Europe in Winter

by Dave Hutchinson

  “You have,” Rupert suggested, “unfinished business.”

  “Damn right,” said Seth.

  “None of us has had closure,” Rupert continued, pronouncing the word as if he’d only learned it recently and was pleased to be able to use it in conversation.

  “Damn right,” Seth said again and drained his glass. “Beer?”

  Rudi and Rupert nodded and Seth twisted in his chair to begin the usually-extended process of catching a waitress’s attention. All of Bunkier’s waitresses were beautiful and very, very smart, and Rupert liked coming here because he was usually in love with one or other of them.

  Rudi looked about him. The weather had turned chilly and the staff had rolled down the plastic sheeting that served as an outside wall for the bar, and turned on the catalytic heaters. He thought about closure. They were no closer to knowing who had killed Seth’s flatmate and his flatmate’s girlfriend and basically burned his life down to the ground than they were to understanding the presumed intelligence war which had taken over Rudi’s. Of the three of them, Rupert – he still insisted on going by his chosen nom de guerre, Rupert of Hentzau – was closest to gaining closure. At least he knew who had destroyed his home and killed everyone he knew, and why, even if the prospect of exacting some kind of justice remained out of reach in a misty distance.

  Rudi said, “Good trip?”

  “Very interesting,” Rupert said. “Azerbaijan. Baku. Extraordinary place.”

  “Dangerous place.”

  Rupert shrugged. “It’s okay if you’re careful.”

  “I’ve never been.” Baku had declared itself an independent city-state a couple of years ago and was currently gorging itself on oil money. Once upon a time, Coureurs would have flocked there. Now it hardly registered.

  “You should. It might take your mind off things for a while.”

  Rudi pulled a sour face. “It’s my experience that no matter how long you take your mind off things, the things are always waiting for you when you come back.”

  Rupert sat back and looked at him. “You were busy for years,” he said. “Running everywhere. Now there’s no need to run any more, but you still feel as if you have to.”

  “I know.” Rudi bent over the table and drew a line through a splash of beer.

  “You need a white whale.”

  Rudi looked up. “A what?”

  “A white whale. Like the captain in the book. Ahab.”

  “Ahab was crazy.”

  “Yes, but he was crazy with a purpose. A foolish and destructive purpose, but a purpose all the same.”

  “I’m a chef.”

  Rupert waved it away. “That’s a job, not a purpose.”

  Rudi pictured himself walking out into the restaurant in the middle of service and announcing that it was a job, not a purpose. He said, “Any suggestions? Any particular white whales?”

  Rupert spread his hands. “We should make more of an effort to find Mundt.”

  “Efforts are being made,” Rudi said. “Believe me.” Herr Professor Mundt had discovered a form of topology which the rulers of the Community believed would allow him to open border crossings between them and Europe, which clearly posed something of a security problem for them. He had also, unfortunately, been missing for the best part of a decade now, having been squirreled away with enormous efficiency by a Coureur named Leo. It was impossible to ask Leo where Mundt was because someone had subsequently cut off his head and left it in a luggage locker at Berlin-Zoo Station.

  One of the waitresses came over finally, and Seth gave their order. “I’m going off shift in a minute,” she told him. “You want to settle up now and another waitress will bring your beers?”

  Seth, who wasn’t used to table service in pubs, looked over at Rudi, who nodded and took out his phone and waved it at the waitress’s credit terminal to pay their tab. He watched her head back towards the bar. He thought about white whales.

  AFTER SETH HAD flown back to England and Rupert had taken off for the gods only knew where, the conversation kept coming back and nagging at him. He found it playing over and over again at the back of his mind through long days and nights at the restaurant. Unfinished business. Closure. Purpose.

