One Minute Out

This was bad. Worse than I’d expected. “Keep going.”

“The second night after dinner they went to a club again, and again he tried to get her to come back to his room. She resisted, although she admitted he was very charming. She also told me Tom met with gangsters from a local group known as the Clanu, or Clan. She said she’d seen them around in discos before, so she knew who they were. She was worried about this, and about the fact that Tom had gotten more aggressive with her, but I talked her into seeing him one more time.

“Everything she told me he said . . . none of it helped me pinpoint anything tangible. A few details about his home and family is all. I knew this man was from the West Coast, that he had a family, and that he worked with the local mafia in Romania in some capacity. I needed photographs, names, I needed something to help the case I was working on.

“So Roxana did what I asked, and she met him the third night in his hotel room.”

I put my head in my hands on the darkened roof. Clearly Talyssa’s drive in all this, despite her lack of experience and her abject terror about what she is doing, stems from deep unwavering guilt about all but handing her sister over to some powerful and evil men.

She seems to sense what I am thinking, and she only confirms it when she says, “I don’t know how to run an agent. I don’t know how to do any type of criminal investigation that doesn’t involve spreadsheets. I sent her into danger, over and over. But I didn’t know it was dangerous. I swear to you, I didn’t know.”

She feels bad enough, so I don’t draw the connection that she’s probably gotten her sister killed.

But she’s been thinking it, thinking about nothing else. That much has been clear all along.

I let her sob a moment without replying. Finally, I say, “And you still didn’t find out who he was?”

“No. She didn’t get me any pictures for facial recognition; she said his bodyguard was always close and always looking. She wasn’t trained for this either, it’s not her fault, but I was hard on her. I knew how much my approval meant to her, and I used that to my advantage.

“She didn’t sleep with him, even after three nights, and he became more aggressive. She sensed a growing anger welling in him.”

“What did this guy look like?”

“About forty-five or fifty years old. Tom was bald, short, very sure of himself. She liked him at first. Found herself being sucked in by his personality.”

“He sounds like a douche.”

“A . . . a what?”

“Never mind. What about others with him?”

“She told me about two men who were always by Tom’s side. One was American; late thirties. He was the bodyguard, and she heard Tom call him Sean. She thought he was nice, and she thought Tom treated him badly.”

I’m picturing an ex-military man being ordered around by a rich and bossy little runt.

“But the one who scared her most, much more than Tom, was a South African. They called him John; I don’t know if that is a real name or not. She said he looked at her with eyes of pure evil.”

“But still . . . you told her to go back and see them again.”

“No. Not after the third night. It was getting too much, even for me. The gangsters, the aggressive behavior of Tom, the unease Roxana felt from John. On that fourth day I recognized this wasn’t just about bankers with ties to organized crime. I began to suspect that this American who called himself Tom was the leader of an organized-crime concern himself. But even then, I had no clue whatsoever that they were sex traffickers.”

She cries a moment. “Roxana decided to go back on her own. By now I guess she felt bad she hadn’t given me what I asked for, so she took the risk.”

“What happened when she went back?”

After a heavy, wet sniff, she says, “She told me he tried to rape her in his hotel room, but she got away, raced past his bodyguard outside the door, and made it through the lobby. I flew to Bucharest that afternoon. Her face and arms were bruised, and she was terrified. I went personally to the police, but they did nothing. I went to the hotel, but the American had left.

“Roxana didn’t want anything else to do with me or my investigation, and I couldn’t blame her. She wouldn’t talk to me.”

“And then she disappeared.”

“Four weeks later she went out to a club, a different club, with some girlfriends. They said she started acting strange, very tired, like she was drugged. They put her in a cab to send her back to her flat, but she never arrived. The cab was found burning under a bridge. There was no one inside.”

“Jesus Christ,” I mutter.

“Harry, either she is still alive, which means I can’t rest until I find her . . . or she is not alive, which means it doesn’t matter what I do.”

“Of course it does. You want to bring her killers to justice, right?”

“Yes,” she says, but it’s not very convincing.

“What is it?”

“This is my fault. If she is dead . . . I will die, too.”

She isn’t speaking metaphorically; I can hear that in her voice.

I say, “I don’t need a partner with a death wish.”

The sobs continue for a time, and then she says, “I understand. I am okay. I must see this through.”

I think a moment about my own actions, then say, “I’ve learned something in my years doing what I do. If you don’t feel guilt, then you can’t change. Guilt can be a driving force for good, for doing what’s right. Or it can be a limiting force. Something that causes you to throw away right and wrong, to justify yourself. That’s the weak way to deal with your conscience. The determining factor in whether guilt locks you into evil or spurs you on towards good is your own inner strength. Your own moral compass.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying you fucked up. Bad. But you’ve come all this way because you are strong enough to admit it, and strong enough to try to rectify your mistake. That’s all anyone can ask of you now.”

I add, “I’ve fucked up before. I’ve gotten people killed. People who didn’t deserve it. It never goes away, but I tell myself the only thing I can do is to help others.”

“That’s why you are here?”

“I guess you and I have similar motivations.”

She sobs yet again, but her voice regains some strength. “I am okay, Harry. I will do this.”

I understand so much now. What I saw as an almost childlike fear in Talyssa was, in part, at least, an incredible dread about what she would find.