They kill every man in that house and they’re still not satisfied.
Moldova is the world capital of human sex-trafficking. There are a thousand little towns here with staging posts in basements and apartments in condemned buildings. They trade in men, too, and in children. The girl children grow day by day until the power comes to their hands and they can teach the grown women. This thing happens again and again and again; the change has happened too fast for the men to learn the new tricks they need. It is a gift. Who is to say it does not come from God?
Tunde files a series of reports and interviews from the Moldovan border towns where the fighting has been most acute. The women trust him because of his reports from Riyadh. Not many men could have got this close; he’s been lucky, but he’s also been smart and determined. He brings his other reports with him, shows them to whatever woman says she’s in charge of this town or that. They want their stories told.
‘It wasn’t just those men who hurt us,’ a twenty-year-old woman, Sonja, tells him. ‘We killed them, but it wasn’t just them. The police knew what was happening and did nothing. The men in the town beat their wives if they tried to bring us more food. The Mayor knew what was happening, the landlords knew what was happening, postmen knew what was happening.’
She starts to cry, scrubs at her eyes with the heel of her hand. She shows him the tattoo in the centre of her palm – the eye with the tendrils creeping out from it.
‘This means we will never stop watching,’ she says. ‘Like God watches over us.’
At night, Tunde writes fast and urgently. A diary of sorts. Notes from the war. This revolution will need its chronicler. It’s going to be him. He has in mind a broad, sweeping book – with interviews, yes, and also assessments of the tide of history, region-by-region analysis, nation by nation. Pulling out to see the shockwaves of the power slosh across the planet. Zooming in tight to focus on single moments, single stories. Sometimes he writes with such intensity that he forgets that he doesn’t have the power himself in his hands and the bones of his neck. It’s going to be a big book. Nine hundred pages, a thousand pages. De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. There’ll be an accompanying barrage of footage online. Lanzmann’s Shoah. Reporting from inside the events as well as analysis and argument.
He opens his chapter on Moldova with a description of the way the power was passed from hand to hand among the women, then proceeds to the new flowering of online religion, and how it shored up support for women taking over towns, and then goes on to the inevitable revolution in the government of the country.
Tunde interviews the President five days before the government falls. Viktor Moskalev is a small and sweaty man who has held this country together by making a series of alliances and by turning a blind eye to the vast organized crime syndicates that have been using his little, unassuming nation as a staging post for their unsavoury business. He moves his hands nervously during the interview, brushing the few strands of hair left on his head out of his eyes constantly and dripping sweat across his bald head, even though the room is quite cool. His wife, Tatiana – an ex-gymnast who once almost competed at the Olympics – sits beside him, holding his hand.
‘President Moskalev,’ says Tunde, deliberately relaxing his voice, smiling, ‘between you and me, what do you think is happening to your country?’
Viktor’s throat muscles clench. They’re sitting in the grand receiving room of his palace in Chisinau. Half the furniture is gilded. Tatiana strokes his knee and smiles. She, also, is gilded – bronze highlights in her hair, glitter on the curve of her cheeks.
‘All countries,’ says Viktor slowly, ‘have had to adapt to the new reality.’
Tunde leans back, crossing one leg over the other.
‘This isn’t going out on the radio or on the internet, Viktor. It’s just for my book. I’d really like your assessment. Forty-three border towns are now effectively being run by paramilitary gangs, mostly composed of women who’ve freed themselves from sexual slavery. What do you think your chances are of getting control back?’
‘Our forces are already moving to quash these rebels,’ says Viktor. ‘Within a few days the situation will normalize.’ Tunde raises a quizzical eyebrow. Half-laughs. Is Viktor being serious? The gangs have captured weapons, body armour and ammunition from the crime syndicates they’ve destroyed. They’re virtually unbeatable.
‘Sorry, what is it that you’re planning to do? Bomb your own country to pieces? They’re everywhere.’
