by RJ Bailey
I could feel myself welling up – the reservoir had clearly sprung a leak – when I heard the bolt on the outside of the door draw back and Inspector Gazim re-entered, a pained expression on his face. He didn’t sit. He simply threw a red folder on the desk in front of me.
I waited. He let our lack of communication stretch out.
‘I have spoken to the duty sergeant at the police station at Pulana,’ he said eventually.
I raised a quizzical eyebrow. And? it said. While my brain said: Oh, fuck, here we go.
Gazim sighed. ‘He confirmed your account. There is a copy of the report in the folder. I have emailed a version to your car-hire company.’
It took a while for me to process this. Then I said: ‘You bastard.’
A brief smile flitted across his face, lightening those serious features, as if the sun had broken cover from behind cloud for a second. ‘Were it all too swift, my colleagues might have suspected I had not investigated properly.’ As soon as he had finished the sentence, it became gloomily overcast again and he was cop-like once more.
‘How long have you known the Colonel?’ I asked.
Nothing came back. He stared at me, impassive, that smile an anomaly to be disowned. Eventually he spoke, as if he were reading off a cue card. ‘I hope this unfortunate incident has not coloured your impression of our country.’
Well, if that was how he wanted to play it. ‘No, not at all.’
‘In which case . . .’ He extracted a pen from his pocket. ‘In the folder is a form saying that you have been treated fairly and courteously by the Policia e Shtetit and have no cause for complaint. It is standard procedure.’
Jesus, even the police want reviews now. CopAdviser.
I opened the red file, removed, folded and pocketed the official police report on our stolen car and signed the How did we do? form. At least it didn’t ask for star ratings.
‘Why did you bring me in here?’
He glanced up at the corner of the room. The meaning was clear. I had been right. There were no cameras to record him talking to the Englishwoman. Fair enough.
When I was done, he closed the folder and placed my passport and phone on the desk in front of me. ‘Thank you, Miss Wylde. Have a nice flight.’
As I collected my things I couldn’t help but notice that, whereas I had arrived in the room with just one phone, I was leaving with two.
TEN
Looking back, I am ashamed of the plan we came up with in Paris. We took advantage of a decent man. Lost him his job, possibly his career. To be fair, Freddie didn’t like it from the get-go.
‘There must be easier ways to get Leka’s attention,’ she had said. There were probably cheaper ones, too. But she couldn’t think of anything that gave us such copper-bottomed leverage and so she went along with it.
I suspected she was beginning to doubt my sanity. But she was a loyal enough friend to keep that to herself.
We had been in Paris for seventy-two hours and had slept for about eight of them. The rest of the time was spent sourcing a vehicle, checking our quarry’s routines, estimating the strength of the opposition and buying drugs. Lots of drugs.
Eventually, we had worked out a plan. Sorry, scenario. It involved Freddie and me stripping down to vests and tight jeans. We were no youngsters, but we looked pretty good, the musculature of our arms still well defined and with something reasonably substantial to push up in a push-up bra.
It wasn’t the flaunting of our bodies that made me ashamed, though. It was the fact that Jens van Welz, a member of my profession ID’d from a picture sent to the Colonel in Zurich, was fooled by one of the oldest tricks in a very well-thumbed book. It was like Fool’s Mate in chess – a hoary old move that nobody ever fell for. Until they did.
When Jens pulled up outside the grand mansard-roofed house in the suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye that morning, he was confronted with two women struggling to lift a chest into the back of a small van. He watched us for a second until Freddie flashed him a we’re-just-weak-women smile and he came over, flexing his shoulders like a weightlifter. ‘What you got in there?’ he asked in French. ‘A dead body?’
‘Not yet,’ said Freddie.
I could slap that girl sometimes.
We both stepped back so he could take a shot at it. He planted his feet wide apart, bent his knees and spread his arms so he could grab both handles at once. The moment he put his back into it and realised the chest was almost empty, that was when we had him off balance. We grabbed a leg each and heaved him inside. Freddie was on top of him in a second, administering a punch to the back of his neck. I held my breath and closed my mouth while I released powder from a talc-dispenser into his face. Cable ties took care of his arms and legs, and within a matter of seconds we were inside the van with an angry, thrashing bodyguard. He stopped when I relieved him of his Glock and put it to his temple.
