The Takers and Keepers

by Ivan Pope

  A small, attractive but worn-down woman emerged from somewhere towards the back of the flat, wiping her hands on her apron as she came. ‘Alicia,’ he said, ‘this is Allen. My friend from England.’ She walked forward hesitantly and reached out a hand. He shook it. It was soft and warm and childlike.

  ‘Thanks, love,’ said Roger, and the girl disappeared back where she had come from. ‘She’s cooking,’ he said by way of explanation. ‘She’s always cooking. And she’s shy, poor love. Her English isn’t very good.’

  ‘How did you meet her?’ Allen asked.

  Roger leaned in, whisky in hand. He became serious. ‘I bought her off the internet,’ he said, sober and cruel. ‘I bought her lazy arse from a Serbian who thought there was no life left in it.’

  Allen shivered; he couldn’t help it, the room seemed to go cold.

  Roger let out a huge laugh. ‘Actually, I found her online. EuroPersonals, on the internet. Find your Serbian Soulmate. I thought that was so ridiculous, I had to give it a go. I sort of knew that all the girls were scams one way or another. But I got chatting to this bird, and after a bit she invited me out to visit her. I was getting a hard-on every night about her, so I thought, what the fuck, let’s go. She sent me all these pictures of her, all sorts, you know, with her tits out and much more. I’d never met a girl like that before, though I never thought it was really her. But I didn’t care too much. Just wanted a shag. Or a bit of fun.’

  Allen wasn’t convinced.

  ‘You know what? It was her, it actually fucking was her, all the pictures and everything; everything she said turned out to be true. Except, of course, that she didn’t have any money and she desperately needed to get married.

  ‘I came out here,’ continued Roger. ‘Said I’d meet her. Didn’t expect much. They were waiting for me, of course, the family. A guy who said he was her brother took me back to his flat, wouldn’t let me out again. Nothing nasty, but I was trapped. I’d fallen right into it, hadn’t I, right slap-bang into a trap. He kept saying I’d spoiled her honour or something. I had to pay a thousand quid just to spend some time with her. But, you know, it was love, for me; I’d fallen for her, or I thought I had. After a couple of days, I went and got the money out and I really didn’t mind. After that, it was all roses, I stayed with her in this little bedsit thing, and she seemed to like me. I hadn’t planned on staying long, though, and when I tried to do a runner it turned nasty again, worse this time. Four guys picked me up and took me away in the boot of their car. By the end of that little escapade, I couldn’t imagine leaving without her.’

  ‘So, what happened?’ said Allen.

  ‘Then I actually did buy her,’ Roger said. ‘But that was what she wanted. Really, I saved her. They were a gang that had brought her in from Ukraine or somewhere, and I bought out the contract.’

  ‘Somewhere like that? You don’t know?’ Allen swallowed a laugh, sensing this was not the moment. ‘How much does someone like that cost?’

  ‘Over ten grand. Luckily, I had a bit of dosh handy, know what I mean? You just met my ten-grand bride.’

  A stupid Rolf Harris song that he’d known as a child was making a repeated circular pattern in Allen’s brain, something about kangaroos, then letting his Abo go loose, Bruce. Something he couldn’t quite place.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Roger, refilling his drink, ‘how are you, old chap?’ He advanced across the room and took Allen in a bear hug. ‘What are you doing these days? It’s been so long …’ He tailed off.

  ‘Eight years, I guess. I’m a writer. Well, I write a bit,’ said Allen. ‘Happy to meet your missus.’

  ‘Well, don’t get fancy. She’s not my missus. She’s a tart. A tart that I look after. My tart. I wanted you to come here to meet a few good fellows,’ said Roger. ‘That’s all I invited you for. We were having one of our meetings and I thought it was time to get to know you a bit better. Can’t do any harm, can it? After all, you’re almost in the same line of work.’

  ‘Almost,’ said Allen and he looked away.

