by Tig Hague
An exchange took place between Meathead and the other woman, who wrote something on to a form. Meathead put the form in front of me and handed me a pen. I hadn’t had a sensible, rational thought from the moment the bureaucratic nightmare began. I was in a state of shock, I suppose. At the very least, I was confused and tired and getting more and more freaked out by the minute. The two armed guards were standing at my side, and Meathead was fixing me with a glare as he held out the pen in front of me. ‘I don’t know what it says. I don’t speak Russian,’ I whispered feebly.
But what if I don’t sign? I was thinking. No one knows where I am! They can just take me away if they want to. They could beat the hell out of me, even kill me, claiming I’d attacked them, or they could frame me with a consignment of heroin, or charge me with anything they damn well like, or they could simply make me ‘disappear’. It was perfectly clear by then that I wasn’t dealing with what you might call a clear and transparent judicial system in there.
‘What is this?’ I asked, mustering a little courage.
‘Sign,’ he replied.
‘But I don’t understand what it says,’ I pleaded.
‘SIGN!’ he snapped.
‘I need a lawyer or the British Embassy. I’m not signing anything else if I don’t know what the forms say!’
Meathead ignored me and carried on holding out the pen over the form that he’d laid out in front of me on the desk. I looked at the pen for about five seconds. Fear got the better of me. You’re a pathetic coward. Your brother Rob would be ashamed of you. Rob would’ve been throwing punches by now, or more likely sitting in the corner taunting them and refusing to do a thing until a lawyer or Embassy official arrived. I snatched the pen, and quickly scribbled at the bottom of the page: ‘I’ve flown to Moscow, there was hashish in my suitcase, the hashish is mine but I did not intend to bring it to Moscow.’ I signed my message, and then I signed along the dotted line. I had no idea what the form said. For all I knew, it read: ‘I’m here to kill President Putin.’
Why the fuck did I do that? And of all the things I might have written, why the bollocks did I write that? I suppose I was still thinking like an Englishman. I couldn’t fathom why there was such a palaver over a piece of wacky-baccy the size of a drawing-pin, enough to make one man feel a little mellow for an hour or two, the equivalent perhaps of three pints of bitter. In England these days, the coppers wouldn’t even bother to issue a warning. They would just send me on my way with a flea in my ear.
I handed back the pen and one of the guards stepped forward, holding a pair of handcuffs, and motioned to me to put my arms out in front of me. Wearing handcuffs was a first for me. Three of them, a guard on either side with Meathead at my rear, led me through a series of doors, offices and corridors and I suddenly found myself out in the concourse of the airport. Passengers were hurrying to and fro as airport workers went about their daily business. I was walked through the throng; people glanced and gawped at me. I was so embarrassed I tried to pull my shirt cuffs down to hide the handcuffs, which were biting into the skin on my wrists. It was as if I was having an out-of-body experience, like I was watching a film. It was as if it was happening to somebody else.
We headed up a set of escalators and through a corridor of shops. Through the mezzanine window I was able to see planes taxiing in and out of their bays and along the runway, and one had just lifted off, rising steeply as it disappeared into the low grey clouds. I could feel my guts churning and I thought I was going to crap myself. I clenched my buttocks and my walk turned into a waddle. We went up a further flight of stairs, leaving behind the echoing din and bustle of the airport. Doors closed behind us as I was led down a dark corridor into a dingy administration area, with little offices off to each side.
Meathead had his great ham of a hand on my shoulder and he was starting to exert more pressure as he pushed me down the corridor, the proud sheriff arriving back in town with his captured outlaw. I was pushed into a very small office where a man in a suit sat behind a desk by a small window. The man didn’t look up as Meathead pushed me down on to a wooden bench along the side wall and left the room. It was very gloomy and the room was thick with the man’s cheap cigarette smoke. He must be a chain-smoker to create this much fog, I thought. The office was a picture of disorganization. A couple of tired old pictures hung on the walls at slight angles. The surfaces were strewn with papers and files and personal knick-knacks, including porcelain figures of animals and small trophies made from poor-quality metal, the kind you find in a gift shop in a seaside resort. It looked like my dad’s office down at the building site.