Honestly, it was so slick, any watching Formula One drivers would have welcomed us into their pit team.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ he asked, but I could tell he already felt like his tongue had been replaced by a fat baguette.
‘If I had a penny . . .’ replied Freddie.
I waited until his eyelids drooped before I wiped the excess powder away from his nose and mouth.
The Devil’s Breath.
Surprisingly easy to get in Paris.
Some weeks before I’d actually been dosed with it myself when I’d stroked the embossing on a business card. So I knew just how effective it could be. And what the hangover was like.
We removed the nasal screens from our nostrils and Freddie opened the chest and began dressing for the part of bodyguard/driver. I removed the car keys, ID and lanyard from Jens’ pocket. I slit the plastic casing and inserted Freddie’s photograph over Jens’. It needed trimming down, but it would pass a brief once-over.
‘How do I look?’
Freddie now had on a dark jacket and trousers with a black silk blouse underneath. Her hair was pulled back in a compact ponytail, her face devoid of any make-up. Unlike me, she never seemed to need it, even on a few hours’ sleep. ‘Like a bodyguard,’ I said.
‘If she phones the agency to check, we’re fucked.’
‘I know.’ I offered Freddie the Glock but she shook her head.
‘It won’t come to that.’
I had to admire her optimism. It was bound to come to that sooner or later.
North of Saint-Germain-en-Laye is the Forêt Domaniale de-Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which, on a weekday morning, has quiet sections of road and a network of tracks to shield ne’er-do-wells from prying eyes. At night, they are a favourite for locals who fancy a bit of car-hopping, shique-shaque. One of these dogging areas was our RV spot. By the time Freddie returned to the rendezvous, Jens was stirring. I almost felt sorry for him as his eyes snapped open and his brain tried to make sense of how he had ended up in the back of a van.
‘What . . .?’
‘What, how, who, where, when?’ I said in English. He was Dutch, so his English was bound to be better than my French. ‘You can try to figure it out all you want, but the memory of how you got here is gone. Retroactive amnesia. You probably recall setting off for work in your Mercedes for certain. Maybe the drive to Mrs Cosovanu’s house. Maybe you even recall seeing two women struggling with a chest . . . but I doubt it. The Devil’s Breath. Like Rohypnol or GHB, but faster-acting.’
‘What . . . what do you want? The kids?’
I shook my head. ‘The kids are at school. Dropped off just like you would.’
‘The wife?’
‘Probably fucking her tennis coach as we speak.’ He looked even more puzzled, if that were possible. ‘Or whatever she does on a Wednesday morning.’
‘I don’t have any money. You kidnapped the wrong guy.’
The door opened and Freddie held up her phone and took a picture of the hapless bodyguard. ‘We don’t want your money,’ she said. ‘We just want to show your boss how easy it is to fuck him ove
r.’
‘He’ll kill me.’
‘Leka?’ I asked.
‘Mr Cosovanu. When he finds out I—’
‘Yup. When he finds out you let strangers get to his kids. Strangers who could have raped, murdered and dismembered them, if they’d so wished.’
‘Thank your lucky stars we are nice people,’ added Freddie. I wasn’t sure he would buy that, considering his situation.
‘What about me?’ he asked.
As if I really did give a flying fuck. ‘You can go back and tell them what happened. But you are right, I don’t think Mr Cosovanu, as you call him, offers generous severance packages to employees who screw up where his children are involved. Your best bet is this: in that chest is a Swiss Army knife. We are going to put the chest, and you, on the road. It may take you a while, but I reckon you can cut those ties. We will even leave you the keys to the Merc. Now, all you have to do is call your agency and make sure those kids are picked up from school safely. Because you’ll be leaving the country and looking for a new job, won’t you?’
He called us some choice name in Dutch.
Freddie chimed in with an alternative. ‘Or we can put you in the boot of the Merc and you can hope someone hears your screams.’
