Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  “The Nuremberg Defence,” said Rudi.

  She swore softly and turned up the collar of her jacket. “How long is this going to take?” she called in Czech, but there was no reply from inside the car and she crossed her arms and jammed her hands up into her armpits for warmth. Rudi wondered why she wasn’t wearing gloves. “I’ll take your passport,” she said to him.

  “I was told to return it.”

  “I don’t care what you were told. It’s the property of my government.”

  He shook his head.

  She glared at him. “I could take you back to the Zone and arrest you.”

  “But you have no powers of arrest in the Czech Republic,” he pointed out. He nodded at the little customs man. “I could claim asylum.”

  “He’d probably have a heart attack if you did.”

  “Worth a try, though.”

  She shook her head. “We have an extradition treaty with the Czechs. We’d have you out of here in two hours.”

  He looked down at her. “Two hours?”

  “Maximum.”

  He thought about it and shook his head again. “I was told to bring it back.”

  “Your people will never be able to use the Tonu Laara legend again.”

  “Oh, I imagine there’ll be somewhere it will be useful.” He smiled at her. “Baku, maybe.”

  The customs officer said, “You can go.”

  Marta looked at him and drew herself up to her full height. “If that dog’s pissed in my car, I’ll make you wish you’d never been born,” she said. “You and the dog.”

  THEY DROVE FOR another hour or so, to the crossing at Český Tĕšín. Marta pulled the car out of the line of traffic queuing for the border and drove around behind a row of brick buildings. Rudi looked out and shook his head. Hectares of concrete and asphalt flooded with white light, dotted with brick buildings and checkpoints, and surrounded by high fences. Home again.

  “I’ll walk with you,” Marta said, opening her door.

  Outside, the wind blew down from the mountains and across all that slushy asphalt and concrete and cut right through his parka. He shouldered his rucksack and followed Marta through the shadowless illumination between ranks of coaches whose passengers looked down at them incuriously as they passed. Across the concrete, a trucker was standing beside his twenty-wheeler and having a spirited argument with a Czech Customs officer.

  “If you don’t mind my saying so,” he told her, “you have a very unusual way of doing things.”

  “We’re the Zone,” she said brightly. “What did you expect?”

  There was a tunnel of razor-wire and high fencing that angled away from the lorry-park and led down to the border. There was a checkpoint about halfway along.

  “Don’t you hate this light?” Rudi asked, looking up at the lamp standards that stood every ten metres or so along the path. “It’s the same all over Europe. Probably all over the world.” He shook his head.

  “The frontier actually runs through the middle of the town,” Marta said. “On this side, it’s Český Tĕšín. Just down there, on the other side of the wire, it’s Cieszyn. Polski Cieszyn, they call it. Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “As if you were going to give me that Coureur speech about Schengen and free movement across borders. You people always do that. I hate idealists.”

  “As ideals go, it isn’t a bad one.”

  “You’re young,” she told him. “You’ll change.”

  He smiled at her. “You’re young too.”

  She punched him in the shoulder hard enough to hurt. “Passport.”

  “No.”

  She held out her hand.

  “How am I going to get into Poland without it?”

  “You can use the passport that says your name is Jan Paweł Kaminski.” They stood looking into each other’s eyes for a few moments. “It was stupid to hide it in your room. Poor tradecraft.”

  It occurred to him that he was lucky to have escaped from this Situation with his life. “I think tradecraft is the least of my problems right now.”

  “How many of these things have you done?” she asked.

  If you included the business with Max’s cousin, and whatever the hell it was that Fabio had been trying to pull off in Poznań, this had been Rudi’s fourth live Situation. “A few,” he said in what he hoped was a wise tone of voice.

  “I think you ought to stop doing it,” she told him. “You’re not very good.”

  At this precise moment, there seemed no way to argue with that. He shrugged and headed for the checkpoint.