The man behind the desk was obviously the airport’s top security man. There was a long silence as he sat there looking down at the papers that Meathead handed him, drawing deeply on his cigarette and exhaling in great clouds without raising his head. I tried to weigh up the possible scenarios, veering from wild optimism to deep pessimism. The best-case scenario, I figured, was a fine for 1,000 dollars or so and a warning that I could expect to be dealt with severely if I stepped out of line again during my trip. The thought flashed through my mind: maybe this guy would take a backhander. The worst-case scenario, I feared, was a few nights in the airport police cell, followed by conviction in some kind of magistrates’ court, a heavy fine and deportation home in disgrace. If that happened, then I kissed goodbye to my job, we lost the house we were halfway through buying, and Lucy did her nut.
The man behind the desk said something to me in Russian. Why did they keep talking to me in Russian? The only words I knew were da for ‘yes’, nyet for ‘no’ and spasiba for ‘thank you’, which I’d picked up from going out to restaurants. I shrugged and said for the hundredth time that I was unable to speak Russian. He made a five-second phone call and then we sat there in silence again, just the two of us. A junior official put his head around the door and peered at me like I was some kind of exhibit in a fucking freak show. He made a strange smiling face at me, and I couldn’t work out whether he was mocking me or showing some sympathy. A few minutes later there was a knock on the open door and a very large woman in her mid-fifties walked into the room. Her clothes suggested she was a sales assistant and the name badge on her left breast was written in English. I couldn’t quite make out what it said, but it was definitely English.
They talked for a moment before she turned to me and said, ‘I am be translator.’
‘Fantastic! At last, thank you,’ I said, my face erupting into its first smile of the day. A sense of relief washed through me.
‘You smuggle drugs,’ she said curtly and then turned to the man, nodded and walked out of the room.
‘No! No! No! No! I’m not a drugs smuggler!’ I shouted after her as she disappeared down the dim corridor. A surge of alarm and anger rose up in me and I turned to the man and said to him as forcefully as I’d said anything over the previous few hours: ‘I need the British Embassy. Now!’
‘Later, later,’ he said, patting the air with both hands as if to say, ‘Calm down, calm down.’
The junior clerk character who’d stuck his head in a few minutes earlier came into the room and I blurted out: ‘I need a lawyer!’ I was beginning to panic. There was a pause as the clerk went to the desk and wrote down a telephone number on a piece of paper and handed it to me.
‘English lawyer?’ I asked, my heart filling with hope. After a pause, the pair of them burst out laughing. The bastards were taking the fucking piss out of me.
‘No. No lawyer,’ said the boss, chuckling.
He barked a sharp order and the two armed guards who’d been chaperoning me all morning re-emerged from the corridor outside the office. They took an elbow each as they hoisted me off the bench and led me further down the long corridor and into another room with two makeshift cells next to each other against the wall opposite the door. The room was obviously a storeroom of some sort where they dumped all the crap that had no obvious home. It was full of cardboard boxes and what looked like a pile of gym mat
s stacked up to one side. There were no windows. They opened the door to the left-hand cell and sat me down on a wooden bench with metal legs. Another guard came in and threw my suitcase into the cell while another removed my handcuffs and then locked the cell door before they filed out in silence.
I tried not to look at the bars as I sat, unable to accept that I was a detainee. I put my head in my hands and stared vacantly at the suitcase for several minutes before it hit me: my mobile phone was in there! Excitement and fear gripped me as one. This was a chance, but also a risk. I quickly turned it on and put it under my leg to smother the noise of the greeting tune.
I sat there for about five minutes, wrestling with what to do. Who did I call? Lucy? Mum and Dad? My boss, John? Rob? The prospect of breaking the news to any of them filled me with dread. At the back of my mind, I was clinging on to the hope that the nightmare was going to be over very shortly and everything would just go back to normal. My eyes began to well up and my breathing became shorter and faster. Strangely, calling home was making me more frightened than anything else that had happened this morning. I found myself dialling John at the office.
‘Hey, Tig, I’ve been trying to get hold of you. You all set up for the day?’
