“Ah, maybe so.” Jan heaved a sigh and looked at his watch. There was a faint, muffled thud from far overhead in the hotel, and distant shouting, audible even over the rumble of the Hobart’s conveyor and the hiss of its water-jets. “Christ, they’re still at it.”
“They’re only kids with too much money,” Rudi said, walking around to the end of the dishwasher and lifting the basket off.
“Too much money?” Jan said. “You try getting them to pay for the damage they cause. Then you’ll see how much money they have.” He looked at his watch again. “Time for my rounds,” he said unwillingly. “You’re sure you don’t speak Polish?”
“I would have noticed.” Rudi started to take the crockery out of the tray. He barely felt the residual heat now; the first time he’d done it he’d shrieked and flung a plate across the kitchen.
Jan shook his head. “I can’t understand what brings a man like you to a place like this.”
“Life is full of infinite variety,” Rudi said. It had become his catchphrase since arriving in Pustevny.
Jan smiled. “Okay, Mister Estonian.” He hopped down off the worktop and ran his hands down the legs of his trousers to smooth them. “You carry on throwing pots and pans into the dishwasher. I know you’re running away from something.”
In the beginning, Rudi had been terrified that Jan was onto him, but he had come to realise that Jan was one of the world’s worst students of human nature; the manager simply suspected everybody, on the grounds that he was bound to be right some of the time.
Rudi grinned. “I like it here, Jan. I just like it here.”
And really it was the truth. After months living under the cloud left by Fabio’s catastrophic visit to Poznań, his life had become incredibly simple. Get up, wash dishes, go to bed. Wait for the Package to arrive and make themselves known.
The Beskid Economic Zone was not a polity as such. It was more of an autonomous national park devoted to stripping tourists of their money. It paid rent to the rump of the Czech Government for use of its land, but the rent was a fraction of the megatonnes of francs, schillings, marks, złotys, euros, sterling and dollars that cascaded into the area every year. This part of northeastern Czechoslovakia had always been a popular skiing destination for the population of neighbouring nations. Even when it began issuing visas – for a small gratuity – and imposing entry and exit taxes on top of the prices of ski-passes it remained popular. It was a big mountainous snowy machine for making money, and one of the wealthiest junk nations in Central Europe.
It was perfectly placed. The Polish border was only three-quarters of an hour away by road, Prague wasn’t much further in the opposite direction, Vienna only another couple of hours or so away. The Zone was making money hand over fist, and Rudi thought that coachloads of drunken Poles were a small price to pay.
The last tray-load of cutlery washed for the night, he shut down the machine and started to go through the cleaning procedure. This involved draining the Hobart’s tanks and removing the stainless steel filter-baskets and rinsing the crap out of them. It was routine and boring and somehow comforting.
As the cobbler had told him, getting into the Zone was simplicity itself. He had shown his passport, just another Zone resident coming back after a holiday, and the immigration officer had waved him through without even bothering to scan the barcode and without charging him the entry tax imposed on tourists.
No one was sure how many Coureurs were drifting around what used to be Europe. Could have been a hundred, maybe a thousand, maybe ten times that. The nature of their work made them hard to find; popular legend had it that they would find you, arriving on your doorstep one dark night when you needed them most, with their stealth-suits hidden under long black trenchcoats, fedoras tilted in best noir fashion to shadow the eyes. This was ludicrous, of course, as anyone could have told you if they really thought about it: anybody who went about dressed like that would deserve to be arrested.
What really happened was a lot less structured and a lot more secretive. Central liked to keep these things vague; even the Coureurs themselves didn’t usually know who had brought them into a Situation. There were tangles of code words and dead drops and mobile pickups and callbox routines, none of which Rudi had yet encountered.
Fabio’s departure had left him without a teacher, and Dariusz had stepped into the breach, flawlessly delivering tradecraft to him in a succession of restaurants and safe houses. Lists of word-strings to memorise, dead drops planned with the help of town plans and photographs, brush-passes to practise. It was almost like working under Pani Stasia again.
