Zero Hour Read online

4

  Lena Kamenka’s office was in the basement of a run-down apartment building south-east of the city centre. An old woman scrubbing her doorstep with a brush and bucket pointed us to a staircase. There was a look of disapproval on her wizened face. Some things, it said, are best swept under the carpet and left there.

  I followed Anna down the metal steps and stood behind her as she pressed the buzzer.

  The girl who answered the door was in her early twenties. She had the kind of jet-black hair you can only get from a bottle.

  ‘Welcome. Please come in.’

  She led us along a corridor, past a battered sofa and coffee-table. The walls of Lena’s office were lined with archive boxes. She sat behind a small desk strewn with files, waffling away at warp speed on the phone. She greeted Anna with a smile and a nod.

  ‘You would like coffee?’ The girl smiled shyly.

  ‘Thank you.’

  She left the room and Lena gestured to us to sit down. She carried on her conversation for another ten minutes in about three different languages. When she finally hung up, she threw her arms round Anna and greeted her like a long-lost sister.

  I guessed Lena was about thirty. In a stylish blouse, grey cardigan and sharply tailored trousers, she looked more like a lawyer or businesswoman than a social worker – or she would have done if it hadn’t been for her short, spiky blue hair and long, silver-painted fingernails.

  She joined us at a small table covered with yet more files and loose-leaf binders. Photocopied head shots of young women stared up at us from their covers. Most were teenagers. One looked no older than twelve. None of them looked like Lilian.

  Lena was a repatriation specialist. Her main task was bringing trafficked Moldovan girls home. Nearly all of them had been sold into prostitution abroad.

  ‘You are lucky to catch me in.’ Lena sighed. She spoke English like it was her first language. ‘I have to go to Odessa today to collect a girl off the ferry from Istanbul. There’s usually somebody on it for us. As for the airport, sometimes I think I should just take my bed up there and move in.’

  Brothel raids in countries like the UK, Germany and Holland produced many of her clients. Her number was on the walls of police stations all over the world.

  Lena tapped her cell phone. She’d positioned it carefully in front of her and kept checking the signal every minute or so. ‘I never switch it off. Sometimes they’re just metres from the pimps. I might have only seconds to get their details. Often they don’t even know what country they’re in.’

  ‘What do you do then?’

  ‘I tell them to look out of the window. A road name, a bus number. Sometimes I’ll get caller ID, but I can’t call back unless they tell me to. It’s too dangerous.’

  We needed to cut to the chase here. ‘Anna told you my paper is interested in trafficking into London, yeah?’ I leaned in. ‘What’s the chain, Lena? Does it start with a kidnapping?’

  ‘Sometimes, yes. They drug girls, take them from the fields. Sometimes they drag a drunken city girl off the street and bundle her into the boot of a car. But they don’t need to go to all the trouble of beating them up and smuggling them out of the country if the girls are happy to travel of their own free will. Sometimes they even pay their own fares. The gangs call it “happy trafficking”. These ones are even given fake passports if they want to get away to start a completely new life, away from the poverty – or whatever else it is they’re trying to escape from. The gangs prefer these girls. If they’re not bruised and battered they’ll earn more as prostitutes.’ She sighed. ‘It’s only when the person who meets them has taken away their passport that they discover the broken promises, and by then it’s too late. The ones with fake ID are lost for ever.’

  She looked up as the black-haired girl came back in with a tray carrying three steaming cups. She put the tray down on Lena’s desk and busied herself with an ancient fax machine. Then she lit herself a cigarette and joined us.

  ‘There isn’t anything happy about happy trafficking, is there, Irina?’

  The girl stared at me for so long I thought she was never going to speak. Then I realized she didn’t quite know where to begin.

  ‘I was seventeen. I was at college. I was training to be a teacher. English teacher. One day a girl I went to school with came to see me. She was working at an expensive restaurant in Greece, she said. She was making a good salary. She could get me such a job if I wanted. I needed more exams to graduate, but also I needed money. My mother was ill.’ Irina took a drag and blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling. ‘I agreed to go with my friend. She organized everything. She drove us to Odessa, and came with me on the ferry to Istanbul. Then she put me on a plane to Athens. She said she would join me later.

  ‘Another “friend” met the flight. He told me the waitress job was finished. He said he could take me to Italy. There was work in Italy, he said. On the journey, he asked me strange questions. “Do you have any scars? Will your parents come looking for you?” We arrived in Milan and there was no restaurant. That was when I found out what my school friend had been working as. And to buy her freedom and get back to Moldova, she had promised to recruit a new girl.’

  She inhaled again, more deeply this time. She was bracing herself. ‘In Italy, the “friend” took me to meet some men in an apartment. Russian men. They said I had to help them repay their investment. I said no, so they beat me. They said they would kill me if I didn’t do what they said, and give them what I earned each day.

  ‘I kept saying to them I must go back to Mother. My mother was sick. She needed medicine. They didn’t listen. I had to work seven days a week, from the afternoon to early morning the next day. Twelve hours every day, except when I had my period. The Russians took everything. They said if I tried to escape, the police would bring me back to them. The police were their friends.

  ‘There were three other girls. We were all locked in the same room until a customer came. We had to wear big T-shirts. For six months, I did this work. The customers paid fifty euros for half an hour. Sometimes I made a thousand euros a night. I got nothing.

  ‘And then, at the end of each night, the Russians had a game. They would come into our room and they would rape us all one by one. One of the girls cried so much they said the neighbours would hear. They crushed her toes under a door as punishment.

  ‘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 c
igarette. 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’état 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 wa
nder 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.’