‘Okay, girls,’ Maritza said. ‘We’re here.’
George jolted awake, horrified by the realisation that she had nodded off. The other transportistas were all yawning and stretching. Some had been sprawled on top of the crates that contained the guns and were now just sitting up. Heart thudding uncontrollably, George looked between her feet and was relieved to see her bag still there – still zipped with its contents apparently still undiscovered.
Scratching at her matted black hair, Maritza dialled a number on her mobile phone. Spoke in rapid-fire Spanish to somebody, nodding. Gouging at her scar with a filthy fingernail.
‘Jesus. I’ve got to pee,’ Paola said, swigging from an almost empty water bottle.
‘That can wait!’ Maritza said, ending her call and shoving her phone into one of the pockets of her cargo trousers. ‘El jefe wants the guns safely stored immediately before sunrise drags the cops out of their beds.’
The shutters were up and George drank in the fresh air, almost cool while the tropical sun was a mere yellow-grey streak on the horizon. With her rucksack safely on her back, she grabbed one handle on a crate of AK-47s as Paola grabbed the other. They clambered gingerly out of the truck. It was the first real glimpse George had had of Mexico apart from the view of the flat green blanket that was the Yucatan jungle from the air on the flight over. That felt like a lifetime ago. Now, in the half-light of dawn, she saw that they had parked on what might normally be a busy street of shops and bars, some built in a faux-colonial style and painted in pale colours. Bunting hung outside one or two places, suggesting a hearty Mexican welcome for whatever tourists might throng the place during wakeful hours. But that early in the morning, the town seemed deserted like an abandoned film set, given authenticity by the tangle of overhead electrical cables that snaked their way towards the green mounds of the mountains in the distance. Under normal circumstances, George would have loved to have visited this place and the nearby ruins she had heard tell of as a tourist. But for now, she was anything but.
‘This weighs a tonne,’ she said to Paola, lugging the crate through double wooden doors into a courtyard.
‘If I don’t get to a toilet, I’m going to piss my pants,’ Paola said.
They followed their colleagues to a store, the entrance to which was concealed behind a heavy, leafy curtain of cornflower-blue morning glories, which were just opening as the sunlight intensified. A stocky, grubby-looking man held back the climber with one hand to let them through; held a cigarette in the other.
‘Hurry up,’ he said. ‘Get this lot stacked and locked inside fifteen or the boss won’t pay your ugly asses. Half in my storeroom. Half to stay on the truck for the hacienda. Those are the orders.’
As she passed him, George could smell a rancid tang of body odour and stale booze and cigarettes on the man. His attention was focused steadfastly on her breasts. He breathed out a plume of smoke contemplatively towards her bosom. If it were possible to see in somebody’s eyes a disregard for women as anything other than an easy fuck, she could see it in this man’s. Reflexively, she sucked her teeth at him. Remembered she wasn’t in Southeast London. Would this guy even realise that she had slighted him? Would he care? No. Bollocks to him, anyway. She waved her pinkie at him. He was oblivious to that, too.
Together, she and Paola heaved the crate onto a pile.
‘El jefe wants you to gather in the bar,’ the man said, gesturing at the glazed doors on the opposite side of the courtyard with his cigarette. ‘You’ll get paid half what you’re owed in there. Half when you get to the hacienda. And when you get there, he’s got another job for you.’
Maritza led the way and her transportistas followed in an orderly line. George contemplated the prospect of meeting Nikolay – an international trafficker that she was supposed to be on good terms with. Jesus. I’m going to die. He’ll take one look at me, realise I’m full of shit and that will be the end of that. I’ll be plugged with bullets like those Guatemalan cops and dumped in the hills. Christ, Letitia. If you’re dead and watching over me, now’s your chance to make up for being a shitty mother.
With the rising sun brighter by the minute and her body more charged with adrenalin by the second, George could feel the temperature rising to furnace-like levels. She trooped inside, scanning the surprisingly well-furnished bar for a man who resembled a drug lord. The place seemed empty. The ceiling-to-floor poles in the middle of a dancefloor told George everything she needed to know.
‘Well. Where is he?’ Maritza asked the grubby man, grabbing him brusquely by his shirt collar and hoisting him with apparent ease off the ground. ‘I was told he’d be here to pay me in person. I deal with el jefe. Right? Where is he?’
‘El cocodrilo?’
‘Yes, fucking el cocodrilo. Or Nikolay. Whatever you want to call him.’
‘He was here yesterday, inspecting the new Russian girls that have just come in. But he’s had to go on ahead to deal with some other business. He’ll meet you at the hacienda. He wants you to go to the landing strip in the mountains.’
Maritza’s glare burned with naked aggression. The musculature of her tattooed arms was a match for any man. ‘Where’s our money? I show up with the guns, as arranged and I get you? You sack of shit!’ She threw the man onto the floor, sending a bar stool flying. ‘I don’t do business with some underling who hasn’t seen a bar of soap in years.’
