Europe in Winter

by Dave Hutchinson

  When the soldiers had left and the door was locked again, she got up stiffly from the bed and went over to the table. On the tray were a biodegradable Starbucks cup of unsweetened black coffee and a plate with a couple of small, sticky and slightly stale pastries. She wolfed the pastries down and drank the coffee in two swallows, and suddenly she really, really wanted a cigarette, even though she hadn’t smoked in almost a decade.

  A few minutes later, the door opened again, and Szili stepped into the room, accompanied by yet another soldier. Szili had slept and breakfasted well. She had showered. She was wearing a fresh uniform and discreet makeup. She looked smug.

  “Madam,” she said, “come with me, please.”

  “You could stop calling me ‘madam,’” Carey said, going over to the bed and collecting her overcoat. “In some places this would count as an engagement.”

  Szili smirked.

  Outside was a grey, chilly morning. The border station had reopened and there were queues of cars and lorries and coaches. Carey turned up the collar of her coat. Some of the passengers in one of the nearest coaches looked down incuriously as Szili and the soldier accompanied her to a small grey van. The rear doors were open; Carey looked inside and saw wooden benches mounted on either side.

  “Please, madam,” Szili said.

  Carey climbed inside and sat on one of the benches. “It’s been a blast,” she said.

  Szili smirked again and closed the doors.

  THEY DROVE FOR an hour and three quarters; Carey timed it. Not long enough to reach Szolnok, not nearly long enough for Budapest. More often than not, these fuckups ended with the authorities deporting the offending Coureur after varying periods of abuse and incarceration, and she entertained the possibility that she was being taken across the border, there to be either dumped at the side of the road or handed over to the Croatian authorities, who would have to let her go because she hadn’t done anything wrong on their territory. Neither of these outcomes, to be honest, would be so bad. She entertained herself for a while by examining the lock on the rear doors; it would have been reasonably straightforward to spring it with the blade of a penknife and simply step out at the next set of traffic lights and walk away. But the border guards had taken her penknife.

  The van finally slowed, made several sharp turns, and bumped over something before pulling to a stop. The doors opened, revealing a man dressed like an undertaker standing outside. He was tall and severe and completely bald, and he wore an old-fashioned suit and a long black coat. He motioned her to get out.

  The van was parked in a cobbled courtyard at the heart of a tall old building with many windows and balconies; she didn’t get a chance for a very good look, because the undertaker grasped her upper arm with a bony hand that felt like a bear trap and urged her, not terribly gently, across the cobbles, to a door.

  The door led into an echoing stairwell, its walls painted lime green. The stairs were just wide enough for Carey and the undertaker to walk side by side, and he never relaxed his grip on her arm. They walked up seven flights, the undertaker led her through a door into a wood-floored corridor, and up to another door, where he knocked with his free hand. A voice inside said “Come,” in Hungarian. So, not Croatia, then.

  The room was large but sparsely-furnished. The heavy curtains were drawn, and the only illumination came from a green-shaded lamp on a desk. Behind the desk sat a small, neat, middle-aged man in a suit which had seen better days. He looked at her, standing there still in the undertaker’s grasp, and he frowned.

  “Oh, let her go,” he said tiredly. “We’re not savages.”

  The undertaker released her.

  “And I think Ms Tews and I can manage a reasonable conversation without a chaperone.”

  Without a word, the undertaker turned and left the room. The door closed, but Carey didn’t hear it lock.

  The man behind the desk gestured at a chair over by the wall. “Please,” he said, “bring that over here and sit down. You must be tired.”

  Carey picked up the chair, put it in front of the desk, and sat. The little neat man was maybe in his early fifties. He had a kind, weary face and collar-length brown hair that was still only touched with grey.

  He clasped his hands on the desktop and said, “You may call me Martón.”

  Carey stared at him.

  Martón sighed. “We have a problem, Ms Tews.”

  “I want to speak with the Texan Embassy,” she said.

  “I have been in touch with your Ambassador,” Martón told her. “She has chosen, in the first instance, to leave this matter in our hands.”

  “Balless bitch.”

  “It’s a matter of diplomacy,” Martón suggested. “All we are required to do is make your Ambassador aware of the situation; it’s up to her what she does with the information. Considering you are in Hungary on behalf of a non-state actor, she has chosen not to intervene at this point.”

  “‘Non-state actor’?”

  Martón reached down beside his chair, came up holding a cardboard folder. He put it on the desk in front of him, opened it, and took out four sheets of paper. In spite of the situation, Carey thought this was quaint. Paper. Seriously.

  “The Hungarian government really does take a very dim view of Les Coureurs des Bois, Ms Tews,” said Martón.

  “Who?”

  Martón regarded her levelly. Then he put the sheets of paper back in the folder and closed the flap. “Very well,” he said. “Then perhaps you will do me the courtesy of listening to what I have to say.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Of course you do.” Martón smiled. “You can listen to me, or you can be taken directly to a special court, where you will be tried on charges of espionage. You will not be granted representation, but you will be given an opportunity to state your case. In all likelihood, you will be given a mandatory sentence of ten years’ imprisonment.” He nodded to himself. “I think that would be a certainty, given the circumstances.”

