Bitter Sweet (14 page)

Some five hundred metres from the station, I saw
a man in uniform run out on to the street. He stopped and looked up and down the road, his gaze settling on our bus and the two BMWs.

Four hundred metres and the transport policeman lifted a mike to his lips, whilst continuing to stare in our direction.

Three hundred metres. Jake lifted his foot off the accelerator pedal and the bus began to slow. Another officer ran out of the building to join his colleague. They took up positions on either side of the road leading to the bus entrance. The first officer still had the mike raised.

‘Get ready,’ I said to Ivonne, and began to undo the buttons on the jacket of my uniform.

Two hundred metres. I removed my cap and let it drop to the floor. I squeezed my phones into my trouser pockets and removed the jacket, revealing a white blouse.

One hundred metres. The two officers moved into the middle of the road, their concentration focused on the BMs. Jake slowed the bus further, ready to turn into the station, if allowed.

Fifty metres left and the bus was down to a walking pace. Jake watched the two officers, waiting for a signal as they were blocking the entryway.

I held my breath, my attention focused on the two officers and the BMWs in the wing mirrors. The BMWs had slowed and the gap between them and the bus had opened up.

Two more officers ran out of the station, whilst the two in front of us now ran towards the sides of the bus. The two BMWs peeled off, and with a squeal of tyres accelerated away. I saw the officers come to a stop, shaking their heads.

Jake kept the bus rolling. A few men stood on either side of the entrance, all with phones in their hands. Too late, the BMs were gone, and there would be no tweets to show that they had been following
us.

As we entered the station, a bus moved to block the entrance.

Of one thing I was certain; Erjon had not given up. We only had minutes before they dumped the cars and came after us on foot.

Jake stopped the bus.

‘Got to go, Jake,’ I said. ‘Thanks for your help.’

Ivonne whipped the veil off her head, undid the two buttons at her neck holding the habit in place. She let it drop to the floor and kicked it under a seat. She shook her head and her blond hair fell around her face; the transformation complete. Any man looking at her would go wow, and the women would be either envious or think blond bimbo, but nobody would make the connection to a nun.

I jumped off the bus to the sound of sirens coming rapidly our way.

‘Let’s go,’ I said, heading towards the concourse.

Once we were well into the crowds, I stopped and quickly looked around. The sirens were closer, but the people in the station did not seem to notice in their hustle and bustle to meet trains. And best of all, no one was paying us any attention.

‘Okay, Ivonne,’ I said, ‘what about you taking the train?’

She looked at the departures board. ‘Platform six in five minutes.’

‘You’ll make that, easy.’ I leaned in closer to her. ‘What about you taking Maria and Olga, and I’ll take Yana?’

‘Good thinking.’

‘What’s Markus’s address?’

‘Number fourteen George Street. It’s a big
block of flats, apartment 611.’

‘How do I get in? Or should I meet you coming off the train?’

‘No, the station is just around the corner. Just keep pressing numbers until someone lets you in. Then go straight up and wait.’

Ivonne made sure the girls knew what was happening. I gave Ivonne a quick hug. ‘See you soon.’

Yana looked unhappy as I took her hand.

I had seen a few taxis at the front of the building on our way in, but I ruled that option out – too many police. The station had an exit to the north; again I ruled that out – we’d have to go back towards the bus entrance. In addition, the BMs had sped north to avoid the police and the fastest way for Erjon to get into the station was via the entrance on the north side. That left the southern exit – the one furthest from where we stood.

I gripped Yana’s hand tighter and set off, staying close to the rows of shops and delis – our progress hampered by their clientele. Halfway across the concourse, I stopped to appraise our situation. There was no sign of Ivonne, Maria and Olga on platform six. I hoped they were now settled on the train.

Behind us, near to where the concourse and the bus terminal converged, the crowds were thickening and revolving blue lights flickered against the walls of the station.

No one was running or striding purposefully in our direction and nobody averted their eyes as I scanned the crowds in our vicinity. 

I set off again, holding Yana’s hand. As we weaved our way through the throngs of people, I kept my head lowered, all the while scanning the people in front of us and glancing intermittently in the direction of the southern exit.

We approached the exit, a grand arch with three steps, at the bottom of which some ten feet away, was a sliding double-glass door. The doors stood open. I started down the steps. A man wearing a leather jacket and jeans rushed in from the street, heading towards the doors.

He looked up
. Our eyes met in recognition. It was one of the thugs from this afternoon.