‘I’ve been fucking arrested, John. I’m in a cell at the airport. The Customs guys found a pinhead of hashish in my jeans. It’s not looking good. They’re treating me like I had a stash of heroin strapped to me. You’ve got to do something. You’ve got to help. It’s a nightmare. They won’t let me have a lawyer or the Embassy. They’re beyond bribing now. There’s too many of the bastards now. I’m too deep into the system. They’re going to fucking hang me out to dry here. I’m freaked out, John. Please do something. Ring Lucy will you? Please. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit…’
‘OK, OK, Tig, stay cool. We’ll get the ball rolling this end. Be calm. We’re going to make sure you’re going to be all right. I’ll talk to the guys upstairs and see if we can get a lawyer sorted for you…’
The door began to open and I switched the phone off and quickly shoved it under my clothes in the suitcase. An armed guard I’d not seen before walked over and put his face up to the bars, like he was in Moscow State Zoo and I was some kind of weird animal. I could feel the warm tears running down my cheeks and my stubble as they dripped on to the floor. I looked at him, hoping for a small gesture of kindness. He leant forward to the bars, smiled, and then lifted up his right hand and started to make a syringe-injecting motion into his other arm. I jumped off the bench. ‘No, I don’t,’ I said to him. ‘I don’t do drugs! I don’t do drugs! I’m not a junkie, I’m not a smuggler! Please, help me!’
He stared at me impassively and then walked slowly from the room, reappearing a few minutes later with two more guards. They put my handcuffs back on and led me back out into the labyrinth of corridors and offices, through the shops, down the escalator and back on to the main public concourse. I just looked straight ahead and paid no attention to the people I knew were gawping at me. Where the fuck are they taking me now? Suddenly, I was standing outside and a blast of aviation fuel hit my nostrils and the back of my throat. A big black official-looking car, a Volga, had its engine running.
The guard opened the rear door and pushed my head down as he bundled me on to the back seat. The door was slammed shut. The two men in the front seats turned round. One had short hair and chiselled features and the other a round face with a huge fuzzy perm and a big moustache. They said nothing as the car pulled out into the airport traffic. We were heading into Moscow. I knew that road. I looked out of the window. Muscovites were going about their business. Kids were playing on street corners, mothers with heavy shopping bags filled the pavements and grandmothers sat on benches, their heads wrapped in scarves, watching the world go by.
‘Where am I going? Please tell me where I’m going?’ I pleaded as I leant forward between the two of them.
The one with the perm, who was driving, half-turned his head and whispered: ‘Smuggle drug Russia? You go prison seven year.’
I slumped back into the seat and my chest began to heave. I could barely breathe. I began to sob uncontrollably.
2
I was lying on the metal bench when the eye-slot on the door slid open with a metallic click and I could see an eyeball fixing me. I must have finally fallen asleep. I was in a cell in a very quiet building in some kind of military or police complex about an hour from the airport. After my arrest they’d taken me to a medical centre somewhere outside central Moscow. The plain-clothes cops couldn’t find it at first and so they had to pull over and ask a little old lady in a headscarf, a proper old babushka, to hop in the back next to me and give them directions. It was a strange episode, me sitting there in cuffs and tears and this nice wrinkled lady talking to the police guys and then turning to me from time to time with a sympathetic look.
At the medical place I was given a full physical examination, which involved standing around in the buff while various people in white coats played around with my body. They put a syringe in my arm and took some blood, they pulled the skin down below my eyes and had a good look inside, I stuck my tongue out and said ‘Aaagh’, someone put two fingers up my arse and had a little rummage, they took my pulse and blood pressure, and I weed into a bottle for them. The whole process took a couple of hours, including the hanging around in between tests – and the weirdest thing was that no one said a fucking word to me throughout. They just prodded and probed me like farmers at a cattle market, weighing up whether to make a bid. Then the Bodie and Doyle guys drove me back to the airport and I was marched through the public concourse and back up into my makeshift cell like I was Carlos the fucking Jackal or some bigshot Chechen separatist. I wondered if the people staring at me would have laughed if they knew I was, in fact, a junior broker on the emerging markets desk at Garban Icap, caught with a pinprick of poor quality hash in my pocket after a stag party.
