Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  The devastation grew worse as one looked down the street, until one’s eye was drawn to the centre, the heart of destruction, the smoking pile of collapsed brick and wood and metal which had once housed the bar known as TikTok. It was as if, Petr thought, the bar had explosively vomited its innards into the street and then slumped in on itself and taken everything above and around it down as well.

  Both ends of the street were full of detectives and uniformed policemen and firemen and soldiers. Further down, an Army bomb team was still sending robots into the destroyed building to check for further devices. Until they were done there was no way to allow the fire brigade or police anywhere near it and until that happened there was no way to discover just how bad the loss of life was. Preliminary reports said fifteen dead, thirty injured, but Petr knew those figures were going to rise in a hurry. The bomb had gone off just as people were going to work.

  “We’re presuming it was a bomb,” Jakub said.

  “Yes,” Petr said. “Yes, we’re presuming it was a bomb.”

  Jakub nodded. “ATG are on their way.”

  Petr sighed. His department’s relationship with the Anti-Terrorist Group was fractious at best. “I’m surprised they aren’t here already,” he said, but it was a poor attempt at a joke. “Did something happen last night?”

  Jakub shook his head. “Normal night, according to the boys.”

  Petr swallowed and asked the question that had been hanging between them ever since he got there. “Milena?”

  “She’s not answering her phones,” Jakub said soberly. “At home or her mobiles. She’d have been starting work about now.”

  Petr scowled. The bombing was bad enough. Losing the young undercover detective he’d placed in the bar was a catastrophe. “Keep trying her phones,” he said. “Has anyone been to her apartment?”

  Jakub nodded. “Nobody there.”

  Petr felt sick. He took a deep breath. “All right. We can’t do anything here until the Army have finished sniffing around. I want everybody out shaking snitches. I want to know how this happened without us hearing anything about it, and I want to know who’s responsible.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “And could you pick the kids up from school this afternoon?”

  Jakub glanced at him, returned to looking at the wreckage of the street. “Yes, boss.”

  Petr made his way to a lorry parked in a nearby street. The doors of the container on its loadbed were open. Petr went up the steps and stepped inside and looked at the rows of detectives and operatives manning the consoles of the mobile control room. At the far end of the container thirty or so paper flatscreens had been pasted to the wall; they were each showing a different view of the wrecked street.

  “Brabec,” a voice behind him said.

  Petr turned, saw Major Vĕtrovec, his opposite number at Anti-Terrorism, standing in the control room doorway. “Miloš,” he said.

  “What do we have?” Vĕtrovec was a small, round, bald man in a tight suit

  “We’re treating it as a bomb until told otherwise,” Petr said. “All utilities have been isolated, the street’s been closed off. The fire brigade can’t get near the seat of the explosion until the Army are sure there are no secondary devices, and we can’t go anywhere near it until the fire brigade tell us it’s safe to do so.”

  Vĕtrovec looked at the screens at the end of the control room and shook his head. He turned and called through the open door. “Ismail, see if you can contact the Minister. The lazy bitch should be here anyway.”

  “Ah, good,” Petr said. “You brought Ismail.”

  “He’s my second in command,” Vĕtrovec said. “Of course he’s here.”

  “He stays out of my way,” Petr warned. The last time he and Vĕtrovec’s dead-eyed assassin of a deputy had encountered each other professionally, they had almost wound up having a fist fight in the middle of an apartment where a terror suspect had been arrested.

  “As you wish,” Vĕtrovec said as if he didn’t care much either way. “I understand this bar was of interest to you?”

  Petr filled him in quickly on the supposed presence of Abram in Prague, the measures he’d taken to investigate. He thought he saw Vĕtrovec’s expression soften when he told him about Milena. Vĕtrovec was an unpleasant little bastard, but he was still a cop, of sorts, and every policeman feels the loss of one of their own.

  When he’d finished, Vĕtrovec said, “The building was of interest to us as well.”

  Petr smiled tightly. “Of course it was.”

  “Not the bar,” Vĕtrovec said, “which is why you were not on the to-know list. One of the apartments on the fifth floor. A group of Saudi students.”

  “Who were, in all likelihood, completely innocent.”

  “Who had already met with a Bulgarian mafia group and were in the process of negotiating the purchase of seven kilos of Semtex.” Vĕtrovec looked at him. “We’re not amateurs, you know.”

  Petr gestured at the screens. “Is anyone else interested in this place who I haven’t been told about? Hm? Immigration? Traffic wardens?” He was aware that he was raising his voice, but he didn’t care. “Because if someone had thought to put me on your ‘to-know’ list I wouldn’t have sent one of my detectives in there undercover!”

  “Brabec,” Vĕtrovec murmured, looking around the control room at the officers who were all trying very hard not to stare at Petr. “Calm down.”

  “You killed her,” Petr said in a dangerous voice, poking Vĕtrovec in the chest with a forefinger. “Just as surely as if you’d blown her up yourself. Because you couldn’t be bothered to share what you were doing.”

  “I didn’t order her to go in there,” Vĕtrovec said reasonably.

