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September 20, 2006
Cigarette Traffickers on a Train
“This smuggling happened during Soviet times too, but it was not quite so easy,” the old Pole told me as we stood in the train car hallway—our arms crossed—watching a crew of twelve operators remove every single wood panel, radiator cover, and light fixture in the cabin.
They were stashing cartons of cigarettes: in the ceiling, between the cracks in the doors, in the luggage areas, behind the moulding, the curtain rods, the heater grilles.
Every train from Kiev to Warsaw—a city now located solidly within the EU—stops for two hours at the border checkpoint to clear customs and change wheels, because Stalin preferred a different gauge so that invading armies would be unable to cross the border. Commerce, though, seems to have gotten the best of Old Joe. Half the people on each trip are smugglers.
My train ground to a halt at 2 in the morning. Sickly flourescent lights flicked on, and I awoke to the sound of Slavs arguing in the hall. My cabinmate, a Polish geezer sleeping in his plaid farm shirt on the bunk across from me gave me a silent, knowing wink. He gestured for me to stick my head out our door.
It was cold. The train had stopped in a massive industrial shed surrounded by shtetl-esque countryside, bushy farm huts, lean wild dogs, Russian colonels—the stuff of Ukranian fairy tales framed by memorable props from cold war suspense flicks. I tossed off my stale sheets and opened our cabin to the hall.
The team of smugglers was hard at work—a dour professional pit crew gone Bonnie and Clyde. Among them was a couple that had been dining on McDonalds and wine when I first got on board, the woman dressed in a tacky Mimi Bobeck-appropriate mu mu. Even in tracksuit-and-trashy-sunglass Kiev, they’d probably be scorned as nouveau riche.
Our rumpled potato of a train car conductor kept circumspect watch from his cabin, beaming with tacit approval. I leaned back against the window rail and let the smugglers push past me.
“During Soviet times, we couldn’t stand in the hallway like this,” my Pole volunteered, shaking his head. He began to butter some bread with his pocketknife.
The smugglers finished stashing their cigarettes and replaced the panels, screws, and bolts. We sat back in our cabins, waiting through the inevitable rounds of border police and “Papers? Passport?”
The Polish police marched on with dogs, weighed down with electronic devices. They then proceeded to unscrew every panel in sight and search all of the luggage compartments, confiscating multiple garbage bags filled with bales of cigarette cartons. The smugglers looked on, blasé.
A border guard asked if I was transporting any alcohol. I pointed to my lone (open) beer. “Just that?” He looked amused. I glanced above me at a crack in the ceiling. It was full of cigarette cartons that the police hadn’t noticed. The guard headed off.
An hour later, the police left and the train started rolling. The smugglers swarmed out like an army of worker ants with screwdrivers. The panels came off again, making the car interior look like a skeleton.
The smugglers recovered three more trash bags of cigarettes, unnoticed by the police. Our train car conductor counted the cartons. Cigarettes in Ukraine are three to ten cents a pack, and they can be resold in the EU at Boston prices, so there’s a good chance they came out ahead.
I watched, bemused. They certainly didn’t mind my looking on. One last time, the panels went up. A plain smuggler in cargo pants replaced the final screw and glanced at me with pride.
Posted by Barron YoungSmith at September 20, 2006 07:43 PM
