Why Clara Is an Angel and Immanuel Kant Is a Wa**er

Chapter 1The Drive into Nowhere

The busted shocks on the old Ford van had been shot for years. Every goddamn pothole on the unlit, single-lane country road came straight up through the cold, rusted metal and slammed into the three women's spines like a dull punch. Clara sat in the dark on the sagging back seat, which reeked of stale old sweat and the sweet, sticky stink of a cheap air freshener. She clutched her heavy gym bag to her knees like one last, desperate shield.

Inside was her whole toolkit for the mechanical, degrading processing that lay ahead of them tonight: the skimpy, cheap costume, countless spare stockings, liters of industrial lube, and her small, essential pharmacy. The strong, numbing painkillers and the salves above all — tonight she'd need those more than ever, just to keep from losing her body and her mind entirely.

They wore ordinary, nondescript everyday clothes. Bare-faced, dark circles under their eyes, nobody on the street would have recognized them as the perfect meat dolls they'd soon be dressed up as in front of the crowd. The old van had no windows in the back, which only deepened the crushing sense of being buried alive. Mia groped aimlessly across the filthy floor panel and hit a stack of crumpled flyers the driver had scattered generously and at random around the city the week before, to lure the men in. A few of them still lay strewn and trampled in the footwell.

Mia grabbed one of the last clean copies and flicked on a small flashlight. The beam trembled over the cheap paper.

"Wow … Clara," Mia whispered, holding the light right on the photo. "You were still really young in this picture."

She held the flyer out to Clara. The image showed a girl smiling into the camera, fresh, firm, completely unspoiled — a brutal, painful contrast to the empty, hollowed-out shell Clara was today.

"Yeah, and now …" Roxy cut in, leaning forward and tapping another corner of the paper. "Roxy, no stretch marks." She let out a nervous laugh, a short, scratchy sound, and jabbed Mia lightly in the side. "Battle scars, girls. Those are goddamn battle scars."

But the laugh choked off again at once in the stuffy air. Not one of them in this windowless van felt even remotely like laughing.

Beside her, Mia and Roxy, the two fluffer girls, sat silent again in the crushing dark, similar bulging bags on their laps, their empty stares fixed on nothing. There was something so abyssal in that cargo hold that none of the three named it, because it needed no name. It was the exact, ghastly mood of the condemned on their last, unavoidable ride to the execution ground. Not one of them wanted to be here. Nobody was looking forward to what was coming. Every fiber of their bodies recoiled in disgust from what they were about to do for money, but grinding poverty forced them to it without mercy.

Roxy scraped at her nail polish with her thumbnail, manic, layer by layer, without really noticing. Mia had pulled a strand of hair in front of her face and picked doggedly through the pale dark for split ends, the same strand over and over. Each of them was trying, in her own desperate way, to channel the panicked tension somewhere, to physically shake it out of her fingers. For none of them did it work. Clara sat perfectly still, her jaw clenched painfully tight, breathing slowly through her nose the way she'd taught herself years ago through sheer effort — but her hands gripped the bag's shoulder strap the way you'd grip a bridge railing before the final jump.

Roxy happened to glance over at Clara. Of the three of them, Clara had by far the hardest, most destructive job ahead tonight: fifty cocks, minimum, one after another, nonstop, all of them inside her. At least Roxy and Mia only had to split the humiliating warm-up work, half each. And still Roxy shuddered even now, here in the dark, at the bare, sickening thought of it — a stranger's unwashed cock in her mouth while the same rough guy pawed her tits at the same time without mercy, and some of them even groped further down to her cunt uninvited, as if that came included in the price. She forced the nauseating thought away and went on scraping at her polish in a panic.

Mia was chasing her own dark thoughts too. She prayed, almost begged, that this time there'd be no disgusting reekers in the mix — guys who weren't too particular about hygiene, who hadn't washed in days and still expected, as a matter of course, that you'd take their filthy cock in your mouth. Mia had limits too, of course. But by now they lay far, far out, so far that in this swamp she almost never laid eyes on them. On top of that, a rotten tooth was giving her hell today, a constant dull throb at the back left, and of all nights she'd have to crank her jaw wide open again countless times until it cracked. The main thing was to keep the dumb bastards forced back at the hips with a flat palm; otherwise they rammed in so deep and merciless it hurt like hell and made her gag every time. She looked at the glowing watch. Hell would break loose soon. But that didn't help her, just the opposite. If only it were already one in the morning, she thought in despair, then all this filth would be behind her and the van would long since be rattling back through the dark to safety.

