to Mark Price and now they were waiting in Nadja’s apartment for him to Skype from London again to ‘confirm all the details’ and ‘have a quick chat’ with Katja. Nadja had asked him if he could find work for her sister too and he said, ‘Why not?’ There was plenty of work in British hotels. ‘The problem is no one wants to work hard here,’ Mark Price said.
‘I want to work hard there,’ Nadja said.
They weren’t stupid, they knew about trafficking, about people who tricked girls into thinking they were going to good jobs, proper jobs, who then ended up drugged, trapped in some filthy hole of a room having sex with one man after another, unable to get home again because their passports had been confiscated and they had to ‘earn’ them back. APA wasn’t like that. They had a professional website, all above board. They recruited all over the world for hotels, nursing homes, restaurants, cleaning companies, they even had an office in Brussels, as well as one in Luxembourg. They were ‘affiliated’ and recognized and had all kinds of testimonials from people.
From what you could see of it on Skype, their office in London looked very smart. It was busy – you could hear the constant murmur of staff in the background, talking to each other, tapping keyboards, answering the ringing phones. And Mark Price himself was serious and businesslike. He talked about ‘human resources’ and ‘support’ and ‘employer responsibility’. He could help to arrange accommodation, visas, English tuition, ongoing training.
He already had something in mind for Nadja, ‘one of the very top hotels’, but she could decide when she arrived. There were plenty of opportunities ‘for a bright girl’ like her. ‘And my sister,’ she had reminded him.
‘And your sister, yes, of course,’ he’d laughed.
He would even pay their airfares. Most agencies expected you to pay them money up front for finding you a job. He would send an e-ticket, he said, they would fly to Newcastle. Katja had looked it up on the map. It was miles from London. ‘Three hours on the train,’ Mark Price said, it was ‘easy’. And cheaper for him this way – he was paying for their tickets, after all. A representative of Anderson Price Associates would meet them at the airport and take them to an Airbnb in Newcastle for the night as the Gdansk flight came in late in the day. Next morning someone would escort them to the station and put them on a train. Someone else would pick them up at King’s Cross and drive them to a hotel for a few nights until they got settled. ‘It’s a well-oiled machine,’ he said.
Nadja could probably have got a transfer to another Radisson but she was ambitious and wanted to work in a luxury hotel, somewhere everyone had heard of – the Dorchester, the Lanesborough, the Mandarin Oriental. ‘Oh, yes,’ Mark Price had said, ‘we have contracts with all those places.’ Katja wasn’t bothered, she just wanted to be in London. Nadja was the more serious of the two, Katja the carefree one. Like the song said, girls just wanted to have fun.
And so now they were sitting in front of Nadja’s open laptop waiting for Mark Price to call.
Mark Price was on time, to the second. ‘Okay,’ Nadja said to Katja. ‘Here we go. Ready?’
The tiny delay in transmission seemed to be making it harder for her to translate what he was saying. Her English wasn’t as proficient as her sister had claimed. She laughed a lot to compensate, tossing her hair and looming nearer the screen as if she could persuade him by filling it with her face. She was pretty, though. They were both pretty, but this one was prettier.
‘Okay, Katja,’ he said. ‘Time’s getting on.’ He tapped his watch to illustrate because he could see the blankness behind her smile. ‘Is your sister still there?’ Nadja’s face appeared on the screen, squashed against Katja’s, and they both grinned at him. They looked as if they were in a Photo-Me booth.
‘Nadja,’ he said, ‘I’ll have my secretary email you the tickets first thing in the morning, okay? And I’ll see you both soon. Looking forward to meeting you. Have a good evening.’
He turned the screen off and the girls disappeared. He stood up and stretched. Behind him on the wall was the smart ‘APA’ logo for Anderson Price Associates. He had a desk and a chair. There was a print of something modern