There had been a hint of something in her voice.  Was it melancholy?  Ben Mordechai wasn't sure and tried to sort it out as he walked.

Helena had never been what anyone would consider "stable."  While she hid her problems well, she was an emotional and psychological basket case.  Had Mordechai gone through what she had suffered, he probably would have been too.

Hers was but one story among thousands in Eastern Europe.  Young girls who had been tricked into the sex trade.  Rings of professional traffickers lured them away from their villages.  They were promised jobs as nannies with nice families in England or France.  While they waited in a neighboring country for their alleged visas to be processed, they were raped, beaten, and hooked on drugs.

Their passports were withheld from them, and they were told horror stories about what would happen to their families back home if they went to the authorities.  There were always families back home.  The traffickers rerely picked the girls unless they had a substantial piece of leverage they could use on them.

Once broken, the girls were shipped to countries around the world.  Helena wound up in Israel.

It was a national stain few Israelis would dare admit.  The record, though, spoke for itself.  When it got too bad to be ignored, the government would take action, but soon enough its blind eye would return.

Helena was held in the southern West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba.  There she and the other girls were forced to perform sex acts with twelve to fifteen men a day.  Some were Jews.  Some were Palestinians.  Many were businessmen from Tel Aviv whom her pimps had inveigled.

If she failed to do what she was told, she was beaten.  If she failed to please the customers, she was beaten.  If she was too ill to perform, she was beaten and starved.

On one occasion, Helena took so sick she almost died.  If it had not been for the other girls sharing their food and nursing her, she never would have made it.

When one girl, a woman Helena deeply cared for, did die - that was her breaking point.  The girl had been beaten to death by one of the customers - a wealthy but very drunk businessman.  The pimps should have returned the favor.  At least there would have been some semblance of justice done.  Instead, they got rid of her body and blackmailed the man.  With the money, they brought in two more girls.  They were very young.  Helena could still remember what it was like to be young.  She had had enough.  That was the night she snapped.

Because of the constant threat of terrorism, many Israelis carried concealed weapons.  They were not allowed to bring them into the brothel, but customers who were known, trusted, and had paid a premium were allowed to.

There was a special area with small, pistol-sized lockers where they could lock up their weapons.  Many of them feigned using the lockers or bypassed them altogether.  One such customer was a client of Helena's.  He liked her, a lot.  But it wasn't reciprocal.

He often drank before arriving and then had a couple of drinks more before heading upstairs.  He was a mean man who liked to get rough.  Some nights, he would show up with a garment bag and word would quickly reach Helena.  Those nights never ended well.  Not that any of her nights trapped in that nightmare ever did.

Inside the garment bag was the wedding dress of the man's wife.  As far as the woman knew, it was safely in storage, waiting to be handed down to their eldest daughter.  He made Helena wear it while he disparaged his wife in absentia for getting too fat to fit into it.  He was a jeweler and completed his sick fantasy by placing a replica of his wife's wedding ring on Helena's finger.