A Door in the River

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  The man had been waiting on the bed, almost expressionless, looking out of place. She came over and sat beside him as she’d been trained, and took his hand.

  “Do you speak English?” he asked.

  “I do.”

  “Do you read it?”

  He palmed a note into her hand and she looked down. It was a folded piece of paper. “Read it later,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s help,” he said, and his eyes slid away from hers. It was almost as if he was ashamed of himself.

  A good actor, she thought. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Read the note.”

  “No,” she said. “Now. What do you want me to do now?”

  His face creased with pain. “Can you dance?”

  She put the note deep in one of her slippers as she undressed for him. He was strange, but many of them were strange. Uncertain of themselves, wanting to be led, needing permission to vault out of their guilt so they could have what they’d paid for. Only Duffy and Brennan had taken her for a whole week and had availed themselves of every vile impulse they had. But the rest could not say what they wanted; some did not know, even. Only their lusts overcame their horror at themselves. So many of them, she could see, could never have had a woman the way they wanted, unless they paid. Here, no one could say no to them. That’s what this place was: a place where you got what you asked for, no matter how romantic, no matter how depraved. The girls had been trained to please. Even when there was just a couple of them, one was always coiffed and made up and glassy-eyed with vodka, and the other was starving. There was demand for both. The ones in the dresses, who sometimes slept on the upstairs beds, eventually made the transition to broken-down and filthy. The ones who started beautiful would tell the ones who didn’t that it was better to be beautiful, just like in the real world. For the ones earmarked for abuse and torture, it was always good to be a little beautiful, but also not too capable of putting up a fight. Their men had agendas. Some of the girls didn’t come back.

  The man, who told her his name was Henry, didn’t want to go to bed. So she danced for him and he watched with a paralyzed expression on his features. She danced for him, telling him if he wasn’t pleased, she would be punished. After fifteen minutes had expired, he knocked on the door to leave. Gene had come on shift and he regarded this “Henry” with a sly look, saying he must have been desperate if he only lasted a quarter of an hour. And Larysa had been taken back to her room in the dungeonlike space below the bedrooms.

  She took the note out when she was securely locked in her cubicle.

  My name is Henry. A man you know as Caleb Merton came to me. He is a friend of mine. He gambles, and he came here, but he didn’t know what was really going on here. I will come back tomorrow. I will help all of you if I can.

  Her heart had sped at reading these words, but she knew well enough not to trust what she was told or what things seemed. There was no limit to the depravity of the men who had found this place. If he came back, she would see what he was made of.

  She kept the note to herself, reading and rereading it that night. Right now, there were two others down in the dirt-walled “dorms” where the girls were kept when they were not upstairs, servicing the paying customers. Timmy was no longer there: she had been delivered up to someone for their personal use. That, or she was gone. Bochko took girls back sometimes, as he had already done once with Timmy. If a girl needed to be disciplined, they became Bochko’s wife for a period. Larysa had heard that sometimes the girls who were punished did not come back. But Timmy had come back once; maybe she would again.

  At night, they pressed their mouths against the dents in the dirt where there was space at the ends of the walls and talked. No one knew how it had all begun; none of the original girls were still here. But the one who had been there the longest knew what had happened to some of them, and knew what would happen to most of them. Her name was Cherry. The other one was called Star. They had shared their real names as well, which they kept like secret coins and never used. There was a form of communal knowledge they had that had been passed down. They knew that above them was a farmhouse on a country road that no one lived on for five or six kilometres in either direction. Only three rooms in the rear of the house were in use: a living room, a bedroom, and a sort of guestroom that looked like an office. The casino itself was down the mouldy-smelling tunnel they brought them through blindfolded if they ever had to take a girl out. They had dug out the back of the house’s basement into the raw dirt and made the three cubicles there as well as a fourth, big enough to hold all three of them. It had come down through the broken telephone that the machines used for the job had been “borrowed” at night from a construction site at a town nearby. But no one knew if that was true or not. It was hard to imagine how this place had been built, but clearly the ground had never been broken in the open. Imagine creating this place in secret, Larysa thought. But this part was a house, which meant there was an exit to the outside closer than the one at the end of the tunnel.

  The capacity of the downstairs pen was four; they could manage four girls at a time. If one vanished, another would appear to take her place. Larysa had replaced the one called Gina. Gina had been another of Bochko’s favourites. Cherry had already expressed her belief that Bochko chose which girl he wanted and then set her a test she would fail. Then she’d have to be punished.

  As he’d promised (or threatened), the man called Henry came back the next day. This time, Gene was on duty. He let her into the room where Henry waited for her. Now he was in the bedroom, proper, with its high, four-poster bed. The wall that she presumed had once held a window had been planked up with gypsum.

  She stood as far away from him as the room would allow, staring at him. He looked harmless to her now; his expression was of honest concern. Finally, she sat on the end of the bed and motioned with her head that he should sit as well.

  “Did you read my note?”

  “There is no reason to save me,” she said.

  “You want to be here?”