I don’t think he liked Freddie’s option. ‘Who the fuck are you and what do you want?’
‘I’m just your average pissed-off mother who wants her daughter back.’
‘A pissed-off mother with a Glock,’ Freddie said.
‘Ah, yes. Sorry, Jens. We’ll be keeping the Glock.’
We were bait once more. It was getting to be a habit. Then again, maybe men shouldn’t be so damn predictable. We were two women at the café on the outskirts of Calais, minding their own business, enjoying a coffee in the morning sun. Our VW Campervan, powder-blue and white with English plates, was nearby. We didn’t ask to be interrupted. They made all the running. The men.
Neither of us paid any apparent attention as a Citroën drove slowly past and then again three minutes later. It parked up behind the VW and two men exited. They were dressed from the Thug section at Zara: leather jackets, jeans, dental-white trainers. Both had bullet heads and mirrored shades, which they took off as they approached. The one who spoke had a thick black moustache.
‘Ladies, how are you today?’
Freddie and I exchanged glances. ‘Fine,’ I said.
‘Can we help you?’ Freddie sounded defensive.
‘May I?’ he asked, pulling out a chair and sitting down. His pal stood behind him, arms folded. The sitter pointed a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Nice van. Yours?’
I nodded. ‘Daisy.’ Everyone names their bloody VW Campervans something like that. Daisy, Clementine, Ruby. The twee-er the better.
‘Daisy. Cute. The thing is, ladies, we’d like to buy it. We’ll give a good price. You could pay for your holiday.’
‘Daisy is not for sale,’ I said. Which was the truth. It wasn’t really ours. We had hired it. And those English plates were fake.
‘Well, in which case, we will hire it from you. Just for a few hours. You drive it across on the ferry, we give you, what, five hundred Euros?’
I leaned in, like I was interested. ‘With how many people in it? Van like that, it’s a GG, isn’t it?’
A GG was a Guaranteed Game.
Now he looked offended. ‘What do you mean?’
‘How many refugees can you get in there?’
‘Well, what we do with it while we have hired it is our business. All you have to do is be in the front and minding your own business.’ Because two women in a VW Campervan called Daisy are a good bet for getting over the Channel and into the UK unchecked. Meaning the smugglers were pretty sure they could stuff the rear with live bodies to bring across, at up to nine grand per person.
Prices changed all the time. It wasn’t only Ryanair and easyJet who had dynamic pricing algorithms, although the people-smugglers’ computers were all in their heads. Just as commercially savvy as the real thing, though.
‘We want to see Leka,’ said Freddie.
It was like she had electrocuted them. Both gave a little spasm of shock. The moustachioed one shot to his feet. ‘Who are you?’
Christ, I was getting bored with that question. ‘We’re not cops. We’re not journalists. We just want to see your boss. For a chat.’
‘About what?’ It was the second man, finding his voice at last.
‘That’s between him and us,’ I said. ‘We have business to discuss. We’ll be here.’
They stood and stared for a few seconds, unsure of their next move. Mr Moustache gave a jerk of his head and they walked back to the Citroën, muttering to each other. The Colonel had told us about people-smugglers targeting van owners on the Shuttle and ferries, offering to rent or buy their vehicles and stashing desperate men and boys inside – they were nearly all male – for the crossing. God knows why they still thought the UK was the Promised Land. Didn’t they read the newspapers? Well, probably not, but it was no secret that there were better final destinations than blighted Blighty.
We ordered another coffee and it had only just arrived when the Citroën returned. There were three of them now, the newcomer a lanky lad with greasy hair to his shoulders and an acne-savaged complexion. He came and sat. ‘Just one of you,’ said the moustache.
We had expected that. I picked up my phone and pocketed it. Freddie had the Glock. I knew I’d be searched at some point, but she might not be. I’d like to see the pockmarked lad try to pat her down. ‘If I haven’t called or if I’m not back in thirty minutes . . .’ I pointed to crater-face. ‘Break his neck and call the police. I’ll be at the Hotel Neptune.’
