The Japanese Lover(56)
“We need to talk,” she told him.
She had decided to follow Catherine Hope’s advice. When she had heard about Irina’s past, Cathy had made her promise she would tell Seth, not merely to tear out the malignant growth poisoning her, but also because he deserved to know the truth.
* * *
At the end of 2000, Agent Wilkins had collaborated with two Canadian investigators to identify hundreds of images being trafficked on the Internet of a girl who looked about nine years old and had been subjected to such excesses of depravity and violence that she possibly had not survived. These were the favorite images of the perverts who specialized in child pornography and exchanged photos and videos privately through an international network. There was nothing new about the sexual exploitation of children, it had been going on for centuries with complete impunity, but the police could now count on a law passed in 1978 that made it illegal in the United States. From then on, the production and distribution of photographs and films diminished because the rewards did not justify the legal risks, but then came the Internet, and the market grew uncontrollably. It was calculated that there were hundreds of thousands of websites devoted to child pornography, and more than twenty million consumers, half of them in the United States. The challenge was not only to discover who the clients were, more important still was to catch the producers. The code name given to the case of the little ash-blond girl with pointy ears and a dimpled chin was Alice. The material was recent. The Canadians suspected Alice could be older than she looked, because the producers tried to make their victims appear as young as possible to satisfy their customers’ demands. After fifteen months of close collaboration, Wilkins and the Canadians tracked down one of the clients, a plastic surgeon in Montreal. They raided his house and clinic, impounded his computers, and discovered more than six hundred images, among which were two photographs and a video of Alice. The surgeon was arrested and agreed to help the authorities in exchange for a reduced sentence. Thanks to the information and contacts provided, Wilkins went into action. The giant FBI man described himself as a bloodhound: once he was on the scent of a trail, nothing could put him off, and he would track it right to the end, not resting until he had succeeded. Pretending to be an enthusiast, he downloaded several photos of Alice; digitally modified them so that they looked original and her face could not be seen, although they were recognizable for those in the know; and thanks to them obtained access to the network used by the Montreal collector. He soon had several potential customers. That was his first clue; the rest was down to his hound’s instinct.
One night in November 2002, Wilkins rang the bell at a house in a poor district in south Dallas. Alice opened the door. He recognized her at first sight: she was unmistakable. “I’ve come to talk to your parents,” he told her, breathing a sigh of relief: he hadn’t been sure if she was still alive. This was during one of those fortunate periods when Robyns was working in another city and the girl was alone with her mother. He flashed his FBI badge and didn’t wait to be invited in: he pushed open the door and barged straight into the living room. Irina would always remember that moment as if it had just happened: the giant black man with his sweet-smelling cologne; deep, drawling voice; big, delicate hands and their pink palms.
“How old are you?” he asked Irina.
Radmila was already on her second vodka and third bottle of beer, but still thought she was lucid, and tried to intervene by saying that her daughter was a minor and that his questions should be addressed to her.
Wilkins silenced her with a gesture.
“I’m almost fifteen,” Alice murmured in a faint voice, as though caught doing something wrong.
Wilkins shuddered, because his only daughter, the light of his life, was the same age. Alice had evidently suffered a deprived childhood lacking in protein; she was a late developer and her small size and delicate bone structure meant she could easily be taken for a much younger girl. Wilkins calculated that if at that moment she looked twelve, in the first images that had circulated on the Internet she could have looked nine or ten years old.
“Let me talk to your mother on her own,” an embarrassed Wilkins told her.
But by then Radmila had entered the aggressive stage of drunkenness and shouted that her daughter had the right to hear whatever he had to say. “Isn’t that so, Elisabeta?”
The girl nodded as if in a trance, her eyes fixed on the wall.
“I’m so sorry, child,” said Wilkins, laying half a dozen photographs on the table. This was what brought Radmila face-to-face with what had been going on in her house for more than two years, although she had refused to see it, and this was how Alice learned that millions of men all over the world had viewed her in secret “games” with her stepfather. For years she had felt dirty, evil, and guilty; when she saw the photographs on the table she wanted to die. For her, no redemption seemed possible.
Robyns had assured her that this kind of game with a father or uncle was perfectly normal, and that many boys and girls who played it did so willingly and happily. Those children were special. But nobody talked about it, it was a well-kept secret, and she shouldn’t ever mention it to anyone, not her girlfriends or teachers, above all not to the doctor, because people would say she was sinful, filthy, and she would be left all alone, with no friends. Even her own mother would reject her, because Radmila was very jealous. Why didn’t she want to play? Did she want presents? No? Okay, so he would pay her as if she were a little grown-up woman: not directly to her, but to her grandparents. He would make sure he sent them money in Moldova on behalf of their granddaughter; she had to write a card to go with the money, but again, she shouldn’t say anything to Radmila, this was their secret too. Sometimes the old couple needed a bit extra; they had to repair the roof or buy another goat. That was no problem; he was bighearted and understood life was hard in Moldova. Fortunately, Elisabeta had been lucky enough to come to America, but it wasn’t good to establish a precedent that money came for free, she had to earn it, didn’t she? She could at least smile, that cost nothing, she had to put on the clothes he told her to, to get used to the ropes and chains, to drink gin to relax, mixed with apple juice so it didn’t burn her throat, she’d soon become accustomed to the taste, did she want more sugar? Despite the alcohol, the drugs, and her fear, at some point she realized there were cameras in the toolshed, the “little house” the two of them shared, where no one else, not even her mother, could enter. Robyns swore that the photos and videos were private, they belonged just to him, nobody would ever see them, he would keep them as a memento in the years to come, when she was away at college. How he was going to miss her!