Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  He looked away and saw Max and another man standing almost toe to toe in one of the darkest corners of the restaurant. They seemed to be having a very quiet, very intense conversation. He thought there was something familiar about the other man’s build and body language. Then he realised that it was familiar because all he had ever seen of him was his build and body language.

  And then Max and the other man embraced each other. Just like long-lost cousins, in fact.

  SOME WEEKS AFTER that – and Rudi thought later that they had actually given him time to think about it – Dariusz came into the restaurant and asked to see him.

  “I thought you ought to know that Max’s cousin is very grateful to you,” said the little mafioso.

  “Max mentioned it,” said Rudi.

  Dariusz sat back and lit a cigarette and looked around the restaurant. “How would you like,” he said, “to do that kind of thing for a living?”

  “I’m a chef,” Rudi replied. “For a living.”

  Dariusz inhaled on his cigarette, held the smoke in his lungs for longer than Rudi would have thought was medically advisable or physically possible, then exhaled a tenuous aromatic haze.

  “How would you like to do that kind of thing as a hobby?” he asked.

  “All right,” said Rudi. “So long as it’s a well-paid sort of hobby.”

  1.

  FABIO WAS FIFTEEN hours late coming in from London.

  “Fucking English,” he said when Rudi finally met him at Jan Paweł II/Balice. “They spend about a thousand years trying to decide whether or not to join the Union, and when they do they become absolute fanatics. I mean, it’s totally offensive. Here, carry this.”

  Rudi took Fabio’s carry-on bag, which was considerably heavier than it looked, and followed the little Swiss-Italian across the arrivals lounge.

  It transpired, between the arrivals gate and the taxi rank outside, that the English were having one of their periodic paranoid episodes – drugs, terrorism, immunisation, whatever – and Fabio had been held up while they confiscated and checked his passport and travel documents.

  “I mean, not allowing one in, I can understand that,” he fumed. “But not allowing one out. What sort of mind thinks like that?” He looked at the motley line of cars pulled up outside the terminal and shook his head. “No, I’m not getting into any of these taxis. I was completely ripped off the last time I got a taxi from this airport. I should have flown in to Katowice, I never had any problems with the taxi drivers at Katowice. We’ll take the bus into town. Follow me.”

  Rudi followed.

  “And they put me in that disgusting hotel at Heathrow while I waited,” Fabio told him.

  EVERY STUDENT NEEDS a teacher, Dariusz had told him, and Fabio was to be his. He was short and chubby and well-dressed enough to be mugged within minutes of setting foot on any street in Western Europe. His suit was from the cutting edge of the Armani Revival and his shoes had been sewn by wizened artisans in Cordova. His luggage cost more than a flat in central Kraków. He was, Rudi thought, one of the least covert people he had ever seen. He thought it was a miracle the English authorities hadn’t arrested Fabio and then just looked for a crime to charge him with, because he was almost a caricature of a Central European biznisman.

  Fabio had a dim view of Kraków’s hotels. The Cracovia wasn’t good enough for him. He refused to even cross the threshold of the Europa. He claimed the head chef of the Bristol was a convicted poisoner. He wound up staying at Rudi’s flat.

  “Forget all that fucking idealism about Schengen,” he told Rudi on his first evening, after hoovering down the meal Rudi had cooked for him. “People in this business care about two things only. Money and prestige. You get money by doing your job, and you get prestige by taking insane risks.” He drank his wine in one swallow and winced. “This is horrible.”

  “It’s a Mouton Rothschild ’41,” Rudi said.

  “’41,” said Fabio, narrowing his eyes at his glass as if it had done him a personal wrong. “What a disgusting year.”

  “It’s a vintage year.”

  “Not for me it wasn’t. Don’t you have anything else to drink? And that steak was overdone, by the way.”

  THEY CALLED THEMSELVES Les Coureurs des Bois, and they delivered mail.

