Europe at Midnight

by Dave Hutchinson

“But you have!” The archaeologist was of a jolly disposition, despite the fact that human turds were bumping against his waist and drifting away. “You’ve noticed that your voice carries a long way down here.”

  Müller really only wanted to get this job done and finished with, and he just said, “Mm.”

  “For instance,” the Archaeologist said as they approached the point where tonnes of rubble had cascaded down out of the tunnel roof, “how far do you think my voice would carry if I spoke like this?”

  “Oh,” Müller said, shining his torch on the monumental slope of rubble before him, “a fair way, I suppose.”

  “And like this?” said the archaeologist in a murmur.

  “Hardly at all,” Müller said, still engrossed in the tunnel problem. He was trying to work out how many people, how much materiel, it would need to fix this problem.

  “All right then,” the archaeologist said in the same low murmur, “I’d be obliged if you could post this for me when you get outside then.” And he held out an envelope.

  Müller was not an idiot. He looked at the envelope and thought of all the trouble he could get into with the Neustadt authorities. He thought about entrapment, and show trials, and a member of the Dresden Sanitation Department standing in a courtroom looking intolerably stupid.

  “It’s for my brother, who didn’t have the good fortune to be with me when the Republic was set up,” the archaeologist said. “He doesn’t know if I’m dead or alive.”

  And Müller looked into the archaeologist’s eyes. And then he did the only illegal thing he had ever done in his whole life.

  “HE WAS VERY clever,” he told us. “When I came out of the sewer I was covered in shit. Nobody was very keen to search me. They had the back of the car covered in plastic sheeting when they took me back to the Aldstadt, and all the windows were wound down. It was freezing.”

  “And you just did it?” Leo said with a hint of admiration in his voice. “You took this letter from a complete stranger, and you posted it?”

  “Look, friend,” Müller said tiredly, “I don’t care what polity he came from. He was a German, just like us, and he asked me for a favour.”

  “But you could have got into all kinds of trouble,” Leo said. “You must have known that. It could have been some kind of trick.”

  “I knew it wasn’t, all right? I knew.”

  “Did he ask anything else of you?” Leo said. “Any other little favours from a fellow German?”

  Müller shook his head. “He just gave me the letter and walked away, back down the tunnel. Left me to do my job.” He looked Leo in the eye. “He trusted me.”

  Leo crossed his arms. “And it’s obvious that he chose wisely, Herr Müller. Because you never mentioned any of this to our colleagues when they interviewed you.”

  “He asked me not to say anything. He said we could both get in a lot of trouble.” A smile twitched up one corner of Müller’s mouth. “And your colleagues never asked.”

  Leo, shook his head sadly.

  “All they wanted to know was what it was like in there,” Müller went on. “What were the people like? What were they wearing? Did they look happy or sad, well-fed or half-starved, what kind of weapons they had.”

  “You’ve just told us about the letter, though,” Leo pointed out.

  “You knew already,” Müller said. Then a hint of doubt crossed his face. “Didn’t you?”

  “And of course you looked at the address before you posted this letter, didn’t you, Herr Müller,” Eleanor said. “This letter to the brother somewhere in the Bundesrepublik.”

  Müller was looking at us suspiciously again, but he said, “Rolf Heidegger. The address was in Berlin. Somewhere in the Prenzlauer Berg.”

  “What was the letter like, just out of interest?” Eleanor asked.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Well, for instance, what colour was the envelope?”

  “Oh.” I suddenly realised that Müller thought he was being accused of opening the letter and reading it before putting it in the post-box. “Cream-coloured. Good-quality paper. It already had a stamp on it.”

  “How big?”

  “One of the long thin ones.”

  “And how thick was it?”

  Once again Müller seemed taken aback by our apparent knowledge. “Quite thick. Several sheets of paper. But if he hadn’t seen or heard from his brother for all that time he’d have a lot to tell him, right?”

  Leo nodded. “Absolutely. Now, you subsequently returned to the Neustadt on one more occasion?”

  “Yes. They were having difficulties with the repair.” He shrugged. “Still are, probably. Their way of solving a problem seems to be to hurl large amounts of money at it.”

  “And did you see your friend again?”

  “Oh, he was there, but we didn’t speak. He didn’t approach me. I did manage to catch his eye and sort of nod, very casually, to let him know I’d posted the letter.”

  Leo looked at the ceiling and seemed lost in thought for a very long time. Finally, he said, “In your opinion, if the Neustadters were still encountering difficulties with this repair, would they call you back into the polity?”

  “Probably,” Müller said. “I’d say it was almost certain.”

  Leo sat forward and clasped his hands on the table. “Herr Müller,” he said very seriously, “while all four of us around this table realise that the concept of patriotism may be somewhat debased these days, how would you like to be of some small service to your country?”

  5

  THE REPUBLIC OF Dresden-Neustadt was an absolute fucking nightmare. You only had to look at the place to see that.

