Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  THEY WENT TO the end of the alleyway and down a connecting alley, and down another, and another, and across a street Petr didn’t recognise, and down another alleyway, and all the time the young man – who called himself ‘Rudi’ – was talking and talking and talking. Talking about Coureurs, heads in lockers, maps, parallel worlds. And suddenly Petr had no idea where they were and all the shops looked strange and the people they saw were dressed a little oddly, a little old-fashioned, and all the shop signs were in English and they emerged from one last alleyway into a magnificent town square, all lit up and cobbled and full of promenading men and women and Petr, who had lived in Prague all his life, had never seen it before.

  “We’d better not go out there,” Rudi said. “We’ll stick out like sore thumbs. I know somewhere we can go.”

  “What...?” Petr managed to say.

  “Welcome to Władysław, Major,” Rudi said. “And you’d better take these handcuffs off. You’ll never find your way back without me, and I’m not going anywhere chained to you.”

  A SHORT DISTANCE from the square, Rudi knocked on the door of a handsome-looking townhouse. The knock was answered by a tall, elderly gentleman who glanced from Rudi to Petr and back a couple of times before letting them in.

  “I hope you don’t mind if I don’t tell you this gentleman’s real name,” Rudi said as they made their way down a hallway. “You can call him ‘John’, if you want. John will have a quick look at you, clean you up.”

  ‘John’ was some kind of physician, it seemed. One of the rooms on the first floor of the house was done out as a surgery. Petr sat on the examining table and let John clean and dress his wounds while Rudi kept on talking.

  “Prague is the only city in Europe with paths that lead directly to the Community,” he said. “I don’t know why. It seemed to me, though, that existing so closely together there must have been some kind of accommodation between the two cities. I needed to see what that was, see how things fitted together here and in Prague.”

  “So you started a war?”

  “There’s a lot of distrust on both sides, it seems. I just gave it a nudge. Learned all kinds of useful things. What you told me about the Police Minister, for instance. That’s very interesting.”

  “She’s involved?”

  “Maybe not. Maybe someone just gave her the photo and told her to show it to various interested parties. But it implies someone quite high up in Prague is involved.” His leg was obviously giving him discomfort. He shifted in his chair while John pressed a cotton wool ball soaked in some alcohol solution against Petr’s head wound. “Anyway, while everyone’s attention has been wandering, I’ve been popping here and there, chatting to people. There’s quite a useful little dissident movement here. They’ve let me have some very nice maps, which will come in handy.”

  “Who bombed TikTok?”

  Rudi looked thoughtful. “The bar? The big bomb? Oh, that was them.” He nodded towards the street. “Community Intelligence.” He snorted. “Intelligence. They bombed the wrong bar. They were supposed to attack a bar in the next street owned by some shady Czech character. I don’t know why, exactly.”

  “And the couple in Pankrác?”

  Rudi nodded. “They planted the bomb. And were then killed – you’re going to enjoy this – by colleagues of the young Arab men who were living over the bar when they blew it up.” He looked thoughtful. “I suppose this means the Community is now part of GWOT. That’s going to make things interesting.”

  “None of this helps me,” Petr said.

  “No,” Rudi admitted. “And what I’m going to ask you to do next is not going to help you, either.”

  2.

  IT WAS MARCH and she was thinking about taking a holiday. March was when the snow started to get patchy and rotten but it was still too cold to hike or sunbathe unless you were of a sturdy constitution. Of course, espionage was no respecter of the seasons, but early spring seemed to be the time of year when Europe’s many intelligence services declared, if not a truce on the scale of the British and Germans playing football in No Man’s Land during World War I, at least an informal relaxation of activities. In all her years in counterespionage, nobody had ever made trouble for her in the spring, and she had a good capable team working for her in case anything did start while she was away. Once upon a time she had stayed at her post all year round, obsessed with the thought that the moment she left something terrible would erupt. But these days she had learned to let go a little. She could spare a few days with her feet up somewhere.

