The Power(78)

He gets a few shots of people leaving the party through the side door. A couple of gun-runners. A bio-weapons specialist. It’s the Horsemen of the Apocalypse ball. There’s Roxanne Monke getting into her car, queen of a London crime family. She sees him photographing her car, mouths ‘Fuck. Off’ at him.

He files the story with CNN when he’s back in his hotel room at 3 a.m. The photographs of the man licking the brandy up from the floor. The glass splinters on the napkin. The tears on Peter’s cheek.

Just past 9 a.m. he wakes involuntarily, gritty-eyed, sweat prickling his back and temples. He checks his email, to see what the night editor’s said about the piece. He’s promised anything that came out of this party to CNN first, but if they want too many cuts he’ll take it elsewhere. There’s a simple, two-line email.

‘Sorry, Tunde, we’re going to pass on this. Great reporting, pix excellent, not a story we can sell in right now.’

Fine. Tunde sends out another three emails, then has a shower and orders a pot of strong coffee. When the emails start to come back, he’s looking through the international news sites; nothing much on Bessapara, no one’s scooped him. He reads the emails. Three more rejections. All for similar foot-shuffling, non-committal we-don’t-think-there’s-a-story-here reasons.

He’s never needed a market, though. He’ll just post the whole thing to his YouTube.

He logs on via the hotel wifi and … there YouTube isn’t. Just a tiny take-down notice saying that this site is not available in this region. He tries a VPN. No good. Tries his cellphone data. Same deal.

He thinks of Peter saying, ‘She is trying to make the press leave the country.’

If he emails the files, they’ll intercept them.

He burns a DVD. All the photos, all the footage, his own piece.

He puts it in a padded courier envelope and pauses for a moment over the address. In the end, he writes Nina’s name and details on the label. He puts a note inside, saying, ‘Hold this till I come fetch it.’ He’s left stuff with her before: notes for his book, journals from his travels. Safer with her than travelling with him or in an empty apartment somewhere. He’ll get the American ambassador to put it in the diplomatic bag.

If Tatiana Moskalev is trying to do what it looks like she might be trying to do, he doesn’t want her to know yet that he’s going to document it. He’ll only get one chance at this story. Journalists have been expelled from countries for less than this, and he doesn’t kid himself that it’ll make any difference that he flirted with her once.

It’s that afternoon that the hotel asks for his passport. Just because of the new security rules at this difficult time.

Most of the other non-bureau staff are on their way out of Bessapara. There are a few war reporters in flak jackets on the northern front, but until the fighting starts in earnest there’s nothing much to say here, and the posturing and threats go on for more than five weeks.

Tunde stays. Even while he’s receiving offers for substantial sums to go to Chile to interview the anti-pope and hear her views on Mother Eve. Even while more male-activism terror splinter groups say that they’ll only deliver their manifesto if he comes to tape them. He stays, and he interviews dozens of people in cities across the region. He learns some basic Romanian. When colleagues and friends ask what the hell he’s doing he says he’s working on a book about this new nation-state, and they shrug and say, ‘Fair enough.’ He attends the religious services in the new churches – and sees how the old churches are being repurposed or destroyed. He sits in a circle in an underground room by candlelight and listens to a priest intoning the service as it used to be: the son and not the mother at the heart. After the service, the priest presses his body against Tunde’s in a long, close hug and whispers, ‘Do not forget us.’

Tunde is told more than once that the police here no longer investigate the murder of men; that if a man is found dead it is presumed that a vengeance gang had given him his proper reward for his deeds in the time before. ‘Even a young boy,’ a father tells him, in an overheated sitting room in a western village, ‘even a boy who is only fifteen now – what could he have done in the time before?’

Tunde doesn’t write online about any of these interviews. He knows how that would end – a knock on the door at 4 a.m. and being hustled on to the first plane out of the country. He writes as if he’s a tourist, on vacation in the new nation. He posts photographs every day. There’s already an angry undercurrent to the comments: where are the new videos, Tunde, where are your funny reports? Still, they’d notice if he vanished. That’s important.

In his sixth week in the country, Tatiana’s newly appointed Minister for Justice gives a press conference. It’s sparsely attended. The room is airless, the walls papered with beige-and-brown string.

‘After the recent terrorist outrages across the world, and after our country was betrayed by men who work for our enemies, we are announcing today a new legal vessel,’ she says. ‘Our people have suffered for too long now at the hands of a group which has tried to destroy us. We do not have to ask ourselves what they will do if they win; we have already seen it. We must protect ourselves against those who might betray us.

‘Thus, we institute today this law, that each man in the country must have his passport and other official documents stamped with the name of his female guardian. Her written permission will be needed for any journey he undertakes. We know that men have their tricks and we cannot allow them to band together.