Trafficked

‘You shouldn’t have spent your money on me, but it’s very thoughtful of you, Johnny.’ She patted his hand before turning away. Mann followed her through to the kitchen.

‘Nonsense—it’s a pleasure. How have you been, Mum?’

She put the kettle on. ‘I’m fine. You don’t need to worry about me.’

He watched her make tea. He liked the familiarity of her actions—her hands never dithered or wavered. Her actions were always measured and decisive and her fingers moved with grace.

She was not a gabbler or a waster of words. She was a woman who took her time and thought things through. She was a holder-in of emotions. He had never once heard her raise her voice in uncontrolled anger. Molly didn’t boil over, she just simmered. She was prickly, almost, except her heart was soft—not everyone could see or knew that, but Mann did.

He looked around him. Something was missing in the flat—the maid hadn’t come in to say hello to him as she always did.

‘Where’s Deborah?’

‘Day off.’ Molly didn’t turn to look at him as she answered.

‘Mum?’ He could tell by her sudden busyness—looking for a teaspoon in a drawer for seconds that she knew where to put her hand on at once—that she was not telling him the whole story.

She glanced over to him on her way to get milk from the fridge.

‘Well, I don’t need anyone full time. What will I do if I have nothing left to occupy my time? I gave her some money to go back home to the Philippines for a while. She has kids she hasn’t seen for months. It’s not right. I am able to look after myself.’

‘And you have enough money to afford an army of maids—it’s Hong Kong, you have to have a few maids, Mum; it’s just the way it is. You have all the money you could ever need in the bank. Why don’t you spend some of it?’

She brought the tea over to Mann, who was sitting at the kitchen table.

‘When the time comes you will inherit it, then you can decide what to do with it—for now I don’t need the money.’ She was getting agitated.

‘I don’t want it. I want you to make a point of spending every last dollar of it, leave me nothing. You are still young, Mum—you look great for your age. You need to get out more. It’s time to make some more friends: join clubs, go on singles’ holidays.’

‘Ha!’ she laughed. ‘With a bunch of other oldies, you mean?’

‘I am sure amongst all the incapacitated octogenarians you will find a few that are like you. Why don’t you go on a cruise or go around Europe and look up family and friends. Use the money to have some fun?’

She stared into her tea.

‘I don’t want to touch the money. I have everything I need.’ She got up and went to wipe the work surface where she’d made the tea.

Mann could see that the time had come for him to drop it, otherwise she was going to clam up completely. He held up his hands in a surrender gesture.

‘Okay, sorry. Let’s drop it. Please come and sit with me. This must be the only kitchen in the whole of this expensive block of flats in which the owners sit and drink tea. Better make sure no one catches us or you’ll be chucked out of the wealthy widows’ club.’

‘Ha…’ she laughed. ‘If such a thing exists, I don’t think they would ever ask me to join, do you?’

‘No, you’re right—you’d have them donating all their money to the poor and making baskets to sell.’

A ginger cat appeared and wound itself around Mann’s legs. Molly’s face lit up when she saw it.

‘Hello, Ginger—just woken up, have you?’

‘I didn’t think you’d agree to take on David White’s cat…Never thought I’d see you with a pet; I always thought you hated them.’

‘Nonsense, it was your father who hated animals, not me. I always had animals when I was a girl, back on the farm. I grew up with them.’ She leaned her hands against the rim of the sink and stared out through the kitchen windows at the wooded hills that rose in a bank of emerald green opposite. ‘My life was very different then.’

‘I can imagine little Molly Mathews running around with straw stuck in her hair and mud on her knees.’

She turned from the window and smiled, but there was sadness in her eyes.

‘That was such a long time ago, it feels like another life. I hadn’t thought about my childhood for years until recently. Now something comes back to me almost daily—vividly—I’m not sure I like it.’ She sighed and turned back from the window, buffing the taps with a cloth as she did so. ‘Anyway, son, tell me…How is it with you? Did you get the rest you needed?’ She came and put her arm around his shoulder and leaned over to kiss his cheek.

‘I did a lot of thinking. As the saying goes, Mum—you can run but you can’t hide.’

She sat opposite him and leaned forward to hold his hands in hers.