  That just left the decision of where to go, what to do, so she’d spent the past couple of days surfing the internet looking for something interesting. She was currently quite taken with the idea of a paragliding holiday in Wales.

  Her phone rang. She said, “Yes?”

  “I just had a call from Immigration,” said Pavel. “They had a flag go up.”

  She frowned and gestured back from the paragliding site to her desktop, where flag alerts usually popped up as little red Gremlins. “I don’t see anything.”

  “It’s an old flag, from before the last system update. Immigration had it on their database but it didn’t get copied over when we upgraded.”

  She sighed. “What’s the name?”

  “Tonu Laara,” said Pavel. “Estonian national.”

  She looked through the window on the other side of her office. Beyond the glass a wall of trees dropped obliquely into a mountain valley.

  She looked at the view for so long that Pavel said, “Chief?”

  She blinked. “Where is he?”

  “He booked into the hotel at Pustevny.” He added, “The flag was tagged ‘observe, do not detain,’ so Immigration observed him and didn’t bother to let us know until now. He’s been here two days.”

  Yes, well. She was long overdue for a quiet chat with Major Menzel, the head of the Immigration Service. But not today. “Do we have anyone up there right now?” she asked.

  “Rikki and Colin.”

  She rubbed her eyes. “All right. Tell them to stay in contact but not to approach. I’ll go up there.”

  “Yes, Chief.”

  “And Pavel?”

  “Yes, Chief?”

  “It’s pronounced Tonu,” she said, getting reluctantly to her feet and bidding a silent farewell to her holiday.

  HE WAS SITTING in the hotel’s bar, nursing a beer and smoking a small cigar. He looked thinner than she remembered, a little more careworn. There was grey in his hair and a walking cane propped against the chair beside him, but he still looked ridiculously young. She walked right over to his table and sat down opposite him. And then they sat looking at each other. There is a peculiar intimacy between two people who have made love and then parted, only to be reunited many years later. Particularly if they spent the whole of their time together lying to each other.

  “Short hair suits you,” Rudi said finally.

  “And you’re doing what here, exactly?” she asked in what she hoped was a firm but not unkind tone of voice.

  “Do you want a drink?” he asked.

  “No thank you.”

  “I have a story to tell you,” he said. “But first I want to claim political asylum.”

  She watched him without saying anything.

  “And then,” he said, picking up his beer, “I want to talk to the Hungarians.”

  THE HUNGARIANS ARRIVED on Friday, five huge men in beautifully-designed casualwear driving up in a Peugeot hybrid 4X4 that looked as though it could tow ships up and down the Panama Canal all day. Discreet surveillance established that they were not carrying weapons beyond the odd Swiss Army knife. They checked into the hotel and headed immediately for the restaurant.

  She had packed the place with her own people two hours before the meeting, but some bona fide guests had still wandered in and ordered meals, including a young black man she remembered seeing in the bar on the day Rudi made his reappearance. She walked over and sat down at his table.

 
; “You know,” she said in her sexiest voice, “I think you’re really hot.”

  He looked up from his menu and said, “Excuse me, miss?” in English.

  “Oh, I love the English,” she said in English. She batted her eyelashes at him.

  He sighed and laid his menu down. “Very good, miss,” he said. “And I’ve spotted your people too. Although it would be fairer to say that I’ve spotted the people who aren’t your people.”

  She saw Rudi coming into the restaurant. “Come on,” she said. “You may as well sit in and listen to what the adults are talking about.”

  If Rudi was surprised to see her coming across the restaurant with Seth, he made no sign. They all sat down at the Hungarians’ table and then everyone just looked at each other.

  “So,” said Rudi. “I have a proposition.”

  The leader, the one who had called himself Kerenyi, looked at him. “You’ve been through the mill. It shows on your face.”

  “I’ve had some interesting times.”

  “And not all in the kitchen.”

