The Sisterhood

Chapter 15


Las Golondrinas Convent, Spain, April 2000





The next morning Sor Teresa shrilled, “Deo gratias!” and Menina rubbed her swollen eyes, and pushed herself up. She hated the world and everything and everyone in it. Her head ached. Thursday. Three days till Easter. Then she remembered the humiliation of yesterday and nothing mattered.

Sor Teresa hobbled briskly out the door. Menina drank her coffee without tasting it, cringing at the way she had lost control the day before. She couldn’t afford to do that again. She pulled on her clothes, feeling numb.

An hour later, she was following Sor Clara toward the sala grande when Sor Clara paused in the kitchen and, grinning broadly, pointed to a startling sight: a large basket of foil-wrapped chocolate fish, wrapped in layers of rainbow-colored cellophane, all topped with a huge bow of multicolored ribbon trailing elaborate ribbon curls. The label said: VALOR.

“Valor is famous, very nice, very expensive!” said Sor Clara, appreciatively. “Captain Fernández Galán brought it.”

Menina eyed the rainbow basket. “Why?”

“Why? Because fish are a Christian symbol! In Spain there are chocolate fish for Easter; people give for presents, in the family, to friends.” Sor Clara cast a sly glance at Menina. “Men give to girls. And a little note is here.” She handed it to Menina and waited.

Menina unfolded a scrap of paper that said “Polizia” at the top, and read aloud.

Señorita Walker, Every year my older sister in Zaragoza sends these for Semana Santa, to remind me I am still her little brother. Please accept them for yourself and the sisters with my compliments.

Alejandro Fernández Galán

Menina normally loved chocolate. Now she ground her teeth, ripped the note in pieces, and was about to hurl the basket on the floor and stomp it flat with her Timberlands when the frightened look on Sor Clara’s face stopped her. “You must take it,” Sor Clara quavered anxiously, pointing at the basket. “Please, you bring it. Alejandro said he will see you later.”

Oh hell! “Why?” She picked up the heavy basket.

Sor Clara shrugged and opened the door of the sala grande. “I don’t know why. Is another of his girlfriends here last night.” Obviously the old-lady grapevine didn’t shut down over Semana Santa. “So many girlfriends. He should get married. He is lonely.”

“Is he?” It came out a little sharper than Menina intended. Why didn’t he give his girlfriend the damned chocolate, let her get fat! In the sala grande Menina slammed the basket down. Captain Fernández Galán was a pain in the ass! One minute he was rude, the next he was worrying about the nuns, the next prying out her secrets, the next…another red-hot girlfriend. She was sick of the captain.

In fact, she was thoroughly irritated by everything and everyone, including poor Sor Clara, the walls of dirty, stupid pictures, and the fact that she probably had only four or five hours of good light. She looked at the painting of the crowd and the demons in its tarnished silver frame, and the clean space on the wall where it had hung. So she’d found it. Big deal.

She looked around to see if any other frames caught her attention. There seemed to be four other paintings of the same size hung at the same height. She stepped up to the closest and felt the frame. Black and patterned and heavy. She yanked it down from the wall hard enough to snap the wire. Too bad. Yes, the same silver frame, same design. There seemed to be three more such frames, hung in a line. She pulled them down, too, and set to work on the first, scrubbing roughly with the bread. Right now she couldn’t care less if she found a horde of lost Rembrandts.

Under the dirt a scene emerged of a group of women watching a boat on the horizon. Some were huddled in groups, some kneeling, stretching out their arms toward the boat. Bundles of spilled possessions were scattered around them. The only woman standing had an arm raised toward the ship; she was a small but central figure, wearing a cloak that billowed powerfully with the same wind filling the ship’s sails. Men on deck had folded arms and were staring in the other direction at the sky. Definitely leaving the women. Theseus abandoning Ariadne on Naxos was the only classical subject that sprang to mind, but then Menina wasn’t sure. The standing woman somehow didn’t look like a Cretan princess. A couple of soldiers in the background looked Roman.

Menina examined it more closely—was it mold, or a dark cloud on the horizon where the blue sea and blue sky met? One of the sailors in the stern of the boat, a tiny figure, seemed to be pointing toward it. Now she noticed all the sight lines of the people in the painting drew the viewer’s eye to the cloud. Funny, it was hardly noticeable at first, then the longer she looked at it, the seemingly insignificant cloud dominated the picture. And the cloud looked like a lot of tiny dots of paint, but the painting looked older than the nineteenth century when French Impressionists, the Pointillists, had also used tiny dots of paint. Her irritation began to dissipate. Just the tiniest bit.

