The Scioneer (7 page)

Crystal
buried these feelings, and she and Lek continued to meet privately.
They visited the National Gallery’s Forgotten Facebook Exhibition
and stared at photos of people partying at the start of the
Millennium, blissfully unaware of the superbugs, the energy crisis,
the gang violence in their midst. They gorged themselves on Retox
meat-sticks and full-fat wheatgerm shakes, while playing in the
gas-jets and the sudoku stones in Leicester Square. They ice–skated
on the Thames in the height of summer, when Smegcorp closed off an
entire section of the river for a marketing campaign and froze it
solid. For a time, Lek and Crystal lived the London life instead of
merely existing.

And then,
one afternoon, Lek didn’t show up for their date. He left her
standing at the Centrepoint Retro Roller Rink for half an hour,
until she grew tired of waiting and drove home. The thoughts she
had fought so hard to suppress over the weeks bubbled to the
surface again. She never gave him the opportunity to explain
himself and just like the fresh cut on her finger, she drew the
pain into herself and tried to ignore it.

Hearing
his name again after so long brought those bitter memories flooding
back. The man on the phone had seemed to be telling her to expect a
visit from Lek. But how could he know? And why now?

The sound of
the doorbell shook her out of her reverie.

Chapter
10

A
river
boat cruised along
the Thames, green water streaming from its paddles, as it cut its
way through the algae and weeds. From his office high above the
Square Mile, Pechev could just about make out the tourists on the
top-deck taking digisnaps of the faded grandeur of London. In spite
of all the bad press, Pechev didn’t believe the city had fallen to
ruin in the time that he had lived there – quite the opposite – he
saw a city that had evolved, adapting to the changing flow of the
socio-economic climate, the environmentalist movement and the
unforeseen shifts in its weather system. He for one enjoyed
watching the sun setting through the Icelandic volcanic ash and the
methane clouds over Hounslow Industrial Plant. He enjoyed the buzz
of a city that teetered on the cliff edge of civilisation, fighting
to retain its standing as a world leader
in the arts
and commerce, education and entertainment, fashion, finance, and of
course tourism
. In the
cool of his office, he watched the city below him sweltering in the
early afternoon heat, and settled down in his chair to take his
siesta. He picked up the phone on his desk and asked his PA to
cancel his meeting with a prominent lobbyist – Pechev had other
matters to think about than gambling laws. He leaned back and
tucked his disfigured hand inside his jacket, to quell the itch in
the stub of his phantom finger. He found it bizarre that after so
many years, he still had the sensation that his middle finger was
attached and still functioning. You carry your past with you,
whether you want to or not, he thought to himself.

Lyubomir
Pechev was born Aloysha Petrov in Kalinovka, in the same wooden
house on the banks of the Volga where his father, and his father
before him, had also been born. It seemed a life struggling against
hardship had already been mapped out for him when his grandmother
was forced to use a kitchen knife to cut the umbilical cord
strangling his tiny blue body as he came into the world. 1986 was
an historical year for Mother Russia as Salyut was replaced by Mir,
but in t
he decade that followed, the crumbling of the
country’s economic and political structures wreaked havoc on the
Union as a whole
. Unlike
the annual spring snow-melt in the Urals, which brought mountain
water flooding into the river valley where the tiny fishing village
of Kalinovka stood, it would take many years before that change
filtered down from the high peaks of Moscow and Nizhniy Novgorod,
Russia’s capitals of business and commerce. Life in Kalinovka
continued in the same way as it had since the time of the Empire
and long before the Revolution, unchanged in years, as its
population which never topped two thousand continued to eke out its
survival from its fishing port and the potassium mines in nearby
Shelanga. Aloysha’s father worked in the eel pickling factory, his
mother cleaned the Church of St Stepan every Thursday morning to
bring in a few extra roubles towards their meagre existence. It was
assumed that Aloysha would find a similar position when his time
came, although his father had grand hopes for his only child
becoming a doctor, a solicitor, or a man of business in a city
somewhere far from the smell of fish, potassium processing, and
wood smoke. It seemed that Aloysha had plans to break the mould
too, for by the time his was two years of age he was able to read
lines from the few books his family owned and scribble his own name
in Cyrillic. While his father worked long shifts to keep the family
afloat, Aloysha’s mother schooled her son with passages from the
Bible and with the permission of the parish priest, taught him the
basics of musical progression on the church organ for an hour every
week after she had finished cleaning the steps of St Stepan’s. By
the age of four, in spite, or perhaps because of his impoverished
upbringing, Aloysha Petrov could read and write like a boy of ten,
and was able to play hymns and those pieces of classical music his
tiny hand-span allowed, like a virtuoso. It was clear that he was a
prodigy. His father had already begun to make enquiries in the
neighbouring towns about furthering his education, since Kalinovka
was obviously too small a pond for a fish of his size. Late into
the night while their son slept, Petr and Tishka would talk about
his future and their finances, and spend hours counting the roubles
saved in the old coffee pot, taking a few coins from one pile to
put on another.

