The Takers and Keepers

by Ivan Pope

  ‘Now,’ he announced, motioning to the front row, ‘I’d like to introduce you to our host. You all know him well, I’m sure. For those of you who don’t, I’d like to introduce the man who has made all this possible: Roger.’

  Roger made his way quickly to the front of the room and smoothed down his jacket. He spoke slowly but confidently, as if he were the founder of a charitable organisation that was recruiting new supporters. His English was immaculate with the clipped cadences of the South.

  He explained how the Keepers grew out of East European prisons in the seventies through contacts made and knowledge of crimes committed. He was, he says, by no means the founder. The real founders could not be here today. The room laughed knowingly. The group was well established, he went on, when he came across it, but it was a loose, inefficient network of like-minded individuals rather than anything effective. It was, he says, his idea to turn it into a well-structured support organisation. Here, several of the men in the room sniggered into their hands but Roger ploughed on without pausing.

  He described vaguely how members were identified and recruited. He waved into the fog of the room.

  ‘Please welcome David,’ he said, ‘and Mikey. And, um, Sid.’ The lanky teenager grinned from the back of the room and gave a circular wave. ‘That’s me,’ he said with a grin. Roger mentioned a few more names and then continued.

  ‘We are well organised now. Our network stretches across Europe and deep into the old Soviet sphere. There are now swaps across Europe, people are taken in one country and spirited into a different country for “keeping”. This works well,’ he laughs, ‘for police forces generally can’t handle the idea that a missing person is not only not dead but is in a different country.’

  He gestured at two tall, thin men standing at the back of the room, both wearing spectacles and what Allen thought looked very much like dog collars.

  ‘Rashim and Leden, our theological brothers.’ He waved to them and they waved back, smiling.

  ‘They are very good at what they do. It’s based on the tradition of solitaries, of anchorites. You’ve heard of them? People who shut themselves away from the world, often by being walled up in small rooms attached to the church.’

  Again, Allen felt a sickly chill in his gut.

  Roger explained that although many takers are amateurs who abduct for sexual or homicidal ends, once they decide to become a keeper, they encounter many more complex issues. Often the keeping ends very quickly and violently, or with the arrest or death of the taker. He said that many of the techniques of the takers come from the human traffickers ‘out of the East’. While it is possible to buy a victim to hold on to, and that these prizes are generally untraceable, it is not a common practice. At this point Roger grinned at Allen, then at Alicia, who was still handing round drinks.

  Roger continued, pointing out that while there were always people around who would never be missed, that wasn’t necessarily the point. ‘So, someone is not missed, so what. Better to take someone who will be missed, very missed. Do you understand my logic? If you do your work properly, after a few days everyone will think they are dead. They will eventually be forgotten about, even if you have provoked a huge police hunt. Then you get the pleasure of knowing, year after year, that that is not so.’ He smiled thinly as if imagining something that only he knew. ‘You have heard of Fred West,’ he said. ‘He and his wife, they took girls, runaways, in their own town. They even took their own daughters. No-one missed them. He wasn’t a keeper though. He was just a thick thug. He might have wanted to keep them, but he never prepared the ground – and nobody really knew who was gone. Fred and his wife, they weren’t keepers. They could have been but they were fucking ordinary takers. Murderers, really. And we’re not murderers. Always remember that.’

  He finished and returned to his seat. A lanky boy stood up and talked about the internet and how he had built a private network where the security is so tight that the police could never break it.

  Allen whispered to Roger: ‘You make it seem so ordinary. Like we can all have a girl in the cellar. There must be police out looking for them. How does this happen? If I grabbed some bird off the street in London, all hell would break loose.’

  ‘We’re just mutual support, help in times of difficulty, if things go wrong. They don’t generally, though. Remember, many takes are never reported. They are not even snatches, they are the result of careful planning, wives acquired for that purpose, daughters even. The police tend to look in the wrong direction because they think they are dead, or they don’t even know they exist.’

  ‘How many in Europe?’ Allen asked.

  Roger said he guessed that there could be as many as a hundred, possibly even more if the former Soviet Union was taken into consideration.

  ‘Read the papers, take a look into the archives. How many of those disappeared people do you think are still being held?’

  ‘I know the archives,’ said Allen. ‘I know the numbers.’

  A man that Allen recognised, the man who had picked him up from the bus station that morning, sidled up to them and looked like he wanted to join the conversation.

  ‘Ah, greetings, Stefan,’ Roger said. He looked at Allen. ‘You’ve met, of course. Stefan was in the war, you know. It fucked him up, things went from bad to worse, but he came out alright in the end. Didn’t you, old chap?’ Stefan grunted.

  ‘War?’ said Allen.

  ‘He fought through the Bosnian campaign, the stories he tells, they’ll scare the skin off you. He brought back a keepen, though, so it wasn’t all pointless.’

  Allen said, ‘War booty?’

  Stefan didn’t smile. ‘It is rendition,’ he said. ‘My right. When the Americans kidnap terrorists and hand them to countries who don’t give a shit. They can torture information out of them, without it being illegal. I play the same game.’

