought a rocket launcher with me. Fifty euros seemed to be the going rate for just about anything illegal these days, and in Sarp it bought me a visitor's visa, and papers for the Dnepr. I took the opportunity to refuel the bike, and then it was just a question of following the coast another two hundred kilometers or so until I reached Trabzon.
It had been almost midnight when I'd reached the Zorlu Grand Hotel, the city's finest accommodations, and checked myself into my room. I'd picked the place not out of a desire to live large, but to present a cover if I needed one. The ride had given me plenty of time to think, and thinking had given me the frame for a plan.
Sex was for sale everywhere. It was just a question of knowing where to look.
My first day in Trabzon, the day I met Arzu, I woke early, did yoga for half an hour, then ordered room service. The food arrived just after my shower, and I ate while going through Bakhar's address book, this time looking for numbers with a Trabzon exchange. There weren't any, which left me the BlackBerry, and while I was violently suspicious of the device, or, more precisely, of who might have Vladek's number and be tracking him through it, it gave me a window into his life and his business. All I needed to do was access the information.
The Zorlu had wireless, so I set up the laptop to download the software I needed, then went down to the lobby and got directions from the concierge to the nearest store selling mobile phones. It was a three-minute walk, but they didn't have the USB cable I needed. I bought two prepaid international SIM cards from them, anyway, then got directions to another store, which did carry replacement cables. I bought another two SIMs, and the cable, and headed back to the room. Then I ran the software I'd downloaded, plugged the BlackBerry into my USB port, and cracked open a very disturbing window into Vladek Karataev's life.
His address book, like Bakhar's, exercised discretion. While this time there were both first and last names to be discerned, there were no addresses provided, only phone numbers. It looked like Vladek had made a point of clearing out his emails and text messages regularly, and I was only able to find a handful of each. It would have been simple enough to recover the deleted communications, I suppose, but all the methods I knew of required additional hardware, none of which I had, and none of which I could think of a way to acquire quickly.
So I worked with what I did have, started searching, and the laptop made that easy; all I had to do was run a find. “Trabzon” didn't kick back any results. “Turkey” got the same negative result. When I tried the country code for Turkey, though, three hits came back, and one of those looked like it was for Trabzon, or at least close by-a man named Arzu Kaya. I checked against Bakhar's book, and lo and behold, he had an Arzu, too.
I skimmed the rest of the BlackBerry entries while considering how to proceed. There were numbers for phones in Georgia, Ukraine, and Russia, and it looked to me like Vladek had kept his business local, though I found two out of Western Europe-one in the Netherlands, the other in Germany.
The mail and text messages got my attention next. Almost all of the emails were in Cyrillic, which was a minor headache, as I could speak Russian much better than I could read it. It took me a while, even though they were universally terse. Vladek had been circumspect, carrying on what little correspondence remained in open code, with references to “deliveries” and “stock” and “items.” It might've referred to anything, guns or drugs as much as people. It might've referred to Georgian wine.
Of the text messages, the most recent had been the one sent by Zviadi at the point of my gun. The only other sequence was a short exchange of messages sent the night Tiasa had been taken, between Vladek and Arzu. The exchange had run in Russian.
BUYING?
HOW MANY
5. 16 16 17 19 AND 14.
WHEN
TOMORROW NIGHT. CALL TO DISCUSS PRICE.
Which meant that Vladek had planned on selling Tiasa even before he and his pals had murdered Bakhar.
For a while, that was the worst the BlackBerry gave me.
Then I found the pictures.
And the video.
The photos had been taken on the phone itself, and the most sinister thing about them was that they were so very mundane. Mostly headshots of different women, different girls, one after another. In a couple, the subject was actually smiling. In a couple, the subject was crying. If I'd seen them in any other place, had known they were taken by any other person than Vladek, it would have meant nothing.
But sitting at the desk in my hotel room at the Zorlu Grand Hotel, looking at them, I could only see them as the record they undoubtedly were. The women he had taken and trafficked, one after another, kept for posterity on his phone.
There were thirty-seven of them, and I made myself look at them all.
The last picture was of Tiasa. She looked at the camera with tears running down her face, snot leaking from her nose, clearly trying to stop crying.
Vladek had taken the picture after he'd raped her. I knew that, because he had the video of it, taken the same way he'd taken the photograph. Some dirty room in a dirty building with a mattress on the floor and four men taking turns with a fourteen-year-old girl who couldn't defend herself and had nowhere to run.
In Batumi, with a puncture in his femoral, Vladek had told me what he'd done to her, and I'd known he was telling the truth, but I had hoped he wasn't. I'd hoped he was throwing spite and hatred at me, trying to deliver wounds with the only weapon he'd had left. That's what I'd hoped.
I turned off the video before I saw more, but I'd already seen too much.
I should've known better than to hope.
The day after I met Arzu, he called me at the hotel. It was twenty-two minutes past four in the afternoon.
“David,” he said, “I think we're in business.”