All that Glitters

by Les Cowan

  “And what about David Hidalgo? Can we contact him?”

  “Certainly,” Rudi said, pulling out his mobile. “Would you like to speak to him now?”

  Andrei blinked. He moved his mouth but nothing came out.

  “I haven’t contacted him already because this is your show, but I’ve got his number. You can call if you want.”

  Andrei shook his head, overwhelmed at the speed things were moving and paralysed by his lack of English to explain a complicated life and death situation to a man he had never met. All he knew was that Tati seemed to see him as their potential rescuer. If Tati had been here she would have known what to say. But if she’d been here he wouldn’t be having this conversation.

  “Ok then,” Rudi shrugged. “Here’s the number and his email. Take your pick whenever you want to.” He handed Andrei a card he’d already prepared. “And this is Spade’s email – or one of them – if you need to contact him.”

  Andrei drove home in a daze. He’d wanted things to move quickly but was stunned by how much information Rudi had and the steps he’d taken already. Do hackers rule the world now? he wondered. Is there nothing they don’t know and can’t do? His grandmother would have gone to a priest if she’d wanted advice or counsel. Maybe the hackers were the priests of the new world order, just like their more religious counterparts – secretive, full of hidden knowledge, skilled in the black arts, and also effectively running the show. As soon as he got in he fired up his laptop and went straight to Google Translate.

  Two thousand kilometres to the west, Spade chuckled as he opened Rudi’s email confirming what had been discussed in Zerno. The money was in quarantine, PGC had lost access to the police computers, and Andrei had been given David Hidalgo’s email and phone number. Wheels were in motion or, you could say, the net was drawing in – the Internet. Thank you, Elvis Costello, he thought. Your aim was true and so was mine. He chuckled again, tore the wrapper off another caramel wafer, and sent Rudi a cheery Scottish thank you. On a bit of a roll he wondered about including a Youtube link to The Specials performing “Message to You Rudi” just for fun but reminded himself that Rudi in Minsk didn’t really understand the concept so it would be a waste. Nevertheless, things were going well and it was fun for him. He hoped these hoodlums were beginning to squirm. He decided to wash some dishes and take out the rubbish to celebrate.

  Also far from Minsk, Elvira was sitting up in bed, devouring another bowl of soup. This was followed by mince and tatties with doughballs, peas and carrots, then a plate of trifle with extra cream. She had previously formed a poor opinion of Scottish food based on what was provided by the lazy, dirty, bad-tempered women employed by Max. But this was delicious. It was rounded off with a cup of tea and a couple of fingers of Sarah’s home-made pure butter shortbread. James and Sarah Dalrymple sat around the bed nibbling their own light lunch, Paul having left once the danger was over. They watched in amazement how much the skinny girl in the bed managed to stow away in minutes. Normally James and Sarah would have been in church at this time or just home getting the roast out of the oven, talking over what Gordon, their minister, had said that morning or what the Sunday School kids had been up to. This morning James had phoned Gordon early and explained they had an unexpected visitor and that he wouldn’t manage his door duty. He had arranged a swap but was calling out of courtesy. He’d see him at the normal leadership on Wednesday – probably. Now they sat around marvelling at the transformation from two mornings ago. It was the third day since Maxi had bounded off into the mist and found something interesting in the waves lapping on the shore. The first night’s sleep had brought her back from the half-dead to at least half-living. The second night had restored her to what seemed more like normality. She ate like a horse, chatted nineteen to the dozen in that particular variety of English Sarah recognized from so many Polish nurses in casualty, and couldn’t stop petting Maxi, who had taken up permanent residence on the bed. James didn’t have the heart to throw the retriever out. Elvira petted and stroked the dog as if she alone had saved her life. In short, her spirits seemed good and her physical recovery was advancing rapidly. Dalrymple felt the time might be right for a conversation he wasn’t looking forward to. It was hard to see how it could fail to be a matter for the police, whatever Elvira might think.