In the
end, it was all academic. Nobody could have foreseen what happened
to young Aloysha. One freezing afternoon in November as he made his
way home from school through the streets of Kalinovka, hand in hand
with his mother, a battered Kamaz van pulled up next to them and
the driver leaned out of the window to ask for directions. As he
explained that he had taken a wrong turning off the Perm motorway
and was trying to find his way back, his accomplice, who had been
hiding behind a tree, crept forward. Before Tishka Pavel had
registered the creaking of his boots in the snow, he had clubbed
her over the head with a steel-wire sap and left her for dead. A
screaming Aloysha was bundled into the back of the van, knocked out
with chloroform and driven away to a new life.

It was a
professional outfit, hired by a company working out of Moscow and
St Petersburg whose business was human traffic. Their trade was
primarily sex-workers: pretty young girls with no future in Russia
who dreamed of a better life in Western Europe, as it was still
known then, or the USA and were happy to be swept away with
promises of a job, a resident’s card, and the chance to own their
own television set, only to find themselves within two months
locked in cages during the day and turning tricks by night. The
head of the company was Herat Taloquan, an Afghani who had made his
fortune buying weapons from the Russians and selling them to the
highest bidder during the Soviet war in his home country. He was a
good looking man - long black hair, piercing green eyes - who
enjoyed the finer things in life: women, cars, casinos - so when he
was offered a job working for the Russian acquaintances he had made
in the arms trade, he jumped at the chance to escape the desert
sands and bask instead in the luxurious glow of Moscow’s
underworld. Taloquan was born for the role, using his skills as a
salesman to raise a small three-man operation into an international
trafficking empire. Over time, he turned his hand to drugs,
gambling, protection – he even dabbled in military intelligence –
but his true forte, his love, was still selling women, for he saw
them not as people, but as commodities. He thought nothing of
buying and selling them just as he had with the tanks and missiles
ten years earlier. He had never considered the idea of selling
children, until one of his employees joked about the innocence of
his latest batch of fresh-faced girls. From that moment onwards,
Herat Taloquan saw the future in the bright young eyes of every
child he passed on the street. He cast out his net and waited
patiently for the right deal, without letting his plans affect his
day to day work. In time, word reached him of a reclusive steel
magnate by the name of Vlad Pechev and his wife, who were desperate
to find an heir for their millions, since they couldn’t produce one
of their own.

Taloquan
had his men set up a meeting which turned out to be nothing more
than a formality. A fee was discussed and agreed upon, as were
Pechev’s stipulations: the child had
to be male; Russian, naturally; under the age of
five and in perfect health. Pechev asked for nothing specific with
regard to the boy’s appearance, but he did insist that the child
was highly intelligent: ‘a prodigy’ were his exact
words.