The next painting was another group scene. Beneath the murk, women and children were sitting around a table holding cups. There was a wine jug like the wicker-covered one she had seen in the convent kitchen, and men in helmets peering through a window. There were loaves of bread and a large fish on the table, and a pot on a fire. At first she guessed it had been commissioned to show a solid burgher’s womenfolk at dinner, and, yes, the fish was a Christian symbol. The clothes were plain—no jewels or fine robes, wimples, none of the elaborately wound turbans Renaissance women sometimes wore in paintings. Other than the fish and a candle on the table there was nothing to indicate the devotional nature of the painting—no saints, no flowers or other symbols she could associate with the Virgin, no angels or biblical references she could identify. In the eaves above the group around the table it looked as if birds were building nests. Swallows. What was with the swallows?

The next picture was another landscape, mountains. Then under the grime she discerned some tiny figures in the bottom right-hand corner. One appeared to be ahead of a group, and they were all on a path or a road or something that began in the lower right-hand corner and wound upward to the left, into mountains dotted with small white spots that looked like the distant white mountain villages she had seen from the bus. Someone—it must be a woman because she had long black hair flying behind her and she seemed to be naked except for a sort of transparent shift—was running from a group of…possibly soldiers? At the top of the highest mountain there was a dark cleft in the rocks. There was a storm cloud in this one, too, a dark mass in the distance that the viewer sensed was approaching. And the people in the painting didn’t see it. Again, it didn’t ring any biblical or classical bells.

She turned to the last, smallest one.

Another portrait, another dark-haired girl. But this one was not about to enter a convent. She was young and disheveled, as if she had just got up from bed. She had dangling earrings, a bright colored shawl slipping off one bare shoulder, parted lips, and a saucy, knowing, come-hither expression in her sleepy eyes. Her hair tumbled in elaborate curls that seemed to tickle her full breasts spilling out of an undone bodice. Menina thought she looked more like a hot sixteenth-century Playmate of the Month than something that belonged in a convent collection. She decided to call it “Captain Fernández Galán’s Girlfriend.”

Menina dragged the paintings to the window to catch the last light and, using the last of the bread, managed to make out “Tristan Mendoza” underneath the grime on each one. So the frames had been a clue.

OK. She had now found five works by Tristan Mendoza—two landscapes, an interior scene, and two portraits. Odd and ambiguous as they were, it was still a major discovery. Menina wished she could get excited about it, but all she could think was, so what? Still, it was good for the nuns. “Well, Sor Clara, I found all five paintings by Tristan Mendoza.”

Sor Clara looked up from her rosary and held up her hand with the fingers spread out. Then she raised the other hand and held up one finger. Then she counted the fingers. “Was six by Tristan Mendoza. Six. Sor Teresa will come soon; time to eat lunch.”

Lunch! Menina realized she was ravenous. She hadn’t eaten anything since falling apart yesterday. She tried not to think about food. “Six? Are you sure?” She looked at the crowded walls.

“Six paintings.” Sor Clara held her fingers to the light and looked at them dreamily. “One, two, three, four, five, six,” she counted in Spanish.

Sor Clara must be as light-headed with hunger as Menina felt. She tried to revive her aggravation at Captain Fernández Galán and his stupid present, but was too wrung out now to care. She unwrapped layers of pale green, yellow, and lavender cellophane just to see what was in the basket. She wouldn’t touch one of the fish if her life depended on it, but it was mean not to give Sor Clara any. She held the basket out to Sor Clara. Sor Clara smiled with delight as she picked a fish, peeled the foil off, and ate it slowly with a happy expression.

Menina looked at the basket, brimming over with shimmering foil-wrapped chocolate…OK, one stupid fish, thought Menina, picking a large one.

“Is good?” asked Sor Clara.

“Mmmm,” said Menina grudgingly. They each took more. Then there were footsteps, the door banged open, and Sor Teresa exclaimed, “Aha!” Sor Clara started guiltily. Menina offered Sor Teresa a chocolate fish, which prompted a sharp lecture about Semana Santa when sweets were forbidden to the nuns. Menina thought it was a good thing she couldn’t see all the bits of colored foil surrounding Sor Clara. Sor Clara sighed and lowered the hand holding a half-eaten fish.

