Vicious Circle (40 page)

One of the crew members stood on each side of Marlene, holding her arms. They looked up at Miguel on the edge of the pool above them.

Miguel told them, ‘
Bueno!
Hold her under.’

Two of them forced Marlene’s head below the surface of the water. The third man grasped her ankles, and lifted them up high. The top half of Marlene’s body was completely immersed. She kicked her legs wildly and her entire body bucked and convulsed so violently that the men had difficulty holding her.

‘Enough!’ Miguel shouted. ‘Bring her up for a minute.’ They lifted Marlene’s head from the water and she gasped and struggled for breath. Then suddenly a mixture of pool water and vomit shot from her gaping mouth, and she choked on her next breath.

‘
Bueno,
that’s good. Put her under again.’ They ducked her head under just as she drew breath and Marlene took down a mouthful of water rather than air. They repeated the duckings at progressively longer intervals as Marlene’s struggles weakened. Amaranthus behind the camera wanted to make the most of this scene. This was one of the stipulations that his sponsors had set, and Amaranthus understood how fascinating this would be to them.

Torn by her love for her sister and her mother, Bryoni left Sacha and crawled to Miguel and tried to hold his legs.

‘She is my mother. Please don’t do this to her.’

He kicked her away, and called to the three men in the pool, ‘Now we will finish it. Keep the old bitch under.’

There was a violent burst of bubbles on the surface as Marlene’s lungs emptied completely. Her struggles grew weaker and at last stopped.

‘
Ha muerto?
’ one of them asked. ‘Is she dead?’

‘
No, esperar un poco más
,’ Miguel ordered. ‘No, wait a little longer.’

Bryoni understood enough Spanish. She crawled back to Miguel and clutched at his legs again, ‘Please, señor. Have mercy, I beg of you.’ This time he kicked her in the mouth and she fell over backwards, holding her bleeding lips.

‘Your turn will come soon enough,’ he jeered at her. ‘But first we must sample your meat; both you and your loco sister.’ He pulled back his sleeve and looked at his watch. Then he spoke to the men in the water. ‘
Bueno!
That should do it. Bring her up. Let’s take a look at her.’

One of the men grabbed a handful of her hair and lifted Marlene’s face out of the water. Her skin was waxy pale. Her eyes were wide open and staring. Her hair had come down in streamers over her face like seaweed exposed on a rock at low tide. Water drooled from her open mouth.

‘Leave her there,’ Miguel ordered and they released her and waded to the steps, leaving Marlene’s corpse floating face-down in the pool.

‘We have been here too long already. It’s time to go,’ Miguel told them. ‘Get that dirty
puta
cleaned up.’ He pointed at Sacha. ‘The
jefe
will kill us if we get shit all over his beautiful boat.’

They stripped Sacha’s soiled pyjamas off her and threw her naked into the pool beside her mother’s corpse. One of them stooped over Bryoni and cut the duct tape from her wrists.

‘Get in there with your pig sister and wash the shit off her,’ he ordered her in Spanish.

Bryoni waded out to Sacha and washed her body and cleaned the blood from the wound above her eye, then led her back to the pool steps with one arm around her shoulders. Sacha kept whimpering and looking back at Marlene’s floating corpse. ‘What is wrong with Mummy? Why doesn’t she want to talk to me, Bryoni?’ Sacha had regressed to her five-year-old state.

*

The dawn was a riot of majestic cumulus clouds set alight by the rays of the rising sun. The
Pluma de Mar
was running hard for the south over an easy and unctuous swell. She was two hundred nautical miles south of Grand Cayman, but she was not on a direct return course for La Ceiba in Honduras.

She was headed instead for the port of Cartagena in Colombia. This was a deliberate ploy ordered by Carl and Johnny Congo. The
Pluma de Mar
had left La Ceiba with only eleven crew members on board. She must return with the same complement; otherwise the suspicions of the port officials would be roused.

As soon as the sun cleared the horizon Miguel ordered the captives to be brought up from the forecastle to the cockpit. Sacha was completely confused and disorientated. She did not understand what was happening to them. She was even unaware of her own nudity. She stood blinking in the bright sunlight, and she kept asking Bryoni where their mother was. ‘Who are all these strange men, Bree? Why are they staring at me? Why did we leave Mummy behind, Bree?’ She had retreated into the profound depths of her dementia.

