Farewell to Freedom

by Sara Blaedel

  He made a face, and Camilla couldn’t help but smile.

  “They make a little bit of food and then they do all they can to become famous, and then they make a little more food while they wallow in their fame. I mean, look at someone like Erwin Lauterbach—that’s a totally different story. He made a hell of a lot of good food and became known for that, and then he continued to make a lot of fucking good food and now he is respected for that. That’s how it should be. And just because those young chefs talk up a storm and attract a bunch of attention, they’ll never be the next Søren Gericke. There’s only one of him. And you should have seen him back in his glory days,” Kaj said, his thoughts slipping back in time. “They’ll never even measure up to his sock suspenders. Not even if they’re on the morning talk shows every other day.”

  Camilla grinned and gave in. Here she’d been thinking the rest of the day would be full of prostitutes and pickpockets, but instead she gotten a regular rundown on major contemporary French and Danish chefs.

  The bag had run out of beer, and Camilla asked if Kaj would stick around if she went and bought them another round.

  “With the greatest of pleasure,” he called to her as she got up and walked over to a basement grocery store.

  She noticed a Citroën C3 stopped and waiting to turn off Absalonsgade onto Skelbækgade. She recognized the prostitute in the passenger’s seat from before, and when the driver turned his head, she made brief eye contact with Holck, the photo editor at the paper who had laid into her at work earlier. He quickly glanced away and zipped across Sønder Boulevard between a truck and a bus.

  It took Camilla a moment to process what she’d just seen.

  “You’ll never guess,” she said when she returned to the bench with a full bag and reported whom she’d just seen.

  “Yes, well, everyone comes here. You’re a reporter—it shouldn’t surprise you. We regularly have the pleasure of influential media people. And then there are the politicians. Everyone needs to let off some steam,” Kaj pointed out.

  Holck was not exactly all that influential, but given the situation, she was way too distracted to ask Kaj who else he’d seen.

  “What the hell?” she snapped. “He has a wife, children, grandchildren, and I don’t even know what all else!”

  Kaj grinned, revealing his darkened teeth.

  Day had faded into evening, but Stig was still on the street talking to the girls as they showed up for work one by one. Camilla didn’t see the other pair of officers who had been there before, but as she scanned the area for them, her eyes settled on a head of long, curly, dark hair that was pulled into a loose ponytail. The person was standing further up toward Halmtorvet with her back to Camilla.

  Camilla had definitely had too many beers to want Louise to run into her here, sitting on a park bench next to an aging alcoholic, who she had to admit was remarkably good company. As a couple of large clouds slid in front of the low evening sun and she felt the first drops start to fall heavily, she got up.

  “Come on,” Camilla said. “Let’s go to the pub instead of sitting here and getting cold.”

  At first Kaj tried to get her to sit back down, pointing to the bag, which wasn’t empty yet, but Camilla remained standing.

  “You can take those home,” she suggested, and when he still seemed reluctant, she added that it’d be her treat, of course.

  Stig had vanished by the time they started walking up Skelbækgade. When Kaj pointed at Høker Café, she followed him.

  Camilla went up to the bar to order. Kaj requested a double whisky, but remained in the background until she passed the glass to him. They looked around for an empty table and found a spot by the window, right across from the gate at the entrance into Kødbyen and the Copenhagen Hospitality College.

  11

  LOUISE STOPPED. SHE SPOTTED KAJ STANDING UP FROM A BENCH farther down the street and walking away, followed by a blonde woman in loose jeans who was carrying a plastic grocery bag.

  Louise watched them stagger through Kødbyen.

  “Hey, do you know if Mikkelsen ever talked to Kaj?” Louise asked, walking over to Lars.

  Lars shrugged and said he hadn’t spoken with Mikkelsen since they’d seen him last.

  “Toft might have talked to Kaj instead. Otherwise, we’ll have to remind Mikkelsen to make sure he follows through on that,” Louise said as they walked back toward their unmarked car parked around the corner.

  They had fifteen minutes until their meeting with Miloš Vituk and Pavlína at Bella Center. They’d just finished a lengthy tour with some of their downtown precinct colleagues of the neighborhood’s brothels, guided by Mikkelsen’s meticulous notes. Some of the brothels were not easy to find, and the police were not particularly welcome at many of them, either, but the brothel operators eased up when they realized the police wanted only to see if anyone recognized the still-unidentified dead woman.

  Their Czech interpreter was waiting for them on the corner of Sommerstedgade. She apologized for not having been able to meet them sooner.

  “I was in court all day,” she explained. “Then I had to make dinner for my kids at home before I could come back out again.”

  “No problem,” Lars said, unlocking the car.

  Once again Louise sensed that Lars didn’t mind spending his evening at work. Not that she had anyone sitting at home waiting impatiently for her, either. She hadn’t since Peter left her three years ago, precisely because he had gotten tired of sitting around waiting. And to tell the truth, Louise thought it had been very much for the best.

