Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  Rudi looked at his watch. Ten minutes since Fabio left. He got up and walked over to the easy chairs, grouped around another of those smoked-glass-topped coffee-tables. There was a scatter of Polish lifestyle magazines on the table, and he sat down and leafed through one of them, shaking his head at the recipes. He looked at his visitors’ pass, hanging round his neck on its lanyard. Rocco Siffredi. He shook his head again.

  Another ten minutes passed. The door opened. Rudi looked up from the magazine he was reading, expecting to see Fabio, but instead two shaven-headed men wearing identical suits were standing in the doorway. They had the neckless look of career steroid abusers, and little wireless headsets plugged into one ear.

  Rudi smiled uncertainly.

  THEY WERE VERY polite. They took his clothes. They put him in a cell that was a windowless concrete cube about four metres on a side, whose only features were a drain in the middle of the floor and an armoured glass bubble in the ceiling containing a light source that never went out.

  Rudi sat for long periods of time on the floor. When it got too cold under his naked buttocks, he got up and paced around the cell. He lost track of time, but he didn’t worry. It was all a test.

  He cursed himself for not realising straight away. It was patently ridiculous that Fabio would just march him across the border without any preparation at all. Therefore it was a test. It was patently ridiculous that someone like Fabio could talk his way past the border guards. Therefore the guards had been in on it. It was patently ridiculous that Fabio could wander around the Line’s Consulate unmolested. Therefore everyone had been in on it. Like the Situation with Max’s cousin, it had all just been a test of nerve and character. All he had to do was sit here and wait for the test to end and he could go back to Restauracja Max.

  He was still thinking that, right up to the first time the Line’s security men waterboarded him.

  AT SOME POINT, he was given an orange jumpsuit to wear, but he didn’t understand what it was and someone had to help him put it on. Then he was helped, not ungently, down a corridor to a little room containing a table and three chairs. A casually-dressed man of indeterminate middle-age was already sitting on one of the chairs. Rudi was invited to sit on the one facing him across the table. The third chair was taken by someone large and humourless.

  Rudi and the middle-aged man looked at each other across the table for a long time. Rudi’s legs hurt and he couldn’t stop shaking and he kept feeling moments of weightlessness.

  “My name is Kaunas,” the middle-aged man said eventually.

  “That’s not a name,” Rudi said through a split lip. “That’s a place.”

  Kaunas sat quiet again for a long time. He had a hard face and greying brown hair swept straight back from his forehead. Finally he said, “How are you being treated?”

  “I’m being tortured,” said Rudi. “Just look at me.”

  “Where is Fabio?” asked Kaunas.

  “He went to consult with a colleague down the corridor,” said Rudi. “What day is it?”

  Kaunas looked at Rudi again for a long time without speaking. Then he looked at a corner of the ceiling and said, “We’ll be making a formal diplomatic protest. He knows nothing.”

  The corner of the ceiling did not answer, but the large humourless person in the third chair got up and lifted Rudi to his feet. “It’s a place,” Rudi told Kaunas as he was ushered firmly out of the room.

  Instead of being taken back to his cell, or any of the other rooms he’d been in, he was walked up a set of stairs and suddenly found himself in the Consulate’s reception room. Hazel was still behind her desk. He smiled at her as he was walked past, but it made his lip bleed and Hazel looked away.

  Outside, the sunshine hurt his eyes, but it was only for a few moments. He was helped into one of those cars with darkened windows and seats so comfortable they felt like leather clouds, and he fell asleep for a while.

  He woke up as he was being helped out of the car. He was marched through a loud space, then up some steps, then down a corridor and into a room with a sliding door and a big window and seats facing each other against two of the walls. He was lifted onto one of the seats. The door slid closed. He looked out of the window, and his mind refused to process the scene when everything outside started to slide backwards. He fell asleep again.

  Some time later, he woke up again and the view outside the window was different. There was a big sign right outside. It read, Kraków, which he thought meant something to him. Then the door slid open and someone came into the room and started to help him to his feet, but his legs hurt and they didn’t work properly and he threw up what little was in his stomach and then he went away for a while.

