“We are all going to die.”
“But not today. Not tomorrow. Not the day after tomorrow or next week or the week after that or the month after that or the year after that.”
She gave him a squint. “I think your safety is off.”
The smell met them before they reached the first shed, a green-painted steel structure. Mae pinched her nose and breathed through her mouth. The shed appeared tidy on the outside, the paint fresh and neat, but the tidy appearance did nothing to disguise the rank odour of human waste or that the left side was an open, outdoor shower that offered no privacy. Facing the shower were two old motorhomes that had been set onto blocks. They stood across from each other, dark, mottled shade-cloth stretched between them, a plastic table and ancient garden chairs in the middle. About the size of a shipping container, the old vehicles once meant for touring holidays had been modified in a number of ways beyond having the wheels removed. The driver and passenger doors had been welded shut, the tall side doors had padlocks.
Kitt drew Mae away from the stink and moved along the exterior of the closest motorhome. Light inside shone from two, small windows that hadn’t been papered over. There were bars welded on the outside of both. Kitt peeked in one side of the window, certain of what he would find. He counted twelve men, African, Middle-Eastern, Asian, Caucasian, crammed inside. “Have a look,” he said quietly. “What do you see?”
Mae stood on her toes and peered inside. “Dirty men in dirty clothes.”
“What do you notice about the dirty clothes?”
She had another peek. “They look like uniforms, the grey sort with the orange trim we saw in the back room of Erotica.”
“If you have to run, don’t touch the goddamned weapon in the glovebox, Mae.”
She looked at the tractor heading away, at a small lorry travelling on the winding drive where the gate stood, at the human forms that had begun to appear in the pale dawn sun. Workers began emerging from two smaller sheds opposite the windmill, heading into the tulip fields. They were all dressed in grey uniforms with orange collars. “You know you’ve never perfected being able to see the future,” she said.
“And neither have you. I’m quite certain your brother has lost his faith, that’s what he struggles with, it’s part of his PTSD, but I’m very surprised to see that you’ve lost your faith as well, especially your faith in me.”
“Perhaps God, Jesus, Mother Mary and I aren’t seein’ eye to eye on a few things, but I have faith in you. I still believe that you’re a terrible spy.”
“Mock, mock, mock.”
“You’re not as bad a spy as Mr Weed.”
“That’s the loveliest thing you’ve ever said to me.” He smiled. “Come on.” Quickly, still in shadows, he led her toward the big windmill. Hand in hand, they walked close to the old brick building, the white-painted sails spinning in a slow circle, as the pair of them moved around the edge of the old red-roofed building. They came to the front, outdoor lights sparkled on the canal that irrigated the fields behind them. A little footbridge crossed over the water to a smaller field of tulips that stood between the chateau and the road that stretched from the glowing greenhouse sprawling out on the right, winding back to the gates. To the left, half-hidden by the windmill, by lovely purple lilac bushes, flowering trees and tall cypress pines, stood another motorhome and a shipping container with an open door.
He knew the container housed the amenities block, but, automatically, Kitt glanced at his watch and waited for his world to shift to last November, when he’d nearly died shut up in a stifling shipping container. He waited to hear his former colleague Bill Dalton to ask ‘What time is it?’ Kitt waited to feel a heavy sheen of near-equatorial sweat, waited to hear the scream of a woman, waited to see the young man on work experience fall dead without making a sound, but the phantom voice of a dead man asking the time didn’t eventuate.
This was not Singapore, he was not inside a stifling shipping container filled with counterfeit merchandise, stolen antiquities, rank, dead bodies, or traitorous co-workers who had tried to have him killed.
Instead of letting not so distant horrors envelop him, he thought about his home, his dog, his wife, his new life, and took a long, deep breath before he looked across to the windmill, at the enormous, glowing greenhouse, at the chateau in the distance and back to the last motorhome and container that he guessed had once served as housing for itinerant farmhands. While one might argue the motorhomes were reasonable accommodation for travelling, seasonal workers, the padlocks stated otherwise, and like the container that had very nearly been his end, Kitt had no doubt the men in the cramped, brutal conditions faced a hopeless living hell of slave labour.
