Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  The doctor looked exasperated. “I can’t treat the casualties from any kind of strike, Kapitan. Haven’t you been listening? We’ve reached a point where even something as straightforward as a burst appendix will be fatal because I just won’t be able to operate, or give even the basics of post-operative care. If you’re planning some kind of strike, better make sure none of our people gets hurt.” He stubbed the joint out in an old tobacco tin on the table. “And you’d better win.”

  LUNCH WAS A solitary bratwurst, eaten at his desk, with another cup of coffee. Food was running low; it was days since he had been able to spare anyone for a foraging expedition. The sausage was of poor quality. One of the kitchen staff knew some English and joked with him that they were ‘down to the worst of the wurst.’ The Kapitan made a mental note to move the man to a work gang.

  He finished his sausage, drank his coffee, then sat up straight behind the desk and said, “I know you’re there. Show yourself.” It was, if anything, an act of absurd faith.

  But it was rewarded. A patch of shadow in one corner of the room rippled and shimmered, and all of a sudden a figure was standing there, apparently dressed in rags and an unusual-looking motorcycle helmet. It moved its hands and from the folds of the rags emerged the muzzle of a small semiautomatic rifle.

  “Not a move,” said the figure quietly. “Not a sound.”

  The Kapitan sat where he was and prepared to die.

  “Florian Grüber,” the figure said. “Styling himself Kapitan Todt.”

  “Yes,” said Kapitan Todt.

  “I’ve been sent to help you escape from here.”

  The Kapitan processed this statement. Apparently he wasn’t going to die just yet. He said, “If you’re the chef, you’re more than a year late.”

  The figure removed its helmet, revealing the face of a young man, his brown hair tousled. “What?”

  There had been a point, a day or so into the civil war, when he had believed that he was going to lose, and the Coureurs had become a real option. He had no qualms about this; he needed to survive, to recover and regroup, if he was to finally defeat Twenty.

  The Swimmer had counselled patience. “Let me set it up for you, Florian,” he said. “I know how to do this kind of thing.”

  And so the Swimmer had made connections and organised things, and Kapitan Todt had waited and waited, and the Coureurs didn’t come but some victories did. Now, he was in a position to make off from the Municipality himself, any time he wanted. He thought he might even be able to get across the Greater German border into Switzerland, where he had family. Thoughts of daring Coureur-aided escapes had faded from his mind. And now here was one of them, standing before him.

  “The Swimmer wants to talk to you,” he said.

  The Coureur raised his gun. “I want to know what’s going on.”

  “The Swimmer will tell you. May I stand up?” When the Coureur made no response, the Kapitan said, “All I have to do is raise my voice and a dozen armed people will come in here and kill you.”

  “Not if I kill you first, you scumbag.”

  The Kapitan shrugged, but he stood up anyway. “You were supposed to be here more than a year ago. What happened?”

  “I got sidetracked. Who’s the Swimmer?”

  “I’ll take you to him. You might want to... disappear again first, though. I’d find it hard to explain you.”

  The Coureur thought about it. Then he put his helmet back on, seemed to shrug, and vanished into the shadows once again. “I’ll be right behind you,” said his voice from the corner of the room.

  “Good. Follow me, please.”

  THERE WAS A room deep in the heart of Building 2. It had once been a community centre, a space big enough for parties and dances and the like. The Kapitan had ordered it reinforced to what some of his people privately regarded as a ridiculous degree. Deep courses of reinforced brickwork and breezeblocks had been laid inside the existing walls and on the floor. Thick plastic sheeting had been stapled over every flat surface and then sprayed with a thick, durable layer of white paint, and into this newly-white and well-nigh impregnable room they had installed the Swimmer.

  He lay in the middle of the room in a glass-walled tank filled with a clear medicated gel. Almost every inch of his body was terribly burned, and the machines and devices and bottles of fluid and gas which kept him alive lined the walls, clear plastic tubes running everywhere across the floor. A bulky mask was strapped to his face, feeding some kind of oxygenated fluid into his ruined lungs.

