The Power(30)

She takes the hand of the woman who spoke. Turns it palm upward. And in the centre of the palm, this thirteen-year-old girl makes a little twist with the thing that has just woken in her collarbone. The woman on the mattress – five and twenty, and thought she was going to a good secretarial job in Berlin – gasps and shudders; her shoulders squirm and her eyes go wide. And the hand that holds the mattress flickers with a momentary silver light.

They wait in the dark. They practise. They have to be certain they can do it all in one go, that no one will have time to reach for his gun. They pass the thing from hand to hand in the dark and marvel at it. Some of them had been held captive for so long they never heard a word of this thing; for the others, it wasn’t more than a strange rumour, a curiosity. They believe God has sent a miracle to save them, as He rescued the Children of Israel from slavery. From the narrow places, they cried out. In the dark, they were sent light. They weep.

One of the overseers comes to unshackle the woman who thought she was going as a secretary to Berlin before she was thrown down on a concrete floor and shown, over and over again, what her job really was. He has the keys in his hand. They fall on him all at once, and he cannot make a sound and blood gushes from his eyes and ears. They unlock one another’s bonds with his bundle of keys.

They kill every man in that house and they’re still not satisfied.

Moldova is the world capital of human sex-trafficking. There are a thousand little towns here with staging posts in basements and apartments in condemned buildings. They trade in men, too, and in children. The girl children grow day by day until the power comes to their hands and they can teach the grown women. This thing happens again and again and again; the change has happened too fast for the men to learn the new tricks they need. It is a gift. Who is to say it does not come from God?

Tunde files a series of reports and interviews from the Moldovan border towns where the fighting has been most acute. The women trust him because of his reports from Riyadh. Not many men could have got this close; he’s been lucky, but he’s also been smart and determined. He brings his other reports with him, shows them to whatever woman says she’s in charge of this town or that. They want their stories told.

‘It wasn’t just those men who hurt us,’ a twenty-year-old woman, Sonja, tells him. ‘We killed them, but it wasn’t just them. The police knew what was happening and did nothing. The men in the town beat their wives if they tried to bring us more food. The Mayor knew what was happening, the landlords knew what was happening, postmen knew what was happening.’

She starts to cry, scrubs at her eyes with the heel of her hand. She shows him the tattoo in the centre of her palm – the eye with the tendrils creeping out from it.

‘This means we will never stop watching,’ she says. ‘Like God watches over us.’

At night, Tunde writes fast and urgently. A diary of sorts. Notes from the war. This revolution will need its chronicler. It’s going to be him. He has in mind a broad, sweeping book – with interviews, yes, and also assessments of the tide of history, region-by-region analysis, nation by nation. Pulling out to see the shockwaves of the power slosh across the planet. Zooming in tight to focus on single moments, single stories. Sometimes he writes with such intensity that he forgets that he doesn’t have the power himself in his hands and the bones of his neck. It’s going to be a big book. Nine hundred pages, a thousand pages. De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. There’ll be an accompanying barrage of footage online. Lanzmann’s Shoah. Reporting from inside the events as well as analysis and argument.

He opens his chapter on Moldova with a description of the way the power was passed from hand to hand among the women, then proceeds to the new flowering of online religion, and how it shored up support for women taking over towns, and then goes on to the inevitable revolution in the government of the country.

Tunde interviews the President five days before the government falls. Viktor Moskalev is a small and sweaty man who has held this country together by making a series of alliances and by turning a blind eye to the vast organized crime syndicates that have been using his little, unassuming nation as a staging post for their unsavoury business. He moves his hands nervously during the interview, brushing the few strands of hair left on his head out of his eyes constantly and dripping sweat across his bald head, even though the room is quite cool. His wife, Tatiana – an ex-gymnast who once almost competed at the Olympics – sits beside him, holding his hand.

‘President Moskalev,’ says Tunde, deliberately relaxing his voice, smiling, ‘between you and me, what do you think is happening to your country?’

Viktor’s throat muscles clench. They’re sitting in the grand receiving room of his palace in Chisinau. Half the furniture is gilded. Tatiana strokes his knee and smiles. She, also, is gilded – bronze highlights in her hair, glitter on the curve of her cheeks.

‘All countries,’ says Viktor slowly, ‘have had to adapt to the new reality.’

Tunde leans back, crossing one leg over the other.

‘This isn’t going out on the radio or on the internet, Viktor. It’s just for my book. I’d really like your assessment. Forty-three border towns are now effectively being run by paramilitary gangs, mostly composed of women who’ve freed themselves from sexual slavery. What do you think your chances are of getting control back?’