‘Hurry! We’ve got to climb the stairs,’ Roman Teminova said in perfect English with an accent that was part Czech, part pure unadulterated Tottenham. He ushered Van den Bergen and George towards the entrance of the apartment block, as though he was directing traffic in the wake of a national emergency. Slightly breathless when he spoke, the Czech detective’s cheeks were flame-red, clashing with the green chequered shirt he wore beneath an ill-fitting navy suit jacket; his sandy-coloured hair dishevelled, giving him the flustered appearance of a farmer who had found himself a policeman in the city by accident, George mused. There was no doubting his sense of urgency though. ‘Now! Come!’
‘Hurry? Why the hell do we have to hurry?’ Van den Bergen mumbled, peering up at the uppermost room in the pistachio-coloured building – six storeys above his street-level vantage point, where three silver Policie Skodas with their blue and yellow go-faster stripes were parked askew near the kerb. ‘Don’t you have bloody lifts in Prague?’ He patted his slightly distended stomach and grimaced at George. ‘I’ve not even digested breakfast yet.’ Shook his head disapprovingly. ‘Jesus. I’m getting too old for this bullshit.’
But the younger Teminova had already disappeared inside, flanked by two uniforms in riot gear, carrying guns.
Above them, burly men wearing the bulky black garb of the Policie sprinted up a vertiginous stairwell that rose to the solitary door at the top. An Escher painting come to life. Van den Bergen gripped the banister and sighed. ‘I thought we were going to compare notes. Take a look around the drug hotspots in the city. I didn’t expect to go on a sodding raid,’ he said, belching. ‘And he drives like a nutcase. I feel sick.’
‘Oh, stop moaning, for God’s sake!’ George said, prodding him in the back. ‘We’ve not come here to eat schnitzel and drink beer with the stag parties from Croydon.’
Shouting from above made George’s pulse quicken. The rhythmic bang of a battering ram against a door drowned out Van den Bergen’s complaints. Footfalls, as the police piled into the Žižkov penthouse apartment.
By the time George reached the summit of the staircase, she felt like somebody had punched her in the chest. Made a mental note to smoke less and cycle more. Van den Bergen took her by the hand and pulled her inside.
‘Jesus,’ she said in English, holding her nose against the sulphurous stink. ‘It reeks, man!’ The walls of the apartment were scuffed and filthy, covered in some dated floral wallpaper that might have been there since Communism fell. Rubbish was strewn along the skirting boards – discarded beer cans, cigarette butts and food wrappers on the uncarpeted floor.
In the living room, it was worse. A stained sofa, where a young man, whom the police had apprehended, lay face down while a uniform cuffed him. Shouting aggressively in Czech over his shoulder at his captor. Wide-eyed and clearly wired. Euro house music pounded at deafening volume from what appeared to be a high-end stereo system; jaunty pink and blue lights dancing up and down on the graphic equaliser’s display. Bass, almost visibly thumping out into the foetid room from the woofers of the oversized floor-standing speakers, making the sticky wooden floor reverberate beneath George’s feet and her molars ache in their dental sockets. Empty beer bottles strewn on their sides next to them, rocking gently to and fro thanks to the sound waves that issued forth. Hedonistic mayhem, juxtaposed against neat piles of cash that had been stacked carefully in a money-counter next to the arm of the sofa. ‘Somebody’s been using this place as party central.’
The stereo was silenced by a giant of a cop who eyed George suspiciously. She felt compelled to give him the finger, but settled instead for sucking her teeth long and low, to convey her displeasure.
‘Thank God he’s turned that off,’ Van den Bergen said, covering his mouth and nose with the sleeve of his raincoat. ‘Maybe they wouldn’t screw their lives up so badly if they didn’t listen to such appalling music.’
From the kitchen, Roman Teminova emerged, wearing a triumphant grin. ‘Methamphetamine production,’ he said, holding up a large, clear plastic bag bulging with crystals of varying sizes. He waved it towards Van den Bergen, as though showing the Dutch Chief Inspector some excellent souvenir that Prague boasted to rival anything Amsterdam could offer. ‘This is only a tiny outfit, but we did a bigger bust in a nearby town yesterday and found a link to this place. Come! See for yourselves.’ He handed them both gas masks and indicated that they should put them on. Pulled his own over his head, sounding suddenly tinny and muffled, as though he had been trapped inside a transistor radio. Reminiscent now of a character in a disaster movie. ‘Be careful not to touch anything, of course.’
Beckoning them into the kitchen, George trod gingerly over the debris on the floor, wishing she had worn something more robust on her feet than trainers. Wellies weren’t enough for this level of filth and contamination, she reflected. Bet Van den Bergen thinks being in here is going to give him cancer. I’ll not hear the end of this until he’s demanded an MRI scan of his lungs and a full-throttle, five-star mole check. And for once, I can’t blame the old fart.