  ‘Tomorrow, everyone will be here. Look, you’ve got your own room. Alicia even changed the sheets.’ He laughed. ‘Put your bag in there. I’ll make you a cup of tea, then we go out.’ Allen would have liked to relax, maybe even sleep for a bit, but Roger had other ideas. He took his bag into the back room where a bed was made up. Next to the bed was a small table with a book and a lamp on it. He lay down on the bed and picked up the book. He looked at the cover. The Collector. The woman brought him a cup of tea and placed it on the bedside table. Allen tried to read but his eyes closed quickly. The next thing he knew Roger was standing at the end of the bed.

  ‘Come on, old chap,’ he said. ‘Time’s pressing on.’ He jiggled from foot to foot as if he couldn’t wait to leave. Allen climbed sleepily from the bed and followed him out of the flat.

  They took a taxi down to the commercial sector where expensive Western-style shops jostled for attention with glittering cafes and car salesrooms.

  Crossing the road on Priznin Avenue, a car swept at speed past them but struck a small wiry dog that ran out from behind a parked scooter. The car rolled over the dog’s hindquarters, rolling and stripping off skin and fur from both legs and leaving a bloody mess. The dog rolled and writhed in the road, yelping and shuddering. Allen and Roger winced visibly and then hurried away from the scene, crossing the road slightly further down. Roger looked visibly shaken. Allen, hating to have seen this, wanted to do something but instead followed Roger further away, down the narrow street.

  Roger ducked suddenly into a doorway and Allen followed him. Above the door were the words Lion Club on a tacky plastic awning. A girl sat at reception, she kept her eyes down as Roger and Allen swept through into the reception area beyond. The reception area was decked out in far too much marble and gold with mirrors filling the space in between. Across the back of the room a low couch stretched from one end of the room to the other. The couch was lined with women, none of them wearing very much. The staff obviously knew Roger well and they deferred to him in a friendly, affectionate manner. Allen could smell the room, though he wasn’t sure what the smell was. Drains. Or something unwashed. Or fear.

  Roger sat down at a table at the back. He pulled out a chair for Allen. A waitress brought two small glasses filled with a clear spirit. Roger said ‘Cheers’ and drank his in one. Allen lit a cigarette to delay the inevitable. Roger lit one too, though he didn’t look like he was interested in smoking it. He laid it in the ashtray.

  The women didn’t look happy. Their faces smiled at the men who clustered across the room from them, but their eyes were dead.

  After a few minutes of talking to the thick set men who stood at the back of the room, Roger got up and walked across to the women, moving slowly down the line. The women preened and disported themselves for him. Eventually he stopped and looked across to Allen. He gestured by moving his head for him to join him.

  He knew nothing of brothels and working girls, he had stayed away, maybe for fear of contamination or maybe what he might find out about himself. Better to keep out of temptation’s way. He shook his head. He wanted nothing to do with this. He wanted information, insights, knowledge. But not to engage with Roger’s prostitutes. He knew it was a test. If he took the bait, he put himself on the same level as every punter who came through the door and lowered himself to the level of the rapist.

  Roger, tiring of his refusal to choose, selected a young dark-haired girl for him from the throng and she led Allen through a door at the back of the room. A concierge handed him a towel and they walked in silence down the corridor and up some stairs. They entered a small room containing a narrow bed and a table. The girl pulled back a curtain to reveal a shower. She motioned to Allen to use it. When he emerged, the girl was sitting on the side of the bed. She lay back, pulled off her pantyhose with a deft movement, lifted her knees and opened her legs in a classic pre-coital pose. She made a hurry-up motion. An image of Emily filled his mind, Emily lying in bed smi
ling at him, Emily getting undressed. Allen turned away and dry heaved. Ignoring the crying of the girl, he dressed quickly and ran back down the corridor, emerging into the reception area with a crash, pursued closely by his assigned hooker. Shouting broke out and the cold-eyed security men emerged swiftly from a side room, bearing down on Allen. Roger quickly held up his hands and smiled at them.

  ‘He is my friend,’ he said. They returned to their videos, satisfied that no robbery or assault was in progress.

  Roger didn’t seem bothered by Allen’s refusal to engage. As they left the building he was in a talkative mood. ‘Those girls,’ he said, ‘they’d frighten anyone off sometimes. Anyway, she’s not really the point. I’m offering you an opportunity. Call it a partnership, if you want. I’d like to work with you – if you are interested?’

