Zero Hour Read online

  We’d arrived at the port in Odessa to discover that the ferry to Istanbul only sailed on Saturdays and Mondays, and took a couple of days. We’d rerouted ourselves in the direction of the airport and spent the rest of the night in the car. I dropped Lena’s pistol into a river and ditched the Beamer, then walked the last two K to the terminal.

  We took the Aerosvit Airlines 07.00 flight to Istanbul, arriving at 08.35. We caught the connection to Copenhagen, leaving at 09.00, by the skin of our teeth. There wasn’t a problem with visas. Brits and Russians don’t need them, and Anna smoothed over the minor hiccup caused by the absence of both a Moldovan exit stamp and a Ukrainian entry stamp with a story about us taking the wrong road out of Transnistria and missing the border post. The immigration guy accepted the explanation, together with all the lei that Irina had exchanged for us. This was another former Soviet republic, after all.

  While Anna slept, I’d thought about Lilian.

  She’d bought herself a return ticket, but that might not be significant. She was bright enough to know she’d have problems at Danish Immigration if she couldn’t show an intention to leave. I bet Slobo had told her that.

  Anna had told me that citizens of the Republic of Moldova can’t just rock up at the check-in desk and jump on the first plane to the EU. Pre-2007, they’d had to report in person to the Danish embassy in Bucharest, in neighbouring Romania, for a tourist visa. Post-2007, an EU Common Visa Application Centre had been set up in the Hungarian embassy in Chisinau to simplify travel to Greece, the Netherlands, Belgium and twelve other ‘Schengen treaty’ countries.

  The Schengen visa was designed to make travelling between its fifteen European member states – which aren’t the same as the EU countries – much easier and less bureaucratic, but they’re still not issued on the spot. They take ten days to process.

  Travelling on a Schengen visa means that the holder can travel to any or all member countries, avoiding the hassle and expense of obtaining a new one for each country. This might have been good for Lilian, but it could be a problem for us. She could have landed in Copenhagen, but then been moved on to Austria, Germany, Belgium, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, or the Netherlands.

  There was something else Julian had got from the Hungarians: a scan of all three pages of Lilian’s Schengen-visa application form. Besides all the usual personal details, she had had to state the main purpose of the journey (she’d put tourism); duration of stay (up to thirty days); whether her fingerprints had been collected previously for the purpose of applying for a Schengen visa (no, they hadn’t); intended date of arrival in the Schengen area (3 March); intended date of departure from the Schengen area (10 March); and surname and first name of the inviting person(s) in the member state(s). If that wasn’t applicable, then the name of hotel(s) or temporary accommodation(s) in the member state(s), and the address and email address of the inviting person(s)/hotel(s)/temporary accommodation(s). She’d put Hôtel d’Angleterre, 34 Kongens Nytorv. Was the cost of travelling and living during the applicant's stay covered by the applicant himself/herself? Yes. Means of support? Credit card.

  None of her responses meant very much. Plenty of people bluff in their visa applications and she’d had Slobo helping her on her way.

  At the bottom of the form, she’d had to sign that she was aware of and consented to the collection of the data required by this application form, the taking of her photograph and, if applicable, of her fingerprints.

  Julian had already checked. They hadn’t taken her fingerprints, but she had supplied a photograph; he sent it to my BlackBerry. She looked more or less the same as she had outside the factory. Her hair was a bit longer, that was all. Or it had been. It might be short again by now.

  So all we knew was that she had landed in Copenhagen. Julian had been able to confirm she hadn’t taken an onward flight. But that also meant jack-shit. She could now be on a train or a car to anywhere in Europe. The only good thing about her being trafficked rather doing a runner was that someone, somewhere, knew where she was.

  We didn’t have a choice. We had to find the next link in the trafficking chain, then follow whatever we could wring out of him.