‘You mustn’t be so hard on yourself. You have been through such a lot these last few months.’

‘It’s nothing to what others have endured, Mum, and I feel responsible for some of that.’

‘You mustn’t blame yourself, Johnny. No one could have known that Helen would be killed.’

‘But I let her go, Mum; I have to live with that.’

‘You let her go because you didn’t think she was the one for you. You didn’t know she would be killed.’

‘If Helen had never met me she’d be alive today.’

‘Chan was the one to blame, not you. None of us could ever have imagined he would turn out like that. All those years we knew him as a child, we never realised how envious, how vindictive and downright evil he was.’

‘Father saw it in him. He hated him.’

‘Your father saw something in him: a ruthlessness, a mercenary heart. He knew the triads well and he knew that Chan had been enlisted.’ Molly gave an involuntary sigh and picked up Ginger the cat and held him close to her. ‘You have to be a bit kind to yourself. You have to let it go now. Time will heal, son.’

Mann looked at his mother and searched her eyes.

‘I will never let it go, Mum. In my own way I got justice for Helen, and I will get it for father. I will find out who killed him and I will make them pay.’

‘Your father made enemies. It killed him. We can’t keep raking up the past.’

‘And I cannot forget it…the sight of my father being executed will never leave me. I can see it so clearly. It is branded on my mind’s eye, on my subconscious, in vivid detail. There is no forgetting for me until I get it explained. I want to find out why his death was ordered and I want to get the man who ordered it.’

Molly was staring at him, horrified. Mann felt instant remorse. He had not meant to worry her. He reassured her with a smile and stroked Ginger, who purred in her arms.

‘I never knew that about Dad—that he hated animals.’

She looked at him and met his eyes with her piercing grey stare.

‘There was a lot you never knew about your father.’

9

‘What is that fucking awful smell?’

The Teacher sat back in his chair and waited for an answer. Reese sniggered.

The Colonel paused, beer bottle to his mouth. ‘What smell?’ He lifted his chin and sniffed the air from right to left.

‘The all-prevailing smell of shit in this place.’

Reese giggled nervously. ‘You get used to it, bro.’

‘Don’t you smell it, Colonel, or is your nose buggered from all that speed you shove up it?’

Reese and Brandon looked anxious. It wasn’t often they saw their boss at the butt of someone else’s jibes. He wasn’t the best at taking a joke. But then, he didn’t usually have to suck up to anyone. His word was the law in Angeles. He owned five of the big clubs there: Hot Lips, Lolita’s, Lipstick, The Honey Pot and Bibidolls. They were the best clubs in Angeles with the youngest, prettiest girls—handpicked by him. He also owned several bars and hotels. The Bordello was one of them, the Tequila Station another. The Colonel set his beer carefully down and looked at the Teacher. He smiled.

‘I thought the same when I first got here. I thought “what a shit-hole”. Now I think “what a gold mine”. The smell of shit and the smell of money have become one and the same for me.’

‘Just as well, because this place is an open sewer.’ The Teacher looked about him in disgust. ‘Literally…’ He was referring to the foul running water that ran the length of the street and followed a course beside the cracked and uneven pavement.

The Teacher gave up the conversation and sat back and drank from his beer bottle. There was too much noise to talk. Opposite the Bordello the mosquito drivers with their noisy motorbikes with sidecars, were trying to impress the girls who stood outside Bibidolls in their bikinis. They were competing to see who could rev their machine the loudest—the night was young and they were bored. They belched fumes and beeped at one another whilst the girls giggled at them—although both sides knew it would not end in a coupling. The boys didn’t make enough money and the girls didn’t give it away for free. The girls’ sole aim in life was to marry a foreigner and get off the Fields. They were Guest Relations Officers, GROs. Their job was to entertain the tourists on Fields Avenue. Besides their yellow plastic bikinis they wore permits that hung long around their tanned necks and settled just below their pert cleavages—permits that had their photos and stated they were legally permitted to work in the clubs and that they were eighteen and over. Most of them weren’t; their documents were forged. The girls swished back their hair and pushed their chests forward as they bantered with the whorists as they passed by.