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘I think you understand us. I can make it easy for you.’ Roger glanced back down the road and lit a cigarette. He offered one to Allen.

  ‘Look, the world is filled with basements, with cellars, underground spaces. I have money but, more than that, I have the contacts. But you, Allen, you know more than me. And you were a military man, you are intelligent. I need someone like you. I need information.’

  Allen wasn’t sure how to reply, but Roger continued. ‘I can give you a present, if you want, you know, if you’re interested in helping out.’

  He did feel a strange attraction to this dark world, incomprehensible to society, to the idea of total control, subterranean lockdown. He wouldn’t take the bait, not really. But. For now, for a moment he could see how this could proceed. He’d been on the edge of society before, been places that most people wouldn’t even know existed, been locked up for years. He was an army man, he knew the value of discipline, how it worked, how the soul could be broken in the service of the bigger ideal. But this was pushing it. It was an almost religious experience, the lure of takers and keepen and their hollow, hidden shrines, their lost contents.

  ‘I’m not interested,’ said Allen. ‘It’s not for me.’

  ‘But I think it is. Why have you come out here? What do you want, then?’

  ‘I’m a writer, I wanted to understand, to fill in the gaps. You know, I’ve been chasing you guys, your stories, round and round for years.’ Allen shook his head.

  ‘Let me bring you into the club. I’ve always wanted you to join us.’

  ‘Tell me about the Keepers. I need to understand what you do. It’s hard, you do something terrible, as if you hate the world. Do you hate people, or just the people you snatch?’

  ‘It goes back a long way, further than you might think,’ Roger said. ‘There have always been takers and there have long been keepers. There have always been keepen. At one point it may even have been sanctioned, legal. It’s like a parasitical relationship – one parasite, one host – but after a while it becomes difficult to work out which is which. Of course, not everybody wants to be keeper, not everybody can understand the relationship. Not all parasitical relationships are mutual. Do you understand that?’

  They stopped in a respectable restaurant – what looked to Allen like a Western pizza chain though he couldn’t read the menu – where several of Roger’s friends were waiting for them.

  ‘These are my friends,’ Roger beamed, pointing around the table in introduction. ‘Ekra, Olaf.’ Several more names followed. They all looked the same to Allen and he quickly forgot most of their names. They ordered huge pizzas and drank several bottles of red wine. After that they moved on to a bar that was similar in design and modernity: a long, slick walnut and chrome bar, hundreds of some strange local brew stacked up in a lit alcove above the bar. Wall of water toilets, the usual. Here they knocked back a single beer each.

  Then they moved on to what Allen would call a traditional European bar. Unlike anything in England, it was still old-fashioned in a modern way. Smokers sat quietly in corners and eyed them as they came in, their group now getting a little rowdy. They spread out across three tables. Ekra delivered a stream of beers from the bar and Allen found himself relaxing into a conversation with Olaf, who told him proudly that he was a master builder. ‘I build cage for Marc. For Marc.’ He prodded Allen in the chest as if that would help him understand. ‘You know, man in Belge take girls lock in cage and they die, take more girls.’ Allen realised what he was talking about halfway through the jabbing, a horror story from Belgium. Olaf insisted that they sampled the local spirit, which turned out to be a vodka of dubious quality but copious quantity.

  After a quick succession of tiny glasses, Allen ducked out of the smoky atmosphere into the clear air of the street. He flipped open his phone and found Emily’s number. She answered almost immediately. ‘Hello, love.’

  Silence.

  ‘Are you there?’

  ‘Hello, Ems. Sorry, just wanted to say hello.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  She could hear something in his voice. Suddenly he wasn’t sure what he was phoning about. Or, he did know but he couldn’t say it.

  ‘Just out and about, you know. Anyway, I just wanted to hear your voice.’

  Drunken fool, he thought, don’t start on the homesickness. He waited.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked eventually, into the silence.

  ‘I’m sitting in Costa. Having a coffee. And reading the paper.’

  ‘That’s good.’ Sanity, he thought.

  ‘Allen? Please come home. You don’t have to stay. What’s the point?’

  ‘The point is, I’m getting something. I think. A good story. I’m close to a story.’

  Roger joined him on the pavement outside the club, putting his arm around Allen to take him away from the comfort of London and Emily.

