Mattias opened the back doors of the vehicle and gestured her out. Varzha discovered that they had pulled into a darkened garage. She didn’t have much time to survey the surroundings. They hustled her inside, up a flight of stairs, and into a long narrow room. A child’s bike rested against a wall of white brick, next to a rickety dining table. An improvised couch made out of a collection of throw pillows sat opposite.
Liam sat her down on the couch. He left the room, then returned and provided her with a can of warm Coke and a chocolate bar.
A country house of some kind, or at least somewhere suburban. Varzha didn’t know why she thought this, perhaps from the faint sound of wind passing through trees outside. Two small chairs sat upended in a corner of the long room, their fabric seats covered in a kid-friendly pattern of ducks and frogs. Could there be children here? Varzha wondered. Did the gadje import evil into their own homes?
She had always been impressed with stories of gadje greed. They accused the Romani of stealing, while their own thefts were comprised not of pennies but of nations, of petroleum, of whole swaths of the earth. Compared to her own people with their pathetic paper cups lifted for alms, members of the master race displayed a bottomless thirst, for gold, for power, for blood.
And sex.
Most people consider money to be the most powerful factor in life. But Varzha’s motivation was purer still.
Revenge.
She would take revenge on the traffickers, for Lel and every other girl stolen from the Romani community in Stockholm. She would immerse herself in the filth of the world and drown that filth with blood. She would then seal her fate by her own doing, a choice brutally taken away from her eleven lost sisters.
Her captors didn’t notice there was anything different about Varzha. Here was just one more piece of human flesh to use and discard, to bleed dry, to sacrifice. She had long kept a blank, passive expression when dealing with gadje. No one saw through her mask. If they had, they would know her fierceness.
Varzha let her hand trail down beneath the couch cushions. She turned up nothing useful, although she did retrieve a colorful candy wrapper, the same brand as the chocolate she was eating, Marabou, Sweden’s favorite and hers as well. She took her own wrapper and snuck it back under the cushion along with the other, thinking of it as a sign of solidarity with the girls who had been here before her. I am here just like you.
An image of Lel hovered in her mind. Her dear sweet best friend Lel Pankov, alternately raped and beaten, raped and beaten, until she was no more than a bloody rag of a human, then discarded as if she were garbage. Had Lel come through this same room on the way to her death?
“Let’s get the girl out of that damned wedding dress, at least,” Liam suggested to Mattias. He spoke directly to Varzha. “Strip it off, darling, let’s have a look at you.”
She ignored him, staring straight ahead, stone faced. Varzha concluded that Mattias and the others believed she could not understand Swedish.
“The word on the street,” Mattias said, excitement in his voice, “is that a virgin, a true virgin, could bring over eighty thousand kronor, ten thousand U.S. dollars, maybe more.”
Street? Varzha wondered. What street was that? And what did it mean, this phrase “true virgin?” She’d been watched closely all her life, first by her parents, then by her caretaker. She was, she supposed, what they meant by true virgin, and they were going to sell her. Varzha could not understand how any woman or man could be sold. What if the plan devised by Moro Part, the Romani godfather, didn’t work? What if her captors took her far away, like Lel—beyond help, beyond hope? She would suffer the same fate as her friend.
She steeled herself, thrusting the bad thoughts away. The plan would work because…it had to.
They waited for what felt to Varzha a very long time. Then the third member of the trio, the young one they called Nils, stuck his head into the room and announced that someone called “JV” had arrived.
Mattias, who had been slouched at the rickety dining table, rose to his feet. “Toaletă,” he said to her in Romanian. Toilet. He directed her to a little powder-room lavatory along a hallway that dead-ended at a locked door.
“Someone should watch her,” Liam said, getting to his feet also.
“Leave the girl be,” Mattias said. “She’s not going anywhere.”
He stationed himself in the corridor, allowing Varzha to use the facilities and change into the clothing he had provided.
Closing the door behind her, Varzha worked quickly to remove the wedding gown. She searched in the waistband for the small sewn pocket. She ripped it open. Hidden inside was a tiny device made of plastic and metal. She examined herself in the mirror, white makeup still covering her face.
A shiver suddenly passed through her, a memory of being a child. Her mother gently folded and wove her thick hair into long braids. Oh mother, where are you now? Can you see me? Hear my prayer. Watch over me in my darkness.
Varzha undid her dark tortoiseshell barrette. She concealed the small plastic device within the shell of the hair clip, then locked it with a snap. She drew up the braids and fastened them to the crown of her head.
Mattias banged on the door. Varzha ignored him. Her dress, her whiteface mask, her whole outfit was her shield, her defense, a barrier created against an alien and heartless world. Now she wiped off her makeup roughly, letting the tissues fall where they would. The new clothing disgusted her: a low-necked white blouse, a miniskirt, and a pair
