The Darkness Gathers (30 page)

Jeffrey held Lydia against him with one strong arm, bracing himself against being thrown around the car with the other. She occasionally slipped into a troubled doze, in spite of the totally worn-out shock absorbers and the rough ride. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed as they rode in silence.

“It is good we are here,” the driver said finally, pointing ahead to the lights of a city on the horizon. “Soon we run out of gas.”

Since the collapse of the tentative economy in 1997 and the resultant riots and chaos, Albania, from all accounts, was a disaster area. Hermetically sealed from the rest of the world since 1944, then enduring the fall of communism, the rush of Western capitalism, and the subsequent crash, the country and its people had been devastated. What Lydia saw as they pulled into Vlorë was a city in ruin, barely functional. It was a city of ancient greatness and its past grandeur still echoed in its battered streets and uneven buildings, with their shot-out windows, angry graffiti, and bloody doorways. A dilapidated mosque with a crumbling minaret sagged on its frame; an old woman struggled up the remains of a sidewalk, a donkey trailing behind her. Lydia could smell the stench of an open sewer.

“I think you missed your calling,” said Jeffrey. “You should have been a travel agent.”

“Do you know somewhere we can stay?” she asked the driver, ignoring Jeffrey.

“Yes, yes. I will take you to the best hotel in Vlorë.”

Lydia couldn’t imagine what that meant.

The hotel lobby was dark except for the light coming from several candles placed throughout the space; a thin woman with limp blond hair sat behind the counter, staring at them without much interest as they entered. Gabriel approached her and said a few words to her in Albanian. She narrowed her eyes at him and answered in a dull monotone. Gabriel turned to Lydia and Jeffrey.

“There’s no electricity for three days. No hot water.”

“Why not?”

“There was a car accident. Someone crashed into one of the power lines. No one knows when there will be electricity again.”

Some men sat around a table near a bar in the corner of the lobby, drinking what Lydia thought must be raki, the national drink—a kind of poor man’s grappa. They were shabbily dressed, except for one young man who wore wire-rimmed glasses, a Western-style shirt, tailored pants, and what looked to be expensive shoes, from what Lydia could see in the dim light. They stared at Lydia and Jeffrey with a kind of suspicious, although not malicious, interest.

“It’s fine,” Lydia said to Gabriel, knowing that they were not going to find any place better and not wanting to drive around the city trying. “Get yourself a room, as well. We’ll pay.”

“No, no. My brother lives here. I will go to stay with him and come back for you in the morning.”

Lydia nodded and he handed her a key. He held on to it for a second, and when she looked up at him, he said quietly, “Lock the door before you sleep and keep all your valuables in your pockets. You are never safe here.”

“Thank you,” she said, discreetly handing him five ten-dollar bills folded in half.

Lydia felt as though they had stepped back in time as the woman, dressed in what looked like a peasant costume—long, heavy woolen skirt and tunic covered by a soiled white apron—her hair in a loose bun, with strands escaping and glowing in the candlelight like spiderwebs, led them up a hallway by candlelight. She opened the door for Lydia and Jeffrey and Lydia handed her the fifteen dollars for the cost of the room—a fee she knew was exorbitantly inflated because they were Westerners. The woman left the candle with them and walked back down the hall without a word.

Lydia was glad they only had a candle for light, not wanting to examine the room too closely. A double bed sagged like a hammock in the middle of the room. A wooden chair looked sad and rickety beside a window where the moonlight shone through. The adjoining bathroom, a five-star luxury in a place like this, was passably clean, if she tried to ignore the faint odor.

“This is nice,” said Jeffrey, sinking into the bed, not even bothering to take his clothes off.

“Don’t get comfortable,” she said.

“Why not?”

“We only have a couple of hours to find that pickup spot.”

A
s medieval as their hotel had seemed, the Paradiso was as modern a nightclub as could be found in any major city in the world. As Lydia and Jeffrey had struck out onto the rutted streets, its neon sign had been like a beacon in the darkened city. Loud music was leaking out the door, which was guarded by two burly men with shaved heads and gold chains. A white SUV-cum-stretch limousine was parked out front. Women who were clearly prostitutes paraded up and down the block, passing in front of the crumbling, graffiti-riven concrete wall next to the club. They seemed extremely young to Lydia. One with bleach-blond hair and a hot pink Lycra dress had barely developed breasts and hips, but she blew a kiss to Jeffrey.

