by David Thorne
On my left, two people are working the saw. The conveyor brings them a carcass. A machine grips the pig from behind and they move the circular saw from its throat to its genitals, slicing it up the middle. As the pig jerks away from them its entrails drop and bubble out through the bottom of the slit, grey and slimy like oiled balloons. There are so many pigs it is amazing.
‘Marta?’ I say. I have to shout above the noise of the saw. She looks at me but does not stop; the conveyor belt runs automatically and she has to keep up with the carcasses.
‘Yes?’
‘I wanted to speak to you.’
‘Why?’
‘About Sabina Antonescu.’
‘What about her?’
As she speaks she inserts the spinning blade of the circular saw into the pig. The saw is on an articulated metal arm and she only has to guide it upwards. I can see organs and matter collapsing and bulging out as the skin parts, black and red, blue and grey.
‘I need to find her. She was looking for somebody?’
She turns to look at me. She is young and has dark eyebrows and her cheeks are round and soft and speckled with blood.
‘You wait outside.’ She looks up at a clock on the wall. ‘Twenty minutes.’
As I walk out of the slaughterhouse, I again hear the sound of pigs squealing, and I cannot help but sympathise with Alex, who did not want to come to this place. It is a hard sound to listen to, having seen what happens inside. Those pigs have got no chance.
Marta’s English is serviceable but her swearing is impressively fluent. She opens the passenger door of my car and gets in, takes off her plastic cap and says:
‘Fucking pigs, can’t believe how fucking many pigs. Fucking shit.’
She is big, and I think of a peasant driving a Soviet-era tractor on some Romanian state farm. I am about to respond but she has not finished.
‘Fucking insides fall out on the fucking floor. Can’t pick them up, fucking disgusting.’ She feels underneath her apron, finds a packet of cigarettes, holds them up to me. ‘You mind?’
‘No.’
She lights up, inhales with the pleasure of the dedicated smoker. I wait for the nicotine hit to calm her circuits, soften the tension in her arms and shoulders caused by cutting through the skin, bone and sinew of a hundred or more dead animals.
‘Sabina?’ she says.
‘I have to speak to her.’
‘Good luck,’ she says and laughs. Through the windscreen we watch the business of the abattoir continue, a truck backing up to a loading bay. Two men are outside the entrance smoking and Marta leans out of the window and yells something at them in Romanian. One of them gives her the finger and she laughs again.
‘It’s important.’
‘She went back.’
‘To Romania?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Got a number for her?’
‘No.’ She has smoked her cigarette quickly, the tip a long glowing cone. She throws it out of the window. ‘Got an address.’
‘That’s all?’
She turns to look at me. ‘Why you want to talk to her?’
‘She was looking for somebody.’
‘Yeah. Her daughter.’
Again that release of adrenalin. Her daughter. Another one. Three.
‘Didn’t find her?’
She takes out another cigarette. ‘No.’ She lights it. ‘Didn’t find her.’
‘Why did she leave it so long? To look for her?’
Marta frowns. ‘Fuck knows. Have to save money? She had like zero fucking money.’ She is quiet for a moment, thinking. ‘You find her?’
‘No. But I might be able to help her. With the money.’
She blows smoke out in a long stream and I watch it furl into itself against the windscreen of my car. ‘Fucking money. Okay, I have to go.’
‘Her address?’
‘Haven’t got it,’ she says in an aggrieved tone, as if I have asked the impossible. ‘At home. I call you.’ She snaps her fingers and I hand her my card. She looks at it, whistles. ‘Fucking lawyer.’ She hauls herself out of the car, stands there for a moment. Then she leans back in. ‘You do not look like one.’
‘A lot of people say that.’
She laughs and stands and heads back towards the entrance to the slaughterhouse, over the wet concrete glistening under the high bright lights. On the way she puts her plastic cap back on, takes a last drag of her cigarette and flicks it at one of the men smoking outside. He says something to her, and without looking at him, she gives him the finger.