  Rudi’s Polish passport was a plastic card embossed with his photograph. The Czech border guard slipped the card into a slot and the machine read the embedded chip. Rudi put his thumb on the reader, the guard looked at his screen, then looked at Marta.

  “It’s the dishwasher,” Rudi said. “The water’s too hot. It blistered my fingerprints off.”

  “Let him through,” Marta said, and the official looked at her one more time and handed Rudi’s card back and Rudi wondered just what kind of arrangements the Zone had with the Czech Republic.

  “Passport,” Marta said to him as the barrier slid aside.

  Rudi smiled at her and walked away.

  Ten metres along the tunnel, the guard at the Polish checkpoint examined his passport and enquired whether he had anything to declare. Rudi opened his rucksack and took out the bottles of Czech rum and Czech whisky he had brought with him, just in case the Package had needed a warming drink. The Customs man pulled a face.

  “They all taste the same,” he said. “Christ only knows what they make them from.”

  “They have great beer, though,” Rudi said, looking back along the tunnel. Marta was still standing at the Czech border post, a small figure in a big jacket. As he watched, she took her hand from her pocket and waved to him. In her hand was something small and green and rectangular.

  “Happy New Year,” the guard said.

  Rudi smiled at him. “And to you.” He laced up his rucksack again, slung it over his shoulder and walked away from the border.

  APART FROM THE Polish street-names and shop signs, and a general air of dilapidation, there seemed very little difference between Cieszyn and its Czech counterpart. The snowy streets were busy with New Year revellers and people making their way to and from church. Rudi wandered along with them.

  As he passed one church, he turned and pushed through the doors. The place was packed, and he had to stand at the back with a crowd of Poles, their feet squelching in melting slush. After a little while, Dariusz came in and stood beside him.

  “They sold us to the Hungarians,” Rudi said quietly.

  Dariusz shrugged. “Next time, they’ll sell the Hungarians to us,” he murmured. “The Zoners like to think they’re holier-than-thou, but they’re for sale like everyone else. It all equals out, in the end.”

  Rudi looked at him. “They stole my passport.”

  Dariusz nodded. “They always do that. We’ll get another one.”

  “The Hungarians got the Package back.”

  “That also happens sometimes.” He reached up and clapped Rudi on the shoulder. “You’re all right, though. That’s the important thing.”

  “I’m not all right.”

  “I know.” Dariusz looked sad. “I know. Let’s go home, eh?”

  It was only later, sitting in the front seat of Dariusz’s Mercedes and watching the inadequately-cleared lanes of the motorway unwind towards Kraków, that Rudi put his hand in the pocket of his parka and realised that he had somehow left the hotel with Jan’s watch.

  1.

  ON NOVEMBER 1, in defiance of global warming, a high pressure area swept down from Scandinavia, bearing on its close-packed isobars tiny particles of snow as hard as ground glass.

  For three days, the many little states of Northern and Central Europe slowly disappeared beneath a coarse, glittering blanket. In some outlying or badly-administered areas,
villages and sometimes even towns were cut off. People mostly battled to work, although in some places schools and offices were forced to close when their oil-fired boilers ran out of fuel because tankers were unable to get through to make deliveries.

  At midnight on November 4, Mr Albrecht finished his shift and drove his creaky old orange tram into the new depot beside Potsdam-Stadt railway station.

  For the past hour, the only other person on the tram had been a figure slumped in one of the rear seats, head leaning against the window, arms crossed over its chest, in an attitude of uncomfortable sleep.

  Mr Albrecht left his driver’s cab, slung his satchel over one shoulder, and walked along the grime-spattered side of the tram to the rear doors.

  Inside, he stood for a few moments looking down at his only passenger. The sleeping figure was bundled up in a long padded coat, its hem wet with slush and its hood pulled up. Within the hood, Mr Albrecht could see a scarf wrapped around the lower half of his passenger’s face. He reached down and took hold of one shoulder and shook gently.

  “Hey, mate.”

