Traffyck (14 page)

He pulled the inner tube tightly across her mouth, holding her head with one hand while stretching the inner tube over the back of her head, wrapping it around her head several times so it became both blindfold and gag. From the momentary brushes of his hand against her face and neck, she knew he wore rubber gloves and she wondered if both men had worn gloves all along.

After unlacing her shoes and tying the shoes tightly together, he moved behind her, releasing her hands momentarily from the straps before retying them behind her back. She felt him pushing string through the webbing of her riding gloves to wrap her wrists. He did not tie her wrists tightly. She felt slackness and hoped he would not notice.

The van stopped, the back door opened, and they carried her out, one holding her by the ankles, one holding her beneath her arms. They seemed almost gentle now. Then they swung her for a moment like a sack of potatoes and let go.

She tumbled on the ground, striking hips, knees, arms, and shoulders. Wet grass slapped her face. She heard the van drive quickly away and knew, for the moment, she was safe.

She waited only seconds in silence before she turned onto her back and sat up. As she worked at the string holding her hands together, she was aware of stings of pain on elbows and knees, perhaps a bruise on her hip. “No marks,” one of them had said. No marks, indeed. She’d have plenty to show the militia! To hell with their warning!

She worked on her hands, trying to pull the riding gloves off, trying to work the string loose. Eventually she was able to pull her left hand out of the riding glove, and her hands were free. She went for the inner tube around her head, pulled it up, and unraveled it from her eyes and mouth. She cried with joy. She was alive. She had not been killed!
Thank you, God. Thank you
.

Although the sun had long been down, there remained a dim, purplish light in the sky. She sat in weeds down an embankment from a road, trees all around, black mounds on the horizon. There was no sign of the van or anything or anybody. It was quiet and still and cool.

She felt at her feet, untied the shoelace that had been tied to both shoes. One shoelace was missing, and she realized it was dangling from her riding glove. Tied with her own shoelaces. Gagged and blindfolded with her spare inner tube. Then she saw, in the weeds nearby, the glint of her bicycle in the light that remained, and realized she had nothing to prove the two men and the woman had ever been there.

She stood and walked out onto the road, a paved road that would have captured no tire tracks from the van. Her helmet was at the side of the road, upturned with her sweatband inside. She picked up her bicycle from the weeds and spun the wheels, checking for damage. She opened her bicycle bag and checked her cell phone. The man was correct—no missed calls. But who would call her except Janos Nagy? And she had failed to give him her cell number.

Everything was back the way it had been, except for a few scrapes and bruises she could have gotten in a fall while riding in the dark. If she told what happened, who would believe her? Unless they drove her somewhere where she could not possibly have ridden. Unless a runner or cyclist on the path remembered seeing her before she was kidnapped.

A cricket chirped, and she was suddenly very cold. She pulled the shoelace out of her riding glove, quickly laced and tied her shoes, put on her helmet, and stuffed the inner tube into her bicycle bag with her phone. Although she thought of fingerprints, she remembered the touch of rubber gloves when she was with the men.

As she rode, she began shaking uncontrollably. The road ahead was lit by an overhead light but blocked by a cable. A sign hanging from the center of the cable said, “Park Closed.” Suddenly, she knew where she was. A few meters beyond the cable was the end of the bicycle path, the place where the van had stopped her. Beyond this, the small road connected to the main road leading to her apartment.

She pedaled as fast as she could. But she knew she was not going fast. Her sobs and shivering consumed her strength. As she rode, she reached back to make sure her apartment key was still in the back pocket of her shorts. It was.

She approached her apartment complex slowly. Its buildings against the sky lit by the backdrop of Kiev resembled a row of coffins. She coasted up the side drive of her building toward the back parking lot and entrance. There was a window open in a ground floor apartment, and she could hear a television booming out a news item about pickpockets, but nothing about kidnappers or rapists. She visualized her shower, the water hot, the hose aimed between her legs where fingers—in rubber gloves or not—had been.

She got off her bicycle and unlocked the vestibule door. As she was about to push her bicycle inside, a figure stepped forward out of the darkness at the side of the walk.

“Mariya?” A man’s voice.

Her breath caught in her throat, and she let her bicycle fall against the vestibule door. When she looked inside, the bright lightbulb on the vestibule ceiling blinded her. The ordeal in the van had left her powerless. The man standing outside the doorway could do anything he wanted to her. She turned to look back at him.

He stepped closer. “Mariya, it’s Janos Nagy.”

He caught her as she fell toward him. She shook with sobs as he held her tightly.

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

Daylight hours consisted of caring for young adults with all manner of deformities. Some had shortened or missing limbs; most had physical
and
mental handicaps. Besides caring for the handicapped, there were household chores and watching video reruns of Pyotr’s idiotic lectures about caregivers performing “good works” to offset the evils they brought with them to the compound. The only times Nadia had moments to think were when Lena, her mentor, spoke with her at meal times or when she lay on her cot in the bunkhouse in the dark. When Nadia tried to recall the past, there was always a veil drawn. The vague recollection of her mother, brother, and grandmother in a cramped apartment in Kursk was dominated by the smell of boiling beets. Nadia’s recollection of her father was from early childhood, when he did things to her…

Pyotr reminded Nadia of her father. Tall, silver-haired, speaking of the so-called “end time.” Her father would say these things while abusing her. She had barely learned to speak, and he insisted there was not much time to do what he did … She was so thankful when her father left the family. But she could tell this to no one.

Nadia concentrated on the recent past. Several memories of street life in Kiev after she ran away were dominated by the end-of-the-day rush to steal enough for an evening meal, followed by a search for a safe place to sleep. The only recollection without a veil was the hell in the Carpathian Mountains. Hell in the mountains where she and the others knew they would die, even wished they would die, until Pyotr’s soldiers, dressed as priests, rescued them.