  “We have to be careful,” she said, “they are watching us.” She slid forward off the end of the bed and kneeled in front of him, spreading his legs. She undid his belt and she had to hold him down on the bed with her forearms to keep his whole body from shooting forward off the mattress. She clasped his thighs hard and said, “Don’t move.”

  “Please, I –”

  He had responded to her touch. He couldn’t hide that he was like all the others. She lay her hand in his lap. “How do you think you can help?”

  “I can get the police to come. Just tell me how many girls are down here. Who has weapons and how many are there?”

  She laughed inwardly. Bochko would kill her for just telling the number of girls. “I know nothing,” she said.

  “I won’t hurt you, Kitty. But I can’t help you if you don’t trust me.” Her eyes were briefly on his. “Upstairs, they were bidding on others. Where are the other girls?”

  “There is no other girls. There is only me.”

  “Jordie – Caleb – said he was asked if he had a preference …”

  “There is only me,” she said.

  “I have to call the police.”

  She raised her head off his lap. His face hovered like the moon against the dark ceiling. She felt cocooned with him. “If you tell police, I will be dead before they come. I promise you this. At first trouble, they shoot.” She felt him tense up beneath her again. “How I can trust you? Huh?”

  He lowered his head and squeezed his eyes shut. “What am I doing here?”

  “I thought you are saving my life. You want? To save my life?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come back tomorrow. Think how. How will you do this? If I believe, I let you save me.”

  He already had a plan. She listened. He wanted to make it possible for her to escape. The look on his face. Once, he touched her hand. He was for real or he was a good actor. When she got out
, she would come to him, and they would go to the police together. He told her to look for his pickup at the back of a parking lot, a place he was pretty sure no one would be looking for her. When she got to him, he’d have a blanket to hide her under in the cargo bed. Then they could go to the police. He made her promise she would come and not risk her safety any further. But why did he want her to come to him? Why not, if he could help her escape, would he just not set her free entirely?

  If she did not go to him, he could not take her to Bochko. And he might be taking her to Bochko. This could be the test she would fail.

  But she had to do it. The chance would surely never come again. If he could get her out, she’d go to meet him. She’d decide what to do about this Henry when she had more information. She still wasn’t sure what risk he posed to her. Yet.

  ] 30 [

  Late afternoon

  “Take those bloody handcuffs off of my constable,” Hazel Micallef said.

  Commander LeJeune told her prisoner to present the cuffs. She unlocked them and Jenner rubbed her wrists together, looking sheepish.

  LeJeune said, “Detective Inspector, do you think I have no idea what’s going on in my own back acre?”

  “I’m sorry your slow-moving investigation has been affected by my own. But you have no idea –”

  “I know about this casino, Detective. There are illegal casinos everywhere. We’ve been gathering evidence on three of the local ones for almost a year.”

  “This one’s different.”

  “You’re to pack up your van and get off native land. You’re lucky you didn’t blow my case. Go.”

  “Take it up with OPS brass. We’re not moving.”

  Greene and Spere were watching her from the side door of the van. Greene came forward and introduced himself. He even fished out a card.

  LeJeune ignored it. Gone were the collegiate courtesies. “I don’t care who you are,” she said. “This is a treaty violation. It also shows a stunning lack of courtesy.”

  “Look,” Greene said, “we’re in place. I think you’re going to want to see what happens, Commander. I don’t believe you have all the facts.”

  “I will have them presently.” She snapped the cuffs shut and replaced them in her belt. “Constable Bellecourt,” she said into her radio. “Come in.”

  “Bellecourt,” came the constable’s voice.

  “I need you to secure Church Bay Road at both ends.”

  “I’ll put Arnette and Mastaw on it.”

  LeJeune keyed off. “If you insist on staying, then stay you will,” she said.

  “I’m glad we’re on the same page.”

  “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  When Hazel returned to the van, Spere planted himself an inch from her face.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Call her back.”

  “Why?”

  “Call the commander back.”

  She looked at him like he was crazy, but she reopened the door. “Commander LeJeune. One of my investigators would like to talk to you.”

  LeJeune hesitated, but then stopped and turned to face them again. Spere replaced Hazel in the doorway. “Keep your eye on that screen,” he said. Wingate’s triangle had been motionless for about a minute. To LeJeune he said, “Could you come here and radio your colleague again?”

  LeJeune approached and took her radio out.

  “Just keep her on for a minute or so.”

  LeJeune wore a distrustful look, but she understood that something was changing. “Bellecourt, come in.”

  The other officer’s voice came through. “Bellecourt.” LeJeune looked at Spere, who was gazing over his shoulder. He rotated his index finger at her, to tell her to keep going.

  “Have you called in the two cars?”

  “Mastaw is on his way. I’m just calling in Constable Young.”

  The whole time she was talking, Spere waved her away from the van, frantically flapping his whole hand at her. She stepped away, five paces, ten. He waved her farther back.

  “Good then,” she said. “Are you off-shift now?”

  “Just left,” said Bellecourt.

  Spere made the okay sign with his thumb and finger, and LeJeune said goodbye. “What the hell is going on?”

  “I had to make sure,” he said. “There was interference.” He half-turned. “Did you see it?”