First, she tried to make sense of a tangle of flasks, canisters and pipes that, at a glance, looked like some kind of old-fashioned moonshine still. A burnt-out oven that might have only ever cooked up nightmares and food poisoning. The walls were dark brown with the residue of years of chemical abuse clinging to the splashbacks. Chairs, shoved beneath the small blistered kitchen table, whose upholstered backs and seat pads had almost disintegrated entirely, looking as though they had been burned in a fire.
Then, her gaze wandered downwards, past the grimy cupboards.
She gasped. Held her hand to the mouthpiece of her mask. ‘Oh, Christ. You’re kidding.’ In the corner of the small kitchen, two kittens lay stiffly sprawled by a bowl of mould-green detritus that had once been food. Clearly dead, judging by the flies that circulated around them. ‘Poor little bastards.’ She needed to get out of there. Needed to get back to street level, where she could breathe the fresh air and be calmed by the sight of the stuccoed old apartment blocks in their crisp, ice-cream colours, overlooking the infamous 1960s TV tower that resembled a failed Communist experiment in building a rocket ship from concrete. Those were sights she wanted to gaze upon at 8 a.m. after a sleepless night of worrying about her parents. Touristy shit. Not this hellish scene of filth and cruelty and dead cats.
‘We’d had complaints from neighbours,’ Teminova said, waving his arm towards the worktop that was barely visible beneath an array of test tubes in blackened holders and boiling flasks containing unsavoury-looking amber-coloured concoctions.
On the floor, with their lids off, stood canisters, barrels and oversized bottles that had been labelled on the outside with foreboding skulls and crossbones. Large serving spoons had been shoved into the chemical contents. Most perplexingly of all, however, was the food processor sitting next to the cooker, filled with some unsightly brown goo. Unbidden and at odds with the scene before her, George was beset by a memory of Aunty Sharon’s homely kitchen, with its baking equipment and spotless oven. Remembered the sweet, intoxicating smell of that place, as her aunt whipped up a rum-laced fruitcake to cheer them both on the weekends when she wasn’t working a shift at Skin Licks, and Van den Bergen, Tinesha and Patrice seemed so very far away.
‘It looks like this lab – if you can call it that – has been up and running for a long while,’ Van den Bergen said, standing stiffly beside George, clasping his raincoat closed. ‘How come you’ve only shut it down now?’
Uniforms, now clad in white jumpsuits, entered the claustrophobic scene, taking photographs of the makeshift equipment. Pushing them back into the living room, where Teminova removed his mask and bid that they do likewise. He ruffled his hair. Barked something at a younger-looking colleague, who nodded deferentially, then marched the complaining, cuffed dealer down the hall towards the front door.
‘The problem is that we have so many of these meth labs springing up all over the country,’ Teminova said, toying with the strap on the gas mask. ‘Last year, the Czech police found over four hundred and sixty labs, nationally. Those are just the ones we know about. It’s the tip of the iceberg, in all probability. Most are in small towns and the country, where the dealers can operate without fear of discovery. But we do get some in the city too. Žižkov has cleaned up its act over the years. But you can still get mugged after dark, coming back from having an artisan beer in a smart, hip bar. And you can always find a dealer, selling whatever your heart desires.’
‘How much does a gram of meth cost?’ George asked, wrinkling her nose at the coffee table that was heavily laden with overflowing ashtrays, dirty syringes, meth pipes and other drugs paraphernalia.
‘Pervitin – that’s what we call it. And it’s relatively cheap here. About fifty dollars for a gram. Two euros for a hit. Cheaper than coke and almost acceptable in a city where smoking weed and drinking heavily is nothing out of the ordinary. We just don’t have a problem with personal use, as long as people aren’t flaunting it under our noses.’
‘Is it not a Class A substance over here?’ Van den Bergen asked, rubbing his stomach and frowning, as though everything about that place was indigestible. He glanced over to the dirty window. Glimpsing the TV tower in the near distance.
Roman Teminova shook his head. ‘It’s a drug that has become embedded in our culture,’ he said. ‘The government used to give methamphetamine to our troops after World War II to keep them alert. During the Communist era, manufacturing the chemicals used in meth was big state business. Hydrochloric acid, lithium, acetone, toluene, used in paint thinners and brake fluid! Pseudoephedrine – that’s—’
‘Yes, I know what that is,’ George said. ‘It’s cold and flu meds, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Teminova said, smiling benignly, as though he was a teacher and George had said something clever in class. ‘Red phosphorous – the stuff you get on match heads. Sodium hydroxide that we use to dissolve road kill.’