  “No. Very few of them in the kitchen. I’m going to tell you a story now and I’d prefer it if you saved any questions, comments and jokes until I’m finished. Okay?”

  Kerenyi nodded.

  And so Rudi told the story again, of a family of English mapmakers and a parallel Europe where dissidence was subtly and totally suppressed and nobody could leave.

  “Coureur Central seems to have mixed views about the whole business,” Rudi said. “On the one hand, they would love to get into the Community because it has no borders. You can walk from one end of it to the other and never see a border post or a customs man. Which makes it very handy. You could take a Package into the Community just outside Madrid, say, transport it all the way across Europe, and pop out again in, say, Helsinki, and nobody here would be any the wiser. Seth and I were smuggled across the border into Scotland like that. At least one dissident found her way out of the Community and set up her own little Coureur operation there.

  “On the other hand, Central doesn’t want anyone else knowing how to do it, and they’re willing to kill to stop the secret getting out. And so, it seems, is everyone else who wants to know how to do it. The Line seems to be mixed up in all this somewhere, I’m not sure how yet. And in the background the Community is doing everything it can to keep its borders secure.” He looked around the table. “I have some evidence that they may have been responsible for the Xian Flu.”

  “This is all bullshit,” Kerenyi said amiably. “You had a knock on the head or something.”

  “They have a university. A very, very big university. It’s been doing a lot of biological research. Some years ago their intelligence service got very worried about... something. I think maybe it was the construction of the Line, maybe they were worried they couldn’t negotiate with the Line Company or something, I don’t know. And whoever runs the Community sanctioned the use of biological weapons against us to stop it. That’s what I’m told, anyway. And that’s murder on a completely unimaginable scale, right there. Someone needs to shake these people up.”

  Everybody looked at everybody else. Finally Kerenyi said, “What do you want us for?”

  “I’m short of manpower. I need help. I’ve got Seth here, and someone on the Prague police force I’ve managed to talk into helping, and I think our friend from the Zone might be minded to join in.”

  “I’m still thinking about it,” she said.

  He smiled. “But for what I have in mind I need more warm bodies, more backup.”

  Kerenyi thought about it. “What’s in it for us?”

  “A hundred thousand Swiss for you and each of your men, for as long as I need you,” said Rudi. “And another hundred thousand for artificing.”

  Kerenyi betrayed no surprise. “You going to war?”

  “Could be,” said Rudi.

  Kerenyi thought about it. “Before I answer, I have two questions.”

  “Sure.”

  “Why us?”

  Rudi smiled. “Because nobody in their right minds will be expecting it. What was your other question?”

  Kerenyi grinned hugely. “What do you have in mind?”

  1.

  PAWEŁ WOKE BEFORE dawn and lay, as was his habit, in bed for several minutes, listening. He heard, far away in the depths of the forest, the snorting of a bison calling to its mate, and closer to a snuffling, sniffing noise he recognised as the old wild boar sow he had named Elżbieta, after his late wife. These were all familiar sounds, reassuring him that all was well, that it was safe to get out of bed and get on with the day.

  He dressed slowly, muscles and joints stiff with the night’s cold. His idiot son who lived in Berlin had sent him an electric blanket last Christmas when, as usual, he had been too busy to come himself. He had forgotten that Paweł’s house had no electricity, which Paweł thought remarkable seeing as the boy had grown up there. Still, he thought cities could do that to a person. Cities made you stupid. His own father had told him that; his father’s grandfather had told him.

  Paweł slept in a pair of thermal long-johns; Damarts, sent from England by his whore of a daughter. If either of his children had had the faintest scrap of sense they would have sent a generator or one of those fancy American fuel cells Nowak had told him about. An electric blanket and thermal underwear. Amazing.

  Over the thermals, Paweł pulled on a pair of quilted trousers and a thick sweater. He dragged on his boots and shuffled through into the kitchen, his breath misting faintly from his lips.