“You’ll probably never need to use any of this,” Dariusz told him one evening in a flat over a bar in Częstochowa. “Most Coureurs do nothing more complicated or illegal than deliver mail.”
“So why do I have to remember all this stuff?” Rudi asked.
“Because one day you may need it.”
“To deliver mail?”
Dariusz shrugged. “Better safe than sorry, wouldn’t you say?”
“By the way,” Rudi asked casually, leafing through a sheaf of Zakopane street maps, “what has happened to Fabio?”
“Fabio has retired,” Dariusz said, and lit another cigarette.
“You said he was good.”
“He was tired.” Dariusz looked at him. “Fabio’s task was to teach you the basics of the trade, but instead he chose to operate to an agenda of his own, and he was not afraid to leave you behind to face the music. Don’t forget that. He had begun to wonder why he was a Coureur. Some do it for the money, some do it because it offers their lives a little harmless adventure. Fabio didn’t know any longer. We should not perhaps dwell too much on the subject of Fabio. And don’t ask me again.” Rudi himself had begun to get confused about where precisely the little mafioso belonged in the scheme of things. He understood that on certain edges Central and the criminal underworld blurred into each other along a line of constantly-renegotiated allegiances, but he couldn’t be certain if Dariusz was a criminal who liaised with Central, or a Coureur who liaised with Wesoły Ptak. He had the impression that Dariusz was no longer certain of the distinction either.
“Why do you do it?” he asked.
“I like to think that I am keeping alive the spirit of Schengen.” Dariusz tapped his cigarette against the crystal ashtray that was doubling as a paperweight to keep all the maps from rolling up. “Everyone, and everything, has the right of free access across national borders.”
“Everything? Drugs? Weapons? White slaves?”
Dariusz grinned at him. “Particularly drugs, weapons and white slaves.”
Whatever. Rudi found himself in agreement with Dariusz. He had started out for the harmless adventure, but the more he saw of them the more he’d begun to think that he really really hated borders and all the stupid bureaucratic paraphernalia that went with them.
Rudi took each of the filters out of the machine and banged them against the side of the sink to shake loose the debris that had been trapped at the bottom. It was amazing what happened to food after it had been through the machine. It was reduced to a lumpy pinkish-grey scum that eventually built up in the trays and blocked them, hindering the recirculation of hot water. In his early days, he had found items of cutlery in the trays – and more than once a cup or a glass – but he had learned how to arrange the cutlery in its baskets so the machine’s jets wouldn’t blast knives and forks off the conveyor to fall into the Hobart’s innards.
He had also learned that you could wedge items of crockery and cutlery between the tines of the conveyor so that the jets wouldn’t knock them loose. You could do that if there were just a few items to put through and the waiters were in a hurry for more clean cutlery, which sometimes happened when the restaurant was very busy and the guests were taking their time eating their meals.
After rinsing the trays, he left them beside the sink and went back to the machine and lifted the side panels. A cloud of hot, humid detergent-scented air billow
ed out. He reached inside and unhooked the spray nozzles and rinsed them in the sink as well.
Finally, he hooked a hose to the tap, took a squeegee from under the sink, and washed down the inside of the machine, which quickly grew a film of mucilaginous gunk if you didn’t hose it down every day. That done, he replaced the nozzles and filters, refilled the tanks with clean water, closed the machine up, and made a last tidying-up tour of the kitchen before putting on his parka and going out into the little loading bay for a cigar.
It was very cold and incredibly clear. Rudi had lived almost all his life in cities, where only the brightest stars managed to fight their way through the orange-yellow haze of streetlight pollution. Here, though, the sky was a depthless black, full of hard, untwinkling stars, the Milky Way a magnificent cloudy ribbon.
