Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  “I should bloody well hope so, all this time gone by.” Sergei narrowed his eyes. “No, you’re different. Some bad stuff happen to you.”

  “I’m a chef, Sergei Fedorovich. Bad stuff happens to me all the time.”

  “That’ll be true,” Sergei admitted. The waitress returned with a frost-rimed bottle of vodka and two glasses and then departed again. Sergei poured them both a drink and then held up his glass. “Fuck your mother,” he said and knocked his drink back in one.

  “Fuck your mother,” Rudi said, and knocked back his vodka.

  “Okay.” Sergei refilled their glasses and then snapped his fingers at another waitress. “You. Black bread, butter, pickled cucumbers, some of that venison sausage.”

  Rudi held up a hand to stop her. “I’m meeting someone, Sergei. But after they’re gone, I’ll have a proper drink with you. I didn’t want to sit here and be rude by not saying hello.”

  “Sure. No problem.” Sergei stood and held up his glass. “Fuck your mother.”

  “Fuck your mother,” said Rudi. They drank their drinks.

  “Okay,” said Sergei. “I’ll go and make sure your pelmeni are the worst you ever tasted.”

  “And I’ve eaten some pretty bad pelmeni,” Rudi said. “Many of them here.”

  “Pah,” said Sergei. “I’ll see you later.”

  A minute or so after Sergei had left, someone came over and sat in the vacated chair. “Well,” said Bradley in English, “that was touching.” He put his brandy glass down on the table and smiled at Rudi. “Enjoying our holiday?”

  “Visiting old friends.”

  “Can’t beat it,” said Bradley.

  “I need some help,” said Rudi.

  Bradley spread his hands. “I’m all ears, old son.”

  Rudi had also rehearsed this conversation last night, but now he felt as though he hadn’t rehearsed quite enough. “My father’s a ranger at the national park up at Lahemaa,” he said.

  Bradley nodded. “I know.”

  Rudi looked at the Coureur. Of course he knew. “He wants to turn the park into a polity.”

  “I know,” Bradley said again. When he saw the look on Rudi’s face, he said, “We haven’t been keeping tabs on your family, but when you had that spot of bother in Berlin we did some checks.” He held up a hand to stop Rudi’s protest. “We just wanted to know who you were, what your background was. That’s all.”

  Rudi scowled at the Englishman. “Is there anything we can do to help?”

  Bradley looked nonplussed. “‘We,’ old son?”

  “Central. Is there anything Central can do to help?”

  Bradley looked around the restaurant, just starting to fill up with the lunchtime crowd of tourists. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Advice?”

  Bradley sighed and picked up his brandy snifter. He looked at it and put it down again. “Operational security forbids that I tell you where I was when we got your crash signal,” he said thoughtfully. “But it was quite a long way away, I’ve not had a very good journey, and I’ve spent all day following you around waiting for you to settle in order for us to have this meeting. So it would be nice if you could tell me I’m not here just because your dear papa has decided to set up his own country.”

  Rudi sat and looked at him.

  Bradley shook his head and picked up his glass again. This time he drained it. “You were given that number and that string in case of dire emergency,” he said, putting the glass down and twirling the stem back and forth. “Not to ask Central to help your father become a pocket Emperor.”

  “I–”

  Bradley shook his head again. “Central does not do that,” he said calmly. “Central does not facilitate in any way, shape, or form, the creation of any type of quasi-national entity. How can they? We must remain impartial, and we can’t do that if we help people set up their own nations.”

  Rudi opened his mouth to say something. Closed it again.

  “Best of luck to your father,” said Bradley, “and if he’s successful then we’ll be happy to do business with him or anyone in his new nation. But until then, we have to stay out of it. And I advise you to stay out of it, too.”

  “He’s going to get himself killed,” Rudi said.

  “That will be sad, obviously.” Bradley stood. “I’m not going to apologise for Central’s position on this, because it’s not a position which needs apologising for. But we will not help your father, and you shouldn’t have asked. And the next time you use that crash code, everyone would appreciate it if it was a genuine emergency.”

