Most of them were Spanish-looking. One black, two Asian. And me. The rest were Latinas, including one set of identical twins who didn’t look any older than eighteen and had long glossy hair, huge breasts, and big eyes. They were strikingly beautiful.
I don’t know what people would say I look like. I’m short and curvy at the hips and boobs but with a tiny waist. I’m ¾ Italian and I’m naturally dark blonde with lots of slightly wavy long hair. I recently had the dark bleached out from the ombre I’d been sporting for a few months so it was all dark blonde right now. I have light brown eyes, like Pop’s, like Tommy’s. I guess I look Italian. I’m not unattractive. None of the girls in this room are unattractive.
Some of them are exceptionally beautiful.
A light went on and it got very bright. Everyone winced or squinted. One of the nurses grabbed my sore arm and pointed for me to sit. Somebody was talking in Spanish over a speaker. And then there was a man walking around with a camcorder, stopping at each girl and speaking in Spanish. A bottle of water was put in my hand by an older Spanish lady, older than the nurses.
Each girl reminded me of a deer in the headlights. The third girl he stopped at backed away in fear and he grabbed her by her hair and held her there while he kept talking, holding the small video camera in front while he palmed her breast and started laughing.
Her face went red and her eyes went downcast. No one else misbehaved after that. He got to me last and talked for a really long time, holding my chin up, taking the camera from me to him and back to me again as he spoke about me. I heard him say “Ferrano”. They weren’t keeping my identity secret. How many people who were attending this auction knew my Pop? Would that work to my advantage or disadvantage?
And then the guy with the camcorder left the room, the lights dimmed, and the nurses encouraged me to drink. I drank a bottle of water and looked to the girl who I’d sat beside. She glanced my way with big eyes. I could feel her trembling beside me.
I grabbed her hand and squeezed. She leaned into me. We didn’t know one another but we were in the same hell right now.
Over the next few hours, we were slowly picked off one by one, removed one at a time, except that at one point, the set of identical twins were taken out at once. I was third last to be ushered out by one of the nurses who took me down that long hallway and put me into a small office with the announcer guy with the camcorder and an older but distinguished man in a suit, who was seated on a big leather chair in front of the desk where the camcorder guy sat. He looked Italian to me. Maybe Spanish. Or maybe mixed. He gave me a once over.
“Knees,” the camcorder guy said to me. “She has had no training yet, senor, we only got her in last minute. I know your facility can handle the training. This is a very important person you got sold to, slave thirteen. You better not fuck up.”
The older man looked at me and spoke in clear English, “Down on your knees, thirteen, then sit back on your calves and place both hands on your thighs.
I shakily obliged.
The man in the suit then slapped an envelope down on the table and I saw the camcorder guy with a large wad of cash.
They spoke in Spanish for a few minutes and then the older man in the suit said,
“Shoes off. Leave them here. Walk beside me, eyes to the floor, until we go. My car is outside. If you misbehave, you will regret it for the rest of your life.”
He said this so simply, so calmly, that I believed him without a shadow of a doubt. I could see something sinister in the man’s eyes; I knew plenty of sinister men from growing up where I did. He meant business.
I nodded a little. It was enough to satisfy him.
The camcorder operator shook that man’s hand, spoke a few more words in Spanish, and then said, “Adios” and left.
The man held his hand out and looked at me. I took his hand and rose to my feet and followed his directions. What else could I do?
***
It took a long time to get out of the maze of hallways in the warehouse we had been in. When two guards with machine guns opened a steel door and we were outside, I took in that we were in an alleyway with reddish dirt, the sun beating down on us. My eyes burned, so I shielded them with my hand. It’d been days since I’d seen the sun.
The alley was dirty, dumpsters overflowing, a horrible dank rotting meat smell in the air. There were a couple of kids kicking around a soccer ball. They stopped and looked at me. One whispered something into another kid’s ear, eyes aimed at me. The limo driver honked the horn and the kids scattered. The back passenger door was opened by a man in a dark suit who looked like a secret service agent. The man who’d bought me put his hand to my back and led me into the vehicle.
I sat.
He got in and sat. Not close, not far. The car surged forward and puke came up in my throat but I swallowed it back down.
Before long, we were on a dirt road with no buildings in sight. The suited man reached into his pocket. My heart started to race and the fear I felt was a living and breathing beast, putting weight on my chest. I tried to focus on my breathing as he lifted out a phone from his inside pocket. He fiddled with his phone a moment, one-handed, while reaching into a small fridge in the sumptuous limo and passing me a bottle of lemon Perrier.
I accepted it, opened it, and downed half of it. Then, when we were on a four-lane road with plenty of traffic, he dialed and put the phone to his ear.
“Hola. I have the parcel.”
He held the phone a moment and then said something softly in Spanish and then passed the phone to me.
I fumbled and then got it to my ear, more than a little unnerved.
“Hello?” I croaked out, not having any clue who was on the other end or what might happen next.