The Traffickers

FIVE

2512 Hancock Street, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 5:01 A.M.

Hancock, off Lehigh Avenue, was only a couple miles southwest of the Philly Inn. It was in the section known as North Philly, which of course was due north of Center City-downtown proper-hence North Philly’s name. If the area around the Philly Inn could be described as seedy and sliding to worse, then it would be no less than a kind and charitable act to call North Philly, particularly the more and more Latino neighborhood containing Hancock Street, a miserable godforsaken slum with zero to zilch chance of redemption.

And in a dilapidated row house on Hancock, Ana Maria Del Carmen Lopez-a petite pretty seventeen-year-old Honduran with light-brown skin, long straight black hair, dark eyes, and soft facial features, including a smattering of freckles across her upper cheeks and pixie nose that made her appear even younger-was startled awake from an uneasy sleep by sounds outside her open second-story bedroom window.

Ana was lying with two younger girls from Mexico on a dirty mattress on the wooden floor of the bedroom. She first heard the familiar rattling of a lawn care utility trailer, then the squeaking springs of the dirty tan Ford panel van pulling it over the curb, across the sidewalk, and through the open gate of the vacant lot next door-where two abandoned row houses once stood before burning and being torn down-and then the white rusty Plymouth minivan with its darkened windows that followed the van and trailer into the lot.

Ana’s pulse quickened as she then heard Latin music coming from another vehicle that was accelerating up Hancock Street. While she was not surprised, she was scared. This had happened nearly every night for the two months she’d been here: One of two vans would bring the girls and others back to the house-she wasn’t sure why they had the trailer of lawn mowers out so late-and El Gato would be right on their heels to collect the cash. If everyone was lucky, he then would just take the money and drive off into the dark humid night.

At five feet eleven inches tall and 180 pounds, twenty-one-year-old Juan Paulo Delgado moved with the grace and power of a big cat-thus his nickname, “El Gato.” He had the toned, muscular body of one who worked out regularly with gym weights, which he’d learned to perfect during a short stint in the prison system. He was as fastidious as a cat in his appearance, keeping his black hair cut short and neat, his face clean-shaven, his body-with one exception-absolutely unmarked.

The exception was a small black tattoo-a gothic block letter D with three short lines on either side representing whiskers-at the base of his palm. The location made it more or less unnoticeable to the casual observer unless El Gato chose to show it. It was the same tattoo he convinced each of the girls to get when he first met them-“To show my love of family,” El Gato told them. But each girl’s whiskered D was tattooed on the neck behind the left ear, at the hairline.

The girls-at first, while they still were under his influence, desperate to believe his bullshit ruse of “love of family”-had enjoyed flashing the tattoo by pulling back their hair and smiling appreciatively, if not seductively, at El Gato.

And Juan Paulo Delgado had another catlike trait: He carried himself in such a way that one moment he could be all charm, his deep, dark eyes almost smiling-then the next moment his short Latin temper turned him intimidating, his eyes cold and hard. When his anger erupted, it made him seem much older than his twenty-one years.

Ana felt the two other girls, Jorgina and Alicia, both fourteen years old and with attractive features somewhat similar to hers, snuggle in closer for protection. Yet they all knew that there would be no protection from whatever was to come.

Of course they know, she thought. And they, too, are scared.

My bruises are almost gone.

Theirs are still dark, still fresh and with much pain…

There was the grating of the wooden slats of the gate as it was being slid closed on the vacant lot. And when that was done-and only after the gate was closed and its chain locked-there came the slamming of the van’s front doors and the sliding open of the rusty side doors of the minivan for the half-dozen girls to exit.

Footsteps could be heard as the girls were herded through the backyard to the back door of the row house, then into their bedrooms. There they, like Ana and Jorgina and Alicia, were kept more or less warehoused, guarded under lock and key until sent out to work-which could be any hour of the day or night.

Ana did not think that the round-the-clock watch was really necessary. If the fear of being beaten again was not enough to keep the girls from trying to get away, then the threats made against their families certainly was. Proof of that was that almost no one tried to get away.

No one but Rosario, may the Holy Father protect her wherever she ran off to.

And then there were the other invisible barriers, among them not having any papers proving who they were-those girls who actually had, for example, a birth certificate had them taken by El Gato “to keep them safe.” Also, the girls could speak only Spanish-and with no real formal education could barely read it-and so they had no understanding of exactly where they were and especially where they could go. Certainly not to the police, whose screaming woop-woop sirens they heard piercing the night. Back home, they’d learned polic?a could not be completely trusted.

And so the fear of the unknown was as strong a deterrent as any of the iron shackles or guarded doors.

Ana listened closely for what would happen next.

Usually, El Gato simply stopped in the street, and Amando or Omar or Eduardo or Jes?s handed over to him the cash-usually in a backpack-and exchanged a few words-or none-and then his Chevrolet Tahoe accelerated up Hancock and made the turn onto Lehigh Avenue as he headed toward his nice converted warehouse apartment in Manayunk, a gentrifying middle-class section on the banks of the Schuylkill River in Northwestern Philly.

Occasionally, however, he came into one of the houses and dealt with whatever problem there had been that night-most often a girl who had not performed for a client as expected or another who needed “encouragement” to work.

El Gato, Ana thought, always says he does not like raising a hand to us girls.

But I think the reason is not because he doesn’t like to hurt people-I think he does, and pray that God may punish him-it is because the marks he puts on us make the men not want to pay.

