‘That’s great,’ said Hillel. ‘Really great.’
She diverted into the room and gave the girl a reassuring rub on the back, then led Ben-Roi up a final set of stairs to the top floor.
‘Moldovan,’ she explained, dropping her voice so it wouldn’t carry. ‘Police picked her up in a raid down in Eilat a few weeks ago. I’ve seen some bad cases in my time, but she was –’ she stopped, looking back down the stairs. ‘Tuberculosis, hepatitis, just about every STD you care to mention bar HIV – and that’s nothing compared to the damage up here.’
She tapped the side of her head.
‘She’s been granted a work permit so she can stay in the country for a year to rehabilitate, but she’s refusing to testify, so once the year’s up she’ll be deported. And when she’s back in Moldova she’ll be targeted by the people who brought her here in the first place and re-trafficked. It’s how these things work. Heartbreaking. She’s still only nineteen.’
Ben-Roi’s eyebrows lifted. He’d pegged the girl’s age at closer to thirty.
‘Can’t she get compassionate residency?’
‘Oh do me a favour! When was a non-Jew ever granted humanitarian status in this country? No, the best she can hope for is to find someone who wants to marry her. Which knowing the sort of men who are attracted to ex-prostitutes isn’t going to make her life a whole lot better.’
She sighed, turned and carried on up to the head of the stairs, which came out into a large open-plan office space. Three more women were sitting here behind desks, staff, Ben-Roi guessed from their age and appearance. Aside from the security guard at the front gate, he had yet to see another man in the place. Hardly surprising after what he’d just been hearing.
Asking one of the women to bring them coffee, Hillel led him through into a smaller, private office with a sloping ceiling and a large picture window looking out over the Petah Tikvah rooftops. She waved him into a chair and heaved herself up on to the desk in front of him, swinging her legs.
‘So,’ she said. ‘Rivka Kleinberg. What can I tell you?’
For a moment Ben-Roi’s eyes lingered on the framed photos hanging above the desk – Hillel shaking hands with Hillary Clinton, Hillel receiving some sort of award from Shimon Peres, Hillel with what he assumed must be her husband and daughter, which surprised him – for some reason he hadn’t thought of her as having a family. Then he pulled out his notebook and got down to business.
‘Her editor tells me Mrs Kleinberg visited the shelter,’ he began, flipping through to a blank page.
Hillel nodded. ‘She called up about four weeks ago. Said she was doing a piece on trafficking, asked if she could come down and have a look around.’
A beat, then: ‘You think that was why she was killed? Because of the article?’
Ben-Roi gave a non-committal shrug. ‘At this stage we’re keeping an open mind.’
‘It wouldn’t surprise me,’ she said. ‘Trafficking’s big business, as I’m sure you’re aware. And the guys who run it don’t like having the boat rocked. Particularly the Russians – they control eighty per cent of the trade and they’re not the sort of people who appreciate having their affairs looked into.’
Ben-Roi stared down at the pad.
Russkaya Mafiya
again. They seemed to be featuring a lot in this case. He made a note to pass it on to Pincas, who was covering the Russian angle.
‘So she visited the shelter,’ he continued, ‘talked with you.’
‘Correct.’
‘About?’
‘A whole load of stuff: where the girls come from, how they’re brought into Israel, what happens to them when they’re here, what’s being done about it. She spent an entire day with us, and then we spoke again on the phone a week later. Not the most socially adjusted person I’ve ever met, but she clearly cared about what we’re doing. And she was wonderful with the girls. Genuinely compassionate.’
Ben-Roi recalled Mordechai Yaron’s parting words:
Rivka had an instinctive empathy for people who were in pain. Probably because she was in so much of it herself.
‘Was there anything in particular she wanted to discuss? Any specific angle she was coming from?’
‘We talked a lot about what the government’s doing to tackle the problem,’ she said, pulling an elastic hairband from the pocket of her shirt and stretching it with her fingers. ‘Or rather not doing. I mean, until recently we weren’t even meeting the
minimum
US State Department standard for combating trafficking. Attitude-wise, most of our politicians are still stuck in the dark ages. Most police as well, frankly. They seem to think that being locked up in a brothel and forced to have sex with twenty men a day is some sort of conscious career choice.’
Ben-Roi shifted uncomfortably. He’d done a brief stint in Vice himself, when he was just out of Police Academy, and he knew exactly the mindset she was describing. He pressed on, not wanting to get bogged down in the subject.
