“Purpose of visit?” asked the Hindenberger.
“I’m on holiday.”
The official looked at him with an expression of mild astonishment. He checked his screen again. “Estonian.”
“Yes.”
The Hindenberger shook his head slightly.
“I only get a week’s holiday a year,” Rudi told him. “I’m a chef. If I take any time off my boss has to employ an agency chef.”
The Hindenberger shook his head again. He unslotted Rudi’s passport and held it out. “You need to get another job, mate.”
“I know,” Rudi said, taking his passport. He walked down the corridor and emerged on another platform, where a train was waiting to leave for Breslau.
3.
IN THE LATTER years of the twentieth century, Europe had echoed with the sound of doors opening as the borderless continent of the Schengen Agreement had, with some national caveats, come into being.
It hadn’t lasted. The early years of the twenty-first century brought a symphony of slamming doors. Economic collapse, paranoia about asylum seekers – and, of course, GWOT, the ongoing Global War On Terror – had brought back passport and immigration checks of varying stringency, depending on whose frontiers you were crossing. Then the Xian Flu had brought back quarantine checks and national borders as a means of controlling the spread of the disease; it had killed, depending on whose figures you believed, somewhere between twenty and forty million people in Europe alone. It had also effectively killed Schengen and kicked the already somewhat rickety floor out from under the EU.
The Union had struggled into the twenty-first century and managed to survive in some style for a few more years of bitching and infighting and cronyism. Then it had spontaneously begun to throw off progressively smaller and crazier nation-states, like a sunburned holidaymaker shedding curls of skin.
Nobody really understood why this had happened.
What was unexpected was that the Union had continued to flake away, bit by bit, even after the Xian Flu. Officially, it still existed, but it existed in scattered bits and pieces, like Burger King franchises, mainly in England and Poland and Spain and Belgium, and it spent most of its time making loud noises in the United Nations. The big thing in Europe these days was countries, and there were more and more of them every year.
The Continent was alive with Romanov heirs and Habsburg heirs and Grimaldi heirs and Saxe-Coburg Gotha heirs and heirs of families nobody had ever heard of who had been dispossessed sometime back in the fifteenth century, all of them seeking to set up their own pocket nations. They found they had to compete with thousands of microethnic groups who suddenly wanted European homelands as well, and religious groups, and Communists, and Fascists, and U2 fans. There had even been, very briefly, a city-state – or more accurately a village-state – run by devotees of the works of Günther Grass. Rudi was vaguely sorry that Grassheim had been reabsorbed by the Pomeranian Republic - itself a polity of only ten or fifteen years’ standing. He really liked The Tin Drum.
THE INDEPENDENT SILESIAN State of Hindenberg – formerly the Polish cities of Opole and Wrocław (formerly the German cities of Opeln and Breslau – formerly the Prussian towns of... etc, etc) and the areas around them – existed as a kind of Teuton island in a Slavic sea. Poland, having been forced by the EU, UN and NATO to accede to an ethnic Silesian homeland, had refused to cede more territory to give the young state a land-bridge to Greater Germany. Hindenberg had responded by imposing draconian visa requirements for Poles, to which Poland had responded by pegging the exchange rate of the złoty and the Hindenberg mark artificially low.
There had been border disputes, frontier actions, Polish war games within yards of Hindenberg’s border fence. Hindenberg unofficially offered its services as a haven for some of Poland’s wealthier and more powerful mafia bosses, and refused to sign an extradition treaty with its Slavic neighbour.
The latest tit-for-tat involved Hindenberg’s railway authority changing the state’s track gauge. The Polish response had been to embargo postal deliveries to the Silesian state.
Eventually, accepted wisdom suggested, things would settle down. Until then, Poles wishing to visit Hindenberg had to pay thousands of złotys and wait six months for a visa, Hindenbergers visiting Poland found that one H-Mark was worth about four groszy, Polish trains could not run across Hindenberg on their way to Poznań and the Greater German border, and postal deliveries into Hindenberg were in a state of chaos.