  Even before Europe had blossomed with new countries, there had been a healthy courier business, some of it legal, rather more of it not. Some things were just too sensitive or important or flat-out illegal to trust to the public mail or electronic transfer. In those days, a canny courier could wangle themselves a cheap flight anywhere on Earth if they chose their assignment well.

  These days, things were more complicated. Border disputes often meant that delivering mail from polity A to nation B was impossible. So people contacted Les Coureurs, and the mail got through. Sometimes the mail consisted of people for whom the passage from polity A to nation B might otherwise be impossibly delicate. Sometimes it was items which nation B might be narrowminded enough to consider illegal.

  They were, in other words, smugglers, although when Rudi voiced this opinion Fabio pointed out that, as with so many things, the term depended very much on your point of view.

  Nobody knew who they were. Conventional wisdom had it that they were a phenomenon of the times, a gradual accretion of little courier firms into an entity which had things in common with the CIA and the Post Office. You got in touch with them the way you made that awkward first contact with a drug dealer, by knowing someone who knew someone who knew someone.

  Rudi thought the popular media had inflated them out of all proportion. They were just couriers, and people had been couriering stuff around Europe since at least the Middle Ages, and smuggling things for considerably longer. They were also, if Fabio was representative, appalling houseguests. Among numerous other little personality quirks, Fabio had a thing about rearranging furniture. Every evening when Rudi got back to the flat he would find the furniture in some new configuration, and Fabio standing in the middle of the living room looking at it. He’d thought at first that the plump little Coureur was practising some bizarre Swiss form of feng shui, but after a week or so he had to wonder if Fabio wasn’t just the tiniest little bit deranged.

  They went over and over his trip to Hindenberg, in obsessive detail. What he remembered, who he had spoken to, where he had been, what he had observed about the people he interacted with, from the border officials to the taxi driver in Breslau to the waiter who had served his breakfast at the Pension Adler the next morning.

  “You kept it simple, which is good,” Fabio told him. “Simple is often best, but not always. Sometimes it’s necessary to make things as complicated as possible. And sometimes you just have to wing it.” He took a sip from his cup and pouted. “What do you call this?”

  Rudi looked at the cup. “‘Coffee,’” he said.

  Fabio returned his cup to its saucer. “Not where I come from, it’s not.”

  “You’ve been drinking it all week.”

  Fabio shook his head. “I can’t stand this ‘continental roast.’ What’s that supposed to mean? ‘Continental roast.’”

  Rudi stood up. “I need some fresh air.”

  “HE’S VERY GOOD,” mused Dariusz.

  “He’s driving me out of my mind,” said Rudi.

  Dariusz lit a cigarette. “What, precisely, bothers you about him?”

  “How long do you have?”

  Dariusz chuckled.

  Rudi sighed. They were in Pani Halina’s on Senatorska. Because Rudi knew Halina’s chef, and because Dariusz was who he was, they had been given one of the restaurant’s private tables, away from the lunchtime crowd of students and tourists and out of work actors.

  “Nothing I cook for him is any good,” he said.

  Dariusz snorted goodnaturedly. “I think you’ll find that people do have their own tastes in food, Rudi.”

  “Where I come from, it’s good manners not to criticise your host’s cooking.”

  “Pe
rhaps it’s different in Switzerland.” The little mafioso shrugged. “I don’t know, I’ve never been there. Next?”

  “He rearranges my furniture.”

  Dariusz looked at him and narrowed his eyes. Then he shrugged again. “Fabio is accustomed to a life of action, not a life cooped up in your flat. He sounds restless.”

  “‘Restless’?”

  “Look.” Dariusz waved Rudi’s misgivings away. “He’s here to teach you. He’s to be the... the Merlin to your Arthur. The Obi-Wan to your Anakin. We have to be indulgent of geniuses.”

  “Must we let them move our furniture about?”

  “If moving furniture about is what makes them happy.”

  “Dariusz, there’s something wrong with him.”

  Dariusz shook his head. “Indulge him, Rudi. Listen and learn.”

