AllFreeNovel
Share Us
How to find out?
One of the best ways would be to ask those in the game. They’d know where the problem places were.
At any rate, she hoped so.
Walking confidently, Cora headed up to one of the working girls, who was standing near the side of a building. Her French wasn’t great. She didn’t know if it would be better or worse than this woman’s English, but they’d have to muddle through the conversation somehow.
"Bonjour," she said, getting right down to it. "I'm here to find my sister. I believe she was taken here by people to work in one of these places.”
The woman stared at her, abandoning some of her come-hither pose. Her eyes were intense as she looked at Cora.
“You know the places,” Cora pressured. “Where do the girls work without getting paid? Where do they get kept inside, their passports held, forced to do the job? Is there anywhere like that nearby here?”
She stared at her, keeping eye contact, hoping for a rapport and for the woman to relent and tell her.
But the woman turned immediately, her back to Cora, and swiftly walked away. If she knew, she wasn’t saying. She wasn’t even getting into the conversation.
Maybe, Cora wondered, that was a clue she was getting close.
“We try again,” she muttered to Gabe.
“Do you think it would help if I stayed back and you asked on your own?” he asked, but she shook her head. “That woman didn’t even look at you. It was the question that put her off.”
She tried again a block later. She wasn’t giving up. Different woman, same question. Same response. This woman simply turned her back and stood silently. She didn’t look at Cora again or respond to any further questions. Eventually, with a frustrated sigh, Cora walked on to join Gabe, who’d strolled ahead.
"There," Gabe said. "There, at the street corner ahead. That woman's been making eyes at me. She's stopped now that she's seen I'm with you. But maybe she'd be more willing to communicate?"
Cora headed directly for the third woman, who watched her coming looking wary.
She asked the question politely.
She waited. The woman stared at her. She was tall, with a curvaceous body but a blank hardness in her eyes.
“How do you know your sister will be in such a place?” the woman replied eventually. She spoke in English, in an accent that sounded more Eastern European than French to Cora’s ear.
“I don’t. But I’m going to start with one place and ask from there,” she explained.
The woman paused, looking thoughtful.
Then she beckoned to one of the others, who was standing nearby.
"Chiara," she said and then spoke rapidly in a language Cora didn't know at all. Chiara spoke back just as rapidly, pointing down an alleyway.
“The place we all know about, it is down there. Near the end of the street, on the right. There will be a guard outside,” she said. “But I am warning you, that place – you should not go in there. They are dangerous. They protect themselves well.”
“Thank you,” Cora said. She handed over a couple of twenty euro notes, just about her last money in the world. The payment to the Mob man who'd told her what had happened to Rose had exhausted her savings. She'd pawned her mother's ring to pay him. The ring was important, and she'd managed to reclaim it, but right now, money couldn't be tighter. She'd only just had enough to pay for their flights and the shoebox-sized hotel room where they'd checked in an hour ago.
Even so, she felt grateful for the information and that the woman had taken the time to point it out.
Now to go there.
The alley was so narrow that a vehicle could barely fit, and the cobblestones were rough and uneven. It was very dark. Cora walked almost all the way to the next tiny cross street before seeing the place she’d been told about.
Up ahead, this place? The building looked shabby as if it had seen better days. Outside the black-painted front door, a mean-looking security guard with a hard jaw and a solid build was keeping watch. He had a gun on him. She saw it immediately. She was sure he was one of many. Those women would be closely guarded.
The problem wasn't the security guard or the black door but rather the silver steel security gate that had been installed in front of the door. That looked to be firmly locked, and it would not be easy to force their way through. So that required some thought, some planning.
Inside, she saw the building stretched up to three high, narrow floors. And in that jumble of rooms, that place where women were held prisoner, perhaps she'd find the start of what they were seeking.