They'd been rounded up like slaughter cattle a good hour ago at a remote, unremarkable commuter lot on the edge of town. The iron, unbreakable rule in this particular dark trade held that you never drove to the location in your own car. The anonymity of this windowless rolling grave was their only life insurance. Far too often in the past there'd been crazy, dangerous creeps who'd followed the girls out of the dark after an event, straight to their own front doors.

Up front in the sagging driver's seat, one of Mike's beefy helpers turned heavily around and passed three fat white envelopes back into the musty dark.

"Here, ladies. As agreed," he grunted, flat. "Quick update from the boss for tonight: we're expecting fifty, sixty men tops at this gangbang party. Which means it'll be a damn tight schedule. We have to push thirty an hour through."

Thirty an hour. Two lousy minutes per man. Clara swallowed hard against the sudden gag rising in her throat, tore the corner of her envelope, and ran her thumb over the cool, dirty bills out of habit. Five hundred euros. Mia and Roxy got two hundred fifty each. A pathetic, humiliating rate for two hours of brutally hard, painful, sickening labor that would leave them barely able to tell up from down at the end. But they all needed the money. All three. Desperately.

Clara did the numbers dully in her head, the way she always did. At least her mother had been asleep when she'd left the apartment earlier — thank God, no hysterical scene, no screaming, no shattered mug in the sink. After the shift she'd have to beg Mike for a little meth. A bit for the old woman, that would last till next week, and a sedated mother was a mother who tore no new, painful holes in Clara's already ruined life. It was not a nice thought. But Clara had broken herself of nice thoughts a long, long time ago.

The driver let his arm rest loose on the seatback and grinned, crooked and obscene, into the murky dark. "And the boss says to tell you: if we clear fifty tonight, there's another clean hundred cash in hand for each of you when I pick you up again after."

Nobody cheered. The already heavy silence in the cargo hold turned almost crushing in a single beat. A hundred more meant more weight, more stinking, panting bodies, more raw friction on skin that was already burning and raw. Clara felt her stomach cramp painfully, but she only nodded, mute and beaten, into the dark. To keep this carnal, perverse machinery running at all, a brown paper bag with cheap vodka and pre-rolled joints already sat waiting up front on the center console. The absolute necessity of numbing themselves for the horror to come hung in the space like thick, poison fog.

Up front the driver shot an appraising look into the rearview. It wasn't the first on this drive and sure wouldn't be the last. Three women in the half-dark, silent, dead tired, close enough to touch — and to him as unreachable as if they sat behind armored glass. He'd have liked to have one of them, any one, honestly he didn't care which. But the girls were Mike's property, his merchandise, and anyone who touched the merchandise without asking didn't drive for Mike much longer. In this ruthless trade a thing like that could cost you more than just the shit job. The driver turned his eyes back to the dark road and let it go, the way he always let it go.

"Look, my mother sent me this this afternoon," Roxy said suddenly, breaking the pressing, leaden weight in a low voice.

As Roxy passed the phone into the middle, Mia saw how badly Roxy's fingers shook with naked panic in the pale glow of the display. The raw tension was written all over her face, and this tiny, trivial distraction with the video was exactly what they all needed right now — like one last, desperate deep breath before certain drowning.

A short video played on a loop. A little girl with blond curls sat in a high chair, slapping the table with mush-smeared hands, laughing carefree into the camera.

"Baa-baa," the child squeaked tinnily from the tiny speaker.

"So sweet," Mia whispered, toneless, and leaned in. The vast contrast between the innocent, pure child's voice and the biting smell of the rolling brothel was almost unbearable.

"She's gotten so big, Roxy," Clara said quietly.

"I know," Roxy answered. She stroked wistfully over the cold edge of the display, and for a second Clara saw the sheer exhaustion in the young mother's eyes. "The new daycare fees are eating me alive, but … at least you know what you're about to get destroyed for."

The van braked hard. The women were thrown forward roughly, the phone light died as Roxy shoved the thing away in a hurry. The soft, grinding crunch of gravel under the tires told Clara at once they'd arrived.

"Okay, girls," the driver called from up front, cutting the rattling engine. "We're here. Back of the old fitness center. Around midnight I'll be here with the engine running to pick you up again."

The heavy rear doors swung open with a shrieking metallic squeal, and ice-cold night air hit their faces like a slap. Clara gripped the strap of her bag so hard her knuckles stood out white. The time of human reality was over, to the second. From here on only bare flesh counted. And the money.