Sudden movement and a sharp inhalation of breath in the corner caught George’s attention. She squinted through the murk and spotted two Caucasian women, seated in a red leather booth. One blonde. One brunette. Though it was no later than 5.30 a.m., they were already scantily clad in sparkling bikini tops and hot pants. Their platform shoes were visible beneath the table.
‘Give us our money!’ Maritza yelled at the man, who was back on his feet now, clutching at his head.
‘Okay, okay, you crazy bitch,’ the man said. ‘I was going to pay you anyway. El cocodrilo said you should hang out here today, get something to eat and drink and get some rest. Meet him at the airstrip tomorrow for your next job.’
As he reached into a cash tin behind the bar, Maritza pulled a pistol from her waistband. Deftly clicked the safety off. ‘That had better be money you’re pulling out there, pal, or it will be the last thing you ever do.’
The man treated the transportista to a withering glance. ‘Jesus. You’re not cool, do you know that? Not cool at all.’ He withdrew a tight, fat roll of cash and flung it to her.
She grabbed it cleanly from the air. Turned to the other women. ‘Use the restroom. Freshen up. Help yourselves to whatever you want from the bar, girls.’ Turned back to the grubby barkeeper. ‘Bring us some food. We want breakfast. Big. Hot. Fresh. Got it?’
While her fellow transportistas barked their orders at the man, George grabbed a Coke and approached the booth where the two women were seated. Close up, she could see that they were no more than eighteen or nineteen, though their heavy make-up suggested they were older.
‘Hello,’ she said in English, wedging her bottom onto the booth’s table. ‘Where are you girls from?’
The blonde raised an eyebrow and glanced at the brunette, as though she was seeking guidance.
‘You speak English?’ the brunette asked. She spoke with a heavy Eastern European accent. Pointed to George’s tattoos with a barely concealed grimace. ‘But you look like them.’
‘I am one of them,’ George said. ‘But I’m half English and used to work for Nikolay in Europe. What are you doing in a Palenque brothel at the crack of dawn, dressed like you’re ready to party?’
The blonde girl spoke quickly to her compatriot in a tongue George was certain was either Russian or Polish. Her bloodshot eyes implied either sleeplessness or tearfulness or both. She was shaking her head, shooting George with a mistrustful glance.
The brunette lit a cigarette, dragged deeply on it, exhaling the smoke over George. She grabbed George’s Coke bottle from her, taking a hearty gulp. ‘My friend Rozalina here doesn’t think we should speak to you.’
‘I’m just being friendly,’ George said, holding the palms of her hands high. ‘You both seem a long way from home. Like me. What’s your story?’
Chattering away in the unfamiliar tongue, the blonde mentioned the name Nikolay and followed it seemingly with a stream of abuse, judging by her tone. She pulled the cup of her bikini to the side to reveal a florid bite-mark on her surgically enhanced breast.
The brunette sighed. ‘We are from Russia. I am Yana.’ Flicked her ash mournfully into the ashtray. ‘And we are sitting here because our last customers of the night went only a half-hour ago.’
‘You’re working girls?’ George asked, staring at the cigarette and wondering if it would be morally wrong to cadge a smoke when she was supposed to be giving up.
‘No!’ Yana said, dolefully staring at the poles in the middle of the dancefloor. ‘We met Nikolay’s man in Moscow. He told us Nikolay lived in Amsterdam but had enterprises everywhere. We paid him thousands to come to the US in search of a new life. It started out well enough. We ended up on a cargo ship for a month, travelling to the Dominican Republic. At least we had crossed the Atlantic.’ She scratched at her crotch area. Sighed again. ‘But when we got to Mexico, thinking we would just travel north over the border into the US and get jobs as hairdressers, Nikolay’s men took our passports.’ She turned to Rozalina and spoke in Russian. There was a brief exchange between the girls. Rozalina started to tremble, then weep silently. Her narrow shoulders heaved with grief.
‘They made us start to work in brothels as dancers and hookers. When we said no, they beat us.’ She pointed to the ghost of a black eye beneath the heavy foundation and eye make-up. ‘They charge the men five hundred dollars a time with all of us Eastern European girls.’
‘All of us?’
The girl inclined her head towards the ceiling. ‘There are about ten more girls upstairs, sleeping it off. Every day, we start at about 11 a.m. The men come from all over. Tourists. Officials. Men who can afford to pay large sums like that in cash. I listen to the conversations if they speak in English because I studied English back home, thinking I would need it when I got to the US! What a joke.’
‘What sort of things do they talk about?’ George asked, pushing her Coke bottle towards the girl in a show of solidarity.
