Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  Back in the kitchen, he lit the two burners and set a pan of water over one. Over the other he put his frying pan and let the solidified fat melt. When it was spitting, he cut some slices from a haunch of elk venison and put them in to fry. The dog Halina stirred and raised its head; thick cords of saliva dripped from its jowls as it smelled the cooking meat.

  The water was boiling; Paweł spooned ground coffee into a metal jug and a plastic bowl, and poured water into both. He let them brew; Halina was a caffeine addict and was more than usually unbearable if its coffee wasn’t strong enough.

  By the time the venison was cooked, the coffee was ready. He put the dog’s bowl down on the floor and the evil creature slurped at it. He poured his own coffee from the jug into a cracked ceramic mug advertising Vienna’s Tiergarten – another Christmas gift from his son the idiot – and stood eating the meat from the frying pan. He dropped a few scraps on the floor to satisfy the dog.

  “What day is it, bastard?” he asked as he slurped coffee. The dog, as usual, had no sensible answer, only thick wet chewing sounds as it breakfasted. “I think it’s a day to go into the village.”

  At the word ‘village,’ the dog stopped chewing and raised its head. When he was young, Paweł had attended school with a boy named Stanisław. Stanisław had liked to amuse himself by trapping insects and pulling off their wings and legs. He kept his crippled victims, as long as their tiny lives persisted, in a little cardboard box, and liked to show them to the girls.

  Later, Stanisław had graduated to small animals, trapping and mutilating dogs and cats. By then, he had abandoned all attempts to impress the girls. Later still, the girls themselves had become his subjects. He had killed fifteen before he was arrested. Paweł had seen his eyes at the trial, and occasionally he saw something of Stanisław in Halina’s eyes.

  It amazed him that the dog recognised the word ‘village’ and showed such interest. He had never taken it to the village; he didn’t dare, in case it decided to start chewing on a child. He shook his head and threw a dirty plate in the dog’s direction. The dog ignored it and continued to stare at him.

  “I can’t take you, you bastard,” Paweł told the dog angrily. “Stupid useless creature.”

  Halina watched him a moment longer, then seemed to perform a slight shrug and went back to its coffee, as if it had completely forgotten he was there.

  PAWEŁ FOUND THAT he had forgotten quite how long it was since he had last visited the village. He thought it might have been in the late spring or early summer. On the other hand, he thought it could have been even earlier.

  Whatever. Going to the shed, he found that his bicycle was almost useless. Both tyres were flat and there was rust on almost every metal surface. He couldn’t remember the chain breaking, but there it was, hanging uselessly. He stood, hands in the pockets of his thick jacket, staring up at the machine hanging from the ceiling of the shed. He stood there quite a long time, trying and failing to remember when he had last used the bike. Clearly it was a while.

  Never mind. He went back to the caretaker’s cottage and found a stout pair of hiking boots, only faintly ghosted with mildew, under a pile of clothes. He laced them up and put on a coat and slung a rucksack over one shoulder and set off down the path that led to the track that led to the road that led to the village.

  The village had about seventy inhabitants. It boasted a bar, a shop, and a garage, all of them run by the same man, and a post office run by a wan, nervous woman who had either come here or been banished here from Warsaw twenty years before. Paweł always expected her to leave, so he had never bothered to learn her name, but year after year, there she was, patiently collecting his post and waiting for him to come into the village for it.

  “And how are we today, Mr Pawluk?” she prattled as he examined the pile of envelopes, parcels and packages which had accumulated at the back of the post office since he last came into the village – and he was beginning to think it had been a very long time since he was here last.

  “We?” he muttered. “We? I’m fine, I have no idea about you. Nowak been about?”

  “I saw Mr Nowak not ten minutes before you arrived,” said the woman. “Going into the, er...” She nodded at the bar.

  “Here, put this in a bag,” he told her, thrusting an armful of his post at her. “I’ll be back for it later.” And he thumped down the steps of the post office and across the road and into the bar.