Taloquan
spent eight months looking for the child and was about to lower his
fee in return for an autistic boy in Tver who was able to draw
entire skylines from memory, until he heard reports of a four year
old in a tiny village near Kazan, regularly playing organ recitals
for the entire village.

After
some research, Taloquan was happy, and so arranged for two of his
employees to pick the child up and advised the steel tycoon to have
his money ready by the following week. Everything would have gone
to plan, had Pechev not died two days later of a massive coronary
attack, probably brought on by the stress of dealing with a known
sex-trafficker and former arms-dealer.

The deal
collapsed there and then. It was a problem for Taloquan, and not
one he felt equipped to deal with, never having sold the soul of
one so young before. Had it been a woman, he would simply have had
her killed and the body dumped. Another victim of the Russian
mafia. But the boy, the boy.... it didn’t seem right taking a male
life, and certainly not the life of so gifted a child. Taloquan
resolved to give the boy a week, while he decided on his fate, and
had Aloysha chained in one of the cells in the basement of his
twenty-bedroomed manor-house in the countryside outside
Moscow.

Weeks
became months. Taloquan renamed him on the first anniversary of his
arrival, and presented him with a framed copy of his new birth
certificate. From that moment on, he was no longer to be referred
to as ‘Aloysha’ or ‘the boy’, but rather Lyubomir Pechev, after
Taloquan’s first borzoi hunting dog when he moved to Russia, and
the boy’s late adoptive father respectively.

Months
became years, and as Lyubomir grew, so Taloquan grew more attached
to him and treated him more and more like a son of his own. In him
he began to see the future of his company. The boy was smart and
sharp, with an incredible head for names and numbers, and Taloquan
vowed to bring him into the business when he was old enough: ten or
eleven perhaps. Lyubomir played the part of an obedient child,
content to sit at Taloquan’s grand piano and churn out classical
music while his master worked at his computer, capitalising on the
new age of business dawning over the internet. Deep down however,
Lyubomir remembered the cries and screams of the women who had been
locked downstairs in the cells next to his, and while his own
living conditions might have improved over the years, he never once
forgot what he was: a prisoner.

He
chanced his first escape when he was eight years old, slipping out
of his room when his keeper was distracted. He calmly walked
straight out of the house, across the frozen ornamental gardens and
into the woods as though he were off for an afternoon stroll. He
was picked up two hours later, when the dogs caught him and Boris,
the gamekeeper brought him home to a genuinely disappointed
Taloquan.

‘After
all I have done for you, Lyubomir.’

‘My name
is Aloysha Petrov and always will be,’ said the boy, in a measured
tone, and although he did not understand its meaning, he copied a
gesture he had seen American actors make in the videos he was
allowed to watch in his room. He petulantly raised the middle
finger of his right hand to Herat Taloquan.

Without a
word, Taloquan took him by the arm and marched him into the
kitchens where he picked up the cook’s cleaver.

‘This will hurt
me more than it will hurt you, Lyubomir.’

He
chopped the finger off with one
swipe.

Chapter
11

‘I don’t
want to see you, Lek
Gorski.’ Crystal peered at his distorted face through the
fisheye peephole of her front door, ‘Now fuck off.’

‘Please can I
come in Crystal? I’m running out of places to go. I need your
help.’

Crystal
took a deep
breath and
against her better judgement, she opened the door. She was shocked
at what she saw. Never had Lek looked so vulnerable. She bit her
lip, shook her head and let him in.

‘You
look… awful, Lek’ she said, taking in his wild eyes and tousled
hair, not to mention the XXL gym-strip and giant spring-boks he was
wearing. ‘What are you doing here? What’s going on?’

‘Can I trust
you Crystal?’ Lek asked the question so abruptly, it sounded like
an accusation.

She
immediately thought about the phone call, but answered, ‘Yes. You
know you can.’

‘I’ve got
to be careful,’ he said, striding into the room. ‘I’m on the
run.’