Europe at Midnight

by Dave Hutchinson

  It was a nice routine. Calming and unhurried. I had been doing it for almost a year now, waiting for my moment of betrayal.

  HOME WAS IN Oakford, one of the most poorly-named places I had ever encountered. There were no oaks in Oakford, just some stunted plane trees and silver birches along the High Street. It was run down and dirty and on Saturday nights it was full of drunks. My flat was on the ground floor of a shabby building off the High Street. It smelled of smoke because at some point in the past couple of years the flat above had been set alight by its occupants, but it was all right really. It was warm and cosy in the Winter. I didn’t dare open the windows in Summer because that would have been an invitation for someone to burgle me, but I’d got used to it.

  The flat had a little kitchen with a gas stove and a fridge, but I had never learned to cook. I usually bought something from the chip shop down the street, or the pie and mash shop on the High Street. I really missed pizza.

  Everyone in the Community was English. From one end of the Continent to the other. There were only English things here. There were no other languages, only regional dialects. No other cuisines but English. No other clothing styles but English. No other architectural styles but English. It was awful. After a year here I would gladly have lynched someone for a kebab. After two years, I would have committed mass murder for a portion of sweet and sour pork. The months living with Alison in Kentish Town had provided me with an indelible education in fast food, and I was now an addict. English cooking was stodgy and unimaginative and under-spiced. I had not found a single dish which employed garlic.

  For entertainment in the evenings, there was the cinema or the theatre. Alison had also provided a crash-course in both, and the Community’s versions were worthy and insipid, a bit like the food. Drawing-room farces and historical dramas in the theatres, musicals and comedies and crime thrillers in the cinemas. In two hundred years, the Community had not provided a single playwright of any great note or a film which would have troubled an Oscar voter for more than a minute.

  God was here, too. But it was not the many-faced God I had encountered in Europe. It was the English God, the God of cricket and landowners and drumhead services, stern and severe and patrician. Why the Whitton-Whytes had made the Campus godless, I had no idea, unless it had been to remove certain intellectual barriers to scientific thought. Maybe they just did it because they could.

  The Community was dull. It was nice and it was quiet, if you lived in the right places, and there was full employment and nobody was starving and everybody was happy. It was no wonder people wanted to leave.

  2

  THE FIRST THING Charles did when I got back to London was listen very carefully to my story. The second thing he did was have the Farmboy beat me up. The Farmboy wasn’t nearly as elegant as Eleanor had been, but he made up for that with sheer brute force, and when he was finished I had two broken ribs and needed another trip to the group’s pet dentist.

  “You’re a disappointment, Tommy,” Charles told me.

  “It was a catastrophe, right from the start,” I lisped. “There was a Russian. He shot Eleanor and then he shot Mundt.”

  Charles looked at his notes. “Koniev,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Koniev, Alexei Mikhailovitch,” he read from another sheet of paper. “Freelance security consultant.”

  “He didn’t say what he was. He just came down into the sewer with us.”

  “What did he look like?”

  I described Koniev again, remembered that last great bubble breaking on the surface of the sewage under Dresden-Neustadt, remembered the look on Eleanor’s face as she drowned him.

  Charles sighed and shook his head. “I have to admit, I find it very hard to believe you managed to escape from Dresden.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “Very true. But it’s the how that bothers me, Tommy. The place is supposed to be impregnable.”

  “The Coureur had a backup plan. In case everything went wrong.”

  “Hm.” Charles leafed through his notes, held up a page, and read. He shook his head again. “Doesn’t work for me, I’m afraid.”

  The best Leo had been able to come up with was a wild story about escaping unseen from the sewers somehow, then hiding out in the great underpopulated polity until we were able to find a rope and climb down the outside wall at dead of night, evading guards and motion sensors and listening devices and the railguns. I thought it was impossibly absurd. “The one advantage you have is that nobody will be able to prove it’s a lie,” he had told me when we parted at the ferry terminal in Holland.

