Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  Inwardly, he was furious.

  Later, when his intelligence chief answered the summons to his office, the Kapitan closed the door behind them and then grabbed the man by the front of his shirt and threw him across the room.

  “Intelligence failure!” he shouted. “People could have been killed! For an intelligence failure!”

  The intelligence chief, whose name was Hansi, picked himself up off the floor and wiped blood from a cut on his face. “None of our sources reported anything like this, Kapitan,” he said.

  “I should dangle you out of this window by your cock and let Xavier and his friends take pot-shots at you,” the Kapitan snarled. The last intelligence failure had missed the Revisionists’ hiring of an expert sniper from Bremen. Eight people had died before an assassination squad broke into Building 1 and killed him. The Kapitan had made Hansi lead the squad himself, and had let him live when his mission was successful. Kapitan Todt did not feel quite as well-disposed towards Hansi today.

  “I give you money,” he yelled. “I give you resources. And in return for that I expect to hear when they go out on a shopping spree and buy missiles!”

  “Xavier himself went to buy them, Kapitan,” the man blustered. “On his own. He didn’t hand out the weapons until moments before the attack.”

  “Oh, you know all about this now, do you?”

  Hansi took half a step backward. “It’s... it’s the only way it could have happened, Kapitan.”

  “And nobody noticed he was missing? Your spies? Your little sneaks on the other side of the Parade Ground?”

  Hansi opened his mouth. Closed it again.

  “Every time you come to me for money, you promise me that Xavier will not be able to take a shit without one of your rats reporting about it to you. And now apparently he can leave the Municipality at will and come back with a van stuffed with high explosives and nobody notices.” The Kapitan took a step towards Hansi and Hansi took another step back. “Find out how this happened, Hansi,” he said. “Find out where he got the rockets from, and then fucking get me some!”

  After Hansi had left, the Kapitan’s second-in-command, Leutnant Brandt, emerged from one of the other rooms and said, “Dangerous man.”

  “Incompetent man,” the Kapitan said.

  “You should get rid of him, before he goes across the Parade Ground.”

  Kapitan Todt snorted. “Xavier’s welcome to him. It would probably work out in our favour.” He looked out of the window – painted with one-way reflective paint ever since the sniper incident – and after a few moments he said, “You think he’s getting ready to defect?”

  “That sort are only ever in the fight for the rewards,” said Brandt. “As soon as they start drying up they’re off looking for someone else to leech onto.”

  “Well I’m not going to keep hurling resources at him if he gets things this badly wrong,” the Kapitan said mildly. “I’d have to be an idiot to do that.” He sighed. “He knows where too many bodies are buried to take the chance. Bury him with them.”

  “Yes, Kapitan.”

  “And Brandt?”

  “Yes, Kapitan?”

  “I’m constantly reviewing everybody’s loyalties.”

  Brandt seemed to falter momentarily, searching for an answer. Finally he said “Yes, Kapitan.”

  BEFORE BRANDT THERE had been Mundt, and before Mundt there had been Falkenberg, and before Falkenberg there had been Meyer, and before Meyer there had been Xavier.

  Xavier. Xavier X, who encouraged people to call him ‘Twenty’ because of his initials and who wore under his shirt a necklace of ears reputedly cut from the heads of shopkeepers and businesspeople who had been shortsighted enough not to join in with his protection rackets.

  Kapitan Todt had found the boy hiding from the Anhalter Bahnhof polizei one rainy night in March, ten years ago. The Grandsons – they had still not quite geared up to make the jump from football hooliganry and medium-level racism to running their own country – had attacked another gang of supporters in the station concourse. The private security police had broken the fight up and everyone had scattered, the Kapitan and his predecessor, Kolonel Aldo, finding themselves in a little-visited area of dumpsters and piles of refuse bags behind some of the station’s fast food franchises.

