IGOR IS THE COMPUTER GEEK who was in Monica’s class at Camps Bay High before the government tracked him down for hacking into their servers, and then employed him as a black hat tester to uncover illegal hacking. A couple of years before I’d convinced Igor to work together with Nathan Khan, a self-styled Internet vigilante introduced to me by Elijah. In his professional daytime hours Nathan was a surveillance expert; every other free waking hour was spent hunting down the molesters of children on the Internet. It had been Igor’s task to hack into various encrypted networks and find the scum who thought themselves to be unfindable. Nathan had flushed the auctioneers of virgin girl flesh out, scaring them out of their hives into the shadows, and Igor had found their hiding place in the subterranean tunnels of the dark web.
Igor’s hacking skills had bought us the time Nathan needed to rescue Simone before she could disappear forever. I’d known that she didn’t stand a chance if the auction was prevented from going ahead – who knew how much had been paid over the years to the Sarrazins to ensure the care and eventual delivery of the highly prized item? The only way we could ensure Simone’s freedom was to let the auction go ahead and place the highest bid ourselves.
In the months following her rescue, I’d been deliberately vague with Simone about the specifics of the online auctions of young female flesh, focusing instead on the story of her rescue from the Sarrazins. The implication had been left floating in the air that the auction had been cancelled. Simone had always appeared to accept my version. What could she possibly want to know from Igor the hacker, so many months later?
I made it clear that I didn’t think it was a good idea to go and see Igor. I told Simone that Igor was the kind of guy you went to see with a specific task in mind. What specific task did we have in mind?
But she ignored my objections, and then scowled all the way there, picking at the hole in her stockings. A second-hand pair of Doc Martens that were too big for her had lit up her face at a garage sale in Sea Point. The young woman selling them was heavily pregnant – maybe she’d decided it was time to grow up, or maybe pregnant didn’t go so well with clumpy shoes made to last a lifetime. Simone fell in love with their honest ugliness. I said all they needed were hobnails and then she’d look like a Fascist from Mussolini’s time but my comments didn’t perturb her one bit. It was something I’d slowly understood about the young girl I’d adopted: her sense of self was strong and true. Nothing anybody said could deviate her once she’d decided on something.
So there we were, me in professional woman garb, her in those broken stockings and the partially laced-up Doc Martens on our way to visit the hacker we hadn’t seen for many months. I’d made every excuse I could think of, and Simone had just kept on at me, a battering ram at a castle that must fall.
‘I have to see him. If you don’t take me I’ll go on my own.’
Go on her own? Be on her own walking along the road, catching a bus, those white adolescent colt legs, the broken stockings, the Doc Martens, all screaming vulnerability? I’d have to take her. The battle was over before it began.
‘Why? Just tell me why? What will it help? We said we were going to put it all behind us–’
‘You said we were going to put it all behind us, not me.’ Her tone was scathing, defiant. She wanted something from Igor and she would get it.
‘Esmeralda agreed. She said it was the best thing to do.’
‘Esmeralda is a cunt. What does she know about anything?’ She was gazing out the window with her face turned away from me.
My knuckles were white on the steering wheel. My brain couldn’t summon a single piece of advice from the parenting course I did.
‘Simone, she cares about you. If it wasn’t for Esmeralda …’ I’d never have had the guts to try being a mother. I leave the thought unspoken.
Igor had spruced himself up a bit since we’d last seen him. The T-shirt had no holes and he had a pair of clean sneakers on. He’d also moved out of his mother’s house into a similar house with pine flooring, just around the corner, where he lived with his Buddhist girlfriend Vanya and the baby Nirvana whose framed face, with beaming smile and ting-a-ling silver-bell earrings, dotted the walls of the lounge. Her fond father admitted to a new hobby inspired by his celestial round-faced daughter: photography. He just wasn’t getting enough sleep, he yawned, running his fingers through his uncombed hair.
Simone was very composed, very grown-up and solemn.
‘What can I do you for?’ Igor asked.
‘I want to know what happened afterwards. When they realised that they’d been tricked.’
I grabbed at my chair armrests, stunned. Igor was awake enough to look over at me in a startled way, as if he vaguely realised there was a problem here.
It took me a long moment to figure out what had happened.
All those months ago when Nathan and I had met with Igor to tie up all the loose ends, we’d left Simone waiting in Igor’s mother’s lounge, which had been taken over by cats and smelt of cat pee. When I thought she was teaching a cat to dance with her feather wand, she had instead eavesdropped on our conversation. She must have heard everything, about the auction, about the furious bidding, how Igor had been lucky, about the price they’d been willing to pay for her … I could hardly breathe, but I knew enough to shut up and let her carry on asking questions. I thanked all the gods silently that at least the financial transaction that was so secret that it could not be talked about had not been discussed in that room. It was best that Nathan knew nothing about what I’d asked Igor to do.