  DARIUSZ CAME TO see him in hospital. Not right away, but after a few days. After Max and the kitchen crew and some (not very many, Rudi was disappointed to discover and determined to revenge) of his acquaintances from other restaurants had visited. He arrived unannounced, outside visiting hours. Rudi, who had been dozing, opened his eyes, and there was the little mafioso, sitting beside the bed and looking as if he wanted a cigarette.

  “You took your time,” said Rudi.

  “You have our abject apologies,” said Dariusz without preamble.

  “Oh,” said Rudi. “Abject apologies. Oh, good.”

  Dariusz leaned forward fractionally. “You’re angry, but–”

  “Yes,” said Rudi. “I am angry. I told you there was something wrong with Fabio, but you wouldn’t listen. ‘He’s a genius, Rudi.’ ‘We must be tolerant of our geniuses, Rudi.’ Fuck you, Dariusz.”

  Dariusz paused. Then he said, “You’re angry, but I need to know what you told them.”

  Rudi looked at him. “What?”

  Dariusz reached out and touched his arm. “I need to know what you told them.”

  “Fuck off, Dariusz.” Rudi turned away from him.

  “It’s important,” Dariusz continued gently. “You don’t know much, but what you do know could compromise... certain things.”

  Rudi turned back to look at him. “I kept your name out of it, if it’s any comfort. But I dropped Fabio in the shit as much as I possibly could.”

  Dariusz sat back and nodded, as if hearing confirmation of something. “Something terrible has happened,” he said. “But it had nothing to do with the Coureurs. It was about as off-piste as it’s possible to be. You must understand that.”

  “Must I?” Rudi struggled into a sitting position, punching the pillows down behind him. “Must I? You brought me a teacher and he almost got me killed. Must I understand that?”

  “Fabio was operating outside orders,” said Dariusz. “He was running his own operation. What he did wasn’t sanctioned by Central. He took you into the Consulate as a patsy to gain time for his own dustoff.”

  A patsy. “Well, great.”

  Dariusz took his time asking his next question. He watched Rudi’s face. He looked around the room. He looked back at Rudi. He said, “Do you still want to be a Coureur?”

  “I beg your pardon?” howled Rudi, loud enough to bring a brace of nurses running to see what all the fuss was about. By which time, of course, Dariusz was gone.

  1.

  “SMALL NATIONS ARE like small men,” said the cobbler. “Paranoid. Twitchy. Quick to anger.”

  “Mm,” said Rudi.

  “I wouldn’t call them nations anyway,” the cobbler went on. “Most of them break down after a year or so. Look at me. Don’t smile.” He pointed a little camera at Rudi, paused a moment to frame the shot, and took four pictures. The camera was cabled, along with a number of other little devices and anonymous boxes, into a battered-looking old Motorola phone. “Thank you. In my opinion they don’t have the right to call themselves nations until they’ve been about for a century or so.”

  “Is this going to take long?” Rudi asked. “I have a train to catch.”

  The cobbler looked at him. “Getting in and out of the Zone is child’s play,” he said soberly. “Residence visas
and work permits are much more difficult.”

  “I know,” said Rudi.

  “My regular pianist wasn’t available; I had to hire someone out of my own pocket.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rudi said, hoping the stand-in pianist was trustworthy.

  The cobbler kept looking at him. “You’re very young.”

  This seemed impossible to argue with. Rudi shrugged.

  “Change the colour of your hair,” said the cobbler. “Grow a moustache.”

  “I don’t have time to grow a moustache.”

  “Well have your hair cut,” the cobbler said testily. “You have time to visit a barber? Alter your appearance somehow. No one ever looks exactly like their passport photograph; it makes immigration officers suspicious if they do.”

  “Perhaps I could wear a hat,” said Rudi.