Beyond the little road that led up to the loading bay, the mountain tipped steeply down towards the tiny little constellations of towns winking down in the valleys beneath a filmy layer of pollution. Rudi saw these lights every evening when he came out for his last cigar of the day, but he had no idea what most of the towns were called. Jan had once pointed each one out and named it for him, but Rudi had forgotten the names.
Jan had also pointed a long, bony finger out into the far misty murky distance, and said, “Poland,” as if it was of great significance. Rudi had merely shrugged and thanked the Czech for showing him where everything was. There was something a little disquieting about Jan’s insistence that he had something to do with Poland, and he didn’t know quite what to make of it.
Up above him, someone opened a window and shouted, “Fucking Czechs! Fucking Czechs!” in Polish. Something – Rudi thought it might have been a chair – came flying down out of the night, hit the piled-up snow at the edge of the road, and bounced off down the slope.
“Happy New Year,” he said, and ground the cigar out on the concrete with his toe.
RUDI’S ROOM WAS on the ground floor, off the lobby and down a side corridor lined with cupboards and tiny offices. It had the appearance of having once been a cupboard itself; there were marks on the walls where shelves might have once hung. There was a tiny little rectangular window of frosted glass high up on the back wall, and a narrow bed that was a fraction too short to sleep on comfortably. A line of clotheshooks along one wall comprised his wardrobe, and a low cupboard beside the bed held his toilet things. There was enough floor-space to move from the bed to the door without having to walk heel-to-toe, but only just. The room was always comfortably warm because it was directly over the hotel’s boiler, but Rudi didn’t want to be here in the summer, when it would probably be unbearable.
He grabbed a towel, soap, shampoo and a change of clothes and went down the corridor to the little staff shower-room. No matter how careful he was, he always ended the day as gunky and greasy as the machine he used, and it took a determined effort to get himself clean.
After his shower, he usually liked to have a couple of drinks in the downstairs bar before turning in for the night, but as he walked across the lobby he heard lots of shouting coming from the bar, and noticed a couple of policemen heading towards the source of the noise. He peeled off and went back to his room and sat down to read.
LATER, MARTA KNOCKED softly on the door and let herself in.
“The Poles smashed up the bar,” she said, taking off her housecoat and hanging it on the hook behind the door. “The police arrested six of them.” Ever since the coach parties began to arrive, she had been referring to her countrymen with a fine disdain, as if trying to distance herself from them.
Stretched out, as much as he could on the bed, Rudi looked over the top of his book and said, “Mm.”
Marta undid her black uniform dress and stepped out of it, hung it with the housecoat on the hook. Underneath she was wearing tights and a worn-out black bra. She was a plump, happy girl with long mousy brown hair that she dyed auburn.
“I thought you’d be hiding in here,” she said.
“We mustn’t speak Polish in public any more,” said Rudi. “Jan heard us the other day.”
Unhooking her bra, she stopped and looked at him. “We’d never say anything to each other in public if we did that.” She actually spoke pretty good English, but for some reason she felt embarrassed to use it. She rolled off her tights and panties and left them on the floor. “Move over.”
Rudi put his book on the cupboard and squashed himself up against the wall to let Marta slide under the covers beside him. Officially, Jan frowned mightily on personal relationships between members of staff, but unofficially he tended to turn a selectively blind eye, so long as the hotel’s routine wasn’t unduly disturbed.
“Why can’t we speak Polish?” Marta asked.
Rudi put an arm round her and sighed. “I didn’t say we couldn’t speak Polish. Just that we shouldn’t do it in public.”
“But why?”
There was no easy way to handle this. For Marta, every answer only sparked off another question; they had once spent nearly the whole night on a single question-and-answer string. Rudi had eventually forgotten what the original question had been, and in the end he had totally lost track of the conversation.
“I won’t lie to you, Marta,” he said.
“That’s what people usually say when they’re getting ready to lie,” she said, snuggling her head into the curve of his neck and shoulder.
Well, that was true enough. He had to give her that. “I can’t tell you why, Marta.”
She shrugged.
