Walking dead

BUYING?

Which meant that Vladek had planned on selling Tiasa even before he and his pals had murdered Bakhar.

For a while, that was the worst the BlackBerry gave me.

Then I found the pictures.

And the video. The photos had been taken on the phone itself, and the most sinister thing about them was that they were so very mundane. Mostly headshots of different women, different girls, one after another. In a couple, the subject was actually smiling. In a couple, the subject was crying. If I'd seen them in any other place, had known they were taken by any other person than Vladek, it would have meant nothing.

But sitting at the desk in my hotel room at the Zorlu Grand Hotel, looking at them, I could only see them as the record they undoubtedly were. The women he had taken and trafficked, one after another, kept for posterity on his phone.

There were thirty-seven of them, and I made myself look at them all.

The last picture was of Tiasa. She looked at the camera with tears running down her face, snot leaking from her nose, clearly trying to stop crying.

Vladek had taken the picture after he'd raped her. I knew that, because he had the video of it, taken the same way he'd taken the photograph. Some dirty room in a dirty building with a mattress on the floor and four men taking turns with a fourteen-year-old girl who couldn't defend herself and had nowhere to run.

In Batumi, with a puncture in his femoral, Vladek had told me what he'd done to her, and I'd known he was telling the truth, but I had hoped he wasn't. I'd hoped he was throwing spite and hatred at me, trying to deliver wounds with the only weapon he'd had left. That's what I'd hoped.

I turned off the video before I saw more, but I'd already seen too much.

I should've known better than to hope. The day after I met Arzu, he called me at the hotel. It was twenty-two minutes past four in the afternoon.

"David," he said, "I think we're in business."