Europe in Winter

by Dave Hutchinson

  “You understand,” Etienne said. “You must still undergo the usual procedures.”

  “Of course,” Kenneth said, suddenly feeling trapped. The plan had been to go through Security with all the other passengers. It was late; the staff would be under pressure to process everyone quickly, they would be able to see the line stretching back to the doors of the departure building and know that they still had a lot to do. They would hurry, be sloppy. Here it was just them and Etienne and the young woman in her smart uniform, and all the time in the world. He looked down at Amanda and said, “Ladies first?”

  If Amanda was at all nervous, she didn’t show it. She rolled the chair up to the scanner and waited patiently while the young woman – whose nametag identified her as ‘Claudine’ – set things up. Claudine was just as apologetically efficient as Etienne, but she and Amanda exchanged a few words – her English was almost as good as Etienne’s – and at one point Amanda reached out and rested her hand on the girl’s forearm, and Kenneth knew everything would be all right.

  At one point during the procedure, Claudine looked up from the scanner’s readout and said, “Madame, there is a...” She touched her stomach.

  “It’s a remote foetal heart monitor,” Amanda told her. “There were some problems early on. It lets my doctor keep an eye on things.”

  “But no problems now?” asked the girl sincerely.

  Amanda shook her head. “We decided to leave the monitor where it is, though, until after the baby’s born.”

  Claudine nodded. “My sister, she was the same,” she said.

  “Her baby, it’s okay, though?”

  “Him? He’s just started school. Strong as a horse.”

  Etienne, standing quietly in the corner using his pad to process their documents, glanced up momentarily, but said nothing.

  “That’s good,” Amanda said with a smile. “I’m glad.”

  Claudine beamed and patted her on the shoulder. “There,” she said. “You’re done.” She looked at Kenneth. “Now you, if you please, sir?”

  Kenneth also passed the security scan, as did their luggage, and as Claudine packed up the scanner Etienne took over again, showing the couple out of the room and down another corridor and through another door and suddenly they were on the platform and there it was in front of them, the sleek blue and silver Paris-Novosibirsk Express, all seventy carriages of it, sleeping in the lunchtime sunshine.

  “I have taken the liberty,” Etienne announced, beckoning a liveried porter over to help with their luggage, “of upgrading your berth.”

  “There was no need to do that,” Kenneth said. “Really.”

  Amanda reached up and touched him on the arm. “Darling.” She said to Etienne, “That’s very kind of you, Etienne. I’m sorry that we’ve caused you so much trouble.”

  “You have caused us no trouble at all,” Etienne assured them, handing their documents back to Kenneth. “It has been a pleasure to meet you, and I hope you have a safe and comfortable journey.”

  He turned and walked back along the platform, no doubt to firefight some other small problem. Kenneth watched him go, knowing that the young man’s life was about to become interesting in ways he could never possibly have imagined. Then he followed Amanda and the porter along the train, where a ramp had been fitted to allow Amanda’s wheelchair to board.

  The upgrade Etienne had told them about turned out to be roughly the equivalent of upgrading from a Sopwith Camel to Concorde. They had booked the cheapest sleeper they could afford, a cramped berth with bunks and many space-saving features. The berth they were shown to was more of a stateroom.

  “It’s got a bed,” Amanda said with a big smile.

  They were obviously in oligarch territory. Kenneth had spotted the mafiye family a little further down the corridor, entering their own stateroom. “And a shower,” he said, peeking in through an open door.

  “Oh, thank God,” she said, levering herself out of the wheelchair. “I really need the loo.” She went into the bathroom and closed the door, leaving Kenneth to tip the porter, who collapsed the wheelchair, stowed it in a cupboard, and left.

  Kenneth wandered around the stateroom. It seemed unbelievable that they had been upgraded quite so far, and if it was unbelievable it was suspect. He took his phone from his jacket pocket, opened an app that would sweep the room for bugging devices, and left it on the bedside table. There were baskets of fruit, chocolates and complimentary toiletries on the bed, along with a bottle of a nice-looking Cabernet and two shrink-wrapped wineglasses. He picked them up, turned them over, put them back.