  “Elvira,” he began after the trays were cleared away. “You seem to be improving well. And you can stay here until you are fully recovered… but we need to ask how you ended up in the water. Who did this to you? You said before that they want to kill you. To help you we have to know who wants to kill you and why. If we can’t find out what has happened I don’t know how we can help you be safe wherever you go from here. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I understand, yis,” Elvira nodded, burying her hands in Maxi’s deep golden fur. “Is not easy explain.” Sarah poured her yet another cup of tea, which Elvira took with two massive spoonfuls of sugar. The room was warm. She was well fed. The people around the bed had saved her life. It was a long and complicated story but that was not what made it difficult. For the first time in years, she felt she had people around her who cared about her and whom she could trust. None of them was a threat. No one was going to drag her from her bed, strip her clothes off, and push her into a room with a man she had never met to do whatever he demanded. Maybe, she hardly dared to hope, that chapter was finally over and Max, Mikhail, Boris, Dimitri, Ivan, Sergei, and all the others could be consigned to the past and she could begin to live again. It was almost too much to take in. She had known the moment would come when she would have to delve back into that life and explain, but she had been putting off thinking about it. Now she owed it to the family in whose lovely home she had no right to be. But how to begin?

  “I am from Belarus,” she said simply. “I used to work in a shop. We sold everything from vegetables to boots, batteries to toothpaste, dresses to detergent. My father’s shop. I was bored and I wanted come to the West. I met a man who told me he could arrange. He promised job in the West, but cost much money. I stole money from my father and gave him. But there was no job. They take me to a house of other girls. I am beaten. Everybody beaten. Then they put in a room and bring in a man. They say you have to do sex with the man or we beat you again. I didn’t do but you know soon you must or they kill you. So I did, many times. Every day, many men. They hurt you and they force you do things is horrible. If you are not good with them they say to Max who write it in a book. They promise if you do enough good then you can go but they never let you go. And every time they write a bad in the book they tell you it take longer to go. Most of the girls more younger than me. They get good in the book. But if not many men want you, then you get worry. Some girls who not do good they make disappear. I wonder when they make me disappear too. So I worry more and then I not good with the men and I get more bad in the book. Tati try to help me. She help everybodys. We get into the office at night and find some papers, but nothing seem to happen. Tati wrote to friend in Belarus but we don know if it come right to him. One day I not able to do any more. Was my birthday. I decided I not able to live here more. And I not able go back Belarus after I take money from my father. So I decide kill myself. Tati find me and call someone. They take me down but Max say I cannot work good any more so they will finish what I start. So Dimitri take me to the river. He put plastics on the wrists and ankles. Max say him to get a boat and go far out. To put a heavy thing on my legs and put me in. But he is fat and lazy. He could not get a boat and did not know how use it. So he took me in the night to a place the boats come in. He hit me on the head and put me in a bag and push me over the wall in the water. That is it. You find me, Maxi find me. Now you know all.”

  The clock in the spare room ticked. Maxi yawned and licked her chops. Elvira kept stroking her fur, not looking up. Illness and injury are no respects of persons; the Dalrymples thought they’d seen a bit of the rough side of life, but this was something else. James cleared his throat while Sarah reached out
a hand. In the few minutes it had taken her to tell her story James had felt his retirement plans slipping away. Modern sex slavery was going on in his city. How dare they! How dare they come here, importing people like meat and selling them on the street. And the anger he felt towards the users was no less – presumably Scottish men who had grown up with what he still considered to be largely decent human values in Scottish society, paying their money without an ounce of pity for the girls they were using. Doing whatever twisted, perverted things they wanted for a bundle of tenners on the table without a single thought for the homes, families, dreams, ambitions, or basic human dignity of the girls they were using. Did these men not have mothers, sisters, wives, daughters? Did they have no one they cared for that they might think of in the aftermath when the animal lust was spent and they wandered home alone? Was there no inner accusing thought or did they just gag the voice of conscience, think about other things, and resume their daily routine until the next time? It was both incomprehensible and appalling that this should be how a developed, mature democracy behaved. So much for the great Scottish Enlightenment.

