by Kitty Thomas
“I’ll get rid of him,” Danika said.
“Are you sure? I mean technically it’s not like he’s done anything wrong. Dealing with drunk come-ons is one of the job hazards.”
“He’s not drunk. He just got here. He’s trouble. He’s out. You stay back here until he’s gone.”
Julie sat behind Danika’s desk in the office, swiveling back and forth on the creaking olive leather chair. There was some shouting—a good deal of it coming from Danika. There was the expected resistance and Aleksei’s certainty that she couldn’t do shit to make him leave. Then the sound of several chairs scraping out as all the regulars got up and escorted him from the building.
There was another attempt to come back in, and yelling, a threat of the cops from Julie’s boss, then he left for good. A few minutes later Danika returned to the office. “It’s clear, you can go back to the bar.”
“Thanks.”
“Yep.”
“Julie, you all right?” one of the regulars asked when she came back out.
“Yeah, a little shaken. I should be used to guys like that by now.”
He shook his head. “You shouldn’t have to get used to guys like that.”
The rest of her shift was uneventful, which gave Julie plenty of time to brood over Gabe. But when she wasn’t brooding, she was seriously reconsidering her employment. She’d never planned to work at the bar this long. It was only meant as a stop gap until she found something better. She’d stayed as long as she had because tips were good and... she’d met Gabe. But with him gone, and the hope dwindling that he’d ever return, the tips weren’t seeming worth the trouble of dealing with guys like Aleksei.
When they closed up for the night, Julie went back to the office. There was one man still in the bar, one of the regulars. They were on a rotation to walk the girls out to their cars after work. It was a tradition that had started long before Julie had started working there.
“Danika?”
Her boss was filing the night’s receipts. She looked up from the pile of papers. “Yeah?”
“I need to move on and find other work. I wanted to give you notice.”
She sighed. “I worried this was coming. Do you know how hard it is to get a cute, mildly flirty girl in here who brings in the clientele and drink orders but doesn’t drink herself or go home with all the guys? You’re like a unicorn around here. I’ll never be able to replace you.”
“I’m sorry. I never meant to stay this long. But I like you and most of the regulars. It had started to feel like home, but now I’m sad whenever I’m here and then guys like Aleksei come in... and it’s not worth it anymore.”
“I understand. But you’ll give me a few weeks to find your replacement?”
“Absolutely.”
Danika nodded, resigned. “I’ll miss you, Julie. Even if you’re late all the fucking time.”
Julie laughed. “Only like four times a week. Can I go for the night? Everything’s wiped down and set up for tomorrow.”
“Yeah, get out of here. Once you get a fancy day job, don’t be a stranger, okay?”
“I won’t.”
“Ready?” Fred asked, when she got back to the front. He was her car escort for the night.
“Yeah.”
Fred walked her to her car. She half-expected the scary Russian guy with the snake tattoo to be lurking out in the shadows, but when they got to the parking lot, it was deserted. Fred said goodnight and waited until she pulled away to go back into the bar and wait on Danika.
Julie only lived a couple of miles from the bar in that twilight space between the good side of town and the bad, though some nights it felt like part of the bad side.
The apartment was dark when she arrived. Her roommate was probably out with her boyfriend. She usually went off with him when she didn’t have the car. In truth, Julie barely saw her. Some cash for her half of the rent mysteriously showed up on the kitchen table at the end of each month. At least she was reliable.
Julie fumbled with her keys. She heard a rustle and turned to find a small animal darting under a bush. Then there was a sharp pain at the back of her head and all was blackness.
Julie woke disoriented. She reached around to the back of her head and felt a prominent and tender bump.
“He knocked you a good one.”
She turned toward the voice still trying to get her bearings. She wasn’t sure if the room was dark or if her vision was all wonky from being hit. She was lying on the bottom bunk of a bunk bed. She gingerly sat up and turned toward the direction of the voice.
It was a dark-haired woman of maybe twenty-five. She had a slight accent, but Julie couldn’t place it. She’d obviously worked very hard on an American dialect, though her words came out almost too crisp and proper as a result.
“I’m Manka.”
“J-Julie.” Her throat was so dry. Was that the creeping fear and dread?
“You’re American? We never get Americans. You must have done something to piss one of them off.”
“One of who off?” But she didn’t need an explanation. The last person she’d pissed off was the Russian guy at the bar. He’d had criminal written all over him. So he’d just… taken her?
Julie sat up in the bed and looked around. She was in a big, long room. There were no windows. Maybe a basement? She didn’t want to think warehouse. The floor was concrete and there was a row of bunk beds lining each wall and a big open space in the middle of the room. Fluorescent lights were recessed into the ceiling. In the space in the middle was a series of large drains in the floor. Overhead were a row of shower heads.
Rising out of the floor were several concrete columns, which contained soap and shampoo. There were no curtains, no pretense of privacy. At the very end of the room against one wall was a large metal shelf with rows of neatly folded white towels. In the corner was a toilet. And again, no door, no curtain.
She shuddered. “What is this place?”
“It’s Dmitri’s basement. We live down here without sunlight or fresh air until our services are wanted. Then they dress us up like little whore dolls and take us upstairs to fuck their rich, disgusting clients.”