The crew had brought up some of the gaily coloured cushions from the benches in the main cabin and strewn them on the deck of the cockpit to serve as a mattress. All of them had removed their black tracksuits and hoods, and had stripped down to tee shirts and shorts. Now that the raid was successfully completed, they were in a jovial and celebratory mood. They were joking and laughing, drinking Mexican Corona beer from the can as they crowded around the two girls. Miguel came down the companionway ladder from the flying bridge. He pointed at Bryoni. ‘Get the clothes off that one. No secrets on board this boat. Let’s see what she has got there for us.’

While Amaranthus filmed them, they pulled Bryoni away from her sister and tore her flimsy nightdress from her back. One of them balled it in his fist and threw it over the side of the boat. The crew crowded around her, reaching out to grope her buttocks and fondle her breasts. Bryoni tried to fend them off by twisting her body around and striking out at their hands. Miguel intervened and pushed them back. ‘No fighting!’ he warned them. ‘Everybody gets a go. By the time we reach Cartagena you will all have had so much of this pussy that you’ll be sick of the sight of it.’ He held up a fan of playing cards. ‘Draw your card,
caballeros.
The numbers are Ace to Jack. Ace gets first turn, and Jack comes last.’ They pushed forward to take a card out of his hand. One of them let out a triumphant whoop and held up the ace of spades.

‘Beat that you whore-sons!’ he challenged them.

‘Stand back!’ Miguel chuckled. ‘Feliciano gets first shot. Which one do you want, amigo?’

‘I’ll take the fat one.’ Feliciano elbowed his way towards Sacha. She smiled at him as he took her hand. She still didn’t understand what was happening. She followed him compliantly as he led her to the pile of bench cushions on the deck and pushed her down on them.

‘No, Sacha! Don’t let him touch you.’ Bryoni was struggling with the men who were restraining her. ‘He is going to hurt you, baby.’

Sacha was smiling happily now. Her mood swings were quick and unpredictable. ‘It’s all right, Bree. I like him. He is such a nice man.’

Then Feliciano knelt in front of her and pulled down his shorts. Sacha’s damaged brain made another instantaneous connection to her brother Carl Peter in a similar pose and she recoiled in fear. It took four of the crew to hold her down before Feliciano was able to enter her. Sacha was still shrieking as Feliciano rolled off, and grunted, ‘
Fantástica! Mejores de la historia!
Fantastic! The best ever! I love to feel them buck and hear them squeal.’

Bryoni was dragged over and thrown down on the floral patterned cushions as the next man in line came forward eagerly. She also began to scream and struggle, but the same four men pinioned her limbs, and spread her legs wide apart. Amaranthus kept on filming.

By the middle of the afternoon as the
Pluma de Mar
roared on into the south both the sisters were in a stupor. Neither of them had the strength nor the will to continue resisting. One of the gang stood up after covering Bryoni for the third time, and complained to Miguel, ‘She is like meat in the butcher shop; dead and cold.’

‘
Bueno,
I can fix that. Bring them down to the main cabin,’ Miguel told him.

They carried Bryoni down the companionway and laid her on the mess table. Miguel wound a length of surgical rubber tubing around her upper arm and tightened it until the veins in the crook of her elbow stood out blue and proud. He poured a heaped teaspoonful of white heroin powder into a small bottle of distilled water and shook it until the powder dissolved. Then he drew it up in a disposable syringe and shot it into Bryoni’s distended vein. Within a few minutes Bryoni was resuscitating as the rush of the drug hit her. She started screaming and struggling again. They dragged her up to the cockpit where the man whose turn it was came forward, lowering his shorts and working up his penis with his hand.

In the cabin below Miguel turned his attention to Sacha and prepared a second shot of heroin for her. Amaranthus recorded the entire process.

That evening, twenty nautical miles off the Colombian port of Cartagena, in the short tropical twilight, the
Pluma de Mar
made a rendezvous with a working barge from the port. Once again the two sisters were trussed and gagged with duct tape. Then they were transferred across to the barge, and concealed under an old stained tarpaulin in the stern. Amaranthus with his ubiquitous camera followed the girls across to the barge. His brief was to stay with them and continue filming to the very end.

