“Trust me.” Gobbie was looking at me oddly. Lysette stared at her knees. “You know my address.” I hate that phrase, keep in touch. It always means farewell.
Darkness had fallen, or what passes for darkness in Zurich. That means lights everywhere, skies filled with sheen, lake reflecting every glim. Our village has an astronomer who keeps suing everybody for light pollution. He’d have a ball here.
“So long. And ta.” I waved from the pavement.
To the hotel. Guy and Veronique weren’t in their room. I lay on my bed. Odd, but I no longer felt sick. I felt calm but hot, sort of flu round-the-corner.
Lysette had begun to speak when we were on the trunk road heading east. Steadily, without inflection almost, stating facts rather than wanting to tell anybody anything.
“There’s still an anti-slavery society,” she said quietly, of nothing in particular. Nobody had said anything until then. I looked round and asked, “Eh?” but she ignored me.
“It only scratches the surface. There are more child slaves now than in the whole of history. In leading industrial nations—us Western peoples—just as elsewhere. Nations sign the UN Articles against it, and take no notice—”
“Shut up.” My analytical thought for the day.
“Jan was approached by an illegal immigrant,” Lysette said in that grave non-voice of hers. She might have been reading football results. “Her children were debt-bonded in Whitechapel. She asked his help, because she’d seen him photographed with one of the financiers. Jan was horrified.”
“Debt-bonded?” Gobbie asked it, knowing I’m stubborn.
“There are two forms of child slavery. Chattel slavery—old-fashioned slavery, bought and sold. It exists in North Africa, elsewhere. There are cases reported every year in Western countries, even among diplomats’ family servants. In debt bondage children work to pay off parents’ debts—India, Pakistan, South America, Africa, the Philippines. I would tell you stories, but you would not bear them, Lovejoy.”
The stupid bitch had gone on and on. I stared at the ceiling, hearing Guy and Veronique arrive next door. They sounded three sheets to the wind, or similar. “… Ten thousand little boys were imported from Bihar to make carpets in Mirzapur-Varanasi. They were bought, bonded, simply stolen children. They work from four every morning until two o’clock in the afternoon. Then they are fed one bread
“What work?”
“Making nice carpets. Making nice bricks. Making nice polished gems for the elegant West End shops, to please elegant Western ladies. Quarrying stones, making matches, rag-picking, doing
“Ta, love.” I meant shut up. Some hopes.
“Plantations, domestics, factories.” Christ, had the stupid bitch never heard of inflexion? She sounded on automatic. “Thailand’s supposed to lead the world, Lovejoy. For exploitation of over three million child slaves, I mean: drug-packers, child prostitutes, leading exporter of bonded or chattelled slaves to the Gulf, Europe. Rongmung Road, near Bangkok’s railway station, the children are sold, to be chained workforces, or to baby brothels. Jan was horrified, not knowing, you see. He isn’t commercially minded. They told him at the Anti-Slavery place. I think they said ten pounds sterling to buy one child slave, though you can get wholesale deals…”
“Excuse me, please. Can you stop half a sec, Gobbie?”
I stared at the ceiling some more. I’d actually uttered the words, remembering, in the privacy of my own hotel doss-house room. Gobbie’d not stopped, of course. How could he, million miles an hour on some fast roads? I’d grumbled, finally told Gobbie to shut her up. She’d only obeyed when Gobbie gravelled out, “That’ll do, Lysette.” Why did she never do as I said, only that gerontic old sod? It gets my goat.
“Lovejoy?” Veronique opening my door made me leap a mile. She laughed, eyes shining with that unholy thrill that came from within. “What were you doing? I startle you?”
“Er, no, love, ta.” I was bathed in sweat. “Time, is it?”
“We’ve just had word.” She spoke coyly. “It’s tomorrow afternoon. You can get on with your merrymaking.” She paused, hand on the door, provocative. At least, she would have been provocative, except drugs meant she was no longer Veronique. She was a trillion different other folk, people I’d never met and didn’t know. Like talking to a chemistry set.
“Off?” I said stupidly, mind cogging slowly into action.
“Postponed.” She smiled over her lie, really more of a leer. Hideous. To think that I’d —“Worth it, was she?”
Lost. “Worth it?”
“You look, how d’you say in English, shagged out, Lovejoy.”
Whoops. Forgotten I was supposed to have been wassailing with a local bird. “Superb, love,” I said weakly. Well, Swiss national honour and all that. “Beautiful.”
“Good as I?”
“Not quite, no.”
“Tomorrow, Lovejoy, you and I will make sweet music, no?”
“No. I mean yes.”
She smiled. I’d never seen eyes so brilliant. “It will be such lovely music, Lovejoy. Like never before!” Her sentences were fraying in their chemical heaven.