Julie flinched. It was almost more bluntness than she could handle, but Manka’s words had come out and run together so fast, she could almost have the luxury of forgetting she’d heard half of them.
“Who’s Dmitri?” As soon as she said it, she wished she could take it back. Why ask questions she didn’t really want the answers to?
“The boss. He might look nice and fancy, but don’t cross him. He will make your life hell. Aleksei is the nice one, which is saying little. And then there are some others whose names I don’t know because Dmitri talks to Aleksei. Then Aleksei gives the others orders but doesn’t use their names.”
Julie felt her throat constrict as her body pulled tight with tension. She felt as though this exchange with Manka was a brief calm prelude to something unimaginable and she couldn’t decide if she wanted to stay in this moment as long as possible or if she wanted it to hurry and be over so she could stop dreading and anticipating whatever was coming.
By way of distraction, she said, “There has to be a way out of here.”
Manka laughed bitterly. “Yes, that’s what the new girls always say. But there isn’t. You see that door at the end of the room?” She pointed to a large steel door that looked way too secure for a mere basement. “If you somehow managed to get through that door, on the other side are big, strong, armed guards. You don’t want to call their attention. If they don’t shoot you, they’ll rape you and then toss you right back in here.”
There were no other exits.
“How did you end up here?” If Julie didn’t keep a semi-normal conversation flowing, she was going to lose her mind. She already felt as if bits and pieces of it were breaking off and floating away from her.
“I met what I thought was a nice American man over the internet. He was supposed to become my husband and give me a new life in Amer
ica. But instead, I was brought here. My passport and identification were taken and... no husband. They said if I managed to escape I would get deported or go in prison because I was a criminal here illegally, and prostitution is a crime. As if I would choose that. Let them lock me up. I’m sure it would be better.”
“Your English is very good,” Julie said.
“Thank you. I practiced a long time for my American husband.”
Julie was about to ask why Manka was the only other person down here with her, when the question was answered by a coughing fit. Manka drank from a glass of water next to her bunk until it subsided.
“Whatever they’re giving me isn’t working. I’m not getting better. I’m going to die down here.”
“You’re not going to die down here,” Julie said. But as she said it, she had serious doubts. If what Manka said was true, short of some FBI sting stopping this and rescuing them, they were all probably going to die down here. It was a thought she tried very hard not to dwell on.
A few minutes later, the door opened, and a large group of women—about thirty in all—filed into the room, all wearing nice black lingerie of various styles.
“Who is this new girl?” a blonde with a strong French accent asked. She immediately started stripping off a long black silk nightgown, uncaring of her nudity. She tossed the garment in a basket beside the bed.
“I’m Julie,” she said, trying not to stare at the French girl.
“Américaine? How odd. Who did she piss off? They never bring américaine girls. They aren’t exotic enough for these pieces of shit.”
“Were you a mail-order bride, too?” Julie asked.
Manka made an offended sound—clearly not appreciating being referenced that way—and the blonde let out a derisive snort.
“Mais, non! I was to have a modeling contract. They said it was lingerie and asked if I would be okay with that. I said, oui. This was not what I had in mind. Je suis Josette. But you may call me, Josie.”
“She does that all the time, mixing French in with her English,” Manka said.
“Excusez-moi, Manka. I didn’t have a perfect mari waiting on me.” Josie turned abruptly and went to the shower in the middle of the room, and turned on one of the shower heads.
“I didn’t either,” Manka reminded her.
Josie rattled off something quite long and derisive-sounding in French and stepped under the spray. Julie looked away.
A Latina girl sat on the bed next to Julie’s. She laughed. “You better get used to public nudity, honey. Everybody’s gonna see it. Paying clients. Guards. Your fellow whores. That’s right. You’re no better than us now, blanca.”
Dmitri must have been looking to get women from all around the world, like some perverse international doll collection. Julie was the American doll. Boring to other Americans, but necessary to complete the set.
“I’m Carmen,” she said, finally. “Welcome to hell.”
“Julie.” Her name sounded stranger and more distant each time it fell from her lips.
“You must be the sweet one on the menu. How many men you fucked? No wait... let me guess... rich bitch living on Daddy’s credit cards. Frat boy boyfriend in college... big brothers to your sorority. Experimented with a few girls to be edgy. How warm am I?”
Finally, the tears came. Whatever dam had been holding them back burst, and she didn’t care if Carmen or any of the others saw her cry.
“Oh shit, we’ve got a weeper. Well, isn’t that special? You better toughen the fuck up, girl, or you’re never going to survive this. Close your eyes and pretend it’s your boyfriend. These men are all into boring shit in the bedroom anyway. Lucky for us.”
Julie must have betrayed something with her facial expression because Carmen’s eyes went wide. “You have had a boyfriend, right, blanca?”
Julie couldn’t meet her eyes.
“Girlfriend?”
No response.
“Okay, but you’ve at least had sex. What are you? Twenty, twenty-one?”
“Twenty-two. And no,” Julie said.
