Lost Girls (7 page)

Marie was moving out of the passenger seat and pushing aside the curtain to reach for the purse on the floor.

It could only be her sister or her parents, Jill knew. If it were Theresa she would be pissed. Wondering where the hell she was at. She hoped her sister would take the call seriously when Marie answered. She hoped she wouldn’t say anything stupid or hang up thinking she was playing a joke.

Marie snatched the purse and unsnapped it on her way back to her seat in the cab. Jill strained to hear what she would say.

The phone continued to ring, third ring, fourth ring…

This was it, she thought.

Fifth ring…

They wouldn’t have to go through the police now. Everything would be over and done with before anyone knew she was missing.

Sixth ring…

For God’s sake answer it! Answer the freaking phone!

Then she felt a rush of air, a window was being lowered. A moment later the window closed and there was silence.

Jill felt at first like she was falling, like she had lost grip on a line tethering her to the world. For a moment she was confused about where she was, somewhere cold, somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be. A bead of sweat ran off her scalp, tickling the back of an ear. She shivered, teeth beginning to chatter. She felt her chest rise and fall as she began to breathe more rapidly.

It was so wrong, so senseless, and yet so telling. If they didn’t care about the money in her purse or reaching out to her family, then she had real reason to worry.

For the first time Jill began to think the unthinkable.

Minutes turned to an hour; the van eventually slowed to a stop. The driver was speaking to someone outside the vehicle. She heard the crinkle of documents, official but casual conversation. It was a border crossing.

There was only one border in all of Hispaniola, Jill was certain, the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Jill could only visualize it as one thing.

A gate into Hell.

When the van began to move once more, she knew she was leaving a very important crossroads behind. She knew she would never be at this place and time again. She knew that with every new mile the unthinkable was becoming a reality.

The van soon stopped for gas, but then it drove on for several more hours. Jill began to become confused again; at one point she thought she heard her mother and father talking; she was a little girl in the back of their car. She lost all track of time. In lucid moments she noticed the roads had begun to deteriorate, they were beyond the boundaries of civilization. She needed to pee, she needed to relieve the muscle cramping in her arms, she needed to rinse the bad taste from her mouth, but most of all she needed someone to tell her she was okay. That everything was going to be okay.

The road twisted on for miles, dirt and stone under the tires. Then they slowed and distant voices brought her back to reality, someone was outside the van, muted laughter, creaking gates, a hundred feet, and the van came to a stop. The driver’s and passenger’s doors opened and closed.

The cargo door slid back and she looked up into the face of a gaunt black man. He was standing behind the glare of a spotlight. A pistol was holstered on his belt. He had one good eye, a brown eye; the other looked like a large white marble.

Marie climbed in next to Jill, cut the tape that bound her limbs, and pulled her up by the shoulders, avoiding eye contact as she nudged her toward the door.

Jill dropped her legs over the side and her sneakers hit the dirt. Her eyes were blinded by the spotlight. The woman threw her purse on the ground next to her, money still inside.

The black man handed Marie a thick brown paper bag, which she tossed to the driver and then she pulled the cargo door closed behind her. A moment later the van’s taillights disappeared behind the closing gates.

Jill stood there alone, shivering in the midst of armed men.

They were at the foot of an immense stone building; it looked old and was tall, with spires like a church.

She could see coils of barbed wire inside the fenced compound. Two men wearing black shirts and jeans stood at the gates. One, with a hat, had dreadlocks. The other was older and fatter and he eyed her hungrily.

A military truck was parked next to them, a canvas tarp covering the cargo bed. A panel truck painted with fruit sat incongruously by a rusting fuel tank on legs emblazoned with a fading Texaco star.

The man with the glass eye nodded and two of the armed men grabbed her arms, pulling her to a set of bay doors that led into the foundation of the old building.

Inside was a catacomb of hallways. They took her to a large room lit by a string of bare lightbulbs. A row of wooden doors against one wall had small open panes cut into them, covered with wire screen.

She was led to the center of the room and the men stepped away from her.

She began to speak and the one-eyed man slapped her hard across the face.

Jill could taste blood as he grabbed the collar of her shirt and ripped it open from the neck to waist, scattering buttons like pearls in the powdery dirt. He pulled the pistol from his belt and put it against her forehead.

“Take off your clothes,” he said.

“Money,” she whispered hoarsely. “My father has—”

He pulled the hammer back on the gun.

She took off the shirt and let it fall to the dirt.