  Inside, Nowak was sitting at a table, looking at a bottle of Wyborowa and two glasses. “Heard you were about,” he said. “Drink?”

  Paweł pulled up a chair and sat and watched Nowak fill the two glasses with vodka. They drained their glasses in silence, and Nowak refilled them.

  “So,” he said, taking an envelope from his jacket pocket, “a writer.”

  “A writer.” Paweł took the envelope, inspected its contents, removed the money and pocketed it.

  “He’s booked the Lodge for six weeks,” Nowak went on. “Says he needs the privacy or something to finish his latest novel, fuck him.”

  “Fuck him,” Pawl agreed, and they both drained their glasses again, and once again Nowak refilled them.

  “He’s paying full price though,” Nowak said. “The whole Lodge, not just the ground floor.”

  “When does he arrive?” Paweł was not a lazy man, but he could foresee some busy days ahead getting the place tidied up. It had been a while since he had done any cleaning at all in the Lodge.

  “Friday.”

  “What’s today? Monday?”

  “Wednesday.”

  “Fuck.” Paweł emptied his glass again.

  “He says he doesn’t want any special treatment,” said Nowak. “Says he’ll cook for himself.” And the two men had a laugh about that because the last person who had said they could cook for themselves at the Lodge had almost burned the place down.

  Paweł was looking at the rental documents from the envelope – Nowak’s business renting out the Lodge was far too ramshackle to include ereaders and tablets and palmtops. “Don’t recognise the name,” he said.

  “Writers,” Nowak said. “Fuck ’em.”

  “Fuck ’em,” Paweł agreed, and they drank again. Paweł stood up and fastened his coat. “Better get the place ready for him, then.”

  Nowak poured himself another drink. “Better had.”

  Outside, Paweł drew himself up straight and marched across the street to the post office, where he barked orders at the woman behind the counter until she handed over his bag of post. Then he headed back into the woods, weaving only very slightly.

  2.

  THE TOURIST WAS very young. He had a beard, and a limp, and he affected the look of someone who had had a hard life, but Paweł, who had had a hard life, knew the difference. This tourist, this writer, was just a boy.

  He arrived early in the morning, while Paweł was sitting in the privy. He heard the sound of boots crunching twigs and leaf-litter underfoot, and when he buttoned himself up and went outside there was the boy, dressed in jeans and a black padded ski-jacket, a big olive-green canvas kitbag slung over one shoulder, leaning on a walking cane and grinning.

  “Hey,” said Paweł, walking towards him. “This is private property.”

  “I know,” said the boy, smiling and holding out a hand to shake. “For the next few weeks it’s my private property.”

  Paweł didn’t shake hands. He thought it was a habit for city people who didn’t trust each other not to be carrying weapons.

  If this bothered the boy in the slightest he gave no sign. He kept smiling and stuck his hand back in his pocket and gestured with his cane at the lodge. “It’s in pretty good shape,” he commented.

  “How did you hurt your leg?” Paweł asked.

  The boy looked down at his leg, then at Paweł, and he grinned. “You know, you’re one of the very few people who’s ever asked me. Most folk assume I won’t want to talk about it. I had a ballooning accident.”

  Paweł raised an eyebrow. “
Ballooning.”

  “Slight miscalculation in weight-to-lift ratios.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “To be honest with you, I’m getting too old for all that stuff.”

  Paweł shrugged.

  “That’s when I started writing, anyway,” the boy went on, starting to walk around the Lodge with Paweł in tow. “While I was in hospital.” He turned and winked at Paweł. “Word to the wise, Mr Pawluk. Anyone who tells you those bone-knitting devices don’t hurt? They’re a liar. Here, have a watch.” And he cheerfully produced from his pocket a complicated plastic box-thing containing one of the ugliest watches Paweł had ever seen, a chunky garish thing with a fat plastic bracelet.

  “Go on, try it on,” the boy urged, and Paweł put it on, and the boy smiled. “There,” he said in a satisfied voice. “Don’t take it off, though. Good luck charm.”