  Petr snarled and pushed past the ATG man and stumbled down the steps and away from the truck, chest heaving. He leaned against a wall and tried to get his breath, tried to remain in control.

  His phone rang. He took it out, looked at it, put it to his ear. “Can’t you deal with it?”

  “I don’t know, boss,” said Jakub. “But you’ll want to see this.”

  “WHO ARE THEY?”

  “We don’t know, boss,” said Jakub. “Cleaner found them four hours ago. We’d have got the shout, but what with the...”

  “We’ve been busy.” Petr sighed. “Yes.”

  They were standing in a smartly-appointed apartment in Pankrác, not far from the prison. The apartment was in one of the two new blocks which the city had grudgingly, after many many years’ discussion about their impact on the skyline, finally given permission for. They had filled up with young professionals – graphic designers, IT entrepreneurs, media people. Several soap opera actors lived in this block, Petr knew.

  Neither of the people lying side by side in the apartment’s living room was a soap opera actor. At least, he didn’t recall seeing them on television. A man and a woman, they were in their middle thirties, their clothes nondescript but a little old-fashioned. Both had had their throats cut. The floor and the furniture and the walls were awash with blood.

  “There hasn’t been a full search yet, but so far, no ID,” Jakub said. “None of the neighbours knows who they were – although one of them thinks they might have been English.”

  Petr groaned inwardly at the thought of having to deal with the English Embassy. “Go on.”

  “Well, the really interesting stuff’s in here,” Jakub said, leading the way to a small bedroom off a hallway at the rear of the apartment. “Uniformed officer who responded to the call made sure life was extinct and then went to secure the apartment, but he says he thought he heard someone moving around in here. Turns out he was imagining things – you know how jumpy you can get at a scene like this – but he took a look, and, well...”

  The bedroom had been converted into a small workroom by dismantling the bed and stacking the frame and mattress against one wall. In the middle of the floor stood a couple of small trestle tables, and on the tables were boxes and tools and rolls of wire.
Without touching it, Petr looked into one of the boxes. “Are these detonators?” he said.

  “Yes, boss. And those bigger boxes, that’s C4.”

  Petr straightened up and looked around the room. “A lot of these C4 boxes appear to be empty.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  They returned to the main room and stood looking at the bodies. “Oh, there was one last thing,” said Jakub. He held up a little plastic evidence bag containing a cheap cigarette lighter. Printed on the side of the lighter were the words ‘TikTok.’

  “That’s just too easy,” Petr said.

  “Yes, boss.”

  “That sort of thing only ever happens in films.”

  “I know, boss.”

  Petr sighed. “All right. When scenes-of-crime have finished and the bodies have been taken away, search this place properly for ID and anything else that looks interesting. Then, and only then, notify ATG.”

  Jakub sucked his teeth. “They won’t like that.”

  “They can sue me.”

  “They probably will,” Jakub noted.

  PRAGUE HAD, IN general, an enviably low crime rate. Pickpocketing had been a cottage industry for decades and there were always muggings and other forms of low-level trouble in and around Sherwood, the park around the railway station, but mostly the old city had escaped the wave of crime which had engulfed other European capitals.

  Following the TikTok bombing, however, a wave of murders swept the city. Organised crime figures were assassinated in their cars and in their homes. Several drug pushers were found crucified against trees in Sherwood. The Government began to take notice, which was never a good sign in Petr’s world.

  Two Scotland Yard detectives flew in to look at the bodies from Pankrác, failed to identify them, consented to being treated to a slap-up meal at a restaurant in the Old Town for their trouble, and flew out again without once mentioning why the job could not have been done just as easily by someone from the Embassy security staff. Petr drove them to the airport himself, watched them go through the security checks, waved bye-bye, and thought about that.

  A Colonel from the Gangs Taskforce met with the heads of all of Prague’s organised crime groups – this entirely off the record and as far as possible from the Press and some of the less-understanding members of Parliament – and reported back that they were as in the dark as anyone else. They all blamed each other for the killings, but when pressed could not give a single good reason why they should have taken place.

  “I told them to stop, and they just shrugged their shoulders,” the Colonel told Petr over a drink. “This is a territorial thing, plain and simple. You mark my words. They just won’t admit it.”

  Except for those two bodies with their throats cut. That whole business had disappeared into the pockets of an angry Major Vĕtrovec, but in Petr’s mind’s eye they stood out from all the other killings. Somehow those two murders, that room full of plastic explosive, made sense of everything else. Except they didn’t.

  The Press took up the story of the gang war, questions were asked in Parliament, and one day Petr found himself sitting in the Minister’s office, feeling small and overdressed in his one good suit. The Minister, a florid woman who favoured grey trouser suits and red shirts, kept him waiting while she read through something on her desktop.

  “Your officers call you ‘Major Zeman,’” she said without looking at him.

  Petr sighed. Major Zeman had been the lead character of an infamous long-running Communist-era television series, a propaganda exercise more than anything else.

  “A joke, Minister,” he explained. “The star and I share a surname.”

  The Minister looked at him.

  “Squadroom humour,” he added.

  The Minister said, “This is no laughing matter, Major.”

  “No, Minister,” he agreed. “It is not.”