The
Pluma de Mar
reversed her course and headed at thirty knots for La Ceiba. The barge trundled on into the port of Cartagena.

*

There was an old Ford three-ton truck waiting to meet the barge on one of the wharves in a remote section of Cartagena harbour. A fresh team of men was waiting to receive them: a driver, his mate and two thugs. The girls were quickly transferred ashore and bundled into the back of the truck. Another tarpaulin was thrown over them. Amaranthus and the thugs climbed into the rear of the truck. The driver and his mate scrambled into the cab. The driver started the engine and drove to the harbour gates. A customs official came out of his hut. There was a muttered conversation with the driver and a wad of banknotes changed hands. The customs man stood back and waved them through and they drove into Colombia.

They headed southwards for the next six days, over progressively rougher unmade roads, through jungle and mountains. At some point they left the state of Colombia and crossed another river by ferry into Venezuela. At each stop along the way the driver climbed into the back of the truck and gave the girls a shot of intravenous heroin. By this stage, as soon as they saw the needle, the sisters were holding out their right arms willingly, eager for the solace that the drug provided them.

As soon as they were revived the driver’s mate flagged down any other passing vehicles on the road and opened the canvas flap on the back of the Ford to display the girls to these prospective customers. If the girls tried to resist they were beaten, and denied their next fix of heroin. By the time they reached Minas de Ye each of the sisters had been used so often that they had lost count of all the men who had climbed into the back of the old Ford to be with them.

Minas de Ye was deep in the jungles of the Amazon basin. It was an area along both banks of the Rio de Oro, a tributary of the Amazon, which cut through the mountains. An army of illegal gold miners laboured in the diggings, risking their lives for a few grains of the alluvial yellow metal.

The truck stopped for the last time at a large ramshackle building on the river bank, where one of the many gold buyers from the city of Calabozo had set up business. The buyer was a fat and shaggy rogue named Goyo who sat behind his gold scales on the veranda and haggled with the miners who brought down the meagre yellow flakes and beads from their sluice boxes in the hills.

Goyo’s woman was a shrewish creature, as thin as her husband was fat. Her name was Dolorita. She sold marijuana, heroin and homebrewed tequila to her husband’s customers. She also operated a brothel in the back rooms of the rambling building. Sacha and Bryoni were unloaded from the truck and handed over to Dolorita, who seemed to be anticipating their arrival. She at once forced the girls to strip off the rags that covered them and she examined them quickly.

‘They have already been used up. This was not what I saw in the photographs,’ she complained when she saw their bruises. ‘But it is too late now. I can’t send them back. I have already paid over a hundred dollars each for them. Anyway, we always need new girls.’ She turned to her overseer. His name was Silvestre and he was a villainous-looking brute with a marked squint. When he smiled, which was seldom, he exposed one gold tooth and another jet black one sitting side by side in the front of his lower jaw.

‘You better try to get some of my money back, Silvestre. Do you hear me? Make them work hard,’ Dolorita ordered him.

Silvestre led the two sisters around to the back of the building and shoved them into a dingy little room in which they would live and work on the two filthy mattresses that were laid side by side in the centre of the mud floor. There was no plumbing, and the girls had no alternative but to bathe in and drink from a bucket of river water in one corner of the room. There was an identical bucket standing beside the first one. This was the latrine which served not only Sacha and Bryoni but any of their clients who felt the need. The contaminated river water gave both the girls intermittent low-grade dysentery.

Dolorita set her prices so low that at all times there was a line of three or four men waiting their turn at the door. They were all miners and their bodies reeked with the sweat of their labour, while their mouths stank of rotting teeth and cheap tequila. Their bodies and ragged clothing were plastered with red mud from the gold diggings.

Bryoni never knew how many other girls were working in the adjacent rooms. All she knew was that there were many of them. Dolorita fed her working girls on a diet of minimal amounts of plain boiled cassava and much larger doses of low-grade heroin. Her turnover of girls from disease, malnutrition and drug overdose was brisk.

The roof of the shack was thatched with palm fronds. The tropical rain dripped through and the girls were seldom completely dry. Within the first week Sacha developed a persistent cough. She refused to eat more than a few mouthfuls of the foul food, and she lost weight at an alarming rate.