First published 2014 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
www.solarisbooks.com
ISBN (epub): 978-1-84997-656-5
ISBN (mobi): 978-1-84997-657-2
Copyright © 2013 Dave Hutchinson
Cover art by Clint Langley
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
For you abide, a singing rib within
my dreaming side, you always stay
Postscript: For Gweno
Alun Lewis
1.
THE HUNGARIANS CAME into the restaurant around nine in the evening, eight large men with gorgeously-tailored suits and hand-stitched Italian shoes and hundred-złoty haircuts. Michał, the maitre d’, tried to tell them that there were no tables free unless they had a reservation, but they walked over to one of the large tables and sat down. One of them plucked the Reserved card from the middle of the tablecloth and sailed it out across the restaurant with a snap of the wrist and a bearish grin, causing other diners to duck.
Max, the owner, had a protection deal with Wesoły Ptak, but instead of calling them or the police – either of which would have probably resulted in a bloodbath – he seized a notepad and set off across the restaurant to take the Hungarians’ orders. This show of confidence did not prevent a number of diners signalling frantically for their bills.
The Hungarians were already boisterous, and shouted and laughed at Max while he tried to take their orders, changing their minds frequently and causing Max to start all over again. Finally, he walked back from the table to the bar, where Gosia was standing frozen with fear.
“Six bottles of Żubrówka, on the house,” he murmured calmly to the girl as he went by towards the kitchen. “And try to be nimble on your feet.”
Rudi, who had been standing in the kitchen doorway watching events with interest, said, “Something awful is going to happen, Max.”
“Cook,” Max replied, handing him the order. “Cook quickly.”
By ten o’clock the Hungarians had loosened their ties and taken off their jackets and were singing and yelling at each other and laughing at impenetrable jokes. They had completed three courses of their five-course order. They were alone in the restaurant. With most of the meal completed, Rudi told the kitchen crew they could go home.
At one point, one of the Hungarians, an immense man with a face the colour of barszcz, began shouting at the others. He stood up, swaying gently, and yelled at his compatriots, who goodnaturedly yelled at him to sit down again. Sweat pouring down his face, he turned, grasped the back of a chair from the next table, and in one easy movement pivoted and flung it across the room. It crashed into the wall and smashed a sconce and brought down a mirror.
There was a moment’s silence. The Hungarian stood looking at the dent in the wallpaper, frowning. Then he sat down and one of his friends poured him a drink and slapped him on the back and Max served the next course.
As the hour grew late the Hungarians became maudlin. They put their arms around each other’s shoulders and began to sing songs that waxed increasingly sad as midnight approached.
Rudi, his cooking finished for the night and the kitchen tidied up and cleaned, stood in the doorway listening to their songs. The Hungarians had beautiful voices. He didn’t understand the words, but the melodies were heart-achingly lonely.
One of them saw him standing there and started to beckon urgently. The others turned to see what was going on, and they too started to beckon.
“Go on,” Max said from his post by the bar.
“You’re joking,” said Rudi.
“I am not. Go and see what they want.”
“And if they want to beat me up?”
“They’ll soon get bored.”
“Thank you, Max,” Rudi said, setting off across the restaurant.
The Hungarians’ table looked as if someone had dropped a five-course meal onto it from ceiling height. The floor around it was crunchy with broken glass and smashed crockery, the carpet sticky with sauces and bits of trodden-in food.
“You cook?” said one in appalling Polish as Rudi approached.
“Yes,” said Rudi, balancing his weight on the balls of his feet just in case he had to move in a hurry.
The Polish-speaker looked like a side of beef sewn into an Armani Revival suit. His face was pale and sweaty and he was wearing a shoulder-holster from which protruded the handgrip of a colossal pistol. He crooked a forefinger the size of a sausage. Rudi bent down until their faces were only a couple of centimetres apart.
“Respect!” the Hungarian bellowed. Rudi flinched at the meaty spicy alcohol-and-tobacco gale of his breath. “Everywhere we go, this fuck city, not respect!”
This statement seemed to require a reply, so Rudi said, “Oh?”
“Not respect,” the Hungarian said, shaking his head sadly. His expression suddenly brightened. “Here, Restaurant Max, we got respect!”
“We always respect our customers,” Max murmured, moving soundlessly up beside Rudi.
“Fuck right!” the Hungarian said loudly. “Fuck right. Restaurant Max more respect.”
“And your meal?” Max inquired, smiling.
“Good fuck meal,” the Hungarian said. There was a general nodding of heads around the table. He looked at Rudi and belched. “Good fuck cook. Polish food for fuck pigs, but good fuck cook.”
Rudi smiled. “Thank you,” he said.
The Hungarian’s eyes suddenly came into focus. “Good,” he said. “We gone.” He snapped a few words and the others around the table stood up, all save the one who had thrown the chair, who was slumped over with his cheek pressed to the tablecloth, snoring gently. Two of his friends grasped him by the shoulders and elbows and lifted him up. Bits of food adhered to the side of his face.
“Food good,” the Polish-speaker told Rudi. He took his jacket from the back of his chair and shrugged into it. He dipped a hand into his breast pocket and came up with a business card held between his first two fingers. “You need working, you call.”