  SO PAWEŁ WORE the watch during the days and weeks of the boy’s occupancy of the Lodge. He hated it and was determined to sell it the moment the boy left, but he made sure the boy knew he was wearing it.

  Not that he saw much of him. Sometimes he saw the boy out for walks in the woods near the Lodge, but mostly he stayed indoors – writing, Paweł presumed. Once or twice he walked past one of the unboarded windows of the Lodge on his way to do some chore or other, and he caught sight of the boy inside, using one of those computers where you typed in the air instead of on a keyboard and your arms got sore after fifteen minutes. There seemed to be quite a lot of computer equipment in the room with the boy, actually. Lots of things with screens and lights and cables. A lot more than Paweł remembered him bringing with him.

  On the other hand, Paweł told himself as he got ready for bed one night, they’d had guests who were much, much worse. He remembered a party of Belgian businessmen who... well, it had put him off ever visiting Belgium. And then the six Maltese who never said a word to him, and possibly even to each other. They were spooky beyond belief.

  He was too old, too slow. As he tried to turn a pair of strong, beefy arms wrapped around his waist and lifted him off his feet, waltzed him around until he was facing in the opposite direction, then a shadow lunged out of nowhere and stuck a length of gaffer tape over his mouth and before he had time to do anything about it a huge hand had grabbed both his wrists, pinning them together while someone else wrapped more gaffer tape around them. Three. Were there three of them? Or only two? It couldn’t be just one person; there were too many hands. He hadn’t even had time to try to shout.

  Two. There were at least two. One carried his upper body; the other one held his feet immobile, and in this way he was carried through the cottage, past the body of Halina, lying on the kitchen floor with her throat cut, and out into the moonlight.

  Where the boy was already kneeling, his clothes torn and his face bloody, hands clasped behind his head. Paweł was dumped beside him, forced to his knees, and he felt the cold muzzle of a weapon brush the back of his neck. “Teach you to steal from us,” said a voice behind him.

  The boy said something in a language Paweł did not recognise, and all of a sudden the clearing seemed to be full of bees and hot, sticky rain and the sounds of large things falling to the ground, and when it was over and he opened his eyes he saw five large black-clad men lying around the clearing, apparently chewed to death by something with millions of tiny teeth.

  The boy turned to look at him, covered in blood, and unbelievably he was smiling. “You okay?” he asked cheerfully.

  Paweł wiped blood off his own face and nodded mutely.

  “Good.” The boy got to his feet and helped Paweł up, removed the tape around his wrists, and looked around the clearing. The wall of the Lodge nearest to them looked as if someone had attacked it with a huge cheese grater. “Better reload, just in case.” He limped up the steps into the Lodge, came back a few moments later with an aluminium stepladder and a couple of towels. He tossed one of the towels to Paweł, carried the ladder over to a tree at the edge of the clearing, and climbed awkwardly up as Paweł wiped gore off himself.

  “Magic,” said the boy, reaching up into the branches of the tree to pluck something... invisible... “Magic guns.”

  The sentry guns were matt spheres the size of grapefruit, and until the boy started to take them down from the trees they were completely invisible. Where his fingers touched them, irregular patches of mottled flesh-pink spread until, by the time he had finished reloading and resetting them, they were the colour of his hands.

  There were more than forty of them, spread in a ragged ring around the Lodge, and the boy visited them all. As he replaced each one it began to disappear again, taking on the colours of its surroundings.

  “I’m glad you wore your watch,” he told Paweł as he replaced the final device. “The guns are programmed to fire on my command at anyone who isn’t wearing one, but you could still have caught a couple of rounds if you hadn’t stayed still.”

  Paweł said nothing.

  The boy led the way back to the Lodge. In the dining room every piece of computer equipment had been smashed beyond repair. The boy stood in the doorway looking at it all.

  “You’d better go,” Paweł told him. “Those five will have friends. They’ll be looking for you.”

  The boy shook his head. “I’m not worried about that.”

  “Well, don’t you think you ought to be?”