  “And the one disadvantage I have is that I won’t be able to prove it’s true.”

  “You have the thing,” he reminded me. “They will want that; it should keep you alive long enough to convince them.”

  “There was a lot of confusion,” I told Charles. “Eleanor wanted something from Mundt, the Coureur was shouting because we had intercepted Mundt’s letter to them and he wanted something from Mundt, Koniev was shouting because no one was taking him seriously and we were all standing up to our hips in shit and then Koniev started shooting.”

  “Who killed Koniev?”

  “I did. I hit him. Then I drowned him.”

  “You see, that I can believe, Tommy,” Charles told me. “You have the look. Where is it? The something everybody wanted from Mundt?”

  “It’s in a safe place.”

  “I can make you tell me. Eventually.”

  “I don’t doubt. But you can’t be certain you won’t kill me in the process, and then it’ll be gone forever. For the moment, it’s safe.”

  “Well, I can’t blame you for wanting some kind of insurance, considering,” he said. “But I don’t believe you ever had it. Or if you did, you don’t know where it is now.”

  “Solid state hard drive, two hundred terabyte,” I said, quoting Eleanor. I held up my finger and thumb. “About so big. Black, with a green stripe around one end. Mundt said it was the end of borders.”

  “Did he say how?”

  “He might have got around to it, if Koniev hadn’t shot him.”

  “We need it, Tommy.”

  “It’s safe. Stop having people hit me, and I’ll tell you where it is.”

  He looked at me for a while. Then he shook his head. “But I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Let’s try something a bit different, shall we?”

  They had an old dining table in one of the upstairs rooms, a solid oak thing that looked as if it weighed as much as a bus. Leather straps had been screwed into the wood. They carried me upstairs, laid me on the table, strapped my wrists and ankles securely, and put a wet flannel over my face.

  They left me like that for a minute or two, and it was actually quite pleasant. It was nice to lie down, and the flannel was cool against my bruised cheeks and forehead. I started to fall asleep.

  Then they started to pour water over the flannel.

  “I’M NOT A sadist, Tommy,” Charles told me. “I don’t enjoy doing this.”

  I just sat and stared at him, my arms wrapped around me. I couldn’t stop shaking.

  “So,” he said, “we have Professor Mundt’s little gift to the world, which is good. And we have confirmation of your story, which is also good.”

  “How in the name of fuck is torturing me confirmation?” I hissed. Right then, I would have killed Charles with my bare hands, if I wasn’t afraid of passing out in the attempt.

  “I regret that,” he said.

  “You utter cunt.”

  He sighed. “Eleanor was something of a blunt instrument, but she always said that if you gave her a wet flannel and a bucket of water she could make anyone tell the truth.”

  Eleanor might have done, but Eleanor was gone. I would have gladly told them that black was white, up was down and hot was cold if it stopped them pouring water onto my face, but I had stuck to my story about my escape from Dresden and then I had given up the hard drive’s hiding place. After tha
t, I had no idea what I had said. The fact that I still wasn’t dead suggested I hadn’t compromised myself too seriously.

  “The Coureur,” he said.

  “I don’t know. He got me to The Hook and put me on a ferry and I walked here from Dover!” I was screaming as hard as I could by the time I reached the end of the sentence, which would have been impressive if something louder than a defeated squeak had emerged from my mouth. I hunched myself up in my chair. “I walked here from Dover, you absolute fucking cunt,” I said quietly. “I didn’t have any money so I had to walk.” I started to cry. “It took days...”

  Charles took a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and handed it over. “You’ve had a rough time, old chap,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry?”

  “The Dresden thing should have gone smoothly.”

  “Eleanor killed two people before we’d even left Paris,” I reminded him. “Because one of them annoyed her. It would have been a miracleif the thing had gone smoothly.”

