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