  As they crouched, panting quietly, waiting to see whether anyone had followed them, Aldo heard something moving under a nearby pile of bags. The two young men threw the bags aside, and found a filthy boy crouching under them, the neck of a broken bottle clutched in one hand and a brand new Sony microtainment centre, still in its box and somehow smuggled out through the Sony franchise centre’s security procedures, at his side. What struck the Kapitan, even then, was that there was no fear at all in the boy’s eyes. He would have tried to kill them both if he had to.

  “Crazy little fucker,” Aldo chuckled.

  “We should keep him,” said the Kapitan, who in those days was still known as Florian.

  Aldo raised an eyebrow. “I bet he’d be handy in a fight,” he allowed. “How about it, kid?” he asked the boy. “How’d you like to join the Grandsons of Gavrilo Princip?”

  “Fuck off, granddad,” the boy spat scornfully. But when Aldo and Florian decided the coast was clear and made to move off, he followed them back to one of their clubhouses, where the frauen made a fuss of him and cleaned him up and it turned out he was on the run from a state orphanage and had nowhere else to go, and by then there was never any doubt about whether he would stay with them or not.

  Not a single one of them could have said who Gavrilo Princip was without recourse to Google, and if it wasn’t for voice recognition software most of them wouldn’t even have been able to do that because the majority were illiterate. Like Twenty – he demanded to be called Twenty, it was only some months later that they discovered the name’s derivation – most of the Grandsons were either graduates of or runaways from Berlin’s notoriously tough orphanage system. Even the ones who had homes and families wouldn’t have called them conventional or loving. They came together out of a common love of football and a common hatred of opposing clubs and supporters. They fought with a finely-honed desperation against fans of other Berlin clubs, other German clubs, other European clubs. Italian Ultras were the best. Ultras literally refused to stop; they just kept coming, long after more rational opposition would have faded away. It was a privilege to fight Ultras.

  Aldo was in Plötzensee now, eight years into a life stretch for torching a Somali community centre in Dahlem and killing fourteen people. The state had demanded the death penalty, but was contenting itself with periodically withdrawing Aldo’s segregated status in jail and waiting to see how long it took the Moslem inmates to try to kill him. So far, the longest he’d survived in the general population without being attacked was fifteen minutes. The Kapitan visited, when he could. Aldo knew the prison guards would intervene in any disturbance, but even so, eight years of it were starting to take their toll. His hair had gone completely white.

  Aldo was almost forty, the oldest of the Grandsons, basically a Methuselah figure. A true visionary. While Xavier was fighting his way up through the ranks, Aldo was proving his visionary credentials by meeting with the leaders of other supporters’ groups, cutting deals, forging alliances. The Grandsons began to join with some of the other gangs, then to absorb them, then to overwhelm them. By the time Aldo was arrested the Grandsons of Gavrilo Princip were almost two thousand strong and they ruled their own country.

  NOTWITHSTANDING TODAY’S OUTRAGE – to which he was already planning an apocalyptic response – mornings tended to be fairly quiet times. The Grandsons’ fondness for industrial quantities of beer and schnapps and, quite often, substances which had not yet been legalised for human consumption, meant that mornings were, for the most part, times of introspection rather than violence. The Kapitan ruled his half of the Municipality with a fist which aspired to be fair but which was still, when all was said and done, a fist. He had his followers divided
into watches, and woe betide anyone who indulged in any kind of stimulant stronger than coffee less than twelve hours before their next watch.

  So when the rocket attack began this morning, all of his people were alert and compos mentis and doing their jobs to the best of their abilities, which was only as it should be, and they were still doing their jobs now, calmly and methodically. Of course, as soon as their Watch was over they would do their best to get entirely off their faces...

  Kapitan Todt considered himself to be a genuine military commander. Aldo had taught him discipline and its value, and those lessons were paying off now. When the war with the Revisionists was over and the Municipality was unified again, perhaps they could relax. But not yet.

