Zero Hour (2010) ns-13

by Andy McNab

  To the left was a cocktail bar. Reception was to the right. The uniformed guy behind the desk greeted us with an efficient but not over-friendly smile. ‘Equality is entrenched in the Danish psyche,’ Anna told me. ‘Staff don’t go out of their way to establish rapport with customers, in any sort of business.’

  And there was me thinking they were just miserable.

  I produced Lilian’s picture and passed it over. ‘Have you seen our sister? She would have checked in here ten days ago. We haven’t heard from her and - well, we’re getting a bit concerned, to be honest. She’s travelling alone.’

  He studied it hard. He was in his twenties himself. A guest as attractive as Lilian would have registered. I watched his eyes not his lips as he replied. He didn’t recognize her. I could have asked if there was anyone else I could check with, but there didn’t seem much point. If all other avenues ended in dead ends, we’d come back here and start all over again.

  We went back to the car.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about your treatment.’

  ‘Lack of it, you mean.’

  ‘Why not in Moscow? We would have more time together.’

  ‘More time dribbling and shitting myself. What’s the good of that? I don’t want it. I certainly don’t want you exposed to it.’

  ‘Isn’t that my choice?’

  ‘Maybe. But the way I see it, I go on until it’s too painful or just too much for us both. Then I take a couple of bottles of pills, we lie down and only you wake up.’ I hit the key fob. ‘What do you think?’

  She opened her door and stared across the roof at me. ‘Brilliant. And I get left to clean up the mess.’

  3

  Christiania was a short distance away. While I drove, Anna scanned the guidebook. In 1971, the abandoned eighty-five-acre military camp at Christianhavn, on the eastern edge of the city, had been taken over by squatters who proclaimed it the ‘free town’ of Christiania. The police tried to clear the area, but it was the height of the hippie era and people looking for an alternative lifestyle poured in from all over Denmark. The following year, bowing to public pressure, the government allowed the community to continue as a social experiment. About a thousand people had settled in, transforming the old barracks into schools and housing and starting their own collective businesses, workshops and recycling programmes.

  ‘A thousand people on an eighty-five-acre site.’ I glanced across at her. ‘Where would a concerned sibling start looking?’

  ‘She’ll have turned up needing somewhere to stay. There’s nowhere you can pay to stay in Christiania. I think Slobo promised to help her do the runner, told her this was the perfect place to hide, and finished off with the oldest trick in the trafficking book: saying he had a friend who would help her and even get her a job.’

  ‘Whatever, she’d also have needed to eat and drink. Even if she’s already been moved on, someone must have seen her.’

  She ran her finger down the page. ‘Car-free Christiania has a market, some craft shops, and several places where you can get coffee and something to eat. The main entrance is on Prinsessegade, two hundred metres north-east of its intersection with Badsmandsstraede. You can take a guided tour of Christiania. There’s a Pusher Street information office next to the Oasen cafe.’

  ‘Can you get us to that intersection?’

  ‘We’re almost there. Left in four or five blocks.’

  ‘Does Pusher Street mean what I think it means?’

  She nodded. ‘Since 1990, the story of Christiania has been one of police raids on Pusher Street. The police, decked out in riot gear, have patrolled Christiania regularly, staging numerous organized raids leading to some ugly confrontations and arrests.’

  She went back to the map page. ‘This is the one. Left here.’

  I found a space on a street full of bars and cafes just off Prinsessegade. I pushed enough coins into the machine to last us a few hours and stuck the ticket on the dashboard.

  We walked a couple of hundred yards to an alleyway. A short way down it, a big wooden sign announced, ‘You are entering Christiania.’ On the reverse, for our benefit on the way back, it said, ‘You are entering the EU.’

  An information board told us that guided tours left from there at three in the afternoon. Another showed a camera with a red slash through it. The dealers had never gone away, Anna said. No dealer likes a camera in his face.