‘Anything else?’ he asked. ‘Any other areas Mrs Kleinberg seemed particularly interested in?’
‘We spent quite a lot of time on the demographics of trafficking,’ she said, still working the band. ‘Where the girls come from, the fact that we’re seeing more and more Israeli girls being forced into the business, picking up the slack now that there aren’t as many foreign girls to go around. And she wanted to know all about the punters, especially the ultra-Orthodox ones. They’re a big market. The brothels are full of them on Fridays, getting their kicks before
Shabbat
comes in.’
She gave a shiver of distaste.
‘She also asked a lot of questions about trafficking routes,’ she added, sweeping her hair back and tying it with the band. ‘Particularly the one through Egypt.’
Ben-Roi’s eyes flicked up. Egypt again. Like the
Russkaya Mafiya
, it seemed to be dotted all over this case. He started to ask for more information, but was interrupted by a knock on the door. One of the women he had seen outside came in with a tray of coffee and biscuits. He waited for her to put it down, hand Hillel a letter and leave, then picked up the conversation.
‘This Egypt route,’ he said. ‘A lot of girls are coming in that way?’
‘Not as many as a decade ago,’ replied Hillel, stirring her coffee. ‘Then it was by far the main smuggling channel. After the crackdown in the early 2000s the traffickers left it alone for a while, found other ways of getting the girls in. Fake passports, false marriage documents, that sort of thing. They’re clever like that, always adapting, keeping one step ahead.’
‘But now the route’s open again?’
‘Well, it’s hard to get precise statistics, but there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that’s the case. There was a big Tel-Aviv pimp, a guy called Genady Kremenko – apparently he brought most of his girls in that way.’
Ben-Roi recognized the name. ‘Arrested a couple of months back?’
‘That’s the one. There was a rather unpleasant joke doing the rounds about Moses bringing the Israelites out of Egypt and Kremenko bringing the girls. Not a nice man. But then none of them are.’
Ben-Roi spooned sugar into his own coffee and stirred. ‘Do you know if they are ever taken through Alexandria?’ he asked, thinking of the El-Al flight Kleinberg had been booked on the night of her murder.
‘It’s usually Cairo or Sharm el-Sheik. They get flown in from Eastern Europe, Russia, Uzbekistan, and are then moved up through the Sinai and across the border by Bedouin.’
‘And Mrs Kleinberg wanted to know about all this?’
‘Not so much the first time she visited the shelter. We touched on it, but not in any great detail. It was when she called a week later that she really started asking questions.’
‘And you told her . . . ?’
‘Pretty much what I’ve just told you. The pimps have overseas recruiters who target the girls and fly them down to Egypt, and then a network of Bedouin who take them across the Sinai and up into the Negev. That’s about as much as I know. I’m a social worker, not a cop.’
She blew on her coffee and sipped, cupping the mug in her hands. Ben-Roi stared down at his notepad. Mitzpe Ramon was in the Negev, only twenty kilometres from the Egyptian border. And Rivka Kleinberg had taken a bus to Mitzpe Ramon four days before her murder. Just as she’d gone there three years ago for the abortive Nemesis Agenda interview. So: another aspect of the case that seemed to be repeating itself, winking at him like some sort of pulsing homing beacon.
Russkaya Mafiya
, Egypt, the Negev. He tapped his pen on the chair arm, shuffling the pieces of the jigsaw, trying to shunt them into some sort of coherent picture. None of it seemed to fit together, none of the links to connect, and with Hillel kicking her legs waiting for the next question, he scribbled a note, let it go and moved on.
‘You said Mrs Kleinberg spoke to some of the girls?’
‘Three of them,’ she replied. ‘Lola, Sofia and Maria.’
‘You sat in?’
‘I did with Lola and Sofia. We have to be careful with strangers – a lot of the girls are extremely fragile, not comfortable around people they don’t know. But Rivka was fantastic with them. Really gentle, really caring. It was extraordinary how they opened up.’ She took another sip of her coffee. Ben-Roi reached for a biscuit and crammed it in his mouth, the closest he was going to get to lunch.
‘What did they talk about?’ he asked, crunching, his voice thick with Digestive.
‘Their experiences, basically. The sort of stuff I’ve just been describing.’
He rolled a hand, indicating she should tell him more. She crossed her legs, balancing her mug on one knee.