  Aldo had also taught him to trust his instincts, but Aldo’s advice was no help as he walked down the corridors of his kingdom with the strangest feeling that he was being followed. The small group of advisers and lieutenants walking with him seemed not to notice.

  Aldo’s plan to unify or absorb or simply erase all the other football gangs in Berlin had reached its apotheosis when he decided his new army needed its own country, and he set his sights on the Municipality, an old housing development a few minutes’ drive from the swanky new blocks in East Kreuzberg.

  The Municipality was four huge apartment blocks arranged in a square around a patch of ground the size of a football stadium. In the past, the open ground had been a park, a play area, a place for children to ride their BMX bikes and skateboards, but the development’s former residents had been moved out to newer estates around the city and it was almost empty. The few anarchists and Greens who were squatting there moved out in a hell of a hurry when Aldo led his people to the Promised Land. Like Moses, however, Aldo was fated not to live in the Promised Land. Within a day or so of the Grandsons taking over the blocks and fortifying them against the authorities – who had better things to do than worry about winkling a group of teenagers out of a couple of old blocks of flats – Aldo had been lifted off the street and advised by his lawyer that he would be on trial for his life.

  In his place, the Kapitan – with Twenty at his side – had set about turning the Municipality into the nation Aldo had intended it to be. And for seven years all had been well. Under the Kapitan the Grandsons branched out from protection rackets into drugs and prostitution and illegal firearms. They made sure they got on well enough with the city authorities to keep police visits to a minimum, they made a good living, their numbers swelled.

  And then the Swimmer had arrived, and the civil war had begun.

  ALTHOUGH IN TRUTH it had only been a war for about a week, and the bloodshed had been awful. Xavier’s followers lost more than half their people, the Kapitan roughly the same. After that everything had settled down into an armed standoff punctuated by moments of extreme violence. After a few tense moments at the beginning, the authorities had decided to keep out of it for now and negotiate some kind of accommodation with whoever survived. It was less labour-intensive, they reasoned, to let the Grandsons thin out their own ranks.

  Numerous skirmishes saw the Kapitan finally in control of Buildings 1 and 2, Xavier occupying 3 and 4 and the two groups facing each other across the desolate wasteland of rusting jungle gyms and roundabouts and concrete biking ramps and skateboarding pits, occasionally shooting at each other, occasionally running infiltrations into each other’s territory.

  For the Kapitan, the war was nothing short of a catastrophe. He had a large and diversified criminal network to run, and for the last year or so he had had no one to run it with. Gangs from other cities, sensing opportunity, had started to move in to Berlin while the Grandsons’ attention was elsewhere. Already half the Kapitan’s protection rackets had fallen to Chechen incomers from Hamburg, and the drugs business had been entirely taken over by a patchwork of mafiye organisations from all over Greater Germany.

  He sat behind his desk in his office and worked his phones and he watched the empire that Aldo had founded and he had worked so hard to consolidate drifting away like a fog, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. The Grandsons’ hold on Berlin’s underworld had been predicated on extreme violence and weight of numbers, and while they were locked in this face-off there was very little he could do to stop things falling apart. The moment he sent any significant numbers of people out to attend to business, Twenty and his people would over-run the Kapitan’s half of the Municipality and that would be the end of that story.

  The tour over, he went down to the refectory and sat alone with a cup of coffee and stared into space. Years ago, when the Municipality was built, the architects had wanted each block to be a self-contained little microcosm of society – an arcology, almost – with shops and kindergartens and communal cafés. Much of that experiment had failed quietly. The cafés had gone out of business, the kindergartens had run out of funding, the shops had closed. Residents drifted away to the new ribbon developments out in the countryside, the blocks began to fall into disrepair and disorder.

  The Grandsons had reversed that. They had reopened the kindergartens, turned the cafés into spartan but passable canteens. They had even taken down the shutters on some of the shops, mainly to use them as fronts for fencing stolen goods or marketing drugs. With a potential army of almost two thousand people ready to repel any action by the authorities, the polizei were reluctant to intervene and start a war, so the shops flourished. Outwardly, the Municipality had come back to life in rather sprightly fashion. You just had to ignore the all pervading air of criminality.

