Zero Hour (8 page)

‘Escaping was not easy. You cannot just jump out of a window and be free. And we had no money. Some of the regular customers were policemen. Our visas were renewed even though we were prisoners. But we talked about it a lot.

‘The apartment was in a big old building. In the winter it was cold. We used to put a blanket in the big gap under the door to stop the draught. I was doing that when I suddenly had an idea. The door was locked from the other side, but they always left the key in. It was a big old-fashioned key. I pushed about a metre of the blanket underneath, and I used an eyebrow pencil to push the key out of the lock. It fell onto the blanket and I pulled it to our side. The others were too scared to come with me, but I ran.

‘I ran and ran. A lady waiting for a bus gave me some money. I took a bus to another city.

‘I went to a church and the priest telephoned Lena. She made all the arrangements and she was at the airport for me. Not my family. They were too ashamed. When I went home, the police came to my house two days later. They didn’t want information about the Russians. They didn’t want to know anything about my friend or her friend in Athens. All they wanted was sex. I said no. They said they would tell the Russians where to find me. They knew who they were. I called Lena and she rescued me - again. Now I help her with her work.’

Irina looked exhausted from retelling her story, but also defiant. ‘I still work twelve hours a day, seven days a week. But now it is with Lena, helping others like me. We will stop the trafficking one day.’

The way she said it convinced me she’d succeed - or die trying.

5

Irina went to make more coffee. Lena offered me a cigarette. I shook my head but Anna was straight in there. They both lit up.

‘Who are these guys? Old-fashioned Mafia?’

Anna waved a hand at the case files that surrounded us. ‘Or the Russian, Albanian and Ukrainian gangsters who run mixed cargoes of women, drugs and arms? Take your pick. But one thing is certain: they’ll do anything to turn a profit. Lena told me about those speedboats being intercepted in the Adriatic. The traffickers threw the women overboard to distract the police and protect the heroin and the hardware.’

Lena nodded. ‘But it must have hurt them. I’ll tell you a sad statistic. After weapons and drugs, human trafficking is now the third most profitable criminal enterprise in the world. Tens of billions of dollars a year. Obviously, trafficking on this level requires organization and cross-border networks. But at the Moldova end, things aren’t so structured. Many of the recruiters are amateurs who see an opportunity and grab it. Friends betray friends. Even a family member sometimes, in exchange for a couple of hundred dollars. Maybe worst of all, it can be the person the girl shares her bed with.’

Anna and I exchanged a glance.

‘Anna told me when she called that she’s helping you research a piece on girls who end up in the UK - is that right? In which case, there’s something you have to understand about Moldova. More than a quarter of the economically active population have migrated in search of work. A third of our GNP - a billion dollars - is money sent home from abroad.

‘Irina and I go around the country, giving out our numbers and showing films. But it’s an uphill struggle. Nobody wants to believe us. On TV, they have their noses rubbed in glossy images of life abroad. Maybe they only have to look next door to see a neighbour’s new clothes or mobile phone. An unemployed girl who’s starving isn’t going to be put off by our warnings.’

That made a lot of sense, but our girl was bright and from a rich family. I was about to ask about university kids, but Lena hadn’t finished.

‘Moldova is important to the traffickers as a source, but the trade isn’t centralized. There are local recruiters, but nearly all Moldovan girls are sold to non-Moldovan gangs. It isn’t a vertical business model. Once they’re out of the country, it’s almost impossible to pick up the trail. We have to wait until the victims contact us.’

‘Where do they end up?’

She shrugged. ‘All over. The Balkans were the big destination until about ten years ago. Now it’s Russia, Turkey, Israel, Dubai, any European city … The methods have changed, too. Traffickers have become smarter. Like I said, nowadays it’s mostly happy trafficking. Victims are only allowed to go home when they’ve worked off “debts” and “fines” invented by their pimps or, like Irina’s friend, if they undertake to send back one or two replacements.’

‘What about the authorities? Supposing a girl is reported missing, what happens? Do the parents go to the police?’