I enjoyed the look of confusion on their faces. We knew where Leka’s office was?
Of course we did.
Our Man in Zurich was bound to know where all the best people-traffickers hung out. But we couldn’t just swan in. We needed them to get us to Leka.
We needed more than that to make sure we got out.
‘Count on it.’
And they thought we were joking.
The Hotel Neptune was a blocky modern building on Avenue Louis Blériot, and Leka had taken over the entire top floor. The two men from the café took me up in the lift, and I was given a quick pat-down by the mostly silent one. They took my phone, then handed it back so I could turn it on. They ran through various apps to ensure it was as it appeared to be. A phone. And not a bomb. Part of me wished I’d thought of that. It would be cleaner than what was to come. And cheaper.
When the lift stopped and the doors opened, I was led along a corridor carpeted in deep red with a gold Neptune motif, to a set of double doors where I got a second pat-down from the sombre-looking sentry outside. After he’d finished with a final poke of my breasts he nodded for us to enter.
It is fair to say that Leka wasn’t what I had expected. The Colonel had sent me a photograph, but in that he looked like any other Albanian hustler. The man sitting behind a desk you could land a helicopter on was smart and handsome, with none of the pudginess seen on some of his more simian colleagues, and he had a haircut that didn’t look like it was done with secateurs. He was wearing a dark pinstriped suit, light-blue shirt and a geometrically patterned tie.
The room was decorated in fake Louis XIV style: lots of gilt, portraits of noblemen with horses and a red carpet a few shades darker than its sibling in the corridor, with a single large Neptune image in the centre. There were padded and quilted carver chairs and, somewhat incongruously, an antique high-backed settle that looked seriously uncomfortable.
Mr Moustache put my phone and passport on the desk. Leka reached into a drawer and placed a silver revolver with a polished wooden grip on the table next to the items. It was a Ruger or a Smith & Wesson, I couldn’t be sure. Although revolvers are less fashionable in the world Leka inhabited, they were often more practical. They didn’t jam like my Beretta had on the mountain.
When he spoke, Leka had that curious mid-Atlant
ic twang of people who learned most of their English from watching TV. ‘You wanted to see me?’ He picked up the passport. ‘Miss Wylde . . .’
And then, as the penny dropped, he laughed. ‘Miss Samantha Wylde. I was expecting you some weeks ago.’
Leka had sent two ‘retrievers’ to pick me up in Zurich. The idea was they would use me as bait to lure Tom, the man who had spared a young Leka after the attempted rape of the young goatherd, to my rescue. It hadn’t worked out well for them.
‘I had business to take care of.’
‘So now you have delivered yourself here, right to my place of work. Very thoughtful of you.’
I saw the inclination of the head. Knew what it meant. I heard the shuffle of white trainers on the carpet and felt the air behind me displaced. It was meant to be a blow to the kidneys, I reckoned. That’s a quick way to get someone on their knees. I sidestepped, spun around, punched the attacker’s ear hard and pushed him towards Leka. Then I stepped away and raised my arms in the air to show I was done.
It was the clean-shaven one who had tried for me, and he levered himself up from the desk and spun to face me.
‘You know, this isn’t my first rodeo,’ I said, dropping to a defensive crouch. I knew I could take him.
‘Enough,’ said Leka. The young man glared at me and curled his upper lip to show me his teeth. I guessed that it meant: You’ll pay for that. He padded back so he was out of my line of sight when I turned back to face Leka.
‘I prefer to do my talking on my feet, not my knees.’
‘Keegan said you were tough. I didn’t believe him.’ Keegan was the chief retriever who had tried to parcel me up for Leka so he could use me to access Tom. ‘I could just shoot you.’
‘But you want to get to someone through me. Can’t do that if I’m dead.’
‘Who said anything about you being dead?’
‘You shoot me, you better kill me,’ I said. I didn’t mind that it was some cliché I had heard. I meant it. ‘But I’m here to persuade you not to. And to leave my friend alone. The man who spared your life once. Doesn’t that count for anything?’
He thought about that for a moment. ‘Wait outside,’ he said to his goons.