Firefly

by Henry Porter

  It was odd, for both men swore that they’d seen the boy in central Athens long after his train had departed. There was no reason for them to lie, so maybe the man who said he had sold Naji a train ticket was simply mistaken. But someone who worked the street for Iliev, fleecing desperate migrants eighteen hours a day, wasn’t likely to make that kind of error.

  When the two men had departed, Samson said, ‘The boy has little money. We know that because he was playing his flute to earn a few coins. So why did he waste the train ticket?’

  ‘Maybe he heard about the demonstration blocking the line,’ offered Procopio.

  ‘Yes, but a few hours added to the journey isn’t going to make any difference to him. A kid like that can’t afford to waste thirty euros.’

  ‘Is it important?’ asked Procopio.

  ‘No, but it is interesting. I’m learning that this boy is very hard to predict.’

  Samson called London and told them he might be no more than twelve hours behind the boy. The good news was that the border was closed and that would delay him further. He would make for the border immediately.

  Five

  The bus travelled through the night and arrived early in the morning in the city of Thessaloniki, where Naji achieved two things: he earned more money from busking in the street and he charged his phone. The man in the kiosk selling newspapers and cigarettes waived his usual three-euro fee for phone charging when he saw Naji’s playing bring him trade. People who stopped to listen remembered they needed cigarettes, or decided to buy a magazine or a lottery ticket. The kiosk owner, who wore a skullcap and a long black jacket, sat stroking his grey beard and telling Naji that he should come every day and they’d make money together. Naji declined, but offered to buy the phone charger from him, whereupon the old guy shook his head and in a kindly enough way told him to get lost.

  Buoyed by the thought that he could make money and wouldn’t have to spend all of his family’s savings, which his mother had sewn in neat little plastic packets into his backpack, jeans and jacket, he boarded the bus for the two-hour trip to Idomeni on the border. He was hopeful about his journey after coming so far so quickly, and now he had the idea of love to spur him on. What else could Hayat’s smile and her gift of the red bracelet mean? He admitted to himself he knew nothing about this aspect of life and wished he had Munira, the eldest of his three sisters, to tell him whether he was now in love, or if this was just a pleasant preliminary.

  The Idomeni transit camp brought him back to reality. As he trudged with the others from the bus towards the camp, he knew that his problem hadn’t changed. Without registration papers he couldn’t cross to the town of Gevgelija in Macedonia; yet even if he had them, he would not be allowed to pass because he was too young. There was another reason that he didn’t want to go through the process of being photographed and fingerprinted. He suspected the terrorists had influence everywhere, and might get access to the database that tracked refugees through Europe and find out where he was. So, he would wait and watch and make his own luck. But it was going to be hard. For one thing, the border was closed and he’d heard people say that Greece would start sending refugees back to Turkey. All Europe seemed now to hate and fear the migrants.

  There were four huge tents set up by Médecins Sans Frontières and the UNHCR and these were already packed with families. More arrivals were expected from the trains that night. Things hadn’t been made any easier by the first big rainstorm of the autumn, which had turned the tracks and the ground near the tents into a quagmire. People put up their own tents and had improvised shelters by tying plastic sheets between trees, but nothing kept the rain and mud out. Those that didn’t have shelter hung around in groups, cold and wet, some cloaked in foil survival blankets they’d kept from the beaches of Lesbos and Kos. They smoked cigarettes, made fires that fizzed and steamed in the rain, and gazed at the vast, dark clouds that had rolled down from the mountains to the north and were now spreading menacingly across the lowlands of Macedonia.

  Naji joined a food line and after an hour of queuing received bread and soup. Then he found a place in one of the big tents between two family groups, where he could just about lie down. It proved hard to get any sleep. The air was foetid – the men pissed in water bottles so as not to lose their places; babies cried all night long and old people groaned and complained to God about their discomfort and misery. After a few hours he’d had enough of the smell and the man snoring next to him. He got up and picked his way through the prone bodies. Outside, he went to join a circle of young men who had built a blazing fire at a safe distance from the tents, and were standing as still as statues, watching the sparks fly into the sky. One of them offered him a drag on his cigarette, which made him feel sick.

  At six, just as dawn was breaking, a youth ran over to the group and said the Macedonians were preparing to let five hundred refugees through to allow them to catch a train from Gevgelija to the border with Serbia. The young men all immediately gathered their belongings and rushed to the border crossing. News had spread quickly: families were emerging from the tents, shouldering backpacks and dragging bags across the sodden ground; fathers were hoisting babies and mothers screaming at their kids. They were wild with a mixture of hope and desperation.

  Naji waited a moment before detaching himself from the young men and joining the families on the left-hand side of the track, for he was sure that the people with children would be allowed to go first and he had an idea of tagging along with one of the bigger families. But he needed to judge it well. If he made his move too early, or too late, he might be stopped by one of the soldiers and asked for his papers.

