by Tom Saric
He wondered, too, how many Natalia Nemets there really were. He lifted the manila folder and pulled out the photos of the missing girls: 194 potential Natalia Nemets. And he couldn’t find one.
As he flipped through the photos, one seemed familiar. A girl with chestnut brown hair and slate grey eyes, almost silver, smiling as she laughed at something going on over the photographer’s shoulder. Her hair tucked behind her ears.
Braun’s eye was drawn to one of her ears. It was smaller than the other, slightly malformed, like a flower bud that never fully opened.
He had seen an ear like this before.
In Tuzla. At the Koko Klub.
Braun swallowed hard and looked at the date of the report.
June 17, 1991.
Nine months before Natalia Nemet disappeared.
Braun dialed his mobile and booked a connecting flight from Amsterdam to Tuzla.
40
Tuzla, Bosnia
Forty-eight hours later, a man whose Brazilian passport identified him as Gustavo Cardoso, born in Minas Gerais, passed through the doors of the Koko Klub. He had been questioned by three bullet-headed men in tracksuits, and his cover story stayed the same: he was an employee of a Brazilian telecommunications company looking to make inroads in Bosnia. His voice remained steady and calm. He kept his gaze unwavering.
He was average height, but burly with huge hands. His white shirt, black suit, and black tie were as crisp as a soldier’s at a ceremony. The subtle yellowish tint of his white gold Rolex matched his cufflinks. His skin was smooth and the color of cinnamon.
As he walked inside, music thumping hypnotically, smoke lingering, he spoke to no one. He acted as if he didn’t even notice or care about the eight women dancing in different corners and stages in the nightclub.
He walked over to the bar, not to order a drink but to ask the bartender a question.
“Do you have a catalogue?” he said, fumbling his way through broken Croatian.
The bartender screwed his face up in confusion. When Gustavo made the motion of flipping pages, the bartender smiled, reached under the bar, and slid a green binder in front of him.
As Gustavo flipped the pages, each a clear plastic sheet with a picture of a girl either naked or in a skimpy bikini and with a name underneath, he reminded himself of the description Braun had given him.
“Brunette, oval face with high cheekbones, thin nose, full lips, thick eyebrows. Eyes slate grey, cold. One ear smaller than the other.”
He soon realized that nearly half of the girls in the binder fit that description. The only defining feature was the ear deformity, but most of the girls had their hair down in the photos.
He stopped on one page and took a closer look. The oval face, thin nose, and thick eyebrows all matched the description, but she was blonde. Her name was Mateja. Her hair must have been dyed in the photograph. He turned around and saw her serving drinks.
Gustavo looked up at the bartender and nodded.
“A dance?” the bartender asked.
Gustavo shook his head. “Private room.”
The bartender pulled out a Sharpie from behind his ear, scribbled on a paper napkin, and slid it over.
Three hundred euro.
Gustavo counted out the money and put it on the sticky bar top.
The bartender signaled to one of the security guards sitting by the door. He rose and walked over to Mateja, whispered something in her ear, and they were off through a door beside the stage.
The man then returned and motioned for Gustavo to follow him.
They walked down a hallway illuminated by red lights with doors on either side. The guard opened the third door on the right and motioned Gustavo inside.
Mateja was already dancing, hips rotating while she slowly turned. Arms outstretched, then fingers slowly running down her neck and over her breasts. Next to her was a massage table. A single blue bulb provided dim light.
The guard closed the door and stood in front of it, arms crossed.
Gustavo shook his head.
“This isn’t a show,” he said. He reached into his pocket and handed the man another twenty euro, which was enough to get him to leave.
Mateja came up only inches from Gustavo and kept dancing. He touched her hair, tucking it just behind her ear. It was small and deformed.
“You can stop now.”
She paused, confused. He wasn’t sure if she understood him, so he put out his hand.
“Stop.”
She took two steps back, cupping her breasts in her palms.
“Listen to me carefully. Tomorrow morning, you will tell your people that you have bad stomach cramps and you need to see a doctor. You will tell them you made an appointment.”
Gustavo handed her a single piece of paper with the name Dr. Bočić and an address.
She stared at both sides of the paper, examining it.
“Why should I do that?”
“You wanted passports, didn’t you?”
“You are working with that man, the German?”
Gustavo nodded. He was Braun’s ex-partner, Juan.
“What if they won’t let me leave?”
“You must find a way. Make sure you’re there.”
41
Braun sat atop an examination table in one of Dr. Bočić’s offices, his legs swinging off the edge. He stared at the clock on the wall, listening to the hollow tick.
9:05 a.m.
He walked to the window, pulled the string to raise the blind, and slid the rusty latch open. Lifting the window a crack, he felt a sharp draft rush into the room and wiped the beads of sweat on his brow with his sleeve. Five minutes late meant nothing… or it meant everything. If she got scared and told Azra, Braun thought, Mateja would permanently disappear.
