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.”
I didn’t want to argue about it. I was already deeper inside his head than I ever wanted to be. The thought of Scrub having sex with anybody was one I wished I could edit out of my brain forever. “You did hurt one of them,” I reminded him, and he groaned in anguish, squeezing his eyes tight shut.
Damjohn, it turned out, was a much better seducer than Rich would ever be. He’d reeled Rich in with the usual banal, irresistible inducements of money and sex and then worked systematically to compromise him to the point where he couldn’t say no to anything. Listening to Rich talk about it, I realized that there was nothing particularly personal about this; it was something Damjohn did automatically, partly because it was useful for business but mainly because it gave him pleasure. He’d even made a casual attempt to do it to me, just in passing, when he’d offered me time with the girls in lieu of cash money. And then once more, with feeling, when he’d offered me the same deal that Mephistopheles offered Faust. I wondered if it came from being an informer and agent provocateur in a former life. Maybe it helped you to feel good about yourself if you proved to your own satisfaction that every man had a price, and most had one that was lower than yours.
In Rich’s case, Damjohn had seen that the man’s true Achilles heel had more to do with security than with sex. Being a procurer of young girls for London brothels tickled Rich’s nostalgie de la boue, but he never once dreamed of quitting his job at the Bonnington; he clung to the steady pay and the safe shallows of the nine-to-five. So that was the area that Damjohn worked on. Every time they talked, he brought the conversation back around to what Rich did for a living and where he did it. He mused about paying a visit to the archive himself, which Rich tried hard to discourage him from. He asked Rich how much the collection was worth, how it was stored, how it was protected.