Girl Who Played with Fire, The - Stieg Larsson [40]
“It sounds like slave labour camps. Do the girls make any money at all?”
“Oh yeah,” Johansson said. “They usually work for several months before they’re allowed to go back home. They’re given between 20,000 and 30,000 kronor, which in Russian money is a small fortune. Unfortunately they’ve often picked up heavy alcohol or drug habits and a lifestyle that means the money will run out very quickly. This makes the system self-sustaining: after a while they’re back again and return voluntarily, so to speak, to their torturers.”
“How much money is this business turning over annually?” Blomkvist asked.
Mia glanced at Svensson and thought for a moment before she responded.
“It’s very hard to give an accurate answer. We’ve calculated back and forth, but most of our figures are necessarily estimates.”
“Give us a broad brush.”
“OK, we know, for example, that the madam, the one convicted of procuring but acquitted of trafficking, brought thirty-five women from the East over a two-year period. They were all here for anything from a few weeks to several months. In the course of the trial it emerged that over those two years they took in two million kronor. I have worked out that a girl can bring in an estimated 60,000 kronor a month. Of this about 15,000, say, is costs—travel, clothing, full board, etc. It’s no life of luxury; they may have to crash with a bunch of other girls in some apartment the gang provides for them. Of the remaining 45,000 kronor, the gang takes between 20,000 and 30,000. The gang leader stuffs half into his own pocket, say 15,000, and divides the rest among his employees—drivers, muscle, others. The girl gets to keep 10,000 to 12,000 kronor.”
“And per month?”
“Suppose a gang has two or three girls grinding away for them, and they take in around 150,000 a month. A gang consists of two or three people, and that’s their living. That’s about how the finances of rape look.”
“And how many of them are we talking about… if you extrapolate?”
“At any given time there are about a hundred active girls who are in some way victims of trafficking. That means the total income in Sweden each month would be around six million kronor, around seventy million per year. And that’s only the girls who are victims of trafficking.”
“That sounds like small change.”
“It is small change. And to bring in these relatively modest sums, around a hundred girls have to be raped. It drives me mad.”
“That sounds like an objective researcher! But how many creeps are living off these girls?”
“I reckon about three hundred.”
“That doesn’t sound like an insurmountable problem,” Berger said.
“We pass laws and the media gets outraged, but hardly anyone has actually talked to one of these girls from the East or has any idea how they live.”
“How does it work? I mean, in practice. It’s probably fairly difficult to bring a sixteen-year-old over here from Tallinn without anyone noticing. How does it work once they arrive?” Blomkvist asked.
“When I started researching this, I thought we were talking about an incredibly well-run organization with some form of professional mafia spiriting girls unnoticed across the borders.”
“But it’s not?” Eriksson said.
“The business is organized, but I came to the conclusion that we’re talking about many small and badly organized gangs.