  We walked between walls plastered with graffiti and murals. A familiar smell hung in the air. The slightly sickly, pungent scent of cannabis thickened the further we went. A woman cycled past us on a bike with a huge wooden box on the front containing a pair of muzzled Rottweilers.

  A young guy with dreadlocks stood guard by a fence, radio comms in one hand, oversized spliff in the other. I guessed the system worked like the one the Amish had in the film Witness. One call and the community came running - or, in Christiania’s case, the dealers. The guidebook had said that the narcotics police, backed by the Riot Squad, had raided Pusher Street several times, arresting any of the dealers who didn’t pack up and run fast enough.

  ‘Does it say why they don’t just close the whole place down and be done with it?’

  ‘There would be riots. The hash market turns over millions a year.’

  Anna read some more from the guidebook as she walked. Perfect. It made us look like tourists in search of a ‘sanctuary for anyone who is tired of the consumerism and routine of everyday life’.

  It must have sounded idyllic to a girl raised in an environment of chaos and gangsterdom after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Slobo wouldn’t have had to sell this one too hard.

  ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out - whatever. Lovely until the money runs out and you realize you have to get a haircut and some work clothes and earn a living.’ I grinned. I was starting to sound like Tresillian.

  Graffiti covered every inch of wall.

  Living to lower standards for a higher quality of life.

  Loud music bounced out at us from somewhere out of sight.

  A guy in a sweater full of holes ambled towards us.

  ‘Pusher Street?’ Anna showed him the map.

  He pointed wearily. Christiania was Copenhagen’s second biggest tourist attraction after the Tivoli Gardens and every one of them probably wanted to be able to tell their friends back home they’d dared visit Pusher Street.

  ‘Have you seen this girl?’

  Anna produced her picture but he’d already gone.

  4

  We came to a small market. Three or four stalls sold T-shirts, hats and scarves. Anna showed the stallholders Lilian’s photograph but none of them recognized her. I wondered if they would have recognized their own mothers. Everybody looked slightly dazed.

  Anna spotted a bar. ‘As you said, she had to eat and drink …’

  We went in. The big airy room was full of guys with wispy beards and woolly hats with earflaps. It was us who looked weird. We did what any concerned family member would do. We went up to the bar and held out Lilian’s picture. The girl had pierced eyebrows and a nose-ring. Her hair was bleached.

  ‘Have you seen this girl?’

  ‘I’m sorry, no.’

  ‘Do you mind if we ask your customers?’

  ‘Be my guest. But please buy something.’

  I ordered a couple of beers and handed over a fistful of kroner. We left the bottles on the bar and started to circulate. The first table responded to the photo with shakes of the head. So did the next. People did look, but I got the feeling they wouldn’t have told us even if they had seen her. I put it down to rage against the machine. ‘This is shit, Anna. Let’s try that information centre.’

  As we turned to leave, a ruddy-faced man in his sixties hauled himself to his feet, as if to follow us out. Then he seemed to think better of it and sat down again. Maybe he was just too stoned or pissed. He had long white hair that needed even more of a wash than we did and a beard that Gandalf would have been jealous of.

  I caught Anna’s eye a
nd we headed back to his table. She sat opposite him, and I stood alongside. He concentrated very hard on his glass. Everything about him suggested he’d downed a good few whiskies before he’d got to this one.

  He nodded at the pictures. His watery eyes seemed to loosen in their sockets. ‘Your … child?’

  ‘No, my sister. She’s run away. She came here, maybe ten days ago. You’ve seen her?’

  He pulled out a packet of Drum and some papers but seemed in no hurry to open them. Anna took the hint and pulled out her readymades. He feigned delighted surprise and helped himself to three.

  ‘You know, many people say that this place saved them when they were at their lowest ebb and had nowhere else to turn.’ His English was accented but faultless. ‘I’m one of them. I left home when I was fifteen and drifted until I found Christiania.’

  He paused to light the first of his recently acquired Camels and sucked in the real deal with the kind of pleasure that only smokers know. Me, I wished we were still in the EU where this shit was outlawed. Anna sparked up too, adding to the pollution.

