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?’
‘Our forces are already moving to quash these rebels,’ says Viktor. ‘Within a few days the situation will normalize.’ Tunde raises a quizzical eyebrow. Half-laughs. Is Viktor being serious? The gangs have captured weapons, body armour and ammunition from the crime syndicates they’ve destroyed. They’re virtually unbeatable.
‘Sorry, what is it that you’re planning to do? Bomb your own country to pieces? They’re everywhere.’
Viktor smiles an enigmatic smile. ‘If it has to be, that is how it must be. This trouble will pass in just a week or two.’
Fucking hell. Maybe he really will bomb the whole country and end up sitting as President of a pile of rubble. Or maybe he just hasn’t accepted what’s really going on here. It’ll make an interesting footnote in the book. With his country crumbling around him, President Moskalev seemed almost blasé.
In the corridor outside, Tunde waits for an embassy car to take him back to his hotel. Safer to travel under the Nigerian flag here than under Moskalev’s protection these days. But it can take two or three hours for the cars to make it through the security.
That’s where Tatiana Moskalev finds him: waiting on an embroidered chair for someone to call his cell and say that the car’s ready.
She clicks down the hallway in her spike heels. Her dress is turquoise, skin-tight, ruched and cut to accentuate those strong gymnast’s legs and those elegant gymnast’s shoulders. She stands over him.
‘You don’t like my husband, do you?’ she says.
‘I wouldn’t say that.’ He smiles his easy smile.
‘I would. Are you going to print something bad about him?’
Tunde rests his elbows on the back of the chair, opening his chest. ‘Tatiana,’ he says, ‘if we’re going to have this conversation, is there anything to drink in this palace?’
There’s brandy in a cabinet in what looks like a 1980s movie idea of a Wall Street boardroom: high-shine gold plastic fittings and a dark wood table. She pours them each a generous measure and they look out over the city together. The presidential palace is a high-rise in the centre of town; from the outside it looks like nothing so much as a mid-price four-star business hotel.
Tatiana says, ‘He came to watch a performance at my school. I was a gymnast. Performing in front of the Minister for Finance!’ She drinks. ‘I was seventeen and he was forty-two. But he took me out of that little nothing town.’
Tunde says, ‘The world’s changing,’ and they exchange a little glance.
She smiles. ‘You are going to be very successful,’ she says. ‘You have the hunger. I’ve seen it before.’
‘And you? Do you have … the hunger?’
She looks him up and down and makes a little laugh through her nose. She can’t be more than forty now herself.
‘Look what I can do,’ she says. Although he thinks he already knows what she can do.
She puts her palm flat to the frame of the window and closes her eyes.
The lights in the ceiling fizz and blink out.
She looks up, sighs.
‘Why are they … connected to the window frames?’ says Tunde.
‘Crappy wiring,’ she says, ‘like everything in this place.’
‘Does Viktor know you can do it?’
She shakes her head. ‘Hairdresser gave it to me. A joke. A woman like you, she said, you’ll never need it. You’re taken care of.’
‘And are you?’ says Tunde. ‘Taken care of?’
She laughs now, properly, full-throatedly. ‘Be careful,’ she says. ‘Viktor would chop your balls off if he heard you talking that way.’
Tunde laughs, too. ‘Is it really Viktor I have to be afraid of? Any more?’
She takes a long slow swig of her drink. ‘Do you want to know a secret?’ she says.
‘Always,’ he says.
‘Awadi-Atif, the new King of Saudi Arabia, is in exile in the north of our country. He’s been feeding Viktor money and arms. That’s why Viktor thinks he can crush the rebels.’
‘Are you serious?’
She nods.
‘Can you get me confirmation of that? Emails, faxes, photographs, anything?’
She shakes her head.
‘Go and look for him. You’re a clever boy. You’ll work it out.’
He licks his lips. ‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘I want you to remember me,’ she says, ‘when you’re very successful. Remember that we talked like this now.’
‘Just talked?’ says Tunde.
‘Your car is here,’ she says, pointing to the long black limousine pulling through the cordon outside the building, thirty floors below them.