I enter the room through the enormous gilded doors on the mezzanine. Classical music plays over the conversations of twenty or so men in black tie drinking cocktails and chatting and laughing and looking very much forward to testing the additions to their portfolios purchased here tonight.
I am the only woman, and as I cut through the crowd, conversations stop and eyes turn. A few seem to believe I’m one of the objects for sale and brush fingers against my shoulders or lean their heads in for a smell of perfume.
Roman spots me just as I spot him. He pulls away from a conversation and strides toward me. “Sofia!” he exclaims brightly, in absolute contradiction to the murderous expression on his face. He grips me hard by the shoulders.
“Good evening, Roman,” I say, not letting him see that it hurts.
He leans in close and hisses, “What in the living hell are you doing here?”
“You asked if I’m hard enough to do what it takes, Roman. Remember? So that’s what I’m doing. What it takes.”
“This isn’t the place for you.”
Bohdan appears behind Roman and smiles at me, unfazed and a model of politeness. “Sofia Timurovna, what a delight to see you. And, Roman. I had no idea you invited your girlfriend.”
“I didn’t,” he says. “She was just leaving.”
I break away from Roman’s grip. “You wanted me to learn the business and help you, Pan Kladivo,” I say. “I’ve already seen one side of it, now I’d like to see the other.”
“You know what happens here tonight, yes? Some women might find this business, we may say, distasteful. But you do not, Sofia Timurovna?”
“I brought these women to Praha, Pan Kladivo. I would like to see it through,” I say evenly. “Besides, a wise man once told me that women who seek to rise in this world must be crueler than even men.”
At hearing his own words played back, Bohdan smiles. He exchanges a few words with Roman in Czech and pats me lightly on the cheek. “Then you are welcome to stay,” he says.
*
The young women are introduced to the room through the kitchen doors at eight-thirty sharp, with Miroslav Beran, chin held high like a haughty waiter, leading the parade. Some of the men cackle and elbow one another in the ribs, nodding in the direction of this or that blond-or raven-haired teenager. It’s what sharks would do if they had vocal cords and elbows.
Bohdan Kladivo’s clients circulate among the newcomers, chatting, studying, and making no effort to hide that they’re doing anything other than appraising. A white guy with thin gray hair runs his fingers over the redhead’s cheek. An Arab cups a blond’s hairdo as if weighing it.
I’d expected the same frightened young women who’d shaken with terror and spat with rage as Emil and I herded them into the truck, but they are not the girls who now parade around the room. They have been transformed into rubber versions of themselves with rubber smiles, who do not flinch when the men touch them. It’s only when the men break away and the women believe they are unseen that their expressions change back to stony horror.
The men have been furnished cards with snapshots and a brief biography of each printed in English, Russian, Arabic, French, and Chinese. I find a set of them sitting on a cocktail table.
Irina, from the city of Vitebsk in Belarus. Irina has fifteen years, and enjoys sport and cinema. She seeks a man who is strong both physically and financially, and describes herself as a romantic with a ravenous appetite for love. Irina has three languages: Belarussian, Russian, and elementary German, but is willing to learn the language preferred by her benefactor.
I find Irina in the crowd. She is thin and flat-chested, dressed tonight in a blue cocktail dress with her white-blond hair arranged elegantly atop her head and makeup applied over a bruise I remember she had on her left eye.
I stay close to Bohdan and Roman, making it clear that I’m with them. Bohdan sees me eyeing Irina’s card. “You see the one talking to her now? He’s Saudi,” Bohdan says. “They always fight for the blonds, easily up to a million euros, sometimes more. Watch.”
And, indeed, the Saudi—in a gleaming, ankle-length thawb with a red-checked kaffiyeh on his head—approaches Bohdan moments later. “Seven hundred,” he says, waving a glass of scotch in the air.
Bohdan laughs, places a hand on the Saudi’s forearm. “I’ve gotten an offer of nine fifty,” he says.
“A million two,” says the Saudi.
Bohdan makes a note on a small pad of paper using the pen I gave my father. “I’ll let you know at the end of the night, Your Excellency,” Bohdan says.
A bear-sized man in a tuxedo charges in, gripping Bohdan’s shoulder as the Saudi slips away. His face is red, and he reeks of liquor. “The dark angel,” he says in Russian. “Tell me she is not yet taken.”
I follow the Russian’s extended finger, which points to a woman of about my age with black hair nearly to her waist. Her eyes are dark, too, like two coals that have gone out. She’s standing in a corner holding a glass of champagne and trying not to fall over in the high heels they’ve put her in. I flip through the cards until I find her picture.
Seventeen-year-old Doina, whose name in her native Romanian means “folk song.” She hails from Constanta on the Black Sea, which was occupied for many years by the Ottoman Turks. You can see in her much spicy Turkish blood!
“Rest comfortably, Sergei Mikhailovich, she can still be yours,” Bohdan reassures him.
“I offer one fifty,” the Russian says as if it were a grave oath.
“You insult me, Sergei Mikhailovich.”
The Russian feigns distress, biting his red knuckle. “Two hundred, not a cent more, you old thief.”
Bohdan laughs and claps him on the shoulders. “Your bid is noted.”
But the smile disappears as soon as the Russian is out of sight. Bohdan leans close to me. “The cheap bastard has been near the top of every Forbes list for the last fifteen years.” He nods in Doina’s direction. “And you don’t see beauty like that every day. It hurts me to see her go for so little.”
The parade of bids goes on. Doina from Constanta is followed by Olesya from Chelyabinsk, who is followed by Tamara from Belgrade, who is followed by Endrita from a town in Albania too poor to have a name. I leave after Endrita, excusing myself to a terrace next to the bar. The air is cold tonight and bristles my bare shoulders and arms. I look out at the city, wondering how I’ll ever go through with my plan, knowing that it’ll never work, knowing that the girls will just head off to Riyadh or Moscow or Macau and I’ll die for nothing.
The stars are good tonight, so at least there’s that. I look at them, watch them, waiting for a sign I know won’t come, waiting for something other than benign indifference. The hardest part about not believing in God isn’t knowing there’s no heaven. It’s knowing there’s no hell. People like Bohdan and Roman who sell women into slavery die the same as everyone else. The most you can hope for is that they feel it before they go, pain and terror.
“Not easy, that,” says Bohdan Kladivo as he comes up behind me. He drapes his dinner jacket over my shoulders and lights a cigar, puffing it to life like a fish blowing bubbles. The smoke is fragrant and smells expensive.