  He studied the ceiling and let out a long breath. If this was going on in Edinburgh, in the twenty-first century, with all our talk about human rights and freedoms and all the moaning about what in comparison were minor inconveniences, he simply did not see how he could pass by on the other side. The girl had come to him; it was no accident. Gordon had been speaking just the previous week about “good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” from Ephesians 2:10. If this didn’t qualify then he had no idea what might. She had come to him; but there must be other Elviras out there. She had mentioned someone called Tati and said there were other girls. But how many? A dozen? A hundred? More? He wasn’t a politician but he had connections. Once they had got to the bottom of Elvira’s story some of these connections would be getting a pointed phone call. A hundred questions and potential realities spun around in Dr James Dalrymple’s head, but he could already see that city breaks around the capitals of Europe, getting back to the piano, or taking up watercolours no longer held much appeal. It would be like standing by during Kristallnacht and watching while the homes of his Jewish neighbours were firebombed and destroyed. Or ignoring the lynching of a black man in the southern states. Whether or not the scale of harm was equivalent, the point was that these people were his neighbours, at least in the biblical and maybe even the literal sense and he had to do something. He took no convincing that evil triumphs when good people do nothing. His mind was made up.

  “Elvira,” he said finally, “I don’t really know what to say. From what you’ve told us you have been through a living hell. But I will say this. You are safe now. You are never going back to that life. Never. And we’ll do every single thing we can to help the other girls you were with. You can stay here for as long as you need to and when you decide what you want to do we’ll help you. If you need further medical care I can arrange that. If you need legal help to remain in Scotland I have a good friend in an old Edinburgh law firm I can call on. I understand what you have said about your family in Belarus but, if you are willing, I would feel it a privilege if you would let us be your family in Scotland. I am ashamed of how you have been treated by my fellow countrymen. But that is now in the past. Sarah and I will do what we can to make things better for you from now on. That’s all I can say.”

  And it was. Dalrymple got up, mumbling something, and left the room. There was a loud sound of nose blowing from the kitchen. Sarah sometimes found her husband’s dogged, stubborn nature something of a trial but now she could see it was going to come into its own. After more than forty years of marriage, reading his mind wasn’t hard. Pity help anyone trafficking in human misery in their city once he got his teeth into it.

  When he had sufficiently recovered, Dalrymple came back into the room, a rather obvious question he had not yet asked in his mind.

  “Elvira, can you tell me why you don’t want the police involved in this?”

  “Police are in the men who come,” she said simply. “They do not say but we know. Sometimes he says a thing makes me think he is a policeman. Some men know each other or come in group and they speak. They say things make me sure. When Tati and I went in office we find a paper. It gives names. And letters. Some of the men I think is police have letters CID. I ask the woman cook for us what means CID. She say is kind of police. That is why Max think he is safe. If they come for him he say all the police who go with the girls. So police never any problem for Max. So I say no when you want phone police for me. David H: Pastor is the only one can help us. His name on another paper. The people Max is afraid of. David H: Pastor the only one to help us. You speak only him.”

  “But who is David H: Pastor?” Dalrymple pressed her. “Is that his name? Pastor? Or is his name David H and he is a pastor? How can I contact him?”

  Elvira looked confused.

  “I don’t know. Only David H: Pastor. He will help us.”

  Dalrymple groaned in frustration.

  “But how can I contact him if I don’t even know his name?”

  “Phone Gordon,” Sarah said, as if it were obvious. “If he’s a church pastor, Gordon will know who he is. Or if his name is ‘Pastor’ then we can search the phone book. You do the phone book. I’ll contact Gordon.”

  More precious than rubies, James Dalrymple thought, not for the first time. The heart of her husband is glad in her. She does him good and not evil all the days of her life.

  “Great,” he said. “I’m on it.”

