Greg Rucka - Walking dead

"And I asked for four, not three."

"Yes, you did, my friend. And here are three of them less than twenty-four hours after you asked me, all of them ready to start work. Give me until tomorrow night, the day after at the latest, I'll get you a fourth, I promise."

I considered, or pretended to, looking back at the women. The one in the corner had shifted her head slightly to watch me and, when she caught me looking, turned it back again. She was the smallest of them, and perhaps the eldest, black hair and an olive complexion, and I caught sight of the swelling at her lip before she hid her face. Her eyes were as dark as her hair, and she couldn't conceal the hatred in them.

"What happened to her?" I asked.

"You know how they are," Arzu said. "Sometimes they need it explained to them."

I nodded, because I didn't trust myself to speak.

"Let's go." Arzu put a hand on my shoulder. "We can talk business someplace more comfortable."

He guided me out of the room and into the next, where two partners or acquaintances or brothers or who the hell knew were sitting around a small table, eating their dinner. Each one of them had a pistol resting next to his plate of mezes. The one nearest us got to his feet and locked the door we'd just exited. Arzu said something in Turkish, without breaking stride, and the response followed us out of the apartment and into the early evening. Arzu took the lead, down the flight of stairs to the street. It wasn't quite evening yet, but the apartment was close enough to the mountains that the sun had dipped out of sight behind them, and the shadows were growing long as the air grew cooler.

"You talk to Vladek?" Arzu asked me.

"Recently?"

"In the last day or so."

"He's not one for chatting unless it's about business, and right now my business is with you."

Since I'd last seen Arzu, he'd left four voicemails on Vladek's phone, and sent two texts, the most recent just after nine this morning. I'd reviewed the lot, and they'd all been pretty much the same, with Arzu asking about David Mercer, trying to confirm the contact. The last one this morning had added, at the end, ALSO, ANOTHER 14?

I'd considered responding to the texts, but had discarded the idea as quickly as I'd found it as one that would only make trouble for me. If Vladek was capable of responding to a text message, after all, why wasn't he answering his phone? Best to let it lie.

"That's true. That's very true." Arzu motioned toward a black Honda CRV parked nearby. "Let me drive you back to your hotel, David."

I waited for him to unlock the car, climbed into the front passenger seat. He snapped his seatbelt into place, started the car, then immediately reached for the radio, silencing the blast of hip-hop suddenly pouring forth. I made a mental note of the street we were on, the number of the apartment block, then put my attention on Arzu. It might have been his mention of Vladek, but I was having trouble reading him, suddenly. There was no doubt that, by now, Vladek Karataev and his friends had been discovered in Batumi, which meant there was no reason not to assume that Arzu had learned that Vladek Karataev was dead. It would certainly explain why the calls and messages had stopped.

Whether or not Arzu suspected me for it was something I couldn't hazard. Based on what I'd just seen, combined with the last text he'd sent, I was sure that Tiasa was long gone, that Vladek had been correct and that Arzu had already trafficked her someplace else.

Just like in Batumi, I had lost time, and Tiasa was gone. Unlike in Batumi, I didn't have the first idea as to where.

Showing Arzu a picture of Tiasa Lagidze and asking him what he'd done with her, asking him where she was, wasn't going to work. Even questioning him about her in the most general terms would be problematic. The women Arzu dealt with weren't people, they were merchandise. Any assertion on my part to the contrary wouldn't just raise suspicion, it would mark me as his enemy. Right now, he believed we were alike.

I needed him to believe that. Unless I was willing to do to him what I'd done to Vladek, it was the only way I would get a lead on Tiasa. I needed Arzu to believe that I was willing to be his friend, rather than someone who wanted to use his head to shatter all the windows on his car.

But dammit if I wasn't thinking about doing it anyway. We'd gone all of a kilometer, winding down out of the mountain terraces that faced the Black Sea, when I asked him if he had paper for the women.

"We have their passports," Arzu said, almost absently. "Took them when they arrived, you know."

"If I'm going to move them, I'm going to need clean paper. Can you arrange that?"

"I'll give you their passports."

"You're not hearing me," I said. "Clean paper. I don't want some customs official in Rome wondering why a sixteen-year-old girl from Romania has entry stamps for Ukraine and Turkey in her passport, each of them less than a month apart. They're cracking down on this stuff, you know that."

"They say they're cracking down on it. We both know they're not." Arzu slowed for a light, letting the car coast to a stop. "Where are you taking them? Kuwait, right? Or Abu Dhabi?"

"Maybe."

"You're being like that with me? Don't you trust me?"

"I trust you completely, Arzu Bey. It's the people around you I don't know that I don't trust."

"Just us here in the car."

"Kuwait," I said.

Arzu laughed. "You're worrying about bullshit!"

"That's easy for you to say. I'm the one who's got to move them. You'll already have my money."

"Just bribe someone, David," Arzu said, starting the car rolling forward again. "That's what I did with the last one I sent that way. You'd have liked her, she was young. Very pretty, not like these others. I should've kept her."

"She went to Kuwait? You got someone I can deal with there? That would be very helpful."

"I'm sorry, no," Arzu said. "It was Dubai, she went with a couple of others. But no paper needed on any of them, just money put in the right hands, you know what I'm saying."

"Dubai isn't Kuwait."

"It's all the same, wherever you go. Europe, America, UAE, whatever. Always someone you can bribe."

I thought about what he was saying, the likelihood that Tiasa was now in Dubai. "It can get expensive that way."

"What's the saying, you have to spend money to make money?" He laughed. "Most of these girls, once they've been taught, you can make the money back in a night, two at the most."

"Speaking of money," I said.

Arzu laughed again. "Okay, I'll give you a price. Say, twenty thousand."

"That's not a price. That's a joke. Ten. Maybe."

I caught Arzu's smile from the side, realized that he was pleased with my counteroffer, pleased that I was willing to play the game. That we were haggling over human beings the way I'd haggled over the Dnepr clearly bothered him not at all.

"David, you're trying to rob me! Perhaps I can do nineteen thousand."

"Twelve."

"Eighteen."

"Fifteen."

"Seventeen. No less, I just can't, even for friends."

"Seventeen," I agreed, and I thought about it, then. I didn't have nearly that much on me in cash, but I could get it. One call to Nicholas Sargenti and a wire transfer and I could put the money in Arzu's hand before tomorrow noon. In exchange, I would take possession of three lives.

Then what? Tell them to run for it? Give them a bundle of bills and wish them good luck and Godspeed? Send them to Georgia? To New York? London? Pay for them to make their way home? And all the time, let Tiasa get further away from me; all the time, let her hours of suffering increase.

Never mind the fact that I would be paying Arzu for three lives, putting money into his pocket for trafficking in slaves.

We'd pulled up outside the hotel, Arzu letting the engine idle. I unfastened my seatbelt.