Farewell to Freedom by Sara Blædel Page B

was obviously making Pavlína clam up.
    Once they were alone, at Louise’s instruction, the interpreter began to probe in more depth, asking Pavlína to talk about what she had been through since she had been stopped on the street back home in the Czech Republic, stuffed into a car, and brought to Denmark.
    â€œHad you seen the driver before?” the interpreter asked.
    Pavlína shook her head and said that she had been with a guy she knew from the street scene back home. She didn’t know him well, but they’d been out a few times even though he wasn’t part of the clique she normally hung out with. He turned up every now and then, and that last time he invited her to a party in an abandoned train station.
    â€œHe brought drinks and cigarettes,” Pavlína said as if to explain herself. Then she added that it had been so cold outside and her sister was with friends, so she’d gone with him.
    On the way there, he had grabbed her shoulders as a dark car pulled over to the curb, and before she knew how it happened, she was suddenly sitting next to a foreign girl in the back seat of a car speeding away through evening rush hour.
    It took some doing for the interpreter to get the rest of the story out of her.
    Pavlína didn’t remember crossing into Germany or Denmark, and said she must have slept a lot of the way. She sounded upset and watched the interpreter intently as she spoke.
    â€œAt one point, another girl joined them in the car,” the interpreter said, turning to Louise. “She says she’s sure they drugged them with the drink they offered because she only has a foggy memory of the whole trip and had no idea where she was when they arrived—not even what country she was in. They put the girls up in a hotel where they were greeted by two men, who later turned out to be Arian and Hamdi.”
    â€œThe rooms were small and dark, and the bathroom was down the hall,” Pavlína said through the interpreter, explaining that she had shared a room with one of the girls from the car.
    She started crying as she recounted how Arian had raped her after Hamdi took the other girl out of the room. Afterward, the men switched places, and they sat her on a chair outside the door while Arian kept an eye on her.
    The next morning the two men came back and took the women to the town to buy new clothes and makeup. They were very generous. But then that same night they sent the girls out onto the street, ordering them to earn back all the money the trip, the clothes, and the hotel had cost.
    Pavlína stared urgently at the interpreter while she spoke, and then the interpreter told Louise that Pavlína had never worked as a prostitute before and had asked the two men several times that first week for permission to return home to her sister, who didn’t know where she was and was all by herself now.
    â€œFirst they threatened to cut her face if she refused to work,” the interpreter translated, “and when she persisted, they threatened to cut her sister. After that, she didn’t dare disobey.
    â€œThey demanded she pay 3,000 kroner a day. Some days she wasn’t able to earn that much, and then she would have to pay extra the next day and even more the day after if she was still behind. There were days when she did up to twenty tricks or more to pay her debt.”
    Pavlína had stopped crying, but there was an absent look in her eyes as she mentioned eight girls who gave money to the Albanians, whom she only knew by the names Hamdi and Arian.
    Louise quickly began calculating how much money the girls had been bringing in each week. Pavlína answered the interpreter’s question by saying that they were forced to work six days a week. Louise closed her eyes and did the math. With eight girls, that must have been about 144,000 kroner a week.
    â€œThere’s a lot of turnover among the girls. Most of them only stay for the three months