  Carey gave him her very best hard stare.

  “Now,” he went on, “the item you were attempting to transport out of Hungary – and it was very well-hidden, I congratulate your associates on that – is not, in and of itself, illegal. Nor, as it turns out, is it illegal in Croatia, which I admit does confuse me slightly. However, Hungary operates a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to the activity of smugglers, and in particular the organisation of which you claim not to have heard. There are other nations, I am aware, which are more... um, enlightened, but we are not. We view the organisation of which you claim not to have heard as a hostile intelligence agency, and for many years we have dealt with them accordingly. This has not deterred them in the slightest. We find them quite tiresome and, if you’ll forgive me, charmlessly amateur.”

  Carey sat where she was, hands folded in her lap.

  “What we could do, here and now, you and I, is come to some kind of accord,” Martón went on. “The situation is not unsalvageable, from your point of view. All you have to do is indicate the individual or organisation which retained your services.”

  Carey thought about this. She sighed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. “I am a Texan citizen, visiting your country for the purposes of work. All my permits are in order.”

  “Yes,” Martón agreed, “they certainly are. Your permits, your passport, your travel documents. Everything in order.”

  “I hired the car from the Hertz desk at Szolnok railway station,” she went on. “If there was something wrong with it, you should be speaking to them.”

  “Oh, we have,” Martón said brightly. “We still are.”

  “Then they’ll tell you I have nothing to do with this.”

  “Well, no,” said Martón. “That’s not what they’re telling us at all.”

  “I can’t help you, then.”

  Martón regarded her sadly. “This is not a game of chicken,” he told her. “I am not going to blink first.”

  She shrugged.r />
  Martón sighed. “You may need some time to think about the situation,” he said. He took out his phone, speed-dialled a number, spoke quietly to the person who answered, and hung up. He blinked at her.

  A moment later, the undertaker opened the door. Carey stood up, and he took hold of her arm again. It felt as if his fingertips fitted into grooves they had previously made there. He led her towards the door.

  “We will speak again, Ms Tews,” said Martón.

  The undertaker led her back down the corridor to the stairwell, and down the stairs to the courtyard. A small, scruffy car was waiting, its driver perched on the bonnet smoking a cigar and chatting to another man. The undertaker and the driver took out their phones and swapped data. They both checked their screens, nodded to each other, then the undertaker put Carey into the back seat. The car smelled of tobacco and fried food. The driver got in, and the other man got in the back with Carey, and they drove off, pausing only to wait for a tall wooden gate at the courtyard entrance to roll out of the way.

  They turned left into traffic. The man sitting with Carey said, “Anyone?”

  The driver checked his mirror. “No.”

  The man turned to Carey. He was tall and bulky, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt and an American-style pea jacket. “My name is Balász,” he told her. “Were you mistreated?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Did they hurt you?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  She sat thinking for a while. She said, “You’re not the police, are you.”

  Balász chuckled. “Oh my word no.”

  “Not the authorities at all.”

  Balász smiled happily and shook his head. “The people who were supposed to be transporting you to detention had a little mishap,” he said. “We’re their replacements, aren’t we, Levente?” The driver grunted.

  Carey looked out of the passenger window at the unfamiliar streets. She noted that the door on her side was locked. “What town is this?”

  “Kaposvár,” said Balász.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To see my boss.” Balász looked at her. “Perhaps we should stop along the way and get you a change of clothes.”

  THEY DROVE FOR about three hours. Balász and the driver seemed genial enough company, but neither was a sparkling conversationalist, and she was mostly left alone with her thoughts.

  “Am I being kidnapped?” she asked, an hour or so into the journey.

  “No, you’re being stolen,” Balász said, and he and the driver laughed.

  For a while, the road ran along the banks of Lake Balaton, and from the road signs she thought they must be heading for Budapest, but the road turned north fifteen or twenty kilometres from the capital.

  They stopped at a little out-of-town mall and Balász went shopping with her. She selected jeans, underwear, a T-shirt and a hoodie, and he paid for them. She had as good a wash as she could manage in one of the mall’s public restrooms, and changed her clothes, and afterward she and Balász visited a fast-food outlet and bought a bucket of fried chicken. They sat in the car, out in the vast car park, and ate the chicken. It was the first halfway decent meal Carey had had since leaving Szolnok about a thousand years ago, and she had to fight the urge to just eat her way to the bottom of the bucket without leaving anything for the others.

  It was starting to get dark when they arrived in Esztergom, and it occurred to Carey that she had seen quite enough of Hungary to last her a lifetime, thank you very much, and if she managed to get out of this nightmare with her wits intact she was never coming back.

  They drove through an historic district of the town, with a castle high on a hill to their left, then turned down a side street and parked outside a high-end leather goods shop, its window full of handbags and shoulderbags and expensive jackets. Balász led her through the shop to a flight of stairs at the back – none of the shop assistants batted an eyelid at the newcomers – and up to what seemed to be a staff refreshment area. Here were some worn but comfy-looking chairs, a low table with a scatter of magazine printouts, a coffee machine, a cork noticeboard on the wall, and a very large blond gentleman in an exquisite suit approaching her with his hand outstretched.