“Shit, girl. Did they steal you out of a convent?” Carmen got very serious and concerned all of a sudden. “Listen to me. You can’t let them know. If they find out you’ve never been with anyone, they’ll make this a thousand times worse for you. These entitled dickheads will fight to see who gets to deflower you, and they’ll make it a big public show. They did that shit to Umiko when she first got here. She was barely seventeen and had been... sheltered.”
The Japanese girl stood at the edge of their conversation, a darkness falling over her expression.
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” Julie said, at a loss at what else to say. These girls were acting so casual it was unsettling. She wanted to buy into whatever sense of normalcy they’d created to survive but she couldn’t yet. She didn’t want this to be the new normal. It couldn’t be.
Umiko shrugged.
Carmen quickly changed the subject. “Umiko is our little mermaid.”
The Japanese girl managed a small laugh. “My name means child of the sea. They like to tease me about it.”
When Umiko had gone off to shower, Julie turned back to Carmen. “They’ll find out if I bleed,” she said, unable to believe she was speaking as if she accepted all this as her new reality. She knew she had to be in some kind of shock. Her voice didn’t sound like her own. It couldn’t be. None of this was really happening. It was all a bad dream. She’d wake up.
Carmen interrupted her internal monologue. “But then it’ll be too late. It won’t matter. Just try to keep the client from finding out then dump the sheets down the laundry chute.”
“Won’t they find it when they do laundry?” Julie asked.
Carmen rolled her eyes. “Oh yeah, like these assholes do laundry. We do the laundry. It’s practically the only other time we get out of this dungeon, to do the domestic shit, but don’t think that’s an escape opportunity. There will be guns on you the whole time. Besides, if they saw it, there would be no way to know who it came from. Maybe a client got rough. Maybe a girl is on her period. These hijos de su puta madre are squeamish about periods. They won’t ask, and they won’t care.”
“Okay.” Julie noticed some dark sinister stains on the ground. “What’s that?”
“You don’t want to know,” Carmen said. But after a pause she told her anyway. “When I talk about survival here, I mean that. If you make too much trouble, they will fucking kill you. A lot of times when it happens, they just drag someone out of the room and nobody sees them again. We’re not completely sure they die. Maybe some get sold to someone else. But I’ve seen them kill a couple of girls here in cold blood. That’s what those stains are. And I was part of the clean-up crew on that one.” She pointed.
“H-how long have you been here?” How long could anybody be here and still maintain any sense of themselves?
Carmen looked around, as if she expected to find a calendar on the wall. She shrugged and said, “What’s time in a place like this? I don’t know... long enough... so long that I’m afraid they’ll notice I’m not as young as the others anymore, and then I might become one of those stains. You don’t get out of this alive. The only thing you can do is prolong the inevitable and hope they’ve made a mistake out there. Maybe someone is investigating. Maybe they’ll bust down the doors any day and get us out of here.”
It was a very nice thought. And too much to hope that this probably-imaginary sting operation would come to an end in the next few hours.
“Do they speak English? The people running this place?” Julie asked. She knew Aleksei did.
“Most of them do, but except for Dmitri, they speak mostly in Russian. A lot of the time we only know what Manka tells us later. She can understand them, so we hear what she can remember, usually the next day. I’m sure they don’t know she’s Russian. They picked her up in Poland, and her English is so good. You’d think they’d be smart enough to know a lot of these girls speak more than one language. But th
ey are usually careful, and Manka is smart. She looks blank whenever they speak, except reacting to general tone like the other girls. But maybe they’re just playing with us. Maybe they know she understands and tells us later. Maybe it’s all part of their sadistic games. I don’t know. There’s no way out anyway. It doesn’t matter what we know or don’t know.”
Several other girls were using the shower now. Josie had finished first and went and brought a big pile of towels and laid them down outside the range of water splash. Eventually, they’d all showered, including the girls in the bunks right around Julie: Carmen, Umiko, Manka. They all got into bed without a stitch on and pulled the covers over them.
“You don’t sleep in pajamas?” Julie whispered to Carmen who was in the bed next to hers.
“Blanca, this ain’t the spa. They’re not going to spring for sleepwear. The only clothes we get is what we fuck the clients in and what we clean the house in.” Carmen’s expression went very dark and hard all of a sudden. “I’d like to slit their motherfucking throats in their sleep. Every night I pray to the virgin. I pray down terror and gunfire on them.”
Carmen was kind of scary. But a good scary. An understandable scary. And a scary that made Julie feel like she wasn’t alone. Somehow she knew this would all be way worse if she were alone.
The door opened, the metal clanking and scraping loudly against the wall.
“Ladies,” an older Russian man said. He was tall and thin and looked out of place as the leader of a prostitution ring, but it was clear he was the leader. The energy and sense of calm resolute power that rose off him was unmistakable.
Aleksei stood behind him and to the right. His eyes immediately found Julie’s, and he smiled. Did he really find this a fitting punishment for being kicked out of the bar? Or had he planned to take her anyway?
Dmitri continued. “The clients have left for the evening. Everyone but Umiko eats.”
“That’s not fair!” Carmen practically snarled. One of the guards stepped out of the line and advanced on her, his hand raised as if prepared to beat her for the outburst.