Europe in Winter

by Dave Hutchinson

  They took their pints over to a table in a quiet corner, away from the handful of locals standing drinking at the bar. Smith took off her overcoat and draped it over a neighbouring chair. She had not once stopped smiling, not for a moment. It was beginning to irritate Rudi.

  Smith took a printed photograph from her pocket and put it on the table beside Rudi’s pint. It was a full-face shot of a stocky, tousled and confused-looking man of about forty. Rudi gave it what he thought was due attention, then he looked at Smith and said, “I don’t know this man.”

  She looked a little disappointed. “That’s a shame, because you might have been able to help us tidy up a small mystery,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, please, don’t apologise.” Smith tried her beer, apparently found it to her satisfaction. She put her glass back down on the table. “He was arrested flying in to Warsaw-Chopin from Moscow a few months ago. Passport Control thought there was something not quite right about his papers so they detained him while they made checks. It turned out he was travelling on very good forgeries.”

  “Not that good, if they were spotted,” Rudi pointed out, although Polish Border Security were famously savvy and well-trained, not to mention ill-tempered.

  Smith admitted the point with a nod. “He had no luggage,” she said. “No other identification. We’ve been able to trace his journey back to Krasnoyarsk, but before that...” She shrugged.

  “Difficult liaison conditions?” Rudi asked.

  “You know how it is.” Smith didn’t appear too upset about it. “He seems to be English. At least, that’s the only language he appears to speak. He’s foggy.”

  “‘Foggy’?”

  Smith sat back and crossed her arms. “Amnesiac. Doesn’t know who he is, where he’s from, where he’s been, what he did there.”

  “Is he suspected of some crime?”

  Smith shook her head. “We’re at a loss, really.”

  Rudi took a swallow of beer. He looked down at the photograph again. “I genuinely don’t recognise him, Chief Superintendent,” he said.

  “Then you wouldn’t have any idea why the only other thing he was carrying was an envelope with your name, address and an identification phrase printed on it,” Smith said.

  Rudi gave the detective a long, level look. “No,” he said finally. “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “One theory we’re working on – the obvious one, really – is that he was coming to deliver the envelope to you.”

  “That would follow,” Rudi admitted while parsing the fact that Smith had approached him in England, where she had no powers of arrest, rather than in Kraków, where she did. “What are you playing at, Chief Superintendent?”

  “Me? Oh, I suppose I’m playing the postman. This is what was in the envelope.” She took another photograph from her pocket and placed it beside the first.

  This one was in black and white, a grainy crowd scene of many gentlemen in old-fashioned formal dress, heavy overcoats, top hats, wing collars. At the back of the crowd was part of the façade of what appeared to be quite an imposing building. In the foreground were four men, one with his back to the camera.

  “I’m sorry,” Rudi said, “but I don’t know any of these people either.”

  Smith laughed. “The gentleman on the left, the one with the rather impressive moustache, is Georges Clemenceau. The patrician chap next to him is President Woodrow Wilson. The man beside him – he’s the one just peeking over the chap with his back turned – is Vittorio Orlando, the Italian Prime Minister. And the jolly gent on the right who’s just putting on his top hat – or taking it off, I can’t tell – is David Lloyd George.”

  Rudi looked at the photograph again. “I’m sorry,” he admitted. “I’m lost.”

  Smith sat forward and became businesslike. “So what we have,” she said, “is a chap travelling on forged documents, with apparently no idea who he is or what he’s doing, carrying a photograph taken in 1919 during the Versailles peace conference, addressed to you.” She drank some more beer. “You can’t blame us for being intrigued.”

  “I get the feeling,” Rudi said, “that you’re rather enjoying yourself, Chief Superintendent.”

  “Well,” Smith admitted, “this has certainly been an interesting little excursion. Would you, for instance, have any idea how my superiors knew you would be here, keeping in mind that you’re travelling on a false passport yourself?”