  2

  The moment I saw the Hôtel d’Angleterre I knew we weren’t going to be finding Lilian’s name anywhere on the register. A big, imposing building overlooking an elegant square in the heart of the city, it was clearly a five-star establishment with fuck-off rooms that would cost at least two thousand kroner (three hundred dollars) a night. When she’d seen she needed a name for her visa application, she must have done a quick Google and chosen the most distinguished. Maybe Slobo had told her it carried a lot more weight than a B-and-B in the hippie quarter.

  I parked up.

  Anna had gone to book us into an airport hotel while I got a serious wad of kroner from an ATM, organized the car, bought a city guidebook and cajoled a shedload of coins from the shopkeeper. Once we’d checked in, I’d gone to the hotel business centre and bluetoothed Lilian’s picture to a printer. Fuck the shower and shave: we’d buy new kit later.

  We now had an A4 colour copy each, as well as a map of Christiania downloaded from the Internet and printed off.

  The d’Angleterre was as grand inside as out. It wasn’t the sort of place to have pictures of its clientele on the wall, but I knew from Anna’s Googling that everyone from Winston Churchill to Tony Blair had stayed there when they were in town.

  To the left was a cocktail bar. Reception was to the right. The uniformed guy behind the desk greeted us with an efficient but not over-friendly smile. ‘Equality is entrenched in the Danish psyche,’ Anna told me. ‘Staff don’t go out of their way to establish rapport with customers, in any sort of business.’

  And there was me thinking they were just miserable.

  I produced Lilian’s picture and passed it over. ‘Have you seen our sister? She would have checked in here ten days ago. We haven’t heard from her and – well, we’re getting a bit concerned, to be honest. She’s travelling alone.’

  He studied it hard. He was in his twenties himself. A guest as attractive as Lilian would have registered. I watched his eyes not his lips as he replied. He didn’t recognize her. I could have asked if there was anyone else I could check with, but there didn’t seem much point. If all other avenues ended in dead ends, we’d come back here and start all over again.

  We went back to the car.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about your treatment.’

  ‘Lack of it, you mean.’

  ‘Why not in Moscow? We would have more time together.’

  ‘More time dribbling and shitting myself. What’s the good of that? I don’t want it. I certainly don’t want you exposed to it.’

  ‘Isn’t that my choice?’

  ‘Maybe. But the way I see it, I go on until it’s too painful or just too much for us both. Then I take a couple of bottles of pills, we lie down and only you wake up.’ I hit the key fob. ‘What do you think?’

  She opened her door and stared across the roof at me. ‘Brilliant. And I get left to clean up the mess.’

  3

  Christiania was a short distance away. While I drove, Anna scanned the guidebook. In 1971, the abandoned eighty-five-acre military camp at Christianhavn, on the eastern edge of the city, had been taken over by squatters who proclaimed it the ‘free town’ of Christiania. The police tried to clear the area, but it was the height of the hippie era and people looking for an alternative lifestyle poured in from all over Denmark. The following year, bowing to public pressure, the government allowed the community to continue as a social experiment. About a thousand people had settled in, transforming the old barracks into schools and housing and starting their own collective businesses, workshops and recycling programmes.

  ‘A thousand people on an eighty-five-acre site.’ I glanced across at her. ‘Where would a concerned sibling start looking?’

  ‘She’ll have turned up needing s
omewhere to stay. There’s nowhere you can pay to stay in Christiania. I think Slobo promised to help her do the runner, told her this was the perfect place to hide, and finished off with the oldest trick in the trafficking book: saying he had a friend who would help her and even get her a job.’

  ‘Whatever, she’d also have needed to eat and drink. Even if she’s already been moved on, someone must have seen her.’

  She ran her finger down the page. ‘Car-free Christiania has a market, some craft shops, and several places where you can get coffee and something to eat. The main entrance is on Prinsessegade, two hundred metres north-east of its intersection with Bådsmandsstraede. You can take a guided tour of Christiania. There’s a Pusher Street information office next to the Oasen café.’

  ‘Can you get us to that intersection?’