  Gandalf waved his free hand around the commune as if it were his kingdom. ‘In the early days we built our own houses in the woods or renovated the old barracks. We had a right to build as we chose. This place is all I know.’

  I wasn’t sure if the smile that lurked behind the hair was fuelled by happiness or cannabis, but it showed off the three or four yellow tombstones that still clung to his gums in all their glory.

  I stuck a finger on Lilian’s chin. ‘Her name is Lilian Nemova. You seen her?’

  ‘Russian?’

  ‘Moldovan.’

  His eyes wobbled as they moved down her picture once more, but only for a fleeting second. ‘You do not sound like a Moldovan, brother.’

  Anna was getting as pissed off with him as I was. ‘He’s helping me find her.’

  He took a swig from his glass.

  I kept an eye on people coming in and leaving the bar. You never knew.

  ‘We were hard-working people here. Artists, socialists, anarchists - people who drank and smoked too much, but we had rules. We have bad people preying on the weak and lonely.’ He waved in the vague direction of the free town outside. ‘It was the dawn of a new era. A new way of living. Then it all changed. We’ve even had a murder here - here, in Christiania!’ He pointed a wrinkled finger at the sugar bowl in front of him like it was the root of all evil. ‘It’s wrong. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.’

  He necked the last of his drink.

  ‘But have you seen her?’

  He shook his head; he didn’t want to look at the photo again. ‘These are sad days. Turkish gangs, Palestinian and Balkan gangs, Russian gangs. They are all here.’

  I crouched down, elbows on the table, trying for eye-to-eye. ‘One of the gangs - the Russians maybe - would they have her?’

  He stared into his empty glass and kept shaking his head. He started to cry. Saliva dribbled into his beard.

  ‘Fuck him. Let’s get out there. The more people we hit, the better the chance that whoever lifted her will front us.’

  Anna wasn’t too sure. ‘You think that would be the best thing to do? We might get very dead, very soon.’

  ‘Got a better idea? People aren’t exactly falling over themselves to help us, are they? We could be here for days waiting for this twat to get sober.’

  5

  Back on the street, I studied my map. ‘That way.’

  There were no signs to tell us we’d arrived, but it wasn’t long before we found ourselves on Pusher Street. It was like we’d crossed the border between the fairy kingdom and the land of the trolls. The atmosphere changed abruptly. These were mean streets. Cannabis fumes hung more heavily in the air. Aggressive-looking skinheads, some hooded, stood round flaming metal barrels, furtive and menacing. I watched a young guy approach one group and be steered down an alley. Their job seemed to be to direct buyers and keep an eye out for police.

  Everywhere I looked, pit-bull terriers wandered unleashed.

  ‘It’s an old Russian trick.’ Anna nodded at a dog that should have had tattoos on its front legs. ‘They’re trained to whisk the stash away from a police raid.’

  Large canvas parasols covered makeshift stalls. I stepped under one and eyed the merchandise. Lumps of cannabis and bags of skunk were displayed on a tree trunk and a wooden barrel. I showed the stallholder Lilian’s picture and asked in English if he’d seen her. He was about her age. He was dressed in grimy old German Army gear that hadn’t been washed since Stalingrad.

  As he started to answer, a skinhead with a black sweatshirt strode over from one of the braziers. ‘Fuck off!’ He yelled it straight into my face and gave me a shove. I nodded and retreated, hands raised. Too many hard faces were glaring at me to play it any other way, too many pit-bulls at their heels. So much for the Summer of Love.

  My anxious sister clasped my arm and guided me away.

  I tried my best to look scared, and part of me was. ‘If she’s shacked up with one of those arseholes, Anna, we could have a problem.’

  6

  There were hundreds of buildings in Christiania and Lilian could have been holed up in any or none of them. Almost all the businesses, shops and restaurants were located in Christiania City. A network of footpaths and bridges connected the sprawling residential sectors. North of where we were, the town gradually gave way to woods.