  Late at night, he found himself jotting things down – on paper, which was easier to destroy than notes on a pad. At first it was just scraps of ideas, half-remembered conversations, Situations, but at some point he realised that what he was doing was writing his own life, or at least the latter part of it, the part which had been taken over and used by Coureur Central and, quite probably, by others. He had no idea who these people were, or what they wanted. He had done what he had thought was right at the time, although to be honest now he looked back none of it seemed to have made any difference to anything. He’d jumped people out of the Community until the Presiding Authority opened the borders – really, in the great scheme of things he could only have been a minor irritation. He sat and thought about white whales again.

  Which eventually brought him here, to this flat in one of the rougher parts of Lëtzebuerg, using his phone to trawl some of the wilder chat rooms and bulletin boards and blogs for word of one Dieter Wilhelm Berg, last seen being marched towards a police car this morning. Yesterday morning, it being three a.m. now. The Englishwoman was snoring in the spare room. Rudi had done some discreet searches of her name, and found no mention of her. Which was interesting. The local police certainly knew her name – they’d raided her hotel – but they had chosen not to circulate a public bulletin, and there was nothing about her in the great undertow of rumour and hearsay which made up most of social media these days. Ditto for Berg, who had claimed to have information for Rudi and appeared to have been preparing to hand the same information to Gwen. Rudi felt a little disappointed with Berg for doing that.

  Berg had found him, heard word that he was looking for something and made contact using a very old word-string on a microblogging site sometimes used by Coureurs. Rudi only saw it by chance, and was intrigued enough to set up a series of blinds and dummies and cut-outs via which to reply. And here he was. And Berg was... nowhere. Not a word of him anywhere, not even among the most paranoid discussion groups, who surprisingly often, and usually without realising it, stumbled across information that was actually of some use. Nothing.

  Rudi shut down his phone and put it on the kitchen table in front of him and rubbed his eyes. Beyond his reflection, snow eddied in the light from the living room window. It had been snowing for a couple of hours, and the sound of the traffic in the street below had given way to a soft, snuggled silence.

  He got up and went to the window. The snow turned the streetlights into great fuzzy spheres illuminating the occasional car or van picking its way carefully along a fat pair of tramlines cut into the pillowed white surface of the road. The shopfronts on the other side were blurry and indistinct. A couple of figures, bulky in cold-weather clothing, fought their way along the pavement, heads down against the wind.

  Rudi turned and perched on the windowsill and looked around the flat. It was two years since anyone had tried to kill him. Something was wrong.

  “IT WAS SUPPOSED to be safe,” Gwen said. “It wasn’t even supposed to be illegal.”

  They were sitting at the dining table having breakfast. Rudi had made eggs Benedict, which Gwen had regarded with some initial suspicion.

  “I don’t understand,” Rudi said. “If it wasn’t illegal, why go to the trouble of all the cloak-and-dagger?”

  “Lewis,” Gwen answered, sitting back and picking up her cup of coffee. “Lewis thinks he’s living in a spy novel.”

  “And you?” asked Rudi. “How do you feel about that?”

  “It’s a bit stupid, isn’t it,” said Gwen, and Rudi saw a hint of embarrassment in her body language, as if she’d been caught enjoying a game meant for toddlers. “Lewis said it was better if a woman came for the meeting because nobody would suspect a woman.”

  “If you’ll excuse me for saying so,” Rudi sai
d, “Lewis sounds like a dick.”

  “I was the only woman in the group,” she said. “The whole conspiracy scene’s mostly blokes. Blokes without lives of their own.”

  “How did you get involved with them?” Rudi asked. “If it’s not a rude question.”

  She shrugged. “Rob,” she said. “My ex. He was at university with Lewis. Lewis invited him to one of the meetings, he took me along. We split up, he stopped going to the meetings, I didn’t.”

  “You found Community conspiracy theories interesting?”

  She tipped her head to one side and looked at him. “I really hope that wasn’t a prelude to some sort of mysoginistic comment.”

  He shook his head. “That never occurred to me, in all seriousness,” he said. “I’m just fascinated by the Community groups.”

  “It wasn’t any weirder than the UFO nuts,” she pointed out. “And it turned out to be true.”