  Hearing something behind him, the Kapitan turned in his seat and looked across the refectory, but could see no one. Just ranks of empty chairs and tables.

  He finished his coffee and took the cup back to the counter – discipline in all things – and went down ten flights of stairs to the building’s foyer. The foyer was dimly lit by battery-powered lanterns – the great glass wall which had given a view out onto the central space of the development had been boarded up and barricaded and reinforced – and a team was stationed there at all times with a Gatling railgun in case the Revisionists tried a frontal assault. All the windows on the lower floors – up as high as the fifth floor – had been bricked up and the rooms sown with antipersonnel mines. The Kapitan presumed Twenty had ordered similar measures on the other side of the Parade Ground. He chatted with the railgun team, offered some words of encouragement, made sure they were being well-supplied with food and coffee, and moved on across the foyer to a set of stairs leading down to the basement.

  The ground under the blocks was wormed with networks of utility tunnels and rooms. At one time they had all connected up, so one could move from block to block without ever seeing daylight. In the wake of the outbreak of hostilities, the Kapitan had ordered large amounts of builder’s rubble to be trucked in and piled up in the tunnels leading to the Revisionists’ blocks, and here too he had stationed railgun teams. As in the foyer, he spoke with each of the teams, hearing their reports – Twenty’s people periodically tried to clear a way through the piles of brick and earth and concrete filling the tunnels – and here too he had the itchy sensation that he was being followed.

  Finally fed up with it, he went up to the twentieth floor of Building 1 and consulted with Doktor Rock.

  “It’s hardly a surprise,” said Doktor Rock. “You barely sleep, you don’t eat properly, and your enemies are trying to kill you. A little paranoia’s to be expected.”

  Kapitan Todt shifted uncomfortably on the chair in the doctor’s consulting room – a former hairdressing salon. “Can you give me something for it?”

  “Almost certainly. You probably wouldn’t be able to function effectively for days afterward, though.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “And fuck you too, Kapitan.” Doktor Rock was sixteen years old, his face inflamed with acne. He took out a small joint and lit it – as the only doctor in the building he was exempted from the rules about on-duty substance abuse. It was the only way he could keep going. “A
lternatively, I prescribe a holiday.”

  The Kapitan snorted. “Malta?” The doctor was obsessed with Malta, for some reason.

  The doctor inhaled on his spliff, held the smoke for longer than was probably medically advisable, and breathed out. “There are worse places.”

  “I should hear your report, while I’m here.”

  Doktor Rock sat back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk. “I’m short of everything. End of report.”

  The Kapitan looked levelly at the doctor.

  The doctor sighed. “Field dressings,” he said. “I have none left; we’re tearing up T-shirts and boiling them to make them sterile. Antibiotics. Hardly any. Surgical sutures – well, let’s just say that I’d rather no one needed surgery. Painkillers. Rationed. Anaesthetics. Ditto.”

  “Noted. What about the general health of the population?”

  The doctor looked at him. “When did we last have one of these little chats?”

  “Last week.”

  “Well, nothing much has changed since then, Kapitan.” He took his feet down off the desk and leaned forward. “I expect to start seeing scurvy quite soon. It’s a miracle we haven’t had typhus and cholera yet, but when they start they’ll go through the blocks like a fire through a dry eucalyptus forest. Pubic lice are at epidemic levels. I’m noticing a lot of nervous skin complaints, insomnia, short tempers, listlessness...” He sighed. “This has gone on too long. People are just falling ill from being cooped up in this place. Eventually we’ll have cases of rickets among the children, and then, dear Kapitan, I am off.”

  Kapitan Todt regarded the doctor for a long while. Despite his youth, Doktor Rock was a more than competent medic. He and his team of ad hoc nurses worked tirelessly. “We need one last decisive strike,” he said.