Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  Outside the shelter, the ivy-covered gravestones and modest little tombs of the graveyard were being given another dusting of snow. Stashing the suit in a situation like this would have been suicidal. He just had to get rid of it the best way he could. He’d dropped the suit’s electronics off a bridge into the Havel, and carried the suit itself with him to the graveyard. He’d dumped it under a bush, pulled the emergency tab, and waited for the enzymes to eat the material. It was always quicker than he expected, like a time-lapse effect from a bad horror film. And then he’d come here, to think. Tradecraft dictated that he get as far away as possible in as short a time as possible, but he needed to think, to compose himself, pull down the options.

  Most of his dustoffs would have to be abandoned because they involved public transport. Too easily stopped and searched. Ditto the car in Babelsberg. Ditto his plan to just walk to Berlin. Ditto the plan to hitch into Holland. Ditto ditto.

  Rudi rubbed his face and reached down to touch the case again. Without it, he was just another blameless anonymous figure in the crowd, hair cut neither too long nor so short as to arouse notice, clothes carefully bought at various shops in Berlin and Magdeburg in order to blend in. With the case, he might as well be carrying a big sign saying ARREST ME. All it would take would be a policeman wearing infra-red amplifiers and he’d stand out from the crowd like someone striking a match in a darkened room.

  He put a hand in his pocket and took out a set of car keys, and thought of the car in Babelsberg. He sighed and put the keys away. Then he took them out again and looked at them.

  THEY HAD SET up a roadblock at the eastern end of the Glienicker Brücke. A hurried, temporary thing, not much more than a couple of policemen waving the traffic to the side of the road while another couple of policemen did a cursory search. It was almost two o’clock in the afternoon and already the light was beginning to fail, and in spite of the heater frost was forming on the inside of the hire car’s windows. He drove normally, just another tourist, and when they stopped him he pulled over to the kerb and wound down the driver’s window.

  “Papers,” said the policeman who leaned down to the open window.

  Rudi took his passport and identity card from the glove compartment and handed them over. “What’s going on?”

  The policeman’s face was scoured red with the cold and the fur collar of his jacket was turned up around his ears. “Routine,” he said. “Turn off your engine.”

  Rudi obeyed, and the policeman took the documents over to his colleagues to confer. They huddled for a moment over a palmtop terminal, and Rudi imagined one of them cursing as he tried to enter code numbers with a gloved index finger that was too big for the palmtop’s tapboard.

  All four of them came back. One of them had a thermal camera hanging from a lanyard around his neck. He lifted it to his eyes and scanned it over the front of the car. Another pointed a hand-scanner at the car’s registration plate to read the barcoded information.

  “Hans Drucker,” said the first policeman, returning to the open window.

  “Yes,” said Rudi. He nodded at the policeman with the camera. “What’s he doing?”

  “What was your business in Potsdam?”

  “Visiting my sister.” Rudi gave the address. There was a stringer there who would if necessary testify in court that she was his sister. There always seemed to be a stringer for every occasion. “I come here every weekend.”

  The cop nodded. “The registration number of this vehicle, please?”

  “I can’t remember,” Rudi said. “I only hired it yesterday morning.” He handed the Hertz documents out of the window, and the cop looked them over. Then he gave them to the cop with the scanner, who compared them with his read-out. One of the other policemen was running a mirror on a long angled rod under the car, tilting his head this way and that to look at the reflection.

  “You visit your sister in a hired car?” asked the cop.

  “My car broke down. Have I done anything wrong?”

  “Why not take the train instead of hiring a car?” the policeman asked.

  Rudi turned his own collar up against the cold surging in through the open window. “I used to until last year. I was robbed on the train going back to Berlin one night. Now I drive.” This was also true. Hans Drucker – or at any rate a stringer working to maintain the legend – had reported a mugging on a late-night train just outside Uhlandstrasse Station the previous year.

  “The registration number of your own vehicle?” asked the cop.

