by Mark Dawson
“I’m back,” he called out.
He took off his coat and hung it on one of the spare hooks that were fastened to the wall.
“Sarah?”
Her voice came from the sitting room. “I’m in here.”
Hicks stopped in the kitchen and put the plastic bag on the counter. The dirty washing from breakfast was still in the sink. That was unusual, he thought. Sarah had been getting ready to clean them when he had left the flat. He dismissed it. She was waiting until the things from lunch needed to be cleaned. They had got into the habit of doing the washing-up together. He washed, she wiped. They spent the time talking. Hicks enjoyed the little routine.
“You want a drink?” he called out.
“No, thanks,” she called back.
Hicks filled the kettle and set it to boil. He took the packet of cigarettes from the bag and went to the sitting room. The door was ajar. He pushed it open and went inside. Sarah was sitting on the sofa, her back to him.
“Are these okay?” he said.
He tossed the cigarettes onto the coffee table. She didn’t turn. She didn’t move to pick them up.
Hicks stepped into the room.
“Sarah?” he said. “What is it?”
He caught a flash of movement in the corner of his eye, but, before he could react, he felt a sharp pain in the side of his neck. A sensation of coldness spread both up and down his body, and a wave of enervating weakness crippled him. The strength in his legs vanished and he stumbled forward, catching himself on the back of the sofa. Sarah got up quickly, turned to him and then backed away, almost falling over the low table.
She looked up. She wasn’t looking at him; she was looking at someone behind him.
Hicks tried to turn. His knees buckled and he fell down, dropping onto his backside. His eyelids felt heavy, as if weighted down, and he had to struggle to keep them from closing. His vision was blurred and, as darkness massed on the edges of his sight and started to swell, he saw a man coming toward him.
Chapter Forty
HICKS COULDN’T OPEN HIS EYES.
He was lying on something uncomfortable, with sharp edges digging into his flesh. He felt so bone tired—why was that?
He lay still for another moment and then forced his eyes open.
He was looking up into the light from two halogen strips that had been fastened to a bare concrete ceiling. The light was bright, and it sent sharp stabs of pain into his brain. He blinked and tried to turn away. He couldn’t. He could move his neck, at least a little, but, when he tried to sit, he found that he could not move. Something was restraining him. He tried to raise his hands to cover his face and felt the bonds that were looped around his wrists. He tried to move his legs and felt the same restrictions around his ankles.
He felt the touch of cool air on his body and knew that he was naked.
He started to panic.
He remembered: Milton’s flat, Sarah, the man who had been waiting for him behind the door.
He remembered the pain in the side of his neck.
He had been drugged.
His eyes were heavy, but he forced them to stay open. He was in a room. It was a large space, around ten metres square, with bare concrete walls. There were no windows, and the illumination came from the two halogen strips. He saw a metal table on the other side of the room. There was a large item on the table, the length of the table, hidden within a dark plastic bag. There was a metal rack with plastic bottles lined up on the shelves. Wooden coffins were stacked next to the rack, one atop the other.
“Hello, Mr. Hicks.”
Hicks followed the voice to his left.
A man was sitting on a chair next to him.
“My name is Pasko,” the man said.
Hicks did not answer. The man was big and heavy-set, with an unshaven face and cruel eyes. He was wearing a white shirt and a black tie. Hicks watched as he made a show of taking out the cufflinks. He rolled the sleeves up to his elbows, exposing tattoos that covered both forearms.
“Where am I?”
“You are in one of my businesses. I have several. We have an undertaker’s business. It serves the Albanian community in London.”
Hicks instinctively turned his head to the metal table. He realised, then, what was in the bag.
“Yes, Mr. Hicks. This room is where the bodies are prepared.”
Hicks turned away from the body and raised his head so that he could look down at whatever it was he was lying on. He couldn’t see very much, save the edges of metal frame. He could see his wrists; they were secured with leather straps. He glanced back at Pasko. There was a wooden table next to his chair. The table bore a tray and a plain metal box from which Hicks saw two trailing cables.
He slumped down, the back of his head resting against something hard and sharp. “Who are you?”
“I am Sarah’s employer.”
Hicks raised his head again and looked ahead. He was naked from head to toe. He saw the bottom edge of the frame and, beyond that, three other people. There were two men, one of whom bore a resemblance to Pasko. The third person was behind them. Hicks couldn’t see them.
Pasko spoke again. “Are you surprised that she would run straight back to us?”
“A little.”
“Did you wonder why?”
“I’d be surprised if it was because of your sparkling personality.”
“You are funny, Mr. Hicks. And you are very naïve. It is simple. These girls, they have nothing. They have no one. All they want to do is stay in this country. They know that they cannot go to the police. They will deport them, and all the money that they have spent to get here, all the risks that they have taken—that will all be wasted. The only people who have given them somewhere to stay, who have fed them and given them the chance to earn some money—it is us. We have had girls who have run away before. They always come back. Always. Isn’t that right, Sarah?”
Hicks fought the fatigue to glance up again. The two men stood aside so that Hicks could see. Sarah was standing there. She looked at him for a moment, their eyes very briefly connecting, before she looked down.