  Actually, looking was all anybody could do. It sat in the middle of the city like some awful grey growth, an area of a square mile entirely surrounded by walls a hundred feet high. On our drive through France and Belgium and Holland we had passed through some of the tiny new nations which Charles had told me were springing up all over Europe, and quite a lot of them seemed to be of a symbolic nature, although they all had their borders and border guards and passport controls. Dresden was different. It seemed to want to absent itself from its surroundings. Buildings had been cleared around the wall, so that it rose from a sea of rubble and weeds. Looking at it from the window of our hotel room, it seemed to block out half the world.

  “How on earth did they manage to do that without anyone stopping them?” Eleanor asked.

  “They were very clever and very patient,” Leo said. “And very, very rich.”

  I was still coming to terms with the idea of ‘Europe,’ so the process Leo described perhaps didn’t seem as outrageous to me as it might to a native. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me that a group might want to set up its own nation, if it had the means to do so, and whoever had created the Neustadt had certainly not been without means.

  According to Leo, there had been a long period of politicking within Dresden’s City Council,

  endless proposals and presentations, firstly to the Greater German Government, then to the EU, then to NATO, then to the United Nations. Europe was still struggling to emerge from the near-cataclysm of the Xian Flu and the slow economic apocalypse which had been going on since the beginning of the century, the first polities were beginning to slough off from the Union; in the chaos, Dresden’s proposals were nodded through.

  For another year, letters and leaflets appeared in postboxes throughout areas of the city where the site of the proposed new polity lay. This part of the Old Town, the communications stated, had been granted the right to secede from Greater Germany, and a newly-minted nation was to rise in its place. Anyone who wished to remain was welcome to stay; those who did not would be well-compensated.

  “Who paid for it all?” asked Eleanor.

  Leo snorted. “Oligarchs.”

  One night, Dresden experienced the thunder of hundreds of heavy transporter engines arriving from all points of the compass, delivering thousands of tonnes of prefab fencing, machinery,
and a small army of workmen. Attending the workmen as they began to erect temporary barriers across every road and street were seemingly hundreds of thousands of armed security consultants. It was if this little corner of Germany had suddenly come under invasion from a heavily-armed corporation of civil engineers. A wave of nervousness ran through the city. The police, realising they were enormously outgunned, checked the official work orders, then pulled back and waited to see what would happen.

  By the next morning, all roads in and out of a large part of the city had been barricaded, and a huge arc around the town had been enclosed with flimsy metal fencing. Three days later the outline of what would become the wall of Dresden-Neustadt was complete. It was, those who watched from a respectful distance agreed, one of the more impressive civil engineering projects seen in Germany in recent years.

  “After that,” Leo shrugged, “it was just more building. They put up the wall. It was all legal and above board. Nobody could stop them. When they’d finished they just told Greater Germany to fuck off and that’s the way it’s been now for the past twenty years. It’s been a blight on the fucking country ever since. The Bundestag is suing them for breach of contract because the wall’s about ten metres taller than specified in the original planning application, they’re countersuing, there’s a pile of class actions taller than I am.” He shook his head.

  “Does anyone know what’s going on in there?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. It’s the world’s biggest data haven, the world’s biggest private bank. Like a fortified version of Switzerland. They don’t post profit notices, of course, so nobody can be certain, but I saw an article in Bild last year that said it was the third richest nation on Earth. It’s basically the place where Russian billionaires keep all their money and their secrets. Allegedly.”

  “That seems to be an eggs-in-one-basket sort of solution, if you don’t mind my saying,” Eleanor mused. She seemed quite taken with the Neustadt.

  “They say there’s a backup somewhere,” Leo said. “Nobody knows where.”

  “If I was going to commit a crime,” I said, “I’d be trying to steal the backup.”

  They both looked at me. I went away and switched on the room’s little kettle. After their unpromising start, Leo and Eleanor seemed to have bonded. I wondered if I would get a chance to mention Roger to him.

  WE STAYED AT the hotel for another three days. We went out for walks, just three tourists taking the air. I didn’t like Dresden; there was a grim feeling to the place, and I still wasn’t used to the crowded buildings and all the people. Leo mentioned that the city had been largely destroyed during the Second World War. Baines had provided me with a course on the history of Europe, but there was a lot of it and my understanding of some things remained sketchy. I still wasn’t sure whether England was in Europe or not; I had the impression that the English would have quite liked to be in Europe so long as they were running it, but weren’t particularly bothered otherwise.

  A lot of our walks took in the parts of the city nearest the Neustadt, but there wasn’t much to see, just the great grey wall sitting there mocking Greater Germany. Sometimes we saw people patrolling on top of the wall, and once we used one of the tourist telescope sites that had been set up at various locations. Leo focused the instrument and then stepped aside to let me look. In the centre of the field of view was a hemispherical object a little larger than a car, mounted near the top of the wall. There were similar objects evenly spaced all the way round the Neustadt.

  “Railguns,” I heard Leo say. “They fire a one-kilo sabot round at five times the speed of sound.” He sounded quite impressed. “Punch a hole clean through an office building.”

  Gibberish. I looked at the object, but it made no sense, and I let Eleanor have the eyepiece.

  “Have they ever been used?” she asked.

