Page 22 of One Minute Out

I don’t know why I say the next words that come out of my mouth, but it’s probably due to the crippling guilt I am feeling right now about my responsibility for the fate of those women in the red room. “What happened to you... it isn’t your fault.”

She waves a hand. “Other girls taken from nightclubs, from normal jobs, from other places. Other girls tricked into sex. I taken from brothel. I make sex for money. I am not victim.”

Blowing out a sigh, I reply with, “After what has happened to you, only a true victim would say she was no victim.”

But I see I’m not getting through to her. Talking isn’t my strong suit; it’s why I tend to shoot people in the face instead. But I try again. “If you help me help those girls, you can do some good.”

She shakes her head. “You no help those girls. You hurt those girls when you came.”

Yeah, I know.

She looks me over. “Why you kill old man?”

“He was a Serbian general in the war. A bad one. War crimes.”

She rolls her eyes. “The war? You mean the war before I was born?”

“Yeah.”

“Nobody care about that war. You come and kill him for it, and now the girls suffer.”

I nod. “I get it.”

She adds, “Girls are gone. Taken away, somewhere else.” After a moment of silence she softens, sips her beer, and says, “Soon new girls taken from Moldova.”

“This shit happens every day around the world, doesn’t it?” I hadn’t even been thinking about the larger picture of this. Only the women and girls I saw who, by my actions, were condemned to more brutality.

She shrugs. “I do not know the world. I know only Tiraspol, Belgrade, and here. But yes... every day some new girl has freedom taken away.”

More to myself than to her, I say, “The shit I’ve seen in this life...” My voice trails off because the shit I’ve seen in this life is not really any of her business, but she surprises me with her response.

She takes a long swig of the beer and then she turns to face me again. “The shit you see. What it make you want to do?”

I think about the question. “It makes me want to kill people.”

“Yes. I want kill people, too.” She nods. “But that does not make everything better.”

Maybe she’s right. Maybe she’s wrong. I see the shittiest parts of humanity, and it is a soul-sucking experience, but at least I have an outlet. I am an assassin.

A killer of men.

Someone like Liliana... a baker forced into prostitution by economic hardship, then kidnapped into slavery. What can she do but sit there and take the world as it comes at her like a monster reaching out from under her bed?

Neither of us speaks for over a minute. Finally I break the uncomfortable silence. “When you get home to Moldova, I wouldn’t go back to Tiraspol.”

She nods. “I go back to bakery. It is safe. No one steal baker for sex traffic.”

She has the right idea, and I clink my beer bottle against hers. She starts to bring it back to her mouth while she keeps her eyes across the street, but she stops suddenly and points out the window. “There! That cop, getting out of the car.”

It’s a white SUV with the Mostar police logo in blue on the side. A driver climbs out and steps up to the sidewalk, opening the back door of the vehicle when he does so.

“You know him? From the farm?”

“Yes. He not in charge. But he always with man in charge.”

The passenger side opens now, and almost as soon as the man steps out, Liliana recoils. “He man in charge.”

A cop in his forties wearing a smart uniform takes off his cap, rubs his hand over his short gray stubble, and then replaces it.

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