While the Poles and the Hindenbergers squabbled, telephone and data cable lines were tapped or cut altogether and radio, television and satellite frequencies were scrambled. Nobody living within five kilometres of the Polish side of the frontier could watch television or use any kind of wifi.
Rudi thought it was a ludicrous but somehow very Polish state of affairs. There was an old saying that the Poles weren’t truly happy unless someone was telling them what to do. Rudi had observed that what actually made Poles happy was listening to someone telling them what to do, and then doing the exact opposite.
BAHNHOF BRESLAU WAS full of light, a colossal wedge of glass and tubular steel inserted into the heart of the old Polish-German city. It was awesomely clean. Rudi actually heard his footsteps echo on the marble floor as he walked from the platform to the main entrance. Just outside the automatic doors, he stopped and stared.
It wasn’t just the station. The whole city was full of light.
Though Greater Germany had given up its constitutional claim to the lands in Western Poland long ago, there was a tacit understanding that Berlin was in fact quite pleased that the ethnic Silesians had finally found a home. Greater Germany was no longer quite as great as it once was, having begun to fission into ever-smaller and progressively more anarchic autonomous regions, so the prospect of extending German influence eastward seemed rather attractive. So much so that a very large amount of D-Marks had found their way into the Hindenberg National Bank, and the Hindenbergers had used them to erase Polish Wrocław and start again.
So Breslau – and Opole, and much of the land inbetween – strongly resembled Berlin; a great mass of office buildings and apartment buildings, interspersed with what mementoes of Prussian architecture had survived two world wars, fifty years of Communist occupation and six decades of Polish administration. The road in front of the station was bustling with cars and buses, and across the road rose the shining monolith of a Marriott. Rudi thought that pretty much said it all; when the hotel chains moved in you could more or less bet that a polity was there to stay.
A line of BMW taxis stood waiting outside the station. Rudi got into one and gave the driver the name of the hotel where he had booked a room for the night, and the car quietly whisked him away.
RUDI HAD READ his share of spy thrillers, so the situation he found himself in seemed familiar. More than familiar, actually; it smacked of cliché. Cloak and dagger, clandestine meetings on darkened streets in Central Europe. He didn’t feel nervous, particularly. Faintly embarrassed, perhaps, but not nervous.
When the taxi turned onto Freytag Allee, not far from the hotel, Rudi leaned forward from the back seat and said, “Tell you what, mate, drop me here. I can walk the rest of the way.”
The driver pulled over to the side of the road, then turned in his seat and looked at Rudi around the head-rest.
“I’m here on holiday,” Rudi said. “It seems stupid to drive everywhere.”
“There’ve been a lot of muggings around here recently,” the driver said, not sounding particularly concerned.
“I heard that Hindenberg had conquered crime.”
The driver laughed. “That’s good,” he said, taking Rudi’s fare. “Conquered crime. Very good.” He was still laughing as he drove off, leaving Rudi standing on the pavement. Rudi waited until the taxi turned a corner. Then he walked back up the street.
Freytag Allee was not, he was delighted to find, that darkened street in Central Europe. It was a brightly-lit shopping street, and it was still b
usy with pedestrians and traffic. Everyone seemed well-dressed and prosperous and happy, which was not what he was used to in Kraków. Rudi wandered along, looking in shop windows, not hurrying. He stood for five minutes in front of a Peugeot dealership, behind whose faintly-green bulletproof glass windows stood a dozen immaculately-clean cars. He looked at the prices, did the conversion from marks to złotys, and estimated that he would have to work in Max’s kitchen for the next hundred and fifteen years if he wanted to buy a Peugeot in Hindenberg.
He wandered on, taking his time. A little further on, about a hundred paperscreen televisions were stuck to the inside of a huge window, all of them tuned to the same football match. From the shirts the players were wearing, Rudi gathered it was the Hungary-England international, and from the action on the pitch and on the terraces he gathered it was a spectacularly ill-tempered game.
After about five minutes, a man came along the street and stood beside him, and together they watched the match.
