The Greek Wall Page 9

  Agent Evangelos knows perfectly well that there are no students in the Polytechnic. He also knows that there are no more anarchists in Greece, and is perfectly aware that his colleagues disguised as anarchists deserve the name no less than the young people in ski masks who claim to be anarchists but know nothing about anarchism and no longer know who they really are – just as he no longer knows either, like his colleagues sent in to spy, just as no one here in Greece knows any longer what uniform to wear.

  This morning, only Agent Evangelos’s daughter seems to know who she is. She must be the only one for whom motherhood and her apartment in Kifissia are the centre of the universe.

  Somewhere in Athens, another young woman is completely lost. She was told yesterday evening that she was in a military clinic over towards Agia Paraskevi. She has been asked to state her identity and undergo a battery of medical tests. It turns out that in addition to Russian, Polina Zubov, born in Vladivostok on 9 January 1988, speaks quite good English. A student of languages in Russia, the young woman also has a few rudiments of Greek, learned during her numerous fortnight-long visits to Greece, working as an escort until she was dropped by her agency a month ago.

  In the utterly chaotic state of Greece, a number of foreign girls turn to prostitution, most of them undeclared aliens. Like Polina, the great majority of those who work in the major hotels, where they pretend to be tourists, come from eastern Europe, mostly Russia and the Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria. Evangelos has already questioned some of them. Sometimes his men require them to provide information on suspects. Some of these young women work in the countless unsavoury hotels in the large Greek cities. Each has a different story to tell. But the usual starting point is in their country of origin. Whether wishing to earn a lot of money as quickly as possible, or crippled by debt, or single mothers, or sometimes just wanting to help out their families, they don’t hesitate to come to Greece to sell their bodies. They turn to agencies which organize their journeys and manage their agenda, starting with putting their profiles and photos on the appropriate websites. In the worst of cases, after working for a few months for one or another of these agencies, they will be kidnapped, raped and beaten by pimps from another agency to which they have been “sold”, like ordinary merchandise, by the prostitution network that initially employed them. Agent Evangelos has lost count of the cases of girls entrapped by phoney employment agencies who promise them a dream job in Greece. But those girls skip working in a hotel: as soon as they arrive in Athens their passports are taken from them and they are confined to brothels. The pimps threaten to harm their families if they run away or resist – a highly efficient form of pressure. In the capital, as in other large Greek cities, African women represent the other extreme in sex trafficking. Often very young, manipulated and forced into prostitution in mostly insalubrious locations, or condemned to streetwalking on Patission Street, they are some of the most destitute among the prostitutes. And then there are the boys, very young ones, including young Afghans aged fifteen or sixteen, posted to solicit at the exit from the Metro on Omonoia Square under the vigilant eye of pimps who pick them up on their clandestine arrival in Greece. But that is another story.

  The questioning of Polina has begun. She says that she picked up the axe, which was sitting on the running board of a piece of agricultural machinery among a heap of other tools, but it was the axe she picked up, she remembers, overcome by rage when she saw this man coming towards her. She heard him yell something like “No, don’t do that!”, but she was in a fury, and since she was holding the axe in one hand, just one hand, it was too heavy, she gripped her makeshift weapon with the other hand, and raised her arms holding it in both hands, but something seems to have stopped her. Something was hindering her. Was there some sort of obstacle? The axe remained poised in the air.

  Agent Evangelos doesn’t push her. Polina has to start over from the beginning.

  “Polina, where were you when the agency dropped you?”

  Polina speaks quietly. Her eyes are losing their wariness, no longer seeking an escape. They agree to restart the film of events, leaving it to Agent Evangelos to press the pause button on certain scenes.

  Agent Evangelos and Polina are face to face. An hour after landing at Eleftherios Venizelos Airport, immediately after being transported at high speed along the flanks of Mount Hymettus in a special van with flashing blue lights, she entered a hospital ward reserved for officers’ wives. A few minutes later she was informed in English of her rights and about the interrogation that would follow. She agreed with a nod, the first evidence of her apparent willingness to communicate, though she still hadn’t uttered a word, remaining prostrate and silent during the entire drive from Orestiada to Alexandroupolis, and equally silent hunched in her seat during the entire flight to Athens. Though, as Agent Evangelos notes, she casts him a grateful look whenever he allows her to go to the toilet, which she did three times in Alexandroupolis Airport: twice in the plane, and once again on arriving in Athens.

  “So, Polina, when did the agency drop you? Where were you?”

  “I was in my room in the President Hotel when the manager called me. He said I was finished, and looking on my computer I found that my picture was gone from the escort sites. He said I wasn’t getting enough customers and that I’d been given a bad review on one of the sites, claiming I wasn’t doing everything it said on my ad. I can’t understand that, because my customers were always satisfied, they gave me little presents, there was even one who asked me to dinner after a visit in my room. We went to eat in a nice restaurant, I thought it was very kind.”

  “Wait, Polina, hold on, not so fast. The ‘manager’, you say. Who is this individual?”

  “The manager, my manager, is the person who tells me where I have to go.”

  “Can you tell me his name? Do you know it?”

