Page 17 of A Favor Owed

When the meeting is over and Elisa and I are back at the office, we review some intake files for trafficking victims. The clients are poor seamstresses from Southeast Asia. A company called Vista International had “hired” them to work in factories all over the western United States. It was supposed to be the chance of a lifetime for the women, an opportunity to make U.S. minimum wage, a fortune compared to what they usually made as seamstresses in their part of the world. Instead, they’d been shipped off to sweatshops around the West Coast, where they were housed in rooms unfit for animals, denied their wages, billed for their visas and “amenities,” overworked half the time and deprived of work for the other half. Armed guards patrolled their living quarters and worksites, preventing escape. But when one of them managed to escape from a sweatshop outside of Los Angeles, it had set in motion a police inquiry that ultimately led to an FBI investigation. The FBI had sent the seamstresses to Elisa to see if they qualified for special visas for trafficking victims.

“Um, Elisa,” I say, shuffling the papers in front of me after reading through about a dozen intakes. “Have you done cases like these before? Ones involving a recruiting company like this?”

“Not one from a business this big, no,” she says.

“Okay…”

“What?” she asks, looking up at me.

I should just keep my mouth shut, but I’m worried about the clients. No matter how much they cooperated with the police and prosecutors, there would be no convictions forthcoming. So I tell her. “This is a mob operation.”

She frowns and squints at the intake in front of her, flipping through the pages intently. “I didn’t see anything in any of my intakes about that…”

“It’s all over the intakes,” I say, my voice low and hesitant.

Now she’s looking at me intently. “What do you mean, Angela?”

Vista International is operating within a different industry from the one I’m familiar with, but they’re committing the same crime: severe human trafficking. Traffickers use force, fraud, or coercion to smuggle people into the United States or other countries where there’s a market for their labor. Sometimes they procure legitimate visas for their victims; other times they kidnap them and smuggle them across borders, sight unseen. But regardless of the means, the goal is the same: get free labor out of them. Pay them as little as possible by racking up imaginary debts (including, ironically enough, the cost of kidnapping and imprisoning them), instill so much fear of violent retribution in them that they’ll never go to the police, and use them over and over until they end up sick or injured or dead. It’s a gold mine.

“The shell business, the procurers in the country of origin who can’t be tied back to the business, the brutal security…” I say.

“I mean, that’s how a lot of trafficking operations are,” says Elisa uncertainly.

“But this one is airtight,” I point out. It’s far more professional than the one-offs and the mom-and-pop operations we usually deal with. This has organized crime written all over it.

“So…what does that mean?” she asks.

I’m not sure what it means. “Can we still help them even if there’s no indictment and no convictions?” I ask.

“Yes, the visa just requires cooperation on the part of the victims, not a successful prosecution, but…” Elisa is looking at me strangely. “Why wouldn’t there be convictions? Or at the very least an indictment? Do you know something about Vista International?”

I feel weird and awkward venturing into this territory. “I don’t know about them specifically. But I know about businesses like them.”

She eyes me keenly. “You do.”

I nod.

“Is it…uh…dangerous for us to be involved with this particular case?” she asks hesitantly.

“No,” I assure her. “Not in this capacity, where we’re just helping the victims get visas. The bosses would only go after people on the inside who snitch. You know, rats. That’s why there’ll probably not be much of an investigation, let alone convictions.”

“Rats…”

I nod.

“And you know this because…”

“My senior thesis,” I say. “Remember?”

“Wow. That must have been some thesis project.” She’s watching me with raised eyebrows. Definitely time to change the subject.

It’s nearly six o’clock, so I tell Elisa I need to go home and study for tomorrow’s classes. She’s still looking at me speculatively as I head out the door.

I bike home in the evening heat and dust, take a long, intermittently hot shower, dry my hair, paint my toes, and ignore my phone for as long as I can. Finally, having no excuse to put it off any longer, I check my text messages. There are two: the one from Brady and one from a girl in my study group. I pull that one up first.

Hi! Study group at Silver Spoon Coffee on Sunday.

See you there, I text back.

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