“Doesn’t it anger you, Emil?” I ask.
It’s a tricky question for Emil’s mind, and he considers it carefully. “Maybe,” he says finally.
“Why maybe?” I ask.
“When I think about it, it’s like—these girls are too young. I think, maybe that redhead wants to be a schoolteacher or something back in Petersburg, but now we make her a whore.” Emil squints at the road ahead, the philosopher deep in thought. “But that’s why I don’t think about it.”
Of course you don’t. And thank you, Emil, for making this so easy for me. I steal a look down at the pistol, tighten my grip. Now.
“It’s like that old fag who’s there,” Emil says suddenly. “Who is he? What the fuck did he ever do to Pan Kladivo? None of my business, so I don’t think about that either.”
My body freezes in place. “The old fag?”
“Yeah, the old guy. Not old-old, but gray, or he’s gray now. At the tábor. In the last cell.”
I slip the pistol back into my pocket. “Oh,” I say. “Him.”
*
We get off the highway at the first light of dawn, trundle over a bad two-lane road, then turn down a gravel path surrounded on both sides by forest. Ahead I see the gates of the tábor.
We park in the middle of the yard, and Emil turns off the engine. As he exits the truck, I slide my iPhone from my pocket, launch the GPS app, and wait for it to pinpoint my location. But there’s nothing. No signal at all.
“You coming or what?” Emil shouts from outside. “These whores won’t unload themselves.”
I slip the phone back into my pocket. “Coming,” I say.
The guard from the gate plus five more from the main building gather behind the truck as I raise the door. The girls are huddled at the far end of the hold. The oldest stands in front of the others, arms stretched out as if to protect them.
One of the guards, a pudgy little thing who looks like he’s still a teenager, finds sudden bravado. “Come on, bitches! Out!” he screams, rapping the butt of a Kalashnikov rifle on the deck. “Ubiraytes! Raus!”
The women jump at the violence of the command but don’t move. Emil orders everyone in to get them. I look away, I have to, as each guard grabs two women by the arm and drags them out. The pudgy one pokes at them with the muzzle of his gun, herding them toward the building.
In the kitchen of the tábor, Emil helps himself to coffee as the guards bring the women to the cells. When the guards return and sit down for their breakfast—someone’s brought pastries—I stay off to the side, leaning against the counter. Emil and the others are engaged in an animated conversation, and the gist of it seems to be the quality of the women downstairs. Two Kalashnikovs on the table next to the food, and everyone with some kind of pistol. I haven’t a chance, not now.
The room is kitted out like a frat house and smells of old towels and cooking grease. The cheap, communist-era office furniture is supplemented by someone’s mother’s old couch and an enormous LED television playing highlights from last night’s soccer match.
Then, in the corner, I spot a desk and an old two-way radio. I walk over to it. It looks at least fifty years old. Switches, dials, a wire running up to the ceiling where it disappears.
“Don’t touch,” someone shouts.
I look back at the table. All eyes are on me. “Why not?”
“No mobile service here, no landline,” says the pudgy kid. “Radio is the only way to call Prague. Coded only. Always.”
One mode of communication. No calling for help if the radio goes down.
“The women downstairs,” I say. “When do they eat?”
“When we say so,” says one of the men.
“How about now?” I say. “They should eat something.”
A murmur at the table, a little laughter, then the pudgy guard rises and unloads a large cardboard box of American protein bars from a cabinet. “Only one each. If more, they get fat.”
*
My footsteps ring on the metal treads as I repeat the journey I took with Bohdan Kladivo. Each step doubles the dread building in my stomach, each step adds a turn to the metal coil in my chest. I don’t know what will be worse—finding my dad here, or finding he’s gone. The protein bars inside the box are rattling against one another, and I have to force my hands to be still.
The corridor at the bottom is empty and exactly as I remember it, with numbered cell doors lining the wall, each with a little hatch covering a window, and a long narrow slot at the bottom.
I slide open the hatch of the first window. The box wobbles and nearly falls to the floor as I move my hand instinctively to muffle my gasp. The women from the truck have been stripped naked and two sit curled up on the cot, while two more are on the floor in the same position—bare arms wrapped around bare legs folded up against bare chests. For the first time, I can see them clearly. They shiver and stare straight ahead. Only one turns her head to look at me through the window. Her expression is fear slowly giving way to panicked sorrow. She knows what’ll happen next. She’s heard the stories. I guess her age to be around fifteen.
I slide a dozen bars through the slot in the bottom of the door.
In the second cell are the remaining six girls in more or less an identical state. The oldest of the group, the one who tried to protect them in the truck, sits with her arms around them, hiding her own fear for their sake. She reminds me of Marina. Once more, I repeat the pathetic gesture and slide a dozen protein bars through the slot in the bottom of the door.
Are there others? I open the third cell and find it empty, but blankets are twisted into contorted shapes on the ground, fingerprints and the leftover residue of human breath smudge the window in the door where someone has tried to see through from the other side. This was the only testimony the women who’d occupied this cell had left behind, little smears of life and desperation. Who knows where they ended up or if they’re still alive.
I check the fourth cell, and the fifth, and the sixth. These appear to be recently vacated, too, though I get no comfort from this. Eyes closed, forehead pressed to the cool stone of the wall, I picture what the fates of the previous occupants were. This place, this tábor, it’s clear to me now, isn’t a prison at all. It’s the holding yard outside the slaughterhouse where the living are turned into meat.
Inside me, nausea turns to hate, and hate turns to rage, and I swear on my own life that I will make the men upstairs and both Kladivos, father and son, die for this.