Fire Raiser (26 page)

It was a trivial place: bed, dresser, easy chair with a basket of folded sheets and towels beside it, shelves clogged with books. The bathroom door was open, the closet door was closed. But it was a room lacking shadows, and even without extending his senses Nick felt the magic spark and quiver like tiny resentful flames. He shouldn’t have snarled at Cam; the boy was right. There was too much magic in this place.

And there was a girl. She was very young, dark-haired and blue-eyed, huddled uncomfortably in the easy chair with a hardback book propped on her very pregnant belly. Squinting, he read the words printed in silver on the spine of the dust jacket.

Jerusalem Lost

McClure

Fifteen

SHE HAS ALWAYS BEEN SMART. School was always easy, although her real education came from the books old György dug out of his vegetable garden after the Communist government fell. Hundreds of books, wrapped in oiled cloth and packed in crates for more than fifty years; books in Hungarian and Russian with leather covers, paperback books in English and French and Italian; novels, history, poetry, myths and legends, plays. She is one of a score of village children who have worked their way through this long-hidden library since its unearthing. Everyone else must work the land. Decades of mismanagement have, incredibly, wreaked less devastation on this country than other former Soviet satellites, but capitalism has been cruel in its own ways and there is as fine a line as ever between survival and starvation.

But she is smart. She is also pretty. The Magyar genetic mix has given her the thick black hair of the steppes nomads, the blue eyes of the Greeks, and the pale complexion of the Slavs and their distant Nordic ancestors. She looks her age—not quite fifteen—but she is poised beyond her years and she is in many ways better educated than a graduate of college. She believes herself to be as sophisticated as one of those girls, anyway, and longs for the greater world outside her village, where she knows that being smart and pretty are formidable advantages.

It is a spring day, warm and soft, and the man and woman have stopped to have a picnic lunch. She is idling her way back home from György’s house, taking her time, for her father has a fresh bottle of vodka this afternoon. As she passes, the woman calls out and invites her to share some lemonade. She joins them beneath the roadside tree. The woman is Hungarian, but the man is Ukrainian, and she is proud to show off her command of his language. Before very long, conversation turns from their trip to the woman’s ancestral village, somewhere a hundred miles or so from here, to the paucity of opportunities there, to the kind of life a smart, pretty girl might enjoy as a governess.

France. England. America. With her education, they tell her, she could have her pick of positions with rich families, and send staggering amounts of money back to her family. The man’s own sister and two cousins, he says, are at this very moment working in Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, and London—perhaps he has their postcards—no, he must have left them in his other jacket. The girls are having a wonderful time, the work isn’t too hard, and only last week his aunt received 500 euros from a London bank.

She gulps lemonade from a plastic cup, thinking what 500 euros could buy.

After a year or two, she could return home—or, the woman says with a wink, a girl might attract the attention of a wealthy young man looking for a smart, pretty wife.

She has read hundreds of books, and school was always easy for her, and she is acknowledged as the smartest girl in the village. But she is still only a fourteen-year-old from an impoverished village in Eastern Europe, with no future except a lifetime on a subsistence farm with a husband gradually succumbing to liquor (like her father) and a houseful of children to raise (like her mother).

So she accepts the scribbled note the man gives her, and agrees to consider contacting the agency that placed his sister and two cousins in their foreign jobs.

The next Wednesday, very early in the morning, she returns the last of the borrowed books to old György and takes the bus all the way to the city. That afternoon, at the address on the note, she is warmly welcomed into an office. A middle-aged woman with a kind, round face gives her tea and buttered bread, and tells her that she would take her application right now but the chief agent himself will want to interview such a lovely and intelligent girl, to make sure the placement is just right. She is embarrassed when the warm tea makes her sleepy, but the woman only smiles and says that she must be exhausted after such a long trip.

She wakes in a dim, airless room, rank with the sweat and urine and feces of the dozen other girls who are in here with her. She knows without even glancing at the door and windows that they are all locked in.