  “Have you ever heard the name Delahunty?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Rafe Delahunty? Or possibly Araminta?”

  “No.”

  Rudi shrugged. “A friend of mine knew them,” he said. “They claimed to have been in touch with a Community group in London, people who had maps of border crossings.”

  “It wasn’t us. Lewis would have multiple orgasms if he ever got his hands on a map like that. When was this?”

  “Quite a while ago. Ten, maybe fifteen years.”

  “No,” she said. “Not us. We’ve only been running for six years or so. And we weren’t that serious.” And she scowled to realise that she was still saying we. As if she was ever going to do anything but knock Lewis unconscious if she ever saw him again.

  “Well, it seems to be fairly serious to me,” Rudi said. “For Herr Berg, anyway. Although to be fair, we don’t know what he was being arrested for, or whether he was released after questioning. For all we know, he might have failed to pay maintenance to his ex-wife. I presume you had no fallback procedure, no way of contacting him directly?”

  Gwen took a drink of coffee. “Lewis,” she said. “I didn’t even know this bloke’s name.”

  “And you have no idea what brought Berg into contact with your friend Lewis?”

  Gwen shook her head. “What was he supposed to be giving you?”

  Rudi got up from the table and started to gather up the breakfast things and carry them over to the kitchen area. “If it’s something likely to bring you into conflict with the authorities, it’s best you don’t know,” he said.

  “Fucksake,” Gwen muttered. “You and Lewis.”

  “So far, you haven’t done anything wrong,” Rudi said, bending over to put the breakfast plates into the little dishwasher. “From what you told me, Berg probably didn’t know your name or even have a description by which to identify you.”

  “The police were at the hotel.”

  “Yes.” He closed the dishwasher and stood up awkwardly. His leg was aching again. “Yes, that’s interesting.”

  “You think Lewis grassed me up.”

  Rudi limped back to the table and sat down. “He knew when you were coming and where you were staying. As did whoever left the contact procedure at the hotel for you.” He shrugged. “I have no idea. Things go wrong all the time; it might be no more suspicious than that.”

  Gwen scowled and drained her coffee. “So what do we do now?”

  “The first thing we have to do is make sure you’re safe.”

  “And safely out of the way.”

  Rudi tipped his head to one side and smiled.

  “According to you I can’t go back home. My job will be gone and I’ll probably be arrested the moment I set foot in the office, if not before. My life’s in ruins; I’m not going to let you just... file me somewhere. I want to know what’s going on.”

  Rudi crossed his arms, came to a decision. “Herr Berg gave me to understand that he had information relating to Les Coureurs des Bois, something they were doing here in Luxembourg.”

  “It’s not the same thing, then,” Gwen said. “Lewis isn’t interested in the Coureurs.”

  “That’s been puzzling me,” Rudi admitted. “What are the chances that Herr Berg would have two separate pieces of information to sell to two different people on the same day?”

  “I have no idea,” said Gwen, taking the coffeepot from its coaster in the middle of the table and refilling her cup. “Right about now I’m prepared to believe anything.”

  Rudi lit a cigar and frowned.

  “Who is this Berg, anyway?” Gwen asked.

  “He works for the Defence Ministry,” Rudi said. “I looked him up. He’s in Procurement.”

  Gwen thought about it. “Have you tried to find out what the Defence Ministry has been procuring recently?”

  Rudi stared at her through a cloud of cigar smoke.

  “I’M NOT A spy,” Rudi said. “I don’t do espionage.”

  “It sounds like exactly what you do,” Gwen told him.

  “It’s not the same.”

  Gwen shrugged. They were sitting in a little café, improbably named the Bouffy Hutch, near the centre of the city. The place was packed; mainly, it appeared, with people sheltering from the snow, which was still blowing past the windows like the carriages of a steam locomotive. The air inside was warm and smelled of coffee and food and damp clothing.

  “What I mean is that it’s not second nature for me,” Rudi grumbled. “I have to think about it.” He sighed. “I’m getting sloppy.”

