The Touch of Innocents

by Michael Dobbs

  ‘What else might a baby have been sold for?’

  ‘Izzy, I’m really not sure. I’m sorry. But you mix drugs, criminal baby bartering and a whole pile of money, and you’ve a mess that I don’t want you walking into on your own.’

  She sat silently, bowed, lashed by imagination. She was back in Colombia, in the car, being driven along dusty roads and dilapidated streets towards the airport, remembering how on a bright sun-filled day the window beside her had suddenly shattered and left her staring into the flaming barrels of three Uzis. She had thought she was going to die at that moment, felt the bullet slicing through her breast, the warm-sticky flow of blood dripping into her lap. She recalled the only words she had found as they had sped away. ‘Those bastards have ruined my favourite blouse.’

  She had discovered it was possible to fight shock, and pain. At the hospital, as paramedics and nurses crowded round, she had waved them away, climbed across the fragments of shattered glass and out of the car, head held high. She hoped that from a distance some of her assailants would be watching. They might try again, might even succeed in killing her, but never in cowing her. Not Izzy Dean. She wanted them to know that.

  Yet that was Colombia, by herself; now, with Bella, she was finding it altogether more difficult to be brave.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she assured him. ‘I’m pretty good at dodging bullets. Only ever been caught once …’ She was about to wave lightheartedly at the scar on her breast, but decided it would not have the right effect on Daniel.

  ‘Aren’t you frightened?’

  ‘Of course,’ she responded quietly. ‘Frightened I might discover nothing from Fauld. And terrified I might discover all too much. All the more reason I have to go on my own – my baby, my risk. Whatever it takes to find the truth. That’s the only thing that matters to me right now.’

  ‘Let me share the risk.’

  She shook her head, said nothing. It had all been said.

  ‘I’m in this with you anyway, whether you like it or not. Whether I like it or not.’

  ‘You’re a very fine person, Danny Blackheart.’ In the circumstances her compliment was not enough; she had meant to say more, but the words eluded her. She sat as though in prayer, her body bent under the weight of the thoughts and fears crowding in upon her.

  ‘Just one thing, Izzy. How do I know you’re not simply using me?’

  She couldn’t see his face, didn’t turn. The words were squeezed dry of emotion, but there was no mistaking their importance to him.

  ‘You don’t, Daniel,’ she responded without looking up. ‘And you won’t know. Until later.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I won’t know myself. Until later.’

  He deserved her honesty; it was the least she could give. Yet they were words of indecision she would grow to regret for the rest of her life.

  Devereux sat in the study overlooking his beloved vale, his relief so evident he could taste it. The awful dream was over, Izzy was gone. From his home, the country, his life.

  Yet his mood was tinged with tragedy. He’d played the game for all it was worth, gambled, and won. But he found no joy in victory, no virtue for him to extol. Only shame. He had sat debating with himself what to record in his diary, the diary that one day would reveal to the world the man in his full glory – as statesman, wit, raconteur, and yes, as lover, too. And as father?

  Through its revelations and rigorous honesty the diary would ensure that the Devereux name and his accomplishments would endure; he would not be forgotten, like his father, drowned in the vat of history. But … honesty could be taken too far. Particularly when it came to Paulette. He had no right to damage her, even to record the damage she had done to herself, and others. The memories of that last, awful confrontation with her, when he found himself no longer able to deny her problem with drugs and had discovered the terrible truth about the baby, still burned inside him like hot coals. They were memories to quell, not to record.

  It had to be that way. Isadora Dean would merit no mention, not even a footnote in his history. Not the means by which he had outwitted her and protected Paulette. The police inspector, a member of his own Lodge. The editor whose scalp he’d saved by extricating him from a ruinous libel battle. The bank manager with whom he played Sunday tennis, the hospital administrator who owed to Devereux his job, even the Embassy of the United States of America, beholden because of the Duster. None of them had known why he had asked for their help in dealing with this deluded woman, a troublemaker, and foreigner to boot. They were pleased to offer their support nonetheless, to him, to Paul Devereux, out of respect. But the story could not be told.