  “Well, in retrospect perhaps Lionel or I should have gone along too,” he mused. “But she assured us everything would go like clockwork. She didn’t even think she’d be able to get into Dresden.” There was a tone in his voice which suggested he wanted to revisit the subject of Herr Müller but had decided to leave it for another day. Leo had promised me he would try to have Müller resettled somewhere, and I hoped that had gone well, for Müller’s sake. I didn’t want him to join the absurdly-long list of people who had been hurt or killed during my brief visit to Europe.

  “Wiser heads have decided we should pull out,” Charles said. “Myself, I’d quite like to come back one day, but we have to go where we’re told, eh? Which in your case means coming with us.”

  “Just let me go home,” I said.

  He looked soberly at me. “My superiors will deal with that. I’m afraid it’s rather outside my brief.”

  “All I ever wanted was to go home.”

  “I know, old chap,” he said. “But you’ve had a rather interesting life, and my superiors would like a chat first. Maybe then they’ll let you go home.”

  “And maybe they’ll kill me.”

  Charles shrugged. “Perhaps so. But life is all about uncertainty, isn’t it?” He smiled. “You could be hit by a bus tomorrow.”

  “You’re just a fucking ray of sunshine,” I told him

  LEO WOULD HAVE called it a ‘dustoff,’ but it really more closely resembled a day trip with a group of friends. Charles, Lionel, Simon, the Farmboy, a woman called Susan whom I had not met previously, and myself all climbed into a large minicab with a small caravanserai of luggage, and were taken down to London Bridge station. The Shard, which sat on top of the station, always reminded me of the Architects’ Tower in Science City. This one, though, had remained almost empty since the day it was completed, and eventually the company which owned it had gone bust and the building had been taken over by the local council and turned into what the English called ‘social housing.’ It was a vertical town, with shops and markets and schools and its own Artists’ Quarter. I’d seen it from Highgate, and had thought I’d like to visit one day, but now I was up close to it I changed my mind.

  We caught a train to Dover. Simon, who collected Europe trivia as if it was a precious natural resource, said the trains had once run from somewhere called Charing Cross, but the station had been wrecked in a bombing thirty years ago and it had been too expensive and dangerous to try to repair or rebuild. It was early in the morning and the train was almost empty as we pulled out of London Bridge and began to rattle and rock slowly over the myriad points and junctions leading out of South London. The Farmboy was wearing the earbuds of a music player and was nodding along to something. Charles was reading a paper copy of The Times, Susan a tablet. Lionel and Simon just looked out of the window as city gave way to countryside and the train picked up speed. Nobody seemed to want to talk. I just sat where I was, with my new teeth and my strapped-up ribs, full of painkillers and not noticeably unhappy. It was nice to spend a day without someone hitting me. I looked out of the window and saw a large aeroplane in the sky. I understood aeroplanes and helicopters now, but there were not enough wild horses on the face of the Earth to get me aboard one.

  A couple of hours later, we got off the train in Dover and I smelled the sea again. I had grown up literally a universe away from the nearest sea, and of all the new sensory experiences I’d found in England and Europe that smell was the one that I found most affecting. I had read books that mentioned oceans, but they had been fakes, part of an awful confidence-trick to persuade my people that we lived in a real world, not some bizarre artefact. The real sea was wonderful; the five hours I had spent on the ferry to Harwich had been an extraordinary adventure, even if the bulk of the other passengers had seemed to spend their time either getting drunk or being sick or fighting among themselves, or all three at once.

  We queued up to board the ferry. Charles went ahead of us, which I thought was rather bright of him. The Security Service would be on the look-out for me; Baines had said they had computers that could recognise people’s faces in crowd photographs. The security cameras here would see me standing with Lionel and Simon and Susan and the Farmboy, and the Service would focus on our little group and ignore Charles. I found it interesting that he would do that, but the others seemed not to notice.