  Rudi reeled it off. A blue Simca, one of Coureur Central’s seemingly inexhaustible fleet of phantom vehicles, was registered to the Hans Drucker legend. The cop typed the number clumsily into his palmtop. Somebody in the queue of traffic on the bridge behind Rudi honked their horn, and the policeman straightened up and gave the driver a stare which silenced them.

  “Open the bonnet, please,” he said, still looking back down the line of cars.

  Rudi pulled the lever that released the bonnet catch, and one of the other policemen lifted the bonnet, blocking his view through the windscreen. “What’s happening?” he asked.

  The cop at the window was reading the reply to his request about Drucker’s car. He said, “What make and colour is your car?”

  “It’s a blue Simca.” He didn’t try to make any pally wisecracks about the car, didn’t try to establish a relationship with the cop. Just kept everything neutral, a little annoyed. He could do this. He knew he could. Just good old Hans from Berlin-Pankow, returning from a visit to his sister in Potsdam. That was all. Nothing out of the ordinary. He had nothing to fear. “Is there something wrong with this car?”

  The cop gave him a bored look. “I just do as I’m told, mate.”

  “Because if there is it’s Hertz’s fault. I was in a hurry, maybe I didn’t check it properly before I left.” A little note of panic now, a straight citizen worried he might have been caught driving an unsafe vehicle. German police were legendary for their adherence to the old EU laws on vehicle safety. They were like toys, wound up and left to run down after their owner had gone away on holiday. Nobody had ever come along with new vehicle regulations after Greater Germany left the Union.

  “It looks fine to me, mate,” the cop assured him. “We won’t be much longer.” The tone of his voice told Rudi all he needed to know about Potsdam policemen being called out on a freezing afternoon to check cars. He presumed they hadn’t even been told precisely what they were looking for, which could only serve to heighten their resentment.

  “The boot,” said the cop.

  Rudi popped the boot, and another of the cops went around the back of the car to rummage.

  “So what’s going on?” he asked, allowing a note of annoyance to enter his voice now he had been reassured that his car was not in breach of any regulation.

  The cop looked in through the window and raised an eyebrow.

  There was a long silence. Rudi sat behind the wheel, trying to behave like a law-abiding citizen, and the cop continued to jab a fat gloved finger at his palmtop.

  Rudi wondered if the cops realised the irony of what was happening here. The original Glienicker Brücke was a wooden bridge built by Friedrich Wilhelm, the Great Elector, to carry the road between his summer palace and Berlin across the Havel. Centuries later, it had been one of the most famous bridges on Earth.

  A student of borders, Rudi remembered seeing old news footage from the days of the Wall, when this place was one of the crossing points between West Berlin and East Germany and spy exchanges took place here. He thought of all those grainy black and white clips, the two lonely figures approaching each other from opposite ends of the bridge. It seemed to Rudi, no matter how many different exchanges he watched, that something would always happen to the way they walked as they passed each other, as they suddenly found themselves closer to homecoming than captivity. Sometimes it was impossible to tell who was going West and who was returning to the East.

  The greatest irony of all
, of course, was that this was not the original bridge; that had been pulled down, ostensibly because it didn’t meet with EU guidelines, and this new bridge, lovely as a swan, had been built to replace it, at more or less the same time that new borders began to spring up all over Europe.

  Finally the policeman at the front of the car slammed the bonnet down, and moments later the one at the back did the same to the lid of the boot.

  Rudi and his policeman looked at each other. “Is that it?”

  “Yes.” The policeman handed Rudi’s documents back. He walked away, eyes already fixed on his next victim.

  Rudi wound the window back up. “The least you could do,” he said quietly, switching on the ignition, “is order me to have a nice day.” He put the car into gear and drove off the bridge and away along Königstrasse, towards Berlin.

  IN ALEXANDERPLATZ, HE parked the car in a garage under an office building and walked a block to a public phone. He dialled a number.

  “Hello?” asked a woman’s voice.

