Unlike me, she wanted to save the world. Maybe you could only do that if you kept yourself just detached enough from it to stop all the shit stuff swallowing you up.
On past performance, I knew that anyone I got involved with wouldn’t stick around too long. Now I also realized that a tiny part of me hoped she might be able to save me too - or at least give me the chance to avoid flushing the last couple of months of my life down the toilet as well as the rest.
She took half a step back and gave me a long, hard look. ‘You have the picture for me?’
I righted her wheelie and she took my arm as we walked towards the coffee shop. I opened up my secure BlackBerry and clicked on the blow-up of Lilian. I left her studying the image at the square plastic table as I went and bought more Nescafe instants with hot, sweet milk. They cost twenty lei each, but the woman was more than happy with a couple of dollar bills. Hard currency still said more about you than the local stuff ever could.
Anna’s eyes were still fixed on the screen when I came back to the table. ‘Does Julian know I’m here?’
‘What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. And it won’t hurt us.’
She turned the BlackBerry screen towards me. ‘She’s very pretty, beneath all that anger. Trafficking has to be the strongest possibility.’
‘But she binned her Facebook account before she went AWOL. And she’s a uni girl, switched on, not some pointy-head from the sticks who’ll fall for the nearest scam.’
Anna smiled like a mother whose kid has just said something naive. ‘You know nothing about this country and its people until you understand about trafficking. I’ll take you to see someone who will help you understand.’
‘Have you ever come across the name Hector Tarasov? He’s her father. He has a factory in Transnistria. A factory with a tank outside.’
She shook her head and reached into her coat pocket for her iPhone. ‘I can Google—’
‘No need, mate. I’ve already had a look. Nothing. It doesn’t matter, just background.’
She sat back, not touching her brew, and tilted her head to one side, studying me.
‘What?’
‘I’m still trying to work out why you’re here, Nicholas.’ She’d started calling me that recently - told me I deserved all three syllables, especially now I’d got a penthouse and a Porsche. I knew she was taking the piss, but I rather liked it. ‘You should be enjoying your life. You have no more reason to do this sort of work.’
I thought we were made of the same stuff: she wasn’t going to hang up her Crusader’s shield any time soon. I was surprised she felt the money might have changed things for me. ‘I
She gave me a puzzled look. ‘I know you’ve taken some punishment over the years, but you should be able to survive a straightforward K and R job …’
I took another sip of coffee and decided that eight cups was already more than enough. I couldn’t quite bring myself to look her in the eye.
‘Except that this isn’t a K and R job, is it, Nicholas? When have you ever been involved in the commercial world?’
I’d known it wouldn’t be long before she rumbled that one. Recovering kidnap victims is quite a business. If the victim is recovered alive, you can cop a percentage of the premium that would have been paid out by the underwriters in the event of a death, or on any ransom demand. It wasn’t entirely risk free, but Anna was right - it was a long way from being on the receiving end of an RPG.
‘I’m doing it for Jules.’ I shifted my chair closer to hers. ‘I couldn’t tell you over the phone.’
She lifted a hand and stroked my face. ‘You look really pale, Nicholas. You sure you’re feeling OK?’
‘Sure. Too many planes, that’s all.’
She got to her feet. ‘Why don’t you fix the car? I’ll phone and check the hotel reservation, then call Lena. I’ll wait for you outside.’
‘Lena?’
‘There’s nothing Lena doesn’t know about trafficking.’
I walked away with a bit of a spring in my step. The only negative so far was that there weren’t any hotels at the airport. If we did find Lilian, we might have to hole up somewhere with her until Tresillian sorted out the safe- house. The beauty of an airport hotel is that all you have to do is scan the departures board, see which plane’s leaving next, and leg it to the sales desk.
3
It was only fifteen Ks into Chisinau. There were a surprising number of shiny new BMWs and Mercedes weaving their way between the clapped-out trucks and tractors, but the road still wasn’t exactly choked with traffic.
The fields on each side of us looked absolutely knackered. As with most of the old Eastern bloc the heavy use of agricultural chemicals, including banned pesticides like DDT, had ripped the heart out of the land. And severe soil erosion from diabolical farming methods had fucked whatever chance these places had of being self-sufficient.
Anna grimaced as we passed a police car. ‘I’ve been to more than fifty different countries and I’ve never seen cops as corrupt as the ones here.’
‘They certainly don’t hang around. I had to cough up a fistful of dollars to get through Customs.’
‘I was stopped here twice in two hours once, both for completely invented offences. They target locals the same. They don’t even wait for people to do something wrong. The moment they’ve finished fleecing one victim, they flag down the next.’
Anna was on a roll.
‘And it’s not just about driving. Their favourite trick on a slow night is to stop foreigners at random for “looking suspicious”. Two hundred lei is the standard fine. If we get stopped on the street you’ll be asked for your passport. The law says that foreigners have to carry them at all times. Photocopies aren’t good enough. If you’re alone, keep saying you don’t speak Romanian or Russian. There are no guarantees, but if you’re lucky they’ll be too lazy to pursue it.’
We hit the city proper. Many of the people on the streets looked pretty well turned-out, particularly the young guys.
I nodded at a fancy-looking restaurant. ‘I thought we were supposed to be in Europe’s poorest country. Who can afford to eat in a place like that?’
‘You don’t want to know. Moldova’s the same as everywhere in the old Soviet Union. There’s a handful of haves and a whole nation of have-nots.’ She stared out of the window at the wide concrete esplanades. ‘Most people in Moldova don’t live like this. They scrape by on less than three dollars a day. Away from the towns, work is scarce. I wrote a piece about a small village a few kilometres from Chisinau where every male had sold a kidney to the West. In lots of villages, only children and grand-parents remain. Over a million have left the country to find work. That doesn’t include the numbers who’ve been trafficked.’
‘I take it Tarasov is one of the haves?’
‘For sure.’
‘And how do we explain all the Mercs and Hummers?’
‘The Moldovans like to claim Transnistria can’t function independently. They say it doesn’t have the industry or infrastructure - but they do, and not just through weapons manufacture. There’s a 480-kilometre border with Ukraine and it’s not controlled. As well as the sale of old Soviet military machinery, extortion of businessmen and money laundering, there is huge trafficking in arms, drugs and, of course, human beings. About two billion dollars are being laundered every year in Transnistria and no one wants to give that up without a fight.
‘But what should really have the rest of the world sitting up and paying attention are the dozen or so companies that produce arms around the clock. They’ve turned up in Chechnya, Africa, all over - even in Iraq in Saddam’s day and now Afghanistan. International organizations don’t accept that Transnistria even exists, so they can’t visit and investigate. There, Nicholas - next right.’
Anna directed me off the main. A couple of turns later, we pulled up outside another drab Soviet-era monolith a dozen storeys high. ‘Forget the arms business. Everyone should just have shares in ready-mixed concrete.’
The Cosmos was pretty much in the centre of town. I could see a bank with an ATM, a shopping centre,
