There were three women in the room, and if you added all their ages together, you could probably break fifty years old.
Barely.
None of them was Tiasa. Two sat on a couch, at opposite ends from each other, strangers bound by common fear. The third one sat on a rickety chair in the opposite corner, almost in profile, watching me without turning her head. All of them wore clean, if worn and used, clothes, and all of them looked fed, and all of them looked bewildered and haunted by their circumstance.
“What do you think?” Arzu asked.
I forced my eyes to linger on the women, and in doing so absorbed more details. A broken fingernail. A bruise around one wrist. A clenched jaw. Finally, I looked at Arzu, and showed him a grin to demonstrate my pleasure. Then I put the grin away, so he could see that, too.
“They're all older than I was hoping,” I told him.
He looked sincerely apologetic. “These are the youngest I could get. Give me another week or two, maybe I can find others.”
“And I asked for four, not three.”
“Yes, you did, my friend. And here are three of them less than twenty-four hours after you asked me, all of them ready to start work. Give me until tomorrow night, the day after at the latest, I'll get you a fourth, I promise.”
I considered, or pretended to, looking back at the women. The one in the corner had shifted her head slightly to watch me and, when she caught me looking, turned it back again. She was the smallest of them, and perhaps the eldest, black hair and an olive complexion, and I caught sight of the swelling at her lip before she hid her face. Her eyes were as dark as her hair, and she couldn't conceal the hatred in them.
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“You know how they are,” Arzu said. “Sometimes they need it explained to them.”
I nodded, because I didn't trust myself to speak.
“Let's go.” Arzu put a hand on my shoulder. “We can talk business someplace more comfortable.”
He guided me out of the room and into the next, where two partners or acquaintances or brothers or who the hell knew were sitting around a small table, eating their dinner. Each one of them had a pistol resting next to his plate of mezes. The one nearest us got to his feet and locked the door we'd just exited. Arzu said something in Turkish, without breaking stride, and the response followed us out of the apartment and into the early evening. Arzu took the lead, down the flight of stairs to the street. It wasn't quite evening yet, but the apartment was close enough to the mountains that the sun had dipped out of sight behind them, and the shadows were growing long as the air grew cooler.
“You talk to Vladek?” Arzu asked me.
“Recently?”
“In the last day or so.”
“He's not one for chatting unless it's about business, and right now my business is with you.”
Since I'd last seen Arzu, he'd left four voicemails on Vladek's phone, and sent two texts, the most recent just after nine this morning. I'd reviewed the lot, and they'd all been pretty much the same, with Arzu asking about David Mercer, trying to confirm the contact. The last one this morning had added, at the end, ALSO, ANOTHER 14?
I'd considered responding to the texts, but had discarded the idea as quickly as I'd found it as one that would only make trouble for me. If Vladek was capable of responding to a text message, after all, why wasn't he answering his phone? Best to let it lie.
“That's true. That's very true.” Arzu motioned toward a black Honda CRV parked nearby. “Let me drive you back to your hotel, David.”
I waited for him to unlock the car, climbed into the front passenger seat. He snapped his seatbelt into place, started the car, then immediately reached for the radio, silencing the blast of hip-hop suddenly pouring forth. I made a mental note of the street we were on, the number of the apartment block, then put my attention on Arzu. It might have been his mention of Vladek, but I was having trouble reading him, suddenly. There was no doubt that, by now, Vladek Karataev and his friends had been discovered in Batumi, which meant there was no reason not to assume that Arzu had learned that Vladek Karataev was dead. It would certainly explain why the calls and messages had stopped.
Whether or not Arzu suspected me for it was something I couldn't hazard. Based on what I'd just seen, combined with the last text he'd sent, I was sure that Tiasa was long gone, that Vladek had been correct and that Arzu had already trafficked her someplace else.
Just like in Batumi, I had lost time, and Tiasa was gone. Unlike in Batumi, I didn't have the first idea as to where.
Showing Arzu a picture of Tiasa Lagidze and asking him what he'd done with her, asking him where she was, wasn't going to work. Even questioning him about her in the most general terms would be problematic. The women Arzu dealt with weren't people, they were merchandise. Any assertion on my part to the contrary wouldn't just raise suspicion, it would mark me as his enemy. Right now, he believed we were alike.
I needed him to believe that. Unless I was willing to do to him what I'd done to Vladek, it was the only way I would get a lead on Tiasa. I needed Arzu to believe that I was willing to be his friend, rather than someone who wanted to use his head to shatter all the windows on his car.
But dammit if I wasn't thinking about doing it anyway.
We'd gone all of a kilometer, winding down out of the mountain terraces that faced the Black Sea, when I asked him if he had paper for the women.
“We have their passports,” Arzu said, almost absently. “Took them when they arrived, you know.”
“If I'm going to move them, I'm going to need clean paper. Can you arrange that?”
“I'll give you their passports.”