“Kitt,” Mae said sharply, tugging his hand, jerking her chin to a flare of flame lighting a cigarette.
An approaching voice chattered in Italian, a man grumbling to himself, “Non me ne frega un cazzo! Non me ne frega un cazzo. Porco miseria!”
Kitt hurried her into the cover of lilac bushes at the rear of the motorhome. He pulled her into the lilacs, took a long, slow breath that tickled her neck when he exhaled.
He watched over her back, peering through bunches of sweet-smelling lilacs, as a pot-bellied man with a clipboard arrived to unlock the motorhome, cigarette hanging from his bottom lip, a chrome whistle swinging over his man-boobs. Padlock in hand, a cloud of smoke puffing from his mouth, he stood aside and thirteen men shuffled out of their lodging into the grey-blue and pink dawn light. They began to make their way to the big greenhouse. The man with the clipboard blew out another cloud of smoke, scurried up two steps made of a cinderblock and a few loose bricks, and went inside the motorhome.
“Stay here,” Kitt said at her ear and pushed her deeper into the lilacs.
Surrounded by fragrant blooms that did little to mask the stench of the shipping container latrine, Mae watched him walk to the motorhome, lift a loose brick, and stand at the top of the makeshift stairs, his jacket obscuring the brick at his side. Her mouth went dry.
“Scusa. Sono mi perso. Dov´é Signor Bianco?—Excuse me. I’m lost. Where is Mr Bianco?” Kitt said loudly, in Italian.
A high squeal of surprise and a short, “Minchia!” brought the man’s potbelly into view, wraparound sunglasses perched on his head, clipboard under his arm. He had been outside Erotica, shepherding two black men in grey uniforms into the white van with vegetables on the side door. He had been in a photo Llewelyn had shown her yesterday. “Che sei, che fai qui—who are you, what are you doing here?” he said, his accent Sicilian.
“Cerchi Bianco—Looking for Bianco. Dov´é lui—where is he?”
“La piccolo serra crocodrillo, a giardino del castello—The little crocodile greenhouse in the chateau garden. Che sei?” Potbelly said again.
“Come si va da qui alla serra del crocodrillo—How do I get to the crocodile greenhouse?”
“Attraversa la piccoo serra a le grande serra, la prima uschita a sinestra—go through the little greenhouse and the big greenhouse, first exit on the left.”
“Da dov´é vengono quegli uomini?—Where are those men from?” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder to the group heading toward a greenhouse.
“Dal mio culo—from my arse.” With a laugh, he tossed away the cigarette. “Buggiardu—liar,” he said, lifting the whistle to his lips.
The brick, hidden by the edge of Kitt’s jacket, swung and smashed into the podgy man’s jaw with a thunk. The motorhome shook as he fell backwards, legs dangling over the cinderblocks. Kitt dragged him back indoors.
Mae counted to fifteen and left the camouflage of the lilacs. Kitt exited onto the improvised steps and padlocked the door shut. He had the clipboard in one hand, a biro behind his ear, a pair of sunglasses resting on his head. “Is he dead?” she said.
“Do you care?”
“No.” She squinted one eye. “Do you?”
“Not so much, no.”
He glanced at the motorhome, at the stinking shipping container ameni
ties block. “Shall we drop in at the greenhouse where the men were heading?”
“All right.” She looked at him for a moment, the sun rising higher, the grey-blue and purple sliding to orange and pink. “You have the gun. Why didn’t you shoot him?”
“Shooting him would have drawn attention, like his whistle. The brick worked just fine.” He stuck out his elbow and she looped her arm through it. “Put your scarf over your hair.”
She pulled the windmill-printed fabric from beneath the collar of her coat. “Do you want it to wipe the bit of blood from your cheek first?”
Kitt dabbed away the dark drops from his skin using the sleeve of his jacket.
She wrapped the cloth over her hair and secured the ends around her throat. “What do we do once we get to the greenhouse?”
“Blend in long enough to get a look.” He held up the clipboard. “All we need to do is look official. You can get far with a clipboard and a pen.”