‘Lola’s Uzbek,’ she said. ‘She answered an advert back home for a waitressing job, ended up getting sold to a pimp up in Haifa. The usual story – everything seems fine till they’re actually in the country, then they have their passports taken, get raped to break them in and put to work eighteen hours a day in a brothel. She was here for five years before she got rescued.’
‘Did she come in through Egypt?’
Hillel shook her head. ‘Flew into Ben-Gurion on a work visa. Sofia did, though. She’s Ukrainian. Boyfriend said he could get her a job in Israel, except of course he wasn’t a boyfriend, he was a recruiter. They target girls like her. Vulnerable, poor, abusive background, low self-esteem – it’s the classic profile.’
‘And she was trafficked through Sinai?’
Hillel nodded. ‘Had a terrible time crossing the desert, poor girl. They all do, of course, but her experiences were particularly bad. Gang raped. Anally raped. Saw one of the other girls getting her kneecaps blown off for trying to escape. I don’t even want to think about it.’
Ben-Roi was reaching for another biscuit. He withdrew his hand, his appetite suddenly gone.
‘Are they here now, these girls?’ he asked.
‘Out at work,’ replied Hillel. ‘Like I said, we find them jobs. All menial, but it’s still an important part of their rehabilitation. Helps them build self-respect, interact with people in a way that isn’t predicated on abuse. Sofia shelf-stacks in an AM-PM. Lola does cleaning.’
‘The other one?’ asked Ben-Roi, glancing down at his pad for the name. ‘Maria.’
There was a pause. When she answered, Hillel’s voice was quieter than it had been. ‘Maria’s not with us any more.’
‘She was deported?’
‘She . . . disappeared.’
Ben-Roi looked up. ‘Ran away?’
‘Either that or her pimp came and took her. We’re praying she ran away.’
Although her demeanour remained businesslike it was clear she was upset by the situation.
‘Her visa was about to expire,’ she went on, ‘and the ministry had just turned down her request for an extension, so that could well have acted as a trigger. She was absolutely terrified of being sent home. Was convinced she’d be re-trafficked. Or worse.’
She didn’t expand on what ‘worse’ meant. Didn’t need to.
‘This was recently?’ he asked.
‘A few weeks ago. Just after Rivka’s visit to the shelter. Maria went into work one morning, never came back. That’s about all we know. We’ve got people on the ground looking for her, and the police have obviously been informed, but so far . . .’
She drew a breath and shook her head. For the first time Ben-Roi noticed that the roots of some of her hairs were going grey.
‘And Mrs Kleinberg interviewed this girl?’
‘It wasn’t quite as formal as that. They definitely talked. Painted as well.’
His forehead rucked. ‘Painted?’
‘It’s something we encourage the girls to do,’ she explained. ‘Drawing, painting, sculpture. Helps them express themselves, get stuff out in the open they might not otherwise want to talk about. We’ve got a small art room and we found Maria in there when I was giving Rivka a tour of the house. I got called away to deal with something, left Rivka with her, and when I came back the two of them were sitting side by side painting together.’
An image from Kleinberg’s apartment flashed into Ben-Roi’s mind.
‘Blonde hair?’
‘Sorry?’
‘A woman with blonde hair. On blue paper.’
Her eyes screwed up in surprise. ‘How did you . . .’
‘The picture was in Mrs Kleinberg’s flat.’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Well, that would figure. She asked Maria if she could keep it, took it away with her.’
Ben-Roi’s trainer had started tapping on the floor, slow and rhythmic, an involuntary motion that always seemed to kick in when he sensed the conversation might be heading somewhere interesting.
‘So you got back, they were painting together . . .’
Hillel nodded. ‘And then when I suggested Rivka and I carry on with the tour she asked if Maria would take her round instead. And Maria agreed. Which surprised me because she was extremely withdrawn, rarely talked to anybody, even our specialist counsellors.’
‘But she did to Mrs Kleinberg?’
‘It certainly looked like it. I saw them out of the window at one point, sitting down in the yard, and they were holding hands and chatting. They spent well over an hour together.’
She flicked a stray hair out of her eyes.
‘It happens like that sometimes. Something clicks for no obvious reason. A girl who’s barely ever said a word suddenly pours out her heart to a complete stranger. There just seemed to be something in Rivka’s manner that helped her open up.’