  IN RUDI’S OPINION, whoever had set up the Coureurs had overdosed on late twentieth century espionage fiction. Coureur operational jargon, as passed on by Fabio, sounded like something from a John le Carré novel. Legends were fictitious identities. Stringers were non-Coureur personnel, or entry-level Coureurs, who did makework like scoping out locations in the field or maintaining legends. Pianists were hackers, tailors provided technical support, cobblers forged documents – Rudi knew that euphemism had been in use in espionage circles as far back as the 1930s. He thought it was ridiculous.

  The business with Max’s cousin had been a test, that much was obvious. As Dariusz described it, Max’s cousin had already been in contact with the Coureurs, and had been presented with a menu of options for his escape from Hindenberg. All Rudi had done was relay his favoured option. Any stringer could have done it; Max’s cousin, in the face of postal problems and telephone and radio jamming and interception of emails, could have sent up smoke signals. It had been, more than anything, a test of nerve, a test of how Rudi would handle the problem.

  It seemed he had passed the test. And Fabio was his reward.

  “Never ever undervalue a stringer,” Fabio told him. “Consider a typical stringer – we shall call him Ralf. Ralf works in a delicatessen in Lausanne. He has a wife named Chantelle, some children, maybe a dog. For much of the time, he lives a normal life. He hates his boss. He fucks his wife. He plays with his children. He takes the dog for a walk.”

  “Maybe,” said Rudi.

  “You’re interrupting me,” Fabio warned.

  “You said maybe a dog.” After two months with Fabio, Rudi had learned to take his pleasures where he could find them. “Now you’re telling me he takes his dog for a walk.”

  Fabio narrowed his eyes.

  “I just wondered whether we should take the dog as a given now,” Rudi said.

  Fabio frowned.

  “These things are important,” said Rudi. “You must agree.”

  Fabio watched him a moment longer, then looked away into the distance. “But on occasion, Ralf is asked to do more specialised work,” he continued. “He is asked to renew a passport in a false name, to get a parking ticket, to take a lease on an apartment in Geneva. These are all things which contribute to the building of a legend. And Ralf knows all the details of these transactions. Invaluable operational intelligence. If Ralf should fall into unkind hands, and if he should tell all he knows, the information could bring any number of Situations crashing to the ground.”

  It wasn’t just the jargon, Rudi thought. If Fabio was representative, Les Coureurs really considered themselves some form of espionage agency. Cloak and dagger, night-time streets in Central Europe, one-time pads, the whole thing. He wondered if he shouldn’t have another quiet chat with Dariusz.

  Fabio looked levelly at him. “Now you can cook me my dinner,” he said. “And then I have some homework for you. And I don’t want any of that disgusting tripe stew you served last night; my insides still haven’t recovered.”

  ‘HOMEWORK’ TURNED OUT to be an interminable round of offices and bureaucrats. A lease signed here, a driving licence applied for there, all in different names. He was expected to buy a car, renew a passport, take a train-ride to Sosnowiec and return with the ticket stubs, open a bank account in the name of Anton Blum, telephone a man named Grudziński and complain about the waste disposal unit in a flat. All the little tracks one leaves every day without thinking about it. And at one point, footsore and really not terribly impressed with the life of a stringer, he thought he saw the point of Fabio’s tale about Ralf and his maybe dog. He could conceivably ruin half a dozen different Situations. If he had the faintest idea what he was doing. And for whom. And why.

  Max said, “I suppose you could just stop any time you wanted,” which was really Max-speak for ‘You’re spending too much time as a Coureur and I’m spending too much money on agency chefs.’

  “It can’t last much longer,” Rudi told him. “Dariusz says once Fabio’s finished with me I might not be needed for another ten years.”

  Max snorted. “Europe must be crawling with Coureurs then.”

  Rudi had some vague idea that Max was, or had been at sometime in the past, involved in some way with Coureur Central, but it always seemed indelicate to ask. He said, “How many do you think there are, out of interest?”

  Max laughed. “In my experience? You and Fabio.” Rudi had brought Fabio to the restaurant the night before for a meal. Not a happy event, for anyone.