  His diaries would record the truth, but not the whole truth. There was nothing here of which he was proud, nothing he wanted ever to be repeated. He felt only shame; it was not an emotion he was used to or wished to share.

  Instead, he sat and wrote late into the night of his triumph with the Duster. Of the low-life Chairman of the Select Committee. Of how his skills had fixed the Germans and the Japs, and that little upstart Cypriot shit, of how he had helped manufacture an election victory. Of how he, Paul Devereux, had changed history. And he wrote, too, of his victory over that tarty wife of the former Transport Secretary, whose name he still had trouble recalling. And the others.

  Paul Devereux. A man amongst men. And one day it would all be revealed, his conquests. But not yet, not until the truth could no longer damage him. Not until time had lent perspective so that his bending of the rules of politics, of marriage, of public and private life, could be seen as the great achievements they were. Historic achievements.

  Achievements he would gladly have sacrificed, every one of them, in exchange for Paulette.

  SEVEN

  Daniel stirred, opened a tentative eye, and focused on Izzy sitting up in the next bed. She had spent an uncomfortable night, sleep ground away by brooding thoughts.

  ‘We need to know more, Daniel. About children, what happens to them. Who buys, who sells.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Before this afternoon and my meeting with Fauld. I need to prepare the ground. Make sure I know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Let’s stop kidding ourselves. You know as well as I do that a baby can be sold for much more than adoption. We need to know facts.’

  ‘We?’

  Her eyes flashed in reprimand. She was already becoming accustomed to the fact that the fewer clothes he wore, the more he seemed driven to talk with her, while the fewer her clothes the more he seemed incapable of much other than laconic grunts. She pulled on a bathrobe.

  ‘Yes, we, Daniel. You and me. Remember? So put your thinking cap on and anything else you propose wearing today and find someone we can talk to before twelve thirty this afternoon.’

  He shook himself. ‘The police? Scotland Yard, perhaps?’

  ‘That’s right. I’m not supposed to be in the country and I’ve got fifteen thousand pounds of someone else’s money in my bag, so you want me to walk straight into Scotland Yard?’

  ‘OK, OK. I’m a bog brain. I’ll find someone else.’

  ‘And I take no sugar in my coffee,’ she threw over her shoulder as she headed into the bathroom.

  When she returned, fully clothed, he was sitting beside a partially demolished jug of coffee and looking smug. ‘Your wish is my command, O mistress mine,’ he said ambiguously. ‘In ninety minutes. Catholic Concern. The other side of the river, behind Waterloo.’

  ‘Thank you, slave,’ she said and bent to kiss his forehead. She smelt wonderful.

  They were ten minutes early but their contact greeted them with an uncomplaining smile and dark, statuesque looks which were highlighted by a ‘Save the Forests’ T-shirt tucked into tight-fitting jeans. She introduced herself as Judi Wasserman in a voice that carried a faint trace of East London. They meandered through the entrails of a large and somewhat dilapidated building whose paintwork could most politely be described as stoic, whos
e walls bore a kaleidoscope of postered appeals for environmental disasters and Eritrean coffee ceremonies, and whose occupants, mostly women, squashed themselves into crowded offices where the battle against a rising tide of literature seemed to have ended in abject surrender. Judi’s office was in the building’s converted attic where the sloping eaves allowed few shelves, causing the paperwork to rise in great piles from the floor like stalagmites thrusting roofwards. Judi stepped carefully over one pile, swept clear two stools which had been similarly infested, and invited them to perch.

  ‘Welcome to the God Squad. You want to know about kids? I’m your girl. How can I depress you?’

  ‘We want to know about babies for sale,’ Izzy said softly.

  ‘Sold? For what purpose?’ she asked.

  ‘Does the purpose make any difference?’ Daniel interjected.

  ‘A hell of a difference if you’re the baby,’ Judi responded. ‘For babies in most corners of the world life is a short, sharp battle against disease and brutality which the majority of them will lose. So selling babies is perfectly legal in many countries, particularly Asia and Latin America. And the lucky few will get sold for adoption to good, white, middle-class Western parents.’