  Only Kapitan Todt and the doctor had keys to this reinforced room. The Kapitan let himself in, stepped inside to allow the invisible Coureur to enter, then closed and locked the door behind them.

  “He finally turned up, Uncle,” he said.

  Behind him, the Coureur shimmered into visibility again and took off his helmet. A few seconds later a synthesised voice from a pair of speakers beside the tank said, “Well, you took your time about it, cook.”

  The Coureur stared at the tank. “Fabio?”

  THE SWIMMER HAD come to the Municipality at an inauspicious time. The Kapitan had been watching Twenty closely for years, and he saw the signs. His lieutenant was schmoozing other members of the hierarchy, whispering in ears, making promises. Anschluss, the Kapitan’s late father would have called it. Tensions between the two men had been heightening for weeks. The Kapitan was starting to believe that the only way he could possibly survive this situation was to make a bold statement, drive Xavier into the ground like a tentpeg.

  And then, late one night, a large van had turned up at Building 1, and inside, accompanied by several large, silent men, was the Swimmer, encased in a kind of gel-filled transparent body-bag, clearly close to death. He had a voice-synthesising computer which he somehow controlled by eye movement, and using this he was able to make his demands.

  When the Kapitan called his senior officers together to tell them of the situation, Xavier was having none of it. The Kapitan over-ruled him and made arrangements to have the Swimmer installed in Building 2, and Xavier and his co-conspirators attempted a coup.

  “Twenty didn’t want anything to do with this,” said the Kapitan. “He said it was espionage. He said it would bring down on us all kinds of unwanted attention. Really, though, all he wanted was an excuse to try and take over.”

  The Coureur was sitting on an old kitchen stool in front of the tank, where the Swimmer could see him by using a mirror strung overhead. He seemed to be in the grip of several powerful emotions at the same time.

  “What the hell happened to you?” he said.

  There was a pause, while the Swimmer’s eyes picked out the words. Then the speakers said, “I was fired.” And then they made a horrible noise which the Kapitan had decided was laughter. When that died away, the Swimmer said, “I was made an example of. I wasn’t supposed to survive, of course, but I’m not without resources.”

  The Coureur appeared to be at a loss for words.

  “I won’t apologise for what happened to you in Poznań,” the Swimmer continued. “That would be an insult to your intelligence. There was something I needed at the Consulate, and you were a means to obtaining it.”

  “You utter bastard,” said the Coureur. “They nearly killed me.”

  “It was a chance I needed to take. It was nothing personal.”

  “You set up this jump too, didn’t you. Off-piste. For him.” He gestured at the Kapitan.

  “My sister’s boy. Little Florian. She married an Austrian. A bad lot. He gave me shelter when I was in need; it was the least I could do to try and help him. Tell me, why has it taken you fifteen months to get here? I taught you better than that.”

  The Coureur stared at the burned man in the tank. He said, “I was in New Potsdam. I got a crash message for a new Situation. I was supposed to meet up with a partner. When I found him he’d been murdered. I went to ground and things have been going very wrong for me ever since. Is this all to do with you?”

  “And it�
�s taken you this long to find out what the Situation was? I really am disappointed.”

  “Fabio, you prick, I’ve been running all over Europe. I’ve been kidnapped. My brother’s been killed. My life has been destroyed. Is this all to do with you?”

  “I took three proofs from the Consulate,” said the Swimmer. “Florian knows where they are. He’ll give you the key. Use them as you see fit. Powerful people want these things, want to know how to use them, want to stop them being used. I place them in your hands. Now go. Take Florian with you; he’s a criminal little shit with the morals of a slime mould but he’s still family.”

  “No,” said the Coureur. “No. I’m not moving from this stool until you explain this to me.”

  “No explanations,” said the Swimmer. “You wouldn’t believe me. You have to see it for yourself.”

  “See what? What do I have to see? Who did this to you?”

  “Central wanted the proofs. They wanted to stop them falling into the wrong hands. I wouldn’t tell them where they were.”