DURING THE NEXT TWO DAYS—she thinks it’s two days, but there is no way to be sure; the windows have been painted black—more girls are brought to the room. Some are feisty and fighting; most are carried in drugged, as she was. Occasionally there is food. Twice the slop buckets are taken out and emptied. It is unspeakably hot and from somewhere flies have sneaked in. Their erratic buzzing bothers her at first, but then becomes just another annoyance to be ignored.

There are twenty girls now. She listens to their quick, whispered conversations, but offers nothing herself. Their stories are sometimes like hers, sometimes worse.

One girl says she is supposed to be in Greece right now. She was to meet her fiancé at a café and they were going to Athens so he could introduce her to his family. She was to stay with his aunt, and begin the process of converting to the Greek Orthodox faith. It was all very correct and proper. But just as she was stepping down from the bus in front of the café, two men grabbed her and forced her into a car.

Another girl, proudly asserting that she can speak Russian, French, English, and even a little Arabic, says that she will be a translator, that she is very valuable, especially because of the Arabic, because of Bush’s war.

Another girl has a photograph of the family whose nanny she is to be. They are very rich. They live in a castle in England and have a house on a beach in Spain.

There is a much-folded paper gripped in one girl’s hand. It is a restaurant menu. She was given it to study by the recruiting agent, so that she will be able to describe everything the cooks make and thus be ready to step right into her new waitressing job at a Russian restaurant in Israel. One girl proclaims herself a singer. Another is a dancer. They expect to work in theaters, nightclubs, hotel shows.

From the far corner of the room a girl says quietly that her father is an alcoholic who sold her. She watched them hand over the money, saw him stuffit into his pocket. The protests are immediate—and frightened. This can’t be right, there were promises made, pictures, letters, the menu, the fiancé waiting in vain—

Someone else says that as she was taken out the kitchen door, through the front door two men brought in a new color television. She is accused, loudly and vehemently, of being a liar. She doesn’t seem to care. She knows what she saw.

A fist pounds on the door, and a man yells for silence.

It is a long time in the darkness before another girl speaks. She knew what this would be. There is no money in this country, no work. At least if she must sell herself, it won’t be where people might recognize her and shame her family. At least if she must sell herself, it will be to rich men in countries where her blond hair and blue eyes will bring premium prices. She will earn enough to find somewhere nice to live, and nobody will ever know what she had to do. Her family will believe she is dead.

Someone begins to cry. The weeping spreads like a disease. The man shouts again, and the girls hide their faces in blankets, in mattresses, in each other’s necks for comfort. She feels the girl next to her shudder with sobs, and turns her back. She isn’t nearly as smart as she thought she was, but she learns quickly. At least, she tells herself, at least she can blame no one but herself. These others, so many were betrayed by people they knew. No one will betray her. Not again. She will not permit it. Shaking off her neighbor’s beseeching hand, she curls around herself and closes her eyes and finally her mind, and sleeps.

That night—or at least what she assumes is night, for there is something about the quality of light not coming through the papered and painted windows that has changed, though she isn’t sure exactly how—when she gets up to use the bucket, she does not return to the mattress she shares with the needy, graspy girl. She hollows out a position near the door, earning herself grunts and an angry elbow or two. She pays interested attention to the pain in her ribs for a while, deciding it isn’t bad, knowing there will be worse to come if she is not careful. If she does not do as she is told, if she displeases anyone in authority, if she so much as looks anyone in the eyes who does not wish to be looked in the eyes, they will deal out pain much worse than a bruise.

She is close enough to the door to hear some of what is said outside. It takes her only a moment to determine which side of the wall she should choose. The door opens inward, and whereas there would be momentary comfort in being hidden behind it, she would rather not attract the kind of attention that must come when the girls there are dragged from its shelter. These are not things she has ever thought about before, but she finds no surprise within herself that she should be considering them now. If she has not been smart, at least she is not as stupid as some of these girls.

What she hears, those next hours, is interesting only for one thing: the men guarding the door are Hungarian, but those giving the orders are Ukrainian. The latter speak their own language with each other, but issue their commands in Hungarian.