It was a bizarre out-of-body experience. Sometimes she was here on the peninsula, sometimes she was an observer, an alien from another planet come down to study these so-called civilized creatures. Like the time after her father was gone, when her mother took her to Kiev and she saw water skiers on the river. Her grandmother was along, speaking of Chernobyl radiation, and Nadia thought how foolish the alien from another planet would find this activity. Perhaps skiing on a contaminated river was torture for doing evil. The river water a deadly molten metal, should one fall, so the skiers desperately stayed upright, resembling spiders chasing a bug larger than themselves while the boat zigzagged up and down the river.

Today, during a brief lull in the din of a video, Guri, who also came from the mountain lodge, told Nadia he found out from one of the other boys that the Romanian gang boss killed during their rescue was named Ivan. “That Ivan was probably killed by our Ivan because they had the same name. Our Ivan wants his name to himself. What do you think?”

“I don’t think,” Nadia had answered.

After this, Guri told Nadia another story. He said he had faked taking his sleeping pill and crept to the other side of the peninsula the night before. Guri said he crawled beneath one of the bunkhouses used by the mentors and looked up through cracks in the floor. He said “our Ivan” was in the cabin with one of the armless women. Ivan took off his Army trench coat, dropped his jeans, and knelt between the woman’s legs. Guri said the woman hissed and wriggled on the floor as Ivan grunted. When he finished fucking the armless woman, Ivan picked up a kitten that was in the cabin, slit the kitten’s throat, and let the blood spew out onto the woman on the floor. The woman screamed, saying the kitten was the only thing left for her in this world. Guri said Ivan cursed the woman in Russian, warning her to never again mention what she had overheard him saying to his men.

“I don’t know what the woman might have overheard,” said Guri. “I waited and listened, but then blood dripped into my eye through the widely spaced boards of the cabin floor. I crawled out and ran. I hope the blood was from the kitten. All blood is different. I’m glad the older Ivan at the mountain lodge is dead, but I’m worried about the man with the camera whose blood and brains were blown into my eyes by the flying bullets. I can only hope that man had not been HIV positive. Blood is everything, don’t you agree?”

Nadia had not answered. And now, as she lay awake on her cot, Nadia wondered if Guri was having nightmares about blood at this very moment. Perhaps he had gone mad. Yes, probably so. Who would not go mad after the massacre in the mountains and their so-called rescue?

Even though it had been a warm day, clear skies made for a chilly evening. While most on the peninsula were already asleep or preparing for sleep, Pyotr and Vasily sat together in the main cabin in front of a fire in the fireplace. Pyotr often invited Vasily for evening discussions of the day-to-day operations on the peninsula. Details like ways to obtain better food, putting up enough firewood for winter, and keeping away pesky fishermen who sometimes ignored the “No Trespassing” and “No Docking” signs and came in close to shore. But they did not talk of firewood or pesky fishermen tonight.

Vasily noticed tonight the two chairs facing the fireplace were pulled closer together. The small table was still between them, but Pyotr’s outstretched legs made it impossible for Vasily to stretch out his own legs without touching Pyotr’s boots. Pyotr had made tea, the pot with two glasses and lemon wedges making it obvious Pyotr desired a long conversation this evening.

Pyotr’s jeans were faded and worn to a lighter shade at the knees. Vasily wondered if the wear at the knees was because of the flexing of the material as Pyotr walked, or if the wear was from kneeling. The only time Pyotr knelt, as far as Vasily knew, was when he comforted one of his so-called Chernobyl orphans. In recent years, as the victims grew older, Vasily felt the comfort Pyotr offered was put on for show for the younger residents in the compound.

Pyotr’s sweatshirt was large and baggy, folding over on his breast as if he were a very tall and thin old woman with withering breasts. Vasily could not recall the circumstances of Pyotr having chosen jeans and dark blue sweatshirts as the compound uniform. Perhaps it had to do with excess supplies of these items after the fall of the Soviet Union. An entire cabin was used to store jeans and sweatshirts of various sizes, the cabin lined with cedar and its cracks sealed to protect the clothing from insects and rodents.

Pyotr’s face was weatherworn from days of standing in the courtyard speaking to residents and supervising projects. His white hair was unusually thick for a man his age. Although Vasily did not know an exact age, Pyotr had been white-haired when he’d created the compound in 1991, after the fall of the Union. At that time, the Chernobyl victims brought into the compound were limited to children born deformed because of Chernobyl, and children given over to cash-poor orphanages because parents were dead. At that time, Vasily, then in his teens, was already aware Pyotr used profits gained through trafficking to fund his “humanitarian” undertaking. Vasily’s best guess at Pyotr’s age was mid- to late-sixties.

Pyotr poured tea in the two glasses and pushed one toward Vasily’s side of the small table. When Pyotr held up his own glass, Vasily took his and they drank together as if one of them had offered a toast. The fire flickered in Pyotr’s eyes as he stared at Vasily. The tea glasses were hot, and they put them back on the table, where steam rose in the firelight. After the ritual of the first swallow of hot tea, Pyotr spoke.

“I see concern in your face, Vasily. Tell me about its source.”

“I’m worried about Ivan. He has always acted strangely, but since the rescue in the mountains, there have been many changes.”

“What changes?”

“He views himself as a malevolent hero. He marches about in his Soviet Army trench coat, speaking of vengeance and violence. Yet there are rumors of him wanting to strike out on his own to establish a trafficking network. The same kind of trafficking network created by the Ivan Babiis of the world.”

“You think our Ivan is planning to take the place of Ivan Babii, the Romanian?”