  The crowd was silent. The sound of cockerels crowing and dogs barking came from across the border and then, to everyone’s amusement, a small, honey-coloured dog sauntered up to the gate, cocked its leg and went through the border as though no border existed. The soldiers beckoned the crowd forward, making it plain with their guns that this was not going to be a stampede. Everyone’s papers were to be inspected thoroughly and they started checking photographs by shining torches into people’s faces, even though by now it was quite light. Naji fell in behind a family of six, which consisted of two young children being carried by the parents and a couple of boys, aged about six and eight. He started talking to the boys about the magnificent train they would soon board.

  The father wearily handed all the family’s documents to a soldier. He flipped through them nodding and then gestured the family forward. With his heart thumping, Naji went with them, wrapping his arm round the smallest boy’s shoulder.

  They went five paces, and a further ten. He’d got through!

  Then he heard the soldier shout, ‘Stop!’

  Naji kept walking but the soldier ran after him and grabbed hold of his backpack. ‘Stop!’ he shouted again, and cursed at him in his own language.

  Naji turned and gestured to the family.

  The soldier called out to the man, ‘This boy is your family?’ The man shook his head and continued up the newly laid road towards the Konska River bridge, which led to the town.

  He was practically carried back into Greece by the huge soldier and was told to stand by a fence post until he was handed over to the Greek authorities. An officer came over to underline the message that if he valued his life he wouldn’t try any more tricks to enter Macedonia illegally; besides, he was plainly underage and needed to be confined somewhere. Naji was appalled: to be stopped from entering Macedonia was one thing; to be detained because he was a child was another.

  A harassed-looking young Swiss woman from the UNCHR was eventually summoned by radio. She interviewed him beside the road as refugees streamed past. To her he told the story of becoming separated from an adult brother who had gone ahead with both their papers. He pleaded with her: at that very moment his brother was preparing to board the train to Serbia. How was it possible that the authorities would prevent the reunion with h
is beloved brother, who was the only person he had in the world? What had he done to deserve this cruelty? His eyes began to water at the thought of this terrible injustice, and he saw that the woman was beginning to believe him and might even persuade the soldiers to let him through.

  ‘You stay there,’ she said, and walked over to the officer. Naji saw him shaking his head and smiling. She returned. ‘I don’t believe anything you say. It’s one story after another with you – first you pretend to be a member of a family with young children, now your brother has left you. You are going to have to come with me, and we will decide what is to be done with you.’ She put her hand on his collar and began to march him back towards the transit camp.

  As they passed near some trees, where a group of African migrants stood, Naji broke free of her grip and ran for his life towards the Africans, whom he rightly guessed would do nothing to help her. In fact, they cheered as he headed towards them and crashed through their midst to the bushes beyond. He knew she wasn’t following – she was too heavy for that – but he kept going, weaving through an area of scrub and bushes until he came to a stony pasture, where a few sheep were grazing. He sat down on a large boulder, out of breath and dejected, but soon he began to feel better. The sun came out. He ate half the energy bar given to him by the old man in the kiosk, propped his backpack against the boulder and dozed a little. Then he watched a mad spiral of little yellow butterflies and a bird of a species he had never seen before darting about in the grass catching insects.

  There was now warmth in the air and he began to think that with a little luck he might be able to complete his journey before winter set in. Naji’s optimism, so often sunk, had revived once again.

  He laid out all his possessions in the sun so that his pack could dry. Apart from what he wore and the money secreted around his clothes and in the pack, he had few belongings. He looked down on his smartphone; the sleeping bag he’d found on the road in Lesbos, which must have fallen from someone’s pack; a map of the Balkans which he’d shoplifted from the store in Mytilene; the little silver frame backed with goatskin that contained the photograph of his mother and his three sisters, Munira, Jada and little Yasmin; an English paperback book entitled The Cosmic Detective: Exploring the Mysteries of our Universe, which the nice woman in Lesbos had given him; a metal cup; a plate; chocolate and assorted energy bars; two apples; a packet of bread; gloves and a woolly hat; spare trainers and spare jeans; his favourite striped shirt; his flute; a compass he had bought at the store; and the knife he’d taken from the office of the therapist, Anastasia.

  He packed everything away very neatly, just as his mother had shown him, though now he had much more to fit into the pack. He looked at the knife. There was something beautiful about it. With a cutting edge on both sides, the blade was slightly wider at the point than where it was fixed into the plain wooden handle. He hadn’t been able to examine it properly before now and, balancing it in his hand, he realised that there was a good reason it was weighted at the sharp end – it was a throwing knife. He tried it out on a nearby pine tree and every time he threw it, it sailed through the air and stuck straight into the trunk with a satisfying thud. This pleased him, for he felt that if he practised, he might become really good at knife throwing and always be able to find his target. He spent an hour trying different techniques, first holding the knife by the handle like a hammer then gripping the blade between his thumb and forefinger, which he found less accurate over twenty throws. The best results were achieved by using the hammer grip. He found that the trick was to start with a straight arm above his head and let the knife fly from his palm as he brought his arm parallel with the ground.

  He was wiping the pine resin from the blade with some leaves when he heard voices from the bushes. He moved over to his pack and slipped the knife in his back pocket. Two young men appeared from the scrub, smiling – an African and a European in a camouflage T-shirt.