Upstairs in the Bordello there were no GROs. This point on Fields Avenue was the boundary. Here marked the beginning of the descent into unlicensed bars and twenty-four-hour hostess clubs where the girls didn’t wear badges. They often didn’t wear bikinis. They were kept locked in a back room. They were children.

The Colonel flashed the group of mosquito drivers a look that silenced them instantly and they moved hastily away.

‘What about the police? Have you fixed it? Blanco hates fuck-ups.’

The Colonel drank from his beer at the same time as he kept his eyes fixed on the Teacher. He was letting him know that whilst he would take some, he would not take a lot of dissent, especially not in front of his men.

He set his bottle down. ‘Blanco doesn’t need to worry. Over the years I have cultivated a good working relationship with the police. Some I have had to trick by providing them with a girl for the night and then informing them that they have slept with a minor. Others, I have had to give a small share of my profits to. Most of the time it has just taken hard currency.’

‘Everyone here has a price, huh?’

‘Not everyone…he he…’ Reese was eager to show he could be part of the conversation and saw his chance to impress the Teacher. ‘…not the Irish priests.’

‘Yes…’ The Colonel stared disapprovingly at Reese. ‘…that is true…they are all over the fucking Philippines like a plague.’

‘Yeah, man. They have a refuge just up the road from here and for as long as the Colonel’s been pimping the girls the priests have been saving them. Twice the Colonel’s been to court …he he… He had to pay off everyone: the girls’ parents, the police and the fucking court judge.’

‘I think you will find…’ The Colonel glared at Reese and made sure that he understood that he had said enough before taking his eyes from him. ‘…that it isn’t just us bar owners who would happily pay to see the priests shot. Even the local church here doesn’t want them interfering. After all, we bring in big revenue and we always give a fucking big donation to charity. But—nevertheless they remain a thorn in our sides. One that I hope you will remove sometime soon—very soon.’

The Teacher nodded. ‘You honour your side of the bargain, I will honour mine.’

Comfort came to the table with a tray of four beers. As she set the drinks down the Teacher ran his hand up over her flanks and bare legs. She giggled, tried to stay upright but was pulled into his lap. She put her arm around his neck and tipped his peak cap up so she could get a proper look at him.

‘Hey, you handsome man.’ She looked at his sky-blue eyes staring back at her. ‘You marry? Wanna nice Filipina wife?’

The Teacher held onto her hair and tilted her head backwards. He smiled.

‘What’s the offer on whores this week—two for the price of one? Buy one, get one free?’ He grinned sarcastically. ‘Hello “Bogof”. Now fuck off, you disease-ridden piece of shit.’ He pushed her from his lap.

Comfort smiled the way that Filipinos always did whatever the situation. She understood the aggression, but not the words. She knew all about the Kano’s temper. She bore the scars on her body from the Colonel’s off-days. She looked at the Colonel for guidance. She had been his favourite when she was ten. Now that she was twenty, she was way past her prime, but she still felt an affinity to him. He had looked after her, in his own way. She still had her uses for him.

‘Ready?’ His expression hardly ever changed. He had been born looking pissed-off, red-faced, angry. His bulbous eyes were puffy above and below like a chameleon’s. If his head was turned upside down his eyes would look the same.

She stood—‘Yes, Kano’—picked up the tray and went back into the bar.

10

Jed wasn’t wasting any time. He’d been in enough of these places to know the score. What you paid for and what you got were two different things. The hotel looked great from outside, but inside it was just a windowless room with a dirty mattress on the floor and no air-con. Still, he wasn’t there for long, and he had just one purpose in mind. He kept his bling on, nothing else. The heavy gold chains swung back and forth beneath his chest, knocking Peanut in the face with every thrust.

He had a hard job controlling himself. He was excited about Comfort. She was that rare Filipina—the one that was confident enough to work it—so many of them were just ‘yes, no, pay now’ girls, but Comfort knew how to be a very good bad girl. She liked sex. She enjoyed it. He was going to take his time, even though Peanut wriggled beneath him. He knew she was eager to get it over with. It was almost time for her to go back to work. He had bought her out from Lolita’s nearly twenty-four hours ago. He’d had his money’s worth. In another hour she would be back dancing in a g-string in front of strangers. The thought of the threesome he was about to have made him thrust harder. But he didn’t want to come. He needed to wait. This was just a warm-up.

