The Last Minute

by Jeff Abbott

  I pick through the hard disc. I open a folder called PRODUCT. Each girl has a file. The top of the window tells me there are one thousand and thirty-six files.

  I can’t wrap my head around the number. Thinking about it is an ax to the brain. I search for Nelly. Sold, for a combination of heroin and $6,000, to a Yaakov Zviman in Tel Aviv. The notes in the file indicate she was auctioned off at a motel room in Eilat, five different bidders.

  I try not to vomit at the thought.

  I memorize the address. But I copy the entire folder to a disc and put the disc in my jacket pocket. I open the desk drawer and finds rolls of money: euros, American dollars, Romanian leu, Turkish lira, and Israeli sheqel banknotes. I scoop them all up, shove them into my pockets.

  I close the laptop and head downstairs.

  And hear the front door opening and a woman’s voice, “Boris, did you remember to feed the whores?” then “What the hell?”

  I run down the rest of the stairway and in the kitchen is a woman, standing over Boris’s wriggling form. The woman is blond, close to six feet tall, wiry, hair cropped short.

  And this woman is pulling out a gun from the back of her jacket.

  Mind goes blank—I forget I have the Taser—and I throw myself toward the tall woman. Like Ivan has taught me. I need a punching bag now. A rage fuels my blood. My fist courts her jaw. The blow, delivered, hurts my hand but the sheer force of my attack knocks the woman back into the refrigerator.

  I hammer another fist, this time into her stomach. The woman swerves, shoving past me, trying to get room to fight back, gasping.

  I step back and aim a hard kick at the woman’s throat. I am too ambitious. I miss, hit low, the heel of my boot slamming into the woman’s breasts, driving air from the lungs. The woman’s gun clatters to the tiles.

  The two captive girls stumble from the kitchen, one dragging the other, trampling over the bound Boris, who is trying to maneuver to his feet.

  I throw the woman across the kitchen. She lands against the counter. Leftovers from breakfast lie by the sink. Coarse bread, mug of coffee. The tall woman throws the mug at me, it catches my temple, ice-cold, bitter coffee splashes in my eyes. I blink away the sting and then I see the sharp bread knife slashing toward me.

  The tip of the knife catches me along the edge of the hand and it hurts, I cry out and the tall woman slashes back with the knife, an inch from my throat, the air singing. I can feel the whip of the blade, the slicing of air. Before the tall woman can slam the blade backward in its arc—and I see her reverse her grip on the knife with a nimble strut of fingers—I grab the skillet, crusted with leftover egg, and slam it into the woman’s face with the force of a tennis racket.

  She howls. Blood flies from her mouth.

  I crack the skillet against the woman’s knife hand; the knife drops to the tile. It bounces, it gleams.

  I use the skillet to batter the woman down, raining the blows. The final barrage sends her sprawling, bleeding, quiet at last.

  The two girls are gone. I stand in the doorway and scan the street for them, flat of my hand against the sunlight, like a mama surveying the street for her kids.

  Better this way, I think.

  I have what I need. The disc, the address for Nelly.

  I realize then that I’m hurt—cut across both sets of knuckles, another slash across my stomach. It doesn’t hurt so much until I see the wounds; the blood brings the sharp sting.

  I turn and Boris has staggered to his feet, hopping, and I pick up the skillet and I put him back down. Then I take the edge of the skillet and slam it into his crotch.

  “Tu mori,” I say to him, but I don’t think he’s listening anymore.

  I turn to the stove. I crank on the gas on all the burners. I open a drawer and find foil and stick a wad of it inside the microwave and turn it on, set the timer to cook for five minutes. I run out the door, Boris screeching behind the gag, what sounds like a plea for mercy. He’s a smart boy.

  I’m not all the way down the street when the back of the house explodes outward, the roof buckling, taking to air like untested wings.

  I hear the debris crashing into the yard.

  I don’t look back. Sam, you cannot look back either.

  68

  Red-light district, Tel Aviv, Israel

  It’s been less than twenty-four hours since I left Bucharest. The bandages on my hands need a change and the pain from the knife cut surges up through my arm like a flickering torch. I had to leave the Taser and the guns behind—I could not have gotten them through Romanian or Israeli customs without extra forms and attention, and I don’t want the Israeli authorities having anything in my file except arrival and departure dates.