“No, Sarah,” Pasko said. “Look at him.”
She did not. Pasko said something in Albanian, and the man next to her grabbed a fistful of her hair and yanked her head up.
“I want you to watch this,” Pasko said to her. “It is important.”
“Let her go,” Hicks said. “She doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
“I am afraid I must disagree with you,” Pasko said. “She most certainly does. Sarah is my property. I paid for her. That means that you and your friend stole from me. And Sarah took a week to come back to me—so that means that she stole from me, too. Sarah understands now that that was wrong. And she is going to watch what happens to those who try to steal from me so that she can tell the other girls.”
Hicks struggled to keep his eyes open. “What do you want?”
“I have some questions for you, Mr. Hicks. Are you prepared to cooperate?”
“I’m a little tired. How about we do this later.”
“We will do it now. What do you do?”
He closed his eyes. “Security.”
“You were a soldier, then? Before?”
“Yes.”
“The same. It is easy, isn’t it, to identify another soldier? Something gives it away. Something about the way we hold ourselves.” He pulled up the chair and sat down. “How was your soldiering?”
“Lots of running around and shouting.”
“Have you fought in wars?”
“Yes.”
“Ireland?”
“Yes.”
“Iraq?”
“Yes.”
“Kosovo?”
Hicks could place the accent now. He hadn’t heard it for many years, but the suggestion reminded him of the time he had spent in Pristina.
“Yes,” he said. “You, too?”
“That was my war. I was born in Prekaz, in Drenica. Central
Kosovo. It has many hills, many sheep and cattle, very little money. My father and his father were Kosovo Albanian guerrillas who fought the Serbs. They fought Tito and then Milosevic. I could not read or write, but I listened to their stories when I was young and I remembered them all. They taught me to fight as soon as I could walk. My mother has a picture of me with an AK-47 that was taller than I was. The Serbs were brutal, Hicks. But the Kosovars were strong men. They still are.”
Hicks’s muscles were cramping, but there was nothing he could do to relieve them.
Pasko continued, ignoring Hicks’s discomfort. “I undertook my military training in Labinot-Mal, in Albania. There were one hundred of us. When we returned, we continued the fight for independence. We sabotaged Serbian interests. We killed their soldiers. Eventually, Milosevic paid attention to us. He sent his soldiers to Prekaz. They had tanks and helicopters. They had artillery. They fired indiscriminately. Women and children were killed. Old men who could not fight. Eventually, there was a siege. They threatened to kill everyone unless we surrendered. They would have done it, Hicks, so we did.”
Hicks opened his eyes again. “What does this have to do with me?”
“Be patient. We were taken to the Serbs’ police headquarters in Pristina. They beat us for a week before they even asked us what they wanted to know. They used bedposts. They used knives and clubs. Electricity. They injected us with drugs. They starved us. Eventually, I was released. I went back to Albania. We had a staging post in the town of Kukes. There was an old factory there. I was put in charge of interrogating the prisoners that we captured. There were Serbs, Kosovo Albanian collaborators. These men did not have information, Hicks. They had nothing we did not already know. It wasn’t about information. It was about creating an example. It was about making them fear us. My superiors wanted to create a myth, someone who would terrify the Serbs. I happened to be very good at what I was asked to do, and they had given me ideas. I was chosen to fulfil that role. My name is still known in Serbia. They called me kirurg. It means surgeon.”
Hicks strained against the bonds. It was fruitless; they were too strong and, even if he had been able to remove them, what was he going to do? He was weak from whatever sedative they had used to knock him out, and he was badly outnumbered.
“Let me sleep your drugs off,” Hicks said. “We can talk about this afterwards.”
Pasko shuffled around in the chair so he could get to the box on the table. “My son was killed when the girl was taken from the flat. I know that you did not kill him. I want you to tell me who did.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Pasko turned back. “Sarah told me what happened. Your friend attacked the flat. Mr. Smith. He was interested in one of our other girls. He took Sarah and promised that he would look after her. But then he left, and he introduced her to you. That is correct, is it not?”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“I am not surprised that this would be your attitude,” Pasko said. “Let me ask you another question. Do you know what you are lying on?”
“I know it’s not very comfortable.”
He chuckled. “And we have not even started yet. It is a parilla. It means cooking grill. The person answering the questions is placed atop it the same way that meat is placed upon a barbecue. It was introduced in South America during the 1970s and 1980s. Pinochet used it extensively. We built this to his design. If you look to your left, you’ll see the wall socket from which the electricity is drawn. It is fed through this control box”—Pasko tapped the box on the table—“and then attached to the victim with electrodes.”
Pasko held the box up so that Hicks could look at it. It was a simple design: there was an on-off switch and a rheostat that would control the voltage. Pasko reached down for a wire mesh bag that was attached to the end of one of two wires that led from the box.
He took the bag and leaned down over Hicks’s body. “Excuse me,” he said as he leaned across and fitted the bag over Hicks’s testicles.
Now Hicks did strain, but it was no use.