  “Once,” Leo said. “Most of the Neustadt’s supplies come by barge up the river. The Bundesrepublik decided to impound one of them, just to see what it was carrying. There was a telecoms tower about a kilometre that way.” He pointed. “The Neustadters fired on it, chewed the top half of it completely off.” He shrugged. “The Bundesrepublik let the barge go.”

  “What was in it?” I asked. “The barge.”

  “Fruit.” Leo looked about at the crowds bustling across the little plaza we were standing in. “The companies that used the tower are suing the city and the Bundesrepublik as well. Also the company that owned the barge. Everybody sues everybody else. It’s what we do these days, instead of sending in tanks.”

  The worst thing was the feeling I had first noticed in London, the feeling that, while Europe was huge and busy and almost too cosmopolitan to comprehend and full of potential, it was also rather ordinary, a bit disappointing. All the things that seemed so exotic and exciting – cars, television, the fashions, the music, the buildings – were just surface. Under it all, people were still just people. Angry, decent, captious, stupid, sometimes magnificent. I wondered how primitive we had looked to Araminta. It was no wonder she had been able to work out so much of the nature of the Campus just by looking around her; it had been an illusion which was only convincing to those inside it.

  “Hey,” Leo said to me. “Cat got your tongue?”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. “Sorry,” I said. “My mind was wandering.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “You hungry? I know a place not far from here.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That would be nice. Thank you.”

  WE BUMPED INTO Roger at the car hire kiosk in Paris. Eleanor was grumpy because the train from London had been late; I was jumpy because Eleanor was grumpy and because the official in the station had seemed to pay an awful lot of attention to my false passport. Eleanor was in the process of staring a hole straight through the woman behind the car hire desk when I heard a cheery voice call, “Ellie! Hey, what are you doing here?” and I saw the set of Eleanor’s shoulders change.

  A moment later, a thin little man with a moustache and one of those suitcases on wheels had joined us. He was wearing a suit and a tan overcoat and he spoke very quickly with an accent I recognised as American from some of the films I had watched in the clinic.

  “Hey, Ellie, what brings you to Paris?” he asked. Then to me, “Roger Parrish. With two r’s.”

  “Tomm –” I started to say, but Eleanor cut me off.

  “We’re just visiting, Roger,” she said. She was smiling perfectly sweetly, but she was very still.

  “Me too,” he beamed. “Business or pleasure?”

  “Business, I’m afraid,” she told him. “And we’re late, so if you’ll excuse us –”

  Roger looked past us at the woman in the kiosk, who was watching with the bored expression of someone who has been round a public aquarium one too many times. “Having a problem with your hire?”

  “Roger –” said Eleanor.

  “I’ve got a car meeting me outside in” – he checked the time on his phone – “well, right now, as it happens. Why don’t I give you a ride?”

  Eleanor was starting to lose control of the situation. Roger wouldn’t stop talking, there were too many people on the station concourse. I could almost hear her mind going through the possibilities and discarding them one by one. I took a step away from her.

  “Ellie and I worked together last year,” Roger told me. “I’m in private security. You?”

  “I’m an English lecturer,” I said, and Eleanor almost glowed with suppressed rage.

  “That sounds interesting,” said Roger. “English, huh? Cambridge?”

  I had no idea. “Yes,” I said.

  “Roger,” Eleanor said, “we really are pushed for time –”

  “Hey, I told you. I have a car outside. I can drop you at your meeting and maybe we can all meet up for dinner later, yeah?” And with that, he picked up my overnight bag and started to march away with it.

  Eleanor and I stood there for a moment. Then she said, “Keep your mouth shut. Don’t talk to him,�
�� and set off after Roger. I followed obediently.

  Outside the station, a sea of traffic was swirling around a huge roundabout. The noise was appalling. Roger was already striding towards a line of cars parked off to one side of the station. He paused at the first two, then went and stood by the third and beckoned us goodnaturedly.

  The three of us sat in the back – Roger in the middle, Eleanor and me on either side – and Roger asked where we were going. When Eleanor told him an address, he looked at her a little strangely, but he repeated it loudly to the driver and we took off into the traffic, seemingly causing several accidents at once.

  Paris was meaningless to me. It seemed to be all cars. Once or twice I caught sight of an imposing building, but the view was instantly whipped away as the driver overtook a larger vehicle or flung our car around a roundabout. It was so unnerving that I didn’t have to worry about Eleanor’s warning not to speak. I couldn’t have said a word if I’d wanted to.

  And Roger was doing all the talking for us, anyway. An unending stream of chatter about business meetings and clients, on and on and on while the traffic thinned out a little and the imposing buildings became shabbier and shabbier and the white faces on the streets were replaced by black ones. I watched huge blocks of flats go by, faced with thousands of balconies. Men and youths on street corners watched us go by, and once I thought I saw one draw back his arm as if to throw something as we passed.

  The change in the city seemed to be getting to Roger. “Banlieues,” he said. “Bad part of town.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” Eleanor said, the first words she’d spoken since getting into the car.

  “Half these places, they’re polities in all but name,” Roger said, looking out at the endless rows of flats under the greying, darkening sky. “They go to war with each other. Had a client out here five, six years ago. Business owner.” And he was off again, the unending stream of consciousness which seemed to characterise the private security business.