  The sleeping figure stirred. “Mm?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome to stay,” said Mr Albrecht. “But this tram’s not going any further tonight.”

  The figure looked up, blinked blearily. “Where?”

  “Potsdam-Stadt depot.”

  The eyes, which were all that Mr Albrecht could see, narrowed. “Shit. I was supposed to get off at Babelsberg. I have to get to Rosa Luxembourg Strasse.”

  “You’ll have to get a taxi.”

  The passenger shook his head. “I haven’t got any money for a taxi.”

  Mr Albrecht sighed. He put his hand in his pocket and took out a folded five-mark note. “Here.” He pressed the note into his passenger’s gloved hand. “You can pay me back.” He gestured out into the big brightly-lit shed of the depot, the ranks of parked trams. “Just leave it at the main office and say it’s for Albrecht. Everyone knows me.”

  The passenger mumbled thanks, took a big heavy-looking duffel bag from the floor under his seat, and got off the tram. Mr Albrecht watched him disappear by degrees into the white howl beyond the depot doors, and shook his head at the chances of finding a taxi in this weather.

  It was almost one o’clock in the morning when he got back to his flat on Voltaire-Weg, overlooking the hated razor-wire border thrown up by those damned New Potsdamers to keep intruders out of their pocket kingdom, but his wife was still waiting, with the patience of long years’ experience, with his evening meal on the table.

  Mr Albrecht had been asked never to speak of his other work, highly infrequent though it was, but he had sworn to himself on his wedding day that his would be a marriage without secrets, so when he had finished his meal and he was drinking a coffee he told his wife about the sleeping passenger he had driven to the depot.

  “What was he like?” his wife asked.

  Mr Albrecht had only seen the passenger’s eyes and heard his voice, but he had been driving a tram around Potsdam for twenty-three years and when you do that you see all types, and you learn some things.

  “He was,” he said, “very young.”

  IN A DOORWAY not far from the tram depot, Rudi took out the five-mark note the stringer on the tram had given him. Unfolding it, he tilted the note towards a streetlight’s illumination and squinted to read the time and place pencilled in tiny letters on its margin. Then he took a stamped and addressed envelope from his pocket, sealed the note inside, and left the doorway. On his way down the street, he dropped the envelope in a post box and let the German postal service dispose of the evidence.

  OLDER THAN BERLIN by two centuries, Potsdam had started life as a Slavic fishing village on the banks of the River Havel. Its name – its Slavic name at any rate, Poztupimi – was first recorded when its charter was signed by Otto III in the year 993 AD.

  Friedrich Wilhelm built himself a summer palace near the river in 1660, and linked it to Berlin with a road lined with lime trees. Frederick the Great gave the city Sanssouci, one of the age’s greatest palaces. In 1747, Bach came to play for him, and three years later he debated philosophy there with Voltaire.

  Almost two centuries later, Allied bombers all but destroyed the heart of the town, and towards the end of the War Truman, Churchill, Stalin and Attlee met at the Schloss Cecilienhof and decided how postWar Germany should be parcelled out. Potsdam fell within the Soviet Sector, and in 1961 the Berlin Wall cut it off from the West, severing Friedrich Wilhelm’s road to Berlin where it crossed the Havel.

  Sometime later, after Potsdam had grown grimy and battered under the Communists, after die Wende brought a certain degree of bemused rebuilding, after the world woke up from its post-Millennium hangover, a group of anarchists squatting in a building off Hegel-Allee declared their home to be an independent nation.

  In this, they were only doing what hundreds of other groups had been doing, with wildly varying degrees of success, all over the world for a number of years. They issued passports, printed their own money, raised their own taxes – these being, it was understood, lamentable and temporary but necessary measures to protect their new country from the predations of the outside world. It was meant to be a suitably obscene gesture to Authority, but to the anarchists’ consternation the idea spread to a neighbouring building. And then another. And then another.