“That was never a goal,” the man said in German after a while.
“It might have been,” Rudi said. “I don’t think anybody understands the offside trap any more.”
“That’s true,” the man conceded. “I certainly don’t.”
Rudi glanced sideways, saw a stout, bulky figure well wrapped up against the cold evening. He was wearing a long overcoat with its collar turned up, and a hat with a broad brim pulled down over his brows. He also appeared to be wearing a scarf wrapped around his neck and lower face, so that all Rudi could see of him were his eyes and his body language.
“This is a very sad city,” said the man.
“Many cities are,” Rudi agreed, as Dariusz had told him to.
The bulky figure beside him seemed to relax. “Fifty-seven,” he said.
“Fifty-seven,” Rudi repeated.
The man put his hands in his pockets and started to walk away. After a few steps, he stopped, turned, and looked at Rudi.
“You’re very young,” he said.
Rudi tried to remember whether Dariusz had given him a response for this particular phrase. He decided that it was actually a bona fide scrap of conversation, and he found to his surprise that he was completely flatfooted by it. “I’m sorry,” he said.
The bulky man looked at him for a few moments longer. Then he shrugged and turned and walked away along the street. Rudi watched him turn a corner and vanish out of sight beyond the Peugeot dealership.
And that was it. Rudi stood in front of the shop window and watched the Hungary-England game on the other side of the glass. He couldn’t quite work out where the pictures were coming from. Not from terrestrial or satellite sources, certainly; the Poles would have jammed them. Ditto for cable links from Greater Germany. Maybe someone had brought the footage in on a stick earlier this evening. The cameras showed a shot of the stands. Someone had managed to smuggle a yachting flare past the metal detectors and the explosive detectors and the random security pat-downs. In a sea of heaving bodies, thick orange smoke boiled out across the crowd from a furious white-hot pinpoint.
He stood there for ten or fifteen minutes. Hungary won a penalty and scored a goal. There were no sirens. Nobody else approached him. Nobody tried to arrest him. Nobody tried to mug him. Finally, he wandered off to his hotel.
4.
KRAKÓW LOOKED DIRTY. There was no way around it; after Breslau, it looked dirty. Stately, beautiful, but filthy. Stumbling down from the train at Kraków Główny, he found himself noticing the pollution in the air for the first time in years. It was a gorgeous sunrise. Kraków had more than its share of gorgeous sunrises, because of the pollution. For the same reason, also it tended to have apocalyptic sunsets.
Rudi walked towards the centre of the city. Some of the pizza and kiełbasa stalls were already open in front of the Barbakan, and the smells of meat and hot oil on the morning breeze made his mouth water, but he walked past them. He thought that only tourists were foolish enough to risk buying a slice of pizza from one of the stalls.
Floriańska was almost deserted. Rudi let himself through Restauracja Max’s front door and locked it behind him.
Downstairs, the tables and chairs were stacked along the sides of the room and one of Max’s Filipina cleaning women was pushing an ancient Dyson vacuum cleaner across the carpet. Rudi waved hello to her and pushed through the swing-doors into the kitchen.
Max was standing among the tiled and stainless steel surfaces, clipboard in hand, ticking off the morning’s food delivery.
“That bastard Tomek’s light on his pork delivery again,” he told Rudi.
“Where’s Mirek?” Mirek was Rudi’s sous-chef, a sometime presence in the kitchen who Rudi was working himself up to dismissing.
Max shrugged. Unlike his mother, Max was at a loss when it came to the kitchen staff. In Rudi’s absence, Mirek should have been in charge of the kitchen, but Mirek was a force of nature, captious and unreliable. He was also, unfortunately, an outstanding chef, and Max’s customers were going to miss him, even if Rudi didn’t.
“I’ll phone Tomek,” said Rudi, stuffing his bag under one of the work-surfaces. Tomek had his own problems, mostly concerning suppliers and staff and kickbacks. The restaurant business had a lot in common with international relations; there was an awful lot of diplomacy, more often than not of the gunboat kind. He took off his jacket. “Have you missed me?”