  ‘The lucky few?’

  ‘Five, maybe ten thousand a year. Depends upon the fashion. Get a TV camera into a decaying Third World orphanage and the would-be mums and dads waving chequebooks won’t be far behind, looking to buy one and maybe take a second if they can get a good discount. “Heir and spare”. Naturally they’ll convince themselves they’re contributing to the welfare of the child’s family; sadly, it doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘How does it work, then?’

  ‘It works because someone, somewhere, is making money, usually a large amount of it and never the mother. Often a lawyer who charges a very modest fee but then discovers a pile of unidentifiable expenses.’

  ‘You disapprove?’

  Judi pushed the dark hair back from her face. ‘Completely. Buying babies for adoption only encourages other forms of exploitation. The market’s worth millions every year; I just wish that money were put into keeping families together, not tearing them apart. The West has stripped these countries of their natural resources, why take their babies too?’

  ‘You talked about other forms of exploitation,’ Izzy pursued.

  ‘For every child who goes for adoption, maybe ten others are sold for different purposes. I spent a number of years in the Far East, in places where children were treated like television sets, to be bought and sold in the marketplace or to be thrown away when they were no longer of any use. In Thailand you can rent boys or girls by the hour or buy them outright. For cash. Four hundred pounds. Sometimes much less. Parents will sell their children for as little as it takes to buy a fix or a refrigerator. Much the same in the Philippines, South Korea, India and a dozen other countries. In China they give away baby girls, if you can find a way of smuggling them out.’

  ‘Who? Who buys?’

  ‘If the kids are lucky they’ll be bought by some Western couple desperate to adopt. If they’re not, they are bought for child prostitution, organized crime, helping to run the drugs rackets. You stuff a child full of packets of heroin and you can smuggle it almost anywhere undetected. Unless, of course, the packets burst, in which case all the authorities have is a dead child who nobody claims.’

  Izzy felt winter invading her system.

  ‘In India they recently found a Bihari group who were selling kids’ organs for transplant,’ Judi continued.

  ‘You’re not trying to suggest they were … killing, sacrificing children just for their organs?’

  ‘Not suggesting. Stating. There’s an international market for children, just like TV sets. Some people buy the whole set, others just buy the parts.’

  Izzy sat quietly for a moment, struggling as a mother to reject the concept of children as a commodity to be bartered or butchered. Yet as a correspondent she knew what the charity worker said to be true, she had seen as much in Colombia and other parts of Latin America. She had arrived at Bogotá airport, a soulless concrete mausoleum, to find it packed with German couples arriving with bundles of US dollars or leaving with bewildered-looking infants and screaming babies. Parents and children, with not a single word of common language.

  ‘What about nearer home? Europe? Here? Tell me it’s different.’

  ‘Sure,’ Judi responded. ‘The difference in Europe is that the price goes up. You can wait for five or six years to adopt a baby the official way and then be told you’re too old. In some countries there are twenty sets of parents chasing each local child. So people pay more. To buy from abroad. To jump the queue. To find someone who will get round the rules and regulations.’

  She looked at Izzy, grown pale under the onslaught of the story. ‘You’re upset. Would you like a cup of tea?’

  Izzy shook her head.

  ‘I can’t apologize for upsetting you. Things won’t change until people start getting upset. It’s not a story you can cover in saccharine.’

  ‘I don’t want apologies, only the truth,’ Izzy replied. ‘In Europe, in this country, are children sold for reasons other than adoption?’

  ‘It can happen. Not in the sort of numbers you get in the Third World, of course, but Europe does have one thing the Third World can’t offer.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘White skin. People will pay more to adopt a white baby. I still have trouble understanding it, but people will also pay more money to have sex with a white child. There are paedophile rings which make pornographic videos involving children. The police occasionally find the videos, rarely the ringleaders and almost never the children.’

  ‘What happens to them?’

