Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  But he didn’t say anything. The evening was going to be difficult enough without having to field the manager’s questions about Poland. As cups and glasses and plates began to come back through the hatch, Rudi fired up the Hobart and began loading trays.

  He didn’t usually drink until he came off duty, but because this was New Year’s Eve Jan had allowed a bottle of Becherovka in the kitchen, and between courses and rushes of dirty crockery they perched on a worktop and added tonic water to the bitters to make the drink Czechs called ‘concrete’ and toasted each other.

  “Na zdraví,” Jan said, raising his glass.

  “Cheers.” Rudi checked his watch. Ten past eleven, and the noise in the dining room already sounded like that caused by the crowd at an important football match.

  Jan drained his glass and wiped his forearm across his forehead. “I’d forgotten how much fun this was.”

  Rudi grinned. “How do you feel about swapping jobs?”

  “What?” Jan laughed and waved his glass at the Hobart. “Go back to working on that thing? I’ve worked for years so I wouldn’t ever have to do that again.” He topped up their glasses. “I was pretty good, though.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  Jan raised his glass in another toast and drained it again. “I was. Really.”

  Rudi looked across at four trays of cups and plates and cutlery that sat along the worktop, and nodded significantly.

  “No,” said Jan, following his gaze.

  “Why not?”

  “They’re already clean. It wouldn’t be the same.”

  Rudi shrugged. “What does it matter?”

  Jan smiled a sly smile. “Fifty crowns?”

  Fifty crowns was Rudi’s wages for a shift, but what the hell, it was New Year’s Eve. “Okay.”

  “Fine.” Jan hopped down off the worktop. “You go first.”

  They split the contents of the trays equally between two baskets and Jan stood beside Rudi with his wristwatch held up in front of his face. “Ready, steady. Go!”

  There was a rhythm to it, a matter of twisting at the hips, not moving your feet. Cups arranged upside down on a tray and loaded onto the spikes of the conveyor, then pick up a stack of plates and deal them one by one upright between the spikes. Rudi was very good. By the time he’d finished loading one tray of crockery into the machine the cups were coming off the other, and he had to trot round and lift them off, then take the plates off and stack them. Then back to the far end to load the next tray.

  “Not so bad,” said Jan, stopping his watch when Rudi had stacked the last plate. “But not good enough. Here.” He handed the watch over. “Press the little silver button once to reset the stopwatch, and again to start it.”

  Rudi turned the watch over in his hand. “Very nice.”

  “From the owners,” Jan said, stationing himself at the end of the Hobart. “When I was promoted to manager. Ready?”

  “Oh. Right.” Rudi held up the watch and put his finger on the button. “Three, two, one, go.”

  Jan had this technique by which he just seemed to spill an armload of plates into the machine, and that was what made the difference in the end, though they both admitted he didn’t win by very much.

  “Best of three?” Jan asked when the money had changed hands and their glasses were full again.

  “I’m impulsive, Jan,” Rudi told him. “I’m not stupid. I know when I’m beaten.”

  “Ah,” Jan clapped him on the shoulder, “that everyone was like that.”

  A pile of dessert dishes had appeared in the hatchway while they had been trying to out-macho each other. “Back to work.”

  “You did come here from Poland, didn’t you?” Jan said as he watched Rudi putting the dirty dishes in a tray.

  “I can’t understand this thing you’ve got about me and Poland, Jan. I’m Estonian, for heaven’s sake. I’ve never said a word about Poland, you’re the one who’s always bringing it up.”

  “My cousin drives a taxi,” Jan said, leaning back against the wall. “He was down at the station when you arrived. He says you got off the express from Kraków.” He poured himself another drink. “And you do speak Polish, don’t you?”

  “No.” Rudi carried the full tray over to the machine, set it on the conveyor and pressed the button to start the belt. “And even if I did, what’s so wrong with that?”

  Jan suddenly became very serious. “Because I hate people lying to me, even about tiny little things.” He drank his drink. “The way I see it, if somebody’s prepared to lie to me about tiny little things they’re prepared to lie to me about great big things.”