Abandoning stealth, following the same trail the group of men in dirty, orange-trimmed grey uniforms had, they went to the wide doorway of a greenhouse full of tulips. In seconds, without question, they wandered about freely, as Kitt said they would. He’d glance at the clipboard, flip through the papers on it, and nod now and again. The occasional worker looked up from feeding tulips with attached dirt and bulbs into a machine.
“A clipboard and a pen.” Mae snorted. “No one’s paid us any mind.”
“One simply has to look as if one belongs. It works with a doctor’s coat, a nametag on a lanyard, keys as well. Then, of course, there’s the sorry reality of white man’s privilege.” Kitt watched blank-faced men place bunches of uniformly cut long-stemmed budding tulips onto a wooden-sided cart that was rolled into cold storage units at either side of the greenhouse.
“Improvising, faking it, is everything. Except,” Mae crossed her arms to dampen the urge to shudder, “no one in here is faking anything. The men in here are working hard. Years ago, when I came to Amsterdam with Caspar, we went on a tour of a tulip farm, a friend of a friend of a friend owned it. Because of that tour, I know bulbs are harvested from the fields—that’s what why the machines lop off the heads, for the bulbs. Tulips for flower shops are grown in greenhouses, like this one, not in the fields. This greenhouse is about the same size as the one I visited before. During the cut flower season, something like eighty to one hundred thousand tulip stems are cut per day. The tulip farm I went to had a machine like that one over there.” She tipped her head in the direction of a conveyer running along the entire length of the glasshouse. “But that doesn’t pick the flowers, it removes bulbs without damaging the stem or the flowers. The harvesting is done by hand. Workers pull the flowers with the bulbs attached, sort them into bunches, and feed them into the machine. They are all men in here. There are no women. Why is that?” She looked over the men, maybe twenty-five or thirty of them, and back to the open exit where Kitt stood, waiting for her. The sun had risen above the horizon, light streamed in from above and across the concrete floor. “Why are there no women?”
“I don’t know.” Kitt glanced at the clipboard, pretended to scribble something with the biro he’d tucked behind his ear, and exited the glassed-in flower processing warehouse where workers in dull grey uniforms tended to the rows and rows of tulips that had budded but not bloomed. Mae followed him out to the morning sunshine, across a laneway, where, halfway down, stood a lorry with its rear container opened. Men, different colours and ethnicities, climbed from between boxes in the container, hopping to the ground to look about dazed, two men in hardhats directing them to move.
Angry, sickened, Kitt pulled Mae into the massive greenhouse. For a while, neither one of them spoke. There was far too much to take in. The tulip greenhouse was average-sized by farm standards, while this greenhouse was gargantuan. Seeing it from the front had given no indication of the how vast the space was. Plants grew as far as the eye could see. Sunlight, supplemented by LED light, streamed in, shining on flora, on workers tending to vegetables. Indoor farming provided the optimal growing conditions, from sowing to harvesting, and men of all colours and ethnic backgrounds, men in grey uniforms harvested tomatoes from row after row after row of plants under a single roof.
Other vegetables and herbs had been cultivated, onions, lettuce, and cannabis with its distinctive, serrated blade leaves. What was once farmed outdoors—or hydroponically—was now planted indoors, with the use of pesticide eliminated, disease kept to a minimum, no nitrates leached to the soil. The sowing and growing had become automated, harvesting done in climate-controlled comfort, at a height that necessitated no back-breaking bending or lifting. It was sustainable, space and waste saving, it increased agricultural yield, could stave off catastrophic famine. Yet, despite the climate control and a more comfortable height, gaunt, somnolent, workers moved about like automatons in dull grey, orange-trimmed uniforms, picking tomatoes from rows and rows and rows. Crops were still harvested by human hands.
And some human hands were cruel and greedy.
Mae stopped for a moment, right in front of small, healthy-looking plants that would be left to grow for a few more weeks. “Is this…”
“Yes, it is.” Softly, Kitt tapped the clipboard against her shoulder. “Let’s keep moving.”
“It’s legal here, isn’t?” she said, falling into step beside him.