21
IT IS HOT in Bucharest, and the sun is so bright that it makes the cobbles on the streets gleam as if they are made of bronze, the tramlines carving through them a dazzling silver which leaves an afterglow on my eyelids when I blink. I have booked a hotel near the centre and take a taxi from the airport, a thirty-year-old Mercedes driven by an old man with a leather cap who does not speak any English. We head down a wide six-lane road, past mile after mile of low, shabby industrial units and three-sided advertising billboards on high poles. The buildings and the walls in front of them are made of concrete, and many are in disrepair, the corners crumbling, the façades peeling and discoloured. The road is busy with traffic, Fords and BMWs and Volkswagens, but also older cars which I do not recognise, underpowered and rusty and trailing dirty smoke.
The industrial buildings give way to apartment blocks, and as we enter the city the road is lined by trees, what looks like a park on one side, the tarmac dappled with shade. We come out from under the trees on a huge roundabout and my hotel is opposite. It is vast and looks like a Vegas hotel that has been built very quickly and with very cheap materials. The driver pulls up outside and says something to me in Romanian. I do not understand and I take out money and he pulls notes from the wad I changed at the airport. I imagine that I am being ripped off but I am too hot to care. I wonder if the hotel has air conditioning. Looking at it I do not hold out much hope.
Marta came through with the address for Sabina Antonescu, which is in a village seventy miles north of Bucharest. On the flight over I sat next to a well-dressed woman who worked for a multinational and whose father had suddenly died; she was going home for his funeral and seemed irritated by the inconvenience, the meetings she had had to reschedule. She gave me the name of the hotel, told me it was the best in Bucharest, though I cannot imagine her staying here.
At reception I book a room for the night and ask the lady behind the desk if she can help me hire a car. She asks me for how long and I tell her just one day, and she nods, smiles, picks up the phone.
‘What do you want to hire a car for?’
A man is next to me at the desk, young, barely more than a boy, although he is tall.
‘Need to get somewhere.’ I turn back to the woman, who is speaking to somebody on the telephone. She looks at me and nods at whatever she is being told, holds up a nail-polished finger.
‘Fucking car companies rip you off, man.’
I turn to the boy. He has a friendly, open face which is hard to take issue with. ‘You want to give me some space?’
‘Trying to help. Avis, fucking Hertz, how much you going to pay them?’ He swears as much as Marta. I wonder whether it is coincidence, or if it is a national trait.
‘Listen—’ I say, but he interrupts me.
‘I’ve got a car. Air conditioning, new tyres. Take you anywhere you wanna go.’
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘But I’m good.’
‘Big mistake, my friend.’ He does not seem too put out. I nod, thank him, turn back to the receptionist.
‘I am sorry,’ she says. ‘No cars.’
‘None?’
She shrugs. ‘Is busy.’
I have come a long way and I need to see this woman, need to speak to her about her daughter. I turn back to the boy, who is grinning at me. He holds out his hand.
‘Nikolai,’ he says.
I shake his hand. ‘Daniel.’
‘So okay, Daniel
.’
I sigh. What choice do I have? Anyway, I will need an interpreter, and Nikolai speaks English, even if chiefly in swear words. ‘I’ll see you down here tomorrow morning. Nine o’clock.’
‘I bring you coffee,’ he says. I thank him, pick up my bag and head to my room. I hope Nikolai’s car is in a better state than the hotel.
Nikolai tells me that the roads in Romania are an embarrassment, a disgrace, a fucking joke. He tells me that they were all laid during the Communist era, that say what you want about Ceauşescu, at least he could build roads.
‘We, the Romanians, we pay fucking corrupt company one and half billion euros,’ he says. ‘You know how much road they make?’