She shook her head, and for a moment I thought she was going to burst out laughing. ‘No. Nobody goes to the police. We never share information with them. The most powerful gangsters are nearly always former cops - and so are their kryshy…’ She looked at Anna, lost for the right word - the first time in an hour.

‘Roofs.’

‘Yes, their roofs - their protectors. These men are at the highest level of the police and the Ministry of the Interior. Before they’ll even open a case they demand sex or money.’

A phone rang, and stopped. Irina went over to the fax machine. She had to bend down to read the first few lines as the paper curled back on itself. ‘From Spain …’

Lena’s mobile rang. She picked it up and signalled for quiet. She listened, then spoke quickly and urgently into the mouthpiece.

She looked at me. ‘I’m sorry. I have to go.’

Irina handed her the sheet.

‘A girl has just been found during a raid in Barcelona. I have to speak to her mother.’

I snatched a glimpse of the picture. The face was bruised, but the girl it belonged to wasn’t Lilian.

6

Str A Mateevici
15.15 hrs

We were parked on the wide avenue that divided the university from the park in the north-west of the city. The university was Lilian’s last known location, which made it a good place to start.

The trams had looked tired and their wires had sagged across the cobblestoned streets as we drove out of the centre, but my first impressions of the city had been wide of the mark. It might have been in shit state, and there was quite a bit of rust about, but there was also a lot of civic pride. Mateevici was clean. The trees both sides were well tended. At first glance we could have been in any town in Connecticut, had it not been for the US embassy building about six hundred metres down the road.

The State University campus was a sprawl of trees, grass and concrete paths. Most of the buildings were ugly lumps of post-war concrete, part of Stalin’s rebuild after the annihilation. A couple of grand Hapsburg Empire-type buildings had survived. They looked like giant Battenberg cakes.

The students walking past the car had come straight from Central Casting. Some were lanky; some were overweight. Most were scruffily dressed. Their day sacks were stuffed with books. Some shared jokes; some walked on their own with headphones or mobiles stuck to their ears.

‘Hard to think that only in April last year these kids were rioting on the streets.’

I’d been away on a job at the time and must have missed the coverage. ‘What about?’

‘Moscow. Young Moldovans didn’t like their leaders embracing the Kremlin. The president, Vladimir Voronin, was a Communist, very pro-Russia. For the past four years the Kremlin had mounted a charm offensive to woo him away from the EU and NATO with offers of subsidized gas and closer economic ties. It paid off. Voronin refused to join Brussels’s Eastern Partnership programme. He called it “a plot to surround Russia”.

‘Then came the elections. The trouble started as soon as the result was announced. The Communist Party had won a suspiciously large proportion of the vote.

‘Ten thousand demonstrators massed in the city centre, most of them students. They carried Moldovan and European flags and shouted anti-Communist slogans. They gathered outside the government building and made their way down the main boulevard to the president’s office. The police used tear gas and water cannon but they couldn’t stop the crowd breaking in. Windows were smashed on two floors and fires started.

‘Voronin called it an attempted coup d’etat and pointed the finger at Romania, a NATO and EU member. Moscow backed him up. The Kremlin were shitting themselves. Imagine - protesters overrunning Moldova’s parliament and ransacking its president’s office. The scenes must have been horribly familiar to them. It’s only five years since young pro-Western protesters toppled Moscow-friendly regimes in Georgia and Ukraine.’

I nodded. I’d been to both after their ‘colour’ revolutions. Russia’s power in the region was at an all-time low. At home, the Kremlin kicked back by stamping out foreign-funded NGOs, abolishing local elections and setting up special ‘youth groups’ so they could keep an eye out for anything similar happening inside Russia. Abroad, the Kremlin’s new priority was to assert its influence and fight against increasing Westernization. Moldova’s unrest would have been a test of Russia’s ability to project power and protect friends.

‘What happened?’

‘What always happens when the people take on the state. The police came in mob-handed and arrested more than two hundred.’

‘Could Lilian have been involved?’

‘A sociology student? Does a bear shit in the woods?’

‘Russian bears shit wherever they want to.’

She grinned. I liked it when she did that. ‘Ready?’