The pistol never wavered.

She felt dizzy, about to faint, but somehow she kept on her feet. She undid her skirt and let it fall to the ground, her top and bikini bottom. She was made to kneel in her socks and Nike sneakers.

And it began.

There was a moon on the ocean, lights ablaze over the superstructure of the gleaming white
Constellation,
the flagship of the Caribbean Star fleet as it slipped from the harbor of Santo Domingo on a glassy black sea. The decks were crowded with tourists recently returned laden with sundries from the islands, beaches, and marketplaces.

It would soon be the dinner hour and a reggae band played poolside as guests filtered below, transformed from beachwear to tuxedos and evening gowns, rising to collect in cocktail lounges, waiting for their appointed seating in one of the ship’s many ballrooms.

By 8
P.M
. they were sitting at the captain’s table, the room aglow with white candles. Golden champagne effervesced in delicate flutes. All around were smiling faces, teeth white and skin burnt red as they recounted their adventures in the Dominican Republic. It was a trouble-free place, this floating palace. The world was held at bay for thirteen days at sea. There were no frantic knocks upon their doors, no letters from the government or attorneys in the mail, no middle-of-the-night wrong numbers to set your heart aflutter. Temporary though it might be, for two weeks the ship was a sanctuary from the trials of an unforgiving world.

Or so Carol had thought. It would hardly have seemed possible for this ship to be the setting for the worst moment in a person’s life, but that’s what it had become. That’s what it always would be.

“Mom?” Carol looked up from the dinner table to see her older daughter standing at her shoulder.

She admired her daughter’s dress. “You look beautiful, Theresa.” Theresa had four other dresses packed, so had Jill and her mother, all bought last April in Bloomingdale’s or one of the boutiques along Oak Street, overlooking Lake Michigan.

Carol reached to touch Bob’s arm, to direct his attention to Theresa’s dress, when something on her daughter’s face stopped her.

“What is it, Theresa? Are you okay?”

“Have you seen Jill?” Her daughter looked distraught.

Perplexed, Carol looked around the dining room, last at the captain, who was talking to a waiter in a tux. “She’s not with you?”

“She left me in a bar by the marketplace in El Conde. She wanted to buy a wraparound skirt. We’d been looking at them earlier.”

“El Conde?” Carol repeated. There was the slightest flutter in her stomach.

She forced a smile, taking a deep breath, convinced she had heard it wrong. Theresa must have misspoken. Theresa had meant to say a bar near the ship’s atrium. Jill was shopping for a wrap in one of the ship’s stores and Theresa had been waiting for her in one of the ship’s bars. That made more sense. And Lord knew it wouldn’t be the first time Jill hadn’t been on time. She could be so irresponsible at times. She could so easily get distracted.

“She could have gotten it tomorrow,” Carol said, disappointed. “I told her this was important. Your father wanted you both here. So did I.”

“Mom”—Theresa’s eyes pleaded—“she never came back from the marketplace. I waited in the bar for an hour. Finally I thought I must have been confused about what she said. You know how she can be, so I came back and showered and I guessed she was out with you.”

Theresa’s lip trembled.

The flutter in Carol’s stomach took hold and the icy fingers of providence marched up her spine. She turned away from the others at the table, tugging at her daughter’s arm, pulling her close and bringing her lips to the girl’s ear. “What do you mean she never came back to the room?” She tried to keep her voice under control, trying not to be overheard by the others, trying not to scare Theresa. “Never came back from where?” Her fingers were leaving white marks on Theresa’s arm and she quickly let go.

“She left me in the village, in a place called Bo Bo’s, a bar near El Conde. We were having a drink.”

Carol was only able to nod at that point, her imagination running wild.

“She wanted to go back and look at a skirt,” her older daughter said. “It was one of those street markets, just around the corner.”

The sounds around the ballroom were suddenly dizzying. “Go on,” Carol said. Her voice sounded strangely detached from her body. Her linen napkin fell to the floor. She snagged a nylon trying to extricate herself from her chair. Bob, chatting with the captain, now turned and started to rise, but she put a hand on his shoulder, pushed him down firmly, and led her daughter a few steps away.

A young blond woman had taken a position behind the Italian captain, touched him lightly on his shoulder, and stooped to reveal faultless breasts. She smiled as she was introduced around the table. Carol saw Bob reach to take the woman’s hand, then turn to look at her, winking when he saw Theresa.