  ‘Allen was in the army,’ said Roger. ‘He probably knows all about that sort of stuff. Don’t you?’

  Allen grinned. ‘I was a lowly squaddie,’ he said.

  Roger suggested quietly that they should talk. He steered Allen across the room, between the low tables, and motioned to Stefan to follow. He pushed Allen towards a doorway and into a bedroom. It contained a dishevelled bed, a small table and a couple of chairs. Allen sat on the bed, Stefan and Roger took the seats.

  ‘Stefan is an expert,’ said Roger. ‘He’s like the military wing of the Takers and Keepers.’

  Allen looked at Stefan. He didn’t feel comfortable in this company but he had to let them take him in. ‘You’re the big cheese, then?’ he said. ‘You know where the bodies are, um, buried?’

  Stefan looked confused. ‘Roger is the boss, Mr Allen. He created this and we look up to him. He is the boss of the takers. He’s an honourable man, to us. He protects us.’

  ‘Protects you? How does he do that?’

  ‘He knows the police, the authorities. He has money and he uses it to keep them away from us. I don’t know.’ He tailed off. ‘He just makes things happen.’

  ‘You understand,’ said Allen. ‘that I’m interested in meeting some of your keepen?’

  Allen looked quickly at Roger and then back at Stefan.

  ‘Tell him about yourself,’ said Roger.

  Stefan had a look approaching contempt on his face, but he started anyway. ‘First, I was in Bosnia, in the war, all over. Special forces from the Bosniak towns, we were the hardest of the hard. We learned to live in cellars, we kept our enemies in cellars and when they left the cellars, we killed them. There they had no fucking choice because we sat and waited for them to emerge. I killed women with a spade, it was the work for the Serbian fatherland. Either they fucked me or I cut their necks with my spade. I got a taste for it. I lived in cellars. I only came out to fight, to fuck and to shit. My officers, they hated everyone, me also. After the war, no work, no money. I went to Germany and I met a man called Ekra and he brought me to this.

  ‘Now the Americans want to take me to
Holland, to the court, for what happened in the war. I can hide anywhere around Europe. Sometimes I put myself in my underground bunker and wait. But I have my own prisoners, they are secure and they will never escape.’

  ‘You make it seem so fucking ordinary. Like we can all have a girl in the cellar. There must be police out looking for them. How does this happen.’

  Roger smiled at him as if that was the most stupid question he’d ever heard.

  After the meeting had ended and they had got back to the flat, Roger announced that he had to ‘go away’ overnight. He didn’t tell Allen where he was going. ‘I’m taking Alicia,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about a thing. Make yourself at home and when we get back we’ll go and visit some of my girls.’

  He showed him the kitchen, where the cups and the coffee were. He pointed to a pie in the fridge. ‘There’s some gibanica for you. The Serbs love it, you must try it.’ He smiled at Allen. ‘Enjoy. Drink the beers too.’ He handed Allen a key and then he and Alicia were gone.

  After they left Allen peeked out through a tear in the window blind in the sitting room and watched them cross the parking lot and disappear towards a small business park, Roger holding onto his wife’s hand as if he was scared she might disappear. He scanned the horizon, trying to orientate himself. There were parks, a fair bit of greenery. Another cluster of housing blocks loomed.

  He felt strange in their flat alone, the combination of trust and abandonment unsettled him. He was at their mercy, what was he supposed to make of that? When would they be back? It was as if this was a test, that they were offering him a challenge – or a trap. He wondered whether the police had any interest in this strange group. He knew that in London they would be watched and infiltrated already, but maybe out here nobody gave a shit. It was a strange place. He knew he should take the flat apart, to see what might turn up, but he couldn’t make himself. No doubt the place was clean. After a while he ate some of the pie and drank a beer from the fridge and settled down for a long evening on his own with only Serbian television for company.

  Stefan

  Something was wrong, but he couldn’t put it together. He was in a car, on the backseat, and when he tried to lift his head, it seemed to be stuck to the headrest. Morning sunlight strobed into his eyes. Nausea rose in him. It was as if he was drunk, but he knew he hadn’t been drinking. He tried to focus on the person in the front seat.

  ‘Stefan?’ His voice wouldn’t quite work properly. There was no answer. ‘Where are we going?’ He couldn’t remember leaving the flat. He couldn’t work out what had happened.

  ‘Stay calm,’ said the voice from the front. ‘You wanted to see this. Now you get a chance. But it is dangerous, you have to trust me. It is for your own protection, there are dangerous people who would like to know what you know.’

  He remembered Stefan promising him a trip to his caves, then realised he had been drugged. His head felt heavy as a sack of potatoes and he let it drop back to the cold vinyl. He remembered many hungover missions with friends where they would drive and he would lie prostrate on the back seat, moaning, hands over his head, trying to keep the nausea down. He slid down, out of the light, and it felt better to be horizontal, wedged between the back doors.

  He drifted and woke. They were still driving. There were lorries, horns. They stopped, started, in some sort of traffic jam. They seemed to be passing the same place, or he was going crazy. His eyes wouldn’t work, he couldn’t recall. Then he passed out.