  ‘Better go now, love,’ Allen said to her. ‘Got to go. Bye.’

  He flipped the phone shut and cut her off mid-sentence. Roger raised an eyebrow at him, trying to pick up on the conversation.

  ‘I thought maybe you were sick,’ said Roger.

  ‘Just a bit of air.’

  ‘Someone interesting?’

  ‘My partner.’ He didn’t want to let Roger any closer.

  Roger took him by the elbow and marched him down the street, friendly and attentive but in control, suddenly ducking them into a tiny basement bar and ordering brandy for both of them. They drank it fast, Roger making conversation and Allen straining to hear over the loud Baltic turbo-pop that was blasting out, listening, waiting.

  ‘Do you want to take a look around my little empire of dark? Visit some girls? Is that what you’re here for?’ He changed the subject suddenly. ‘Remember when we last met?’ Roger’s languid approach didn’t fool Allen – he knew quite well when they’d met. He must have known the year, the month, even the day. The last day of Roger’s stretch, just before dawn. In that stinking cell, talking shit.

  ‘You told me you were going to make your fortune,’ said Allen. ‘You said you had a plan.’ He could recall exactly what Roger had been thinking, but he didn’t want to make it easy. ‘Something to do with foreign tarts,’ he offered.

  Roger leant towards Allen. ‘When I left jail, I was a bit fucked. My family didn’t want to know. Job was long gone. I walked out of that pit with nothing. Now I’m in the import export business and I’m a success,’ he said.

  ‘Import export?’ said Allen.

  ‘Girls. Bints. Tarts. Buy low, sell high. I buy ’em and sell ’em. I know where to get them cheap, and I know how to sell them high. I know how to trade them, that’s where the money is.’

  Traded. That meant driving across Europe with a human being stuffed in a van or the boot of a car.

  ‘Traded, how?’ he asked.

  ‘In a van. Sometimes in a box. Sometimes rolled up in a fucking carpet. So what?’ said Roger. ‘I pay for them. That’s what counts.’

  ‘You buy them?’ said Allen.

  ‘’Course they’re bought. Not always for cash, though. Sometimes it’s to pay debts, or they’re swapped for ot
her stuff.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘Come on, Allen,’ said Roger. ‘You know all this, don’t come all innocent with me. I’m not teaching you anything here.’

  Swapped. Jeez. This was class.

  ‘You know what,’ said Roger. ‘Money makes everything alright with most people. Remember what I said back then in the jug? I was going out to make money. Lots of money. So that I could carry on doing what I wanted to do but without the hassle of having the police on my back. That there was always a legal way to do things and an illegal way to do the same things. I’d noticed that prison was full of men whose crime was to be of the wrong sort. Or, to put it better, to be poor and of the wrong class. It always seemed to me that you could get away with anything, like killing someone if you wish, or stealing large amounts of money, if you approached it from an attitude of effortless superiority.’ He coughed and reached for his drink.

  ‘Do you know about the relative values of different, shall we say, illegal activities? Most of those guys in prison ended up there not because they chose to become criminals, but because they didn’t choose what sort of criminals to become. I realised that they had fallen into their specialism through utter chance. Whether they were any good at it or not didn’t seem to matter to them. At some point in their lives they had started out being, say, a robber or a lifter or muscle, and, finding that it worked some of the time, they carried on doing it. More to the point, so long as there were others around them who reinforced their sense that this is what they were good at, they never really thought about what the point of it all was.

  ‘Notice how they were really in love with payday. They, almost to a man, had convinced themselves that they were experts and that this was their chosen way of life. The fact that they got regularly caught and bunged inside for longer and longer stretches never seemed of any consequence.

  ‘I bring girls in from East Europe, all over. They go to the saunas. It’s a good business, nothing too heavy. I’m a small player in this game, Allen, but I know the ropes. I have to put money down and then I go to Bucharest or Pristina to see them. I put down the cash, then we arrange delivery. Delivery isn’t much of a problem, there are routes, you know. These girls, I own them. They go to work across the country, from here, Belgrade, down to the south coast. It’s a busy life, I drive a lot of miles. But I make a lot of money.