  In answer Judi rifled through the papers on her desk and plucked out a press cutting. Of a paedophile ring in Amsterdam which circulated videos of a man torturing two girls, the younger of whom appeared to be scarcely eighteen months old. Izzy and Danny read the report, drawing closer together with each fresh detail. Of the police raid on a country farm, of the discovery of video equipment, of instruments for inflicting sexual pain. And a barrel of acid which according to the article appeared to contain pieces of dissolved flesh. Pig flesh, the arrested man claimed.

  ‘In Europe the stakes are higher, so the price of babies is higher. There’s even reverse racism. Reports from the Lebanon of Arab traditionalists purchasing white baby girls so they can be brought up in the harem, white women reared to know no better. A suggestion that one sheik in Yemen had purchased two white girls for his young son, like laying down vintage port for his coming of age. I’m not trying to suggest it’s widespread. But you did ask.’

  Izzy nodded in pain. ‘That’s in Europe. What about here, in Britain?’

  ‘Britain is Europe. There’s no difference any more, no checking of passports, no customs posts, nobody to ask questions about the identity of the small boy or girl in the back of the car. Doesn’t matter where you are in Europe, it’s all the same. Just one big happy family.’

  The discussion appeared to have affected Judi, too. Her lips had drawn thin, her jaw set, her manner grown fierce, almost aggressive.

  ‘How did you get into this job, Judi?’ Daniel asked gently.

  The mask on the charity worker’s face cracked for a fraction of time before it was reassembled with practised speed. ‘I had a baby sister who disappeared. Accident? Crime? Kidnapping? No one knows. Not a single trace. We never did find out.’ She exhaled as though expelling demons. ‘Somehow I keep hoping that this job might one day help me find the truth, bring her back. And bring other babies back.’

  ‘Wasserman,’ Izzy whispered, her voice chafed with emotion. ‘A Jewish name, isn’t it?’

  Judi nodded.

  ‘What are you doing working for Catholic Concern?’

  ‘Babies aren’t Catholic, or Protestant, or Jewish or Moslem or Hindu. They’re just babies. And a dead one is no good to any god.’

  She reappe
ared from the hotel bathroom shortly before noon. Daniel rubbed his eyes, making sure. He’d expected something demure, discreet but very fashionable, probably Italian. Not jogging shoes.

  ‘Mother of God,’ he gasped, lapsing into brogue, ‘and just look at you.’

  ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ she responded coquettishly, spinning on her toes so that he could get the full effect of her designer tracksuit. ‘He couldn’t see me for ten days. Too busy, his secretary said. No free appointments. No lunches, either, because he always goes jogging in the park. So I thought I’d try to short-circuit the system.’

  ‘You’re going to run him down?’

  ‘Something like that. His office is only a stone’s throw from St James’s Park. I’m betting that’s where he does his work-out.’

  ‘And if not?’

  ‘What have I got to lose?’

  ‘Apart from a few pounds …?’

  For a moment she wanted to kill him.

  Twenty minutes later she was hovering on the southern side of the park, at the edge of the pelican lake, as the lunch hour approached. She was perturbed at the number of masochists who began to emerge in all shades of running gear to brave the chilly December conditions, but most were young – too young, she guessed, to be a Coroner. She was looking for someone in his forties, at least.

  And then he appeared, on the stroke of the half hour, clad in a sweatshirt declaring him to be a supporter of the Weschester Hospice Fund. He began a well-practised if ungainly circumambulation of the lake, more of a rapid shuffle than a run, scattering the pigeons and raising a cackle of protest from the Canada geese in search of crusts. She fell in beside him.

  ‘Mr Fauld? Mr Gideon Fauld?’

  He looked at her but said nothing, his stride pattern not faltering. He was in his mid-forties, of medium height and build with steel-rimmed glasses which covered sharp-witted, darting eyes. The hair was thick but slightly receding and swept back, giving him prominent temples and lending him an almost donnish air. He also had a prominent stomach which obtruded alarmingly; whatever his lunchtime restraints, it appeared he managed to stoke the fires forcefully at other times of the day. His jogging habit also suggested that he lived in constant regret of his indulgences.