Menina tried to tell Sor Teresa about finding the other paintings, but before she could, Sor Teresa said, “Alejandro is here again and says you must see him. I tell him he must behave, not upset you like yesterday. He knows I am very angry with him. Sor Clara! Come!”

Sor Clara surreptitiously popped her last piece of chocolate into her mouth, and followed Sor Teresa out.

With a sinking heart, Menina picked up the bits of foil and basket of fish and closed the door of the sala grande. The room had grown dark suddenly, as the sky had clouded over and it was going to rain. Next door the locutio parlor was dark, too, and she put down the basket, groped for the matches, and lit a candle. Today she would maintain a dignified silence, saying yes or no as necessary and nothing else. Only she was so nervous and self-conscious and embarrassed about yesterday’s failure on the ladylike front that she immediately blurted out, “Alejandro…I mean Captain Fernández-um?” What was this man’s name?

“Mees Walker,” he said from the other side of the grille. “I like it better if you call me Alejandro.”

Nervously Menina replied, “Oh. Fine, call me Menina; no one calls me Miss Walker either…Um, thank you for the chocolate. I’ve never seen a basket of fish. We have Easter eggs at home, you know, children dye them, and the Easter bunny…” Menina cursed herself. Here she went again! What happened to dignified silence? Why did she always have to sound like an idiot? “About the chocolate,” she began.

“Oh that. Please. My pleasure. But I am here to ask you to do something.”

“Look, I’m working as fast as I can,” said Menina, “but with no electricity the light’s not great when the sun goes, and I don’t have night vision.”

“It is nothing to do with paintings. I need your help.”

Now what?

“What?” demanded Menina.

“I need you to open the gate and let someone in the convent, late tonight.”

“You want me to what?”

“Yes. I will bring an Albanian girl. I think is Albanian. She is better with you I think than nuns. They will not like. She is about sixteen, maybe not quite.”

The girlfriend Sor Clara had mentioned! A man in his thirties had no business with a girl who was practically a child. “Let me get this straight—you want me to bring a girl into the convent, an underage one, whom you obviously don’t even know all that well because you aren’t sure where she comes from?”

It sounded like the captain was saying he needed to hide her. He started to explain, but Menina erupted before he could finish. “I already know about your ‘girlfriends’! Do you have any idea how fast gossip travels here? The old ladies who come to Mass watch everything everybody does in the village, and rush to tell Sor Teresa or one of the other nuns. The nuns are scandalized, think they’re all prostitutes. I am the last person on earth to help you have sex in the convent with a teenager!” She paused for breath. This man was revolting, sordid, sleazy.

“Please, is not what you are thinking! The girls the old ladies see, yes they are supposed to look like prostitutes. I am a man; old ladies disapprove but not surprised. Is Spain—men are men…”

It was not the right thing to say. Menina, the good girl who had rarely argued with anyone or even raised her voice much in the course of nineteen years, heard herself shouting like a demented fishwife for the second time in twenty-four hours. “Men treat women like pieces of meat! How do men get so damn arrogant? And now, now, you’ve got this, this kid, she’s maybe fifteen? You’re nearly old enough to be her father! What’s the matter with you?” she shouted. She was angry again, ranting about sorry-assed f*ckwit men. She sounded like…Becky!

Good!

“That is not…listen to me a minute, oh my God, you think I like children for sex…No, no, no!”

“Well, what then?” Menina’s voice reached a decibel level she didn’t know she possessed.

“Alright! You are not in a mood to believe me, is normal after what you have been through. Be quiet and I will tell you what is going on, what the police business is. I cannot tell the sisters, not even Sor Teresa, but now I think is more dangerous for too many people if I do not tell you. Girl is in big trouble so I need your help.”

“No, I damn well won’t help you! You’re revolting!”

“Ay, and I thought your voice was so sweet! Listen first, then you can scream all you like. Maybe you wonder why I stay in this village? Here is quiet and old-fashioned, many old people. Maybe you think is because of my aunt, because my family was here? Yes, these things are important, but because my family is from this village and everyone knows I promise my father it is also my cover. I am here because of what I learn at the police academy in the US, surveillance. Several years ago, when I am coming back to Spain to live, I am recruited for a big surveillance operation with the Spanish authorities and Interpol.”