  ‘We’re almost there. Left in four or five blocks.’

  ‘Does Pusher Street mean what I think it means?’

  She nodded. ‘Since 1990, the story of Christiania has been one of police raids on Pusher Street. The police, decked out in riot gear, have patrolled Christiania regularly, staging numerous organized raids leading to some ugly confrontations and arrests.’

  She went back to the map page. ‘This is the one. Left here.’

  I found a space on a street full of bars and cafés just off Prinsessegade. I pushed enough coins into the machine to last us a few hours and stuck the ticket on the dashboard.

  We walked a couple of hundred yards to an alleyway. A short way down it, a big wooden sign announced, ‘You are entering Christiania.’ On the reverse, for our benefit on the way back, it said, ‘You are entering the EU.’

  An information board told us that guided tours left from there at three in the afternoon. Another showed a camera with a red slash through it. The dealers had never gone away, Anna said. No dealer likes a camera in his face.

  We walked between walls plastered with graffiti and murals. A familiar smell hung in the air. The slightly sickly, pungent scent of cannabis thickened the further we went. A woman cycled past us on a bike with a huge wooden box on the front containing a pair of muzzled Rottweilers.

  A young guy with dreadlocks stood guard by a fence, radio comms in one hand, oversized spliff in the other. I guessed the system worked like the one the Amish had in the film Witness. One call and the community came running – or, in Christiania’s case, the dealers. The guidebook had said that the narcotics police, backed by the Riot Squad, had raided Pusher Street several times, arresting any of the dealers who didn’t pack up and run fast enough.

  ‘Does it say why they don’t just close the whole place down and be done with it?’

  ‘There would be riots. The hash market turns over millions a year.’

  Anna read some more from the guidebook as she walked. Perfect. It made us look like tourists in search of a ‘sanctuary for anyone who is tired of the consumerism and routine of everyday life’.

  It must have sounded idyllic to a girl raised in an environment of chaos and gangsterdom after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Slobo wouldn’t have had to sell this one too hard.

  ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out – whatever. Lovely until the money runs out and you realize you have to get a haircut and some work clothes and earn a living.’ I grinned. I was starting to sound like Tresillian.

  Graffiti covered every inch of wall.

  Living to lower standards for a higher quality of life.

  Loud music bounced out at us from somewhere out of sight.

  A guy in a sweater full of holes ambled towards us.

  ‘Pusher Street?’ Anna showed him the map.

  He pointed wearily. Christiania was Copenhagen’s second biggest tourist attraction after the Tivoli Gardens and every one of them probably wanted to be able to tell their friends back home they’d dared visit Pusher Street.

  ‘Have you seen this girl?’

  Anna produced her picture but he’d already gone.

  4

  We came to a small market. Three or four stalls sold T-shirts, hats and scarves. Anna showed the stallholders Lilian’s photograph but none of them recognized her. I wondered if they would have recognized their own mothers. Everybody looked slightly dazed.

  Anna spotted a bar. ‘As you said, she had to eat and drink . . .’

  We went in. The big airy room was full of guys with wispy beards and woolly hats with earflaps. It was us who looked weird. We did what any concerned family member would do. We went up to the bar and held out Lilian’s picture. The girl had pierced eyebrows and a nose-ring. Her hair was bleached.

  ‘Have you seen this girl?’

  ‘I’m sorry, no.’

  ‘Do you mind if we ask your customers?’

  ‘Be my guest. But please buy something.’

  I ordered a couple of beers and handed over a fistful of kroner. We left the bottles on the bar and started to circulate. The first table responded to the photo with shakes of the head. So did the next. People did look, but I got the feeling they wouldn’t have told us even if they had seen her. I put it down to rage against the machine. ‘This is shit, Anna. Let’s try that information centre.’

  As we turned to leave, a ruddy-faced man in his sixties hauled himself to his feet, as if to follow us out. Then he seemed to think better of it and sat down again. Maybe he was just too stoned or pissed. He had long white hair that needed even more of a wash than we did and a beard that Gandalf would have been jealous of.