  Rudi went back to the hatch and started loading another tray. “I’m really getting tired of this, Jan. Your cousin has the wrong bloke. He saw somebody who looks like me getting off that train. Shall I tell you how I know this? I know this because I didn’t come here by train from Kraków. I hitched here from Vienna, and I hitched to Vienna from Paris.” This happened to be true; Rudi had been very careful about his approach to the Zone. “I don’t speak Polish. I’ve never been to Poland.”

  Jan listened soberly to all this, nodding. When Rudi was finished, he shrugged. “You forget my position,” he said. “I take on a lot of temporary staff, sometimes people just passing through the area. Are they criminals? Are they on the run from some polity’s armed forces?” He looked at Rudi and tipped his head to one side. “Surely I should know these things.”

  Rudi looked at Jan for a moment. Then he shook his head. “I’m a resident of the Zone, Jan. I’ve lived here for six years. I have a resident’s passport. I can apply for citizenship next year.”

  Jan nodded. “Yes, and very good references you have from your last job. From your last three jobs, in fact. I contacted your last three employers, and they all spoke very highly of you. Which is what makes me suspicious.”

  “Your logic is impeccable, Jan. My previous employers have nothing but good words to say about me. Therefore, I must be a criminal.”

  “Take your girl, for example.”

  “What?”

  “Marta, your girl. Oh, come on. Everyone in the hotel knows about you and her.”

  Well, if he’d learned anything while he’d been here it was that it was impossible to keep a secret in an hotel. “What about her?”

  “Arrived here two days before you. Impeccable references. Hotel Bristol, Warsaw. The Warszawa, Warsaw. The Cracovia in Kraków. Wonderful references.” Jan almost looked nostalgic remembering them. “And here are you, just turning up at the back door with nothing but a rucksack and a nice smile.” Jan nodded and refilled his glass, apparently not caring any longer whether or not he was drunk on duty. “Terrific references.” He waved his hand, forgetting he was holding his glass, and sloshed concrete everywhere. “Just like you.”

  Rudi said, “Jan,” and then he stopped.

  When he thought about it later, he thought that Jan had actually heard it before it happened, which he supposed was what separated the kitchen porters of this world from the managers. They had both grown used to the increasingly raucous noise from the dining room, but Jan suddenly tipped his head to one side as if listening, and then all hell broke loose.

  They went to the hatch and looked out. The dining room had been reconfigured for the disco, chairs and tables pushed against the walls. The lights had been lowered and the volume of the Poles’ sound system raised, and blinking lights and flashing lasers picked out an immense brawl. Bottles and glasses were flying across the room, people were punching each other, girls were screaming, glass and furniture was breaking. As they watched, a little circular table, caught in the stop-motion of a strobing laser, clambered jerkily out of the general chaos and hung in the air for a moment before falling back.

  “I knew this would happen,” Jan said calmly, as if perversely happy to be proved right. “I kept saying this would happen.”

  Rudi looked at his watch. It read 00:02. “At least they waited until midnight.”

  Jan sighed. �
��Lock all the doors in here and close the hatch. I’ll go and call the police.” And he went out into the dining room. The last Rudi saw of him, he was wading through the melee towards the door.

  Some of the waiting staff pushed into the kitchen before Rudi managed to get the door closed and bolted. They stood around in a little group listening to the sounds of things breaking and people screaming and fireworks being set off in the dining room. Then Rudi put his parka on, took his rucksack from its hiding place under one of the counters, and went out the back door to the loading bay.

  It was a lovely night. The stars were bright and hard and unblinking, and down in the valley tiny little firework explosions burst over the towns. He watched them for a while, struck by how strange it was to see fireworks exploding from above. From the front of the hotel, he could hear shouting and the deep bass grumble of the engines of tracked police vehicles.

  Behind him, a shoe scraped the cement beneath the loading bay’s thin layer of crusty slush.

