The Sisterhood (30 page)

“Oh.” Menina put her forehead on the grate and closed her eyes, remembering the feel of Theo’s hand clamped over her mouth, her terror, and, worst of all, the powerlessness. Like she had been reduced to dirt, to nothing. Her mouth was dry. Hearing about it happening to other girls made her want to be sick.

“The women that old ladies tell Sor Teresa are my ‘girlfriends’ are policewomen. Undercover. Like I say, is Spain, men are men. I am not married. Old ladies do not approve if I have prostitutes, but nobody thinks is strange. Old ladies are shocked. They make a
scandal. This is what I need, because it is cover. The policewomen are helping me watch the men who come and go in the mountain villages.

“There is a lot of construction, new villas for wealthy foreigners in the mountains, jobs for foreign workers. The authorities cannot check all of them or stop them coming to Spain. And when they finish a job, they travel around looking for other work. You saw some of those men working in the village the day you missed your bus. Villages like ours hire them now to build the
Semana Santa
floats for the Easter procession, because is no longer enough young men who live here to build them. We know criminals mix with the gypsies who have always come at this time with their markets. Then they all help when the trucks bring another load of girls and drugs. The day you come to the police station, I am angry because I cannot decide if you are merely a stupid call girl who is in my way, or maybe you are a decoy or somehow involved—a kind of madam for the girls they are bringing. Your story about a college trip to Madrid sounded impossible. And yesterday when you say ‘Theo’ I think, I must know if he is involved.”

“Oh! No, he’s not. He’s a…creep but he’s not smuggling women or drugs.”

“You did not know what a narrow escape you had that day in the square. They could easily take you like the other women. You are very pretty, sexy, young. You are worth money. But my father’s friend worried when he saw the poster with your picture. He knows about this operation, and came to warn me that if people come looking for a missing American girl it will jeopardize our careful operation. We must keep the low profile until we catch them.”

“Of course. This is all pretty horrible.”

“Yes, and it gets worse. The people who buy drugs from these gangs buy women, too, and they pay more for very young ones. You were angry thinking I wanted a fifteen-year-old—there are
men who want little girls even of twelve, sometime younger. Some yacht owners will buy several girls for a cruise, different ages but all young, all girls who thought they were going to a better life and find themselves in hell. If the girls they buy come back, they are sold again, but sometimes they do not come back. We are finding bodies in the sea. They throw girls overboard when they are finished. If you could see what has happened to them before they die…These men are animals. And men who have sold girls to the yacht owners bring more. Always more. And we must stop them.”

Menina thought about the men who had circled her that afternoon she had missed her bus and closed her eyes. “And this girl you want me to let in tonight?”

“This girl is Almira. She cannot talk much—they broke her nose and her jaw, but she is braver and stronger than they think. I think she is a survivor because she is angry, angry like you yesterday. She managed to escape, and now she is an important witness; she can identify many of the men. Last week, just before you came, one of the undercover policewomen, one of my ‘girlfriends,’ brought her up here from the safe house where we have kept her, hiding in the back of her car. Almira told us that the truck that brought her there last spring had an air vent, and she pried it off and saw the sun setting between the mountains. We waited until the same time this year so the setting sun would be in the same position, and took her at the same time along the old road into France so she could show us where. When she did, nearby we found a fork of the road we did not know existed, and the road they used. She is a smart girl and risked her life to help. Even though she is very, very afraid.

“It was Almira who told us she overheard the men talking about bringing more girls at the time of the
Semana Santa
—we think either tomorrow, on Good Friday night, or on Saturday night, because those nights we have our traditional
Semana Santa
processions, and people come and walk in the procession with
candles. Then there is a party, a crowd, very noisy. Everyone is looking at the procession; there is singing and people do not pay attention to a strange van coming out of the forest. Don’t see girls tied up inside.

“But we have made a big mistake, the policewoman and I. When my colleague was ready to drive Almira back to the safe house where she is staying, Almira begged to have a ride in my car. She says it is so beautiful, she has never seen one like it. Poor girl, we are sorry for her. I told my colleague to wait for us a little way outside the village. I will bring Almira to her. We go for a drive and then head back to the village. Almira was laughing, playing with the stereo, pretending she is a movie star in Hollywood. Until we came back to the village and she recognized the men working in the square. She threw herself on the floor and started moaning they would kill her now. I said she would soon be back in the safe house, but when I got to the meeting place my colleague was not waiting for us. That is bad, and I cannot send a message or telephone for help. I cannot stop watching. I have no choice but to bring Almira back and keep her here. Almira is right—she is dead if they find her. She has been hiding at my house, but I do not like her there. It is safer if she hides inside the convent with you.”

“Tell me what to do.”

“I need you to be at the gate at midnight—they will ring the bell for the vigil at midnight—and open the gate to let Almira in, then close and bolt it. Walls are high, gate is very strong, the convent is like a fortress when it is closed. But it is better that the nuns do not know police witness is here. They will worry.”

“Of course.” Her heart sank. A million miles from anywhere and now caught up in a dangerous police operation. But she knew she had to help Almira. Almira was refusing to be a victim, despite terrible things that had been done to her—even worse than what
had happened to Menina. OK, if Almira could do it, Menina would find some courage, too.

Menina wished with all her heart that Becky were here. Becky was the tough one.

“Wait! What about those people you said are looking for me? I can’t think of any reason they’d want to.”

Captain Fernández Galán sighed. “I think that is another problem and we must leave it till later.” He cleared his throat. “And one more thing, you do not think bad things about me anymore? You know I am not a pedophile? I do not have the girlfriends?”