  “He’s called Yuri; he’s the one who tells me if I’m going to Athens, and for how long. Also, I think he was angry with me because I told him I didn’t want to go to Thessalonica.”

  “You know nothing about him, you’ve never seen him?”

  “No, he lives in Crete, we always talk by phone, and I was afraid to go to Thessalonica because the girls there work for the Mafia.”

  “For the Mafia?”

  “Yes, they work for Mafia guys, and I think my manager is friends with the Mafia. There are girls like that who disappeared there, girls who hoped to work independently, came on their own to Greece, and who put their pictures on websites themselves without saying anything to the manager, and they disappeared.”

  “Let’s backtrack for a moment, Polina. How did you join this agency?”

  “I was living in Moscow. I had just finished my language courses. I wanted to buy a little apartment, but I knew it would take me years before I’d have the money. Then a girlfriend told me about this agency that sends girls to Greece. I went to an office and I was interviewed by a woman who explained it all to me. There was a contract to sign, with all the details. Then I took part in a photography session in a big Moscow hotel. I knew what it meant, working as an escort, but I was getting ahead, earning ten years’ money in two years. That’s the way it started. I went to Greece for the first time, and it all went according to plan. I had to stay in such-and-such a hotel and wait for clients to call me on the phone provided by the agency. Every morning a guy came to pick up the money. We were only allowed to accept cash, always euros. Then the agency deposited my share in a bank account, and I paid for the hotel with a credit card. When I talked to my parents by phone I told them I was in Moscow, though I was really in Athens. It was tough to start with, but I soon learned what to do. When a customer asked me if I enjoyed being with him, I’d smile and close my eyes, and he’d believe me. You just had to find the right words and what you did happened automatically.”

  “Polina, how long would you stay in Athens, usually?”

  “Two weeks, sometimes just one, like these past months when there were fewer customers, becau
se of the crisis.”

  “One more thing. In Athens, did you always work in big hotels?”

  “Yes, in the President or the Park. I wasn’t afraid at all, for there are lots of people around and you can always call reception; the hotel staff are nice, they know very well what you’re doing but they don’t say anything, and they give you a wink on your way out.”

  “I think you said you’d called a client the evening the agency fired you.”

  “That’s right, that evening I felt uneasy at the idea of going to Thessalonica. I thought the manager was angry, and I felt all alone in my room, and then I called a customer I liked a lot, the one who’d invited me to dinner. I’d kept his phone number and his first name; he’d told me to call him Peter but I don’t know if it was his real name, though it suited him well. When he answered my call, he seemed surprised to hear me, but he seemed like a person I could talk to, so I told him I was bored all on my own. I was scared to go out, because I don’t like Athens very much, for the men in the street just give you funny looks. The customer was so sorry, he was just about to leave Greece, so I wished him a good trip, and then felt all lonely in my room again. OK, it’s true I wasn’t getting a lot of customers compared with the previous times I was in Greece. But it wasn’t my fault, there’s a crisis happening and I was getting fewer calls on my mobile, but I don’t understand why they dropped me like that. I didn’t want to go home to Moscow, but on the other hand I didn’t want to keep paying for the room in the President, a hotel completely lacking in charm.”

  Agent Evangelos takes note of “completely lacking in charm”. It may be true, of course, but he quite likes the multi-storey hotel, its massive bulk visible from afar, towering over the district of Ambelokopi, probably because of his recollection of the time he went there to pick up his uncle from America, his mother’s elder brother. Evangelos had waited in the foyer, in front of the leather armchairs, formal in his suit; he’d come to meet the old man and bring him to his parents’ house, one Sunday around noon. As he entered through the President’s sliding doors he told himself that the United States must resemble this: the vast foyer, the different levels, the few steps and a ramp leading to the lifts, the staircases, broad accesses to the lower floors that plunged into the basement like on the photos of the Grand Central Terminal in New York, and the conference rooms whose noticeboards announced the “60th Anniversary of the Melbourne Greek Association” or an “International Symposium on Hydrocarbon Resources in the Aegean Sea”. His uncle walked behind him, and Evangelos could see the two of them in the endless mirror of the bar to their left as they went, leaving the smell of filter coffee and bacon and eggs behind them and emerging from a decor that was still novel in Athens, with the city fragmented and rearranged into cubes in the reflection from its windows of smoked glass.