  “It flickered,” Hazel said, “Wingate’s triangle.”

  “Every time your constable spoke. And the interference was as strong with you standing right beside the van as twenty metres away. So it’s not your radio that’s causing it. Or our equipment.”

  “Causing what,” the commander said frostily.

  “We have a man in Sparrow’s right now,” Spere said. “He’s got a tracking device on him. When you were talking to your constable, the signal fluctuated. More or less in time with her transmissions.”

  “Why?” said Hazel, leaning in to look at the screen. “Oh … oh, shit.” She turned back to LeJeune. “She’s under there, for Christ’s sake.” LeJeune’s radio was rising into position. “No. Put that down. Just go find Lee Travers.”

  “You think he’s still here?” said LeJeune, her face registering new knowledge.

  “Who’s Travers?” said Greene, but Hazel was plunging past him with her hand out.

  “Give me your keys,” she said to LeJeune. Spere kept calling to her from inside of the van. “Hazel – Hazel … you better come here.”

  “Tell me what is going on,” LeJeune said.

  “Girls,” Hazel said to her. “That’s what your constable is involved in, with her hunky fiancé. Kidnapped girls. Now give me your keys.”

  “Shoes,” said Reserve Constable Lydia Bellecourt. They were standing in the laundry room with the stairs that led up to the house. Wingate kicked them off and she leaned over them. “Which one?”

  “Which one what.”

  “Are you carrying a tracker up your ass, Detective? Because I can check there.”

  “Left.”

  She pulled up the insole from the left shoe and unpeeled the tracker from its underside. It was a sticker with a tiny metal transmitter stuck in the middle of it. A small red light shone along its rim. She put it on a step and smashed it with the butt of the Ruger. “Anything else I should know about?” she asked.

  “The second that signal fails, they’ll be on their way.”

  “They’ll be at least twenty metres off. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what they do. Come on.”

  She held her hand out in mock gentility, and he walked ahead of her. “Did your partners find you in the police service,” he asked, “or did they put you through the academy to get you in place here?”

  “Not partners.”

  “What?”

  “Partner. I’m monogamous. Not like these sluts and the garbage that fuck them.”

  “Sorry, my mistake. Partner. Did he make you what you are, Lydia?”

  She held the gun on him as he ascended the stairs to the television room. Then she steered him down the hall that had the bedrooms in it, and to another door. It led down to another part of the basement. “The way people honour each other is different from relationship to relationship. Watch your head.”

  He walked down to the bottom and she nudged him to the right with the end of the rifle barrel, and he turned and waited beside another door. She opened this one with a key and flicked a switch. He was hit with the stench almost at the same moment the light reached his eyes. It was a smell that made him recoil. She led him in, and he put his hand to his mouth to filter the air. The guard named Gene was lying on a packed dirt floor, the earth around his head stained a wet purple. “What will happen, Detective, is that I’m going to radio my skip in a couple of minutes and tell her and your people to come on up here. And they’re going to wait at the distance I tell them to until I’m satisfied everything that needs doing is done. And then you can come out and dust yourself off. How does that sound?”

  �
��Sounds like a lot of moving parts, Constable.”

  “I’m a multi-tasker. Here we are.”

  He’d been trying to inscribe on his memory the desolation of this hopeless pit as she moved him through it. There were paths of cardboard on the ground, crisscrossing the little space, leading to a wall with four doors in it. These were the holding pens, he gathered. The whole space was perhaps four hundred square feet. The wall to his right had a steel door set in it.

  “No expense spared,” said Bellecourt. Someone had dug out this space. Just a small borer and a conveyor to the surface would have moved the dirt out. Probably it had been spread in the fields. The fields and the underground river had offered them perfect cover.

  Bellecourt unlocked the heavy steel door. The moment it was open a crack, a pair of thin arms shot out of the space and scrabbled along the thick wall. Bellecourt smashed the arms with a downward swing of the rifle and a piercing cry shocked his ears. “Get back, whores,” she shouted. “Get back or get shot.”

  She pulled the door open further. Wingate saw two women within, blinded by the sudden light. Both shielded their eyes and cried out. He recognized Cherry. Bellecourt had the gun at his back.

  “Get in. We’ll sort you all out later.”

  He walked into the space. It was ten by ten. The door closed behind him and he heard the workings of a heavy lock rotate the deadbolt into its concrete pocket.

  “No … no …,” whimpered one of the voices. He felt a hand on his arm.

  “It’s me,” he said, covering the hand. “Cherry, it’s me.”

  “We are dead. Dead now.”

  “I’m Detective Constable James Wingate,” he said, reaching out to the girl he didn’t recognize. “I’m going to get you out of here.”

  “No,” she said, avoiding his touch. “We will never leave here.”

  Hazel was already in LeJeune’s cruiser, waiting with the window down for an opportunity to get moving. LeJeune had placed a call to someone she trusted in the casino and as they feared, Travers was nowhere to be found. They’d had the drop on them all along, Bellecourt and Travers. They’d controlled their every move. And now Wingate had gone silent, and the woman was down there, holding all of the cards.