Dr. Bočić was in his early seventies, and over the past four years his health had deteriorated. As a result, he was scaling back his practice and no longer worked on Fridays. So when Braun approached him offering two thousand euros to rent his office for a day, Dr. Bočić saw little reason to question him. He notified his receptionist that she was to open the clinic on Friday and to work for Braun for the day at a rate of one hundred euros per hour. She, too, was reluctant to raise any questions.
The silence in the room brought calmness over Braun. He’d completely crossed the line to rogue, an enemy of the organization he once upheld and now saw as infected by an evil force. His feet had left the ledge and he was plummeting into the unknown. A tremendous wave of peace came over him. He felt free.
The door swung open, scratching against the frame. Braun turned. The receptionist poked her head through the doorway, keeping it slightly bowed.
“She is here,” she said, just above a whisper. Braun could hear two women’s voices down the hallway. “With another woman.”
“An older woman, grey hair?”
The secretary nodded. “She wants to come in with the patient.” Azra, the madam, protecting her “family.” The secretary’s jaw quivered. “She insists.”
“No,” Braun said. “She must come in alone.”
The secretary hesitated, eyes downcast and meekly searching left and right, as she anticipated a confrontation with Azra.
“The fee I’m paying you requires that the patient comes in alone.”
She let out a stuttering breath, tears welling in her eyes. For a moment Braun thought she would renege, but without saying a word, she slipped from the door and pulled it shut behind her. For a hundred euros an hour, she’d find the courage to tell Azra to take a hike.
Braun sat down in a chair and crossed his legs. He kept his jacket buttoned up. His Sig Sauer was holstered against his ribs in case it all went to hell.
The door creaked open, and a head peered round it. Mateja’s scared silver eyes examined the room and then rested on Braun. She stepped forward, past the threshold, and hesitated, as though waiting for instructions.
“Close the door, please,” Braun said.
She obeyed without
taking her eyes off him. She wore faded jeans, ripped at the knees, and a T-shirt. He easily would have mistaken her for a university student, not a captive, a slave owned by a cartel in operation since the ’90s.
“Please sit.”
She lowered herself into the chair and rubbed her hands nervously on her thighs.
“I want you to know I am going to get you passports. But I need some information from you first.”
She snorted and then raised her hand. The look of fear evaporated. “Do you know how many times I’ve been told I’d get a passport?”
Braun nodded. These girls were always tempted with the promise of freedom by their captors or johns. The carrot was repeatedly dangled in front of them, but just out of reach.
“I will get them for you, I promise. I know that means very little to you, but a promise means a lot to me.”
He then handed her a digital camera.
“What’s this for?”
“I need photos of each of the girls. Only their heads, against a white background.”
He popped open a slot at the bottom and held up the memory card.
“Then you send this to me. You’ll get your passports.”
She said nothing, staring at him without protest.
Braun flipped over a paper beside him. It was Mateja’s missing person’s photo from when she was nine years old. “This is you.”
She held the paper in front of her and seemed to be looking through the photo. It vibrated between her hands. Tears welled in her eyes and she met Braun’s gaze, defiantly pushing the emotions back down. She wouldn’t let him make her cry. Her voice became distant. “What information do you want?”
“When you were taken, were there other girls taken at the same time?”
She nodded.
“Was a girl named Natalia there?”
Her eyes shifted as she searched for the name. How many girls had come and gone, Braun wondered. Mateja shook her head.
“There was a girl who escaped,” Braun began to explain. But before he took another breath, Mateja’s darting eyes stopped cold and she looked at him.
“Pipa?”
Braun felt his heart race. “Yes, Pipa. You knew her?”
“She was like my sister. We played together. They told us we were at an orphanage because our parents died in the war. We didn’t know any better. But it was a lot of fun, all of us girls together, playing. It didn’t last.”
Mateja stopped speaking and studied Braun, her eyes widening in disbelief when she saw that he didn’t understand where she was going.
“Fourteen.”
She looked at Braun, waiting, as though expecting him to read her mind. She took a couple of breaths.
“Fourteen years old. That’s when they would take the older girls away. They told us that they were being moved into the city to attend school.”
She closed her eyes and winced, seeing something in her mind.
“One day, Pipa and I saw one of the girls who left, Dika, walking through the park. She was so… different. She didn’t look at us. When we tried to talk to her, she just called us ‘stupid’ and said that she didn’t like us anymore. But her eyes looked so tired, sad. Pipa was really upset about it. She wanted to know what had happened to Dika, so she snuck into the trunk of Azra’s car and ended up at the nightclub. She looked through the window and later told me what she saw. The girls were dancing, men grabbing them, men having sex with them. Pipa was so scared that she ran all the way home.”
“What happened to Pipa?” Braun said.
“She came back and told me about it. She said we had to leave. ‘But where?’ I said. She just kept insisting that we had to leave, had to run before we turned fourteen. We made the plan. We had been slowly slipping money out of Azra’s purse for six months until we saved enough for two bus tickets to Sarajevo.”
“What stopped you from running away?”
