Mircea had never been to Cyprus before – he preferred to take holidays in Croatia or Italy, but he always felt he missed out on the Eastern part of the Mediterranean. Piotr went on and on about Bulgaria the Black Sea, but even he had been to Turkey. On Tuesday, Mircea found himself in the company of eight Belarussian beauties, girls Andrei deemed pretty but not too beautiful to leave Belarus, on the way to Ercan. They were all blonde, and attracted attention from the moment they boarded the plane. Mircea tried to keep a low profile, sitting behind the troupe of girls, but several male passengers tried to flirt with them, making it impossible for Mircea to pretend that he didn’t know them. He had to intervene several times, claiming they were underage gymnasts, and he was their coach. He amended that to assistant coach, when glances took in his unsporty physique. For the millionth time, Mircea wished he had lieutenants to take care of such things as bringing the girls to the club. For one, he hated babysitting, and lieutenants didn’t work alone. There would be two or more of them, able to keep admirers away. Two or more minders would be much more effective in keeping the girls unmolested.
No one had organised transport when they landed – Mircea had to figure out how to ferry eight girls to the club. It was hot and humid in Cyprus, but that wasn’t why Mircea was dripping with perspiration. If Piotr or Andrei ever got wind of the disorganisation, Mircea would be worse than a laughingstock. There were no minivans available – there was no way he would put all the girls on to a public bus. Thinking quickly, Mircea commandeered two taxis, but then realised he couldn’t afford to separate the girls without any means of communication between them. The girls had surrendered their passports to Mircea, and didn’t have mobile phones of their own. Mircea was supposed to be in complete control of them – how was he going to manage this?
He noticed how many people were jabbering away on mobile phones. He looked around the arrivals gate, realising the convenience store there did not sell anything as useful as mobile phones. SIM cards yes, but not the actual phone. Sweating bullets, Mircea had a brainwave. He bribed one of the taxi drivers with an outrageous sum of money to call him on his mobile – Mircea handed the taxi driver’s phone to the brightest of the girls, demanding she keep talking to him the whole time. The taxi drivers found this hilarious, and made several comments in Turkish, lowering Mircea’s opinion of the language even more.
“Yeah, I know…we’re a comedy troupe,” Mircea said stiffly in English, handing money to the drivers. The girl with the phone was watching from the back of the taxi.
“Why did you give them so much money?” she demanded. Mircea waved at her to keep quiet, wondering if he would have to pay her off, too.
“Are you part of a circus?” the driver of the taxi Mircea would ride in asked. Seeing four girls squished into the backseat of a compact car made Mircea think of the trick where an improbable number of clowns burst out of a small car.
“Yes. The circus.” Mircea rolled his eyes, and prayed this story would not make it back to Minsk. His jaw throbbed from the tension. He threw himself into the passenger seat of his taxi, not realising they drove on the left in Cyprus. He found himself staring at the steering wheel, as the driver coughed impatiently. He smiled stupidly up at him, pain shooting through his mouth. He would have to put the splints in!
“The circus,” he explained to the driver, getting out of the driver’s seat.
“What are doing?” the girl in the other taxi asked Mircea over the phone, as he ran around the front of the car to get into the passenger seat.
Mircea almost told her to shut up, but he was afraid of her hanging up and cutting off the lines of communication. “Stop asking questions,” he ordered stiffly. The taxis drove off, and Mircea told the girl to alert him if she lost sight of his taxi.
The girl wasn’t listening. There was the sound of an argument in her taxi. “The driver won’t let us smoke!” the girl finally told Mircea.
Did these stupid females think they were on a holiday? “So don’t smoke!” Mircea told the girl. He noticed his taxi driver was smoking, and gestured at him to stop. The driver misunderstood, and handed him the pack, offering him a cigarette. Sighing, Mircea took one. The girls in his taxi asked for one, and Mircea yelled at them to shut up.
“Hey, are you smoking?” the girl on the phone screeched.