  Not “lacking in charm” then, the President, but it’s true the hotel can’t be unchanged. Yet Agent Evangelos can well imagine himself waiting there for Polina, and seeing her emerge from the lift. He can see himself crossing the foyer with Polina on his arm, like that Peter who takes her out to dinner, she clinging to his arm and he feeling a slight pressure from her hand as if to say that she won’t make a nuisance of herself, that they mustn’t forget that this is all just a game. And then dinner in a restaurant in Kolonaki, Polina wearing a simple pullover and jeans – Evangelos imagines her in a little cream-coloured leather jacket; only her belt is a little ostentatious, with its buckle bearing the emblem of an Italian brand. She sits very upright on her chair in the restaurant, fending off the world with her smile. Her nose, eyes, blonde hair, are all perfectly matched: the nose is perfect, the eyes too, the mouth is fine, but that’s not at all surprising since Polina doesn’t talk much, and her smile isn’t evasive, as you might remark too hastily – no, it’s just an invisible thread that makes him aware of the distance. Now she’s taking her time reading the menu, finally choosing just a mozzarella salad and saying to Peter, “I wouldn’t mind having a little white wine, but just a glass,” and he laughing as he imagines her losing control for a moment; Peter is relaxed, sensing that she appreciates the occasion; she’s not as mechanical as in the bedroom a while ago; she’s here, not behaving like a hooker any more. Poor fellow, do we have to maintain this illusion of crossing the invisible frontier separating us from this young Russian woman; a glass, just a glass of white: apparently Polina always wants to stay in control, as Agent Evangelos is beginning to understand.

  Agent Evangelos is listening to Polina, who now says, “So since I didn’t want to stay at the President, a hotel lacking in charm, and seeing as I didn’t have too much money left either, and I didn’t want to leave Athens without earning something, I began sending messages to friends in Russia who also work as escorts, and I remembered a girl from Vladivostok who does the same as me, her name is Olga, she works for another agency that might have taken me on, though I don’t think that one is much good. Olga never answered my calls, but she told me in a text message that she had mentioned me to them; she was on Mykonos, an island in Greece, she told me. Two hours later she sent me a phone number I should call. A guy who spoke Russian answered. He arranged to meet me in another hotel in Athens, the Lacoba. I got ready, I packed my bag and I went there by taxi.”

  “Where did you stay?”

  Agent Evangelos thinks he knows where the Lacoba is, one of those “love hotels” that exist by the dozen in Athens, offering a room at twenty-two euros for three hours, anonymity guaranteed, you pay cash, there’s no trace: you leave with your girlfriend, a student like yourself, and go with her to her parents’ house; you leave with your lover, no one is any the wiser; you exit on your own, leaving the hooker alone in the room to get dressed; sometimes you leave the hotel holding your head down, with your wife, yes that’s who she is, you leave very nonchalantly and go home to the children, for there’s no privacy in your two-room apartment.

  “Where did you say, to the Lacoba? That must be the hotel at the bottom of Syngrou Avenue, behind a big hospital. Do you remember the address?”

  No, Polina just knows that the taxi knew right away where it was, and it was just now when Agent Evangelos asked her to describe the route it took to the Lacoba that she managed to remember: “Yes, it took a kind of motorway in the middle of town, towards the sea, and then turned to the right.” She knows too that there was a large deserted entrance foyer with only a young woman at the reception desk, who gave her the keys to a room on the fifth floor. And when she got out of the lift she was surprised to hear moans, women’s voices, laughter, men’s voices too, but mostly women, exclamations, little cries, well, she’s not going to join the dots, you know what it is!

  Agent Evangelos asks Polina to think carefully about what she’s saying. She mustn’t forget anything, she mustn’t lie. He reminds her that she doesn’t have the right to remain silent, that she can’t ask for a lawyer, since this isn’t the usual kind of interrogation. She has to understand fully that she must tell the truth and really describe everything in the slightest detail.

  So, yes, Polina was surprised to hear so many women enjoying sex in the nearby rooms, you could hear everything, there was also a sound like lashes from a whip, at intervals, but regularly, and waiting there in the room all by herself, sitting on a big bed with a large white sheet stretched over it, waiting in her room listening to those cries from the other side of the walls covered with mirrors, seeing herself there all alone in the mirrors, in the room lit by little red and yellow bulbs, waiting in this very immaculate place, now, long after the cries and the voices stopped, Polina could hear the noise of a vacuum cleaner in the room with the whip, and then there came the dull thumps of a mop against the corridor door, still all alone, smelling the cleaning product, hearing steps, a door closing, then more little cries and moans that became louder and louder. Polina decided to call reception to ask if they might have something to eat. And it was later, when she’d finished her grilled ham and cheese sandwich and had finally fallen asleep on the
bed, her face lit by the glow of the porno film playing on the big screen above the bed, it was a while later that the man knocked on her room door.

  Polina says he was Greek; he spoke no Russian, it wasn’t the person on the phone.

  “He only spoke Greek, and he signed to me to follow him. I pretended not to understand, and that’s when he slapped my face.”

  Agent Evangelos would like to know more about this individual, but he can see that Polina has had enough, he knows well that this rape is the first of many, he knows, he can imagine the distress and the fear. He asks the young woman if she can tell him how long it lasted, she must tell him if it was five minutes or an hour, whether the man allowed her some time or if he took her to the parking lot immediately afterwards, whether they met anyone in the corridor, and if she cried out or called for help.

  No, Polina was so scared that she didn’t dare call for help; she cried out at first, but behind the mirrors, in the other rooms, there were other cries, and no one was surprised to hear cries, and even beatings with a belt like was done to her, and also because she herself had heard something like lashes from a whip earlier on after she arrived at the Lacoba, and because of all that she had no choice, in that hotel where you could hear all kinds of things going on and anything could happen.