Hell Gate

TWENTY-TWO

The two young women from Ukraine were brought to the waiting room outside my office by federal marshals shortly before ten o’clock Friday morning. Laura tried to make them comfortable until the interpreters arrived, but their fear was palpable.

“You take the conference room, Nan. I’ll work in here.”

“Did you get any sleep last night?”

We had broken up around eleven P.M., and Mercer dropped me off at my apartment. I soaked all the day’s tension out of me with a steaming hot bath, and a double shot of Dewar’s as my nightcap.

“Actually, I slept pretty well.”

“No nightmares about Salma?” Nan asked.

“She was crowded out by my visions of the bodies from the ship, if you know what I mean.” It was only my friends in the office and the NYPD who themselves experienced and could understand the emotional toll the job took many days.

“Did Luc call?”

“The time zones don’t help this relationship,” I said. “He left three messages, but it was crazy for me to wake him up in the middle of the night.”

“Have you seen Battaglia?”

“I haven’t talked to anyone this morning. If he didn’t come looking for me, I figure I’m already ahead of the game. Mike’s at the autopsy, Mercer’s leading the canvass of Salma’s apartment, and I’m with you. No McKinney, no Spindlis, no bad karma, no new bodies on land or sea. So far, so good.”

“I’m cooking dinner at home tonight. We have a few neighbors coming in. Want to join us?” Nan asked.

“I’ve had a better offer. I’m going to babysit for Logan while Mercer and Vickee go to a family party. I’ll skip out early if everything stays calm.”

“Good for you. The little guy has to eat something, you know? That’s pretty hard when the sitter can’t cook.”

“All planned,” I said, standing to greet the pair of interpreters who were presenting themselves at Laura’s desk.

The Simchuk sisters appeared to be in their midthirties. They introduced themselves in lightly accented English, detailed their academic backgrounds and experience, and listened carefully as I explained why it was necessary for Nan and me to separate each of the witnesses-victims, despite whatever Donny Baynes and Mike Chapman thought of their possible involvement in criminal affairs-as we started the process of questioning them.

“I’ll take the younger girl,” I said to Nan. “Let’s see how we do.”

Ms. Simchuk invited the teenager to come into my office. The two girls looked at each other but neither one moved. Simchuk tried to coax them gently but they refused to stand up.

I knelt beside her and put my hand on her arm, but she recoiled as though I’d been about to slap her. “Tell them they’ll be safe with us,” I said. “Tell them that’s our job-to help women who’ve been hurt.”

The older one spoke softly, in Ukrainian. “If she goes with you, do I see her again?”

They had been separated from all of the others on the ship. How could they possibly know what would come next in this strange new land?

“They will be together in a very nice house tonight,” I said. “A safe house. Nan and I will take them there ourselves. They’ll be very well taken care of by the staff.”

The third time the pair of interpreters worked on their subjects, the girls released each other’s hands, embraced, and followed us as we took them in different directions. I brought the tall, slender woman into my office and drew three chairs into a small circle. The desk would impose too much formality between us.

I asked the marshal to sit behind the girl-a slip of paper told me her name was Olena-out of her range of sight, simply to be an observer, as Donny Baynes had insisted.

“My name is Alexandra. Alex to my friends. What’s your name?”

Everything took twice as long to do through an interpreter. It would take half an hour before the two of them became more or less comfortable with each other-if at all-and as long as that for me to get a sense of whether Ms. Simchuk was editing the translation, intentionally or not. Sometimes a feeling of empathy for what the subject had undergone seeped into what I hoped would be a word-for-word retelling of the facts.

“She is Olena,” Simchuk said, trying to warm the girl up with a smile. “In our language it means the light of the sun.”

I was getting the edit already. Olena had answered with only one word. The interpreter gave me more. There was no need to correct her yet, until the substance of the responses became more critical.

“Are you warm enough?”

The girl nodded but didn’t speak.

“Are you hungry?”

She looked at Simchuk out of the corner of her eye.

“Would you like a good breakfast, Olena? Some eggs and some fresh juice?”

Again she shook her head up and down. She didn’t look any happier for the suggestion that we feed her, but she clearly wanted to eat.

I stepped to the door and asked Laura to order in from the coffee shop for both of the girls. Neither one looked like she’d been fed well in a long time.

“How old are you, Olena?”

The answer was too long to have been her age.

“What will become of her, she wants to know,” Simchuk said. “She says she won’t answer questions until you tell her that.”

I had no idea what would become of her. She seemed to sense that in my hesitation.

“What would you like to do, Olena? Of all the things you could choose, what would you like to happen to you now that you’re here?”

Simchuk translated and the girl shrugged her shoulders.