“I guess I have to believe you, but you fooled everybody.” He’d had her wondering if she had been kidnapped to become a nun, but there was no need to mention that.

“Good,” he said with a sigh. “And so you know, I am not really old enough to be Almira’s father. I am thirty-three. See you later.”

Menina called into the darkness after him. “Captain…Alejandro, please, can you bring some food tonight?” She hoped he had heard. Otherwise she and Almira were going to have to survive on chocolate fish and stale bread.

She felt her way back to her room, shaken by what she had heard about trafficked girls. Dinner was on the meager side on the Thursday before Easter. She ate bread and lentils and an apple as slowly as she could, and remembered what Sor Teresa had said about many girls coming to the convent. Well, they would never have expected girls in the kind of mess Menina and Almira were in. She really hoped she could keep Almira out of Sor Teresa’s way.

From the Chronicle of Las Sors Santas de Jesus, Las Golondrinas Convent, Andalusia, Summer 1549

Deo gratias
, on this day of Salome’s birth my hand permits me to write a little. She would be nearly forty-five now, an old woman. But God has sent girls to fill the hole in my heart—first Esperanza, then Luz, and now Pia. She is a striking creature, with silvery hair like summer moonlight, fine pale skin, clear blue eyes, and delicate features. She is fourteen, and though slender and willowy, having just begun her monthly cycles, is developing a woman’s figure. Formidable Sor Sophia, who shows such courage in defying the enclosure rules to go abroad on convent business and is such a quick wit when challenged, has affected her rescue.

Pia is self-possessed, and her icy calm is unnerving in one so young. She told us a terrible story in a voice that was flat and without emotion:

My mother died when I was ten. She was very beautiful, and we lived in a fine house, with soft beds and silken hangings, and enough to eat—all things I did not think of until I no longer had them. I inherited my mother’s hair, on which her fortune was built. Blondes were scarce in a land of dark-haired beauties, and
my grandmother came from a place in the far north where the people have pale skin and hair like the sun and the moon. She had been traveling with her husband by ship when pirates attacked. The pirates killed her husband and took my grandmother captive, selling her into the harem of one of the last Muslim merchants in Seville, in the early reign of the
Reyes Catholicos
. But the merchant’s mother learned that my grandmother was, like her, a Christian, one of the northern sects called Protestant. She took pity on this young widow who was in the early stages of pregnancy. The merchant’s mother persuaded her son to free his captive, and my mother was born under the lady’s protection. This lady died soon afterward and left my grandmother a generous gift of money to enable her to support herself and her child.

My grandmother’s fine features and silver hair attracted many men, but marriage to an outsider who was neither Spanish nor Catholic, and whose family could not be vouched for, was out of the question. Yet as a woman her security and that of her child depended on the protection only a wealthy man could provide. My grandmother bought a house in Madrid and became a courtesan.

My mother inherited her northern beauty, and was raised in the Protestant religion that my grandmother stubbornly refused to relinquish. When my mother was seventeen, my grandmother accepted for her the protection of a handsome and charming young grandee, an only son who stood to inherit a great fortune from silver mines his family owned in the American colonies. He promised to provide her with a fine house, clothes and jewels and carriages and servants—everything a beautiful and vain young woman could desire. His only stipulation was that she bear no children. His family would countenance no bastards who, they feared, might make a future claim of their fortune. My mother told me only that for many years she “managed,” that there were no children, though a shadow crossed her face when she told me this.

She became pregnant again and this time refused to “manage,” believing my father would accept me. But he did not. He was furious and I was kept out of his sight as he did not wish to see me at all. Then news came that my father’s family was ruined. Their silver mines in the colony had disappeared in a terrible earthquake, plunging the family in Spain into debt. In a desperate attempt to restore his fortunes, my father began to gamble wildly, only adding to the mountain of debts. My mother’s jewels and carriage were sold, and our fine house was stripped of its furniture.

I was the focus of my father’s rage. He would call me the Protestant whelp of a Protestant bitch, and say I should have been drowned at birth instead of living like a princess at his family’s expense. He spent less and less time with my mother, taunting her that he preferred to court the ugly heiress his family hoped he would marry. Creditors descended, pressing my mother for money we no longer had.

She grew ill, and doctors could not save her. It was as if she had no more strength to live. My father sold the house but quickly gambled the proceeds away. The ugly heiress married another, and my father began to look at me in a strange calculating way. Though he hated me, he kept me with him. I was careful not to speak in his presence.

At court he tried to gain the king’s favor and obtain preferment for a highly paid position, but was unsuccessful. He gambled more and more desperately. We moved from place to place, to lodgings that were ever dirtier and dingier. Though he could not afford to follow the court about the country, when the king was in residence in Madrid my father would put on what was left of his fine clothes and hover around the powerful courtiers, trying to wheedle their favor and influence. By then we lived in two dark and dirty rooms on a street that echoed with the shrill calls of prostitutes who hid their disfigured faces in the shadows. I was sent to a charity school
by day, but otherwise was left alone for long stretches of time, cold and often hungry, save for the rare occasions when my father bid me put on the little finery I possessed and to comb my hair over my shoulders like a cape, and took me with him to court.

There I kept my eyes down and never spoke unless obliged to answer a direct question. I sensed that I had begun to attract attention. One day an older man, a grandee I had seen turning from my father’s approaches, accompanied my father home. I was summoned into the cold room my father sarcastically referred to as the “salon.” The man, who looked very old to me, had piercing eyes and wet red lips. I did not like him. “Make your curtsy!” my father ordered.