“She was supposed to come back to the bar,” Theresa repeated. “I’m sure that’s what she said, but she didn’t and then I thought maybe I had it wrong, that she told me she’d meet me in the room or something. I was going to look around the plaza, but then the ship whistle blew and I came right back.”

Carol wanted to reach out and shake her daughter, to get her to repeat what she’d said earlier and to put it in some context that made sense. But the girl looked distressed enough.

“I was sure she’d be back in the stateroom, Mom. You know, getting ready for dinner.” Tears began to pool in her eyes. “When she wasn’t in the room I thought she must have already gone to meet you. I called your room, but no one answered; you were already gone, so I didn’t know where to look for you. I got ready for dinner.”

Carol’s eyes glassed over. “We were having drinks with Ed and Marge….” Suddenly her voice trailed off; she was feeling the effects of the champagne, probably it was her empty stomach or maybe it was something cerebral, some knowledge that her world was changing and that it would never again be the same. “Call her,” she said frantically. “Call her cell phone, for Christ’s sake.”

“Mom, I’ve been calling her for two hours.”

“Call the bar, the place you had drinks, what was that place?”

“I did that too.”

Carol looked down at her feet and saw a scuff mark on one white shoe. “She didn’t get on the ship?” Carol’s voice was husky, her eyes looked helpless. “That’s what you’re saying.” She looked back to the table and to Bob and the captain. “Excuse me,” she said, stumbling toward them. “Bob?” she called out. “Bob, I need to talk to you.”

A few minutes later the ship’s captain was reassuring them that this kind of thing happened all the time. That her daughter was surely on board the vessel. “Young girls meet young boys.” He smiled, hands clasped over his gleaming silverware as if cheering, looking up at the young blond woman at his shoulder. “Sometimes the heart drowns out the wisdom of the mind and, well, there are escapades and rendezvous and most likely…”

Carol leaned down and put her lips against the captain’s ear. “Get out of your fucking chair,” she whispered icily.

Jill Bishop woke in cool sweat, heat radiating from the walls of the cell that confined her. She was groggy and nauseated by the searing pain below her waist. Vomit had dried around the corners of her mouth.

There was a door made of wood and a slot in it at eye level. Behind her on the wall was another small opening through which she saw daylight, an air vent.

She could smell the stench of body odor and vomit and raw sewage. She could feel the grit of dirt and sand under her bare legs. Someone had put her underwear, shirt, and skirt back on, but she did not see her shoes. She tried to lift her head, but the motion triggered a skull-splitting spike of pain through the center of her forehead; she began to have flashbacks of a room painted red, a gynecologist’s chair; she had been strapped to it and her head had been placed in a viselike device so that she could move only her eyes. An old black man with white hair gave her a shot between her toes with a hypodermic needle. There were bottles of dark liquids on a metal tray beside him and a camera on a tripod in the corner.

Other men lined up facing her. A large television on the wall played loops of a woman being raped with a rodlike object. Each time it was inserted, the woman’s back came off the chair and she screamed as if being electrocuted. It was the very same chair in the very same room.

They told her if she disobeyed she would be raped by a zombie, a man infected with AIDS.

She vomited again, then rolled to her side and heaved until there was nothing left in her stomach.

Being gang-raped hadn’t been the end of it. She remembered the drugs taking hold on her mind, how the red room had been painted to make you lose orientation. She remembered the old man leaning over her face, the dirty thick lenses of his glasses, the surgical gloves on his hands. Even as they raped her he took a hot iron rod to her face and burned the skin from beneath her right eye. It was the last thing she remembered.

She reached now to touch her face and found a patch of gauze. Why they had tortured her she couldn’t imagine, unless of course they were terrorists. Unless they had made a film of what they’d done? She didn’t dare think what it would be like for her parents, sitting in the recesses of some embassy or police station and looking at that film.

She started to peel away the gauze patch when something moved in the dark behind her and she lunged for the door, screaming as a hand came toward her. It was a small hand, its fingers clenched in a ball, reaching slowly toward her.

Jill pushed her back to the door and began to whimper.

She heard soft words in what sounded like Russian, then German, then English, before Jill nodded that she understood.

“It’s okay,” the woman soothed, hand lightly on her forehead. “It’s okay.” She stroked Jill’s hair. “I’m a friend.”

Jill looked at the woman blankly.

“Where am I?” “Haiti,” the woman answered.

Jill began to cry and the woman wrapped her arms around her. “I am Aleksandra, from Poland.”