‘My God!’ Van den Bergen said, taking out his blister pack of antacids. Appraising the filthy apartment. Seemingly thinking better of swallowing anything in that foul place and shoving the pack back in his pocket. He ran his hand over his neck. ‘No wonder people are getting ill and dying from this shit.’
‘Anhydrous ammonia,’ the Czech said, pointing to an empty canister on a windowsill behind the soiled sofa. ‘Know what that’s used for?’ He rocked back and forth on the heels of his dated loafers. Raised an eyebrow. His florid cheeks flushed an even deeper shade of red. ‘Fertiliser and strong cleaner. All, well, most of this stuff you can get hold of in DIY shops and builders’ merchants. It’s cheap to make and the profit margins are impressively high. Higher than coke, that’s for sure. And you can control the purity and output if you cook it yourself in a dump like this, or the much bigger lab we found in the basement of a farmhouse yesterday. Now you can see why it’s the drug of choice for our dealers.’
‘But why so many labs, here in the Czech Republic in particular?’ George asked. ‘Not Germany. Not the Netherlands or the UK. Users on the dance and gay scene are going crazy for the stuff there, but the gear is all imported from here. I don’t understand. You’re talking about mass-produced chemicals under Soviet rule. It’s over a decade since Communism fell.’
Teminova held his arm out to move her aside as an officer emerged from the bedroom, carrying several stacking boxes full of crystallised product. There was a gleam in the detective’s sharp blue eyes that spelled out precisely how delighted he was that this raid should have taken place with his Dutch counterpart present as a witness. Perhaps he had deliberately waited to conduct the search until that morning, when they had been scheduled to arrive in Prague.
‘Like I said,’ he continued. ‘We’ve lived with the drug for a long, long time. It used to be prescribed by our doctors for depression, ADHD, alcoholism, obesity … you name it. Meth was a cure-all. The only time it gets bad press is when some little turd blows their kitchen up or poisons the entire family with phosphine gas.’
‘Don’t you at least have some kind of regulation on the sale of pseudoephedrine?’ Van den Bergen asked. ‘Most countries do. We can’t buy Sudafed in the Netherlands at all anymore. I wish!’ He stuck the tip of his little finger inside his nostril and chuckled. ‘I haven’t been able to unblock my nose since a trip to the States in 1990. If I asked my pharmacist for it, she’d think I was trying to get high. You certainly can’t get it in industrial quantities in most of Europe.’
‘Poland,’ Teminova said, walking to the window and studying the view. ‘Dealers can just nip over the border and buy in bulk to their heart’s content. They bring it back here and le voilà! It’s no different from when I spent some time in the Met in the Nineties. The posh kids in Essex would drive to Hackney or Dalston to get what they wanted if they couldn’t get it in their village or tinpot town. No such thing as borders or barriers where drugs are concerned.’
George spied the cats being removed from the kitchen in evidence boxes. Perhaps she had drunk too much coffee at breakfast or was simply sleep-deprived; suddenly, she felt that the air was being sucked from her lungs with a strong vacuum. ‘I’ve got to get out of here,’ she told Van den Bergen, thrusting the gas mask into the Czech detective’s hands. ‘And we need to talk about Nikolay Bebchuck. But somewhere nicer. With artisan coffee or some home-brewed hipster shit.’
Cradling her cold Gambrinus beer, George sat on the bench in the Letna Park beer garden, drinking in the sight of an almost sunny downtown Prague, laid out beneath them like a colourful quilted throw – terracotta rooftops, elegant spires and pastel façades of a city that had been carefully moulded and fired in the clarifying heat and passion of the Renaissance; cooled and partially buried by the ideological stodge and concrete of the Soviet era; excavated in the last twenty-five years since the Velvet Revolution by a generation that had dared to reclaim their cultural heritage and vibrant birthplace from Moscow, as an adoptive child might rediscover exotic, bohemian roots, freeing herself from a suffocating and bland guardian. It was the first time George had been to Eastern Europe. Toying with Van den Bergen’s enormous foot underneath the picnic table, she was sure she could smell romance in the air.
‘What do you think of Prague?’ Teminova asked George.
‘Your beer’s shit and your sausage is too salty,’ she said, clinking glasses with the detective. Grinning when he met her declaration with a confused half-smile. ‘Nikolay Bebchuck. We didn’t fly five hundred miles to chat about the scenery.’
At her side, Van den Bergen took out his notebook. Started to sketch the canopy of trees above them.