  “Fuck you, Bradley,” said Rudi.

  Bradley came over to Rudi’s side of the table and leaned down close so he could speak in Rudi’s ear. “And I meant it about your not becoming involved,” he said quietly. “I can’t force you, but I strongly recommend that you have nothing at all to do with your father’s nationbuilding activities. If someone were to discover that a Coureur was involved, it would call into question the activities of all Coureurs. No one would trust us any more. You think about what that would mean.”

  Rudi turned his head to look at Bradley. “Have a nice trip,” he said.

  Bradley straightened up. “You’re good at what you do,” he said. “You don’t think so, that’s obvious from our conversations. But you are good. You could help a lot of people who really need your help. You can’t do that if people don’t trust you.” He put a hand on Rudi’s shoulder and squeezed gently. “Don’t get involved in this business.” And then he was gone.

  Rudi poured another vodka and drank it. Eventually Sergei himself came out of the kitchen with a plate full of pelmeni and brought it to Rudi’s table.

  “Did your friend not turn up?” he asked, putting the plate down in front of Rudi.

  “Something came up,” Rudi said. “He couldn’t stay.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  Rudi smiled. “Yes.” He picked up his knife and fork and regarded the plate of dumplings, boiled in meat broth as usual, a nod to Sergei’s Siberian heritage. “Let’s see if you’ve got any better at making these, shall we?”

  NOT ENTIRELY SOBER, but not nearly as drunk as he would have liked, Rudi made it to the last tram for Palmse. In the summer they ran until almost midnight, but out of season the last tram left at eight and he had to move smartly to get to the stop in time. The whole tram was empty. He clambered into the last car, waved his phone at the reader to pay for his ticket, curled up on one of the seats, and fell asleep.

  He was woken, sometime later, by someone gently shaking his shoulder and saying, “Hey, mate.”

  For a moment, Rudi didn’t want to open his eyes, afraid that if he did he’d find himself back on the tram in Berlin on the night that everything had started to go wrong. On the other hand, he thought, while the hand kept shaking him and the voice kept saying, “Hey, mate,” more and more insistently, when had things ever gone right? He’d had some small successes, moved some Packages in not-too-strenuous circumstances. But it was the disasters that stayed with him. Potsdam. Berlin. The Zone. The Line. He had to wonder about an organisation that retained an employee with a record like that. Were Central just being pragmatic in not wanting to lose even the most inept Coureur, or did the greater proportion of Situations actually end in catastrophe?

  He opened his eyes and saw the tram driver standing beside him. “Hello,” he said.

  The driver straightened up. “End of the line, son,” he said irritably. “If you want to go back to Tallinn tonight you’ll have to walk.”

  Rudi looked out of the window and saw the Manor and all the other buildings of Palmse lit up. He sighed. “No, I’m home, thanks,” he said.

  WHILE THE TOURIST industry had always been important, for decades Palmse had earned a good living as a conference centre. Computer nerds and captains of industry and science fiction fans and lingerie executives had come to stay in the hotel and have their conventions. Office workers from up and down the Baltic coast had come for
team-building weekends and paintballing sessions. When he was growing up, Rudi liked to watch these groups. One weekend, a conference of international chefs had come to the Manor, and fifteen-year-old Rudi had sneaked into every discussion and panel and demonstration he could. He’d attached himself, in the irritating way of certain adolescents, to a Russian chef named Sergei, whose permanently incandescent temper only made him more interesting. Every time Rudi saw Sergei he fell into step beside him or sat down beside him at mealtimes, and bombarded the Russian with questions. Fortunately, Sergei spoke good Estonian.

  Finally, driven beyond endurance, he said, “Listen, kid. You want answers? Huh? You come to Tallinn, to my restaurant, you get all the answers you can handle, maybe more. Here.” He handed Rudi a card with the name of the restaurant embossed on it. “Now will you just fuck off and leave me in peace, actually? Okay?”