I do not know. Nikolai’s car has air conditioning but it doesn’t work and he has to shout above the sound of the wind coming through the open windows, tearing at our hair and clothes. His car is an old Ford, and although it has new tyres, its engine sounds no smoother than the tractors we occasionally overtake, rusty sun-dulled relics from the days of collective farms hauling straw bales and pens full of pigs and sheep.
‘Fucking fifty-four kilometres,’ Nikolai says. He cannot hide his delight at the scale of his country’s corruption, its vastness. ‘Fifty-four.’
The road we are on is two lanes wide and potholed, with no dividing line down the centre. It curves through low wooded hills and Nikolai often overtakes other vehicles, frequently on blind bends. Once we are overtaken by a Porsche with its headlamps on full beam although it is bright daylight, and as it passes Nikolai nods to himself and says, ‘Gangsters,’ then leans his head out of the window and yells, ‘Where’s our fucking roads?’
Although it is only seventy miles to Sabina Antonescu’s village it takes us over two hours and it is almost midday when we arrive. There is a main square with a café on it; we stop and Nikolai asks two old men sitting at a table outside where to find her house.
We drive on for two hundred metres and take a left before a level crossing which guards a railway that looks unused; there are weeds growing between the sleepers and the rails are rusty. Sabina lives in a small house built from breeze blocks which have not been rendered, making it seem unfinished, although it also looks as though it has been there for a long time. I knock on the door and wait but there is no answer. It is hot and very quiet, as if the village has been stunned silent by the sun’s heat. I can hear crickets and nothing else.
Nikolai and I lean on his car and wait; there is nothing else we can do. A black cat passes us but apart from that there is no sign of anybody. It is so hot that it has even shut Nikolai up; minutes pass without him saying anything. We wait over an hour before a man on a quad bike drives past. He stops, turns around and drives back to us. Still sitting on the bike, he asks us something. I do not know what he says, but Nikolai answers and they speak for some time.
‘He wants to know why you want to see Sabina,’ Nikolai says.
‘Tell him that she has been left money. In England.’
Nikolai speaks to the man who nods and leans over the side of his quad bike to spit before replying. He is wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap and is maybe fifty.
‘He says why. Why has somebody left her money.’
I do not want to get into this, do not want to tell strangers about Sabina Antonescu’s inheritance. In a village like this, that kind of wealth would be almost unimaginable.
‘Tell him that I am a lawyer and that it is confidential.’
Nikolai raises his eyebrows, pretends that he is impressed. He speaks to the man on the quad bike who hears him out, then spits again before pushing back the peak of his cap and appraising me. Eventually he says something to Nikolai, then stands up on the bike and looks about the fields on the sides of the low hills surrounding the village.
‘He says she is working on her land,’ Nikolai tells me.
The man says something, points. I cannot see anything but Nikolai tells me that that is where Sabina Antonescu is working, way over there. The man nods as Nikolai tells me this as if he understands what he is saying, and when Nikolai is finished he starts up his quad bike and drives away. Nikolai and I look at where the man pointed. There is perhaps somebody there, a dark shape moving slowly. I give Nikolai an encouraging push and he swears, but there is nothing else to do, so we head off to find her.
Sabina Antonescu’s initial expression of hope is one of the most heartbreaking sights I have ever witnessed. She is hoeing a piece of land which is planted with some kind of root vegetable in tidy rows; she sees us approaching from a long way off and waits, standing, her hoe held across her rigid body. Her eyes are fixed on us as if, were she to blink, we might disappear, as if we might be mirages sent to taunt her.
She bows her head when we get close enough to speak and says something to Nikolai, who looks confused and turns to me, says, ‘She wants to know if we have found her.’
‘Tell her,’ I say, and I realise that I do not know how to handle this situation. I am officially here to inform her of her inheritance; that is my job and my duty as a lawyer. But my search for Sabina Antonescu is no longer about that; it is about finding out what happened to two, and perhaps three, young women who disappeared without a trace. I am the only person on this planet who cares about what happened fourteen years ago. What do I say to this woman? ‘Tell her that I do not know where Anica is. Her daughter.’