“Fear. I was too fucking scared.” She balled her hands into fists and pressed them against her eyes. “We were ready to go—we had a change of clothes and money. We snuck out of the window, and when we reached the fence, I froze. What if we didn’t make it? What if someone hurt us? Azra was always telling us how dangerous the world was. Murderers, landmines, rapists. Maybe she would take care of us. Maybe Dika wanted to work at the nightclub. Maybe I didn’t have to. Maybe she made a lot of money. I still remember Pipa pleading, ‘Come, we must go, we must.’”
She ran her hand through her hair. “But I just shook my head. I didn’t say a word. She begged me. But I didn’t go. So she left.”
“Did you ever hear from her again?”
“Not for years. I thought she’d forgotten about me. Or worse.”
She looked at her hands, pumping them open and closed as if trying to get circulation back. She looked up at Braun and smiled.
“She didn’t forget about me. She didn’t. Two years ago, she came back and found me. We met in secret. She looked so beautiful, so healthy, so different from me. She ran away to Austria, then Spain. She went to school and got a job. But she looked so sad to see me, so sad for me. She blamed herself. I couldn’t tell her what I’d become, what I was. A whore. She wanted me to leave with her, but I couldn’t. They would find me if I tried. Their friends work at the border. And if they found me, do you know what they would do? This life is nothing compared to how terrible they could make it.”
There was a knock at the door. The secretary’s head appeared, eyebrows knitted together. “The w-woman,” she stuttered. “The woman with her, she’s insisting on coming in.”
Mateja sprang up and moved to the door, and the secretary stepped away. Braun put his hand on the door and let it click closed.
“Can you tell me where she is in Spain?”
Mateja put her hand on the handle and twisted.
“Please,” Braun said.
She rubbed her hands together and blew into them, then darted to the desk, grabbed the prescription pad, and scribbled across it.
She pushed past Braun, opened the door, and walked out.
When she was gone, he looked at the pad.
8 Carrer de la Junta de Comerç, Barcelona
42
8 Carrer de la Junta de Comerç, Barcelona
Braun stood in the middle of the cobblestone street, staring at a graffiti-covered steel roll-down door. Above it hung a metal square with a faded number 8.
On either side of the steel door were facades of art studios, used bookshops, antique stores, and cafés alternating with corner stores, money exchanges, and entryways to apartment buildings. Narrow balconies overlooked the street three stories high. Laundry was slung over railings to dry. Pedestrians, bicycles, and mopeds shared the street.
But Number 8 looked abandoned.
He felt foolish for following the lead. Of course Natalia hadn’t used her real address with Mateja—that would be putting herself in danger. She had escaped human traffickers as a mere child, made it across Europe, and survived. She was too smart to risk her location getting back to Azra or Debeli.
Braun decided to visit the newsstand and tobacconist two doors down. An old, bald Asian man sat behind a cash register covered in stacks of magazines and newspapers, today featuring a headshot of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the latest concerns about enriched uranium production in Iran.
“Excuse me, sir,” Braun said. “Do you happen to know when the store at Number 8 will open? I have a package to deliver.”
The man shook his head and said something in broken Spanish that Braun didn’t understand.
Braun then walked to the grocery store across the street, but a line for the cash register had formed, stretching outside, looping past a fruit stand.
From this vantage point, Braun saw a light on in the second-floor window of 8 Carrer de la Junta. Inside, he saw the silhouette of a person sitting at a desk.
The only possible way someone could have made it to the second floor was through those steel doors. For some reason, whoever was inside wanted to keep p
eople out, and simply locking the door wasn’t enough.
A swell of frustration overcame him. He needed to find Natalia Nemet now. He simply didn’t have any more time.
Braun searched the gutters that ran along the street and found two pieces of crumbled concrete, then picked one up and threw it at the window. He winced, hoping that he hadn’t thrown hard enough to risk shattering the glass. But the concrete hit with a thump before dropping to the sidewalk.
He had just cocked his hand back to throw the second piece when the window lifted open.
A middle-aged man with a neatly trimmed grey beard stuck his head out and scanned both ways. Braun noticed he was wearing a crisp white lab coat. He waved.
“What in God’s name are you doing?” the man shouted.
“My apologies, Doctor. But your entrance is closed, and I am looking for someone at this address. Natalia Nemet?”
The doctor shook his head.
“Wrong address.”
“I don’t think so, sir. She also calls herself Filipa. Pipa.”
“No one by that name.”
The doctor’s expression didn’t change, but he denied it too quickly, Braun thought. The doctor pulled back from the window.
“Doctor, please tell her that I am here just to talk to her,” Braun yelled up to him. “Tell her that Mateja sent me!”
He didn’t know if the doctor even heard the last statement. The window slid closed.
Braun sat down on the low curb and waited. If, as he suspected, Natalia was inside, or even if the doctor knew her, they would need time to discuss Braun’s request. Clearly, given their precautions, they were afraid of something.
A few minutes later, the steel door rolled up halfway. The doctor emerged from underneath it, followed by a young woman. Her short, platinum blonde hair was parted and swept across her face, partially covering her blue eyes. She wore a white tank top and jeans. A colorful tattoo crept past her shoulder straps.
“I’m Dr. Forlan,” he said, stepping protectively in front of her. “Who are you?”