He paused, listened. He was sure he could hear Comfort in the corridor outside. There it was, her knock on the door, just like she’d said she would. He took some deep breaths, relaxed. He could wait for the fun to begin.

‘Come in, honey.’ As the door opened Jed felt the rush of air cool the sweat on his back. ‘We bin waitin’ for ya.’ He turned, slow, kept himself hard and strong inside Peanut, who lay motionless beneath him with his crucifix resting on her eye.

‘Where would sir like it? Up the arse?’ The Teacher fired two shots from a Heckler & Koch P7 pistol with the silencer attached. He fired one into Jed’s rectum to immobilise him. Boomph! He fell like a felled elephant on top of Peanut, who lay there, eyes wide, unable to move. Then he fired the other shot into the back of Jed’s head. Brain and skull fragments splattered across the wall above Peanut.

11

Mann boarded the plane and settled down for his twelve-hour flight. Better twelve than eight, he thought. At least he had some hope of sleeping five or six hours and not being force-fed like a laboratory animal every couple of hours. But sleep wasn’t going to come easy. He thought about what his mother had said. She had come to a crossroads in her life, it seemed to Mann. She was in a reflective mood. Today, for the first time ever, his mother had hinted that her marriage had not been as it should. Now Mann had the task of revisiting his memories from a different angle. He had to take away the child’s perceptions, straighten their edges and see them through untinted glasses. It would be a hard task. The most time he had spent with his family had been the years before he was sent away to school—he had started boarding when he was eight—and then there were the holidays when he’d come back to Hong Kong. Was it true that their marriage hadn’t been as strong as he had always assumed? His mother always left out more than she ever said.

He was in for a long night. Thoughts bounced around inside his head. He hadn’t been back to the UK for a long time—seventeen years. The last time he had stood on British soil his father had still been alive. It wasn’t that he hadn’t meant to return, but there had just never been a good time.

Mann practised his particular type of meditation—he shut his mind to all but the pursuit of sleep. Anything unwanted, even sex, that popped into his brain was booted out without being looked at. He pulled his fleece blanket up over his face and mentally put himself on the beach, with not a bikini in sight.

12

‘La La La. Love Love Love. Kiss Kiss Kiss Me.’ Eight-year-old Sophia sang along to the jukebox in the Tequila Station.

‘Love that one, sweetie. You coloured that real pretty.’

Sophia turned the pages of her book and showed her father her efforts. Terry ran his hand affectionately over Sophia’s soft brown curls, keeping one eye on her work and the other on the door. It was a quarter to eight. The meeting was scheduled for eight. The others would be arriving soon.

The Tequila Station was a large sprawling bar set out on three levels, the most popular bar on Fields Avenue. Just down the road on the same side as the Bordello and within spitting distance of all the best clubs, it was the perfect meeting place for whorists who, in between fucking and partying, came to play pool, relax and get something to eat. It was the favourite place for the younger of them—a home from home. Then, fed and watered, they partied solidly till three in the morning.

Terry and Sophia sat just past the main bar on the right, down two steps in a private seating area that was screened from prying eyes. It had a RESERVED sign permanently on it, although most of the time that wasn’t needed. Everyone understood it was not an area for the general public to sit in. Terry and Sophia were the first ones to arrive.

Sophia was still in her school uniform and was doing her homework whilst Terry talked on the phone beside her. His laptop was open. Terry had installed Wi-Fi so that he could connect with the world from anywhere in the bar.

Sophia sucked the end of her coloured pencils and paused frequently to survey her work. Occasionally she demanded her father’s attention. She didn’t speak—she pushed her face into his as he talked on the phone, and pointed to her work. He smiled and nodded, pretended to be interested.

‘Wait,’ he mouthed to Sophia. She tugged at his arm. He held the phone away from his mouth and covered the mouthpiece. ‘Wait, sweetie. I’ll be with you in a minute.’

She pulled a cross pouty face and went back to colouring, her tongue protruding just a little as she concentrated on keeping the colours inside the lines.