I let go
of Yana’s hand, jumped the last two steps and landed centring my balance on my back leg. My brain flashed; bodyguard combo. I ran towards the thug. He hesitated, surprised. Using my right leg, I pushed off. My left leg flew upwards, braced for impact. The speed of my foot flying forward, combined with the momentum of my body, drove the sole of my foot into the man’s torso with over three hundred pounds of force. He lurched backwards, doubling over. My right foot landed on the floor, giving me the spring necessary to launch my left leg upwards to shoulder height. I was now airborne. My left foot flew towards the man’s nose. The foot connected. I heard the crunch of cartilage and bone. The man fell to the ground.

With both feet now back on the ground, I spun around, bringing my fists back to my sides.

Yana stood with her mouth open, staring at me.

I knew the thug wouldn’t be getting up. However, someone had probably seen me at
tack, and I wasn’t going to hang about to explain.

‘Come on,’ I said, grabbing Yana’s wrist.

We rushed out of the station. On the street, I turned right. Adrenalin was pumping through my veins with all my senses on alert. I spotted a cab, just as its rear passenger door opened. I raced towards it, pulling Yana along. 

11

I slumped on to the sofa and explained m
y fears to Ivonne. She listened without interruption and then said; ‘The only person, besides me, who knows you made the threat is Jake.’

‘Do you think he’d give me away?’

‘Only if someone knows to put him under pressure. If he’s threatened with the sack – yes.’

‘But as you said, they’d have to know.’

‘And what’s more,’ Ivonne said, ‘the police would have to join a lot of dots to get that far.’

‘That’s true,’ I said, f
eeling a lot more confident. ‘And only Liz knows my phone number. She’d have to divulge that before they could make the connection.’

I kicked off my shoes and drew my knees up under my chin. ‘As to a trafficking charge, there is that recording device in my apartment.’

Ivonne frowned.

‘The DVD recorder, or whatever it is, that I lifted from Martha’s place.’

‘Yeah, got you,’ Ivonne said. ‘Do you think it’s safe in your apartment?’

‘Erjon wouldn’t, would he?’ But he would, and I knew it, and it was obvious he’d go looking for it in my apartment or Ivonne’s. Just as it was it was bleedin’ obvious as to who had helped the girls escape.

‘So how are we going to get it?’I mused.

‘Well, T
ina,’ Ivonne said. ‘I know how uptight you are about keeping your private life and the escorting separate.’

I said nothing, aware that in a round-about-way criticism was about to get dumped on top of me.

‘All those rules,’ Ivonne continued, ‘for escorts to follow, you’d think it would make it easy. And I’ve read all the books; the upmarket racy ones, titillating society with sexual revelations and perversions, all the way to the hard-ass massage parlour ones who’ve counted the number of Johns they’ve serviced in their careers.’

Oh, oh, here it comes.

‘But all those rules are guidelines written from the safety of a desk. And you think you’ve got it all mapped out in your head. Maybe you have. There is one thing you’re missing though: you respond to some clients, giving of yourself without knowing it, telling them things you shouldn’t, sharing with them things you shouldn’t. It’s just the same as in your private life – one guy is on the same wavelength as you, the next one isn’t. There’s nothing you can do about that.’

I nodded at the truth of what Ivonne was saying and then drew my knees further up to my chin, wrapping my arms around my legs. Ivonne wasn’t finished.

‘Right now you know the answer; you’re just being stubborn about it.’

‘That’s right.’

‘You just don’t want to ask for help. He is a client, and taking his help, asking for his help just doesn’t sit. The last time you took his help, you just kinda let things roll along, saying yes to keep him happy. And then bingo, you needed help and it was there. You didn’t even have to ask for it, but it saved your ass. And that suited you just fine, didn’t it? You didn’t need to break any of the rules.’

I sat frozen. Ivonne was dumping not just criticism, but truth on me. It exactly described the way in which I had accepted Mike’s help. I’d gone along with his idea, and yes, mainly to keep him happy.

‘Anyway,’ Ivonne said, ‘from what I’ve seen the two of you are long past the client-escort relationship. You mightn’t like my saying that. But you know each other too well. Mike is a clever guy, not just brainy; he’s clued in as to what makes people tick.’ Ivonne leaned forward. ‘It’s just your principles, your stubbornness that’s stopping you from seeing that the line between escorting and your private life is fuzzy.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Not that.’ Ivonne laughed. ‘You’ve got a one-track mind. You think you can keep him and your private life in two separate compartments. But you are one person, not two.’

Ivonne placed a hand on my knee and gave me a playful shove. ‘Phone him,’ she said, smiling.

‘I’ll be in his debt.’

‘That’s what friends are all about.’

Ivonne was correct; Mike was more a friend than a client. I still didn’t like the idea of being in his debt. And there was the damsel-in-distress factor – men really loved to help when called upon. Would Mike end up getting too close, wanting more than just friendship?

I made the call – it was the right thing to do.