I nodded. I was in her hands. I didn’t speak the language, and I wasn’t the world’s leading expert on universities.

‘They’ll think we’re parents visiting, or here to find out about evening classes or something. We’ll just wander round a bit, try to find out what bars she went to or groups she hung out with. Then we’ll take it from there.’

We left Mateevici and followed one of the concrete paths that snaked through the grass. Anna had been on Google in the car. There were twenty thousand students, spread across twelve faculties.

We stopped at a blue and white signpost that must have been really useful if you could read Cyrillic.

‘OK. Philosophy’s in that direction. Sociology must be close by.’

She put her arm through mine as we followed her hunch. ‘These kids are hungry for knowledge, Nicholas. They know it’s the way out of poverty. You people in the West, you have it so easy. You think education is a right, not a privilege that must be earned. You have a welfare system to catch you if you fall, or if you just don’t give a shit. These people have no safety net. They have nothing without an education.’

I could see through the windows that every lecture room was packed. We came to a newer building, lots of brick and glass. I held the door for her. Wherever you are in the world, an institution smells like an institution: a blend of body odour, wood polish, boiled cabbage and bleach.

She led me down a wide corridor lined with posters, wall charts and notice boards. My boots squeaked on the tiles. Students young and old leant against walls and talked sociology shit, or maybe just shit.

Anna stopped an older guy in a brown and grey patterned sweater. He looked Scandinavian rather than Russian. He pointed in the direction we were already heading. I smiled my thanks and got a very dark look in return. Maybe my jacket didn’t have enough herring-bones and snowflakes.

‘Where are we going?’

‘I thought we’d start at the administration offices. Maybe I’ll say I’m an aunt on a surprise visit from Moscow, hoping to pick up her phone number or address.’

We came to a line of benches that would have been more at home in a park.

‘Wait here, Nicholas. It might be better, just a woman on her own. And we’ll have a problem explaining the fact you don’t speak your niece’s language.’

It sounded fine to me. I took a seat as she disappeared into the office.

7

I was surrounded by display cabinets bursting with trophies, framed certificates and photographs of bigwigs handing them over, shots of social and sports events, class and year portraits. It got me thinking. I decided to have a closer look.

It took a few minutes, but it was worth it.

A group of students dressed like Victorians stood, bathed in sunshine, outside the building; a party maybe, or some kind of commemoration. Lilian was in three of the pictures. She was alone in one, poking her tongue out at the camera. In another she looked almost shy, alongside three or four other girls. It was the third that interested me. The lad she was with had eaten a few too many pies. He had a mop of fuzzy brown hair and bum-fluff on his chin. He and Lilian had their arms around each other. Their eyes were swivelled towards the camera and they seemed to be enjoying a very un-Victorian kiss.

I was about to move on to the next display when Anna rushed out of the office. ‘We need to go.’

I kept scanning the photos. ‘Hang on, look at—’

She grabbed me. ‘Now, Nick. Now.’

Sweaterman was piling down the corridor towards us with a posse of six or seven very pissed-off mates.

‘What the fuck’s happening?’

The office clerk came to her door. She shouted and waved her arm to move us on.

‘No questions.’

I started walking fast beside her. We went back the same way we’d come in, with Sweaterman’s posse in hot pursuit.

8

Anna didn’t turn a hair as we drove away. There was no need to flap. They hadn’t jumped into vehicles and followed us. All we had to do was make some distance.

I watched in the wing mirror my side as we rumbled across a cobbled junction. Trams, buses, cars, carts - all tried to head in a dozen different directions at the same time. Once we were clear I glanced behind us.

‘What the fuck was all that about?’

‘They thought we were secret police.’

I turned back but kept an eye on the wing mirror. A dark blue Beamer with the new shark-eye headlights and low-rider sills was shadowing us, but keeping its distance. The front fairing made it look like a hovercraft. It was having a hard time with the cobbles and potholes.

‘So teachers now stand up to the police round here, do they?’

‘The people united will never be defeated. Haven’t you heard?’ She allowed herself a smile. ‘Or, as they’ve been saying more recently, the people with Twitter will never be defeated.’