Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

Damjohn had been very interested in Rich’s language skills. He invited Rich out to dinner at a fancy hotel and put the moves on him. He had, he intimated, a possible opening for a handsome young westerner with a clean British passport who could talk Russian, Czech, and Serbian at need. It would be easy work, too—occasional, well paid, and not impossible to fit in around a regular job. Rich took the bait.

It was hard to say no, he told me. Damjohn’s personality was so intense and powerful, he just swept you along. Rich looked at me defiantly, as if I was about to disagree. “He’s not Serbian, you know,” he told me truculently. “He was part of all that Kosovo shit, but only because he was caught in the middle of it. His family were all Slovenes—and after Slovenia decided to fly solo, the Slovenes in Kosovo had almost as fuck-awful a time as the Albanians. But he was in Vlasenica when the Serbian army came through, and he was lucky enough to fall in with a colonel, Nikolic, who was trying to update the census records for the area. Nikolic didn’t know his arse from his elbow, so Damjohn helped him out. Told him where people lived and if they were still around.”

“People?” I echoed. “What people, Rich? Albanians? Muslims?”

Rich shrugged. “People,” he repeated stubbornly. “The point is that Damjohn was a survivor. He could have been rounded up himself, but instead he made himself useful. And then he made himself indispensable. When they set up the concent—the transit camp at Susica, he was on staff. He was actually on staff. A Slovene! They used him to handle initial interviews. Triage. Only he didn’t bother with interviews—he had a better way. When a new truckload came in, he’d go in and sit with them, as if he was just another sheep-shagger caught out by a Serbian patrol, and if anyone spoke to him, he’d just shrug—no speakee. Then he’d listen to them talking among themselves, and within a few minutes, he’d know exactly who was who and what was what. He had an agreed signal to give to the guards—when he was ready, he’d give them the wink, or whatever, and they’d take him out as if they were going to interrogate him. So then he could give them the lowdown on everyone else in the batch, and sometimes—depending on what he’d overheard—leads on other people who were still hiding out up in the hills. Fucking incredible. If the war had gone on for another year, he’d probably have been running the place.”

Rich was looking intently at me as he said all this. He wanted me to understand why he couldn’t just say no to Damjohn—wanted me to share his awe, which clearly went beyond conventional morality. I found myself thinking back to the images I’d seen when I’d touched Damjohn’s hand. I knew from that brief flash that the man’s skills as an informer had been learned at a much earlier age; the war in Kosovo had just been another career opportunity for him.

Rich had been horrified, of course, when he found out what the work was. He only took it on a one-off basis, at first, because his car had just died, and he didn’t have any money for a deposit on a new one. And he was still fuming over the shit that had gone down at the archive, so he probably wasn’t thinking too straight. He just hadn’t thought enough about what he was getting into. If he had, he would never have gone on that initial run for Damjohn, and none of the rest of it would ever have—

“Just tell me what he asked you to do, for the love of Christ,” I interjected harshly. “And put the bullshit in an appendix at the end.”

Rich went on holiday to the Czech Republic. And while he was there, he went into a lot of city-center bars in Prague and Brno. Young people’s bars. He was looking for girls, and he wasn’t very good at it, at first. Oh, he could run a chat-up line as well as the next guy, and he knew how to trade on his well-heeled-westerner chic, but he didn’t know how to segue from that into doing the recruitment pitch.

Come to London right now, was roughly how it went. Leave your family and your friends behind, and you can get yourself a new life like you’d never even believe. You can do a secretarial course—government-funded—and after six weeks, you’ll be walking into a twenty-grand-a-year job. And you’ll be living in a flat with your rent and utilities paid, because everyone in London claims state benefit even if they’re working, so your only expenses will be food and clothes. Even if you only do it for a couple of years, you can come back with a stake. Stick to it for five years, you can come back rich. Or say fuck it and don’t come back at all.

Rich learned quickly, though. Part of the trick was to choose the right girl in the first place. The “leave your friends and family behind” line played best with women who didn’t have a big share of either, and he came to be good at spotting them. Young was good. Stupid was good. Ambitious was best of all; a girl with a hunger for the bright lights would tell herself bigger lies than you’d have the balls to tell her yourself and then invest more effort into believing them.

The reality behind the pitch was as squalid as you’d imagine it to be. Rich would help the girls to fill in a passport application and give them their traveling money from the Czech Republic to Sweden. In Sweden, they were looked over by an associate of Damjohn’s, a German named Dieter—no second name that Rich ever heard of, just Dieter. And if Dieter liked what he saw, he sent the girls on to London.

That was where they disappeared from the official statistics, though. They didn’t come into the UK by plane, and they didn’t come in on their own passports. If there was a trail, Sweden was where it ended. Rich himself came home alone and didn’t trouble himself with the unpleasant details.

“But you knew where the girls were going?” I demanded.

Rich hesitated, then nodded his head just once. “The flats,” he muttered. “I’m not saying I’m proud of myself. But all I was doing was talent-spotting. No rough stuff, Castor. I never hurt anybody!”

The flats were the bargain-basement end of Damjohn’s operation. The girls there weren’t whores by choice, they were co-opted. It was a matter of horses for courses, Rich explained morosely. In the West End and the City, you could charge a premium price for a premium product: beautiful girls with some personality and imagination who’d throw themselves into it—play games, dress up, talk the talk. The flats were a different approach for a different demographic: men who had very little in the way of disposable income, but who’d still pay for sex if the price point was low enough. In the clubs, the girls took 50 percent of whatever the john paid. In the flats, they worked for food. And they didn’t get to choose who they went with or what was on the menu. They just did what they were told.

Needless to say, the girls that Rich was recruiting couldn’t just be put to work as soon as they arrived in the UK. There was a certain amount of—not training, maybe, but conditioning—that had to be got through first. They had to be broken in, taught what was expected of them and what the rules were. Like never say no to anything. Never cry when you’re with a john. Never ask for help. And they needed to know the names of things—parts of the body, for example, and certain kinds of physical acts. After a little while, Rich got involved on that end of the operation, too. It wasn’t so glamorous—no exotic foreign travel, no expense account—but the perks were amazing.

His mind filled with images: flesh grinding against flesh like the cogs in a surreal and horrible machine.

“You got to screw them first,” I paraphrased.

He flinched. “No!” he protested. “Well, sometimes, yeah, but—if I wanted to, I could—I was mainly just talking them through it, but yeah, there were times. Jesus, Castor, they were prostitutes. The only difference was that with me, it was on the house. And it was a lot better if they did it with me than with Scrub, say. At least I didn’t hurt them.”