“What? Here? In the middle of nowhere?”

“Yes, is because it is in the middle of nowhere. Today most people come here on the highway. Like you did on the bus. But before there is the highway, there is an old road that comes here from the coast, near Marbella, goes east through mountains to the Basque country, then to the border. This road has probably been there for two thousand years, and it goes even beyond this village into the mountains, toward France. Is bad road, hard to find, many trees, sometimes boulders fall from mountains, very dangerous, so nowadays no one use it. But is many old mountain roads, all over Europe, in good weather sometimes they are passable and there are people who use them.”

“Who?”

“This is what I am trying to tell you. For years the police across Europe are watching these roads because people are using this route for smuggling from the old Eastern Bloc countries and from farther, from Iran and even Afghanistan. Is very big criminal operation and for a long time they are working carefully to make a trap. Here.”

“Oh.” This explanation made Menina feel a tiny bit sheepish for shouting at him. “Drugs?”

“Yes, drugs are involved. Drugs are a very big business. These men who come to Spain know the old roads are difficult for authorities to watch. They bring heroin and cocaine across Europe from Afghanistan and Turkey. Is big market for drugs here, many rich people on the coast in Marbella, Puerto Banus, other places in the south where there are big yachts, villas, much money. Criminals, too. They think they are safe, can do what they like. But they smuggle something worse than drugs. Maybe you hear, even in America, gangs traffic women from East Europe—Kosovo and Albania and Romania and Ukraine. People there are very poor, have nothing, no jobs. Men come and tell young girls they can go to France and Germany and England, rich countries, plenty of nice jobs, in restaurants, caring for children of rich families, be au pair, have a nice room, learn English, make a lot of money. Can send money home to families, save money to get married. So the girls go of course—sometimes they want to go, sometimes families force them, even sell them to these men, and sometimes they are kidnapped. Then they find the men lie about restaurant jobs and looking after children. They are locked up in trucks and taken to be prostitutes, like slaves. The men who bring them beat them up, rape them, give them drugs to make them work as prostitutes, take their money, and threaten their families back home if they try to run away or call the police.”

“Oh.” Menina put her forehead on the grate and closed her eyes, remembering the feel of Theo’s hand clamped over her mouth, her terror, and, worst of all, the powerlessness. Like she had been reduced to dirt, to nothing. Her mouth was dry. Hearing about it happening to other girls made her want to be sick.

“The women that old ladies tell Sor Teresa are my ‘girlfriends’ are policewomen. Undercover. Like I say, is Spain, men are men. I am not married. Old ladies do not approve if I have prostitutes, but nobody thinks is strange. Old ladies are shocked. They make a scandal. This is what I need, because it is cover. The policewomen are helping me watch the men who come and go in the mountain villages.

“There is a lot of construction, new villas for wealthy foreigners in the mountains, jobs for foreign workers. The authorities cannot check all of them or stop them coming to Spain. And when they finish a job, they travel around looking for other work. You saw some of those men working in the village the day you missed your bus. Villages like ours hire them now to build the Semana Santa floats for the Easter procession, because is no longer enough young men who live here to build them. We know criminals mix with the gypsies who have always come at this time with their markets. Then they all help when the trucks bring another load of girls and drugs. The day you come to the police station, I am angry because I cannot decide if you are merely a stupid call girl who is in my way, or maybe you are a decoy or somehow involved—a kind of madam for the girls they are bringing. Your story about a college trip to Madrid sounded impossible. And yesterday when you say ‘Theo’ I think, I must know if he is involved.”

“Oh! No, he’s not. He’s a…creep but he’s not smuggling women or drugs.”

“You did not know what a narrow escape you had that day in the square. They could easily take you like the other women. You are very pretty, sexy, young. You are worth money. But my father’s friend worried when he saw the poster with your picture. He knows about this operation, and came to warn me that if people come looking for a missing American girl it will jeopardize our careful operation. We must keep the low profile until we catch them.”

“Of course. This is all pretty horrible.”