  I sit in the pizzeria. From this window I can see the men walking past the open door of the restaurant. I wear dark jeans, black untucked blouse, dark glasses. I order a steady supply of juice and food so the counter staff are not annoyed by me keeping a table. I have a notebook so they think I am a writer sitting and working. No Cokes, I cannot take caffeine on top of my nerves. I feel worn down, exhausted, as though I am getting sick. I eat a slice of vegetarian pizza. I don’t have much appetite.

  The brothel is above the pizzeria. The sidewalks on Rehov Fin—or, as it gets nicknamed, Rehov Pin, for “penis”—are painted with red arrows that point to the peep shows and brothels. The windows on the second stories are barred. Signs show women, in silhouette, writhing in ecstasy, or bound, or beckoning to men with a curled finger. Club Joy. Sexxxy’s Studio. Club Viagra. No, I’m not making that last one up, Sam.

  I watch the men as they arrive and leave. Many are alone, and they are a mix: Jewish and Arab and Christian. Some look like businessmen or office workers, some like foreign laborers. Some are soldiers, in uniform. Apparently they rate a discount. Some are Orthodox Jews, stuffing their skullcaps into their pockets as they enter the doors. And pulling them out when they walk back into the accusing sunshine. Some are duos and trios of young men I am sure are Americans. College students.

  What would their parents think, I wonder.

  I want to storm the doors. But if my plan is to work, I must know how busy the parlor is, when it is at its least crowded. But I hate every second, knowing Nelly is inside.

  I know what they will do to me if I am caught. They will kill me or try to break me like the girls back in Bucharest. Like Nelly.

  So I force myself to watch, to find the pattern of scumball traffic that will allow me to get in and get out with the least violence. I see an older man leave, return with a bag of food. An employee. Probably there are at least two employees inside at all times. One to take payment, coordinate the visits. One for security, to make sure the girls can’t leave and to make sure the clients behave themselves.

  And maybe Mr. Mohawk, Zviman, maybe he’s inside. Him I long to meet. Remember, Sam—I have a lesson for him.

  I see that there is a sudden, noticeable drop in traffic before dinner time. Fine. I go back to a hotel, not the one that I am staying in, to get what I need.

  Every hotel guard is armed in Israel. Ivan told me this; he’d read about it in an article covering a thwarted Palestinian attack where the guard shot down the suicide bomber. I approach a guard at a Marriott, fumbling with a Russian-language guidebook, confused look on my face, a wrongly folded map. Tourist from Moscow, I can almost see the thought flit across the guard’s face.

  I drop the map and jet the pepper spray I’ve bought into the guard’s face, with a hiss of sorry on my lips. As he staggers, his hand going to the gun, I seize the weapon out of its holster.

  And I run. I flee out of the hotel, through a shopping center, into a cab. The gun is cool against the flat of my stomach under my shirt.

  I think about what to wear into battle. I expect I could die so I decide to splurge. Only the best for the crazy teacher, Sam. I know you have always admired my style, yes? The next afternoon I find a boutique at the very upscale Ramat Aviv mall and I buy black leather pants and a taut blac
k turtleneck and a neat, fitted black leather jacket. It’s as close as a girl gets to armor. Winter has passed so I get the gear on sale, but it still would cost a fortune back in Moldova. I use Boris’s cash for the purchase. Thank you, Boris. The gun fits into the small of my back.

  Back at my hotel room I get dressed and then I make a secret preparation, in case I am captured. A final revenge on Zviman or his men. I check my gun. If I cannot get us out, then a bullet for Nelly and a bullet for myself.

  I calm myself by applying my makeup—more than I would ever wear back home. I look like such a bad girl. Red mouth, cat eyes heavy on liner. I laugh to myself, thinking Girl, now you have on your warpaint. I feel like a different person. The schoolteacher is dead. The schoolteacher has killed three people and freed two slaves and blown up a house.

  That was nothing to what I must do now.

  I take a cab to the pizzeria.

  It’s still daylight, the sun sliding its farewell into the Mediterranean. It’s the time of the pre-dinner lull I noticed yesterday.