The smile slid from Teminova’s face. ‘When we’ve closed down meth labs, many of the dealers mention his name during questioning. Bebchuck seems to be behind much of the illegal drugs trade in the Czech Republic – at least the bigger enterprises that are well co-ordinated. You’ll hear his name spoken in some of the whorehouses in Prague. Nikolay is quite the man about town when you want to shift women or product out of the country. I think he runs drugs and whores under a franchise model.’
George folded her beermat down the middle into two perfect portions. Ripped them apart with precision. ‘Please don’t use the word “whores” in front of me, Roman,’ she said. ‘It makes me a bit … stabby on account of my having a vagina.’
Van den Bergen trod heavily on her foot. Coughed uncomfortably.
‘You got a frog in your throat, Chief Inspector?’ she asked, turning with studied nonchalance towards her lover. ‘You wanna do something about that. Maybe drink your beer.’ Turned back to the Czech detective. ‘Where was I? Oh, yes. Working girl or just prostitute will do fine.’ She treated him to a perfect show of teeth. ‘So, Bebchuck supplies chem-drugs throughout Europe? And he’s into people trafficking. What do you know about him?’
Teminova said nothing. Toyed with the cuffs on his green tartan shirt. Blushing ferociously. George wondered if his flame-red cheeks might actually erupt.
‘Do you even know what he looks like?’ Van den Bergen asked.
‘No. There’s no way of knowing if he’s even real. We’ve never found anyone in our state records who could be him. Nobody seems to know a single thing about him, apart from the dealers and brothel-keepers. And even when threatened with prison sentences, they won’t talk. There’s an unbreakable code of silence.’
‘Europol and Interpol have no real details on the guy,’ Van den Bergen said. He turned to George. ‘I had Marie check. If he’s travelling around the Continent or further afield, he’s doing it under a completely different name with legit passport and papers.’
Sipping his beer, Teminova fell silent. George was certain he was avoiding making eye contact with her. Part of her was pleased. Part of her wished she could just make nice with strangers. It would be so much easier.
‘You think one of Bebchuck’s labs made the meth that’s killing your kids?’ he said, finally.
From his pocket, Van den Bergen pulled two specimen bags, each containing small white crystals. ‘George here got this while she was undercover at an Amsterdam nightclub,’ he said, poking at the first baggie with his long index finger. ‘My detective, Dirk, got the other in a gay sauna.’
Teminova raised his eyebrow. ‘And?’
‘I was told Nikolay was the dealer’s wholesale supplier,’ George said, draining her glass and wondering if it would be considered unprofessional to demand a second. She bit hungrily into the sausage, almost cold now. Spoke with her mouth still partially full. Realised her manners weren’t up to scratch and that Aunty Sharon would lay into her for being an uncouth pig. Covered her mouth with her hand, too desperate to get her words out to swallow. ‘And Elvis – I mean, Dirk was told the same thing. Nikolay Bebchuck’s name is all over town. Now, we can’t work out if he’s some homophobic lunatic, just out to poison and kill Dutch men who like a bit of hot cock on a Saturday night.’ She studied her half-eaten sausage and set it down onto the picnic table, suddenly losing her appetite. ‘Or if there’s a problem with supply.’
Shaking his head, Teminova said, ‘Funnily enough, we’ve had no reported deaths whatsoever from lead poisoning for at least five years. There haven’t even been any other crystal-meth-related incidents apart from the usual petty theft by users, looking for money for their next fix. Not even the odd OD. The nearest we’ve got to that, like I said, is cooks poisoning themselves with phosphine gas or blowing their kitchens up. And that’s not a regular occurrence. These people aren’t that stupid.’
Van den Bergen dropped his biro onto the table and groaned. ‘Then we’ve hit another dead end. Can we not arrange for an analysis of your local product and compare it to ours? Maybe this Bebchuck is deliberately shipping low-grade product outside the Czech Republic.’
Teminova took the baggies into his hands, holding them up against the sunlight, where the dull crystals started to shine like melting ice. ‘I’ll get our best chemists on it straight away.’
They sat on the bed in their hotel room, sipping gin from the minibar, drinking in the view of the historic rooftops and listening to the infernal bong of some irritating church or other not far away. George jumped when Van den Bergen’s phone rang.
‘Speak,’ he said, pulling his T-shirt over his naked crotch, as though the caller could see down the phone.
‘Oh. Really? I see. Yes. I’ll tell her.’
Ending the call, Van den Bergen turned to George, his dark eyebrows almost arched into question marks above eyes that now sparkled with intrigue.
‘Well?’ George asked, setting her drink on her belly.
‘Our meth does have a faulty composition, containing fatal doses of lead, but it’s not from here,’ he said. ‘It isn’t Czech at all!’
‘Where the hell is it from, then?’
‘Mexico.’