“Do you want to go home? Do you want to go back to Ukraine?”

Her eyes widened and the vehemence with which she responded was a universal no.

I asked questions and still I got nowhere. “Why did you want to come to America, Olena? Did you know anyone else on the boat? Was someone you know supposed to meet you here?”

They were all met by a stony silence and a scowl more serious than the teenage pouts that regularly confronted me in my office.

“Tell her this, Ms. Simchuk, if you would.” I explained what the district attorney’s office is and how it functions. I told her about the creation of our unique unit, and the pioneering work we had done since the 1970s, to address the terrible epidemic in our own country of violence against women and children. Olena wouldn’t make eye contact with me at first, but began to pay attention when I told her specifics of some of the cases that I had handled involving girls who were roughly her age.

The food was delivered and we left her alone for fifteen minutes, as Nan left her shipmate, so that they could see that we hoped they would relax, that we would continue to respond to their needs, and that we wanted them to be comfortable in our offices.

“How far have you gotten?” I asked Nan.

She held up her thumb and forefinger in a circle. “Goose egg. She’s not talking until I tell her what we’re going to do with them,” Nan said. “And I don’t mean this weekend, I mean next week and the week after.”

“They must have made a pact not to talk.”

“Well, we certainly can’t lie. They’ve had enough of that to last a few lifetimes.”

Laura signaled to me that Olena had come out to discard her garbage.

“Round two. I’m trying to tell her about other girls who’ve been saved from this awful trafficking life. I’ll let you know if it works.”

I told a few more stories about teens who’d been forced into prostitution, which seemed to impact Ms. Simchuk more than it did Olena.

“Where these girls live now?” Simchuk asked me.

“That’s you speaking, or Olena?”

“Olena.”

The conversation picked up and within the next half hour, the interpreting became far smoother as I tried to answer questions that the girl wanted to know. She was beginning to open up a bit.

“Where they live and what they are doing now depends on their age in some cases. Depends on how willing they were to cooperate,” I said. “Young ones have been adopted here by families from their own countries. Others have gone to school to study, to learn a trade.”

“Tell me about detention centers.”

I looked at Olena while I spoke, letting Simchuk describe the impossible dilemma the government often faced when dealing with large groups of illegals who’d been smuggled into the country.

“We can try to get you asylum,” I said. “There are organizations, good people who will fight for you.”

Olena picked up her head. “Will you fight for me? I want to know if you will fight for me.”

“Of course I will. I’ll do everything I can to make you safe.”

Her head dropped to her chest again and she spoke to Ms. Simchuk, who gave me the answers. “Sixteen. She wants you to know she is sixteen years old.”

I was poker-faced. Olena was getting ready to disgorge to me the ugly facts of her young life. Any sign of shock that I displayed might be off-putting to her, so I prepared to listen to her story while she was in the mood to tell it.

“Be precise, please,” I said to Ms. Simchuk. “Speak exactly the words she tells you. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“Certainly.”

It was well over an hour after we started, and now I would be hearing Olena’s story through the voice of another woman.

“I was fourteen when I ran away from home. My father was an alcoholic who had a girlfriend and my mother beat me. He was never home, and she was cruel. Not to my brothers, but to me.”

Olena described life in her small town and her dreams of escaping it. The fall of the Soviet Union caused many of the small satellites formerly in its grasp to suffer economic collapse. I knew that its borders had become porous, and that human rights activists estimated that as much as 10 percent of the female population of countries like Ukraine had been sold into prostitution.

Ms. Simchuk continued to narrate. “A neighbor in the village-this is very poor village, you understand-told my mother she could have money, maybe five hundred dollars-from guy who was coming to find wife for a man in Italy. I heard them talking. My mother agreed this is good idea.”

Olena paused and took a long drink of water. “Next day, instead of going to school, I ran away and I hid in the forest.”

“By yourself?”

“Yes, alone.”

“For how long?”

“Three days. Till I was so hungry I couldn’t stand it. Went back to my town. Me and my friend decided to leave Kotovs’k. She knew guy who would take us to new life. Would pay us the money, not my mother.”

“To get married?”

“No. I’m too young to get married,” Olena said to Simchuk, with the hint of a wistful smile. “Pay us seven hundred dollars each to work in kafane. To be a waitress there. Sometimes to dance with the boys who come in.”

“Kafane? What’s that?” I asked. “A place?”

“No, no. Is word. It means a café sort of bar,” Simchuk said. “They often operate as brothels in many towns. That’s why I was surprised. Forgot to make translation.”

“Try not to show your own feelings to Olena,” I said. “She’ll shut down if you make judgments about what she did.”

