He slipped unconscious, succumbing to his loss of blood despite trying as hard as he could to fulfill his obligation to Katarina. She knelt by him, genuinely surprised he’d passed out so soon. He’d been tamping down on his leg steadily, but his gradual loss of strength led to gradually letting the flow increase, which meant losing more strength, which meant a vicious cycle. She started tying it off, the leg. She took the shirt off the younger guy, Oleg, tore it in strips, then rapidly made a sort of rope, then tightened it across the top of the old man’s thigh as tightly as she could. “Wake up,” she said to him several times. “Wake up. Hey!” She slapped his face. “Hey. Or else you’ll—Hey!”
He stirred. Slightly.
She turned to me. “We need elevation for his leg.”
I didn’t respond.
I no longer cared.
She started to reposition him, soon looking over at me and seeing that I hadn’t moved. “Come on,” she said to me. “We need elevation right now.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard about a life like this so it wasn’t the content of his words that jarred me. It was his presence. Here. In the room. With me, near me—this wrinkly old guy had actually carried all this out, participated in it with his own bare hands, and now here he was, several feet away from me, his presence making it all so real.
“Adam!”
You fixate. You get so lost in how ugly it is that you fixate on the man and you really don’t see the other person near you—the victim, the girl—and you forget to consider how the fuck she herself should feel about it.
She worked to retighten his tourniquet. “You’re not going to help me?! Adam!”
“No.”
“Help me!”
“I don’t care about this man anymore.”
“He will die.” She backed away from him, seeing my obstinacy, seeing what she felt jeopardized her overall goal. “We need to get him to a paramedic or it will be impossible to keep him alive. I gave you my word. That I would keep him alive.” She was growing frustrated. “It is crucial that you are trusting me. It is crucial because I’m going to ask you to do something and I need you to trust me when I ask you to do it.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not.”
“It’s fine. I’ll do what you’re asking.”
“Khhhhh!” She scoffed.
“I will.”
She got up and came over to me, then held her palm outward toward me.
She kept it there, her hand, outstretched.
“What?” I said.
I didn’t understand but she wanted something from me. I’d just told her I’d do whatever she asked. I’d seen enough. I’d lost whatever motivation I had to argue over the morality of it. I’d spent most of my adult life making sure these sorts of grand decisions stayed simple for me. Not that I’d ever faced something this extreme, but the basics of it—right versus wrong—should never be complex or nuanced or tricky or layered or asterisked or annotated. There’s either do you treat people well or do you not? Nothing between. But of all the undesirable places to shove a system-needing individual like myself into, the crevices of a sex trafficker’s résumé were the worst for me to try to stay true to myself. What good could an old man like him possibly do on this planet? Reform himself? Reinvent himself? Do charity? If we sutured him up and sent him on his merry way, how many more girls does he scar?
“What?” I said again, staring at her open palm. “What do you . . .?”
Did she want comfort?
I reached for her, warmly. I wanted to hug her tightly, maybe kiss the top of her head. I felt numb, speechless.
“The gun,” she said.
I looked down at it—the gun—still in my hand. She wanted to take it from me. I slowly started to offer it to her—the gesture alone being all the approval she needed before snatching it from me, clicking the release, popping the cylinder, emptying the shells, then snapping the cylinder back, and walking away.
“We’re leaving.” She walked out of the room.
I followed her without asking how we were going to get away with what we just did. I followed her without knowing who might find this place next. We were now in what felt like a hallway made of dirt. She dropped the empty gun just outside the door to the room, literally tossing it on the floor, then closed the door behind us. I couldn’t conceive of giving up a weapon like that—I wanted to sleep with it under my pillow for a year—but I guess she foresaw whatever complication it’d bring. We were abandoning the old man in this room. Wasn’t that murder? Should we care? She started leading me down the path for several minutes of silence, guiding us with an old flashlight she held up, taking us through a small junction where we kept going straight along a narrow, dark utility corridor. You almost had to hunch over as you walked.
“You sure?” I said to her.
In the first half hour, the walls we were passing were stone slabs. In the second half hour, our tunnel became more and more like the sides of a cave. Raw rock. Raw dirt.
“You sure?” I said again, wondering whether or not she had the right route.
She didn’t answer. She had us hiking along a very gradual incline—seemed to be over a mile. We were no longer inside any kind of industrial structure. The thing felt medieval.
“What are we doing?” I said, knowing I’d get no response. “Hey!”
She didn’t look back.
“I’m not following you anymore until you tell me.”
“Lower your voice.”
“Why?”
“Lower your voice. We don’t want to be heard.”
“Why?” I started to slow down. “Are there people down here?”
“Yes. And they’re not friendly. We don’t stop.”
I stopped.
She turned around. “You have a simple question? You can ask me whatever you want to ask when we arrive.”
“Arrive where? I have fifty questions. None of them are simple.”
She came over to me. “You can ask me one—one quick one. That’s it. We need to hurry to get up to street level before daylight comes. The man who ran from us—the driver—he will tell who he needs to tell and it will be bad.”
“Seven years ago you were fifteen. Does that mean you’re twenty-two? You don’t look twenty-two. Why are people chasing me? How did you find me by the van?”
“People are not chasing you. They’re chasing me. Now that they know we are together, they will look for you and they will kill you.”
“How do you know how to fight?”
“Be first.”
“Are we in the Catacombs?”
“Yes.”
“This is the Catacombs? Are there dead bodies? ‘Be first.’ What does that mean?”
“We have to go.”
“Are there dead bodies?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“A million? I don’t know. Does it matter?” She motioned for us to move forward. “We have to go.”
“A million?”
“The whole city is built on top of caves. It’s . . . how do you say . . . the, uh, uh, calcaire. The rock. It’s very strong.” She pointed to the rock all around us. I was nervous in tight spaces in general, but to be in a tight space surrounded by a million corpses? “We have to keep moving. We have to protect ourselves from the homeless here. They are territorial.”
“Did you have something to do with the burning of Evan Goldman?”
She knew this was one of my crucial questions. This stopped her. I didn’t have to grab her arm to hold her in place. She took a good, long look at me, calculating what I had the capacity to hear. “If I told you that he caused his own death, you’d say I’m lying.”
I couldn’t exactly spell it out—why I’d agree to help her, why I’d agree to involve myself in something so antithetical to the comfort of a lower-class kid now in an upper-class life. I chose to believe she represented my best path to legal redemption and that any help I provided her was justifiable under the lens of the law. I chose to believe that. “I’d say you were lying, yes.”
“So . . .”
“So . . .?”
“So let’s not have you think I’m lying. I won’t say anything about Evan and you can believe what you want.”
“Why can’t we go up to street level here?”
“It’s too soon. It’s safer for us to move down here. We are going to visit someone. When we get there, we can prepare for what’s next and I can explain to you how you can give me what I need.”
“And what is that?”
She turned around and continued up the path. She was done talking.
“And what is that?!” I yelled.