  The journey across to France was disappointingly brief. We sat in one of the ferry’s cafés the whole way. The Farmboy demolished two burgers. It occurred to me that I had never heard him speak. We chatted among ourselves until we docked at Calais, then we disembarked in the midst of a big crowd of passengers – Charles again subtly separate from us. I had been worried that the French police would have a similar computer system looking for my face, after my previous visit to France, but the officer at the Immigration desk just glanced at my false passport and waved me through and we walked over to the station and caught a train for Paris.

  From Paris, we took a series of trains, each one shorter and more rickety than the last, and at the end of that part of the journey the five of us were standing on the platform of a deserted little railway station deep in the French countryside. Charles no longer seemed to want to disassociate himself from the rest of us.

  We waited for over an hour in the late afternoon sunshine with only the sound of birdsong and insects for company. The Farmboy walked to the end of the platform and looked out across the fields and woodlands beyond the station. Lionel and Simon had a little chess set. They put it on one of the benches between them and set the pieces up in what were obviously their positions in an ongoing game. I looked idly at the board but I couldn’t tell who was winning. Charles sat typing on his phone. Susan put on a pair of sunglasses and stretched out on another bench. No one spoke. I thought I detected a tired sort of sadness in the little group. None of them really wanted to leave Europe.

  Presently, I heard a noise further up the track, and from around a bend just outside the station came a small train drawn by a steam locomotive. The carriages were decked out in green and gold livery, and it pulled to a stop at the platform with a great hissing and venting of vapour and a guard uniformed in the same livery as the coaches got off, checked the tickets Charles gave him, and helped us load our luggage into the final carriage. Then he led us down the train to a sleeping-car and showed us to our compartments. I shared mine with the Farmboy. Of course.

  THE LITTLE TRAIN travelled for hours, unhurriedly puffing along through the countryside, rattling around bends in the track and labouring on gradients. As night fell over the great expanses of farmland and trees, we sat and ate dinner in the dining car. The food was not, as far as my memory served, remotely French, although the wine was.

  Afterward, we all retired to our respective sleeping compartments, where the Farmboy proceeded to keep me awake half the night by snoring. I managed to nod off at some point, but not long after that the train pulled into a station and the guard came down the carriage
knocking on the doors to wake us up.

  As the Farmboy dressed, I lifted the window-blind to one side and looked out. We were in a big station full of steam trains. It was very early in the morning, so there were not many people about, but I could see a vaulting ironwork roof and more liveried railway staff pushing trolleys.

  There was a sign right outside the window. On it was the word WŁADYSŁAW. I stared at it and felt a strange sensation in my throat, as if I was about to cry, or about to burst out laughing. I had finally reached Lady’s Law.

  3

  WEDNESDAY WAS HALF-DAY closing. There was no particular reason for this that I could see, but almost all the official buildings in the city – post offices, banks and so on – closed at lunchtime, and most other businesses seemed to have decided that there was no point in staying open as well. Wednesday was Christine’s day for visiting her aged mother in an old-folks’ home on the other side of the city. Christine and her mother loathed each other, but there were certain filial duties which had to be observed, otherwise the neighbours would talk, so she loaded up a basket with crossword magazines and fruit and walked across the Market Square to the tram stop on Rhododendron Street and took herself out to Mount Royal. Thursday mornings, she was usually in quite a foul mood.

  That left me in charge of the shop on my own for about four hours, which Christine seemed to think was long enough to trust me without the business going bust or me setting the building alight. There wasn’t a lot of trade on Wednesdays, anyway, outside the usual pensioners coming in to sit and read. I usually spent the time working on a continuing stock-take.

  This particular morning seemed busier than usual. There was a sudden rush around ten – a sudden rush for us was three customers coming in at once – and they all had complicated questions about some book or other which required me to consult the inventory, and while I was busy with them another customer came in, a short, stocky man in his late thirties with a confident stride and an unhurried smile. He waited until I had finished the last of my queries and then came over to the desk.