  A man catcalls me as I get out of the cab and tip the driver. I ignore him. I walk up the steps. Lucky Strike Parlor, the sign reads in both Hebrew and English. Whose luck? I wonder. I go up the stairs to a door that is blood-red, LUCKY STRIKE painted on it in cursive black letters.

  I resist the urge to kick in the door. Instead, I open it like anyone else and step inside the parlor. The room is cool and smells of salt, of heavy perfume, of beer. I hear a whiny voice say, “C’mon, baby, smile for me.” The voice has a New York crawl to it, like I have heard in movies and TV.

  It is as if I have entered a stained dream. The lights in here are, yes indeed, a shade of red. A dim, bitter crimson. Low-grade electronica trance music plays in the background. I see a reception desk, an old man sitting there. He eats a cookie, with his mouth open. Behind him is what looks like a raised platform, two women sitting under sallow spotlights. They wear see-through clothing. Neither of them is Nelly. If they have heard the young man’s plea they give no sign, no reaction. They sit very straight, and they do not smile. They could be mannequins.

  I think: they are just waiting for the next bad thing to happen.

  Lounging on a nearby couch are two college-age men, swigging Goldstar beers, wearing jeans, one in an American football jersey, the other sporting a sweatshirt that has a store name on it. The shirt is blood-red under the glow of the lights.

  They are telling stupid jokes, in English, trying to get the girls to smile, like I know now tourists do in London with the British guards at Buckingham Palace. Either the girls are forbidden to laugh, like the guards, or they cannot. It strikes me that it might be dangerous for a girl here to laugh at a man.

  Bubbles of hate rise in my chest. Bubbles, no, too soft a word, Sam. I must be honest: the hate fills me like a flooding river. I hate everything about them.

  “Excuse me, miss?” the old man says in Hebrew. He is unsure—maybe I wandered in, he must think. He talks to me around the crumbs of his big cookie.

  “Hello, there, you showing up for a shift, baby?” the boy in the store-name shirt calls. He raises the beer bottle toward me, like a welcoming toast.

  “I am here to apply for a job,” I say to the old man, in English.

  The old man is speechless, brow furrowing. He stands up, which is all I want him to do now that I see his hands are empty except for that cookie.

  I pull the gun out from the back of my leather pants and the bullet barks over the soft thrum of the bad disco music. The old man drops, wordless, his chewing jaw gone. Him eating that cookie while those poor girls sit there waiting to be bought pisses me off.

  The two Americans freeze in shock. The women on the platform stare; one of them stands, her chair tottering back to the floor.

  “You’re paying to rape,” I say to the guys. “My sister is here and you are paying to rape her.”

  “Now wait a minute, honey, wait—”

  “We’re Americans—”

  I shoot them both, and, because they are stupid, thoughtless children, I fire into their legs. They jerk into screaming spasms on the floor. The blossoms of blood on their clothes are bright in the red lights. Their howls fill the room, broken by gasps of air.

  “Go. Run,” I say to the tired, dull-eyed women. They run, in scanty lingerie, out and down the stairwell. But the fear on their faces, I think, it doesn’t tell me that they’re free.

  Off the entrance parlor there’s a hallway and in its curve I see a door open. A fortyish man, stumbling out, trying to pull up his pants, panic in his eyes. I see a glint of wedding ring on his hand. He charges toward me and I shoot him in both knees. He can explain that to his wife. He thunders to the floor, mewling and screeching. Behind him a woman screams.

  I stop, yell at the woman in English, “Get out! Run!” The woman doesn’t. I repeat myself, but in Russian then Romanian. The young woman—younger than Nelly, bloodless with fright—hugs the wall, naked, too terrified to move.

  Where is the guard?

  Then I see a door yank open, two down and across the hall from the scared girl’s room. The college boys keep shrieking and I hear one call out for his mama. Like Mama wants to see this.

  No one exits the door.

  I want to believe that it’s Nelly, or some other girl too frightened by the gunfire, cowering in the doorway, unsure of what to do.

  Too much hope in my heart. I call: “Nelly? Nelly, it’s me…”

  Silence. Then a bear of a man charges around the open doorway toward me, a shotgun in his hands, leveled at me, and when he sees me—slip of a girl in black leather—a naked wave of surprise passes over his face. He hesitates.