Viktor smiles an enigmatic smile. ‘If it has to be, that is how it must be. This trouble will pass in just a week or two.’
Fucking hell. Maybe he really will bomb the whole country and end up sitting as President of a pile of rubble. Or maybe he just hasn’t accepted what’s really going on here. It’ll make an interesting footnote in the book. With his country crumbling around him, President Moskalev seemed almost blasé.
In the corridor outside, Tunde waits for an embassy car to take him back to his hotel. Safer to travel under the Nigerian flag here than under Moskalev’s protection these days. But it can take two or three hours for the cars to make it through the security.
That’s where Tatiana Moskalev finds him: waiting on an embroidered chair for someone to call his cell and say that the car’s ready.
She clicks down the hallway in her spike heels. Her dress is turquoise, skin-tight, ruched and cut to accentuate those strong gymnast’s legs and those elegant gymnast’s shoulders. She stands over him.
‘You don’t like my husband, do you?’ she says.
‘I wouldn’t say that.’ He smiles his easy smile.
‘I would. Are you going to print something bad about him?’
Tunde rests his elbows on the back of the chair, opening his chest. ‘Tatiana,’ he says, ‘if we’re going to have this conversation, is there anything to drink in this palace?’
There’s brandy in a cabinet in what looks like a 1980s movie idea of a Wall Street boardroom: high-shine gold plastic fittings and a dark wood table. She pours them each a generous measure and they look out over the city together. The presidential palace is a high-rise in the centre of town; from the outside it looks like nothing so much as a mid-price four-star business hotel.
Tatiana says, ‘He came to watch a performance at my school. I was a gymnast. Performing in front of the Minister for Finance!’ She drinks. ‘I was seventeen and he was forty-two. But he took me out of that little nothing town.’
Tunde says, ‘The world’s changing,’ and they exchange a little glance.
She smiles. ‘You are going to be very successful,’ she says. ‘You have the hunger. I’ve seen it before.’
‘And you? Do you have … the hunger?’
She looks him up and down and makes a little laugh through her nose. She can’t be more than forty now herself.
‘Look what I can do,’ she says. Although he thinks he already knows what she can do.
She puts her palm flat to the frame of the window and closes her eyes.
The lights in the ceiling fizz and blink out.
She looks up, sighs.
‘Why are they … connected to the window frames?’ says Tunde.
‘Crappy wiring,’ she says, ‘like everything in this place.’
‘Does Viktor know you can do it?’
She shakes her head. ‘Hairdresser gave it to me. A joke. A woman like you, she said, you’ll never need it. You’re taken care of.’
‘And are you?’ says Tunde. ‘Taken care of?’
She laughs now, properly, full-throatedly. ‘Be careful,’ she says. ‘Viktor would chop your balls off if he heard you talking that way.’
Tunde laughs, too. ‘Is it really Viktor I have to be afraid of? Any more?’
She takes a long slow swig of her drink. ‘Do you want to know a secret?’ she says.
‘Always,’ he says.
‘Awadi-Atif, the new King of Saudi Arabia, is in exile in the north of our country.
He’s been feeding Viktor money and arms. That’s why Viktor thinks he can crush the rebels.’
‘Are you serious?’
She nods.
‘Can you get me confirmation of that? Emails, faxes, photographs, anything?’
She shakes her head.
‘Go and look for him. You’re a clever boy. You’ll work it out.’
He licks his lips. ‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘I want you to remember me,’ she says, ‘when you’re very successful. Remember that we talked like this now.’
‘Just talked?’ says Tunde.
‘Your car is here,’ she says, pointing to the long black limousine pulling through the cordon outside the building, thirty floors below them.
It’s five days after that when Viktor Moskalev dies, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, of a heart attack in his sleep. It is something of a surprise to the world community when, in the immediate aftermath of his death, the Supreme Court of the country unanimously votes in emergency session to appoint his wife, Tatiana, as interim leader. In the fullness of time there would be elections in which Tatiana would stand for office, but the most important thing is to maintain order at this difficult time.