  I caught Anna’s eye and we headed back to his table. She sat opposite him, and I stood alongside. He concentrated very hard on his glass. Everything about him suggested he’d downed a good few whiskies before he’d got to this one.

  He nodded at the pictures. His watery eyes seemed to loosen in their sockets. ‘Your . . . child?’

  ‘No, my sister. She’s run away. She came here, maybe ten days ago. You’ve seen her?’

  He pulled out a packet of Drum and some papers but seemed in no hurry to open them. Anna took the hint and pulled out her readymades. He feigned delighted surprise and helped himself to three.

  ‘You know, many people say that this place saved them when they were at their lowest ebb and had nowhere else to turn.’ His English was accented but faultless. ‘I’m one of them. I left home when I was fifteen and drifted until I found Christiania.’

  He paused to light the first of his recently acquired Camels and sucked in the real deal with the kind of pleasure that only smokers know. Me, I wished we were still in the EU where this shit was outlawed. Anna sparked up too, adding to the pollution.

  Gandalf waved his free hand around the commune as if it were his kingdom. ‘In the early days we built our own houses in the woods or renovated the old barracks. We had a right to build as we chose. This place is all I know.’

  I wasn’t sure if the smile that lurked behind the hair was fuelled by happiness or cannabis, but it showed off the three or four yellow tombstones that still clung to his gums in all their glory.

  I stuck a finger on Lilian’s chin. ‘Her name is Lilian Nemova. You seen her?’

  ‘Russian?’

  ‘Moldovan.’

  His eyes wobbled as they moved down her picture once more, but only for a fleeting second. ‘You do not sound like a Moldovan, brother.’

  Anna was getting as pissed off with him as I was. ‘He’s helping me find her.’

  He took a swig from his glass.

  I kept an eye on people coming in and leaving the bar. You never knew.

  ‘We were hard-working people here. Artists, socialists, anarchists – people who drank and smoked too much, but we had rules. We have bad people preying on the weak and lonely.’ He waved in the vague direction of the free town outside. ‘It was the dawn of a new era. A new way of living. Then it all changed. We’ve even had a murder here – here, in Christiania!’ He pointed a wrinkled finger at the sugar bowl in front of him like it was the root of all evil. ‘It’s wrong. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.’

  He necked the
last of his drink.

  ‘But have you seen her?’

  He shook his head; he didn’t want to look at the photo again. ‘These are sad days. Turkish gangs, Palestinian and Balkan gangs, Russian gangs. They are all here.’

  I crouched down, elbows on the table, trying for eye-to-eye. ‘One of the gangs – the Russians maybe – would they have her?’

  He stared into his empty glass and kept shaking his head. He started to cry. Saliva dribbled into his beard.

  ‘Fuck him. Let’s get out there. The more people we hit, the better the chance that whoever lifted her will front us.’

  Anna wasn’t too sure. ‘You think that would be the best thing to do? We might get very dead, very soon.’

  ‘Got a better idea? People aren’t exactly falling over themselves to help us, are they? We could be here for days waiting for this twat to get sober.’

  5

  Back on the street, I studied my map. ‘That way.’

  There were no signs to tell us we’d arrived, but it wasn’t long before we found ourselves on Pusher Street. It was like we’d crossed the border between the fairy kingdom and the land of the trolls. The atmosphere changed abruptly. These were mean streets. Cannabis fumes hung more heavily in the air. Aggressive-looking skinheads, some hooded, stood round flaming metal barrels, furtive and menacing. I watched a young guy approach one group and be steered down an alley. Their job seemed to be to direct buyers and keep an eye out for police.

  Everywhere I looked, pit-bull terriers wandered unleashed.

  ‘It’s an old Russian trick.’ Anna nodded at a dog that should have had tattoos on its front legs. ‘They’re trained to whisk the stash away from a police raid.’