They left me in there for an hour or two and the longer I sat there the more convinced I became that they’d brought me back to the airport because they were going to deport me. I got that funny feeling in my stomach – like when you go over a humpback bridge in a car – as the hope spread out through my body. Why else would they have taken me back there but to put me on a flight? I heard myself singing under my breath, to the tune of ‘Three Lions on a Shirt’: I’m going home, I’m going home, Hague is going home… But as soon as the guards came back in and cuffed me again I could tell by their faces and manner that London was not my next stop. They led me out to a minibus with a police driver who took me to a compound surrounded by trees and barbed wire. It was a huge place but it was so quiet it felt like I was the only person there, bar a couple of guards.
Night was falling by the time we arrived and, for the third time since my arrival in Russia, I was told to strip naked. I almost laughed. Maybe it was an old Russian custom to take off your clothes every time you arrived somewhere new. Once they were absolutely sure that I hadn’t managed to get any knives and guns on the way from the airport and hidden them about my person, they handed back my clothes. Except my shoes, for some reason. Maybe they thought I was going to batter myself to death with my penny loafers.
It was the first time I’d been in a proper cell and it looked pretty much how I’d always imagined one to look: dirty without being disgusting, graffiti on the peeling walls, small, barred window high up on one wall, wide bench for sitting and sleeping, low-wattage bulb hanging from the roof near the door. I spent most of the night staring at two flies circling the bulb, over and over, like they were on a long-distance aerial racetrack. My panic had turned to blank exhaustion after the drama earlier in the day and I lay on my back with my hands behind my head watching the fly race in a daze, thinking about Lucy, and Mum and Dad. I hated myself for all the grief I must’ve been causing them. I kept thinking, How many more days will they have to sit there fretting about me?
It felt very cold in the cell, but I couldn’t work out whether that wa
s the temperature, or just me being tired and hungry. I was seriously hungry and thirsty. Nothing had passed my lips since I’d had a bowl of pasta, a glass of red wine and a cappuccino at Heathrow on the Wednesday night. That was about thirty-six hours. I curled up in a ball on the bench facing the door and I could feel the salt from my tears of the night caking the skin around my eyes when, after a while, the eye-slot opened and a hand passed through a steaming metal mug and a piece of black soda bread. Ah, the Continental breakfast. The sweet black tea was delicious. I tried to eat the bread but it was very stale and I had a smoke instead. There was a tinny radio playing further down the corridor and the silly Russian pop songs didn’t agree with my mood, but then ‘At Night’ by Shakedown – Rob’s song, a funky electro-pop number – came on and I found myself tapping my foot and mouthing the lyrics through my cigarette smoke.
It was the song Rob had been playing all the time when I went to visit him in Spain last summer. We used to listen to it driving around in the evening heat, windows down, shades on, tapping the doors of the car, as we headed out to his favourite bars on the coast.
The upbeat, familiar tune lifted my mood and a flood of positive thoughts washed over me: Garban will have rolled out the heavy guns of their legal department by now, the Embassy will be straightening it all out with the relevant authorities, Mum and Dad will have put in some calls, maybe one of my Russian client friends has taken care of it all… The cell door opened and the guard threw me my loafers. Great, it’s all over now. Let’s get home.
Two uniformed policemen handcuffed me and escorted me to a black minibus. I was driven back into and around Moscow for at least an hour in total silence but for the noise of the rush-hour traffic outside. Not a word had passed between the three of us when we finally turned off the main road and on to a very long straight tree-lined road somewhere in the city suburbs. At the end of the road I could see a large international-style hotel and my heart quickened at the thought that they’d been ordered to leave me there to be collected by one of my clients, or the Embassy. But about 200 yards before the hotel the car pulled over and the cops got out and walked up a path into a small low red-brick building. They were getting my release papers and/or the caution from the authorities, I guessed. It was weirdly quiet outside. Just one car passed by in twenty minutes. The thought kept crossing my mind: do a runner, do a runner…