Rudi took the card. “Thank you,” he said again.
“Okay.” He put both hands to his face and swept them up and back in a movement that magically rearranged his hair and seemed to sober him up at the same time. “We gone.” He looked at Max. “Clever fuck Pole.” He reached into an inside jacket pocket and brought out a wallet the size and shape of a housebrick. “What is?”
“On the house,” Max said. “A gift.”
Rudi looked at his boss and wondered what went on underneath that shaved scalp.
The Hungarian regarded the restaurant. “We break much.”
Max shrugged carelessly.
“Okay.” The Hungarian removed a centimetre-thick wad of złotys from the wallet and held it out. “You take,” he said. Max smiled and bowed slightly and took the money, then the Hungarians were moving towards the exit. A last burst of raucous singing, one last bar stool hurled across the restaurant, a puff of cold air through the open door, and they were gone. Rudi heard Max locking the doors behind them.
“Well,” Max said, coming back down the stairs. “That was an interesting evening.”
Rudi picked up an overturned stool, righted it, and sat at the bar. He had, he discovered, sweated entirely through his chef’s whites. “I think,” he said, “you should renego
tiate your subscription to Wesoły Ptak.”
Max went behind the bar. He bent down and started to search the shelves. “If Wesoły Ptak had turned up tonight, half of us would have wound up in the mortuary.” He straightened up holding half a bottle of Starka and two glasses.
Rudi took his lighter and a tin of small cigars from his pocket. He lit one and looked at the restaurant. If he was objective about it, there was actually very little damage. Just a lot of mess for the cleaners to tackle, and they’d had wedding receptions that had been messier.
Max filled the two glasses with vodka and held one up in a toast. “Good fuck meal,” he said.
Rudi looked at him for a moment. Then he picked up the other glass, returned the toast, and drained it in one go. Then they both started to laugh.
“What if they come back?” Rudi asked.
But Max was still laughing. “Good fuck meal,” he repeated, shaking his head and refilling the glasses.
THE HUNGARIANS DID not come back, which seemed to bear out Max’s view that they had just been out for a good time rather than intent on muscling in on Wesoły Ptak’s territory.
Wesoły Ptak – the name meant Happy Bird – was a deeply diversified organisation. Its many divisions included prostitution, drugs, armed robbery, a soft-drink bottling factory on the outskirts of Kraków, a bus company, any number of unlicenced gambling dens, and a protection racket centred around Floriańska Street, just off the Market Square of Poland’s old capital.
They were not, on the whole, known for their violent nature, preferring to apply force with surgical precision rather than in broad strokes. For instance, a restaurateur or shopkeeper who tried to organise his neighbours against the gang might find himself in hospital with anatomically-novel joints imposed on his legs. The other rebels would get the point, and the uprising would end. Another gang might be more likely to launch a massive firebombing campaign, or a wave of spectacularly bloody killings, but Happy Bird were content with a less-is-more approach.
In the wake of the Hungarians’ visit to Restauracja Max, some of the other businesses began to wonder out loud just what they were paying Wesoły Ptak for. This went on for a day or so, and then the son of one of the owners suffered a minor accident at school. Nothing life-threatening, just a few bumps and scrapes, and after that the grumbling along Floriańska subsided.
A week or so later, Dariusz, Wesoły Ptak’s representative, visited Restauracja Max one evening just before closing. All the staff but Rudi and Michał had gone home. Max asked Rudi to prepare two steak tartares, and he and Dariusz took a bottle of Wyborowa and a couple of glasses over to a table in the darkest corner of the deserted restaurant.
When Rudi emerged from the kitchen with the components of the steak tartares on a tray, Max and Dariusz were deep in conversation inside a cloud of cigarette smoke dimly illuminated by the little sconce on the wall above their table.
As Rudi approached with the food, Dariusz looked up and smiled. “Supper,” he said.
Rudi set out on the table the trays of anchovies and chopped onions, the little bowls of pickled cucumbers, the condiments, plates of rye bread, saucers of unsalted butter, the two plates of minced beef, each with an egg yolk nestling in a hollow on top.
“We were discussing your visitors of last month,” Dariusz said.
“It was an eventful evening,” Rudi agreed, swapping the table’s ashtray for a clean one. “Have a good meal.”
“Why don’t you sit and have a drink with us?” Dariusz asked.
Rudi looked at Max, sitting at the other side of the table like a smoothly prosperous Silesian Buddha, hands clasped comfortably against the broad expanse of his stomach. Max was smiling gently and looking off into some faraway vista. He nodded fractionally.
Rudi shrugged. “All right.” He put the tray and the dirty ashtray on the next table, pulled up a chair, and sat.
“A busy night,” Max rumbled, picking up a fork.
Rudi nodded. Takings had gone down for a couple of days after the Hungarians visited, but they were back up now. Earlier in the week, Max had murmured something about a raise, but Rudi had known him long enough not to take it seriously.
“I was wondering about Władek,” Max said.
Władek was the latest of a long line of alleged cooks to arrive at Restauracja Max and then discover that they were not being paid enough for the long hours and hard work.
