The women followed the elegantly dressed Thai man down a narrow passage and descended another set of stairs, finally emerging into a small, plainly furnished room.
‘Ladies,’ began the man, ‘please place your bags over there in the corner. If you step through this door to the right, you will find a dressing room where you can disrobe and head on through to the showers. In the lockers you will find clean clothes and towels. After you have had a shower and clothed yourselves in your uniforms, please return to this room, where we will provide you with a hot meal and tea or coffee, depending on your preference.’
‘I’ll have tea, plea—,’ one of the girls began, but the man held up a finger to silence her.
‘Hold your horses my dear,’ he said, smiling sweetly. ‘We’ll sort that out later. Now, please proceed to the showers.’
The women filed into the room, and for the first time in weeks Adriana noticed smiles on their faces as an atmosphere of optimism infused the air. Still, she could not allow herself to partake of it, for her sixth sense was screaming out that something here was terribly wrong.
‘What a lovely man,’ a woman remarked as they entered the locker room. ‘So much nicer and more polite than any of those other pigs we’ve encountered on this horrid voyage!’
‘He’s very smartly dressed,’ another woman added. ‘That must mean we’re going to be working in a fancy place. Just think of the tips these rich diners will give us! We’ll be sending plenty of money back to Moldavia.’
‘I’ll be able to send my little Raluca to school, finally! She’s a year behind because we couldn’t afford the school fees last year, but she’s wonderfully smart, she’ll catch up in no time. She’ll be so excited to be back in the classroom!’
Adriana thought briefly about asking them what they thought about the man’s evasion of their questions about their passports, or why this supposed restaurant had armed thugs guarding the doors, but she decided against it, especially since Roxana finally had a smile on her face. She stripped off her clothes, noticing only now in this clean, odour-free environment how pungent they smelled. Judging from the wrinkled noses and grunts of disgust coming from the other women, they too were noticing the stench of the garments that they had been in, unchanged, for ten days.
Nonetheless, their faces were all smiles again as they stepped into the large communal shower, attractively tiled with mosaics of dolphins, waves and mermaids. The hot jets of water hitting their grimy skin catalysed spontaneous outbursts of glee and relief, and jokes and laughter echoed through the steam-saturated space as they washed themselves.
After they had finished, they emerged from the showers and perused the lockers in which the man had said their uniforms would be. However, as they sifted through the items of clothing their smiles soon began to droop and wither, morphing into frowns of consternation.
As Adriana picked and sorted through the clothes, a sense of deep unease welled up within her.
‘Are there no other clothes but mini-skirts, tube tops and G-strings in these lockers?’ she mumbled.
‘These clothes will make us look like whores!’ another woman exclaimed.
‘There … there must have been a mistake,’ Roxana muttered.
A tornado of dread began spinning black fear through the room, and it whirled about them with menacing abandon. The blood drained from Adriana’s face as the realisation of the fate that had befallen them started to dawn on her. Before she could vocalise any of her panicked thoughts, however, there was a knock on the door.
‘Ladies,’ came the voice of the well-dressed man, ‘your new employer is outside waiting to meet you. Please don’t keep him waiting; he is an extremely busy man, and patience is unfortunately not one of his myriad virtues.’
‘Jesus!’ one of the women gasped, her face contorted with worry and fear. ‘What the hell is going on here?’
‘We’d better just do what the man says,’ another grunted.
The young women all began putting on the items of provocative clothing, and when they were all dressed and ready, they filed grimy out of the room in compliant but anxious silence. Outside they saw the Thai man standing next to a table that was decked out with all sorts of snacks as well as two urns of tea and coffee. To the right of the table were two European men, who looked to be in their mid-thirties, dressed in expensive business suits. Both were built like warriors of legend; all height, broad shoulders and heavy muscles. One sported a mane of long, thick platinum hair that hung loose about his shoulders, and adding to his ursine appearance was a great blonde beard that was braided in places and decorated with beads. His eyes, ice-blue and almost translucent in their paleness, were set beneath a jutting brow and thick, pale eyebrows. A deep gash of a scar ran across his nose, all the way across one cheek and down onto his bull-neck. Another scar ran vertically down the right side of his face, tracing a bone-white passage from his hairline down over his eye, paring the eyebrow neatly in half and reaching the terminus of its journey at the corner of his mouth, which the wound had twisted downwards into what looked like a permanent snarl.
His companion was of a similar height to the bearded man – around seven feet – but he had close-cropped chestnut hair, piercing green eyes and a square granite jaw that was cleanly shaven. Full-colour, intricately detailed tattoos extended from inside his suit all the way up his throat and the sides of his thick neck to his ears and spilled out of his suit sleeves onto his bear-paw hands.
The bearded man, smiling benignly, began to speak in fluent Russian, his voice