The door opens, and the girls behind it are jolted awake. Three more girls are shoved in. They look stunned, and one of them seems angry. But the door does not close. Instead, a tall, fat man fills its space. In Hungarian he says that two at a time they will be taken to wash up. He then speaks in Ukrainian, in Russian, in English. And as he talks, he watches intently, dark eyes scanning every face.

She realizes what he is looking for: any reaction, anything that would indicate understanding. For what he has said in Hungarian does not match what he says in the other languages. In Ukrainian he says they will be taken four at a time; in Russian, that they will be having breakfast; in English, that they will be released.

She keeps her face a blank mask as his eyes strafe her side of the room. Several girls stiffen as he speaks in Russian, for it has been a long time since the last bread and cheese and basket of grapes was shoved into the room. The Russian-French-English-and-a-little-Arabic girl bleats softly, like a goat, when she hears the words “release you.” He grins at her, and points. She wobbles to her feet. He grasps the arm of a girl cowering nearby, hauls her up, and within moments the door has slammed shut again.

Throughout the next hour, those girls whose faces revealed comprehension of languages other than Hungarian are taken away two at a time. None of them come back. This confirms her wisdom, and begins to restore some of her confidence in her intelligence. She wonders if languages make a girl more valuable, or less. An understanding of orders would be advantageous—but an ability to plead for help would not. She decides it doesn’t matter for now. She will listen, observe, learn, keep her silence, and respond only to Hungarian.

There are twelve of them left now. At almost fifteen, she is in the middle age range. One of the girls cannot be older than eleven.

An unknown amount of time later, the door opens and two men enter. One of them hauls a dark-haired girl to her feet and makes a gesture. She cowers, terrified. He rips her dress from neck to hem. The second man walks slowly around the room. Anyone looking away is forced to turn her head, open her eyes, and watch.

The dark girl is shoved onto a mattress, face down. What the man does then makes her scream. The second man shouts at any girl who turns her face away, and everyone understands that they must watch or be punished. She manages all the same not to look. She finds a stain on the floor beside the mattress and gazes at it through her eyelashes. All she sees is movement, not specifics. The screaming is bad enough.

When it is over, both men leave. This is surprising; she would have thought the other one would take his turn. The girl lies on the blanket, sobbing in great convulsions like an epileptic. Eventually someone goes to help her.

The next time she sees the outside world, it is night. She and the other girls are tied with twine around their wrists. They are taken down five flights of stairs and through a kitchen where a pot of stew and a plate of bread and a pitcher of wine have been left out on the table—a deliberate cruelty, she thinks, for there has been no food upstairs for quite some time. Out the back door, she smells exhaust fumes and gets a brief glimpse of the city’s night glow above the rooftops and down at the end of the street before being pushed up a steeply sloping ramp into a truck. When all the girls are inside, the ramp is removed. Metals doors are slammed and locked.

At each of four stops within the city, ten to fifteen more girls are loaded in. After a long drive, there is a fifth stop. Six boys are flung inside. It is too dim to see their faces, but their voices are shrilly adolescent. She wonders why the others are so shocked. Can it possibly be that they still don’t understand?

Along with the boys, two cardboard boxes are tossed in: one-liter bottles of water. An older girl takes charge of distribution, and says that it would be best to drink slowly, conserving the water, because they don’t know how long they’ll be traveling. When most of them ignore her, she shrugs and mutters that they’d all better keep hold of the bottles after they finish, because they’re going to need someplace to pee.

She stays awake, sipping rarely from her bottle of water, forcing herself to ignore the smells. If she is to survive this, she reasons, she must learn to shut down her senses.

The journey lasts a significant fraction of forever. Finally, slowly, her nose stings with scents she has never smelled before: the salt and fish and dampness that must be the ocean. They have not been traveling nearly long enough to reach the Black Sea. The Baltic could not possibly be this warm, not even in summer, and it is only May. This must be the Mediterranean, then—perhaps the Aegean Sea, or the Adriatic—

The truck comes to a halt. Now that the engine noise and the road vibration is gone, she can hear a little of the outside world.

A muezzin is calling the Faithful to prayer.

Turkey? Albania?

Several of the girls and two boys cry out with a frantic babble about which direction they must face in, where is Mecca, which way should they kneel?