“Samson sent me. He needs help. Please.”

The woman seemed to study him. She was a nice little number, maybe thirty, but a bit older wasn’t always a drawback. Blond hair, petite. Through the pain he assessed her, out of habit, as though she might bring him value. He remembered her now; he’d seen her in the bar before, when he drank beer with Sam. A prime little number, he’d joked.

“I don’t know who Samson is and the bar is closed.” She spoke with the very slightest muddle of some eastern European and British accent. Her words were hard and precise. He liked the accent. He’d developed a taste for hearing broken English with Slavic pronunciations, usually in a begging scream. He knew how to deal with Slavic girls.

“I don’t care if it’s closed. I want to see Henrik or whoever runs the place. I got information to sell.” He remembered the name Samson had used at Taverne Chevalier in Brussels. “Roger Cadet. That’s who I want to see, whoever works with Roger Cadet.”

“What sort of information?”

“On who Peter Samson is chasing.”

“His name’s not Peter Samson,” the woman said. Now he really didn’t like her tone, a bit clipped and impatient. Bitch needed a lesson in respect, he thought. “It’s just Sam,” she said.

“Well, Sam what-the-hell-ever. He works with you, right? You and the people in Brussels with the same bar? Can you make me a deal or not, bitch?”

She smiled at him. “Yes, I think I have a deal for you.”

He lowered his voice to a hiss. “Your boy is fighting some badasses right now. He needs help.”

“And you want protection from those same people. Your type, it is very predictable to me.”

He didn’t know what she meant. He didn’t care. “I got stuff of value.”

She looked hard at him. “I am Sam’s… superior. Come inside.”

She opened the door and he stumbled in. She closed the door behind him and shut the curtains. “Christ. Thank you. Can I get a drink?”

She went to the bar, poured a stiff shot of jenever. He eased onto a stool and drank it down. The alcohol seared his lacerated gums. “Sam kicked my teeth out.” He sounded like a whiny child.

She stayed on the other side of the bar and poured him another. “Yet you are here.”

“Sam had backing. You don’t just show up at a bar and leave armed to the teeth.” He slammed the second one down. Warmth seeped through him.

“My name is Mila,” she said. “And I’m not offering anything in trade. You will simply tell me where Sam is.”

Piet spat blood onto the bar, feeling nauseous. “Nothing’s free in this world.” He poured himself a refill and gulped the jenever again.

“Pain is.” She raised a small black stick. A baton. It telescoped out to an arm’s length. And she lashed it hard across his nose and mouth. He screeched in agony as the jenever glass shattered in his face. He swung blindly toward her and missed. She vaulted over the bar and began to hit him with a precision that rivaled a surgeon’s, delving past nerve and blood vessel to diseased tissue. He felt his nose break on her second blow. He lunged, trying to close his massive arms around her pixie’s frame, and she shattered his knee with a blow. Air vacated his lungs.

Her fist closed around his testicles, and agony replaced breathing. Then she hammered her forehead against his broken nose and he lay flat on the floor.

He opened his eyes. A lock of her blond hair, daubed with his blood, lay between her eyes. She was breathing hard.

“Do not move,” Mila said. “Do not raise your hands. Do not do anything except breathe and listen.”

He gasped and he listened.

“I know what you did to the women in the machinists’ shop,” she whispered. “I know. I know what you are. In the old days, Piet, you would have been the captain of a slave ship. Or a Nazi commandant, whipping laborers to death. You are cut from the same foul fabric. I know what you are. I know every inch of what you are.”

He moaned and writhed. His knee. The thought that he might never ever walk right again scratched past the pain in his brain.

“The bar has a concrete floor. The walls are soundproofed. None of that is an accident,” she said. She ran the edge of the telescoping baton along his shattered knee. “You will tell me what I want to know or I will rape you with this baton.”

A cold terror enclosed his heart. He looked up at her and saw, in a flash across her face, all the women he had sold. Past her shoulder he saw the red prince, in his portrait, the splatters of paint marring his face. He could see his own blood splatters, low on the bar’s front.

“Do you understand me?” Mila said.

“Y-yes.”

“Where is Sam?”

He babbled out the address of the brewery and directions. She moved the baton toward his groin. “Please… please…”

“Shut up. You don’t get to ask for please. You don’t get to ask for mercy. Those are human concerns, and you are a human being in species only.” She stood. He sobbed, clutching his knee, moaning in pain.

“Stand up,” she said.

“I can’t, I can’t, you bitch.”

“It would take ten of you to make a real person. You shot one of the Moldovan girls in the calf when she fought you,” Mila said. “I know. She told me. She managed to stand. I’m just seeing if you’re made as tough as those women were. Stand—or the baton goes up your sorry ass. Ten. Nine. Eight…”

On two, he was on unsteady feet, shuddering in pain and rage.

“Listen,” he said. “It’s not my fault, it’s just a business… I had to make money. My parents are ill…”

“Shut up,” she said. “You are Piet Tanaka. You never knew your father and your mother is a dead whore. I don’t care that you hurt right now. No one cares. You made your choice about life. Your whining bores me.”

Tears leaked from his eyes. “I told you, I can provide information…”

“Those girls you send. To Israel, to Britain, to Spain, to Africa. They don’t get mercy. They don’t get to cut a deal. They don’t get traded to the police. They get used up and then they get killed. They get raped two dozen times a day.”

“Please…” Piet tried again.

“I think you need to know what it’s like. To be taken into a dark room and know that you are only there to be used. To be hurt. To be treated as less than human.”

Piet grabbed the brass railing along the floor, in front of the bar, squeezing it in agony. He sobbed.

She pulled a phone from her pocket and dialed a number. “Hello? Nadia?”

Nadia was the name of one of the girls. He remembered: the redhead.

“I have him. He has a broken leg, a broken nose, and he’s beat up good. He can’t get away from you. He can’t hurt you. Do you want me to bring him? You all could do with him what you like.” A pause that lengthened. “Are you sure? It might make you feel better. No. All right, then.”

She rang off. “The women don’t want to ever see you again. I guess they’re better than you.” Mila shrugged. She closed the baton.

“Please… please.”

“The women are also better than me.” She pulled a gun from the small of her back and she shot him in the crotch. Pain beyond imagination. He screamed and writhed and howled and clawed at the concrete.

Mila began to count. Leisurely. “One-Amsterdam. Two-Amsterdam. Three-Amsterdam,” while Piet sobbed and shuddered on the concrete. When she reached eight—one count for each young woman she’d saved from him—she put a mercy bullet between his eyes. He jerked, his corpse hissed out a purring breath, and lay still.

She didn’t look at him again. She picked up the phone and called Henrik. He answered on the third ring.

“I need you to clean up a very serious mess. Use the dump site out past the airport—and keep the bar closed today until you hear from me.”

“I understand,” Henrik said.

She unlocked the door, relocked it, and hurried to her car, arrowing onto the still streets. She started to shake about five minutes out of town, thinking of the dying man’s terrified eyes. A gaze that pled for a mercy she could not give.