  He came to with his head enveloped in a thick black sack. He sweated into the darkness, almost panicking, before reminding himself to breathe slowly through his nose, a survival technique he had learned in the army.

  Stefan called out, ‘You alright, Allen?’

  Then nothing.

  When he woke again, Allen found he was lying on a low bench in a small room. As the anger and fear passed, he pulled himself up and stood against the wall, then walked carefully out, into a corridor lined with doors, each with a small reinforced glass window. He paced to the end, past doors with ribbons and photographs pinned to them. The photos showed young women, looking into the cameras. Some as if in love for the first time, or serious, having their high school or passport photo taken, others fearful, browbeaten, livid, broken. Some faces were made-up as schoolgirls, others plain, staring. Some doors had more than one photo pinned to them, and fragments of older, removed images.

  He banged on the nearest door. Then on the next. He pulled at the handles, but they were locked. He lifted a small hatch in the first door and peered through, then jumped a good yard backwards. From inside the cell a human locked eyes with him. He held the gaze for a few moments, the brown eyes in a pale face looking into his, unwavering.

  ‘Hello,’ he ventured.

  ‘Yassa.’

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked, but the ghostly figure shrugged back at him with a deep, lost despair. He lifted the flap of the next door and peered in, but there was no occupant. Every other cell was empty.

  He leant against the wall for a while and considered his situation, then, with an urge to find a way out, he started moving faster, peering into a room with a low bed and a thin mattress, and metal rings set into the floor. At the other side of the room stood a worn purple couch with pink cushions. Magazines were scattered on the floor and two plates, seeming to contain the remains of a meal, sat on a round rug. The contrast chilled Allen. Some sort of waiting room, he thought.

  The lights went out.

  On a timer, he thought. Some remnant of light remained, a sort of glowing limelight. He couldn’t work out where it came from, but it gave everything a dim iridescence. Through a long horizontal slot he could see a light in another space, connected to this one, but at a different level, higher up or lower down. There were more spaces. How many, and how deep did they go, he wondered?

  In the dim light he felt like the first man on the moon in a black and white movie where he had to move slowly, or in a diving bell at the bottom of the sea with no air. He slowly lifted one leg, then the other, and stepped sideways, trying to remember the layout of the dungeon. He turned around and could make out the doorway through which he’d entered this room. Far away a woman cried softly, not sobbing but a mumbling moan of someone unhappy and frightened. Or maybe a warning, he didn’t know. Slowly he made his way back to the room where he’d started and lay down.

  There must be more people here, in the cells, he was sure, on different levels, behind other doors, wretches captured and held. It was Roger’s domain, his world of keepen. He shouted, but there was no response. He swivelled his head around and stared into the gloom, but the harder he tried the less he could make out. He blinked, again and again, waiting for his eyes to adjust. After a while he convinced himself he could see the edges of the space in the stygian deep – here a doorway, an opening, a corridor. And there, a human figure.

  He blinked. Nothing. Now he was imagining things. ‘Hello?’ he shouted. A very slight scrabbling sound in the dark, then again, nothing. I’m losing it, he thought.

  After this, during a period when he wasn’t sure if he was dreaming or not, a tall woman with long matted hair came and stood over him, watching him sleep. Each time he opened his eyes she was there and he closed them again immediately. This wasn’t something he could handle.

  He was dreaming between the dream, if it was a dream. He was in cars, on the top of buildings, with no brakes. He wanted to drive down, but instead rolled slowly to the edge of the roof where he found the brakes didn’t work. And then he woke and didn’t know if he was still in a dream. But the white lady was standing over him in the dark, looking at him with a fearful expression.

  He wondered if he still had the hood over his head, but how could he see this woman if he had a hood on? She seemed real enough – when he reached out his hand she recoiled back into the dark. He woke again, and she was squatted in the dark against the wall.

  His world filled with endless dreams of ghost-like women who stood over him, sometimes
holding cups of water to his mouth. He didn’t know whether these were figments of his imagination or inhabitants of this dungeon, but even in his dreams he knew he was trapped, that Roger had tricked him and somehow Stefan had kidnapped him. He knew he was close to ending up a keepen himself.

  And this repeated and repeated and finally there was nothing.

  Eventually he woke fully and everything was different. The light was on and hurting his eyes. He twisted to look up, his body aching all over. Stefan stood there, his blue suit crumpled and dusty. He was holding a gun, pointing it at Allen. He looked down at him with a wry, pitying face. ‘So, you see how it is, my friend. Have you seen enough? Do you like his children?’

  It was some sort of a game, but what game were they playing?

  ‘Help me,’ Allen said. ‘I’m hurting.’

  Stefan crouched on his haunches and stared into Allen’s eyes. ‘You feel good now? Think you still rescue girls from here?’

  It wasn’t a question.

  ‘How you like to spend a few years in this? You like that. Nobody knows where you are, gone from the world. You are in the depths, down with the underworld.’ He laughed.

  Allen looked around the space. He seemed to be in the corridor of some military bunker. The walls were studded with metal bolts.

  ‘This isn’t right. You don’t need to lock me in here.’ A memory of army training came to him. He was desperate now, his mind searching for an escape.