  The anarchists were forced to form committees to cope with finance, food, power, water and sewerage. Periodic attacks by drunken shaven-headed youths forced them to form a Border Guard. The necessity of coordinating maintenance on their buildings required some kind of works committee. Cameramen from Die Welt and Bild and Time/Stone Online came, took their photos, posted their stories, and went away again. There was a moment – nobody identified it until much later – when events seemed to pause for a breath.

  And then the anarchists’ gesture against authority was a nation a little over two kilometres across and it was called New Potsdam.

  After a week of tense negotiations with the Potsdam city council – which had failed to take the New Potsdamers seriously until much too late – the anarchists were deposed in a bloodless coup by a neo-Traditionalist faction which wanted to run the new polity along strictly Prussian lines. Most of the anarchists departed, muttering darkly to the Press but privately pleased to be relieved of responsibility for sewage and economics.

  Meanwhile, Berlin – which had too many of these pissant nations to deal with already – watched the coup and gave New Potsdam no more than two years before its citizens were clamouring to rejoin Greater Germany.

  Until that happened, the New Potsdamers were still trying to consolidate the country they had, almost by surprise, found themselves living in. All their services still depended on Greater Germany, including their electricity grid.

  Responsibility for the supply to the western quarter of New Potsdam ran through a featureless four-storey building in Berlin, overlooking the Spree. There, in a room on the third floor, was a certain computer workstation, and at this workstation, on this particular evening early in his shift, Wolf sat down, pushed his spectacles up his nose with his forefinger, and air-typed a couple of strings of commands.

  The heads-up drew him a schematic of New Potsdam’s security cameras and their relevant security stations. Wolf, in his late twenties but already with a receding hairline that gave him a deceptively serious look, swept the cursor to a certain closed-circuit television monitoring station inside New Potsdam, and double-clicked.

  Almost all the buildings in New Potsdam which depended on the Greater German grid had backup generators, but generators cost money and they required manpower to install them and there were little blind spots here and there. Wolf pulled up a sub-menu and scheduled a fifteen-minute brownout for this particular New Potsdam monitoring station.

  He thought this was rather elegant. A blackout would have been just as easy to program, but a reduction of eighty percent would cause the monitoring system to shut itse
lf down just as effectively, and he could imagine how much it would annoy the New Potsdamers.

  Wolf’s grandfather told tales of life in East Germany that were still hair-rising despite becoming progressively more and more embroidered with each re-telling, and though Wolf didn’t think of himself as being particularly political, he had inherited from the old man a distrust of borders. Traudl, his girlfriend of two months, was a kindred spirit – in fact tonight’s harmless bit of mischief had been her idea.

  Once the idea had been presented to him, Wolf developed megalomania. The thought of blacking New Potsdam out appealed to him, but Traudl convinced him that a certain subtle approach was best.

  “That way,” she told him one night in bed, “we can do it again and again. Nobody will know we’re doing it, and the New Potsdamers’ security police will go slowly crazy.”

  “What do you mean ‘we’?” Wolf asked.

  Traudl giggled and snuggled up to him. “I meant you, of course,” she said.

  The affected monitoring station received feeds from about sixty cameras mounted here and there around the Brandenberger Tor and some traffic intersections further south. The target had also been Traudl’s idea.

  Wolf closed down the sub-menus one by one, then called up a section of Berlin’s grid, sat back in his chair and whistled tunelessly as his supervisor passed by.

  “Any problems?” asked the supervisor.

  “All quiet on the Western Front,” Wolf replied with a small, smug grin.

  THE WEATHER WAS a bonus.

  It was the sort of night Coureurs prayed for. Fifteen centimetres of snow and seven degrees of frost on the ground and a wind-chill, unhindered all the way across North-Central Europe, driving the air temperature down to somewhere in the minus thirties, a howling gale carrying snow like airgun pellets. On nights like this, people made mistakes, got sloppy, paid more attention to their own comfort than to their job.