  The cobbler looked at him for a few moments longer, then shook his head sadly. He went over to the phone and started to fiddle with its little roll-up tapboard. “And of course the Zone has these paper passports,” he said, looking intently at the phone’s screen. He shook his head at something, poked the tapboard several times. “Silicon is so much easier.”

  “It’s supposed to be more difficult.”

  The cobbler shook his head again. He rapped the phone with a knuckle. “With silicon, I can do everything in here. With paper... well, you must find the correct paper, the correct inks, the correct stamps... much more difficult.”

  “Right,” said Rudi.

  “My pianist took ten minutes to hack the Zone’s immigration computer and update your legend’s records. Where’s the security there?”

  “Right,” said Rudi.

  “Everyone should produce passports like this,” the cobbler went on. “Any pianist can hack a silicon passport, but it takes an artist to work with paper and ink.”

  “Right,” said Rudi.

  The cobbler glanced up from the screen. “You probably believe you know everything.”

  “That’s the first time anyone’s accused me of that,” Rudi told him.

  The window of the cobbler’s shop looked out over a landscape of sharply-pitched roofs broken by chimneypots and about a hundred different types of radio, television and satellite antennae. In the far distance, Rudi could see the cranes of the Gdańsk shipyards. The shipyards had gone bust sometime during the early part of the century, and the land was now occupied by trendy apartment blocks and studios for artists and those little design firms no one ever quite understands the purpose of. The cranes had been preserved, as historical monuments, although nobody could agree who was supposed to be maintaining them so they were slowly and quietly rusting away.

  The cobbler’s shop itself was clearly one of Central’s myriad temporary spaces, rented by a stringer on a monthly basis for whatever brief occupancy circumstances dictated. A dusty boxroom right at the top of a tall brick-built rooming house, floored with lino that looked as if it dated back to the Second World War. A pile of teachests stacked over in one corner, an ancient wooden rocking-horse under the window. The cobbler’s equipment could be packed into two medium-sized attaché cases and moved from place to place as circumstances demanded. The cobbler himself was as anonymous as the room. Small, slight and middle-aged, with a receding hairline and battered, slightly old-fashioned clothes.

  “You speak Estonian?” he asked, reading the laptop’s screen.

  “I can get by,” said Rudi.

  The cobbler nodded. “Your Polish is very good,” he said, looking at the screen again. “But you’re from up the coast somewhere; I can hear your accent.”

  Rudi took a battered bentwood stool from a stack in the corner of the attic, set it right way up, sat down, and folded his hands in his lap.

  “I know,” said the cobbler. “None of my business. Everyone in the Zone speaks English, anyway.” He took from his pocket a small parcel wrapped in what appeared to be chamois leather. Unwrapping it, he held up a thin little book with laurel-green covers. Its front cover was gold-stamped with an extremely stylised eagle and some writing.

  “Worth more than its weight in gold,” he said. “Literally. Virgin; never used. Bring it back.”

  “All right,” said Rudi.

  The cobbler opened the passport and laid a thin sheet of transparent film over one of the pages. Then he fed the whole thing into one of the little boxes connected to the phone.

  “We don’t get many of these,” he said, and Rudi wondered if he meant virgin passports or something else. He typed a couple of commands into the tapboard and a moment later the box ejected the passport. He stripped the film away and Rudi saw that his photograph and some printing were now embossed on the page.

  “Actually,” he said, rooting around in one of his cases, “they’ve been very clever.”

  Rudi tried to feign interest. “Oh?”

  “Not many people these days have the paraphernalia to do work like this successfully.” He took from the case two stamps and two ink-pads. “I had to mix the inks myself. Specific fluorescences, magnetic particles. Very tricky.”

  Rudi looked at his watch.

  The cobbler carefully inked the stamps and inserted the residence visa and work permits. Then he took out a gorgeous antique Sheaffer fountain pen and dated and initialled the stamps. Then, with several other lovely pens, he signed several different signatures.

  “Then, of course, they have to spoil it all.” He typed another couple of commands and another little box ejected a narrow length of plastic printed with a barcode. The cobbler stripped off the backing and pressed the barcode onto the final page of the passport.

