able to lie to me without me knowing. He tried to pull away, but his heart wasn’t in it. He radiated self-pity and surrender.
“Tell me about it,” I suggested, and if he read an “or else” into my tone of voice, he was exactly right.
It was a few minutes before he could formulate a sentence. Then—with a few more pauses along the way for tears and hand-wringing—it all came spilling out.
It wasn’t Rich’s fault. It was Damjohn’s fault. Peele’s fault. The girl’s own fault, for panicking and making everything so much worse than it should have been. But not Rich’s fault. Fuck, no.
I sat and watched his matey persona dissolve under pressure into a stinking mulch of misery and denial.
It all started with Peele—or at least, that’s the best I can do by way of summary. It wasn’t as though Rich was telling this in a way that made any real sense. But it had been Peele who’d stabbed him in the back when he was looking for a promotion, and so it was Peele who’d kick-started the whole sorry chain of events.
Rich had been at the Bonnington for five years by this time—“five bloody years”—and it was no secret that he was after the senior archivist job. When Derek Watkins retired on ill-health grounds, who else was there besides Rich who was qualified to step in? Who else knew the whole system and had the personality to be able to handle the reading-room side of things as well as the organizational skills needed to keep things ticking over backstage?
But Peele had brought in an outsider. He’d poached Alice from Keats House, Alice who was—these things need to be spelled out clearly—younger than Rich biologically, his junior in terms of years served, and a woman.
He was choked. Well, you would be, wouldn’t you? To see your contribution undervalued like that, the rights of your case set aside, and not even to get an explanation, still less an apology. Rich had gone in to see Jeffrey as soon as he’d heard and had lodged a formal protest. He was told that the decision had been taken at JMT level. They wanted someone with more of a managerial background. He indicated that it might be difficult for him to work on a team under someone who’d swiped a promotion from under his nose. Jeffrey said that if Rich felt that strongly, his resignation would be reluctantly accepted, and his reference would be very positive.
He was fucked, in other words.
So Rich became fairly cynical and embittered about the archive job. He still needed it for the regular salary, but he decided to give it no more of his time and energies than he could possibly help. And since the only way up was dead man’s shoes, he’d look for some other way to supplement his income and give him the lifestyle he felt he was owed.
“I never wanted to be a millionaire,” he protested, snuffling as he massaged his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I just didn’t want to be stuck in the same fucking hole for the rest of my life. You need a few luxuries, just to keep yourself sane.”
He’d been frequenting one of Damjohn’s brothels for as long as he’d lived in London—not Kissing the Pink, but another place out in Edmonton that made no bones about what it was and didn’t bother with niceties like liquor licences or twinkly neon lights. Damjohn himself put in an appearance every Thursday night to collect the takings, and the ice had broken between them when Rich had recognized Damjohn’s Serbian accent and had been able to tell him wassup, or the equivalent, in his native tongue.
Damjohn had been very interested in Rich’s language skills. He invited Rich out to dinner at a fancy hotel and put the moves on him. He had, he intimated, a possible opening for a handsome young westerner with a clean British passport who could talk Russian, Czech, and Serbian at need. It would be easy work, too—occasional, well paid, and not impossible to fit in around a regular job. Rich took the bait.
It was hard to say no, he told me. Damjohn’s personality was so intense and powerful, he just swept you along. Rich looked at me defiantly, as if I was about to disagree. “He’s not Serbian, you know,” he told me truculently. “He was part of all that Kosovo shit, but only because he was caught in the middle of it. His family were all Slovenes—and after Slovenia decided to fly solo, the Slovenes in Kosovo had almost as fuck-awful a time as the Albanians. But he was in Vlasenica when the Serbian army came through, and he was lucky enough to fall in with a colonel, Nikolic, who was trying to update the census records for the area. Nikolic didn’t know his arse from his elbow, so Damjohn helped him out. Told him where people lived and if they were still around.”
“People?” I echoed. “What people, Rich? Albanians? Muslims?”