  The rain hammered on the roof and windshield of the car as they drove toward Bella Center. Earlier in the month, they had had a long spell of sunshine and warm weather, lulling Copenhageners into feeling summer had come to stay, but now the weather changed constantly. As they drove over the Sjælland Bridge, a flash of lightning tore across the night sky, and the subsequent clap of thunder was so powerful that it shook the car for a moment. The rain picked up, battering them. Lars slowed down and turned the windshield wipers up as fast as they would go.

  “They’re not going to come in this weather,” Louise said as they crawled along through the dense rain.

  “It’ll stop. It’s just a front coming through,” her partner replied calmly, sounding just like her father had when she whenever she didn’t want to go outside as a kid because it was raining. “Of course they’ll come. After all, they’re the ones who want to be able to move around on the street without having people extort huge sums of money from them.”

  And Lars was right. When they turned off Center Boulevard, the rain stopped as suddenly as it had started. Lars turned off the windshield wipers, and Louise spotted a lone red car in parking lot P7.

  “Where did you tell them we’d meet?” Lars asked.

  “I think that’s them,” Louise replied and he drove over and parked next to it.

  Pavlína Branková was short and slender. From a distance she looked more like a high school student than an adult, but as Louise got closer she could tell that the woman must be in her early twenties. Her thick bangs ended in a sharp edge right above her dark eyebrows. Her hair was black and smooth and hung down just past her shoulders.

  Her handshake was limp and her eyes hesitant, but she nodded when she was asked to follow them over to the benches along the side of the parking lot.

  “Let’s just begin with your name and date of birth,” Louise told the female interpreter, opening the trunk of the car to see if there was anything in there she could spread out on the bench so they wouldn’t get wet when they sat down. Luckily there were a few wadded up plastic bags.

  Louise sat down across from Pavlína, and the interpreter sat down next to the Czech woman and started talking. At first Pavlína’s answers were curt, but gradually the conversation began to flow more smoothly.

  Miloš Vituk jumped in several times, and Louise sensed Pavlína was keeping her eye on him whenever she said anything, so Louise suggested that Lars take Mi
loš back to the car. Maybe the witness would speak more freely if there were only women present. Miloš’s presence was obviously making Pavlína clam up.

  Once they were alone, at Louise’s instruction, the interpreter began to probe in more depth, asking Pavlína to talk about what she had been through since she had been stopped on the street back home in the Czech Republic, stuffed into a car, and brought to Denmark.

  “Had you seen the driver before?” the interpreter asked.

  Pavlína shook her head and said that she had been with a guy she knew from the street scene back home. She didn’t know him well, but they’d been out a few times even though he wasn’t part of the clique she normally hung out with. He turned up every now and then, and that last time he invited her to a party in an abandoned train station.

  “He brought drinks and cigarettes,” Pavlína said as if to explain herself. Then she added that it had been so cold outside and her sister was with friends, so she’d gone with him.

  On the way there, he had grabbed her shoulders as a dark car pulled over to the curb, and before she knew how it happened, she was suddenly sitting next to a foreign girl in the back seat of a car speeding away through evening rush hour.

  It took some doing for the interpreter to get the rest of the story out of her.

  Pavlína didn’t remember crossing into Germany or Denmark, and said she must have slept a lot of the way. She sounded upset and watched the interpreter intently as she spoke.

  “At one point, another girl joined them in the car,” the interpreter said, turning to Louise. “She says she’s sure they drugged them with the drink they offered because she only has a foggy memory of the whole trip and had no idea where she was when they arrived—not even what country she was in. They put the girls up in a hotel where they were greeted by two men, who later turned out to be Arian and Hamdi.”

  “The rooms were small and dark, and the bathroom was down the hall,” Pavlína said through the interpreter, explaining that she had shared a room with one of the girls from the car.

  She started crying as she recounted how Arian had raped her after Hamdi took the other girl out of the room. Afterward, the men switched places, and they sat her on a chair outside the door while Arian kept an eye on her.

  The next morning the two men came back and took the women to the town to buy new clothes and makeup. They were very generous. But then that same night they sent the girls out onto the street, ordering them to earn back all the money the trip, the clothes, and the hotel had cost.

  Pavlína stared urgently at the interpreter while she spoke, and then the interpreter told Louise that Pavlína had never worked as a prostitute before and had asked the two men several times that first week for permission to return home to her sister, who didn’t know where she was and was all by herself now.

  “First they threatened to cut her face if she refused to work,” the interpreter translated, “and when she persisted, they threatened to cut her sister. After that, she didn’t dare disobey.

  “They demanded she pay 3,000 kroner a day. Some days she wasn’t able to earn that much, and then she would have to pay extra the next day and even more the day after if she was still behind. There were days when she did up to twenty tricks or more to pay her debt.”

  Pavlína had stopped crying, but there was an absent look in her eyes as she mentioned eight girls who gave money to the Albanians, whom she only knew by the names Hamdi and Arian.