Now Simone wanted to know more about what she’d overheard that day. Maybe it was better like this. I told Igor with my eyes and a slight nod that it was okay. Maybe I wanted to know myself.
But Igor was more cautious. Having baby daughters did that to one. ‘How do you mean … afterwards?’
‘They paid for me and they didn’t get me. What did they do?’
Oh God …
‘Well, it didn’t go exactly like that …’ I said quickly, before Igor could reply. ‘We set up a bid that looked like a real bid from a fake Internet account. Nobody actually lost any money. They just didn’t get you. So it was like a cancelled auction.’
Simone’s eyes blazed at me. Liar. Liar. Pants on Fire. Then she turned back to Igor. ‘So what did they do after the cancelled auction?’
‘They closed down the site,’ Igor said, scratching his head thoughtfully, trying to get out of it. ‘They always do that, move around. I don’t know what they did afterwards.’
‘I don’t believe you. I know you help Nathan.’
‘Nathan does his own thing,’ Igor said evasively, looking over at me.
‘If it was your daughter, would you have carried on looking for them?’
‘Hey kiddo, your case was a first for me. I thought we did okay. You’re here, aren’t you?’
‘Simone, that’s enough. Let’s go.’ To my surprise she obeyed, after giving him a long accusatory look.
In the car I looked over at her, slumped in her seat, staring out at nothing, chewing a nail.
‘What did you want him to say?’
She gave me the silent treatment all the way home, mumbling to herself as she went after her fingernails with a kind of ferocious despair.
After eating supper alone I tried again. She was lying on her back on her bed, still dressed, staring at the ceiling.
When I asked her the same question – what did she expect Igor to say? – she replied in such soft even tones that my brain only registered the words later. The whole strange week had been like that: all my reactions delayed as if I couldn’t quite get on top of the meaning of things.
‘They must have got some other girl. Somebody else went in my place, that’s all that happened. That’s what none of you want to say. Some other girl went in my place. Why don’t you just admit it?’
I didn’t know what to say. I stood transfixed. This was the terrible thought that my daughter lived with – that some other girl has suffered the horrific fate meant for her.
‘Sometimes in my dreams I think I can see her face and her hair, she’s very fair, then sometimes I see her driving past in a car and I just catch a glimpse of her and then she’s gone. Sometimes I imagine what they do to her.’
It was on the tip of my tongue to say ‘That’s not what happened, you don’t have to worry, they got their money,’ but I stopped myself in time.
The moment to tell her would have been at Igor’s when she asked. But how would I have responded to the next question: Where did you get so much money from? That would mean opening the window to the matter of her identity and bloodline.
What Simone did not know, and what she must never know, was that I had come up with a scheme to make a legitimate bid. I’d remembered that my ex-boyfriend Nicky’s billionaire father − her biological grandfather − was a collector of rare and valuable weaponry swords, often obtained on the Internet from other private collections. Igor helped me to carry out a sleight of hand that involved hacking into van den Bogen’s confidential banking information and shifting a large sum of money from a bank account used for his sword purchases to the auction account. Van den Bogen would only find out after the money had already cleared out of his account. We’d known there was a possibility that they’d follow the hacking trail back to Igor. But he hadn’t seemed troubled by the possibility when I gave him a last chance to back out. ‘They’d have to find someone better than I am, so we’re okay, I think.’
I never told Igor why I’d chosen van den Bogen; perhaps he thought I was desperate enough to use anybody’s money and van den Bogen was obscenely wealthy anyway, or maybe he guessed there was some process of human-aided divine retribution at play, because he never showed any squeamishness about what I had asked him to do. As far as I was concerned justice was about to be served: van den Bogen was a disgusting human being who had deliberately sold his own granddaughter into adoption because of her illegitimate birth and now his money was going to save her. Even so, we’d almost lost her because what we considered a ridiculously high bid had only just won the bidding war.
There was no instruction pamphlet for this type of situation.
All these months I’d deluded myself that the only thing that mattered was that the fraudulent money transaction had saved Simone from being auctioned off to a depraved pervert and had rescued her from the Sarrazins. But of course Simone was right, it was never just about the money. For every seller there was a buyer. A wolf in sheep’s clothing had been preparing himself to take delivery of his prize, a young female virgin. Somebody out there had lost the bidding war we’d manipulated to our advantage; somebody had been duped out of something he’d been promised.
The wolf had been left empty-handed. He would not have been happy.
Love is a strange dastardly emotion. I want to feel guilt for what we did but I cannot. Simone has simply put into words what I have been too cowardly to face. Some other girl has taken her place. That seems certain. Even if there is a string of such girls, one particular girl must have been chosen as sacrificial lamb to allay the buyer’s fury about the one who got away. And in Simone’s accusing eyes I can see that she knows that deception is not my greatest sin. My greatest sin is that love makes me hope that this replacement girl, and all the other girls that will follow her, the ones who mean nothing to me, should be enough to still his appetites, so that he will not come after my daughter again.
I am sick with fear for her.