A twenty-dollar bill got Lydia and Jeffrey through the door. “Americans?” asked one of the beefy bouncers. Lydia nodded and the man smiled enthusiastically. “Welcome!”

The bar was lined with American and European brands of liquor and cigarettes. Lydia wasn’t surprised that those companies had wasted no time in getting their products into the depressed country; with the First World becoming so health-conscious, they were always looking for new markets that cared more for escapist pleasure than long life. A heavy techno beat dominated the large space, which was crowded with people and filled with smoke. The dance floor heaved with bodies. Jeffrey ordered two straight Stolis from the bar, and they found a corner where they could watch the show.

On a stage above the dance floor, cheaply, scantily clad women gyrated listlessly. Occasionally, two or three of them would walk down a narrow flight of stairs on the side of the stage and move into the crowd, which was comprised almost entirely of men. More girls replaced them on the stage. Lydia then noticed that those who walked into the crowd would pair up with one of the men and disappear into the back of the club. After they had watched this ritual a number of times, Lydia and Jeffrey followed.

They trailed a thin young girl whose badly dyed black hair revealed at least an inch of sandy blond roots and a man so heavy that the floorboards creaked audibly beneath his feet and the back of whose head had three chins. He wore the most hideous-possible powder blue polyester suit. The dandruff on his shoulders glowed in the hallway’s black light. Lydia tried to imagine a dollar figure that would make it all right to have physical contact with him, couldn’t come up with one, and cringed as the man placed a heavily ringed hand on the girl’s fragile neck. The hallway was narrow and seemed to go on forever before the couple disappeared ahead of them.

Lydia and Jeffrey were stopped by another bouncer at the velvet curtain through which the couple had passed. Lydia couldn’t be sure whether it was a different man from the one at door or not, for they all looked so similar with their shaved heads and gold chains. But his attitude was far less welcoming. “Private,” he growled. When Lydia handed him a fifty-dollar bill, he nodded to another bouncer, and they found themselves flanked and about to be escorted from the club.

Like a guardian angel, Gabriel appeared from behind one of the curtains and said a few magic words in Albanian, and the men seemed to relax. “They are my friends,” he said in English. And then he looked at Lydia and Jeffrey. “I’ve been waiting for you.” He led them away behind the curtain to a quiet table.

“Why have you come here?” he asked when they were seated, leaning in close to them. His breath was rank, and Lydia noticed that his teeth were brown and crooked. The face that had seemed sweet and boyish, peppered with freckles, was more hard-edged and tired, older than she had thought.

“Just looking for a good time,” Lydia answered, not sure how well they could trust him.

“That’s ‘bullshit’—isn’t that what the Americans say?” he said, curling his mouth into some expression halfway between smile and sneer.

She looked around and noted with slight distaste the couple they had followed into the lounge. The girl was engaged in a lackluster lap dance, her hands caressing her companion’s fat head, her eyes dull and staring off into the distance. Several other couples were engaged in the same activity. And Lydia noted that there was yet another velvet-curtained doorway at the far end of the room. She didn’t have to wonder what happened if the men elected to be escorted through that doorway. Apparently at the Paradiso, there were levels of debauchery, pleasure for every budget.

“Why do you care what we’re doing here?” asked Jeffrey.

“Maybe I can help you,” he answered with a nonchalant shrug.

“Why would you want to help us?”

He flipped a Marlboro from a soft pack he removed from his pocket. He held the pack out to Lydia and she took one, ignoring a scowl from Jeffrey. Gabriel lighted it for her with the flourish of a silver Zippo. “I like your American dollars,” he answered easily.

Lydia regarded him for second, trying to weigh what they had to lose by trusting him versus what he could tell them or show them that they might not be able to find out on their own. She decided the gamble might be worth the risk.

“Who owns this place?” she asked.