“I understand. It just happened, is all.”

“This place was in your town? In Kotovs’k?”

“No, no. Is far away.”

“Who made the promise to you?”

Olena looked up and fixed on my eyes. “Why?”

“Do you know the man who made the promise to you? To give you that money?”

“I didn’t see him till we get there. My friend Karyn tell me. She come too.”

“Did you learn his name?”

“You want name?” There was a defiance in Olena’s voice as she said that to Simchuk.

“Yes, please.”

“Name is Zmey,” and as Simchuk said that to me she giggled nervously.

“You’re laughing now?” I said to the interpreter. Olena didn’t seem any more pleased about that than was I.

“Sorry. I wasn’t expecting that. She says his name is Dragon. In Ukraine, Zmey is a dragon who is green, with three heads, and spitting fire all the time.”

“You said you met Zmey when you got ‘there,’ Olena. Where, exactly?”

“Why is important this, she wants to know? Was two years ago.”

“I think it will help explain to me why you are here today. It lets me know the kind of care we need to give you.” It might also let me understand the level of desperation that had fueled this tragic voyage she undertook at such a tender age.

Olena’s back hunched over as she went on with her story. “They took us to Macedonia. To a town called Velesta.”

My heart sank. Trafficking was the only industry in that small town, which international police agencies had long considered one of the most dangerous places for young women introduced to the sex trades.

“I know Velesta,” I told her. “I know what goes on there. Did you have papers of any kind? A passport?”

Olena looked at me as though I was stupid to ask the question. “What for would need papers? Karyn and me, we traveled in the trunk of a car, of a boy from Kotovs’k. Don’t need papers in car trunk.”

From Ukraine, she had been smuggled through Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria-across the Danube at some point-stopping occasionally at night at the homes of men friendly to smugglers. Border guards were bribed to look the other way, I knew from my experience with other cases.

“What happened when you reached Velesta?”

It was a long, slow process to get the story from Olena. I couldn’t push her, for fear she would stop altogether.

“What do you think happened? The Dragon put me to work in the kafane.”

I needed to hear her words, her description, though I knew what it would be.

“As a waitress?”

Simchuk translated my words and Olena just glared at me.

“What kind of work?”

“You know what kind of work. You stupid if you don’t,” Simchuk said. “I’m sorry, Ms. Alex. Is her word-stupid-not mine.”

“That’s fine. Tell her I know the questions seem silly to her, but I have to ask them. Otherwise I’d just be guessing. I’d be thinking of someone else’s story that I heard another time.”

Olena listened to my reason, took a drink of water, and slumped down in her chair to continue.

“You and Karyn, where did you live?”

“No Karyn. Karyn didn’t stay with me. Dragon said she wasn’t pretty enough. Was lucky thing for Karyn.”

“And you?”

“In the basement of the kafane. Three other girls and me. For days I just cried. The door was locked and someone threw in the food and bottles of water. But the Dragon said I couldn’t come out until I stopped crying. Till I put on the lingerie like the other girls and didn’t show no tears.”

And so Olena was welcomed to her new life, her fantasies of freedom and opportunity shattered before she had been driven very far from her home in Kotovs’k-shattered in the trunk of a smuggler’s car and the dingy basement of a demon pimp.

She told us the story of how she started to work for the Dragon’s men, who owned the bar and the brothel. She told us how her youth and beauty-masked now by her abuse and the long confinement-had made her so popular among the clientele. She told us that she believed that being forced to sell her body for sexual favors was enabling her to pay off her debt to her captors, and that after a period of time they would keep their promise to let her go.

“How long were you held there, Olena?”

“I know exactly how long. Fourteen months and five days. I could tell you almost to the minute.”

The next question was one of the hardest to ask. It would imply that I expected the action I asked about. “Did you-did the other girls-ever try to escape? To run away, the way you tried to run away from your home?”

Olena swallowed hard and looked up at the light fixture on the ceiling.

“Would you like to take a break, Olena?”

“No, Ms. Alex. Not if I have to come back and you ask me again. I thought you knew this story from other girls. What is it you don’t understand?” Simchuk was trying to translate as rapidly as Olena was now talking, looking everywhere in the room except at me. “I was living in a basement with no windows, no light. I was kept there under lock and key, by men who are monsters. If I disobeyed orders-small orders to do things, when I sick or when I was exhausted-I was made to be on my hands and knees and to clean the floor with my tongue.”

Olena’s voice was flat. She made her case without any emotion built into it, a form of self-protection that had probably allowed her to survive the experience.

“I was raped over and over again. I was beaten for nothing, for no reasons at all. Passport, you ask. I’m in Macedonia then. Where can I run without papers?”