  She consulted her desktop again. “Thirty-seven fatalities. Not including the TikTok bombing. Not a laughing matter at all.”

  “Has someone complained that we were treating it as such?” he asked.

  Another level stare. The Minister said, “The Press seems to think that the Prague police force is incompetent. Those criticisms tend to arrive on my desk, Major, not yours, and the President and Prime Minister expect me to answer to them.”

  “Yes, Minister.”

  “The Gangs Taskforce appear to believe this will burn itself out eventually.”

  “Do they?”

  “They have something they call...” she checked her desktop once again “...dynamic modelling. Are you familiar with it?”

  Petr shook his head.

  “Computer software,” she said. “From the United States. It constructs a model of the relationships between groups. Any kind of group. Model train enthusiasts, football supporters, the fans of the latest teen pop singer, criminal gangs. It’s supposed to predict the dynamics between those groups, locate periods of stability and chaos. What do you think of that?”

  “I think it would probably have been more cost-effective to examine the entrails of a chicken, Minister.”

  A smile quirked her lips. “Dynamic modelling says that these killings will run their course and stability will return.”

  “Eventually we’ll run out of criminals,” Petr said. “Then stability will certainly return.”

  The Minister sighed. “Meanwhile, the latest round of budget cuts mean savings will have to be made across the board.” She left unsaid the obvious, that departments which showed results would need to make the fewest savings. She took a single photo printout from a folder on her desk and showed it to him. “Do you recognise this man?”

  The picture was a blurred blow-up, the face of a youngish man in half-profile. He had an ordinary-looking face, shortish brownish hair. An ish sort of a man, completely unremarkable. Petr shook his head.

  “We believe this man is involved in the gang war somehow,” the Minister said.

  “Oh?” Petr stopped himself asking who We were.

  “He’s been in the country several weeks now.”

  “This is new intelligence to me, Minster,” Petr said. “May I have that photograph?”

  “No.” The Minister put the print back into its folder, put the folder in a desk drawer, and locked the drawer. Petr watched each of these steps with interest, wondering what exactly he was being told here. “I know you and your detectives – the whole force – are doing your best, but these killings have to stop, Major. We can’t wait to see if this dynamic modelling is accurate or not. They have to stop now.”

  “I won’t insult your intelligence by telling you that my officers are working as hard as they can,” Petr said.

  “And I won’t insult yours by telling you that it’s not good enough.” The Minister busied herself with her desktop again. “Keep me informed, Major.”

  And that seemed to be the end of the interview. Petr stood. “Of course, Minister.”

  AND OF COURSE the pep-talk, if that’s what it was, had no effect at all. The killings continued. Cars were bombed, relatives kidnapped, shops ransacked, and nothing the police did could stop it. All leave was cancelled, Army Intelligence – to the displeasure of the police – was called in. Nothing availed.

  “Look on the bright side,” said Jakub, “sooner or later there’ll be no one left and we can live in peace.”

  “I told the Minister something similar,” Petr said.

  “How did she take that?”

  “I thought she appreciated the joke.”

  They were sitting in a booth at The Opera, a bar whose one saving grace was that no other policemen ever used it. Jakub drank some of his beer and chuckled. He said, “There’s one good–” and then the air was full of smoke and burning and Petr found he was sitting against a wall some distance from the booth and something was dripping into his eyes. He wiped it away and looked at his fingers and saw that they were slick with blood.

  He looked across the bar and for a moment his brain refused to fit the i
mages together. The interior of the Opera seemed to have shaken itself to pieces, and limping towards him through the destruction was a young man with a walking stick. He limped right up to where Petr was sitting, leaned down, and offered his hand.

  “Come with me, if you want to live,” he said.

  “I’VE ALWAYS WANTED to say that,” the young man said. “Also ‘Follow that car’ and ‘I’m getting too old for this shit.’”

  They were in an alleyway around the corner from the Opera, Petr with one arm slung over the young man’s shoulders, his knees still sagging. He said, “I know you.”

  “You really don’t,” said the young man. “But I’m afraid I am the author of all your woes, Major.”

  “The Minister showed me a photograph of you.”

  The young man looked towards the mouth of the alley. Police cars and fire engines and ambulances were howling past towards the bombed-out bar. “Your Minister? The Police Minister?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say about me?”

  “That you’d been here a while and that you were involved in the war.”

  “Well, those two things are true enough. How are you feeling?”

  Petr stood up straight. “Better. Where’s Jakub?”

  “Your colleague? He didn’t make it.”

  Petr took a deep breath and sighed. He put his hand in his pocket, brought it out holding a pair of handcuffs, and in one move snapped one bracelet to the young man’s wrist and the other to his own. “You’re under arrest.”

  The young man looked at the handcuff on his wrist. “And you are an ungrateful bastard, Major. That little bomb back there – and it was a little bomb, otherwise nobody would have got out of there alive – was meant to up the ante, make things personal between the police and organised crime. It was a provocation. And I saved your life.”

  “You have a minute,” Petr said. “Talk quickly.”

  “It’s going to take more than a minute,” the young man said. “And it’s easier if I show you.”