  “No, I would not. Would you?”

  Smith shook her head. “I’ll be honest with you, we’d find it an effort to care less about you entering England illegally. England is a constant pain in the arse; always whining, European only when it suits them. Let them worry about passport control. All I want to do is find out who this poor chap is.”

  “I can’t help you with that,” Rudi said. “I’m sorry.”

  “One last time?” Smith said. “Passing business acquaintance? Someone you know on social media? A customer at the restaurant?”

  It occurred to Rudi – not for the first time since they had sat down in the pub – that he was actually being given two messages, neither of which he understood. He really didn’t like that reference to the restaurant.

  He looked at the photo again. “I don’t do social media much,” he said.

  “Ah well,” said Smith, “it was worth a try.” She finished her beer and took her overcoat from the chair.

  “May I keep this?” Rudi asked, nodding at the mugshot. “Just in case?”

  “Of course, of course.” Smith stood and started to put on her coat. “My contact details are on the back, if you think of anything. You can keep the other photo, too.”

  “Well, it was addressed to me.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not the original. Evidence. Forensics and all that. You understand.”

  “The envelope?” Rudi asked, thoughts of microdots crossing his mind.

  Smith shook her head. “Same thing. Even I’m not allowed to touch it.” She settled the coat with a shrug of her shoulders, picked up her hat, patted her pockets to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything, and smiled. “It was good to meet you,” she said.

  Rudi inclined his head. “Chief Superintendent.”

  “Oh, and please don’t travel in the EU on false papers. We really are quite strict about that.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  She started to leave, but stopped at the door as if suddenly remembering something. For Rudi, who had grown up watching old episodes of Columbo, it was almost funny.

  “Oh, I forgot,” Smith said. “Have you ever visited Luxembourg?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” he said. “I would have remembered, I think.”

  She nodded. “Ever heard of a Gwendoline Katherine Craig?”

  “Are you trying to tie up a lot of old cases here, Chief Superintendent?” What Rudi chiefly remembered about Columbo was that Peter Falk had simply annoyed his suspects into confessing. If they’d only managed to keep their heads his conviction record would have been a catastrophe.

  “Name ring a bell, though?”

  He shook his head.

  She smiled. “Ah well,” she said cheerfully. “Worth a try, though. You take care now.”

  After Smith had gone, Rudi sat for some minutes drinking his beer and looking at the two photographs and trying to work out what had just happened to him. One of the drinkers from the bar, an older man with a broken nose, came over and sat opposite him.

  “I had to go back through the wood to get here ahead of you,” Rupert said. “I tore my trousers.”

  This was Rupert’s way of saying ‘you’re welcome,’ so Rudi said, “Thank you. I appreciate the backup.”

  Rupert shrugged. “I thought this was just going to be a pleasant day out and a bit of babysitting.”

  “That was the plan, yes.”

  “What was it all about, anyway?”

  Rudi picked up the black and white photo and looked at it. His life these days was rarely, if ever, conv
entional, but even by his standards this was unusual. “And here I was thinking that nothing could ever surprise me again.”

  THEY DROVE TO Bury St Edmunds, where Rudi visited a copy shop and had the two photographs digitised. He put the originals in a rubbish bin at the bus station. Two days later he was back in Kraków – on his own documents – and Rupert had resumed his happy exploration of Europe.

  There was no point bothering to scope out his flat or the restaurant. Passive surveillance devices, small enough to be all but invisible even without a mimetic coating, could be glued to buildings and just left to run almost for ever. If EUPol wanted to keep an eye on him close to home, they would, and there wasn’t a lot he could do about it.

  He did all the usual stuff with the photos. Facial recognition, pattern recognition, image searches. He quietly circulated the Versailles image through some boards and rooms frequented by Coureurs, looking for useful comments, but nothing turned up.

