Code of Conduct

CHAPTER 9

There had been a hint of something in her voice. Was it melancholy? Ben Mordechai wasn’t sure and tried to sort it out as he walked.

Helena had never been what anyone would consider “stable.” While she hid her problems well, she was an emotional and psychological basket case. Had Mordechai gone through what she had suffered, he probably would have been too.

Hers was but one story among thousands in Eastern Europe. Young girls who had been tricked into the sex trade. Rings of professional traffickers lured them away from their villages. They were promised jobs as nannies with nice families in England or France. While they waited in a neighboring country for their alleged visas to be processed, they were raped, beaten, and hooked on drugs.

Their passports were withheld from them, and they were told horror stories about what would happen to their families back home if they went to the authorities. There were always families back home. The traffickers rarely picked the girls unless they had a substantial piece of leverage they could use on them.

Once broken, the girls were shipped to countries around the world. Helena wound up in Israel.

It was a national stain few Israelis would dare admit. The record, though, spoke for itself. When it got too bad to be ignored, the government would take action, but soon enough its blind eye would return.

Helena was held in the southern West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba. There she and the other girls were forced to perform sex acts with twelve to fifteen men a day. Some were Jews. Some were Palestinians. Many were businessmen from Tel Aviv whom her pimps had inveigled.

If she failed to do what she was told, she was beaten. If she failed to please the customers, she was beaten. If she was too ill to perform, she was beaten and starved.

On one occasion, Helena took so sick she almost died. If it had not been for the other girls sharing their food and nursing her, she never would have made it.

When one girl, a woman Helena deeply cared for, did die — that was her breaking point. The girl had been beaten to death by one of the customers — a wealthy but very drunk businessman. The pimps should have returned the favor. At least there would have been some semblance of justice done. Instead, they got rid of her body and blackmailed the man. With the money, they brought in two more girls. They were very young. Helena could still remember what it was like to be young. She had had enough. That was the night she snapped.

Because of the constant threat of terrorism, many Israelis carried concealed weapons. They were not allowed to bring them into the brothel, but customers who were known, trusted, and had paid a premium were allowed to.

There was a special area with small, pistol-sized lockers where they could lock up their weapons. Many of them feigned using the lockers or bypassed them altogether. One such customer was a client of Helena’s. He liked her, a lot. But it wasn’t reciprocal.

He often drank before arriving and then had a couple of drinks more before heading upstairs. He was a mean man who liked to get rough. Some nights, he would show up with a garment bag and word would quickly reach Helena. Those nights never ended well. Not that any of her nights trapped in that nightmare ever did.

Inside the garment bag was the wedding dress of the man’s wife. As far as the woman knew, it was safely in storage, waiting to be handed down to their eldest daughter. He made Helena wear it while he disparaged his wife in absentia for getting too fat to fit into it. He was a jeweler and completed his sick fantasy by placing a replica of his wife’s wedding ring on Helena’s finger.

The more he would talk about his wife, the angrier he would become. And as his anger increased, so too did the level of pain and abuse he heaped upon Helena — until the night she snapped.

As it always did, word spread when the jeweler arrived that he was not only downstairs but that he had brought the garment bag with him. By the time he made it upstairs, Helena was ready for him.

He was unsteady on his feet, his eyes glassy. More inebriated than normal. She could smell his putrid, alcohol-soaked breath halfway across the room.

Reaching into his jacket pocket, he pulled out the small velvet box and threw it at her, telling her to put the ring on.

She did as he asked and waited for him to hand her the garment bag to put on the dress. She had everything planned. The request didn’t come.

Instead, the man unbuckled his trousers and told her to come kneel in front of him. When Helena asked him if he was sure he didn’t want her to change, the man barked obscenities at her.

He was making too much noise. If her pimps heard him this angry, they would step in, blame her, and she would take a terrible beating. She hurried to comply in the hope it would get him to quiet down.

The string of invectives continued until she was on her knees in front of him. Only then did he stop shouting at her.

He was a disgusting ape of a man covered in coarse, curly dark hair. The mere thought of him was enough to repulse her. The mere thought of any of the men that visited the brothel was enough to repulse her. She refused to judge any of the women who sought to escape the horror of their lives through the drugs the pimps provided. She herself had freely used the drugs throughout. But not tonight. Tonight she was sober.

It made doing her “job” even more difficult, but it was amazing what the body could be coaxed into doing if the mind was set upon a compelling goal.

Kneeling there in front of the jeweler, Helena prepared. He wobbled momentarily, unsteady on his feet. She paused, wondering if the man was possibly about to pass out. Mistake.

Angry that she was taking so long, the jeweler slapped her in the side of her head. The blow was so severe, blood began to trickle from her left ear.

She looked up at him half in anger, half in shock. When she did, the man punched her right in the face.

There was the crack of cartilage as he broke her nose, accompanied by a spray of blood.

He pushed her over backward with such force that her head struck the floor and she began to black out. She struggled to maintain consciousness.