  Rudi looked round. A small, slight figure was standing a few metres away, a suitcase in one hand. The figure took another step forward into the loading bay’s lights, and Rudi saw it was a small middle-aged man, shivering in his inadequate overcoat, cheeks and nose nipped crimson by the cold. They stood and looked at each other.

  “Are you the Coureur?” the little man asked finally.

  Rudi sighed. Dariusz had told him it was usually pointless giving Packages word-code recognition strings. They never remembered them, he said, or forgot to use them in the excitement of the jump, or just thought they were stupid and childish, which was Rudi’s personal opinion as well.

  But tradecraft was tradecraft. “I’m the kitchen porter,” Rudi said.

  The little man’s face fell until something at the back of his excited, terrified mind recognised Rudi’s half of the recognition string. “Oh,” he said. “Right. Er, Are you with the Air Force?”

  Embarrassing. Rudi rubbed his eyes.

  “Hey!” another, cheerier voice boomed. “Hey! Are you cooking here now?”

  Rudi took his hand from his eyes. Crunching through the snow towards them, looking like a blond Kodiak bear in a hugely-stuffed puffa suit, was the Hungarian who had spoken to him three years ago in Max’s restaurant, the one who had complimented him on his good fuck food.

  “I’m washing dishes,” Rudi told him, trying to radiate calm on behalf of the Package.

  “That’s a real shame,” the Hungarian said. “Obviously you’re wasted here.” He reached for the Package and soft-landed one huge gloved hand on the little man’s shoulder. “Stay,” he rumbled goodnaturedly.

  The Package ignored the command, somehow managed to shrug his way out from under the weight of the Hungarian’s hand, and took off for the edge of the road, dropping his suitcase as he ran.

  Rudi and the Hungarian looked at each other. Rudi wasn’t carrying a weapon, and wouldn’t have used one if he was. The Hungarian smiled at him.

  The Package reached the edge of the service road and jumped, disappearing down the slope in a flurry of snow and flying coat-tails. There was a shout, a thump, then silence.

  “Did Max fire you?” the Hungarian inquired.

  “Your Polish has improved,” Rudi observed.

  The Hungarian inclined his huge shaggy blond head. “I find that if you work hard and pay attention, you can learn almost anything.”

  Two more huge blond men appeared at the side of the road, toiling up the slope with the Package dangling between them. They lifted him over the piles of snow at the edge of the road and dragged him over to the Hungarian. The three of them proceeded to have a very brief whispered conversation, during which the Hungarian never took his eyes off Rudi, then the other two started to drag the insensible Package away along the side of the hotel.

  “Now then,” said the Hungarian when they had disappeared from view around the front of the hotel. “What are we going to do with you?”

  “He’s ours,” said a voice from the back of the loading bay. Rudi scowled.

  “Is that so?” asked the Hungarian.

  “That’s so,” Marta said, coming to the edge of the loading bay and looking down at them. She was wearing jeans and a big chunky sweater and hiking boots and a down-stuffed jacket. For a moment, Rudi didn’t know her. Her hair was tied back, and she had removed the makeup she customarily wore. She looked at once wide-eyed and innocent and capable and businesslike. “The Package is yours. The dishwasher is a resident of the Zone.”

  The Hungarian grinned and winked at Rudi to let him know what he thought of the dishwasher pantomime. “It seems you have an admirer.”

  Rudi looked at Marta and considered the number of ways in which he had been stupid. There were, he thought, too many to count.

  The Hungarian went over and picked up the Package’s suitcase. It looked like a toy dangling from his massive hand. “Maybe I’ll come to Restauracja Max sometime and we can have dinner.”

  “Don’t hurry,” Rudi told him.

  The Hungarian looked hurt. “Ah well,” he said. He saluted Rudi, bowed to Marta, and walked away into the night.

  When he had turned the corner of the building, Marta walked down the loading bay steps and stood beside Rudi. “Time to go,” she said.

  Rudi picked up his rucksack. All of a sudden, he felt very heavy and tired.

  A SHORT WALK down the mountainside, slipping and sliding through deep powdery snow, brought them to a narrow forestry road. A car was waiting, part of Rudi’s dustoff. Somehow, Marta had come across a spare set of keys. She drove.