  The room was in fact four regular-sized berths knocked together. At one end was a little kitchenette-diner area; in the middle was a living area with an entertainment set and a coffee table and a small sofa. He looked in the cupboards in the kitchenette, found basic cooking equipment. One cupboard hid a little fridge with some wrapped cheeses and sliced meats. In one of the drawers he found a corkscrew, and he took it back to the bedroom and opened the bottle of wine, set it on the bedside table to breathe. The phone was still scanning, but it hadn’t found anything yet.

  The door of the bathroom opened. Amanda came out, saw him sitting on the bed, and came over and sat beside him. She took his hand and held it against her cheek. Neither of them said a word.

  THE LINE HAD been decades in the building. It had originally aspired to being a straight line drawn across Europe and Asia, from the Atlantic coast of Spain to Cape Dezhnev, facing Alaska across the Bering Strait. Geography and simple pragmatism meant that this was never achievable, and the Line crossed the continent in a series of meanders and doglegs. Only one train a year ever made the entire journey – popular with tourists and gap-year students with wealthy parents and train buffs who had spent the previous decade saving for their tickets. The rest of the scheduled services ran on a weekly or monthly basis, vast trains crossing the continent at up to two hundred and fifty kilometres an hour and peeling off down branches from the main Line to reach their destinations.

  The Paris-Novosibirsk Express ran twice a month, in each direction. The capital of the Republic of Sibir had reconfigured itself into a financial powerhouse to rival Shanghai, a genuine global player, and according to Kenneth and Amanda’s temporary Line citizenship application they were travelling there to meet with a group of hedge fund managers who had shown some interest in investing in Amanda’s business. Siberian businessmen were big on physical presence; for important meetings they preferred face-to-face, in-the-flesh stuff rather than teleconferencing. It was a nine-hour flight from Paris, which Amanda’s doctor had advised against, and driving was out of the question. Which left either a journey on various national railways made almost impossible by interminable border delays, or a three-day trip on the Line.

  The train left Savigny on time on a quiet vibration of motors. It was said, although no one had yet been able to prove it, that Line trains were powered by fusion generators, notwithstanding that fusion power was still in its infancy. The train made its way down the branch line from Savigny at a steady seventy kph, leaned into a long curve as it joined the main West-East Line, and accelerated smoothly up to full speed.

  Before they were even out of France Amanda put on her glasses, dialled some numbers on her pad, and settled into a long and apparently very dull conference with Marie-France in Paris, Luhansk’s merchandising manager in London, and at least two members of the band themselves, probably in some Caribbean tax haven. Kenneth could only hear her side of the conversation. Glancing at her pad, on the living room coffee table, he saw a two-dimensional representation of the conference space she and the other participants were using. It was a generic boardroom with the avis of the others gathered at the end of a narrow conference table; the perspective looked odd because Amanda was seeing it in fully-rendered three-d through her glasses.

  He left her to it, went over to the window. Not that there was much to see. The twin tracks of the Line ran across Europe between high fences, about a kilome
tre apart. The space between the fences was a rushing wasteland of gravel broken by the occasional siding and repair depot. Any scenery was a long way away. He went and had a shower.

  Amanda was still at it when he came out, sketching notes in a text editor on her pad while she carried on her conversation via the conference space. Kenneth poured himself a glass of wine and stretched out on the bed.

  He woke some time later, the empty glass on the table by the bed and Amanda sitting beside him.

  “Sorry,” he said, struggling upright against the headboard. “Nodded off.”

  “It’s the rhythm of the wheels on the tracks,” she said. She stroked his hair. “It always makes me sleepy.”

  “Where are we?”

