"Superficial," Alena said. "Fortunate."
"Are you finished?"
"Yes. You should drink something, try moving around."
She took the kit, rising, and I got myself off the bed, feeling muscle-sore but unimpaired. The ringing was gone from my ear but my head still ached, though it might have been dehydration as much as anything else. I pulled on a shirt, feeling the tape on my back pull and flex, then followed after her, down the hall.
In the kitchen, Alena handed me a glass of water, then put the kettle on. She avoided looking at me.
"How was Nicholas?" I asked.
"He was fine. It was a short meeting."
"No trouble?"
"With him? Is there ever?"
"I meant on the trip."
"I was stopped on the M1, outside of Gori, by the Russians. They wanted to search the car, but it was a shakedown. I had to pay twice, going and coming."
"Money."
"Yes." She looked up from where she'd been watching the kettle. "You think something else?"
"Nothing you would give them," I told her. "Doesn't mean they didn't want it."
She shrugged. "The same everywhere."
I finished my water, watching her. She was right, it was the same everywhere, all around the world, first to third, and certainly here in the former Soviet states. At almost every border crossing, at almost every checkpoint, someone, always male, had his hand out. Most of the time, money would do it, because most of the time, the people manning such checkpoints and crossings were desperately poor, despite their uniforms. But if you were traveling with a woman, or if you were a woman alone, most of the time it wasn't money they wanted.
"You're thinking about Tiasa."
"Trabzon's maybe two hundred and fifty kilometers," I said. "We take the car, leave by midmorning, we should be there before evening, even with all the stops."
"No."
"The other option I'm thinking is to go back to Batumi, take a boat. It'll take longer, though, and I don't want to lose the time. And we'll need to arrange transportation on the other end."
She shook her head. The light in the kitchen turned her copper-colored hair orange, turned her complexion sallow. "I'm not talking about the route. I'm saying no, we're not doing this."
"Tiasa-"
"I know." She held her look on me for a fraction longer, then reached for the canister of tea, began digging a spoon out of the utensil drawer.
"If this is because you think the information is-"
She cut me off. "I doubt he lied to you."
"Then Trabzon-"
"No."
I tried again. "She's fourteen, she's-"
"I know," Alena said, sharply, spooning too much tea into the pot.
"I can't abandon this," I said.
The utensil hit the counter with a clatter. "Tiasa is gone. Like her family. We have to forget them."
"You trying to convince me or yourself?" I asked, after a second.
"Yes, both of us, yes." She straightened, squared her shoulders, fixing her posture, all her little tells that I knew meant she was struggling with her emotions. When she was ready, she looked at me again. "Those men in Batumi, they will have friends, friends who found Bakhar. They can find you. They can find us."
"All the more reason for us to go."
"This is our home. I will not leave it."
"You know what's happened to her, what's going to happen," I said. "Someone has to find her."
"Then let someone else do it. Not us."
My frustration finally broke. "I don't understand. You liked Tiasa. Forget about the rest of them for now-Bakhar, who he was, what he did, it doesn't matter. This is about Tiasa. You adored her."
"I love her."
She said it softly, without hesitation. Considering that "love" was hardly a word she was ever willing to speak aloud to me, it was surprising.
I said, "There's no one else. You know that. We can't just sit here and hope some NGO is going to discover her, free her, and we both sure as hell know some Good Samaritan won't come to her rescue."
"I know."
"I can't forget this," I insisted. "I have to go after her. I can't let this sit."
She inhaled, and her eyes shifted aside for a moment, pained. Her eyes were hazel, and beautiful, and since I'd first met her had become more and more expressive. There'd been a time when reading her was next to impossible, quite deliberately so on her part, something she'd been taught that had turned as autonomous as breathing. Survival had hinged on being able to hide not only her thoughts but her feelings. While I'd become better at it, she'd become worse; it was another of the trades we had made by joining our lives.
"You'd leave me here alone?" she asked.
"It's not like you can't take care of yourself."
"Don't. Don't go."
"Come with me."
"I can't." Behind her, on the stove, the kettle began to rattle, spilling steam. "I can't."
"What aren't you telling me?" I asked her. "What's going on?"
She shook her head, brushing past me as she left the room. I heard the back door open, then close, hard.
I stood in the kitchen alone, listening to the chattering kettle.
After a minute, I went to the bedroom and began to pack.
CHAPTER
Eight My second night in Trabzon I met a man named Arzu Kaya, who promised me all the pretty girls I could ever want.
"How much?" I asked.
"Two hundred, you get one all night," he answered.
I stopped myself from laughing. "Maybe for two. Two hundred for two girls."
"Two hundred yeni?"
I shook my head. "Euros."
He bit his lower lip, sucking air through his teeth. "You got my name from Vladek?"
"Last week. In Batumi."
Arzu went after his lip again, thinking. He was a Turkish national, possibly even a Trabzon native from the way he spoke his Russian-there was a large Russian expat community in the city, and had been for decades-and younger than I'd expected, only in his early thirties. His clothes and manner were better suited for Istanbul than the more conservative eastern part of the country. There, like here along the northern Black Sea coast, Islam was both omnipresent and traditional. Yet Arzu's clothing didn't particularly mark him as out of the ordinary. I'd seen plenty of similarly Western-attired folks about and around since I'd arrived the day before. Women dressed modestly, at least in public, and the men I'd seen went clean-shaven.
"Wait here a minute, okay?" Arzu sprang from his chair opposite me, grinning. "I'll send one of the girls down, keep you company."
I checked my watch. "I've got other places to be."
"Won't take me long." He was already crossing the lobby, such as it was. "Just wait for me."
I watched him disappear up a set of stairs, turning out of sight. The hotel we were in was off the northeastern edge of Ataturk Alani, the kind of place that guidebooks charitably listed as "budget," except that the kind of guidebook that would list this place you'd never find in a bookstore. Like countless other similarly grimy lodgings around the world, the hotel doubled as a brothel.
A handful of seconds after Arzu disappeared, a young woman in a halter top and shorts that were too tight and too short came into view, descending the stairs. She saw me immediately, and started on a beeline. I gave her my don't-fuck-with-me face, and it stopped her in her tracks, but only for a second. Then she glanced over her shoulder, back the way she'd come and Arzu had gone, and resumed crossing to me. When she reached where I was sitting, she tried to sit in my lap.
"No," I told her, in Russian, pushing her gently away.
"Free," she said, and tried it again. "For a friend of Arzu Bey."
She was pale, her hair a filthy blonde, with a face hidden beneath heavy makeup. She might've been pretty once, before she'd come across the Black Sea from Russia or Ukraine or Moldova, the same way she'd had a name. Now she was just another natasha, like countless other girls who, one way or another, had been trafficked across the water expressly to be used for sex.