“This is not a holiday camp!” Mircea shouted into the phone. “You do as you are told – if that means no smoking, then you don’t smoke!” Mircea stuck his hand out of the window, three fingers pointing out. “Do you see our taxi?” When she confirmed this, Mircea asked her how many fingers he was holding up. When she said three, he made the thumbs up sign. “Excellent!” It was ragtag and unprofessional, but Mircea was managing this transfer of girls.
The girl on the other end snorted. She spoke some English, so she could communicate with her driver. “He says it will take about an hour to get to the club…are you going to make signals at us the whole time?” Mircea could hear the girls in the other taxi laughing at him. Wordlessly, he stuck the cigarette in his mouth and the driver lit it for him.
“I can see you smoke,” the girl on the mobile sulked. Mircea waved the hand holding the cigarette out the window at the other taxi. “You bimbos are driving me to smoke!” He took a drag -the cigarette was a local Turkish one, and it was vile. Mircea threw it out on to the road, coughing.
“Will we get anything to eat?” the girl on the phone asked. “The food on the plane was disgusting, and we’re hungry.”
Mircea clenched his teeth, causing himself absolute agony. He was tempted to knock the girl’s teeth in once they got to the club, which brought back a vision of Milla. Mircea closed his eyes and moaned softly.
“Hey, are you okay?” the girl on the phone asked.
“I’m fine!” Mircea insisted, opening his eyes. He couldn’t imagine keeping a conversation going with this idiot, so he racked his brains to come up with something. “Sing me a song!”
“A what?” the girl said. “I can’t sing!”
“So put on one of the girls who can!”
Mircea heard muffled noises of the phone being passed, snippets of talk like he’s crazy and he’s Moldovan! Then he heard a thin but pleasant young voice singing The Internationale, of all things. Mircea found himself singing along, and to his surprise, the girls and even the driver in his taxi joined in.
“A communist circus!” the driver roared. Mircea listened to the sound of the singing, realising these girls actually had some talent. Too bad they weren’t going to be the nightclub act he told the immigration authorities they would be. The taxi driver started to sing along, dangerously swerving as he did so. Mircea swore and shouted; the last thing he needed was to get into a crash.
“Everyone shut up!” he roared. Remembering to keep the girl on the line, he told the singer to give the phone back to the original girl. “Tell me a joke!” Mircea ordered.
“I don’t know any jokes,” was the lame reply.
“Someone think of a joke!” Mircea yelled. The phone changed hands in the other taxi; one of the other girls told a weak off-colour joke about some gay priests. Mircea immediately thought of the Catholic missionary Michael, and demanded another joke. One of the girls in his taxi piped up that she knew one, but Mircea waved at her to shut up. He needed to keep a conversation going between the two taxis.
Another girl stammered her way through a bad political joke, one that probably only made sense to a Belarussian. “Sing another song – not the Internationale this time!” Mircea ordered. Someone started to sing Happy Birthday, or all things. Mircea glared at his driver, putting a finger to his lips.
“It’s your birthday?” the driver asked.
“No, one of the girls,” Mircea lied.
“Who?” the driver asked. Mircea dug into his pocket and came up with more money to shut the driver up.
“Sing a folk song,” he said into the phone. Several of the girls joined in on this one. Though the song was slow and gloomy, the girls really did sing well. He noted that the taxi driver was nodding his head along to the sound of the singing, and he worried about the safety of the taxis again. “Let’s practise English,” he suggested, stopping the singing. “Who can count to ten?”
The phone was handed back to the original girl, who had trouble with seven. “Hold the phone up, and all of you, repeat after me.” Mircea proceeded to hold an English lesson between the two taxis, as the girls in both taxis chanted the numbers in English after Mircea.
“They should learn the Turkish numbers!” the driver suggested. Shrugging, Mircea nodded, and repeated the numbers the driver recited into the phone. There was a lot of giggling and squealing, as the driver of the other taxi corrected the girls’ pronunciation. Mircea wondered who would teach the girls some more useful vocabulary, like how much each different sex act would cost.