  She looked across the stateroom to the little paperscreen pasted to the far wall beside the kitchenette. It was showing, in a constantly-scrolling series of measurements and languages, their speed and present position.

  “Still in Greater Germany, by the look of it,” she said.

  He picked up his phone and checked the time. The bug-scanning app had finished its job and found nothing objectionable, but that didn’t rule out all forms of surveillance. “How was the conference?”

  She shrugged. “It’s always the same. Last-minute tweaking, last-minute panics. They just need an adult to hold their hand and tell them everything will be fine. You know how it is.”

  He sighed. “Do you want to go out for dinner or get room service?” he asked.

  “Maybe we can eat out tomorrow,” she said with a smile. “I’m tired.”

  “All right,” he said. He got up and went over to the entertainment centre and waved up the onboard menu.

  Room service turned out to be excellent.

  OLIGARCH STATUS OR not, it was still, after all, a train journey, and the next day dragged as the express crossed Poland, skirted the northern borders of Ukraine, and passed teasingly close to Moscow before angling away eastward. Amanda took care of some more work, Kenneth tried to read a novel. They sat and watched a film, and then spent an hour or so arguing about it.

  In the evening, they took the wheelchair out of its cupboard, unfolded it, and headed for the dining car in the next carriage. Few of the passengers had decided to take advantage of the early sitting for dinner, and the car was nearly deserted. Most of the other diners seemed to be travelling alone. Kenneth ordered Kobe beef with dauphinoise potatoes and a green salad. Amanda chose red snapper. They ate in silence, apart from a few comments about how good the food was.

  Afterward, they went back to their stateroom and lay on the bed, holding each other, while the paperscreen on the wall ate up the kilometres and the train reached the edge of the European Plain – the edge of Europe itself, as some saw it – and began to negotiate the Ural Mountains.

  Just before eleven o’clock in the evening, Kenneth’s phone rang a discreet little chime. He sat up unwillingly and checked the screen on the wall, found that his calculations had only been a few tens of kilometres out, and he leaned over and kissed his wife. There was no need to say anything.

  They didn’t bother with the wheelchair. Kenneth began to take it out of its cupboard, but she put her hand on his shoulder and shook her head, and he understood that this was something she wanted to do under her own steam.

  As they stepped out into the corridor, Kenneth felt the train slow and lean into a curve in the track; the approach to the Ufa Tunnel, cutting beneath a number of problematical mountains in the Southern Urals which it had been uneconomical or geographically impossible to go around. At twenty-four kilometres, it was the longest of the Line’s many tunnels.

  Kenneth and Amanda walked unhurriedly. Few people were about at this time of the night; they saw a couple of white-jacketed stewards carrying trays of late snacks to other sleeper berths, nodded hello as they passed. Just an ordinary couple stretching their legs before retiring for the night.

  They walked three carriages towards the front of the train. At the end of the third, they came to a dead end, a blank wall. On the other side of the wall was the carriage containing the train’s power unit, whatever it was. As they reached it, there was a concussion through the train, the shockwave as it entered the tunnel at a little over ninety kilometres an hour. At that speed, they had about eight minutes until it reached the midpoint. Kenneth triggered the stopwatch countdown on his phone and looked into Amanda’s eyes. There was nothing to say, really. She put her arms around him, buried her face in his neck, hugged him tightly.

  Everything had, in the end, gone all right. Kenneth thought of William, hopefully by now out of France and on his way home. He thought of Etienne, probably sleeping the sleep of the innocent in a flat somewhere in the Paris suburbs. He had liked Etienne. He thought of the mafiye family, all the other families on the train, all the children. We are not evil people, he thought.

  He held his phone so he could see it over Amanda’s shoulder – she was a little taller than he was – and dialled a number, touched call to arm the device implanted in her belly. She’d carried it for so long, so stoically. She had never faltered. His heart swelled with love and pride for her.

  The alarm on his phone started to beep. He dialled another number, hovered his thumb over call.

  He said, “I love you so much.”