Jill cried until she no longer could. Then she turned her head to study the woman’s face. “Why are we here?”

“They are traffickers,” Aleksandra said quietly, continuing to keep her arms around the teenager.

“I don’t understand,” Jill said. “What did I do?”

“Nothing, honey.” Aleksandra stroked her hair.

“But what do they want with me?”

Aleksandra didn’t say anything. “Why don’t you rest for a while?”

“Traffickers, you mean like drugs?”

“People,” Aleksandra said. “They trade in people.”

“Do you mean they are going to sell us?”

Aleksandra just looked at her.

“No,” Jill cried. “No!”

Jill had had nothing in life until now to compare this to. She had never even known anyone who had been date-raped, let alone kidnapped, gang-raped, and locked in a cell to be sold—at least, according to this woman. It was almost impossible to accept and, even if it was true, Jill was still sure somewhere down deep inside that her kidnapping had been a mistake. This must have been a mistake. The people who snatched her must have thought she was someone else. She just happened to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Her father had told the girls for as long as she could remember that no matter how impossible something seemed, you only needed to get to the right person and anything could be resolved. Jill was sure that if she could only talk to whoever was in charge of this compound, she could straighten everything out. She needed to tell them who her family was. She needed them to understand that in good health, she was worth money, far more money than any amount they could get for her on the black market.

Not that Jill doubted she was in real trouble. This was way more than going to the wrong side of town and ending up at the wrong kind of party. Still, she didn’t fit into whatever was going on here. These men had nothing to lose by letting her go and everything to gain. She wasn’t going to press charges or cause them any harm. It could only benefit them to let her go before the police came looking, and if Jill knew anything about her family, they would most certainly come looking. Bob and Carol Bishop would never stop looking for their younger child. They would have made that crystal clear to whatever authorities were in charge of this island and she knew they would pay for their daughter’s return with no questions asked. They would leave a way out for the kidnappers.

If that didn’t work they would hire the kind of people who could find her. That was what would persuade the kidnappers the most.

This woman Aleksandra might not have had the same options. Probably no one was looking for her. She had been abandoned and by now forgotten.

Money would straighten this all out. She would even negotiate to get Aleksandra out with her. She started to bang on the door. She started to yell out for the guards. She wanted to know who was in charge.

Aleksandra pulled her back, pinned her to the ground, covering her mouth with a hand.

“Don’t,” the woman whispered. “Don’t make a sound.”

Jill’s eyes bore into Aleksandra’s. She wriggled under the wiry woman’s arms, unable to rise.

“The man in charge is the man that did that to you. The one-eyed man runs this camp. You fight him and he will take you back to the red room and there are things worse even than rape.”

This place was an indoctrination camp, Aleksandra told her, for women being trafficked into South America. The authorities in Haiti were corrupt, she said. The police, the prosecutors, the judges, they would all turn their heads.

“Here we are to learn discipline,” Aleksandra said. “If you resist in any way, they will make an example of you to the others.”

Jill stopped fighting, but she wasn’t convinced. She had certainly heard of human trafficking, but had never really given thought as to who was being trafficked where or why. The victims were always shadowy images in her mind, not the crisp, clear, up-in-your-face kind on screens at Live Aid concerts of children brushing flies from their eyes.

In fact, the whole concept of human trafficking was a little hard to get your head around, harder, say, than AIDS or ethnic cleansing, more in the realm of black holes and quantum physics. It was something people believed to be true but no one could really articulate. It was a reality, just not her own.

There was also a certain stigma suggested by the word
trafficking,
a stigma that implied consent and complicity. When you heard the word
trafficking
you had to wonder if most of the victims weren’t somehow involved in their own demise, that they were co-conspirators in victimless crimes like gambling, drugs, and prostitution. She would have conceded there were probably third-world populations displaced against their will, tribes of one class moved across geographical lines and made subservient to another. That kind of thing had probably been taking place since the beginning of time. And sure, there must be an occasional woman lured off the streets to work as a prostitute, but this wasn’t Russia or Africa or China. This was the Caribbean, not even a thousand miles from the coast of the United States. This kind of thing didn’t happen here. People didn’t go shopping in paradise one moment and end up a slave in some jungle the next.