  Finally, he opened the passport at a number of different pages and flexed the spine back and forth. Then he closed it and bent it between his hands. Then he leaned down and rubbed both covers and the edges on the dusty floor.

  “Congratulations,” he said, holding the passport out to Rudi. “You’re Tonu Laara.”

  “Thank you,” Rudi said, taking the passport. “And it’s pronounced Tonu.”

  The cobbler smiled. “There. I like a man who knows how to pronounce his Christian name.”

  2.

  THE POLES BEGAN to arrive a couple of days before New Year’s Eve.

  First to arrive, on the 29th, were about a dozen in three cars with skis strapped to their roof-racks. They all seemed to know each other, booked into their rooms, and went straight back out onto the slopes.

  Early that evening, a coach arrived bearing about thirty more, all of them loaded down with ski equipment. From his hatchway Rudi watched them at the evening meal, deriding the food and calling good-natured insults to each other.

  The next day, more cars and another coach. It was a package tour organised by some firm in Upper Silesia, Jan confided.

  “They stop off in town and buy up all the alcohol in the supermarket and then come up here and drink like madmen,” he said.

  “Why?” asked Rudi.

  Jan gave a great expansive shrug as if to demonstrate that the motivations of Poles were as mysterious to him as the workings of the cosmos.

  Whatever. Most of the first coachload of Poles left the hotel and strapped on their skis almost as soon as the sun came up over the far peaks the next morning. The rest stayed in their rooms and began to drink their purchases, and when the second load arrived in the early afternoon, already loudly drunk, there were some fights between the two groups.

  Rudi was familiar with some of these people. The skiers were just ordinary Poles, here to have a good time on the slopes and spend a nice New Year’s Eve. The drinkers were in their mid-twenties and well-dressed, young Polish entrepreneurs who had made a lot of money very quickly and wanted to take their girlfriends on a cheap, loud, boozy holiday. At dinner that evening there was a lot of shouting and some food was thrown. Later on there were more fights, discharged fire extinguishers, weeping girlfriends running screaming down the corridors with their mascara smeared in long black teary streaks.

  In the kitchen, Rudi put basket after
basket of dirty crockery onto the conveyor of the ancient Hobart dishwasher, walked round to the other end, and took baskets of clean crockery – heated to just short of the melting point of lead, it felt like – off. After three months handling red-hot plates and cups his fingertips had blistered and peeled and he was almost bereft of fingerprints, which he thought was an interesting effect.

  “It was the same last year,” Jan said morosely, perched on one of the stainless steel worktops. “Fights, alcohol poisoning. They even let fireworks off in the hotel. I had to call the police.”

  “But imagine the income,” Rudi said, slinging another basket of coffee cups into the Hobart.

  Jan shrugged. He was actually the hotel’s manager, and there were always pressing demands on his time, so that he rarely went to bed before three in the morning. But he had begun his career in the hotel trade as a humble kitchen porter – Rudi’s post – and seemed to feel more at ease in the kitchens than anywhere else. He had studied at the London School of Economics and spoke very good English, which was Rudi’s second language. This was fortunate because Rudi’s Czech – based mainly on the language’s similarities to Polish – was on the poor side of rudimentary.

  “Income,” said Jan as if the prospect was the most depressing he could imagine. “And for what? We only spend it repairing the damage. I wanted to ban Poles after last year, but the owners said I couldn’t. You speak very good Polish, don’t you?”

  “Not me,” Rudi said. “Not a word.”

  “I heard you talking to that girl Marta the other day. The one on the evening cleaning shift. It sounded like Polish you were speaking.”

  “You heard wrong, Jan.” Operationally, Rudi wasn’t keen to let anyone know where he had come from. On a practical level, he was even less keen to get roped into some situation where he was called on to try and calm down a gang of fantastically-drunk Poles, which was bound to happen if Jan thought he spoke the language with any great facility.