Stripping off the rest of his clothes, the man then threw himself on top of her. He landed with his full weight, knocking the air from her lungs. It felt like being crushed under a collapsed, stone wall.

His coarse, wiry hair chafed against her skin like rough wool. She could feel his pawing hand searching her body for where her legs met. As she fought to breathe, and the air finally returned to her lungs, she struggled to move out from underneath the man. As soon as she did, he dug his teeth into her breast.

She began to scream, but caught herself. Instead, she felt for her weapon. It wasn’t much — an old razor blade taped to a toothbrush — but it was all she had.

Grabbing as much of his hair as she could, she pulled his head away from her chest and bent his neck backward, exposing his soft, fleshy throat. She didn’t think twice about what she did next.

Cutting as hard and as deep as she could, she pulled the razor from his left ear all the way across to almost his other ear before the toothbrush broke from the amount of force she was applying. It didn’t matter. The job was already done.

She let go of his hair and watched as his hands flew upward. He clutched desperately at his neck and throat. His eyes, which had been wide with surprise, were now white with fear.

Shoving him backward with every ounce of strength she possessed, she toppled him sideways and quickly moved to get away from him and the blood that was spurting from his fatal wound. Even if help could be summoned, there was no saving him. He was a dead man.

She had hidden extra clothing in the room. After quickly cleaning herself at the sink, she got dressed.

She went through his pockets and took his wallet, his watch, and jewelry. She took his cell phone though she didn’t have a soul in the world she could call to come rescue her — it might have maps or access to other information she might need. She also took his gun.

She had no idea what caliber it was or what company had manufactured it. All she knew was that it was loaded, and that the man also travelled with a spare magazine. As best she could tell, she had somewhere around thirty rounds total. More than enough.

She had only fired a weapon a handful of times in her life. She had an older cousin who had been a soldier. Sometimes, when he was home visiting, he liked to get drunk and let the younger cousins fire his sidearm.

She had enough experience to know that she had to pull the slide all the way back in order to seat a round from the magazine into the chamber. The pistol was already chambered, though, and as she did that, the existing round was ejected.

It rolled somewhere, maybe under the bed. She didn’t have the time to worry about it. If everything she was about to do hinged on one round, she was destined for defeat anyway.

Holding one small towel against her nose to help stanch the bleeding, she wrapped another towel over the pistol and exited the room.

The back door was locked and only led to a small courtyard anyway, surrounded by an eight-foot-high wall topped with barbed wire. The only way out was through the front door. The only way to the front door, though, was through the salon.

Helena had long ago given up on God. No matter how badly she begged Him to save her, He had never come to her rescue. She had resigned herself to having been abandoned. This night, though, felt different.

Now she prayed like she had never prayed before. She prayed all the way down the stairs and into the salon. She felt the eyes of clients and of the girls on her. They were saying things to each other, whispering at first as she passed with the bloody towel clamped to her face and blood trickling down her neck from her left ear.

It was a spectacle, but nothing those who worked at the brothel hadn’t seen before. Girls were beaten up. It was part of the business.

What they hadn’t seen before was one of the girls crossing the salon, walking up to the muscle at the door, pulling a semiautomatic pistol, and shooting him in the chest. Whispers turned to screams.

Helena stood frozen, unsure what to do. When the door to the office opened, something took over. Her arm came up and she watched, almost detached, as the pistol fired. The man fell dead, as did the man behind him as she fired again.

There was a rush behind her and she spun to see clients running to the lockers to get their guns. One after another, she shot them.

There were shouts from the back of the brothel as the last two pimps ran into the salon with their fully automatic rifles, convinced they were under some sort of terrorist assault. Helena changed magazines, hid the weapon behind her back, and waited for them.

When they saw her and her battered face, they immediately disqualified her as the threat. She nodded toward the lockers.

That was all the pimps needed. They charged in the direction she had indicated. As soon as they had passed, she shot both of them in the back of the head.

Her bloodlust not yet sated, she walked back into the salon. Four men cowered along the wall near the bar. She shot each of them before heading upstairs.

She could read which girl was in each room, and she knocked and called them to come out. She told them it was safe. Once all the doors were open and everyone was in the hallway, she separated the girls off, and shot each of the remaining men. Then without a word, she turned and walked back downstairs.

The door was ajar, and she could see the lights of the town. Freedom. But with no passport and no one to help her, what exactly was she escaping to? At the moment, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she get out.

As she was stepping toward the door, her foot got caught between two of the bodies. Or so she had thought.

Looking down, she saw one of the pimps. Half of his lower jaw was missing and blood was pouring from a hole in his chest. Even so, he still had enough strength remaining to grab her around the ankle. In his other hand was the small pistol he kept in his pocket and had used in the past to pistol-whip unruly clients and even one or two of the girls.

Helena brought her weapon up to finish him off only to see that the slide was locked back and she was out of ammunition.

Jerking her ankle from the man’s grasp, she stomped on his opposite wrist, causing him to let go of his gun. She picked up the pistol and pulled its trigger again and again, emptying the magazine into him.

She then left the brothel. The bloodbath was over. But everything else was just beginning.