  The kitchen had an astonishing smell which Paweł had stopped noticing when he was around a year old. It came from the haunches of bison meat hanging from just below the low ceiling, from the hundreds of strings of dried wild mushrooms, from thick sweat-sodden socks hung to dry beside the two-ring burner, from decades of coffee and kasza and wet woollen clothing and candles of home-made tallow and at least a dozen dogs worn out one by one over the years.

  His present dog was a huge white brute, a mountain-dog from the South. He had named it Halina, after his second wife, with whom it shared some personality traits.

  As he came in from the bedroom, the dog stirred in its nest of rags and ancient newspapers in the corner. It weighed almost as much as he did, and its coat was matted and filthy; it lifted its massive head and watched him with lunatic eyes.

  “Not yet, you bastard,” Paweł muttered, taking a crusted saucepan from the kitchen table and tossing it at the dog. “Wait, damn you.”

  The dog snapped its head forward with unlikely speed and caught the pan’s handle in its mouth as it spun by. It dropped the pan and investigated it with a disgusting red tongue.

  “Bastard,” Paweł said, and pulled open the front door. The door was as warped, as Nowak liked to point out every time he came to call, as a politician, and Paweł had to put his back into the task of dragging it open. As he did so, he detected several new aches.

  The privy stood fifty metres away, by the edge of the forest. Its door had rotted off years before; he pulled down his trousers, opened the trapdoor in his thermals, and sat, looking back towards the house.

  The little house still looked like the fairytale hunting lodge it had been built to resemble, back in the early years of the last century when Dukes and Princes had come here to hunt the żubr and the elk and the wild boar. It was still solid, though the years had not been kind to the fabric. All the windows on the upper storey were broken; most of those on the ground floor were broken too, and had been filled in with planking that had gone silver with the years. The verandah along the front – admittedly a later addition – was rotten and unsafe and piled with rubbish. It was... well, he couldn’t remember exactly when smoke had last emerged from the chimney; it seemed that all his life bottled gas had been preferable, and now the chimney must be choked solid with old birds’ nests and muck.

  He had been meaning, these past four or five years, to reopen the upper storey. He had no use for the rooms up there, particu
larly, since the tourist trade dried up, but he thought that perhaps some of the hunters of years gone by might have left something valuable behind, and since his imbecile children couldn’t be bothered to help him out it might be time to go up the stairs and see if he could find something to sell in the village.

  His bowels, like everything else, had slowed to a crawl over the years, but he didn’t mind that. Sometimes he sat here for an hour or more, looking at the house and thinking. The view never changed; there was just the view of the house. Sometimes he planned what he would do with the house; sometimes he thought about cutting back another metre or so of new growth around the clearing in which it stood. He rarely acted on these meditations, but he found them calming, and they took his mind off the increasingly wayward nature of his digestive system.

  This morning, for example, he considered cleaning the chimney. The living room – into which he had not ventured for three years or so – had a hearth nearly three metres across, implanted with intricate and antique ironwork and still piled with ancient ashes. He knew the chimney was a job that was beyond him, and he had no money to pay for the work, but it soothed him to think about doing it, and now he did think about it he might be able to sell the antique grate somewhere, if he ever got around to prising it out of the fireplace.

  Finishing, finally, he wiped himself with a torn sheet from an old copy of Gazeta Wyborcza, pulled up his lower garments, and stepped out of the privy.

  The house was entirely surrounded by the forest. Beyond the privy marched endless dark avenues of oak and fir, spruce and beech and alder, populated by żubr and elk and the Tarpan and beaver and wild boar. The last dark corner of Europe, Nowak called it. It straddled the border between Poland and Lithuania, but it had shifted with the demands of history ever since the concept of frontiers had come into being. It had been Polish, Lithuanian, German, Russian. Secrets had been buried here, and the lawless post-Communist years, both in Poland and across the border, had brought countless bodies to the soil under the trees. Paweł had seen it all, and very little of it had impressed him.