  “Wrong hands? Whose?”

  “Yours, for one. Now go.”

  The Coureur glared at him, then tipped his head slightly to one side. His eyes unfocused and he seemed to be listening. Then he said, to no one in particular, “All right, we’re coming out.” He looked at the Kapitan. “Your little bum-boy’s decided to make a move in broad daylight.”

  Despite himself, the Kapitan had to smile. “Fucker,” he murmured.

  The Coureur stood up and started to fasten the front of his stealth-suit. “What about you?” he asked the Swimmer.

  Again, that awful laughing noise. “I don’t have any future left. Word will get around if I turn up in any hospital in Europe and I’ll have an ‘accident.’ Florian’s people have done their best, but I’m on the edge of multiple organ failure. They can’t help me much longer. Go.”

  The Coureur looked round the room and said, “Jesus Maria, Fabio.”

  “Go,” said the synthesised voice. “Just go.”

  The Coureur seemed to come to a decision. He grabbed the Kapitan and urged him over to the door. “You. I want this key he was talking about, and I want to know where these proofs are.”

  “In my office.”

  “Right. Let’s get them and get out of here.”

  THEY STOPPED FOR a few moments in the Kapitan’s office, where he unlocked his safe and took out an envelope and handed it to the Coureur. The Coureur stowed it in a pocket of his suit and then they were out again, running down corridors full of people panicking at the Revisionist attack. The Kapitan shouted some orders, tried to calm things down as he passed, but it did no good. “He has a tank!” someone shouted as they went by.

  Instead of going down, they went up. Up endless flights of stairs, ascending into quieter and quieter parts of the building. At one point there was an almighty bang and the whole building seemed to shake dust off itself and the Kapitan found himself on his hands and knees, the Coureur dragging him back to his feet and urging him on through the stinking dusty corridors.

  And then they were at the top of one final flight of stairs and the Coureur was throwing open a door onto a patch of late afternoon sky and they were on the colossal flat roof of the building.

  “Seth!” the Coureur shouted over the sound of small-arms fire from far below on the Parade Ground, and a patch of air alongside a pile of boxes and metal bottles shimmered and became another stealth-suited figure.

  They ran over to the figure, who pulled back its hood to reveal the anxious face of a young black man. “These people are not normal,” he said.

  “Football fans,” said the Coureur. “Don’t know why they couldn’t just have got themselves lives.” He grabbed the Kapitan and planted him front and centre. “Get this piece of shit out of here.”

  The second Coureur began buckling nylon straps all over the Kapitan. Then he snapped a harness to the straps. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “I’ll meet you as arranged,” said the first Coureur. “I have to collect something first.”

  “Right.” The second Coureur opened one of the boxes on the roof at his feet and snapped several lengths of line to his stealth suit. Then he stepped right up to the Kapitan and fastened their harnesses together so that they were face to face just inches apart. He grinned. “I understand you’re a right-wing racist bastard.”

  The building shook again, and a wall of smoke billowed up from the side closest to the Parade Ground. “You two will have plenty of time to get to know each other,” said the first Coureur. “But we ought to get out of here.”

  “Okey dokey,” said the second Coureur, and he pulled a cord and three of the boxes exploded as the balloons inside them suddenly inflated. He looked into the Kapitan’s eyes and beamed. “Run, you fucker,” he said quietly. And together, awkwardly, the big balloons above them tugging them up on their toes, they ran sideways towards the far edge of the roof as the first Coureur was still strapping himself into a harness.

  At the very last moment a gust caught the balloons and swept them up into the sky, and for a few seconds, before their combined weight took over and began to drag the balloons in a slow arc that would eventually deposit them on the other side of the Landwehrkanal and safety, the Kapitan could see into the Parade Ground. Hundreds of people were fighting there. Hundreds more were lying on the ground, very still. And yes, Xavier did have a tank. Clever boy.

  IT WAS THE same locker.