  Gwen looked at the windows. “Is it ever going to sodding stop?” They had spent the past two days at the flat, digging stuff up from the internet and making phone calls, and the snow had not ceased once. In some places it was over a metre deep.

  “Better pray it keeps up,” Rudi told her, sipping his coffee. “There’s nothing the police hate more than searching for a fugitive in a blizzard.”

  Gwen had found herself quite surprised by how easily she had taken to being a fugitive. The trick, it seemed, was simply not to act like one. So long as you looked as if you belonged somewhere and knew what you were doing, nobody noticed you. Stomping through the snow bundled up in cold-weather clothing, fur-lined hood pulled up over her head, she was perfectly anonymous. Sitting here, she was just another face in the crowd.

  “Here’s our man,” Rudi said, and Gwen looked up to see a short, stout figure making its way through the café towards them, annoying diners on either side by shaking flakes of snow off its sleeves. Rudi waved – three friends meeting each other for lunch – and the figure came over, pulled up a chair, and sat down.

  There were some awkward moments while they all stared at each other. The newcomer was in his early sixties, dressed in a leather jacket over a hoodie over a massively-thick knitted sweater, what seemed to be several metres of scarf wound round his neck. He had tiny, annoyed eyes under bristling badgery eyebrows, and an old-fashioned lumberjack-style hipster beard.

  “Fritz,” he said. “We spoke.”

  “Indeed we did,” Rudi said. “Are you hungry? Can we get you anything? A pastry, perhaps?”

  “You mentioned money,” Fritz said. His English was heavily-accented.

  “I did,” Rudi agreed again. “If you’d care to check, you’ll find a small addition to your bank balance.”

  Fritz took his phone out, thumbed a sequence of numbers, swept through a couple of menus, read the screen. He looked at Rudi and raised his eyebrows.

  “For your time,” Rudi told him. “I’ll transfer the rest, if your story’s interesting enough.”

  Fritz put his phone away. “Three weeks ago,” he said. “Everything’s puttering along nicely, then all of a sudden we get this order.”

  “Out of the blue,” Rudi said. “Urgent.”

  Fritz nodded. He looked at Gwen.

  “My friend can be trusted,” Rudi assured him. “Although the money isn’t hers.”

  Fritz pouted. “A kilometre of fencing,” he said. “In ten-metre sections. Five metres tall.”<
br />
  “That’s a lot of fencing,” Rudi noted. “Did your employers have that much in stock?”

  “Business has been slow lately,” Fritz said. “We had a big contract, an office renovation, but they ran out of money and left us with the fencing we’d manufactured. My boss was sick of it; he wanted to sell it for scrap and start again, stupid bastard.”

  “There must have been a contract, though? Were you never paid?”

  “The firm doing the renovations went bust; it’s still in the courts.”

  “But you wouldn’t need a kilometre of fencing for a building site,” Rudi said, and Gwen got the sudden impression that the firm Fritz worked for must be teetering on the brink of disaster, mainly because his boss had made some very poor business decisions.

  “Do you want to hear the story?” Fritz asked. “Or shall I call up a spreadsheet of our accounts?”

  Rudi smiled and made an after you gesture.

  “So we get the word,” Fritz went on grumpily. “A kilometre of close-woven mesh, so-and-so tall, buyer to collect. Boss went wild, never seen him smile so much.”

  “But the buyer never collected?”

  Fritz shook his head. “Got the word a couple of days later, there’d been some kind of fuckup and could we deliver for them.”

  “That’s interesting. Did they say why?”

  “No, but it was obvious later; they were just so fucking poorly organised, they didn’t have enough transport of their own.”

  “And where were you to deliver it to?” Rudi asked nonchalantly.

  Fritz sat and looked at him.

  “You make me sad, Fritz,” said Rudi. He took out his phone and thumb-typed quickly. “Here’s another third.”

  Fritz checked his own phone and then stared at Rudi again.