Sherman shook his head. It couldn’t work. Besides, he was a police officer and this was a murder, even if LaPhonso had been nothing but a piece of garbage.
Yeah, you gonna do her,” Antwain said. “Then she ain’t tell nothin bout our business. Do her or we gonna do yo ass.”
Sherman looked over at the girl in her slip — pale and thin, but with a pretty face and something in her eyes.
“All right, then,” he told Antwain, and told the girl, “Come on. Get some clothes on.”
A few minutes later he had her out in his old Cutlass. Now what? Antwain wouldn’t believe he’d blown her away unless there was proof. He’d want to see the body.
He felt the girl looking at him as he pulled out of the lot. Did she believe he was one more sorry nigger, a killer?
He headed downtown on New York Avenue. Approaching Chinatown a few minutes later, he still didn’t know what to do.
One of his favorite spots, the China Doll, was open till 4 a.m. on weekends. He turned left on 5th, right on H, and parked under a streetlight. He looked over and the girl was so pale, the eyes so big. Striking.
He wondered what the moment felt like to her. Wondered who she was, where she was from, what her story was.
As if she’d read his mind, she said, “I’m Mariana. From Moldova.” Heavy accent, but understandable.
“Mol—?”
“Moldova. My country.”
It sounded familiar, but only vaguely. Sherman felt stupid.
“Your first time in Washington?” he said. “Nation’s capital?” And felt stupider yet.
“Capital of the world,” she said. “Is what we learn in school. We study English language and much about United States.”
“How’d you end up here?”
She shrugged. “Why you ask? Man say you kill me. So?”
“I’m not going to kill you,” Sherman said. “I’m police, not a killer.”
No reaction. Maybe she didn’t believe him.
At a loss, he asked her again how she happened to get to the U.S. from… “Moldavia?”
“Moldova.”
“I don’t even know where it is,” Sherman said.
“Is far. You know Romania? On other side. Far.”
They sat there for most of an hour, under the streetlight, while she told her story. She said Moldova was one of the old Soviet states, one of the poorest countries in the world. In their capital, she said, men who worked in hospitals had been arrested for chopping up corpses and selling the flesh as meat at open-air markets. She grew up in a village called Droki, in a little house where the electricity rarely worked — her and two sisters and their mother, after her father drank himself to death. She quit school at fourteen and worked in a beetroot factory. Two years ago, when she was seventeen, an aunt in a neighboring village sold her out — told her about job opportunities abroad and dropped her off for an interview, supposedly, but the “interviewers” were Albanian gangsters who locked her up with some other girls and later drove them across Romania and Serbia to Macedonia, where they were locked in little rooms in back of a kafane, a club — like the Sunbeam, Sherman imagined — and forced to service twenty, thirty men every night. Slaves. After sixteen months she was saved by a man who bought her and took her to the authorities. The authorities arranged her passage back to Moldova. She got home only to find the Albanian Mafia had not only snatched her sister Nataly but murdered their little sister Lena, who had witnessed the snatching. Nataly had been gone for nearly a year. Their mother had received a single card from her, which said she’d been taken to Italy and forced into prostitution.
Sherman tried to take it all in. You thought growing up in Barry Farms was tough?
She — Mariana — said she’d gone to Albania then, last year, and asked to go to Italy as a prostitute, “my only hope to find my sister.” She was sold at an auction and put on a speedboat across the Adriatic at midnight with other illegal immigrants. Gangsters in Italy took her first to a beautiful seaside town called Rimini and then many other places. Everywhere, she showed a picture of Nataly, but no one knew her.
The life was brutal, as in Macedonia. Threats, beatings, torture. When one girl was suspected of talking to the polizia the men gathered all the others, tied the “bad” one in a chair, pulled her tongue out with pliers and sliced it off. Mariana saw girls killed for no reason than to put the fear in the others. Three girls killed themselves.
Sherman was sweating, hearing it. He started the Cutlass and ran the AC.
She said she was finally reunited with her sister. The gangsters had murdered a Nigerian girl and believed Mariana might go to a priest about it. One night they took her to a warehouse and produced Nataly — with a knife at her throat, and did Mariana still want to talk to the priest?
To get them out of Italy, away from the authorities, the gangsters flew them to Mexico. Then they were trafficked into the U.S. and sold again. Eventually they were brought to D.C.
“Together, at least,” she said. “But they take me one place, Nataly another. I no see her. Sometime I hear something, but I no see her.”
Sherman didn’t know what to say. He sure as hell didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t take her to a police station — no telling who might be connected with LaPhonso or LaPhonso’s people. If he took her to any authority at all, including the FBI’s human-trafficking unit, he was asking for trouble — he’d have to say how he happened to know her, have to tell about the Sunbeam. He’d immediately be put on administrative leave and would probably wind up out on his ass. It was illegal for a cop to work anyplace that served alcohol — aside from the dealing, prostitution, and everything else at the Sunbeam. The MPD brass looked the other way if you wanted to take your chances, but if things blew up they’d hang you out to dry.
That was the best-case scenario. It would get a lot worse if they found out LaPhonso was dead and Sherman hadn’t reported it.
And beyond the authorities, there was Antwain. Sherman would be as good as dead when Antwain found out he hadn’t taken this girl somewhere, straight from the club, and murdered her.
This girl. Mariana. From Moldova. Her life more harrowing than Sherman’s, LaPhonso’s, Antwain’s.
“At this place they lock me in the room,” she was saying, “and I know what I must do. Every day, every night. And this man — this man—”
“LaPhonso?”
“—he come sometime, too, and I must do for him. Anything. Sometime he want this and this and I say no and he hit me, hurt me. Sometime I want him to kill me. I’m dead inside, so no matter. Except for my sister. I live for my sister. I know she live for me.”
She told it with no emotion at all. Spooky, as if she dead inside. Except Sherman didn’t believe she was. This girl could be saved, if he only knew how.
“Now,” she said, “is okay I die. No matter. You kill me, is okay.”
Sherman didn’t understand. “I’m not going to kill you. And you just said you need to live, for your sister.”
“No. Dead, my sister.”
“Dead? You said…”
“Yes, dead. A girl come from the other place and say they kill a girl for nothing. I know is Nataly — hair, scars on the hand where men in Italy burn her with cigarette. Yes. And now, why I live? They kill me? — okay. You kill me? — okay.”
Jesus.
“I’m not going to kill you,” Sherman said. “Let’s go in the restaurant and figure out what to do with you. Eat if you want.”