  “Hello,” he said, “is that one seven two seven three?”

  The woman sighed, as if this happened to her all the time. “No, you’ve got a wrong number. This is a private flat.”

  “Oh,” said Rudi. “I’m sorry.” He hung up and walked another two blocks to another phone. It was ringing as he arrived. He picked up the receiver.

  “Jürgen?” asked a man’s voice.

  “Aunt Gertrude wasn’t there,” Rudi said. “But she left her knitting behind.”

  The voice at the other end of the line sighed. Another lost Package. “You stupid bastard.” Just routine tradecraft, no offence intended. “She really wanted to talk to you.”

  “I know. But at least she left her knitting.” Central loved this kind of cloak-and-dagger stuff.

  “She did?”

  “She did. And it’s very good.” Rudi wondered if the call was being monitored, and if there wasn’t some security policeman somewhere who was having a good laugh right now, without having a clue what he was laughing at.

  “Well,” said the voice, “I suppose that’s what she wanted.”

  “By the way, I heard that Uncle Otto and Uncle Manfred have set up in business together.” Just to let Central know that the New Potsdam security men and Old Potsdam’s Polizei appeared to be cooperating for the moment. Even after five years as a Coureur, Rudi still felt slightly embarrassed when he used communication strings; it all seemed so innocently transparent to him, he couldn’t understand why the presumed listeners didn’t see right through it.

  “Really?” The voice at the other end sounded properly surprised. “It’ll never last.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “All right. I’ll see you around. Will you be at work tomorrow?”

  Rudi frowned. “Yes.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you there, then.”

  “I expect so.”

  They hung up. Rudi stood in the telephone kiosk for longer than was absolutely necessary, looking at the phone.

  He sighed, gathered himself, and went back to the underground garage. He drove the car out into the cold again, and down a series of side-streets until he reached a little garage, not much more than a shed with warped wooden doors.

  The owner of the garage was waiting for him, alerted by a phone call from a callbox somewhere between Old Potsdam and Berlin. He was a squat, middle-aged man with a squashed boxer’s nose and a network of fractured capillaries in his cheeks. He opened the doors and Rudi drove the car inside.

  “You’re late,” the garage-owner said, closing the door.

  “Potsdam police,” Rudi said, getting out of the car.

  The owner made a rude noise. “You’ve got an hour.”

  “Okay,” said Rudi, and watched the older man leave through the judas-door.

  It took him forty minutes to get the engine far enough out of the car to be able to reach underneath and wiggle the briefcase out of its hiding place, just as it had taken him about three-quarters of an hour of nitpicking concentration in a Babelsberg garage part-owned by Central to get the bloody thing in there in the first place.

  He hadn’t actually been sure it would work, whether the heat of the engine would mask the heat of the briefcase, whether the Polizei would spot it when they searched the car, whether the case would overheat and cause some unspecified but spectacular disaster.

  He felt the case again. There were half a dozen things he could have done to check what was inside, but he didn’t doubt the thing was boobytrapped against x-rays and NMR scans and millimetre-wave radar and simple old-fashioned lock-picking. He wondered if there was anyone, anywhere, apart from the Package he’d had to leave behind in New Potsdam, who knew how to open it.

  He put the engine back into the car – the garage owner came back about halfway through and helped him finish up – and drove it back to the Hertz office and turned over the keys, then walked to a café not far from the Alexanderplatz S-Bahn station. He bought a coffee, sat at a table near the back, and put the briefcase down on the tiled floor beside his chair.

  The café was very busy, bustling with people wrapped up against the cold. It took him five minutes to finish his espresso, and at some point during that time the briefcase vanished.

  He never saw it go. One moment there, next moment lost in the crowd, another moment gone altogether. He looked down at where it had been. A scrap of paper lay pasted to the tiles by the melted snow that customers had tracked in on their boots, the writing on it already blurring and dissolving. It lasted long enough to read, then he got up to go and unobtrusively scuffed the paper to bits with his toe.