  Rudi sat and watched the tunnel of snow-laden trees advance on him in the car’s headlights. The forestry road hadn’t been cleared, and there were ten or twelve centimetres of snow on it. The car was moving at about five kilometres an hour. It would be easy to open the door and tumble out into the deep snow at the side of the road and make his escape, but he couldn’t see the point.

  “It could have worked, if it’s any consolation,” she said.

  He looked across at her. “What?”

  “It’s always chaos up there on New Year’s Eve,” she said, squinting out at the road. “You might have made it, but they were following your man all the way.”

  “Who?”

  She shrugged. “There’s no way to be sure. They bought a certain degree of cooperation from us for a certain period of time.” She glanced at him. “Don’t look like that. It was an interesting plan.”

  He watched her for a minute or so, steering the car carefully down the gentle slope of the road. “Are you from Zone counterespionage?” he asked.

  She laughed. “Now there’s a grand title.” She shook her head. “What I wonder is, was that a real fight, or did you start it?”

  “I was in the kitchen the whole time,” Rudi said. “Jan will vouch for me.”

  “Not you personally,” she said. “Agents provocateurs, hired for the occasion – what do you call them?”

  “Stringers. As you very well know.”

  “Stringers, yes. I love Coureur terminology. It’s so quaint. What I wonder is, did you hire some stringers to start that riot and cover your departure?”

  “Like you said,” Rudi murmured. “There’s always chaos up there on New Year’s Eve.”

  They drove for another ten or fifteen minutes in silence. The slope of the road rose and fell, and finally the trees withdrew gently from either side and they were driving along a two-lane road, cleared enough for Marta to accelerate to around twenty kilometres an hour.

  “Who was the Hungarian?” Rudi asked.

  “He says his name’s Kerenyi. But you say your name’s Tonu, and I say my name’s Marta.” She shrugged her shoulders at this world where nobody could be certain of anyone else’s real name.

  “You knew I was coming,” he said.

  “We knew he was coming,” she said, meaning the Package. “The Hungarians told us where he would be and when he would be there.”

  “And all you had to do was wait f
or me to turn up.” He rubbed his face. “What are you going to do with me?”

  She was hunched so far over the steering wheel that her face was centimetres from the windscreen. “Wait and see.” The car hit a patch of ice and fishtailed for a moment. Rudi listened to Marta swearing as she fought the wheel. The prospect of sliding into the path of an oncoming truck seemed quite attractive, right then.

  Finally, she got the car back under control and looked over at him, and her face was pale and a little sweaty in the light of the streetlamps.

  “We’re not even particularly angry with you,” she said.

  “No?”

  “This sort of thing happens once or twice a year. Somebody’s intelligence service decides to mess around with somebody else’s intelligence service, and they decide to do it in the Zone.” She slowed the car for a set of traffic lights, the first they’d seen since leaving the hotel. “Tourism is our only industry, and in order to exploit it properly we have to be neutral.”

  “It’s hard to be neutral.”

  “No intelligence operations on our soil. If we find them, we blow them. Spoil everybody’s stupid little game. Eventually everyone will get the point.” She was almost shouting by this time. “I mean, why don’t you all just go and play in Baku or somewhere like that and leave us alone?”

  “I just go where I’m sent.”

  “The Nuremberg Defence,” she muttered. The lights changed. She put the car into gear and they moved off.

  AFTER HALF AN hour or so they arrived at the border between the Zone and the Czech Republic. Marta slowed the car long enough to wave a laminated pass at the Zone guards, but she had to stop on the Czech side of the crossing for customs and passport checks.

  Rudi hadn’t realised quite how warm it was in the car until he got out to allow the Czech customs man to look inside. He and Marta stood side by side watching the plump little Czech and his springer spaniel sniffer dog clamber around on the back seat. Rudi couldn’t be sure which of them was having the most fun.

  “It’s not personal,” said Marta, and each word was a distinct little balloon of fog in the cold air. “I was only doing my job.”