“There were other girls already on the bus, girls from nearby villages. By the time they reached the border with Romania, there were probably a total of thirty or forty. Though Adriana couldn’t have known this part, you and I and Mihai all know that their long border stop was for bribes. They crossed Romania, stopped again, crossed Hungary. They reached the Austrian border.”

She took a long draft from the wine bottle. Oskar waited.

“You know, we like to think we’re better than those easterners, but all it takes is a little money. Money is the great equalizer, don’t you think?”

“I suppose it is.”

After another sip, she said, “They arrived in Hamburg two days later. They were herded off the bus into a warehouse in the more dangerous part of St. Pauli, gave up their passports, and were told that a lot of money had been invested in them. As soon as they paid it back, they would be free to start their modeling careers. Then, one by one, they were raped.”

She took another swallow and spoke to the road ahead.

“There was a man and a woman who worked together, looking over the girls and making notes on a clipboard. They were deciding which girls would go where. Adriana was shipped to a whorehouse outside Berlin. This, according to Mihai, was a sign that they liked her looks. The occasional government functionary made it to their establishment and would pay well for an eleven-year-old as pretty as she was. Not so fast.”

Though on this stretch of the A9 there was no speed limit, Oskar hadn’t realized he had slowly accelerated to something far above any safe speed. He let off the gas and glanced at her. “Sorry,” he said, then noticed she was already halfway through her bottle. “Maybe you should slow down, too.”

Erika followed his gaze. She wedged the bottle between her thighs and rested her hands on her knees. “One of the worst curses for anyone in our profession is imagination. We should all be born without it.”

“Go on.”

“Is there any need?” she asked. “You know what happened next. Five to ten men a night, and if they paid enough-and most did-they could do with her what they liked. Adriana was checked after each visit, because a bruise would cost the visitor extra. Adriana made a lot of money for them. But then…” Unconsciously, she removed the bottle from between her thighs and held it near her lips. “She was lucky, wasn’t she? She had an uncle who had been in Germany for years, a man who was familiar with the criminal classes. He got a call from his brother, that Adriana had gone missing. He’d learned from her jealous girlfriend that she was modeling in Germany. And while Andrei was too much of a villager to understand a thing, Mihai immediately understood. He did his homework. Among the immigrants he helped out, some had contact with the flesh road. They tracked her to Hamburg, and then to Berlin. And then…” She paused again, ignoring the bottle. “I didn’t ask him why he didn’t just call the police. I think I know why, but it would have been good to hear it directly from him.”

“He doesn’t trust cops.”

“Yes, but that’s not it. It’s his brother. Adriana’s father is a dunce, and if the police raided the place and sent her back to Moldova with an escort, then he would learn what had happened to his daughter. Mihai wanted his brother to remain in blissful ignorance. He still wants it-that’s why he demanded silence from me. It’s why he took matters into his own hands four years ago. He approached the men who ran the Berlin house and made them an offer. If they gave up this one girl, then he would give them the use of his bakery to launder money. They thought he was crazy and suggested a counteroffer. They would give him the girl if he gave them his shop. He would continue to run it, but for a salary, and all profits would be deposited into their bank.”

These were the details she’d skipped on her initial telling, and Oskar waited impatiently for Mihai’s reply. “Well?”

“What could he do? He signed the ownership papers over to them, then took Adriana back to Berlin. He nursed her until she was fit enough, then smuggled her back into Moldova. It was a secret between them-her parents would continue to believe she’d been pursuing a modeling career.”

Oskar considered that, but however he looked at it, it still made no sense. “Andrei didn’t suspect? No one’s that stupid.”

“I said the same thing. Mihai thinks Andrei suspected but was too horrified to ever ask the question. But he did change. A month after her return, he called to ask if Mihai could help them get papers to move to Germany. He wanted to do it, he said, for Adriana, because if she could run away to go to Germany, then leaving was very important to her.”

“The man lives with blinders.”

“Don’t we all,” said Erika. “When I asked Mihai for names, he seemed very nervous-it was the first time during our talk that he was. But he gave me one. Rainer Volker, the man who owned his bakery. Ring a bell?”

“No. He doesn’t own it anymore?”

“He’s dead now, so he doesn’t own a thing,” she said wistfully as she gazed at the gray sky ahead of them. “His name didn’t ring a bell with me either, but when we got into the car, I remembered him from a piece in the Hamburger Abendblatt. Last month-first week of January, I think. Rainer Volker was found shot to death down by the Elbe. You know what the article said he was?”

“I don’t know.”

“A philanthropist.”

Radovan Pani ć had been home less than a week, making arrangements for his mother’s cancer treatments in Vienna, when he learned from a friend in a smoky Novi Beograd café that the parliament of Kosovo, the Serbian province they had fought a humiliating war to keep, was holding a vote on independence that coming Sunday. Radovan, distracted by the details of the Zürich heist and finding a visa for his mother, had stayed away from newspapers.

The result was a foregone conclusion, because the Serb-dominated northern region of Kososvo was too much of a minority to hold any sway. Had there been a public referendum, they might have all boarded buses to offset the vote, but since it was a parliament vote the only idea anyone had was to send buses of Kalashnikovs.

As Sunday grew nearer, his more optimistic friends pointed out that the results didn’t matter. Kosovo had already declared independence before, in 1990, and only Albania had recognized it. This time around, no one would, because Article 10 of the UN Security Council’s Resolution 1244, which had ended the Kosovo War, gave Kosovo “substantial autonomy” within Serbia, which negated the possibility of real independence.

“That’s historical record,” said one, clutching his cigarette in a fist. “Internationally recognized. Go ahead and let them play their game. They’ll end up with egg on their faces.”

The optimists weren’t worried. The others-and they were far more numerous-included friends and most of the politicians he heard on television. The world, they reminded him, had long ago singled out Serbs for eternal punishment. They adored the Muslims in Kosovo because they had been fooled by their crying women and those alleged mass graves. The Americans, who after 9/11 should know better, would once again let their stupid political correctness get the better of them.

Radovan preferred optimism. With a mother being slowly eaten by cancer, it was the one stance that could give him some measure of peace. However, he was also a career criminal who knew the world didn’t always bow to your optimism. The result of the vote that chilly Sunday one week ago was no surprise to anyone. What followed was.

Afghanistan was the first to recognize the Republic of Kosovo. Then Costa Rica and, of course, Albania. There were jokes, because sovereignty is only as strong as the nations that agree with it. Then France said yes. The French president was of Hungarian stock, and Hungarians hated Serbs more than most, so perhaps it was an anomaly. Breaths were held. Turkey-more Muslims, so what else could you expect? Then, in Dar es Salaam, George W. Bush, that ignorant cowboy, said, “The Kosovars are now independent.”