“Yes and no.” He said quietly, handing her the clipboard as they passed an Asian man and a skinny, young Middle Eastern man clipping bunches of cherry tomatoes. “Coffeeshops selling cannabis is perfectly legal in the Netherlands, but merchants growing and producing the cannabis products for sale is not. Shopkeepers who attempt to grow their own cannabis and sell it are punished with high fines. Growers are still forced underground, which first, makes it rather difficult for authorities to monitor the quality of products that coffeeshops sell to consumers, and second, the growers who supply the products frequently have links to organized crime. The Netherlands’ record for organised crime is poor, it’s always been a hub for illicit drug trade with an underground economy supported by cannabis. Organised crime funnels profits into their own networks, trafficking harder drugs. So, there is a push to have approved growers, a push to monitor the growth, a push to monitor and provide labels that accurately test the levels of THC in the cannabis and display it on packaging. The approved grower-merchant model is being tested in smaller cities, like Groningen—that’s another location on the garden tour circuit—but legal producers are still fronts for organised criminal activity, like human trafficking and forced labour.”
“The men in the back of the lorry, the, the men in the motorhomes.”
“Yes.”
Mae glanced at the clipboard. “That’s why you do it, isn’t it? For people like the men here. They have no voice, they’re invisible, working right in front of us, providing the food we eat, the food we complain about being too expensive. Why don’t they run away?” She looked up at Kitt.
“And go where?” he said. “These people have nothing. No home, no money, no passports, no support. So often, too often, when they go to the police, they’re treated like criminals, viewed as illegal immigrants, incarcerated again and held for deportation. When the actual perpetrators are caught, they’re rarely prosecuted, and even fewer are convicted.”
She screwed her eyes shut, clenched her teeth, saying. “From stolen jewellery that’s actually fake, a dead man in a sex shop, your employer dropping dead, men living locked in little motorhomes being forced to harvest lettuce tomatoes and marijuana, the men in the lorry, what in underfuck is this about?”
“At some point this will all come together and make sense.”
Mae opened her eyes and handed over the clipboard. “Do you believe that?”
“Wholeheartedly.”
“Liar.”
“Yes.” Kitt refrained from taking Mae’s hand and hurrying her out of the great glasshouse. She yawned and rolled her head on her neck. Yesterday, yes, it had been yesterday
, in the rooms behind the sex shop front, they’d stumbled on what could have been interpreted as living quarters for sexual slaves. He wasn’t so sure forced prostitution was part of the human trafficking and forced labour ring they witnessed here. Either way, sexual exploitation or labour exploitation, it was modern slavery, and it was the fastest growing area of organised crime.
Wearily, the lack of sleep scratching, but not yet clawing at him, Kitt walked on, Mae beside him. She looked tired, but adrenaline kept her going. He was glad she’d made him breakfast. The food in his belly provided energy that slightly dulled the need for sleep. They progressed through the huge greenhouse, unnoticed, and when they finally reached the first side exit, they took it, moving onto a laneway where three delivery white vans and a lorry were being packed with lettuce from another section of the immense greenhouse, a bright logo of lettuce, tomatoes, and carrots on the side of each vehicle.
The narrow road between the two greenhouses ran all the way to the chateau. Silently, the greenhouses and windmill behind them on the right, they followed the gravel surface and soon skirted the edge of red-tipped yellow tulips bright and cheery in the morning sun, a tractor moving along a row, beheading the blooms.
Kitt flung the clipboard into a row of headless flowers. “I think can we say, without any doubt, that this isn’t a merely a flower farm. It’s hectares of large-scale produce production under one mammoth roof, the sort of thing Vlaming mentioned. He said the Netherlands are at the forefront of agricultural innovation, that may include cannabis edibles and nutraceuticals. This farm may be an approved grower, part of the country’s experiment to monitor, test, and regulate cannabis, to move production above ground, so to speak, and out of the hands of criminals, but I doubt it. This is sustainable agriculture, the growing time is reduced, the plants get the nutrients they need, and food production is doubled with half the resources. It’s year-round, high volume, high-quality produce farming that is run by big business, companies who, despite their crowing about how they’re saving the planet, are using forced labour to cuts costs.”
True to Your Service Page 27