So we stay locked up till the marks go away…

Ana heard the sounds of tires climbing the curb-El Gato liked to park his SUV off the narrow street, its right-side wheels crushing the weeds growing in the sidewalk cracks-then the engine being turned off. Next came a door being opened and shut, followed by a short honk that reported a button on the remote had been pushed to lock the SUV’s doors and activate its alarm.

Ana suddenly realized that the sounds had caused her palms to sweat and that she had begun to slightly shake. She felt one of the girls, who apparently recognized the shaking for what it was, rubbing her back in a calming fashion.

Dear God, please do not let him come up here.

I told him again and again I do not know where Rosario went.

Another beating will not change that.

She next heard the unlocking of the front door, then the heavy footfalls quickly pounding up the flight of wooden steps. Finally, the bedroom door swung open.

Faint light from the streetlights up Hancock bled in through the open window, which had been wedged open to provide the room with some-any-air circulation on the hot humid night. El Gato was dimly lit in the doorway.

Maybe with my bruises almost gone he is taking me to work?

Please, no…

As El Gato approached the bed, she saw something fall from his hand, then heard it make a soft bump as it hit the wooden floor. Ana suddenly curled up defensively in the fetal position. Then, when he grabbed her by the collar of her T-shirt, the two younger girls back-crawled off the mattress to a dark corner of the room.

“No…” Ana softly said, and whimpered in anticipation of what was about to come.

Breathing heavily, Juan Paulo Delgado hovered ominously over her.

Ana smelled the alcohol on his breath, some beer probably and what had to be tequila. She could visualize his cold hard eyes in the dark even though she could not clearly see them. Then she heard him grunt-and saw his right arm in silhouette suddenly swing back, then forward, his palm finding her face. As she recoiled, her T-shirt ripped in his left hand.

“No mas! No mas, por favor!” she cried out, wishing that this all was just another nightmare. But she then felt the sting of his backhanded slap, and she understood with painful clarity that this was building to be the real thing. Again.

“You fucking bitches! Every one of you!” Delgado yelled in English, then swung again, this time striking her with a balled fist. He switched to Spanish: “I helped you, made you family, and how do you repay me?”

Ana looked away from El Gato, trying to hold her small hands to her face as protection.

“You want to see your cousin?” he went on in Spanish, and hit her again. “I take you to Rosario! I’m through with the both of you!”

Ana began to sob. She did not understand; for months now she had been doing the disgusting work for El Gato, selling her body to repay her passage debt-and now her room and board-to him. As had Rosario. And it was not Ana’s fault that Rosario had had enough and finally run off. Though Ana knew that it was futile to try to make that point now.

El Gato again cursed her, and her cousin, then hit her again.

The salty taste of sweat on Ana’s lips now mingled with a metallic one-and she recognized the warm sticky fluid as her blood.

As El Gato yelled-there was a furiousness in his voice that she had never before heard, even during the other beatings-she silently prayed, Holy Mother of God, please make him stop.

But he began striking her repeatedly, the sickening thuds of his fist on her face triggering whimpers of sympathy-or fear, or both-from Alicia and Jorgina, who were clinging to each other in the corner of the bedroom.

Then she stopped sobbing, made an awful groan, and went limp.

And Ana Maria Del Carmen Lopez’s prayer was answered; he stopped beating her.

Alicia and Jorgina, fearful El Gato would turn and unleash his fury on them, tried to silence their whimpering. They watched in the dimness as he walked back to the doorway, picked up what he’d dropped on the floor, then returned to Ana.

The sound of a strip of heavy tape being ripped from its roll came next. Delgado applied that over Ana’s mouth and nose. He then took the roll of heavy tape and wrapped her wrists behind her back, then bound together her ankles.

He threw the roll of tape back on the floor, then grunted as he dragged Ana’s limp body out the door and let it fall with a dull thud.

A moment later, he came back into the room.

Alicia and Jorgina recoiled.

El Gato walked over to them in the corner. He got down on one knee and in Spanish softly said, “It will be okay now,” then reached out with his left hand and stroked Alicia’s hair, his fingers brushing her tattoo in the process.

Then he pulled from the front pocket of his blue jeans two paper packets and tossed them to the floor by the girls. Without looking, the girls knew what they were.

Each small packet-the size of a business card-was white and had a rubber stamp imprint in light blue ink of a cartoonish block of Swiss cheese, on either side of which were three lines that shot outward-not unlike the lines of their D tattoos-and above the cheese the legend QUESO AZUL.

“If you’re good, and I know you will be, I will bring you more,” he said, then stroked Jorgina’s hair and stood and left the room.

Alicia and Jorgina heard the thump, thump, thump of El Gato dragging Ana down the stairs. Then the back door opening, then the sliding of the minivan door, then the grating of the wooden slat gate of the lot. There was a banging of metal tools in the lawn care trailer, then the slamming shut of a minivan door.

The Plymouth spun its wheels in the dirt and gravel of the lot, the tires chirping as it quickly drove off the sidewalk and up the street.

In the now eerie silence of the dirty bedroom, fourteen-year-old Alicia and Jorgina clung to each other and started crying uncontrollably.

After a few minutes, Jorgina reached for one of the paper packets. She opened the flap at the end, took the tiny straw from inside, put that to her nose, and snorted the brown powder contents of the packet.