He could hear the girls having another conversation in the other taxi; one of them was trying to get the driver to take them to the beach in broken English. Mircea’s blood boiled; where did these stupid girls think they were going? “No beach!” he shouted in English, then remembered to say it in Russian.
“No beach?” the driver of his taxi repeated, and the girls in the back moaned in disappointment. Blindly, Mircea lashed out and slapped one harshly, turning with his hand raised to the back, to quell any further complaints.
“You girls are here to earn money!” he shouted into the phone in Russian, making sure the girls in his taxi heard as well. “You’re not here for your fun!”
He heard one of the girls in the other taxi protest that they were on an island, so not letting them go to the beach was unfair. He flirted with the idea of pulling the taxis over and dealing with the dissenters, but he knew he couldn’t manage that on his own. How could he be sure to get both taxis to stop? His driver was too inclined to get involved in everything as it was.
“We will do nice things later, once we have checked in at the club,” Mircea found himself promising with the honeyed voice of an uncle. He thought of how instilling a sense of urgency, of some goal that they had to reach, would distract the girls. “You have to eat first, and that will be at the club. They are waiting for us, so we can’t be late!”
The promise of food seemed to quiet the girls. One of them asked if there would be American-style pizza; Mircea had to wonder where she got that idea from. Where did these girls think they were going? He had thumbed through their passports earlier, which of course were fake and didn’t have any real information on any of them. On forged papers, they were all over eighteen, but Mircea was starting to ask himself how old they were really. He suspected some of them might really be young, like fourteen or fifteen. “Say the numbers again,” he suggested, hoping that would distract them enough to keep from complaining. He listened to them chant numbers in English and Turkish, rubbing his sore jaw.
He was amazed that it could take them an hour to get anywhere on such a small part of an island, but traffic was pretty dense. It did almost take them an hour to get to the club, by which time Mircea thought he would go crazy. Here, they were expected; a team of bouncers swarmed on the taxis, herding the girls together like a flock of sheep, and dispatching their luggage immediately. Mircea handed the driver of the other taxi his mobile phone back, turning down his request for a drink at the club. The Swan Nightclub was out of the price bracket of a taxi driver.
Mircea was shown into the back office of the nightclub, where the manager, Nikita , was watching the closed circuit cameras. “You must be Mircea,” he said in greeting, barely looking up. One of the video cameras was evidently in the dressing room, and Nikita was leering at a screen of the new girls in varying states of undress.
“I am,” Mircea affirmed, looking at the screen with him. He looked at the body of one of the girls he suspected of being underage – without clothes, she really was young, with the nearly androgynous body of a child. Mircea liked young girls, but this was borderline paedophilia.
“These Belarusians really are hot stuff!” Nikita commented approvingly. He squinted at the screen. “We’ll get them to get Brazilian waxes, so people can’t see that some of them are not natural blondes.” He laughed and held up his hand in a high five to Mircea. “Good job in getting them here in two taxis. There should have been a minivan waiting for you, but these Turks can’t organise anything.”
Mircea smiled, pleased. He had passed a test in getting the girls to the club. As long as no one found out about the sing-a-long, he would look competent. On the screen, two of the bouncers who had dispatched the luggage had come in to the dressing room, and the girls were screeching in protest.
“What’s this?” Mircea asked. Nikita snorted.
“Employee bonus time,” Nikita explained. Each of the bouncers had chosen a girl and was leaving the room with them. Mircea inhaled, and Nikita raised an eyebrow.
“Better one of our Russians than a Turk for the first time,” he said mildly. One of the girls who was chosen was the one Mircea suspected of being seriously underage. Mircea relaxed his jaw – that was what she came here to do, after all. And it wasn’t like she was a virgin or anything.
He looked away from the screen; his part of this business was done. “Any chance of some food?” Mircea asked.