  I fire and a splinter of drywall explodes by his shoulder and I shoot again. He falls and fires as he ducks back and the pellets mist my doorframe into shreds. I throw a hand over my face and the adrenaline masks the pain, but I feel flesh pierced: ear, shoulders, back of the neck, by the flying debris.

  I lie halfway in the room, my legs prone in the hallway, and I freeze, my mind telling me to be still, I have baited a trap by lying here where he can’t see I am conscious. Every fiber telling me to run, hide.

  I stay still.

  Wait. I steady my gun up at the shattered doorway. Waiting for him to creep into view. Playing dead. He can’t see my gun until he’s risked a glance around the peppered wall.

  The man with the shotgun inches down the hallway. I hear the shuffle of his feet; weirdly, it sounds like Boris struggling to breathe. The Americans and the married man have either stopped fussing or have died. He sees my legs, I imagine, lying deathly still.

  He turns into the doorway and I fire into his stomach. He screams and staggers back, the pain overriding his trigger finger. I stand and I kick the shotgun out of his hands. I think I break a toe. He screams and he falls, blind with pain. I pick up the shotgun.

  What is strange now is my calm. The calm is a heaviness inside me, smothering the pain, the fear.

  I leave him gut-shot. On his belt I see a baton of some sort. I pull it from his belt. There is a thumb control and it telescopes into a length. Cool. I like the weight of it in my hand so I take it, like a trophy. What is wrong with me? He has a knife, too. I tuck that inside my boot. Taking his weapons was like hoarding small treasures I had earned, Sam, isn’t that odd?

  No one else is rushing out to shoot me. I kick in the other doors. Mostly empty. No more men.

  But none of the women are Nelly.

  When the woman in the last room yells Please don’t hurt us in Moldovan, I lower my gun.

  “Where is Nelly?”

  “Working a party—for Zviman.”

  Zviman. The mohawk. The owner. Smiling at me on the video, over his shoulder, raping and slapping my sister. I must pay my respects.

  “Where is this party?”

  “His house, I think, I don’t know, I swear, please don’t kill me.”

  “What is the address?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.
”

  I believe her. “Run. This is your chance to get out. Now. Run.”

  There are six women in the hallway and four of them flee immediately, hurrying down the stairs in their frilly lingerie. The other two stay, as though frozen by the prospect of freedom as much as the certainty of peril.

  “Run! What’s wrong with you?” I know the police will be here in minutes and I don’t have much time. I jab the gun into the face of the gut-shot man.

  “Zviman! Where is he? Tell me and I’ll call an ambulance for you.”

  The man whispers an address and I whip him unconscious with his own telescoping baton.

  “There’s your ambulance. Consider it called,” I say. I shove the edge of the baton—it’s a little bloody—against the wall to close it.

  I herd the two reluctant women out, past the married client who has passed out from the agony of his broken kneecaps, past the mewling college boys. They’re still alive, just quieter in their suffering. They try and crawl and hide from me, behind the couch, the little darlings. I am their lesson they will never forget.

  Out on the street now, me and a gang of fugitive women.

  “Are you stealing us?” one asks.

  “What?”

  “Stealing us to work for another brothel?”

  Her question makes my heart hurt, Sam. “No, honey, you are free.”

  There is a hospital a few blocks away and I point them toward it. Police cars, summoned by the pizzeria owner, brake past them with sirens blaring.

  I ignore the cars, the cops, the lights. I guess in my leather pants they think I’m one of the fleeing prostitutes. I herd them into the hospital emergency arrival zone and then I’m gone.

  I have a man, or something that calls himself a man, to see.

  69

  Tel Aviv, Israel

  The house is grand, overlooking the Mediterranean, sitting atop a flattening hill not far from Hatzok Beach on the city’s north side. Pimping must pay awfully well. I think it looks more like the home of a legitimate businessman: perhaps belonging to a software maven, a real-estate investor, a well-regarded lawyer. A wall surrounds the house, with entrance gates. I climb over the gates. From inside the house I hear electronica music playing, the kind Westerners like and that sounds like a pulsing hump. It’s not that different from the music inside the brothel. Are these men so pathetic, I wonder, that they need a dance beat for rape?