“Yes, and it gets worse. The people who buy drugs from these gangs buy women, too, and they pay more for very young ones. You were angry thinking I wanted a fifteen-year-old—there are men who want little girls even of twelve, sometime younger. Some yacht owners will buy several girls for a cruise, different ages but all young, all girls who thought they were going to a better life and find themselves in hell. If the girls they buy come back, they are sold again, but sometimes they do not come back. We are finding bodies in the sea. They throw girls overboard when they are finished. If you could see what has happened to them before they die…These men are animals. And men who have sold girls to the yacht owners bring more. Always more. And we must stop them.”

Menina thought about the men who had circled her that afternoon she had missed her bus and closed her eyes. “And this girl you want me to let in tonight?”

“This girl is Almira. She cannot talk much—they broke her nose and her jaw, but she is braver and stronger than they think. I think she is a survivor because she is angry, angry like you yesterday. She managed to escape, and now she is an important witness; she can identify many of the men. Last week, just before you came, one of the undercover policewomen, one of my ‘girlfriends,’ brought her up here from the safe house where we have kept her, hiding in the back of her car. Almira told us that the truck that brought her there last spring had an air vent, and she pried it off and saw the sun setting between the mountains. We waited until the same time this year so the setting sun would be in the same position, and took her at the same time along the old road into France so she could show us where. When she did, nearby we found a fork of the road we did not know existed, and the road they used. She is a smart girl and risked her life to help. Even though she is very, very afraid.

“It was Almira who told us she overheard the men talking about bringing more girls at the time of the Semana Santa—we think either tomorrow, on Good Friday night, or on Saturday night, because those nights we have our traditional Semana Santa processions, and people come and walk in the procession with candles. Then there is a party, a crowd, very noisy. Everyone is looking at the procession; there is singing and people do not pay attention to a strange van coming out of the forest. Don’t see girls tied up inside.

“But we have made a big mistake, the policewoman and I. When my colleague was ready to drive Almira back to the safe house where she is staying, Almira begged to have a ride in my car. She says it is so beautiful, she has never seen one like it. Poor girl, we are sorry for her. I told my colleague to wait for us a little way outside the village. I will bring Almira to her. We go for a drive and then head back to the village. Almira was laughing, playing with the stereo, pretending she is a movie star in Hollywood. Until we came back to the village and she recognized the men working in the square. She threw herself on the floor and started moaning they would kill her now. I said she would soon be back in the safe house, but when I got to the meeting place my colleague was not waiting for us. That is bad, and I cannot send a message or telephone for help. I cannot stop watching. I have no choice but to bring Almira back and keep her here. Almira is right—she is dead if they find her. She has been hiding at my house, but I do not like her there. It is safer if she hides inside the convent with you.”

“Tell me what to do.”

“I need you to be at the gate at midnight—they will ring the bell for the vigil at midnight—and open the gate to let Almira in, then close and bolt it. Walls are high, gate is very strong, the convent is like a fortress when it is closed. But it is better that the nuns do not know police witness is here. They will worry.”

“Of course.” Her heart sank. A million miles from anywhere and now caught up in a dangerous police operation. But she knew she had to help Almira. Almira was refusing to be a victim, despite terrible things that had been done to her—even worse than what had happened to Menina. OK, if Almira could do it, Menina would find some courage, too.

Menina wished with all her heart that Becky were here. Becky was the tough one.

“Wait! What about those people you said are looking for me? I can’t think of any reason they’d want to.”

Captain Fernández Galán sighed. “I think that is another problem and we must leave it till later.” He cleared his throat. “And one more thing, you do not think bad things about me anymore? You know I am not a pedophile? I do not have the girlfriends?”

“I guess I have to believe you, but you fooled everybody.” He’d had her wondering if she had been kidnapped to become a nun, but there was no need to mention that.

“Good,” he said with a sigh. “And so you know, I am not really old enough to be Almira’s father. I am thirty-three. See you later.”

Menina called into the darkness after him. “Captain…Alejandro, please, can you bring some food tonight?” She hoped he had heard. Otherwise she and Almira were going to have to survive on chocolate fish and stale bread.

She felt her way back to her room, shaken by what she had heard about trafficked girls. Dinner was on the meager side on the Thursday before Easter. She ate bread and lentils and an apple as slowly as she could, and remembered what Sor Teresa had said about many girls coming to the convent. Well, they would never have expected girls in the kind of mess Menina and Almira were in. She really hoped she could keep Almira out of Sor Teresa’s way.