"Acting on anonymous information, federal authorities raided a house in New Paradise, Nevada, this morning, as part of an ongoing investigation into human trafficking More on this as it develops."
That was it. That was all.
I turned the television off and the BlackBerry on, called Alena.
"You have her?" she asked.
"I have her."
"How is she?"
"She hasn't said much. She hasn't really said anything."
"May I speak with her?"
"Hold on."
I moved to the bathroom door, tapped lightly on it. The water had stopped running over ten minutes ago.
"Tiasa," I said.
She opened the door, wet black hair and jeans and a dark green T-shirt. She didn't look at me; she hadn't much looked at me, at least when she thought I was looking at her, since I'd put her in the Jetta back in New Paradise and started driving.
"Yeva wants to talk to you," I said, and handed her the phone, then moved away, giving them privacy. For almost two minutes Tiasa said nothing, listening.
Then, her voice hoarse, she said, "I understand."
She brought the phone back to me, then sat on the other bed in the room and began to put on her new sneakers. I put the phone to my ear.
"I'll contact you when we get to New York," I said. "Ask Bridgett to call her sister, let her know we're coming."
"Don't rush," Alena told me, switching to English. "It would be stupid to die now because you were speeding."
"I miss you," I said.
"I miss you, too."
In the background, I heard Bridgett make a gagging noise. We were back in the Jetta and heading north, into Wyoming, before afternoon. Mostly, Tiasa slept, or appeared to. We stopped in Cheyenne to eat, and she didn't have much of an appetite. After dinner, we got back on the road, following Interstate 80 into Nebraska. Again, Tiasa seemed to sleep, or to try to. Sometimes, I thought she was talking to herself, her voice so soft I wasn't sure I was hearing it at all. I didn't know what to tell her, what to say, and so I drove and told myself that she would talk to me when she was ready, when she had something she wanted to say.
We were some eighty miles west of Omaha, past one in the morning, and I was thinking we were going to need to stop soon, when she finally did. The car was dark, the only lights from the instrument panel, the occasional splash from headlights passing us in either direction. The farmland spread out forever on all sides.
"Yeva," Tiasa began, then stopped. She was speaking softly, in Georgian, and I almost lost her voice amidst the engine and road noise. She coughed, cleared her throat. "Yeva told me that she was raped."
"Yes," I said. "When she was young, younger than you."
"Oh," Tiasa said, and then lapsed back into silence. We stopped for the rest of the night in Omaha. Tiasa went to take another shower before sleeping, and again, I turned to the television for an update. Since MSNBC had done well by me the last time, I went with them again.
The story had expanded. Six girls, between the ages of twelve and sixteen, had been rescued in the raid on the house in New Paradise. Footage showed them being led from the building as men and women in FBI jackets fluttered around them. Authorities had three people in custody, one found at the house, the remaining two arrested at the local hospital. They were said to be cooperating. Authorities were also, apparently, searching for a fourth individual, who they stressed was not a suspect, but rather a person of interest. There was no mention of any part the New Paradise PD might have played in the business.
I turned the television off, removed my glasses, rubbed my eyes. My side ached, and my arm. From the bathroom, I could hear the shower still running. The sound of Tiasa trying to wash away shame and humiliation and pain.
She was in there a very long time. A day and a half later, outside of Cleveland, making our last push toward New York, Tiasa spoke again.
"What am I going to do, David?" she asked.
I thought of the many ways to answer that, all the things the question could mean. Finally, I said, "You're going to be a dancer, Tiasa."
"No," she said. "No, I mean… I mean…"
She faded into silence again. I glanced over at her. She had her head leaning against the window, staring at the dashboard. She was biting her lower lip, hard, one hand wrapped around the handle of the door, the other in a fist, pressed into her thigh.
"I don't know what you're feeling," I said, after another couple of miles. "I can imagine it, but I don't know, not really. But I've lost people I love, Tiasa, had them taken from me, and there have been times when I didn't want to go on without them. And it's hard, and it is going to be hard for you for a long time. But you will survive this. You will survive this, and someday it won't hurt quite so much, and one day you'll smile again. One day you'll laugh again.
"And then you'll want to dance again."
Her voice was thick. "Yeva told me to be strong. That she knew I was strong."
"Yeva knows what she's talking about. Yeva's stronger than I'll ever be." I took another glance at her, saw that she was as before, but had shut her eyes. I looked back to the road. "Yeva's going to have a baby."
"Yeva is?" Tiasa asked, slowly.
I nodded.
"You're going to have a baby?"
"Yeah."
She thought about that.
"I hope you have a boy," Tiasa said. The New York Times had the full story on the front page the next morning, below the fold, listed as part one of a series. The article seemed to work extensively from the material I had sent anonymously to the paper, supplementing it with information from the State Department's annual Trafficking in Persons report. It began with a description of the house in New Paradise, what it had been used for, the people who had maintained and managed the location.
Then it went on to talk about the girls who had been held there, where they were from, and how they had come to the United States, to the Land of Opportunity. It described the supply chain, how a girl in Ukraine would be sold to a man in Turkey; how that man in Turkey would offer that girl for sale; how, upon receiving payment for her, a "coyote," or middleman, in Amsterdam would bring her to the U.S.
The article pointed out that, according to the International Labor Organization of the United Nations, 12.7 million people were, at this moment, bound in one form of slavery or another around the world. Either in forced or bonded labor, or in sexual servitude. The majority of these slaves were women and children.
Some NGOs, the article stated, claimed the ILO estimate was exaggerated, that the number was closer to 4 million slaves. As if that made it better.
The piece concluded by saying that other organizations put the estimate as high as 27 million. Three days after leaving New Paradise, Tiasa and I met Sister Cashel Logan in a park on the southeast edge of the Bronx, a place called the Half Moon Overlook in the Spuyten Duyvil neighborhood. It was the last Wednesday of July, hot and humid, and the sun was bright off the water where the Hudson and Harlem rivers met.
She was already waiting for us when we arrived, sitting on a bench near the wrought-iron fence marking the border of the park, and when she saw us coming, she rose to her feet, smiling. She was wearing a cream-colored blouse and black pants, and as ever, the pin of her holy order was in place on her lapel.
"Hello, Tiasa," Sister Cashel said in practiced and poorly accented Georgian. "My name is Sister Cashel."
Tiasa, walking at my side and not touching me, stopped, so I stopped with her. Cashel's presence wasn't a surprise; I'd told her who we were meeting and why, and Tiasa had nodded and kept her silence. Now, it seemed, the silence wasn't going to be enough.
"I have English," she told Cashel, in an accent as bad as Cashel's had been in Georgian.
"Atticus told you about me?" Cashel hadn't moved, still smiling, still calm and reassuring.
Tiasa's brow creased, trying to translate, and after a second, I did it for her, adding, "She calls me Atticus."