  ALTHOUGH THEIR EXISTENCE was regularly denied by various Government agencies, everybody knew – or thought they knew – all about the Coureurs. There were Coureur films, Coureur novels, Coureur soaps, Coureur comics, all of varying degrees of awfulness.

  What none of them mentioned, with their tales of unending derring-do, was the sheer crashing boredom of Coureur life. In the soaps there was a new Situation every week, whereas a Coureur might in fact go for months without a sniff of action. And the action, if it did come, was usually nothing more than Coureur Central’s core business, which was the movement of documents and encoded data across Europe’s continually reconfiguring borders.

  In the series, the Coureurs spent an hour rescuing beautiful female scientists from polities populated by characters with sinister Latino or Slavic accents, and usually wound up in bed with the beautiful female scientists, who were properly grateful for their deliverance from actors with dodgy accents.

  In the real world, Coureurs spent most of their working lives delivering mail, which at its most clandestine meant nothing more than a pickup from Dead Drop A, a short train or car or aircraft journey, a delivery at Dead Drop B, and very little scope for getting laid.

  The Coureur fictions annoyed Rudi. The one thing that really annoyed him was that every week these tall, wide, handsome unreal-looking people, who couldn’t submerge themselves in a crowd if their life depended on it, had a new Situation. Every week the word came from Central that someone needed rescuing, some impossible task needed accomplishing. That hardly ever happened. A Coureur would do his job, dust off, and go back to ordinary life for a month or two months or six months, or years even. You never got Situations back-to-back.

  THE SLIP OF paper at the café had given the address of a post office in Grunewald, and a name.

  “My name’s Reinhard Gunther,” he said at the counter. “There may be some poste restante mail for me.”

  The clerk went to check. Rudi idly scoped out the post office. Will you be at work tomorrow was a communication string for a crash Situation, something urgent and immediate. He had never been given it in operational circumstances. It also meant that, whether he liked it or not, he was being assigned a partner.

  The clerk came back with an envelope. Rudi showed him the Gunther ID he’d had made up by a cobbler in Pankow. It was a rush job and not very high quality, but it didn’t have
to be. The clerk barely looked at it, handed over the envelope, and Rudi walked back out into the cold.

  He had rooms in two different pensions, under different names. He took a bus to the nearest, in Charlottenburg, and made sure the door was locked before he sat on the bed and opened the envelope.

  Inside was a luggage-locker keycard with a photo of Hansel and Gretel, Berlin Zoo’s Siberian tigers, embossed on the front.

  IT WAS SAID that if you were a criminal, a member of some tinpot political party, an agitator for a minority interest group, a drug addict, a property speculator, a forger or bootlegger of any kind, an artist, a fashion designer, a writer, underground film director, musician, or just plain crazy, Berlin was where you would eventually end up. It seemed to be the repository of all Europe’s extremes. Extreme poverty and extreme wealth. Extreme greed and extreme philanthropy. Extreme good taste and extreme bad taste. Everything was here.

  It was a long time since Rudi had last visited Berlin, and the place didn’t seem to have improved very much in his absence. The business heart of the city, built after reunification along the no-man’s-land where the Wall had been, towered over the rest of Berlin in a shining clean ribbon of modern office buildings and hotels, but everything else seemed to be falling into decay and disrepair.

  The streets around Berlin-Zoo S-Bahn were lined with beggars, wrapped up in layer after layer of rags and blankets and sheets of Berliner Zeitung. Most of them were shivering with the cold. A few had stopped shivering and just sat there, frost on their eyelashes, waiting for the evening police patrols to pick them up and take them to the morgue. They shared the pavements with whores and pushers and pickpockets and muggers and tourists and business people, all shuffling along through the filthy slush.

  Inside the station was almost as bad, despite the efforts of a trio of uniformed Polizei to move the various undesirables back out into the cold. Rudi went across the concourse to the left-luggage lockers, found the door that corresponded to the number on the key, swiped the card through the lock, and opened it.