“It would have been better if you had been here,” Max admitted.
“Does that get me a raise?”
Max gestured with the clipboard.
Rudi hung his jacket in a cupboard and rubbed his eyes. It seemed absurd to feel jetlagged after having travelled such a small distance. “I’ll sort out Mirek.”
“I had to get an agency chef in last night,” Max told him.
Which, in Rudi and Max’s world, was about the worst thing that could happen to a restaurant. Rudi thought of the smoothing of feathers he was going to have to do with his crew, and said, “Who was it?”
“Paweł Grabiański.”
Which was not the disaster it might have been, although Rudi’s crew should really have been able to cope without him and Mirek. He’d thought he had them organised better than that. There should have been a shuffling of the pecking order. Someone should have taken charge. He realised he was going to have to yell at them, something he had once sworn he would never do in his kitchen.
“Paweł’s a pretty good chef,” he said lamely.
“He just looks so sad all the time,” Max told him. “Like he’s going to burst into tears.”
“I’ve had days like that myself,” Rudi said, taking the clipboard from Max’s unresisting fingers. Max had only checked a couple of items from the stack of recycled plastic crates sitting in the middle of the kitchen.
“You look tired.”
“I’ll get everything cleared away and I’ll have a nap for a couple of hours, all right?”
“You should go home and sleep properly,” Max told him. “I’ll call the agency for today’s lunch service.”
“They might send Paweł again.”
Max’s face showed an agony of indecision.
“I’ll be all right,” Rudi said. He tucked the clipboard under his armpit and went across to get himself a cup of coffee from the espresso machine he’d bullied Max into installing in the kitchen.
Max was obviously struggling not to ask about what had happened in Hindenberg. Rudi said, “I saw him.”
“And how did he look?”
“It was dark; his face was in shadow.” Rudi wondered how long they were going to continue the charade about Max’s ‘cousin.’ He said, “I have to talk to Dariusz.”
“And so you shall,” Dariusz said, stepping out from the corridor that led into the courtyard behind Restauracja Max. “And the magic number is?”
“Fifty-seven,” said Rudi.
“You’re sure?” said Dariusz.
“Fifty-seven,” Rudi repeated.
“You’ve done very well
,” said Dariusz, and he turned and went back down the corridor. Rudi heard the courtyard door open and close. He and Max looked at each other.
“Did he seem well?” Max asked.
Rudi poured himself a cup of coffee. “I told you; it was dark.” This was obviously not sufficient for Max, so he said, “He certainly sounded well.”
Max nodded. “Good,” he said, a little awkwardly, Rudi thought. He turned away and walked towards the swing-door of the dining room. “Good.”
AND THAT SEEMED to be the end of Rudi’s little adventure. Max didn’t mention it again, and Dariusz didn’t come back to the restaurant. It was as if nothing had happened, as if he had never taken the train to Hindenberg. He cooked, he watched sous-chefs arrive in the kitchen and then depart some days later shouting about minimum wages and unsociable hours. Max shook his head sadly, and they went on with their lives.
The chilly Polish spring gradually became the lush, oppressive Polish summer. The air conditioning in the kitchen broke down and the kitchen staff began to wilt, and in some cases to faint. Kraków began to bake in the heat. The city swelled with tourists.
One busy evening in July, one of the customers asked if he could give his personal compliments to the chef, and Rudi went out into the restaurant to receive them.
The customer was a tall wafer-thin man with gelled-back hair and a bushy walrus-style moustache of the kind you didn’t see very often in Central Europe these days. He was wearing an expensive German business suit, and his wife was wearing a startling off-the-shoulder backless – and very nearly frontless – purple evening dress.
Rudi sat and allowed the husband to pour him a drink and congratulate him. The wife smiled and complimented him on the meal and leaned forward to pat him on the knee and ask for his recipe for bigos, and he found that he could see down the front of her dress all the way to her pubic hair.
Europe in Autumn Page 3
