‘Am I –’
‘Are you done? Because I have work to get on with now so if you’re finished –’
‘No, I’m not fucking done.’
But he is. Even as he stands in Margot’s office spitting on to the fine furnishings and the shaved-glass awards for municipal excellence, phone calls are being made, emails are being sent, tweets are being posted and forum posts composed. ‘Did you hear that lady on the morning show today? Where can I sign my girls up for that thing? I mean, seriously, I have three girls, fourteen, sixteen and nineteen, and they are tearing each other apart. They need someplace to go. They got to let off steam.’
Before the week is over, Margot’s received over one and a half million dollars in donations for her girls’ camps – some cheques from worried parents, all the way up to anonymous gifts from Wall Street billionaires. There are people who want to invest in her scheme now. It’s going to be a public-private initiative, a model of how government and business can work hand in glove.
Before a month is done, she’s found spots for the first test centres in the metropolitan area: old schools shut down when the boys and girls were segregated, places with good-size gymnasiums and outdoor space. Six other state representatives arrive for informational visits so she can show them what she’s planning.
And before three months are out, people are beginning to say, ‘You know, why doesn’t that Margot Cleary run for something a little more ambitious? Get her in. Let’s have a meeting.’
Tunde
In a dark basement in a town in rural Moldova, a thirteen-year-old girl with a faint moustache on her upper lip brings stale bread and old, oily fish to a group of women huddled on dirty mattresses. She has been coming here for weeks. She is young and slow-witted. She is the daughter of the man who drives the bread truck. He keeps lookout sometimes for the men who own this house and the women who are kept here. They pay him a little for the stale bread.
The women have tried asking the girl for things in the past. A cellphone – couldn’t she bring them a telephone somehow? Some paper, to write a note – could she post something for them? Just one stamp and a paper? When their families hear what’s happened to them, they’ll be able to pay her. Please. The girl has always looked down and shaken her head fiercely, blinking her moist, stupid eyes. The women think the girl may be deaf. Or she has been told to be deaf. Things have happened already to these women to make them wish they could be deaf and blind.
The bread-truck man’s daughter empties their bucket of slops into the drain in the yard, rinses it out with the hose and returns it to them clean, apart from a few flecks of shit under the rim. The smell will be better in here for an hour or two at least.
The girl turns to leave. When she’s gone, they’ll be in darkness again.
‘Leave us a light,’ one of the women says. ‘Don’t you have a candle? A little light for us?’
The girl turns towards the door. Looks up the stairs to the ground floor. No one is there.
She takes the hand of the woman who spoke. Turns it palm upward. And in the centre of the palm, this thirteen-year-old girl makes a little twist with the thing that has just woken in her collarbone. The woman on the mattress – five and twenty, and thought she was going to a good secretarial job in Berlin – gasps and shudders; her shoulders squirm and her eyes go wide. And the hand that holds the mattress flickers with a momentary silver light.
They wait in the dark. They practise. They have to be certain they can do it all in one go, that no one will have time to reach for his gun. They pass the thing from hand to hand in the dark and marvel at it. Some of them had been held captive for so long they never heard a word of this thing; for the others, it wasn’t more than a strange rumour, a curiosity. They believe God has sent a miracle to save them, as He rescued the Children of Israel from slavery. From the narrow places, they cried out. In the dark, they were sent light. They weep.
One of the overseers comes to unshackle the woman who thought she was going as a secretary to Berlin before she was thrown down on a concrete floor and shown, over and over again, what her job really was. He has the keys in his hand. They fall on him all at once, and he cannot make a sound and blood gushes from his eyes and ears. They unlock one another’s bonds with his bundle of keys.
They kill every man in that house and they’re still not satisfied.
Moldova is the world capital of human sex-trafficking. There are a thousand little towns here with staging posts in basements and apartments in condemned buildings. They trade in men, too, and in children. The girl children grow day by day until the power comes to their hands and they can teach the grown women. This thing happens again and again and again; the change has happened too fast for the men to learn the new tricks they need. It is a gift. Who is to say it does not come from God?
Tunde files a series of reports and interviews from the Moldovan border towns where the fighting has been most acute. The women trust him because of his reports from Riyadh. Not many men could have got this close; he’s been lucky, but he’s also been smart and determined. He brings his other reports with him, shows them to whatever woman says she’s in charge of this town or that. They want their stories told.
‘It wasn’t just those men who hurt us,’ a twenty-year-old woman, Sonja, tells him. ‘We killed them, but it wasn’t just them. The police knew what was happening and did nothing. The men in the town beat their wives if they tried to bring us more food. The Mayor knew what was happening, the landlords knew what was happening, postmen knew what was happening.’
She starts to cry, scrubs at her eyes with the heel of her hand. She shows him the tattoo in the centre of her palm – the eye with the tendrils creeping out from it.
‘This means we will never stop watching,’ she says. ‘Like God watches over us.’