There was a wooden handle on the table with a metal end. The second wire was attached to the handle, and Pasko picked it up. “The Chileans, in particular, were inventive. For a woman, they would attach the wire to a wetted steel wool pan scrub and insert it into her vagina. For men, they would take a thin metal rod and insert it into the urethra. I have a rod like that in the tray here. Perhaps we will use it later.” Pasko took a piece of cloth from the table, folded it into a single strip, and then secured it over Hicks’s eyes, knotting it behind his head. “One of the distinguishing features of this equipment is that the shocks are high voltage but low current. You know what that means, of course. The shocks will be excruciating, but they won’t kill you. I’ve used this equipment on people for days at a time.”
Hicks couldn’t see a thing through the blindfold. He felt a ticklish sensation across his ribs and realised that Pasko was running the metal end across his skin. He couldn’t help himself: he instinctively arched his body away from it, but there was nowhere for him to go.
“Let’s try again. Who is the man who killed my son?”
Hicks gritted his teeth in anticipation of what he knew was about to come. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He heard the click of the switch and then felt a cold sensation as the metal was held against his knee. A bolt of pain flashed from his groin and then down his leg, sending spasms through the muscle and lighting up every nerve ending. He grunted in pain.
“His name is John Smith. Tell me about him.”
Hicks took a moment to regain his composure. “The straps are chafing a bit around my wrists,” he managed through the pain. “I don’t suppose you could loosen them a bit, could you?”
Pasko laughed. “You are a funny man, Mr. Hicks. Unfortunately for you, I have all day. And I will get the information I need.”
Hicks heard the flick of the switch again.
Part 5
Italy and France
Chapter Forty-One
MILTON WATCHED as the faint outline of land became visible through the haze on the horizon. The word was passed back along the boat, and people stood to look. The journey had been long and fraught, and, now that the end was in sight, there was an outpouring of relief.
It was the afternoon of the second day at sea. They had been travelling for thirty-six hours. The worst moments had come during the night. A huge freighter had crossed their path, worryingly close, and their boat had bucked and kicked across the troughs of wake that had been left in the sea. Spray had lashed them and the boat had oscillated to and fro, the captain taking the wrong angle and allowing the waves to strike them side on rather than carving through them. The passengers had exchanged terrified glances, and some of them had started praying. Milton had stayed where he was, his fists clenched, knowing that there was nothing that he could do to affect whether they continued or capsized. The smuggler with the pistol had waved for them all to sit down where they were and, after two or three minutes of uncertainty, the sea calmed down again and they were able to continue. Milton had watched the freighter as it disappeared behind them, visible for another hour until the lights winked out against the horizon and they were alone beneath the stars again.
The pilot nudged the boat to port, the change of direction allowing Milton a better view of the terrain ahead. It was an island; he thought, at first, that it had to be Lampedusa. The island was the first trace of Europe, part of the Pelagie Islands that lay between Italy and Tunisia. As they drew nearer, though, the island grew larger and larger, and Milton realised that it couldn’t be Lampedusa.
It must be Sicily.
Details resolved out of the misty haze as they drew closer. Milton saw rocky outcrops of limestone and dolomite, stripped clean and barren thanks to the attention of the wind and the lack of rainfall. He saw buildings and other ships, and then a harbour, the concrete wall of the dock a distinctive grey stripe again
st the limpid sea.
They drew closer. Milton had expected them to aim for Lampedusa since it was closest, and he had studied the geography of that island before he departed, in preparation for landing there. His knowledge of Sicily was not quite as current. He could be looking at Agrigento or Gela, perhaps. He knew that those towns were on the southern coast of the island. Wherever it was, this particular harbour might have been pleasant at one time, but it was scruffy and down-at-heel now. Most of the businesses that Milton could see were closed, shutters locked down and emblazoned with graffiti.
They sailed into the harbour, the boat approaching a large concrete harbour wall. The tide was low, meaning that there was a climb of six feet from the gunwale to dry land. Milton noticed a wide concrete apron just beyond the dock wall and a steep slope that climbed up sixty or seventy feet to a collection of makeshift buildings and tents that had been erected where the land eventually plateaued. He saw a sign on one of the buildings—LICATA—and assumed that that must be the name of the town. There were several cars parked on the concrete apron, several backed right up to the edge. A crowd of people were waiting on the dockside and the slope. Some of them wore the light blue shirts and dark blue trousers of the Italian police.
The mood had lightened as soon as the passengers had realised that they were going to make it, but now the quick burst of jubilation had been smothered by anxiety. There were immigration officials on the dockside, too, waiting for the boat as it was bumped and buffeted on the rolling waves. The skipper turned the wheel so that they were side on, and men at the fore and aft took the coiled mooring lines and tossed them ashore. They were collected and looped around concrete bollards.
There were a man and woman with two young children ahead of him. The man jumped across first, but, as the woman tried to lift her daughter, the boat jerked on the tide and she lost her balance. She clutched the toddler to her chest as she started to fall ahead, into the suddenly widening gap. Milton reached out and caught her by the shoulder, pulling her back once again. The men on the dock hauled the mooring line and the boat drew closer to the jetty.