  ‘Hi,’ the African called out.

  Naji nodded.

  ‘You speak English?’

  Naji nodded again.

  ‘This guy, he is from Bulgaria and he wants to know if you go to Macedonia,’ said the African.

  ‘Yes, I go to Macedonia,’ replied Naji.

  ‘You go to Macedonia with me,’ said the local, gesturing in the direction of the border. ‘I bring you in Macedonia.’

  ‘He says he can take you there for money,’ said the African.

  ‘How much money?’

  The African looked at the man. ‘He says seventy euros. He has to pay the police.’

  Naji thought about this. If he had to spend that amount at every border he would quickly run out of money. ‘Forty euros – maybe. Seventy euros too much,’ he said.

  The smuggler looked hurt. The African explained that he’d seen what happened at the border that morning and he’d brought the smuggler to find Naji because he thought he needed help. The guy had put himself out to come and make this offer, he said. Naji knew he was probably getting a cut for introducing clients – just a few weeks in refugee camps had educated him in that particular way of the world. ‘I will pay forty-five euros – twenty-five now and twenty on the other side.’

  ‘Sixty euros,’ said the smuggler. ‘Forty now; twenty later.’

  They both looked at him without saying anything. He returned their stare. The black guy seemed okay – as straight as you were likely to find in the camps and on the road, he thought. The other man he didn’t trust. But he’d be much more frightened if he hadn’t got the knife in his back pocket. For once people couldn’t treat him as just a kid and he didn’t have to be scared rigid, so he stared back at him, good and hard. Then he asked the African where they planned to cross.

  ‘They are making a hole in the fence tonight a few kilometres that way.’ He pointed to the west. ‘We go in the dark. We meet in four hours.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The Fire of the Africans.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘The place where we have our fire under the tree – you were there.’

  Naji nodded.

  ‘He wants the money now,’ said the African. ‘Forty euros now.’

  ‘I’ll give it when I see the hole in the fence.’

  ‘But it is necessary to pay police,’ said the African.

  Naji asked them to turn away, took the money out of the slit in the strap of his pack and reluctantly handed it to the smuggler. Then he hoisted his pack.

  ‘Ciao,’ said the African.

  ‘Ciao,’ said Naji, using the word for the first time and feeling good about it.

  Naji told himself that he’d just learned a valuable lesson. He must never again put himself in a position where he might be attacked. Throwing a knife at a tree a few metres away would never save his life. If he was to survive, he needed to find people to travel with. He needed friends.

  *

  Samson picked up the call, from Macy Harp’s Curzon Street number, on his personal phone, twenty miles from the ­Macedonian border. He asked the driver – supplied by the Greek intelligence service – to pull over on the mountain road so he could keep the signal. He got out of the car and walked to the edge of a drop to face the stupendous view.

  ‘That thing we’ve been working on – it’s over,’ said Macy.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes, we are.’

  ‘Have you told the client?’

  ‘No, he told me. He had a lot of people working on it and they have established it beyond doubt.’

  Denis Hisami, a Silicon Valley investor in his late forties and billionaire several times over, had come to the Curzon Street offices of Hendricks-Harp and told Macy Harp, Samson and two other ex-SIS people about his sister, Dr Aysel Hisami. A distinguished medical scientist in her prime, the thirty-two-year-old had returned to Kurdistan from California as IS rampaged through Iraq in 2014 to serve as
a frontline doctor for the Kurdish forces. She was captured by IS. Her family feared the worst, but two Yazidi teenagers who had escaped from sex slavery brought news that she was alive and being held with forty other women deep in IS territory. Hisami had set about trying to buy her freedom and Samson had gone three times into northern Syria and Kurdish-controlled territory in Iraq to meet with possible intermediaries who seemed to stand a chance of purchasing Aysel Hisami in the horrendous slave markets that operated in northern Iraq. Locating her, keeping track of her as she was moved from place to place, finding out exactly which IS commander controlled her fate and trying to cross-check the information was a very delicate operation. It required enormous patience, which Hisami did not have because he knew that his sister, brave as she was, could take only so much of the sexual violence and torture that the young Yazidi women had reported. She was owned by a particularly sadistic IS commander, they said.

  Hisami, a quiet, thoughtful man whom Samson liked a lot, had become increasingly impatient and opted for another approach. Eight weeks ago he had flown into London to tell Hendricks-Harp that he was standing the firm down while he developed new lines into IS. It was typical of the man that he had done this personally. Macy suggested that their client had spent so much money on the contract that they should keep the job ticking over, just in case things didn’t work out. Samson went to Syria once more to talk to his contacts about Dr Hisami. What he learned about the treatment of the slaves in the process would, he was sure, stay with him for the rest of his life.

  ‘Do we know what happened?’ Samson asked.

  ‘She committed suicide about ten weeks ago,’ said Macy. ‘There are two independent reports from escapees. She saw no other way out of her situation. I am sorry, Paul. I know you were deeply committed to her release.’