‘Drugs, mostly. They think we don’t understand. But I understand fine. Nikolay himself has occasionally come in here to do business with big shot American drug dealers from New York and Chicago. Places like that. He has a lab in the jungle that makes meth, apparently. But if you’re in one of the groups of transportistas that he likes to employ, you must know about that.’
‘Sure.’ George nodded disingenuously. Committed every word to memory, wondering how she could relay this information to Van den Bergen without alerting potentially corrupt local cops to her whereabouts. ‘Do you know where the meth lab is?’ she asked breezily.
Rozalina shook her head. Lit another cigarette. She smelled of smoke and too much cloying perfume with the underlying but pungent scent of sex evident as she crossed and uncrossed her legs. ‘Of course not. We’re stuck here in Palenque. We have been for months, now. Our money’s gone. Our passports have gone. Our hope of a fresh starts in the States is just a dream. And we have nothing to do with drugs, though I know they sell them behind the bar if you know who to ask and how to ask. The guys smoke weed and meth in the rooms when they’re with us girls. It makes them aggressive. It’s horrible.’
Again, Yana snapped at her and slapped her own mouth, as if admonishing her friend for speaking out. Rozalina patted the girl’s leg reassuringly.
‘Anyway, when the drug dealers from the US come, they have a good time with us girls at Nikolay’s expense,’ she said. ‘We are like hospitality. If he says we must go with a man, we go. And the time one of the girls refused, she got thrown to Nikolay’s pet crocodiles, apparently.’
‘That’s why they also call him el cocodrilo,’ George offered, joining the dots.
‘Yes.’
She shuddered visibly, as did Rozalina, who mouthed the words ‘el cocodrilo’ in near silence.
‘Have you thought about going to the police?’ George asked.
The Russian girl shook her head. Tugged fretfully at her long dark locks. ‘There are police who come in here as customers. You don’t know the straight guys from the crooked.’ She frowned. Her mouth seemed to harden. She folded her long, bruised arms. ‘You’re one of them,’ she said. ‘How come you’re asking me if we’re been to the authorities? Are you trying to catch me out? Are you one of Nikolay’s spies?’
Yana turned to Rozalina and said something that made Rozalina’s blue eyes harden.
‘No!’ George said, realising she had revealed too much. ‘I’m not spying.’ Searching for an excuse for her cross-examination. The last thing she needed to do was draw attention to herself in front of Maritza, who was busy about a pile of chocolate-dipped churros but who, George reasoned, would instantly swap her breakfast for the thrill of a kill and an extra share of the money. ‘It’s just that we transportistas are independent. You know? We’re not slaves or trafficked like you two. We work for Nikolay but, hey! We’re all women, aren’t we? I don’t have to like that you’re being exploited.’
Pursing her lips, Yana sized George up. Lit another cigarette with shaking hands. ‘You don’t have to like it?’ she asked. She laughed mirthlessly. Leaned in with a suddenly stern expression, lowering her voice so that she could not be overheard. ‘Now I know you’re lying. Because that pig who runs the bar told us that about ten Salvadoran girls from another of Nikolay’s brothels managed to escape and ran into the hills to an airstrip in the middle of nowhere, hoping to get a flight back to El Salvador. But they got caught. He said they’ve been rounded up and taken prisoner. And you know what?’
George didn’t like the expression on the Russian girl’s face. It had a fatalistic air of bitter resignation to it. ‘What?’
‘Before you lot showed up, he said your next job would be to travel to the airstrip to meet Nikolay, where you’ll be expected to chop the heads off the escaped girls.’
Opening and closing her mouth, George felt the Coke fizzing unpleasantly in the pit of her stomach. Beheading runaway trafficked women. This was not something she had ever signed up to do in the course of trying to track down her missing father. She swallowed hard. And this Nikolay would definitely be there. Maritza would be expecting her to be on familiar terms with him. Shit. This is getting worse by the minute, she thought. I’ve got to see this through but if I do, I’m definitely either going to have to kill or get killed. Why did I sign up to this? Why?
‘Oh,’ she simply said in answer to the Russian girl.
‘Because that’s what he does,’ Yana continued. ‘Nikolay has earned his nicknames because he’s a brutal, lying monster. El cocodrilo. El silenciador. Human life means nothing to him. He steals everything from you. Your money, your body, your future, your voice.’
Standing, George realised she was attracting attention to herself by talking to the Russian girls. Yana now had her arm around a sobbing Rozalina. Maritza and the other transportistas were looking over at them. But something had struck a chord with George.
‘Hang on a minute. Did you say one of Nikolay’s names was el silenciador?’ She felt the colour drain from her face. ‘And that he lives in Amsterdam?’
‘Yes.’
‘The Silencer?’
‘Yes.’ Yana nodded and blew a plume of smoke into the air.
George stumbled backwards as the enormity of what the Russian girl had said hit home. There was only one Silencer. And he would recognise Georgina McKenzie in a single, rotten heartbeat.