He continued his conversation, a smugly satisfied look on his face.

‘She took a lot of finding. It was thanks to our men in black…Yes…She’s being seasoned right now. Be ready in a week or two. I know, I know, ha ha, a nonstop fucking supply of baby whores—couldn’t ask for more. Yes…So far, so good…The deliveries should keep coming regularly. They are standing by their word. But this is the Philippines; they might always sell out to the highest bidder…. Yes, the Chinaman, is he still buying up everything? We need to show them we mean business…It’s in hand.’

Terry finished his phone call and gave his attention to Sophia, but she had lost interest in her colouring and had now got out Princess Pony to play with. She started combing its hair. The smell of raspberry-scented pink plastic nauseated her father as much as it delighted her, and he instinctively turned his back on her and watched the door. He knew that the others would all be on time. Only the main man would be late, as was his privilege.

Sophia was making clacking hoof noises and Princess Pony was trotting across the table when the door opened.

The security guard stepped aside to allow Reese through. He didn’t get frisked like everyone else, none of the Fields’ VIPS did. The strict ‘no weapons’ policy all around Angeles City did not apply to them. Brandon walked in behind Reese.

The four young black guys playing pool looked up and watched as the two men entered. One of them nodded in their direction. Laurence also worked for the Colonel and had the job of looking after four of the Colonel’s clubs. The Colonel had taken him under his wing as ex-US army; he had felt a bond with him.

Reese and Brandon picked themselves up a drink, and then went straight over to sit with Terry and Sophia. Sophia looked up from her colouring. She knew them both but she never bothered to talk to them because they did not acknowledge her. Only Reese talked to her sometimes, when her daddy wasn’t around.

Laurence finished up his game of pool and came over to join them. He sat down and checked his watch.

‘Five to eight…same old fuckin’ bullshit. We have to be early, but he rocks up when he fuckin’ feels like it. Then he’s gonna turn up with all that “time of reckoning” shit, spoutin’ stuff from the Bible.’ He looked at the others for support. Only Reese sniggered. The Colonel had a Bostonian accent that Laurence could mimic very well. Terry stared back, expressionless, and Brandon just looked around the bar. He could not afford the luxury of a gripe.

Terry looped his arm around the back of Sophia’s seat. At fifty-six he was the oldest member here. He had been in the Philippines for eighteen years. He’d come as a backpacker and an opportunist and stayed. He had married a local widow with several young children and he had fathered one of his own—Sophia. Terry knew how to keep everything low-profile. He went about doing his work unhindered. He bought houses and then offered them for tailor-made paedophile holidays to people from all around the world. Terry was the Internet king. People contacted him from all over the world and he got them what they wanted. He found them a house, he even arranged for a child to be waiting in their bed when they got there. Not just any old child: one to order, one handpicked and pre-seasoned. Now, with his new contacts, Terry was able to have a bigger hand in child recruitment. He had control of a new gang who were delivering on time and on target. No longer did he have to rely on the small-minded gangs of feuding triads to recruit the girls, he was now in control of a slick team that could locate and capture any number of young girls. Terry was a happy man.

Reese tapped away with his cigarette packet, turning it over and over. He did not have room to cross his legs so instead he jiggled his left foot incessantly. Reese was Terry’s ‘gofer’. He did all the day-to-day stuff. He kept the customers happy. Reese didn’t make a fortune from it, but it kept him in a lifestyle he loved. He got to lie on a beach, smoke weed and have lots of sex. Reese had spent his childhood in care. As the boy with the golden curls, Reese had had a lot of attention from the other boys and the wardens. Now he had finally found peace and tranquillity in the laid-back smiling arms of the Filipinos he didn’t want to lose it and he was worried that he would: tension was creeping in everywhere. The Teacher had brought it with him and Reese felt that panic inside him just like when he was a child in the orphanage. He felt he was about to get shafted.

13

‘He didn’t have to hit me.’ Amy’s sobs broke through her words. ‘I was only looking outside.’ She touched her mouth; it was sore from where the rough Hong Kong man, who she now knew was called Tony, had hit her. She could taste the rawness where her brace had cut into the inside of her cheek. She couldn’t stop shivering.