But, says Tunde in his report, Tatiana Moskalev may have been easy to underestimate; she was a political operator of skill and intelligence and had evidently used her leverage well. In her first public appearance, she wore a small gold brooch in the shape of an eye; some said this was a nod to the growing popularity of ‘Goddess’ movements online. Some pointed out how very difficult it is to tell the difference between a skilful attack using the electrical power and an ordinary heart attack, but these rumours were without any evidential foundation.
Transfers of power, of course, are rarely smooth. This one is complicated by a military coup spearheaded by Viktor’s Chief of Defence, who takes more than half the army with him and manages to oust the Moskalev interim government from Chisinau. But the armies of women freed from chains in those border towns are, broadly and instinctively, with Tatiana Moskalev. Upwards of three hundred thousand women passed through the country every year, sold for the use of their moist bodies and fragile flesh. A great number of those have stayed, having nowhere else to go.
On the thirteenth day of the fifth month of the third year after the Day of the Girls, Tatiana Moskalev brings her wealth and her connections, a little less than half her army, and many of her weapons to a castle in the hills on the borders of Moldova. And there she declares a new kingdom, uniting the coastal lands between the old forests and the great inlets and thus, in effect, declaring war on four separate countries, including the Big Bear herself. She calls the new country Bessapara, after the ancient people who lived there and interpreted the sacred sayings of the priestesses on the mountaintops. The international community waits for the outcome. The consensus is that the state of Bessapara cannot hold for long.
Tunde records it all in careful notes and documentations. He adds, ‘There is a scent of something in the air, a smell like rainfall after a long drought. First one person, then five, then five hundred, then villages, then cities, then states. Bud to bud and leaf to leaf. Something new is happening. The scale of the thing has increased.’
Roxy
There’s a girl on the beach at high tide, lighting up the sea with her hands. The girls from the convent watch her from the clifftop. She’s waded into the ocean up to her waist, higher. She’s not even wearing a bathing suit – just jeans and a black cardigan. And she’s setting the sea on fire.
It’s coming on to dusk, so they can see it clearly. Threads of kelp are spread in a fine, disorderly mesh across the surface of the water. And when she sends her power into the water, the particulate and debris glow dimly, and the seaweed brighter yet. The light extends in a wide circle around her, lit from beneath, like the great eye of the ocean gazing at the sky. There’s a sound like popping candy as the branching limbs of the sargasso plants smoulder and the buds swell and burst. There’s a marine scent, salt and green and pungent. She must be half a mile away, but they can smell it from the clifftop. They think at any moment she must have used out her power, but it goes on; the flickering luminescence in the bay, the scent as the crabs and small fish rise to the surface of the water.
The women say to one another: God will send her salvation.
‘She has inscribed a circle on the face of the waters,’ says Sister Maria Ignacia. ‘She is at the boundary of light and darkness.’
She is a sign from the Mother.
They send word to Mother Eve: someone has come.
They’d given Roxy a choice of places to go. Bernie’s got family in Israel; she could go to them. Think about it, Rox, sandy beaches, fresh air, you could go to school with Yuval’s kids; he’s got two girls about your age, and you’ve got to believe the Israelis aren’t locking girls up for doing what you can do. They’ve already got them in the army, they’re already training them up, Rox. I bet they know stuff you haven’t even thought of. She looks it up on the internet, though. They don’t even speak English in Israel, or write with English letters. Bernie tries to explain that most people in Israel do speak English, really, but Roxy still says, ‘Nah, don’t think so.’
Then her mum had family near the Black Sea. Bernie points it out on the map. That’s your grandma comes from there; you didn’t ever meet your grandma, did you? Your mum’s mum? There are still cousins there. Still family connections; we do good business with those people, too. You could get in with the business, you said you want to. But Roxy had already decided where she wanted to go.