Rich shrugged. “People,” he repeated stubbornly. “The point is that Damjohn was a survivor. He could have been rounded up himself, but instead he made himself useful. And then he made himself indispensable. When they set up the concent—the transit camp at Susica, he was on staff. He was actually on staff. A Slovene! They used him to handle initial interviews. Triage. Only he didn’t bother with interviews—he had a better way. When a new truckload came in, he’d go in and sit with them, as if he was just another sheep-shagger caught out by a Serbian patrol, and if anyone spoke to him, he’d just shrug—no speakee. Then he’d listen to them talking among themselves, and within a few minutes, he’d know exactly who was who and what was what. He had an agreed signal to give to the guards—when he was ready, he’d give them the wink, or whatever, and they’d take him out as if they were going to interrogate him. So then he could give them the lowdown on everyone else in the batch, and sometimes—depending on what he’d overheard—leads on other people who were still hiding out up in the hills. Fucking incredible. If the war had gone on for another year, he’d probably have been running the place.”
Rich was looking intently at me as he said all this. He wanted me to understand why he couldn’t just say no to Damjohn—wanted me to share his awe, which clearly went beyond conventional morality. I found myself thinking back to the images I’d seen when I’d touched Damjohn’s hand. I knew from that brief flash that the man’s skills as an informer had been learned at a much earlier age; the war in Kosovo had just been another career opportunity for him.
Rich had been horrified, of course, when he found out what the work was. He only took it on a one-off basis, at first, because his car had just died, and he didn’t have any money for a deposit on a new one. And he was still fuming over the shit that had gone down at the archive, so he probably wasn’t thinking too straight. He just hadn’t thought enough about what he was getting into. If he had, he would never have gone on that initial run for Damjohn, and none of the rest of it would ever have—
“Just tell me what he asked you to do, for the love of Christ,” I interjected harshly. “And put the bullshit in an appendix at the end.”
Rich went on holiday to the Czech Republic. And while he was there, he went into a lot of city-center bars in Prague and Brno. Young people’s bars. He was looking for girls, and he wasn’t very good at it, at first. Oh, he could run a chat-up line as well as the next guy, and he knew how to trade on his well-heeled-westerner chic, but he didn’t know how to segue from that into doing the recruitment pitch.
Come to London right now, was roughly how it went. Leave your family and your friends behind, and you can get yourself a new life like you’d never even believe. You can do a secretarial course—government-funded—and after six weeks, you’ll be walking into a twenty-grand-a-year job. And you’ll be living in a flat with your rent and utilities paid, because everyone in London claims state benefit even if they’re working, so your only expenses will be food and clothes. Even if you only do it for a couple of years, you can come back with a stake. Stick to it for five years, you can come back rich. Or say fuck it and don’t come back at all.
Rich learned quickly, though. Part of the trick was to choose the right girl in the first place. The “leave your friends and family behind” line played best with women who didn’t have a big share of either, and he came to be good at spotting them. Young was good. Stupid was good. Ambitious was best of all; a girl with a hunger for the bright lights would tell herself bigger lies than you’d have the balls to tell her yourself and then invest more effort into believing them.
The reality behind the pitch was as squalid as you’d imagine it to be. Rich would help the girls to fill in a passport application and give them their traveling money from the Czech Republic to Sweden. In Sweden, they were looked over by an associate of Damjohn’s, a German named Dieter—no second name that Rich ever heard of, just Dieter. And if Dieter liked what he saw, he sent the girls on to London.
That was where they disappeared from the official statistics, though. They didn’t come into the UK by plane, and they didn’t come in on their own passports. If there was a trail, Sweden was where it ended. Rich himself came home alone and didn’t trouble himself with the unpleasant details.
“But you knew where the girls were going?” I demanded.
Rich hesitated, then nodded his head just once. “The flats,” he muttered. “I’m not saying I’m proud of myself. But all I was doing was talent-spotting. No rough stuff, Castor. I never hurt anybody!”
The flats were the bargain-basement end of Damjohn’s operation. The girls there weren’t whores by choice,
