Ekaterina felt cold, like I’d rubbed up against a frozen statue. I jerked my chin away from her grasp. “Luna. Luna Wilder.” I wish I’d said something like Remember my name or It’ll be the last one you ever hear or something equally Bronson-esque, but I was so exhausted that I just plodded after Anna, Deedee and Charlie.
We got into a car this time, a Cadillac, shiny and new as if it had just rolled off a lot. “The fall of communism’s been good to you, I see,” I said.
Mikel gave me a shove and I fell into the back seat, landing on Charlie. She shoved at me, managing to fold my five-foot-ten-inch frame into the space between her bony knees and the front seat. “Get off. Idon’t want your sweat on me.”
“You don’t smell like a rose, either,” I said as the car started to roll. I could see the tops of buildings out the window, telephone wires, chimneys. Everything was washed out, browns and grays of forgotten industry and ever-present poverty. A few fat sparrows clung to the wires as the Cadillac rolled past. Mikel and Peter fought over the radio, and Ekaterina sat between them, facing back, regarding us all with her cool emerald-chip eyes.
“You will be washed and dressed,” she said. “You will be fed, and tonight you will be put to work. This is the easiest job you can be given, and it can be lost very easily if you fight, cause trouble or don’t bring in enough money for my liking. Understood?”
Anna nodded, her knees pulled up to her chest as usual. Deedee was watching out the tinted windows, though what we could see was just a parade of urban decay punctuated by the occasional sign in Cyrillic. I wished that I’d made Dmitri teach me Ukrainian. My chance of getting away would be so much better …
The car rolled to a stop at the rear of a building that proclaimed apartment in both English and Cyrillic. Same drill—pull, push, brandish Kalashnikov and march forward. Up a dank set of fire stairs, down a hallway that smelled overwhelmingly of perfume, under bulbs dressed up with small red shades.
The building had been, at one point, luxurious. The wallpaper was a rich rose brocade that was tearing off in strips, and what was left of the carpet was expensive Persian wool. The doors still bore their script numbers, along with penthouse suite names in Ukrainian.
Ekaterina pointed at rooms as we passed, snapping orders. First Charlie, then Anna, then finally Deedee was shoved through a door, which was promptly locked again from a ring on Peter’s belt. I filed it in my memory for when I escaped. When, not if. Even in the hell of the shipping container, that had never changed. I just needed an opening, the smallest slip, and I was going to run, find a phone or the U.S. embassy, bring all the weight of the law down on these people.
The last door was a double set, the presidential suite, probably. The thought made me giggle, and I clapped a hand over my mouth. Ekaterina shook her head. “In. No more of your sass.”
She must have learned English from a kindly old schoolteacher in some small British village. She talked like she was about eighty years old and was about to offer me a crumpet. That just made me giggle more, and Mikel rolled his eyes and put his foot into the back of my knee, sending me stumbling through the doors.
The lock clicked behind me and I stopped laughing when I saw the room. I’ve seen my share of brothels, but this one was beyond what I’d ever imagined.
The bed was round, hot-pink bedding in a leopard pattern, and there was a large mirror bolted into the crumbling plaster ceiling above. The rest of the furniture was cheap, in a style I’d classify as Vintage Las Vegas Pimp, plenty of satin and animal prints. There was a small platform for dancing and an armoire full of skimpy outfits that a stripper at Tit for Tat would be embarrassed to prance around in.
“Crazy?”
I started as a voice spoke up from the corner, in the chair by the window. The window looked out over the courtyard, but it was heavily barred and padlocked from the inside. There went my bright idea to tie the tacky bedsheets together and rappel down the face of the hotel, Bond-style. I stilled as I took in the vista. It wasn’t just one apartment building. There were five, arrayed on a wagon wheel, all of them with barred windows, all with armed guards patrolling the rooftops.
Women, like small bright tropical birds, looked back at me from their cages, down into the empty courtyard, the dry, crumbling fountain and the heavy black iron gates with electrical wires attached to the top. A guard with a German shepherd on a leash walked along the quad. This wasn’t just a brothel, this was a compound.
“You,” the woman sitting in the chair said, taking a drag on a black cigarette that smelled like the morning breath of Satan. “I said, are you insane?” She enunciated each word like I might be stupid as well as mental.
“No,” I said. “But I was locked in a shipping container for a week. It’ll do wonders for your stress level.” I slumped down on the bed. Never mind getting out the window … I’d be lucky to get two steps once I was on the ground. I can’t heal from bullet holes.
“I wouldn’t,” the woman said. “I had a customer about half an hour ago and they haven’t changed the sheets.”
I bolted up like I had springs in my legs. “Hex me.”
She snorted and took another drag. “Fuck, these things are disgusting. All that they smoke here. Real cigarettes are worth