“I can’t tell you why because I don’t want you to get involved in it,” he said, which as it happened was the pure and simple truth.
“I don’t mind,” she said sleepily. “I love you.”
“That’s what people usually say when they’re getting ready to say something really silly,” he told her, but by then she was snoring gently, fast asleep. Jan worked all the maids far too hard, but the hotel was understaffed because people wanted to be with their families over Christmas and New Year.
Rudi smiled and kissed the top of Marta’s head. She had never asked if he was married, if he was already in a relationship, what he was doing in the Zone. When they made love they used a condom and a viricide, and that was the entire extent of her distrust of him. She was a simple, uncomplicated soul to whom nothing really bad had ever happened, just like ninety-nine percent of the population of Europe. He wanted to tell her how quickly and reasonably innocence could go sour, but he wasn’t sure how to explain it.
He hugged her, and felt himself fall away from consciousness like a scuba diver dropping out of a boat.
ON NEW YEAR’S Eve, the Poles had a disco.
Jan wanted to throw them all out of the hotel, but the owners stubbornly refused to let him. The Zone was renowned for taking anyone, anytime, no matter how disgusting their behaviour. It existed to attract tourists, and if word got about that the hotels had started to sling people out for such minor misdemeanours as gang fights in the corridors, fire extinguishers let off in the bar, and the forcible ejection of furniture from seventh-storey windows, the Zone’s economy might suffer.
Here, Jan and the hotel’s owners parted company in terms of philosophy. Jan wanted to run an hotel; the owners wanted to make money. In an ideal world, they would have found some kind of mutually acceptable accommodation. In the real world, Jan – and all the other hotel managers – had to suffer. It would take some unusually disgusting behaviour for a guest to be permanently barred from a Zone hotel. This made the Zone a rather raucous place much of the time, but not particularly unbearable, apart from public holidays.
The disco was part of the Poles’ package. And it was a package which seemed to date from the early years after the fall of Communism. A trip to the Zone, a visit to the supermarket down in the valley, skiing for those who wanted it, and a disco and meal on New Year’s Eve. There was also, Rudi had begun to realise, an extramural part of the package, one which involved violence and colossal amounts of alcohol and was entirely beyond t
he control of the reps who accompanied the tour.
From the hatchway between the small dining room and the kitchen, Rudi watched dinner being served. Jan’s patience with the Poles, tenuous at the best of times, had finally evaporated, and he had instructed Chef to take care of the other guests in the big dining room. Then he had taken off his manager’s jacket, donned an apron and a chef’s hat, and set about cooking for the Poles himself.
All afternoon he had been beating cheap cuts of pork senseless with a meat hammer, dipping them in flour and egg and coating them in breadcrumbs. Coming on for his shift, Rudi found him loading trays of breadcrumbed cutlets into the fridge ready for the evening meal.
The Poles were all dressed up. The hardcore troublemakers, the ones who had been picking fights and letting off fire extinguishers and pitching furniture out of the windows, were the best-dressed of all, in wonderfully-cut expensive suits of soft black fabric. Their girlfriends were wearing Paris dresses that this year were mostly chiffon and big lace panels. Rudi had seen people like this in Kraków, early in the evenings, getting out of chauffeur-driven limos outside the casinos. What they were doing here, paying a pittance to mix with poor people, when they could have block-booked a floor in a Marriott anywhere in Europe, was beyond him. He’d long ago given up trying to second-guess Poles.
In the kitchen, Jan laboured, frying the prepared pork cutlets, slinging them still sizzling with fat onto plates, topping each one with a fried egg, and adding boiled potatoes and string beans. The manager’s face was shining with sweat and there was a look in his eyes that Rudi thought was a kind of deranged gleefulness, serving this kind of crap to the Poles. Rudi wanted to tell him the Poles loved stuff like this; to them it was good solid home cooking, virtually national cuisine, and Jan was making a fool of himself.
Europe in Autumn Page 8