  The following weekend, it was a conference of machine-tool manufacturers from the North of England. Rudi had chores, but instead he caught the bus into Rakevere, and from there made his way to Tallinn, and by asking for directions from almost everyone he encountered he made his way to the address on the card, on Raekojaplats in the Old Town, and he pushed open the door of Troika for the first time.

  “You’re fucking kidding me, right?” Sergei said when he emerged from the kitchen, summoned by the rather bemused waitress to whom Rudi had shown the business card.

  Rudi raised his chin. “You said there’d be answers here,” he said.

  Sergei – he had a magnificent head of hair, back then, swept back and leonine – looked him up and down. “You’re out of your fucking mind, kid,” he said, and turned to go.

  “You said there’d be answers here,” Rudi said loudly enough for most of the restaurant to hear. “Was that a lie just to get rid of me?”

  Sergei stopped and his shoulders set in a way Rudi would become familiar with over the next few years.

  “Because if there aren’t any answers here,” Rudi went on, “maybe I’ll go to another restaurant and try and find them there.”

  Sergei turned back to look at him. “How old are you, kid?” he asked quietly.

  Rudi mistook the quiet tone of the chef’s voice for calm. It was the only time he made that mistake. “Eighteen.”

  Sergei tipped his head to one side.

  “Sixteen,” said Rudi.

  Sergei pursed his lips.

  “In November,” said Rudi.

  Sergei nodded. He snapped his fingers at the waitress Rudi had shown the card to. “You. Get his name and phone number.” He looked at Rudi. “You. I’ll call your parents, see if they’ll let you come spend some time here, okay?”

  Rudi’s heart filled with joy. “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay. Now fuck off.” And Sergei turned and went back to the kitchen.

  Rudi never found out how the conversation between Toomas and Sergei went, although in later years he found himself wishing someone had made a recording. In his mind, he reconstructed it thus: Toomas was furious that Rudi had missed his weekend chores and was becoming annoyed that his son spent more time dicking about in the kitchen than doing proper men’s work out in the park. Sergei was annoyed that this Estonian teenager had attached himself to him like a limpet. Both men, for their own reasons, wanted the situation to end. So Sergei had agreed to break Rudi and Toomas had agreed to let him.

  The first weekend, Rudi turned up bright and early and smiling and happy, and Sergei handed him a mop and worked him almost continuously for forty hours. Every shitty kitchen job was given to him, often simultaneously. He napped in a side room, returned to Palmse with muscles and joints aching so much he could barely walk. And as he went past the visitor centre he saw his father, and he saw the look of glee on Toomas’s face, and the next weekend he went back to Troika and they did it all over again. And again the next weekend. And the next. And the next. And one day he came home – not aching very much at all because the work had hardened him – and he saw the gleeful look on his father’s face falter, and he knew he was going to win.

  Sergei was a tougher prospect than Toomas. While Toomas started to make whining little speeches about missing Rudi around the place at weekends, Sergei kept yelling and hounding and, on one occasion, whacked him in the face with a roasting pan that hadn’t been cleaned to his testingly microbiological standards.

  And then one day, after almost two years of this, Rudi was preparing food.

  Rudi couldn’t actually remember what had led to this, but he did remember that both he and Sergei were somewhat surprised that it was happening. Sergei maybe more so. And then of course the real nightmare had begun.

  ABOUT FIFTEEN YEARS ago, the Ministry had granted Palmse the funds for a new purpose-built conference centre. They even ran an international competition, which attracted entries from as far afield as New Jersey, to provide a design for the new building. In the end, though, graft or nepotism or patriotism or simple excellence had won out and a firm of architects from Tallinn had got the commission. Rudi had never understood why, but he was a chef, not an architect. His father, who was an architect, at least by some degree of training, had praised the Conference Centre for its “innovative use of the Baltic Tradition,” but to Rudi it just looked like a huge wood and glass box adorned with fiddle-faddling Baroque decorations copied off buildings from St Petersburg to Vilnius. On the other hand, his father had once described his beef wellington – a dish of which he was very proud at the time – as “a crime against good beef,” so really it was, as the English liked to say, horses for courses.