  Louise quickly began calculating how much money the girls had been bringing in each week. Pavlína answered the interpreter’s question by saying that they were forced to work six days a week. Louise closed her eyes and did the math. With eight girls, that must have been about 144,000 kroner a week.

  “There’s a lot of turnover among the girls. Most of them only stay for the three months they’re legally allowed to remain in Denmark as tourists. If they want to be here longer than that, they have to apply for a residence permit, which they won’t get,” the interpreter said as Pavlína confirmed what Miloš Vituk had already explained.

  “Several of the girls have been here multiple times,” the interpreter said. “Some are sent home for a while, but then are brought back the following year. Some of the girls are also sent on to Norway or Sweden. If they move around from country to country, it’s hard to keep track of them.”

  “That’s what the Roma are known for doing,” Louise said, and asked if Pavlína was sure the men were Albanian and not Roma, because the Roma were well known in Denmark for their brutal human trafficking and successful methods at evading detection. They were called “shepherds” for a reason. They moved their girls around Europe as if they were livestock, cleverly directing them from meadow to meadow to avoid attention from the various governments or police.

  “What if the girls earned more than 3,000 kroner in one day? What would happen to the extra money?” Louise asked and watched the interpreter while she waited for the question to be translated.

  “They got to keep that. That was the carrot,” the interpreter reported after having passed the question on. “But that rarely happened.”

  “Ask her if she could have gone home if she had enough money for the ticket,” Louise asked, but the girl shook her head once she understood the question. “No, once you’re with them you can say farewell to freedom. There’s no way out again.”

  Louise nodded sympathetically and thought for a moment before changing the topic.

  “I understand from Miloš that at one point you were forced out of his apartment and taken to a club on Saxogade.”

  Pavlína listened carefully to the interpreter, who let her talk for a long time before she started translating. Louise couldn’t tell from Pavlína’s voice whether she was angry or afraid.

  “She was raped again while she was locked in a small room in the back of the club. Someone hit her because she said they couldn’t force her back out onto the street now that they had their money.”

  Pavlína’s voice had become high-pitched and frenzied.

  “They taunted Miloš, saying he couldn’t look after me properly. Just look how easy it was for them to come and take me. They said it would be better for me to stay and work for them, because then I would have security.”

  That last part made her shake her head.

  “Ask her if she knows the girl we found on Skelbækgade,” Louise said, looking at the interpreter.

  There was a longer pause during which a string of reactions flickered like a slide show over the woman’s face in rapid succession. Finally Pavlína nodded and looked down at her hands.

  “She was one of the girls who was in the car,” she said quietly, but quickly added that it wasn’t the girl she’d shared a room with.

  Louise tried to catch the young woman’s eye. She could have chosen to ask this right off the bat, but she thought she would wait until they were done so it didn’t get in the way of the woman’s own story.

  “Do you know what her name was, or where in the Czech Republic she was picked up?”

  Pavlína said she didn’t know anything other than that her name was Iveta—or at least, that’s what she said her name was. Pavlína estimated they were the same age, but didn’t know where Iveta was from.

  “Ask if she knows who murdered her, or if she knows why Iveta was killed.”

  Louise followed along intently as her questions were translated and tried to discern some of the answers.

  “She thinks Iveta fell victim to the threats the men were always making if the girls didn’t obey,” the interpreter said. “Once they arrived at the hotel, Iveta had begged incessantly to go home again because her mother was seriously ill and needed her. She wanted to go home and earn money so she could help her mother.”

  The interpreter added that unlike Pavlína, the murdered girl had worked as a prostitute back home as well.

  “But she found out that either she had to raise the money to buy her way out or she would have to find someone else to pay for her. A few days before s
he died, she received a message that her mother was in the hospital and, in a final attempt to get permission to go home, she went to see Arian and told him that she was pregnant and couldn’t work anymore because it hurt.”

  Pavlína started crying again. This time it took a long time before she was ready to continue.

  “That was just something she said,” the interpreter continued once Pavlína started talking again, “because she hoped that they would take pity on her. The next day, she disappeared, and Pavlína didn’t see her again until Miloš showed her Iveta’s picture in the paper, where it said she was dead. He had also asked if it was someone Pavlína knew. But she was afraid, so she just shook her head.”

  A heavy silence lay over them until Louise got up and thanked Pavlína for telling her story.

  They walked back over to Lars and Miloš, who were sitting in the police car, waiting. As soon as he saw them, the Serb leaped out of the car’s front seat and rushed over to meet Pavlína with his arms outstretched. He put them around her shoulders and pulled her into an embrace.

  “The girls have to show up at the main train station every morning and pay the two Albanians. They do that at the entrance onto Istedgade,” Louise said when she reached her partner.

  Lars walked the couple steps over to Miloš and thanked him for arranging the meeting with Pavlína.

  “We promise we’ll keep an eye on those two,” Lars said and explained that the police needed evidence to support Pavlína’s story before they could do any more.

  Before they parted, Louise requested that the interpreter ask if Pavlína would stop by the pathology lab and identify the dead woman, because no one had confirmed her identity yet.