Lying in this cell and hearing Aleksandra suggest she was to be trafficked into sexual servitude for the remainder of her life was an unacceptable proposition. And considering she’d been fooled once already, who was this Aleksandra woman anyhow? She was filthy and ragged and had this vulgar tattoo on her face of a grinning skull wearing a top hat. The tattoo in itself was telling. Serious people didn’t disfigure their faces. Aleksandra, whatever else she might be, must have been into hard-core something in her life, she’d had to be, which was probably how she ended up here in the first place.

Jill knew the type. They were in every school. Aleksandra was one of those girls turned woman who went around asking for trouble. She was different from Jill, which was why Jill should be trying to speak with these men.

Then, as she lay in the dirt, looking up at Aleksandra, a seed of realization began to sprout. She stared at the woman’s thin face and then into her eyes and back and forth and something vile wriggled out of the pit of her stomach, creeping up her neck and into her face. Her fingers reached to lightly graze the patch beneath her right eye, but before she touched it, she stopped and reached instead to touch Aleksandra’s face and gently traced the outline of the tattoo.

Jill saw it all then. She saw it in the Polish girl’s beautiful brown eyes. She hadn’t been burned or tortured with any instruments strapped to that table. She had been tattooed. There would be a grinning skull wearing a top hat on her own cheek, just like the one on Aleksandra’s.

Tears formed in her eyes. She had been branded for market. These men had no intention of ever letting her go. This was more than words or money could fix.

She broke down then, simply lost it, hugging herself and rolling in the dirt, choking on her sobs. She moaned and the moan became a long buzzing drone to block out the sound of Aleksandra’s attempts to comfort her. How could this be? How could this happen to her of all people? She didn’t party. She went out of her way to help people. She was a Goody Two-shoes, she didn’t drink or smoke or use drugs of any kind. She even hated caffeine.

“Am I going home soon?” she blubbered. “Can’t we go home now?”

Aleksandra cradled her head, stroking her hair until finally Jill cried herself out and fell asleep in her arms.

That evening she woke when the guards brought their food. She ate listlessly, numbly staring at the ceiling, not sure what to feel.

She knew her parents would be back in Santo Domingo by now, just miles away, though it might have been a million. She knew how crazy her parents would be. How stressed her father could get, and his heart worried her plenty. She wanted him to know she was okay. She wanted to tell them she was sorry. That she felt responsible. How stupid could she have been to crawl in the back of a van anywhere, let alone some foreign country?

Then she felt angry, angry at her sister who had blisters on her heels and who couldn’t walk back to the marketplace with her. She felt angry at the men who raped and sodomized her. She was angry at the spectacled man that shot her full of drugs and tattooed her face and angry even for the guilt she felt for thinking she was above all this because she was an American from Oak Park, Illinois.

The anger subsided in time, replaced at first by exhaustion and then by hopeless resignation.

The first week was hardest. You were still a believer the first week. You still thought there was a chance you would be saved. Every noise, the sound of running feet, the beat of a low-flying helicopter outside the vented grates, meant you were going to be rescued. But when you weren’t you began to let go.

Every night the man with the spectacles—the guards called him
Docte
—would examine their bodies, looking for drug reactions or self-inflicted wounds. Jill knew what to expect by now. Jill knew that his soporific syringe was full of heroin. Heroin was a cheap and ever so effective restraint.

Aleksandra said the
docte
would keep increasing her doses until the day she would think of nothing but his nightly visit. Aleksandra said she was already there and Jill had no doubt it was going to happen to her. Everything else that Aleksandra had told her had already come true. The doctor drew blood from her. Later he performed a procedure in her vagina without anesthesia. Aleksandra said that inserts were wired into her fallopian tubes, a procedure performed on all the girls. In three months she would be sterile. Permanently sterile.

She mustn’t fight them, Aleksandra told her. She must offer her body willingly in the hope there would be another day, another opportunity to be rescued or to escape. The alternative was to be sold on the market and turned over to a new master with his own kind of syringe.

The light in the cellar was the same, day and night. Their toilet was a seat screwed over a wooden box. The guards brought them a bucket of water for drinking and cleaning themselves. Once a day they were led to a room with showerheads.

Opposite the row of eight-by-eight cells the large cellar stretched into cobwebbed shadows. There were hundreds of sacks of old rice bags marked UNICEF. Pallets stacked with bags of lime, loose rifles, broken furniture, and old tires. In the center was a round wooden platform on which they were made to kneel for countless hours. In the center of the platform was a pole to which the women were tied if they committed an infraction. The guards sometimes tormented them with electric cattle prods while the others were made to watch.