Nikolai speaks to Sabina. She remains bent, staring at the earth that she has worked, taking time to control herself. When she looks up at me there are tracks of tears through the dry dust on her face.
‘Who are you?’ Nikolai translates, although I suspect he is wondering the same thing now.
‘I am a lawyer,’ I say. ‘But the case I am working on, it might be connected to what happened to her daughter.’
Nikolai translates, comes back with, ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Why was Anica in England? What made her look for her in Essex?’
‘She says it was the last place her daughter wrote from.’
‘Before she disappeared?’
‘She says Anica stopped writing. So she went to England to look for her.’
‘When did she disappear?’
Nikolai speaks with Sabina. She talks quietly now, her anger gone, despair and bewilderment in the way she flaps her arms gently against her sides as she tells her story.
‘In February.’
‘Yes, but what year?’
Sabina looks surprised at the question. ‘She says, this year.’
‘This year?’
‘Five months ago.’
I must look confused because Nikolai says, ‘What, man?’
‘Ask her… You’re sure? Not fourteen years ago?’
Nikolai speaks to her and she talks for a long time. I say, ‘Tell me exactly what she says.’
‘She says, my daughter, she went to find work last year, last summer. She says she wrote twice a week, twice a week for nine months, she was a good girl. And then the letters stopped. She waited for a week, two weeks, and then she went to the police.’ He stops to listen to Sabina speak, then continues. ‘The police all laughed at her. She is poor, and they asked what she wanted them to do. Told her it was her daughter’s fault for leaving, probably found a rich Englishman. But her daughter would never stop writing, they were close, they never argued, never.’ I can see that Nikolai is finding telling the story difficult. ‘So she took out all of her money from her bank and she went to England, to look for her.’
Sabina stops and leans on her hoe, looking off into the distance. We wait, and at last her shoulders give and she rests her cheek against the handle, weeps silently.
‘The police in England didn’t care. The Romanian embassy didn’t care. Nobody cared. But people don’t just disappear. Her daughter didn’t just disappear. She must be somewhere. She must be.’
Sabina stops speaking again, and then takes her hoe in both hands. She goes back to her digging, slowly, desolately, and every time she scrapes the hoe
through the ground she says softly, ‘She must be. She must be. She must be.’
I am silent on the drive back to Bucharest, and Nikolai must be able to tell that I do not want to talk because he is quiet too, only occasionally swearing at other cars as they hold him up.
We left Sabina Antonescu up on her hill, a thousand and a half miles from where her daughter was last heard from. I think of her bewilderment and helplessness. I think of Gabe’s impotence in the face of a witness lying in a coma. Both of them in situations they cannot do anything about. And I am the only person in a position to help either of them.
Nikolai tries but he cannot keep quiet any longer and he asks me what is going on, what the trouble is. Perhaps it is because I am so far from home that I can break confidences without fear of comeback; perhaps it is just that I need to speak to somebody and Nikolai is there. Whatever, I tell him about William Gove, the money he left to the parents of two young women who went missing fourteen years ago. I tell him about Luke Gove, about Saskia, and about Duncan, sobbing and firing a shotgun to prevent men from digging up his land. Nikolai listens while he drives.
‘And now this Anica,’ says Nikolai. ‘Money is left to her mother. But she disappears only five months ago.’
I think of William Gove. He had been an invalid for years. He could not have been involved in Anica’s disappearance; at least not alone. Who helped him? Luke? Duncan? A father passing on his depravity to his children? I do not know, but whatever happened fourteen years ago is still happening today and I cannot do nothing. I cannot let this go.
We get back to Bucharest and Nikolai parks in front of the hotel. I shake his hand, thank him for his help, give him money. He wishes me luck and I get out and watch him drive away, his exhaust blowing thick black smoke into the blue sky above the city.