  To his knowledge, only four people had ever used the Rokeby Venus contact string – himself, Seth, Rupert, and a Community intelligence officer named Molson. Process of elimination suggested that Molson, whom he had some time ago begun to suspect enjoyed his job far too much, had sent him the photograph. Why was anyone’s guess, but he had stopped expecting why in his life a long time ago. Was he supposed to go to France? Was a French person about to approach him? The problem with some people who worked in Intelligence, he had discovered down the years, was that they took it too fucking seriously, bought into the whole le Carré thing of dead drops and honeytraps and one-time pads, whereas in reality it was just a case of continually winging it.

  So that was the first part of the message. The second part, delivered mostly via body language and innuendo, was that EUPol knew who he was, what he did, and where they could find him, which was not, when all was said and done, much of a surprise. But they had known about his meet with Mr Pasquinel. Maybe Molson – or someone else – had told them about it. And that was a bit of a surprise, and also fucking irritating.

  And, of course, there was the third part of the message.

  “I don’t know anyone called Smith,” Gwen said, one evening in the restaurant. “Well, I mean, I do. Everyone knows someone called Smith. But I don’t know any detectives called Smith.”

  Rudi shrugged. “I presume Berg sang his little heart out about arranging separate meetings with us. It’s hardly a great stretch of the imagination to connect you and me.”

  “But they can’t know we saw... whatever it was. Unless Fritz went to the police and told them.”

  “No.” Actually, the thing which was bothering him was Berg’s insistence that his information involved Les Coureurs. Had that been true? Had it been a lure to get him to Luxembourg for some purpose which he had, without realising it, evaded? One of the problems with his life the way it was lived now was that there were too many scenarios to consider. If he took all of them into account he’d never do anything.

  “Have you had any more ideas about what to do with me?” Gwen asked. She was living in Bonarka, in an old Coureur safe-flat, and she was beginning to get cabin fever. Max let her do shifts at the restaurant, waitressing, just for something to do, while Rudi tried to work out what was going on and how to help her.

  He looked around the kitchen, feeling suddenly claustrophobic and at the same time rather invigorated. At least he wasn’t bored any more.

  “Do you feel like taking a little trip?” he asked. “Nothing dangerous, just something to do.”

  “Sure.” She had been in touch with a couple of people in England, just to let them know she was alive and well and... somewhere. She hadn’t contacted her employers; there had seemed no point, her professional life was over. “Where?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I’ll let you know.”

  Gwen checked her watch. “I’d better get back out there,” she said, heading for the door to the dining room. “Let me know, yes? Don’t leave it too long.”

  After she’d gone, Rudi rubbed his eyes and considered what Mr Pasquinel had told him in Suffolk. Unless they were rather extraordinary, the Penningtons – if they had bombed the Line – hadn’t acted alone. There was a lot of resentment about the Line, here and there in Europe, but Rudi didn’t think anyone was quite that resentful. What was it? Business rivals? An insurance scam? A particularly spectacular and messy assassination?

  He really didn’t want to jump the dapper little Frenchman out of the Line, for any number of reasons, but equally he didn’t want to see him arrested for espionage. He knew from personal experience that the Line’s security services favoured an iron fist in an iron glove sort of approach when they were annoyed.

  “Well nobody’s said anything yet,” Mr Pasquinel told him a few days later in a crash call using encrypted SIMs. “I finished my holiday and just went back.”

  “That was very brave,” Rudi said.

  “I have nowhere else to go.” The encryption made it sound a little as if he was being voiced by Mel Blanc. “Who was that person outside the church?”

  “So your feeling is that you’ll stay?”

  Mr Pasquinel paused, just to make Rudi aware he had noted that his own question had been ignored. “I really don’t see why not.”

  The encryption was bouncing the call between frequencies and anonymisers, but even so they had less than a minute before being connected long enough for someone to detect it. Rudi said, “Stay in touch. If you get the slightest sense that something’s wrong, let me know and I’ll jump you out of there. Okay?”