“He seems keen,” Rudi said, watching Max use the edge of his fork to mash up the egg and beef on his plate.
“They all do, at first,” Max agreed. “Then they get greedy.”
“It’s not greed, Max,” Rudi told him.
Max shook his head. “They think they can come here and be ready to open their own restaurant after a month. They don’t understand the business.”
Max’s philosophy of the restaurant business shared certain features with Zen Buddhism. Rudi, who was more interested in cooking than philosophy, said, “It’s a common enough misconception.”
“It’s the same in my business,” Dariusz said. Rudi had almost forgotten the little man was at the table, but there he was, mixing anchovies and chopped onion into his beef with a singleminded determination. “You should see some of our recruits, particularly these days. They think they’ll be running the city in a year.” He smiled sadly. “Imagine their disappointment.”
“Yes,” Rudi said. “The only difference is that it’s easier for a sous-chef to leave a restaurant than it is for someone to leave Wesoły Ptak.” Max glanced up from his plate, sighed, shook his head, and went back to mashing his meal together with his fork.
If Dariusz was offended, he gave no sign. “We’re a business, like any other,” he said.
“Not quite like any other,” said Rudi. Max looked at him again. This time he frowned before returning his attention to his steak.
Dariusz also frowned, but the frown was barely discernible, and it was gone after a moment. “Well, we do less cooking, it’s true,” he said, and he laughed. Max smiled and shook his head.
Rudi sat back and crossed his arms. Wesoły Ptak was nothing out of the ordinary; he had encountered organisations like it in Tallinn and Riga and Vilnius, and they were all alike, and Dariusz didn’t fit the demographic. He looked ordinary, a slim little middle-aged man with a cheap haircut and laugh-lines around his eyes. If he was armed, his unprepossessing off-the-peg business suit hid it wonderfully well.
“Should we worry about the Hungarians?” Rudi asked.
Dariusz looked up from his meal, his eyebrows raised in surprise. “Worry?” he asked. “Why should you worry?”
Rudi shrugged and watched Max working on his steak. Rudi hated steak tartare. The customer did all the preparation themselves, and they took up table space while they did it. Poles in particular seemed to regard it as a social occasion. They took forever about it, tasting over and over again and minutely adjusting the seasoning. When he had his own restaurant, steak tartare would not be on the menu.
Dariusz reached out and touched Rudi’s forearm. Rudi noticed his fingernails were chewed. “You mustn’t worry,” Dariusz said.
“All right,” said Rudi.
“This kind of thing happens all the time.”
“Not to me it doesn’t.”
Dariusz smiled. “You have to think of us like nations. Poles and Hungarians are the criminal princes of Europe.”
“And the Bulgarians,” Max put in goodnaturedly.
Dariusz shrugged. “Yes, one must include the Bulgarians as well. We must constantly visit, check each other out, put our toes in the water,” he told Rudi. “It’s a matter of diplomacy.”
“Do you mean what happened here the other night was a diplomatic incident?” said Rudi.
“It might well have been, if wiser heads had not prevailed.” Dariusz nodded at Max.
“You haven’t got a drink,” Max observed. He looked across the restaurant and Michał, responding with a maitre d’s telepathy, brought a clean glass over to the table
for Rudi and then retreated behind the bar. Max filled the glass with vodka and said, “They were just looking for a good time, but nobody would give them one because everyone was afraid of them.”
“I can’t blame them,” Dariusz said. He tasted his steak, winced, reached for the tabasco bottle and shook a few drops onto the meat. “A bunch of drunken Hungarians, armed to the teeth, wandering into restaurants and bars. What’s one to think?”
“Indeed,” Max agreed.
“It would be their own fault if someone was to over-react,” Dariusz went on. He tasted his steak again, and this time it was more to his liking. This time he actually lifted a forkful into his mouth and chewed happily.
“And nobody would want that,” Max said. Apparently, his steak was also prepared to his satisfaction. He started to eat.
“Well, precisely,” said Dariusz. “Something like that could start a war.” He looked at Rudi and cocked his head to one side. “You’re from Tallinn, yes?”
“I was born in Taevaskoja,” Rudi said. “But I’ve lived in Tallinn.”
“I’ve never been there.” Dariusz looked at his glass, but it was empty. “What’s it like?”
Rudi watched Max filling Dariusz’s glass. “It’s all right.”
“You speak very good Polish, for an Estonian.”
Rudi picked up his own glass and drained it in one swallow. “Thank you.”
Dariusz put down his fork and burst out laughing. He reached over and tapped Max on the shoulder. “I told you!” he said. “Didn’t I tell you?”
Max smiled and nodded and went on eating. Rudi uncapped the Wyborowa and poured himself another drink. Michał had told him that Wesoły Ptak took their name from a song by Eugeniusz, one of a long line of Polish sociopolitical balladeers to rise briefly to fame before drinking themselves to death or being shot by jealous husbands or jilted lovers. The bird sings in its cage and its owners think it’s happy, Michał had told him, but the bird is still in a cage. The reference had completely baffled Rudi.
Europe in Autumn Page 1