  This evening, the big gingerbread box was all lit up by halogen spotlights mounted on its lawns. It looked like one of Crown Prince Rudolf’s final fever-dreams, or something Ruritania might have come up with if it had ever made it into the twenty-first century. The car park was crammed with vehicles. A large percentage were hummers, the weapon of choice on Lahemaa’s roads, but there were also sleek BMWs and Mercedes and battered old Land Rovers and fuel-cell-powered people carriers and five Polish-built Fiat minibuses. Rudi looked at the minibuses as he went past. They were all identical. He walked around one of them and was quite impressed by how clean it was. Its numberplate was a barcode designed to be read by automated toll-road computers, but there was also an index number which showed it was registered in Tallinn. As was the next minibus. And the next. Rudi looked at the buses. He looked at the Conference Centre. He began to run.

  The Centre was built around a lecture hall designed like an open-cast mine, a stage surrounded by concentric rings of fifty ranks of seating rising steeply towards the ceiling. Around the outer edge of each ring of seating were offices and smaller conference rooms and dining rooms and performance suites and communications rooms. The whole place smelled of polished wood and new carpets and air conditioning and hot lights.

  The lobby, several hectares of hardwearing carpeting and hidden lighting and modern-style furnishings and coffee-points separated from the night by floor-to-ceiling panels of smoked glass, was deserted. Rudi could hear waves of shouting rising and falling in the auditorium. He tried the doors, but they were locked. He tried the lifts, but they had been switched off. He took the stairs two at a time and finally emerged halfway up the amphitheatre into an unoccupied rank of seating.

  The noise which greeted him as he burst through the doors was not unlike that made by football fans who have spent a large amount of money to watch their side play in a European Cup Final. They haven’t been able to get tickets to the match itself, but they’ve travelled to the venue city anyway, to support their side and for the ‘atmosphere.’ The venue city has set aside a couple of public spaces for visiting supporters, complete with a huge screen on which they can watch the match. The fans have been drinking good-humouredly all day. The match kicks off. Then the screen breaks down. It was that sort of noise.

  From where he was standing, between the seats and the row of office doors, Rudi could look down into the auditorium and see the tiny figure of his father on the
stage. The auditorium had expertly-designed acoustics, and that and the PA system meant that Rudi could hear his father say, “...the beating heart of Estonia...” before his voice was overwhelmed by a cresting wave of shouting from the packed ranks of seating around and above him. Rudi could see fights breaking out in the rows below him, heard his father call out, “No, don’t give them the satisfaction...” before his voice vanished into the noise again.

  Rudi turned to head back for the stairs to try and find his way to the floor of the auditorium, and at that moment the door behind him opened and someone grabbed him by the shoulders and jerked him backwards.

  He found himself standing in one of the office suites with three men. They were all identically dressed in black combat suits, body armour, boots and helmets. They all had machine-pistols attached to ripaway slings on their chests, automatics at their hips, combat knives strapped to their thighs, and various other bits of equipment attached to loops all over them. They closed the door and stepped between it and Rudi.

  “You have to be kidding,” he said.

  The middle figure raised its visor, revealing a strong, middle-aged face. “Major Ash, sir,” he said in English. “SAS. I’m authorised by His Majesty’s Government to offer you political asylum.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Rudi asked.

  “I’m also authorised to sedate you and extract you anyway if you turn down the offer,” Ash continued. “Personally, I’d advise against that. The sedative leaves you with a terrible headache and some other side effects. You’d be wiser to come with us voluntarily.”

  “I don’t need political asylum,” said Rudi. The noise from the auditorium grew even worse. Rudi started to make for the door. “Please thank His Majesty for me, but I’m needed here.” And he felt something sting the side of his face and the next thing he knew he was waking up in Finland and, as promised, he had the worst hangover in human history.

  1.

  THE FIRST DAY, he resolved to be uncooperative.