“The same people who own everything. The Mafia, as you call them. Not the Italians … the Albanian mob. They control the country now. There is no government here anymore. Even those in power are only puppets of the mob,” he said. He had a peculiar way about him, at once grandiose and insecure, as though he were pretending to be a man he wasn’t and lived in fear of being discovered.

“These women, where do they come from?”

“From the villages, mostly. They are simple, you know, not smart,” he said, tapping his temple. “They think that they will have jobs as waitresses in the city, make money for their families. But then they become prostitutes.”

“By force or by their own free will?”

“Who can say? Some claim it is by force, but how can you trust the word of a whore, eh? But once they’ve become whores, they can never go back to their families. Even if a woman is raped in Albania, she is considered dirty. She might even be killed by her husband or her brothers.” He spoke without judgment. This was the world, as Gabriel knew it, and he didn’t seem to have an opinion about it one way or the other. Lydia was sure they couldn’t really trust him, but she figured as long as they had American dollars to give him, he’d tell her what she wanted to know, and take her where she wanted to go.

“Does the name Nathan Quinn mean anything to you?”

He shook his head slowly, seeming to mull it over. “No. I do not think I have heard that name.”

“What about Radovan Mladic?”

A look of distaste crossed his face as he dredged mucus from the back of his throat and spit emphatically on the ground near Lydia’s feet. “The ruin of this country is on the soul of that man.”

He lighted another cigarette and said, “After the fall of communism, there was hope for the first time. Goods and money flowed in from the West. We were able to see television broadcasts, magazines from overseas,” he said, gesticulating grandly while his eyes darted back and forth between Lydia and Jeffrey as if gauging their responses.

“We saw that the world was decades ahead of us. When businesses from Italy and Greece, and even the United States, started to come here, we thought, We will be rich like those from the West. American Equities was one of those companies. People all over the country invested the money they had.

“But Radovan Mladic was a criminal. He had always been a criminal … a pimp, as Americans say, and a dealer of guns and heroin. But no one seemed to care.… They just wanted to invest their money and become rich. They didn’t even know what American Equities was or what kind of business they were doing; they were so naïve. American Equities stole the people’s money. And then the riots came. Most of us still do not understand what really happened here. But we have never recovered.”

“What happened to him?” Jeffrey asked.

“He was murdered, shot in the head.”

“Murdered?” asked Lydia. “I thought he committed suicide.”

“No. He was killed.”

“By whom?”

“A lot of people take credit for it; no one knows for certain. They found his body after the building that housed American Equities was burned to the ground.”

“What happened to his wife?” she asked, trying to get a handle on how accurate his information might be.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Someone said maybe she went to America.”

Since they had seen Jenna Quinn at Valentina’s service, a thought had been turning somewhere in the back of Lydia’s mind: Jenna Quinn was the missing piece to their investigation, and nothing made sense until Lydia factored her in as a player. But she still wasn’t clear on the woman’s motivations or how, why, and if she could be involved in her own daughter’s disappearance.

Lydia looked at her watch, suddenly remembering what they had come for and what they needed to know.

“There’s someplace I want you to take us, Gabriel,” she said.

“Where?”

She leaned toward him and lowered her voice. “Where the boats come from Italy to take the girls overseas.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, suddenly cagey.

“Bullshit,” she said, and smiled.

Gabriel looked around him in the dimly lighted room; he seemed to be considering his options. He’d turned skittish on her, and for a second she thought he would get up and bolt.

“Maybe,” he said, lighting still another cigarette off the one he was about to extinguish, “for the right price.”

I
t was nearly dawn by the time they saw what they had come to see. The sky had lightened from pitch to charcoal, the stars fading slowly, when in the distance they heard the low rumbling of a high-powered speedboat and saw the circle of a spotlight bouncing on its bow. Lydia, Jeffrey, and Gabriel crouched behind large rusted barrels, peering through the spaces between them to watch the dock just fifty yards away. The large boat pulled up slowly, its engine roaring, and then the engine cut out and the ship drifted into the dock. A man stood at the bow and another one at the stern. From a darkened boathouse, two men came running out to grab the lines. Their machine guns hung from straps slung across their chests.