“Please, Ms. Alex,” Simchuk said after Olena stopped for a few seconds. “Is too hard on her to do this more. Please stop.”

“She’s asking you that, is she?”

“No, no. Is me who is unhappy,” Simchuk said.

“Ask her how she feels, okay? That will decide when we stop.”

Olena started to talk again. “I thought you know so much about this.”

I sat back and waited for her to look at me. “I thought I did too. Each one of you is different, Olena. I’ll never understand how you endured so much pain.”

“You want to know how I got out, yes?”

“Please.”

“I got pregnant, Ms. Alex. Was near the end of one year. Pregnant and sick all the time with it,” Olena said, tilting her head as if it would help her remember. “Was nothing sick compared to the boat ride, but was bad. When my belly got big, I was no use to the Dragon anymore. He didn’t want me. No men wanted me. Lots of younger girls to take my place.”

“Then they let you go?”

“Someone pay again,” Simchuk said, leaning in to hear the soft voice of Olena. “Everybody make money excepting me. A man whose wife and two children died in car accident, he bought me. Lived on a farm outside town.”

“Was he-?”

“Kind? You will want to know if he was kind, of course. He was good to me until I lost the baby. Miscarried, how you call it? The baby came very early. I was by myself at the house. Was already dead.”

Olena had delivered a stillborn child at the age of fifteen, without any medical care, alone at the home of a stranger in the cruel countryside of Macedonia.

“So I left. Hitchhiking to home. Hundreds and hundreds of miles.”

I must have looked incredulous. I could tell immediately that I had spooked her.

“You don’t believe possible, right? You’re thinking passport,” Simchuk picked up speed again and Olena’s staccato dialogue poured out. “My best customers, Ms. Alex, is border guards. My best customers is police who actually-first time-give money to me. Fed me and let me sleep.”

“At least you got home safe. You got home in one piece.”

“What home? My mother dead from alcohol. And my brothers don’t let me in house. I was not family anymore. It was like throwing a dog out on the street. Only some people in my town would have taken in a dog, been good to a dog.”

I didn’t have to ask why she was discarded.

“No more their sister. Now I was a whore, which everyone would tell.”

“How would anyone else know what had become of you?”

“Girls run away in Ukraine, in Moldova, in Macedonia, is the work that they are forced to do. I was naive. I believe the guys who talked to me. I get home, couldn’t be with the boys from my town, Ms. Alex.”

“You’re smart, Olena, and so pretty. You could have been with boys again, if that’s what you wanted.”

“I’m marked too many ways boys don’t want. Scars on my breast where I was burned with cigarette, bite marks on my arms that got infected. Tattoo from the Dragon where is everybody knows what it means.”

“Where is the tattoo, Olena?”

“You want to see?” she said, standing up.

“No, no. Just tell me where.”

She pointed to the same spot on her inner thigh as the tattoos I had seen on Salma Zunega and our unidentified Jane Doe #1.

I couldn’t think fast enough about what it would mean if she had the same image as they did burned onto her body almost two years ago in a small town in western Macedonia.

“What is it, Olena?”

“It’s Zmey, Ms. Alex. A green monster with three heads and fire that came from his mouth,” she said. “I was property of the Dragon. No one would touch me if they knew that.”

It had been too much to hope that Olena could lead us to the snakehead whose tattooed rose had linked Salma Zunega to one of the victims of the Golden Voyager.

“I’m going to let you rest now, Olena. It’s almost time for you to have lunch,” I said, trying to disguise my disappointment, which was meaningless in light of the odyssey she had just recounted.

“You want to know why I come on this boat, Ms. Alex?”

“Yes, Olena, I’d like to know that.”

“There is an orphanage in Kotovs’k. The nuns who run it, they took me in, let me go to school. I read about America in their books,” she said, finally offering me a smile that showed off her best features.

“I’m glad they did.”

“You had a great war once,” she said to Simchuk, and even the translator seemed happier now. I heard Olena say the name Abraham Lincoln. “Abraham Lincoln freed all the slaves in America. You have black man even who is president.”

“Yes, we do.” I thought of the hundreds of slaves who sailed to New York centuries ago and the African burial ground, just a few blocks from where we sat.

“I was a slave, too, Ms. Alex. I came to America, even though very scared still, because that can’t happen to me here.”

The wreck of the Golden Voyager may have been the only break in Olena’s young life. This wasn’t the moment for me to tell her that the American traffic in sex slaves-local and international-still flourished and thrived, and that this disastrous accident may have been the thing that saved her from another round of forced prostitution.

“No, Olena,” I said, taking her hands in mine and squeezing them. “That can’t happen to you now.”