Twenty minutes later Mike arrived. I gave him a big hug and told him exactly what had happened. He listened, only interrupting now and again to clarify the odd detail.

I had expected him to come over all concerned, but he never once made any emotional comments, although I could see his forehead tensing up. It was all factual, as if he were some kind of recording device.

I gave him the key to my apartment. He asked for and received the mobile tracking device; after all he would be entering Erjon’s territory – the Merchant Building.

He gave me a big hug and requested that we stay inside the apartment with the door locked and bolted, and to stay by the phone, and if in the unlikely event that Erjon was to find Markus’s apartment and come calling, then we must, despite our misgivings, call the police via the emergency services.

12

I switched on the TV, bringing up the twenty-four hour BBC news channel in the hope that the regional news might provide some information as to how the police were treating the bomb threat, and as to whether they were still pursuing the idea that we were traffickers.

Whilst waiting for the regional news, I used my phone to search for the tweet which had mentioned the police interest in us as traffickers. I found the tweet and followed it back to the source and then searched through the list of followers. It looked like the guy who’d made the tweet had been told to shut up as he’d received a tweet to the effect; what the hell are you doing.

Maria called me to the dinner table. The girls served up a mincemeat version of goulash with rice. Whilst eating I sensed the girls, particularly Maria, watching us surreptitiously.

Maria put her knife and fork together and looked at me.

‘Thank you for your help,’ she said, twiddling nervously with her hair.

‘We still have to get you to some place really safe.’ I glanced at Ivonne questioningly.   

‘Ah . . .’ Maria said, and then glanced at Olga and Yana, who were studying their plates.

‘Go on, Maria,’ I said. ‘What is it?’

‘But you,’ she looked at me and then glanced at Ivonne. ‘You are prostitutes?’

‘Escorts,’ I said, eyeing up my fingernails.

‘You’re being pedantic,’ Ivonne said.

Maria looked at her puzzled.

‘I do it of my own free will,’ Ivonne said. ‘I work for myself.’

‘But how can you like it?’ Maria asked. ‘Is it not a bad thing?’

‘I’m not going to say it’s moral or immoral,’ Ivonne said. ‘I don’t know. What I do know is; I’m single and I enjoy sex. So why not have sex and get paid at the same time. Same goes for the client
s, I’m not going to moralise about them, they’re all old enough to know what they’re doing. They’ve all reached the age of majority, free to make their own decisions.’

Maria shook her head.

‘Maria,’ Ivonne said. ‘What I do is wildly different from what happened to you.’

Maria looked at her and frowned. ‘You are a good person.’

‘Being part of the sex trade doesn’t make me a bad person,’ Ivonne said. ‘The trade is like most things there is good and there is bad. The difference is, maybe, that the bad side is very bad. And that is fuel for the moral objectors’ arguments. They see the bad things in what is for them a morally repulsive business. The abhorrent nature of the things which go wrong adds weight to the age-old clamour to shut the whole business down, rather than to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty fixing those aspects which don’t belong – morals aside.’

  I had always taken Ivonne for being a clever cookie, hiding behind the veil of a bimbo, and now she was proving it. And she hadn’t finished.

‘As to what works? I don’t know. There is the Swedish model. Ban the whole damn business. That’s not quite true. Their law is very clever. I can offer to sell sexual services, but it’s illegal for the client to buy them. In effect it puts me out of business, or I have to work underground, or lie on behalf of the client. Maybe that law works there; the Swedes are pretty promiscuous and open minded.

‘Then t
here is the German version – their laws don’t have the moral aspect. The trade is legal; the girls pay social security contributions and taxes. It’s all out in the open. The downside  – pimping and living off immoral earnings is legal, and the tax authorities have been quick to reap in the money on the backs of those working in the trade.

‘Neither system is perfect, but then what system is? In my life unfair things happen, minor and major. I get it all the time with my accent, and all sorts of other shit directed at the Poles. Duh, you know it’s also unfair that I can’t earn this sort of money back home.
I just accept it. The world isn’t perfect, and by the looks of things neither my politicians nor yours, aren’t going to get it perfect in a hurry.’

Ivonne looked at me and said; ‘T
hen there is the personal side. If you stay at it too long you become calloused. You start to judge men, in private or in the trade, as stereotypes, partly because you’ve seen so many in our line of business who fit the descriptions. You become hardened, and you fail to spot the men who aren’t, the ones who mean what they say, the ones who aren’t spouting lines full of double meaning, saying one thing but meaning something else, trying to get one over.’

‘Ivonne,’ I whispered, leaning towards her. ‘Heh, I think they’ve heard enough.’

She turned to the girls. ‘Sorry, maybe I’ve said too much.’

They shook their heads.

‘It’s okay,’ Maria said. ‘I can feel that you care.’