  Chapter 21

  PLAZA DE ESPAÑA

  The general opinion in Ribadeo regarding restaurants was that the Parador was good but expensive, the portions tended to be on the meagre rather than filling side, and the menu was more geared to international visitors who wanted something “típico de aquí” than meeting the tastes of genuine locals. Casa Pepe was good, though lacked the view of the Parador and tended to be something of a meatfest. So, partly by elimination and partly the genuine hard work of the owners and staff, San Miguel came out on top. It was perched on a little outcrop of rock at the far seaward end of the harbour and had uninterrupted views both inland over the Ria across to Castropol and out to sea. While red meats and chicken were available, it was fish and seafood – pescados y mariscos – that diners came for and were not disappointed. Merluza, lubina, bacalao, percebes, navajas, gambas, and bogavante were the order of the day and the reason David wanted to bring Gillian here for Sunday lunch. By October the tourist season was dying down and the families with holiday houses had gone back to Madrid or whichever other hotter-than-hell inland city they lived in the other ten months of the year, so a reservation wasn’t in itself a problem. David particularly wanted a window seat and these were issued parsimoniously by the management; however, it turned out that the current jefe was actually a far-out cousin and remembered David from childhood holidays despite it being something like forty years previously.

  “How did you manage to pull this off?” Gillian asked as they were seated.

  “Enchufe,” David answered.

  “A plug?”

  “Well, sort of. Enchufe does mean an electrical plug but more generally it means connections. A relative, friend, neighbour, someone you’ve done a favour for, a cousin or a colleague. Anything you like. When you’ve got enchufe there’s almost nothing you can’t get and almost nothing you can get without it.”

  “So bribery, corruption, and nepotism?”

  “I suppose so, in the strictest sense, but it doesn’t feel like that within the culture. It’s just getting along and helping each other. If you have one window table left, who are you going to give it to – a perfect stranger or somebody you have a connection with? It’s also like a reward for living here a long time and paying your way, like membership of the invisible society of the town. You have to earn it but once you’ve got it you’re an insider.”

  “Not much room for equal opps there.”

  “Perhaps not. Bu
t we’ve got a window table, haven’t we? Enjoy it.”

  They did – the table, the view, the meal, the service, and the sense of security, of being out of the firing line for a bit. Whether the police were just as corrupt as the racketeers had been was left sticking to the wall by mutual consent. David felt this must be what the Apollo astronauts felt like after finally landing on board the aircraft carrier, having been picked up out of the sea after re-entry: grounded and glad to be home but still a little bit giddy. Gillian, on the other hand, felt keyed up as she always did before presenting to a sophisticated academic audience who might spot some methodological error or missed connection in her research. But she was again enjoying the feeling of being back in Spain with a Spaniard. It was funny; David was just as Scottish as she was at home, but get him on Spanish soil and all of that seemed to burn off like morning mist. Naturally he dressed and spoke differently, but she would have sworn that he also walked differently, sat differently, and laughed a lot more. He relaxed like her dad did the minute you got him behind his drums.

  That afternoon they had a siesta then drove to Playa de las Catedrales, a local wonder David insisted they visit. Gillian was impressed. It was as if someone had taken a rough saw and cut into the cliffs, gouging out a series of cuttings, arches, inlets, towers, and turrets, all in natural stone overlooking golden sand and rolling breakers. Gillian kicked off her shoes and paddled. They wandered as far as the tide would let them, hand in hand, then came back up to road level and found a table at one of the tourist bars. There was a sea breeze that wasn’t exactly cold but tended towards the “bracing” so they kept outer layers on and sat quietly absorbing the atmosphere, looking at a few sails out to sea, and people watching. Eventually Gillian sighed and finished her drink.

  “Sorry to break up the party,” she said, “but I really need to check my presentation again. I’m on at 12.30 on Tuesday, just when the international delegates will be starting to get peckish, not yet working to Spanish meal times, so I want to make sure I keep them interested.”