  “I’m going to be busy then.”

  “Looks that way,” Max sighed.

  2.

  MORE ‘HOMEWORK.’ PHONE calls, passports applied for, job interviews attended. One day he spent an entire morning in a very untidy flat in Sosnowiec. Eventually a policeman turned up and took the details of a burglary which had been reported at the flat. Rudi gave the policeman a list of missing possessions. The policeman left.

  It occurred to Rudi that, while he was certainly getting a feel for the work of a stringer, Central was also getting its money’s worth out of him. He had lost count of how many legends he was contributing to. He opened bank accounts. He rented an office in Zabrze. Fabio gave him a slim attaché case and told him to place it in a safety-deposit box at a bank in Katowice.

  Along with homework came tradecraft. And it was disappointingly run-of-the-mill stuff. Dead drops, brush passes, tips on how to drop a tail, tips on how to pick one up. It was straight out of Deighton or Furst. Almost comicbook stuff. Rudi doubted that even the security services still did this kind of thing.

  Using maps, Fabio made him plan jumps from half a dozen Polish cities, peppering each one with alternate dustoffs. Then Fabio demolished each jump, one by one, in a high, hectoring tone of voice, have you learned nothing? Am I getting through to you yet?

  As time went on, Fabio began to disappear for days at a time. Rudi would wake up in the morning, and there would be a Fabio-shaped hole in his life. No complaining about the food or moving the furniture about. The first time it happened, he thought the Coureur had simply given up on him and gone home, but a day or so later Fabio was back, making obscene comments about Poles and daring Rudi to cook him a meal he could actually enjoy. More absences followed, at irregular intervals.

  They had day-trips to neighbouring towns and cities, and Rudi was required to improvise jumps off the top of his head from this office building or that police station. Then Fabio demolished each one.

  “This is a lot of fun,” Rudi admitted wearily on the way back from one trip, “but I have a real job to think about as well, you know.”

  “Of course you do,” Fabio said. “And you are free to return to it at any time. And I can go somewhere else.” He smiled brightly. “Perhaps there will be decent food there. What do you think?”

  What Rudi was thinking, increasingly, was fuck you, Fabio. “I think you’re going to be stuck with me for a little while longer,” he said.

  Fabio sighed. “Of course. I was afraid of that.”

  ONE NIGHT, TEN weeks after the beginning of his apprenticeship, Rudi was woken by a strange conviction that someone else was in his bedroom. He rolled over,
opened his eyes, and saw Fabio standing beside the bed.

  “Get dressed,” said the little Coureur. “We’re going on an exercise.”

  Rudi looked at the clock. “It’s three o’clock in the morning.”

  “You should have gone to bed earlier, then,” Fabio snapped.

  Rudi, who had promised Max that he would make one of his increasingly-rare appearances at the restaurant today, said, “Can’t we do it tomorrow? Or Friday? Friday would be better.”

  Fabio turned and headed for the door. “You want to go back to being a cook, fine,” he muttered. “I’ll pack and you can drive me to the airport and I can leave this stinky little town.”

  Rudi felt a stirring of the spirit of resistance that Pani Stasia had lit within him. He got out of bed and pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. “I’m a chef, you ridiculous little bastard!” he shouted.

  Fabio came back to the door and looked at Rudi. The bedroom was in darkness and the little Swiss was silhouetted by the hall lights, so Rudi couldn’t see his expression.

  “And this is a city,” Rudi told him more quietly. “Not a town.”

  Fabio turned away and went into the living room. “Town, city,” he said. “Whatever.”

  THEY WALKED DOWN to the end of the street, where Fabio had the keys to a parked Lexus. He had his heavy carry-on case with him. He put it in the boot and told Rudi to drive to Częstochowa.

  At Częstochowa, Fabio directed Rudi to park the Lexus outside the station. He retrieved his case, and they walked for about forty minutes, at which point Fabio stopped beside a parked Mercedes, produced a set of keys, and said, “Get in. I’ll drive.”

  “Are we going far?” Rudi asked.