  “They’re just hired muscle. I’ll be long gone before any backup arrives.” He sighed. “On the other hand, you’re right. Their friends will want revenge, just to save face. You should go, too.”

  “Me?” Paweł laughed. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  The boy tipped his head to one side.

  “There’s most of an SS rifle division out there,” Paweł told him, gesturing beyond the windows to the forest. “Came here in 1942 looking for Jewish resistance fighters. Only three of them ever came out, and my father said they were all insane. No one ever found the bodies. You think I’m afraid of the mafia?”

  The boy smiled. “I’ll leave you the guns, just in case.” He looked around the room. “You can have all the other stuff as well. Even the broken things can be sold for spares.”

  “They said you’d stolen something from them.”

  “Not true. I found something that someone else wanted. I’m going to do something with it. They hired the mafia to stop me. Or maybe not. Maybe it was someone else. I’m still filling in the blanks.”

  “Who is this ‘they’?”

  “Well, that’s the thing. I don’t know for certain. There are a number of possibilities. Lots of people, apparently. And possibly some people are in the background, helping me. I don’t know.” He beamed at Paweł. “Exciting, no?”

  “Was it valuable, this thing you found?”

  The boy thought about it. “You couldn’t go into a bank or a moneychanger’s or a pawnshop and get money for it.”

  Not worth anything, then. Paweł lost interest in the subject. “You should go now,” he said, thinking of the components in the smashed computers. He could get them to Nowak by this evening, and be back here the next morning with a big wad of cash. Maybe he could buy himself a new sleeping bag.

  THEY TOOK SHOVELS from the Lodge’s outhouse and went back into the clearing to bury the bodies. The boy searched the dead men, removed shredded wallets and lacerated phones, dropped them all in a plastic bag. They buried Halina too. It was slow, dirty, backbreaking labour but the boy did more than his share of the work, despite the obvious discomfort from his leg. It was almost dawn before they’d finished. Paweł leaned on his shovel and looked around the clearing, which looked exactly like someone had buried a number of bodies in it.

  “There’s a phrase the Stasi used to use,” the boy said. “Something about washing a bear.”

  “Washing the bear without getting wet,” Paweł said. Then he scowled.

  The boy grinned. “Why, Mr Pawluk. Who would ever have guessed you’d be familiar with a Stasi saying?”

  Paweł had a sudden sense th
at the boy knew everything about him, including the time he’d spent in Berlin in his youth, a couple of years before the Fall. “It means to carry out a dangerous task without exposing one’s self to risk,” he said. He said it without shame. He had done nothing to feel ashamed about during those last heady days of the Berlin Wall; he’d told himself that often enough to accept it as fact.

  The boy nodded. “Indeed it does.”

  Paweł looked about the clearing. “But you seem to be exposing yourself to a certain amount of risk.”

  The boy leaned down until their faces were just inches apart and looked him in the eye. In that moment, Paweł thought he saw a high triumphant gleam of madness on the boy’s face. “This,” he said, “is not really risk at all. This is just a bunch of hired thugs. The particular bear I’m trying to wash entails a whole different order of risk.”

  Paweł raised an eyebrow. “Is it worth it?”

  The boy smiled. “Shall we see?” he said.

  Paweł was about to reply when he heard voices coming from the track that led deeper into the forest. Looking in that direction, he saw dim lights bobbing along. For a moment he thought the thugs’ friends had arrived, but as the voices came closer he heard their accents and relaxed. It was just the English.

  “Well,” said the boy, brushing dirt and twigs and leaf-litter off his clothes. “We’re hardly in a state to receive guests, but I don’t think they’ll mind too much, considering. Would you like to meet them?”

  There were four of them, three men and a woman. They were carrying torches and they had rucksacks on their backs and hiking boots on their feet. The men were all in their late fifties or early sixties; the woman was younger, perhaps forty. They were all dressed in that irritatingly old-fashioned way the English dressed; tweeds, shirts and ties. The woman was wearing tweed trousers and jacket over a big chunky fishing sweater. They all looked terrified.