“You're not hearing me,” I said. “Clean paper. I don't want some customs official in Rome wondering why a sixteen-year-old girl from Romania has entry stamps for Ukraine and Turkey in her passport, each of them less than a month apart. They're cracking down on this stuff, you know that.”
“They say they're cracking down on it. We both know they're not.” Arzu slowed for a light, letting the car coast to a stop. “Where are you taking them? Kuwait, right? Or Abu Dhabi?”
“Maybe.”
“You're being like that with me? Don't you trust me?”
“I trust you completely, Arzu Bey. It's the people around you I don't know that I don't trust.”
“Just us here in the car.”
“ Kuwait,” I said.
Arzu laughed. “You're worrying about bullshit!”
“That's easy for you to say. I'm the one who's got to move them. You'll already have my money.”
“Just bribe someone, David,” Arzu said, starting the car rolling forward again. “That's what I did with the last one I sent that way. You'd have liked her, she was young. Very pretty, not like these others. I should've kept her.”
“She went to Kuwait? You got someone I can deal with there? That would be very helpful.”
“I'm sorry, no,” Arzu said. “It was Dubai, she went with a couple of others. But no paper needed on any of them, just money put in the right hands, you know what I'm saying.”
“ Dubai isn't Kuwait.”
“It's all the same, wherever you go. Europe, America, UAE, whatever. Always someone you can bribe.”
I thought about what he was saying, the likelihood that Tiasa was now in Dubai. “It can get expensive that way.”
“What's the saying, you have to spend money to make money?” He laughed. “Most of these girls, once they've been taught, you can make the money back in a night, two at the most.”
“Speaking of money,” I said.
Arzu laughed again. “Okay, I'll give you a price. Say, twenty thousand.”
“That's not a price. That's a joke. Ten. Maybe.”
I caught Arzu's smile from the side, realized that he was pleased with my counteroffer, pleased that I was willing to play the game. That we were haggling over human beings the way I'd haggled over the Dnepr clearly bothered him not at all.
“David, you're trying to rob me! Perhaps I can do nineteen thousand.”
“Twelve.”
“Eighteen.”
“Fifteen.”
“Seventeen. No less, I just can't, even for friends.”
“Seventeen,” I agreed, and I thought about it, then. I didn't have nearly that much on me in cash, but I could get it. One call to Nicholas Sargenti and a wire transfer and I could put the money in Arzu's hand before tomorrow noon. In exchange, I would take possession of three lives.
Then what? Tell them to run for it? Give them a bundle of bills and wish them good luck and Godspeed? Send them to Georgia? To New York? London? Pay for them to make their way home? And all the time, let Tiasa get further away from me; all the time, let her hours of suffering increase.
Never mind the fact that I would be paying Arzu for three lives, putting money into his pocket for trafficking in slaves.
We'd pulled up outside the hotel, Arzu letting the engine idle. I unfastened my seatbelt.
“You want a wire transfer or cash?” I asked him.
“Cash is best, if you can do it.”
“You'll have the other girl by tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
“Call me when you're ready,” I told him. “I'll have the cash.”
He nodded, wished me a good night, and I got out of the car and headed into the lobby. He hadn't asked for any money in advance, and I understood that was because he didn't actually need it as security. Even if the deal we'd made fell through, he'd easily find another buyer.
A guy like Arzu would always find another buyer.
The Zorlu had a bar off the lobby, done up like an English pub, and I went inside and ordered myself a whiskey, a double, neat. I hadn't had liquor in almost five years, since before I'd taken up with Alena, and I'd never been much of a heavy drinker prior to that. In Kobuleti, we would occasionally share a bottle of wine, but even that was infrequent.
When my drink came, I slammed about half of it back, then took the remainder more slowly. By the time I'd finished, it had been twelve minutes since Arzu and I had parted company.
I paid and headed back into the lobby, checked with the concierge for the phone number I wanted, and then assured him it was not due to a problem with the Zorlu that I wanted it. Then I went outside, and pulled Vladek's BlackBerry from where I'd been carrying it in my jacket pocket. His SIM card was still in it, and I liked that irony.
I called the police. I spoke only in Russian. I gave them the address of the apartment building I'd left less than an hour earlier, and I gave them Arzu Kaya's name, and I told them there were two other men there, and that they were armed. I told them about the three women. When they asked me, I told them my name was Vladek.
Then I hung up, popped the battery out of the BlackBerry, and pulled the SIM card. I broke it between my fingers, tossed it in the gutter, then went back inside and up to my room. Packing took all of four minutes, and within ten I'd checked out and was on the Dnepr. I headed to the Trabzon airport in search of another hotel, thinking about Tiasa, wondering how in the world I was going to find her in Dubai, if she was even in Dubai. Thinking about the three women I'd seen, and the little help I'd been able to give them.
It wasn't enough, not nearly enough.
But it was the best that I could do.