‘I’m not thick,’ she said. ‘I know you’ve got to get me out of the country, cos they’re looking for who killed Primrose. It’s not a holiday.’
And Bernie and the boys had stopped talking and just looked at her.
‘You can’t say that, Rox,’ said Ricky. ‘Wherever you go, you just say you’re on holiday, all right?’
‘I want to go to America,’ she said. ‘I want to go to South Carolina. Look. There’s that woman there, Mother Eve. She does them talks on the internet. You know.’
Ricky said, ‘Sal knows some people down that way. We can fix you up somewhere to stay, Rox, someone to look after you.’
‘I don’t need anyone to look after me.’
Ricky looked at Bernie. Bernie shrugged.
‘After all she’s been through,’ said Bernie. And that settled it.
Allie sits on a rock and dabbles her fingers in the water. Every time the woman in the water discharges her power she can feel it, even at this distance, like a sharp smack.
She says in her heart: What do you think? I’ve never seen anyone with this much strength in her.
The voice says: Didn’t I tell you I was sending you a soldier?
Allie says in her heart: Does she know her destiny?
The voice says: Who does, sweetpea?
It’s dark now, and the lights from the freeway are barely visible here. Allie dips her hand into the ocean and sends out as much charge as she can. She barely sends a flicker across the water. It’s enough. The woman in the waves walks towards her.
It’s too dark to see her face clearly.
Allie calls out, ‘You must be cold. I have a blanket here, if you want it.’
The woman in the water says, ‘Bloody hell, what are you, search and rescue? Don’t s’pose you’ve got a picnic there, too, have you?’
She’s British. This is unexpected. Still, the Almighty works in mysterious ways.
‘Roxy,’ says the woman in the water. ‘I’m Roxy.’
‘I’m …’ says Allie, and pauses. For the first time in a long while, she has the urge to tell this woman her real name. Ridiculous. ‘I’m Eve,’ she says.
‘Oh my word,’ says Roxy. ‘Oh my Lord, it’s only you I’ve blimmin’ come to find, isn’t it? Bloody hell, just got in this morning; night flight, it’s a killer, I’m telling you. Had a nap, thought I’d go looking for you tomorrow and here you bloody are. It’s a m
iracle!’
See, says the voice, what did I tell you?
Roxy hauls herself up on to the flat stone next to Allie. She is suddenly and instantly impressive. She’s muscular in her shoulders and arms, but it’s more than that.
Reaching out with that sense that she has honed and practised, Allie tries to gauge how much power Roxy has in her skein.
She feels that she is falling off the edge of the world. It goes on and on. As limitless as the ocean.
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘a soldier will come.’
‘What’s that now?’
Allie shakes her head. ‘Nothing. Something I heard once.’
Roxy gives her an appraising look. ‘You a bit spooky, then? That’s what I thought when I saw your videos. Bit spooky, I thought. You’d do well on one of them TV shows – Most Haunted, you ever seen that? Actually, you don’t have anything to eat, do you? I’m starving.’
Allie pats down her pockets and finds a candy bar in her jacket. Roxy tears into it, taking huge bites.
‘That’s better,’ she says. ‘You know that thing when you’ve used up a lot of power and it just makes you starving hungry?’ She pauses, looks at Allie. ‘No?’
‘Why were you doing it? The light in the water?’
Roxy shrugs. ‘It was just an idea I had. Never been in the sea before, wanted to see what I could do.’ She squints out at the ocean. ‘I think I killed a bloody load of fish. You could probably have dinner out of them all this week if you’ve got …’ She juggles her hands. ‘I dunno, a boat and a net or something. I suppose some of them might be poison. Can you get poison fish? Or is it just like … Jaws and that?’
Allie laughs, in spite of herself. It’s been a while since someone last made her laugh. Since she last laughed without deciding beforehand that laughing was the smart thing to do.