  “Ms Tews,” he said, shaking her hand. “May I be the first to apologise for your treatment at the hands of our frankly psychopathic authorities. I hope they didn’t harm you?”

  Carey blinked at him.

  “I am László Viktor,” the large man told her. “It was my merchandise that you were transporting.”

  Carey felt as if she might very well be on the verge of overload. She said, “Oh?”

  “Do you dance?” Mr Viktor said. “I dance. It’s good exercise.”

  “What?”

  “Have you ever,” asked Mr Viktor, “danced the Argentinian tango?”

  “No,” said Carey. “I have not. And if you’re asking, my dancing days are far behind me.”

  Mr Viktor smiled. “It takes a lot of... intuition. One must read the body language of one’s partner, almost on a subconscious level. They move, you move. There’s no time to think, or the music will lose you – it only takes one misstep. It’s very rigorous. The moves themselves are simple to learn, but the relationship between partners can take a lifetime.”

  Carey sighed. “I’m really too old to be impressed by a cute metaphor, Mr Viktor. I’m grateful to you for getting me away from the authorities, but say your piece and I’m out of here.”

  “You have no money, no resources. Where would you go?”

  “I can take care of myself, thank you.”

  Mr Viktor sat down in one of the comfy chairs and clasped his hands across his stomach. He looked like a particularly contented blond bear. “You lost my merchandise,” he said. “It was unique, irreplaceable, and now the authorities have it.”

  “We don’t give any guarantees,” she told him. “Jumping stuff across borders is tricky, you know that.”

  “I want it back,” said Mr Viktor.

  “I don’t have it.”

  “I want you to get it.”

  She stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”

  Mr Viktor gazed at the Coureur serenely. “It was your responsibility to take my merchandise to its destination, and you failed in that. I don’t think it’s unreasonable of me to expect you to return it to me.”

  “I think you’re confusing us with UPS, Mr Viktor.”

  He chuckled, a deep, happy sound. “You get my merchandise back and return it to me. Then maybe I’ll send it UPS.”

  “You can’t make me do that.”

  “Well, no,” said the Hungarian. “Obviously I can’t make you. I can, though, help you.” He nodded to Balász, who had been waiting patiently on the other side of the room. Balász trotted down the stairs to the shop, and returned a few seconds later with another man. This one was young and lithe, with a rodent look to him.

  “This is Benedek,” said Mr Viktor. “Benedek will do anything you tell him.”

  Carey looked at Benedek and said, “Fuck off.” Benedek stood where he was.

  “Well, almost anything,” said Mr Viktor. He became serious. “Ms Tews, to my mind this is a matter of trust. I trusted your organisation to transport my merchandise to its destination, and you not only failed but you lost the merchandise. Not only did you lose my merchandise, you delivered it into the hands of the people I was trying to keep it away from. Surely you can see my point.”

  Carey had had about enough of this bullshit. “They knew I was coming,” she told him. “They knew where I was going to cross the border, and they knew there was something in the car. I didn’t tell them any of those things.”

  “Nor did I,” Mr Viktor said equably. “Chiefly because I didn’t know.”

  “Nobody knew,” she said. “The mechanic who put the Package in the car knew it was there, but he didn’t know where I was going. The only way anyone could have known where I was leaving Hungary would have been to follow me, a
nd nobody followed me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hertz tags all its vehicles,” Mr Viktor said. “Someone could have hacked into their location system.”

  “My mechanic took the tag out.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Carey opened her mouth. Closed it.

  Mr Viktor rubbed his eyes. “You should tell us who this mechanic is,” he rumbled. “Then maybe Balász can go and have a quiet word.”

  Carey looked at Mr Viktor, at Balász, at Benedek.

  “This is all quite fascinating,” said Mr Viktor, “but it doesn’t get my merchandise back, does it.”

  “I can’t help you,” Carey said again, but this time her voice sounded tired.

  “Oh, of course you can,” Mr Viktor said happily. “You just need a little time to work out how.” He stood up and placed his huge hands on her shoulders. “I have a place near here,” he told her, beaming. “Why don’t you go there, have a shower, have a proper sleep, a decent meal, and think about the situation. We can talk tomorrow and you can tell me what your plan is.”

  Carey looked at the three men again. Like her dancing days, her brawling days were long behind her; she wasn’t going to be able to fight her way out of this. She needed help, and for that she needed some way of contacting the outside world. She was on her own for the moment. And to be honest, the prospect of a shower was very tempting.

  “Okay,” she said. It was not remotely okay, but she was aware that it was the closest she was going to get for the moment.

  THE EVENING STREETS of Esztergom were bustling with people who all looked prosperous and well-dressed and well-fed and well-rested, and Carey felt out of place and weary. She considered making a run for it, losing herself in the crowds; there was a callbox routine she had memorised for emergencies which would theoretically summon some kind of support, but she was just too tired.