  The main barracks had been converted into an apartment building called the Ark of Peace. It was the largest halftimbered house in northern Europe, and housed more than eighty people. Then there were another eighty-five acres of old army buildings, run-down trailers and modern self-build wood and brick cottages. Even if everyone was at home, it would take the two of us days to cover the ground.

  ‘We’re going to have to split up, Anna. Are you OK with that?’

  ‘No problem.’

  I unfolded my map. ‘Why don’t you start at this vegetarian restaurant, the Morning Place, and the after-school centre, the Raisin House, and carry on down the road into the green residential area? I’ll do the bars and clubs round Pusher Street. If we get jack-shit, we RV back at the bar at last light anyway.’ I touched her face. ‘Any drama, just run.’

  Anna gave me a hug and I watched her disappear down the street. Just a few yards away, two roaming dogs suddenly had a turf dispute that erupted into a full-blown fight. Their owners ran over with chains to subdue them. I was in no doubt of what kind of welcome we’d get if we did track Lilian down.

  7

  The Opera was a music-venue-cum-community-centre in an old brick-layered building at the top end of Pusher Street. The Cafe Oasis was on the ground floor. Above it was the information office.

  I went inside and tried the girl at the till. ‘She might have cut her hair. She might have dyed it.’ I doubted Lilian would have spent her hard-saved cash on a visit to the stylist, but if she had fallen foul of a trafficking gang there was no telling what look they’d have opted for, and I needed to get people’s brains in gear. I scanned the other customers while I was talking. You can concentrate so hard on looking for the next person to quiz or the next bar to go into that the target could walk straight past without you noticing.

  The girl shook her head.

  I stuck my head inside the music venue. A high ceiling supported by tall, decorated wooden pillars and a red and white dance floor in the shape of a starburst gave it a circus feel. Sofas and armchairs were arranged living-room style along the furthest wall, in stark contrast with the shit and rugs outside. The place was deserted.

  I went upstairs to the information office. I drew a blank there too, but at least the guy suggested pinning up a photocopy. I hadn’t brought any. I thanked him and said I’d come back later if I’d had no luck.

  The Children’s Theatre and the Jazz Club also shared the building. Nobody was in either of them. Immediately across the road was a clothes and ethnic handicrafts store, and Marzbar, an Internet cafe. I visited th
em both, keeping my eyes skinned.

  A long, three-storey grey-stone building that had once been the garrison’s arsenal now housed the music venue, Loppen - the Flea - along with a restaurant, a gallery, some hobby workshops, a youth club, and, down by the entrance, the Infocafe and the Christiania post office. It took me more than an hour to cover every option with Lilian’s picture.

  Back out on Pusher Street, I went into the Sunshine Bakery, the laundry, and behind these, the community kitchen and a bar called the Monkey Grotto. Nothing. I just hoped that people would be starting to hear about the two dickheads bouncing about trying to find a girl. Maybe it would get to the gangs before we started turning up the temperature tonight.

  I dropped into another bar, Woodstock, a bit further on, and the tattooist opposite. I bought a grilled-vegetable sandwich in a small gallery and eating-place next door. I moved on to Nemoland, a cafe and outdoor music venue, with a bar inside and outside, bench tables and parasols, an outdoor stage, and a bistro serving Thai food. There were palm trees, Greek- and Chinese-style decorations, lots of blue bench tables, but not one sniff of recognition of Lilian from the locals.

  I began to think it might be time to take another route. Plan B was double-edged. It might lead us straight to Lilian - or fuck us up so completely that we’d never get anywhere near her.

  8

  I headed for the RV just before last light. Noisy revellers, a lot of them already the worse for wear, were streaming into Christiania for a night of music, drink and drugs. Outside in the city, the street-lights would be burning. Here in the free town, bare bulbs hanging behind windows struggled to do the same job.

  Moving as fast as I could without drawing attention to myself, I jinked down a series of lefts and rights, stopping only once to check the map. I ran into Anna on the way.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Nothing. But I did get a call from Moscow. He’s found out the end user.’

  ‘A company?’