  “Will do. Is everything all right with you?”

  “Everything’s fine. Where are you?”

  “In a restaurant. It’s snowing here again.” There was a moment of dead air at the other end of the connection. “You remember you asked something about Luxembourg?”

  “Yes?”

  “Someone said something, in a meeting a couple of days after I got back. A contractor, one of the security firms we employ to look after some of our outside interests. He said his company had taken a big new contract in Luxembourg, then he shut up about it.”

  “That could have been anything,” Rudi said, relaxing again.

  “It could have been, but he said it was connected to something he called the Realm.”

  Rudi sat back and looked up at the ceiling. “Are you sure that’s what he said?”

  “I was sitting right next to him. Tedious, self-important little man.”

  “If there were no tedious, self-important little men, there would be no Intelligence,” Rudi told him. “What’s the name of the firm?”

  “Arabesque. Arabesque Security. Dreadful name.”

  Rudi made a note on the back of an old restaurant order slip. “Okay,” he said. “Thank you. You take care of yourself. I’ll be in touch.”

  He hung up and looked out of the window. It was snowing in Kraków, too.

  1.

  ACCORDING TO HIS father, once upon a time winters had been so cold that the Suur Strait regularly froze and it had been possible to build an ice road from the mainland to Muhu. That only happened about one year in five these days, and Rudi had never seen it.

  In fact, he had only been here once before, and that had been at the height of summer. The Manor at Pädaste had had an international reputation for the quality of its cuisine since the early days of the century, legacy of a long line of quite extraordinary chefs who had passed through down the years. He’d come up here when he was working in the Turk’s kitchen in Riga, saved up what amounted to a month’s salary to stay for a couple of days and work his way through the menu. Back then, the chef had been a burly, taciturn Norwegian named Amund, and his food had been so good that Rudi had almost quit cooking on the spot because he realised he would never be half as talented.

  “Oh, do fuck off,” Amund told him one evening when service was finished and they were sitting in the Manor’s bar, one chef to another. “I knew a guy once. Simeon. Worked in a kitchen in Hamburg.” He shook his head in wonder
at the memory. “I’m still trying to cook as well as he did.”

  “Fucking hell,” Rudi said, trying to imagine that.

  “He told me his mum did this fantastic salmon dish. He’d always wanted to try to replicate it, so he worked for months, trying out this and that, but he could never get it quite right, so finally he went to his mum and asked her what she did that made the dish so special, and she just said, ‘Oh, I don’t know, I buy it from the fishmonger.’”

  They both laughed. It was an old story, one of those urban legends. Everyone ‘knew’ a chef that had happened to.

  “There’s always someone better than you,” Amund said. “Sooner you get used to the idea, the better. Stop thinking about it, just try to do the best you can.”

  Leaning on the rail of the ferry, Rudi watched the red and white buildings clustering about Kuivastu harbour draw closer. Even at this time of year, the ferry was packed with tourists and their cars heading for the other side of Muhu and the causeway leading to Saaremaa. Kids were running about on deck, enjoying the twenty-five minute crossing, their parents promenading more quietly. At least it wasn’t as busy as midsummer. Rudi remembered the last time he had done this trip; there had been a kilometre-long queue of cars waiting for the ferries at Virtsu.

  His phone rang. “How are you?” asked Lev.

  “I’m all right.”

  “Are you? Really? I was talking to the Community Man. He told me what happened.” Lev refused point blank to call Rupert ‘Rupert of Hentzau’. He said it was the stupidest workname he’d ever heard.

  “I’m fine, Lev. But thanks. Is there a problem?”

  “I’ve been looking for commonalities in some of the data we’ve been working with,” Lev told him. “And I think I’ve found one.”

  Rudi flicked his cigar butt into the breeze. “Anything interesting?”

  “Well, if you think about it, it’s probably not that surprising, but most of the money to build Dresden-Neustadt came from some of the same places the money to build the Line came from.”