  She hugged him tighter. “Oh, sweetheart...”

  He touched call.

  For a fraction of a second, before the top of the mountain blew off in an explosion which was heard in Kyiv and detected by a college seismology experiment in Vermont, both ends of the tunnel jetted a plume of plasma as hot as the corona of the Sun.

  1.

  THE HUNGARIANS CAME into the restaurant around nine in the evening, eight large men with gorgeously-tailored suits and hand-stitched Italian shoes and hundred-złoty haircuts. Michał, the maitre d’, tried to tell them that there were no tables free unless they had a reservation, but they walked over to one of the large tables and sat down. One of them plucked the Reserved card from the middle of the tablecloth and sailed it out across the restaurant, causing other diners to duck.

  Instead of calling the police – which would at very least have resulted in a brawl and massive property damage – Max, the owner, seized a notepad and set off across the restaurant to take the Hungarians’ orders. This show of confidence did not prevent a number of diners signalling frantically for their bills.

  The Hungarians were already boisterous, and shouted and laughed at Max while he tried to take their orders, changing their minds frequently and causing Max to start all over again. Finally, he walked back from the table to the bar, where Gosia was standing frozen with fear.

  “Six bottles of ˚Zubrówka, on the house,” he murmured calmly to the girl as he went by towards the kitchen. “And try to be nimble on your feet.”

  Rudi, who had been standing in the kitchen doorway watching events with interest, said, “Something awful is going to happen, Max.”

  “Cook,” Max replied, handing him the order. “Cook quickly.”

  By ten o’clock the Hungarians had loosened their ties and taken off their jackets and were singing and yelling at each other and laughing at impenetrable jokes. They had completed three courses of their five-course order. They were alone in the restaurant. With most of the meal completed, Rudi told the kitchen crew they could go home.

  At one point, one of the Hungarians, an immense man with a face the colour of barszcz, began shouting at the others. He stood up, swaying gently, and yelled at his compatriots, who goodnaturedly yelled at him to sit down again. Sweat pouring down his face, he turned, grasped the back of a chair from the next table, and in one easy movement pivoted and flung it across the room. It crashed into the wall and smashed a sconce and brought down a mirror.

  There was a moment’s silence. The Hungarian stood looking at the dent in the wallpaper, frowning. Then he sat down and one of his friends poured him a drink and slapped him on the back and Max served the next course.

  As the hour grew late the Hu
ngarians became maudlin. They put their arms around each others’ shoulders and began to sing songs that waxed increasingly sad as midnight approached.

  Rudi, his cooking finished for the night and the kitchen tidied up and cleaned, stood in the doorway listening to their songs. The Hungarians had beautiful voices. He didn’t understand the words, but the melodies were heart-achingly lonely.

  One of the Hungarians saw him standing there and started to beckon urgently. The others turned to see what was going on, and they too started to beckon.

  “Go on,” Max said from his post by the bar.

  “You’re joking,” said Rudi.

  “I am not,” Max told him. “Go and see what they want.”

  “And if they want to beat me up?”

  “They’ll soon get bored.”

  “Thank you, Max,” Rudi said, setting off across the restaurant.

  The Hungarians’ table looked as if someone had dropped a five-course meal onto it from ceiling height. The floor around it was crunchy with broken glass and smashed crockery, the carpet sticky with sauces and bits of trodden-in food.

  “You cook?” said one in appalling Polish as Rudi approached.

  “Yes,” said Rudi, balancing his weight on the balls of his feet just in case he had to move in a hurry.

  The Polish-speaker looked like a side of beef sewn into an Armani Revival suit. His face was pale and sweaty. He crooked a forefinger the size of a sausage. Rudi bent down until their faces were only a couple of centimetres apart.

  “Respect!” the Hungarian bellowed. Rudi flinched at the meaty spicy alcohol-and-tobacco gale of his breath. “Everywhere we go, this fuck city, not respect!”