  Rudi paused and looked at the number printed on the key given to him by Fabio’s nephew. Thirty-eight. He tried to remember the number of the locker he had looked into the last time he was at Zoo Station, and found that he could not. But it was the same one. He knew it was. There were no coincidences any longer; he was in the hands of what was, basically, a malicious God.

  You cheeky bastard, Fabio...

  He was also attracting attention, standing here like an idiot. He put the card into its slot and opened the door.

  He half-expected to see Leo’s head, mummified and shrunken but still with that surprised expression on its face, but instead there was only Fabio’s burnbox, a calfskin-covered attaché case which would incinerate its contents at the first sign of unauthorised tampering. He grabbed the handle, pulled it out of the locker, swung the door closed, and limped out across the concourse.

  At every step he expected to be shot, or stabbed, or mugged, or arrested. None of those things happened.

  He left the station, went down the steps to the U-Bahn, got on a train to the Hauptbahnhof, and there boarded a train for Hannover.

  Twenty hours later, he was sitting in an hotel on the Channel coast, a few miles from Dieppe. He was a thousand years older. Looking at himself in the flyblown mirror in his room, he thought it was a miracle that his hair hadn’t turned white.

  1.

  THIS YEAR WHEN the season ended, Lev decided to kill himself.

  He stood on the jetty and watched the last of the tourists being ferried back to their floating country and he put his hand in his pocket and felt the few drachmas and euros and dollars there and knew he couldn’t survive the winter. All of a sudden his legs felt watery. He sat down on a bollard and looked out over the bay and some of the younger fishermen laughed at him. The older ones, though, the ones who knew how quickly and completely a man’s life can fall apart, kept a grim and respectful silence.

  The great white ship in the bay was simply called Nation. It was a country for tourists, a country of tourists, making a year-long tour of the Mediterranean and Aegean before wintering in dry-dock in Kiel. It was a nation of the aged and the wealthy from all over the world.

  This year, the great vessel brought him Myrna, on a cruise to console herself over the death of her fifth husband. “Did it when Danny died as well,” she told him. “And George. And Charlie.” And she smiled, and Lev felt himself shrink inside. When she smiled, she reminded him of owls. Not the wise owls of legend, but the mouse-destroying birds of prey.

  Myrna. Rippe
d and exercised to the point of mutation, barely an ounce of fat on her, like a woman made entirely of twigs and the tufts of hair left by sheep on barbed wire fences. No way to tell how old she was, but old. She had wined him and dined him and consented to let him pleasure her, but she had been unwilling to bestow any more lasting gifts upon him. Gifts, for instance, which he could sell to pay his rent.

  Gods but it was hot, even though winter was howling its way along the Med. This place was no good for Russians. Too hot. Too alien. The food tasted wrong and the alcohol was terrible, although one was able to overlook that if one drank enough of it.

  He had come here four years ago, island hopping until his funds ran out and he could no longer afford a ferry fare. In Greek, the island’s name meant something like ‘The Place Where We Forgot Where We Were,’ which seemed appropriate. Lev’s arrival had coincided with Nation dropping anchor in the bay and disgorging its population, including Penny. Penny from Pittsburgh, who had taken a shine to Lev to the extent that when she left he was able to sell all the things she had given him and rent a single filthy room over a taverna in the Old Town and survive, somehow, until the next boatload of tourists came in.

  Nation’s next visit had brought Alice. Then Corinne. Between times, Lev scratched a living teaching English and Russian and proofreading guidebooks, although the material return for that was tiny. He began to regard Nation with the fervour of an eighteenth century cargo cultist.

  But he supposed he had known, in his heart of hearts, that one day it would all have to end. Either the people who owned and ran Nation would suddenly decide to send her on a round the world cruise instead, or the ship would hit an iceberg and sink, or he would simply latch on to a woman who would take more than she gave. And so it had happened. Myrna, on her way to pastures new, glowing with memories of her Russian lover, while her Russian lover starved and was thrown out of his room and eventually just walked down to the harbour, picked up some very heavy object, and jumped into the water with it.