Europe in Winter

by Dave Hutchinson

  The alley opened onto a busy shopping street off the Market Square. She crossed the street, walked a hundred metres or so, and entered a shop which seemed to sell nothing but ladies’ gloves. Through the shop to the back, where another door gave access to another alley. This one led to a maze of little alleyways, some of them cobbled, some of them not. She muttered the memorised route under her breath, “Left and right and right and left and forward and left,” and after fifteen minutes or so she stepped out onto a street full of motor cars and shops with Czech signs.

  “Right on time,” Seth said, stepping up beside her and slipping his arm through hers. They started to walk. “How did it go?”

  “Tell you later,” she said. “I’ve got to change these fucking clothes. I look like an extra from Brief Encounter.”

  4.

  “WE NEVER THOUGHT we would actually be visited by one of the trustees,” said Mr Coltrane. “For years the trust has taken care of itself, with occasional minor adjustments.”

  “Is it a problem?” asked his visitor. “My being here?”

  “No, not at all,” Mr Coltrane reassured him. He looked at the sheaf of documents on his desk. “Everything’s in order. We were notified of the death of the previous signatory, of course.”

  “May I ask by whom?”

  Mr Coltrane consulted his pad. “A Mr Salumäe.”

  “Ah.” The visitor nodded. “Of course.” The visitor was well-dressed but indefinably tired and careworn. He walked with a cane and he had a very faint accent. Mr Coltrane fancied himself a student of accents, but he couldn’t place this one.

  “The gentleman’s authentications were correct,” said Mr Coltrane, suddenly concerned that something was amiss.

  “I’m sure they were,” said the visitor. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a plastic card. “As, I hope, these will be.”

  They spent five minutes matching random groups of letters and numbers from the visitor’s card with another which Mr Coltrane had taken from the office safe. There were signatures and countersignatures to be taken, terms to be read out loud, more signatures, then an exchange of encryption keys.

  When everything seemed to have been completed to the solicitor’s satisfaction, the visitor said, “You’ll appreciate that I’m new to this matter; perhaps it would help if you could provide me with an overview of the trust and its disbursements, so I can get up to speed.”

  “Certainly.” Mr Coltrane went back to the safe, returned with a red cardboard folder, which he laid on the desk in front of the visitor. “I have some business I need to take care of,” he said. “Perhaps you’d like to stay here and read in private...?”

  “That would be very kind,” said the visitor. “Thank you.”

  Rudi waited until the solicitor had left the office, then he got up and went to the window. The firm of Leonidas & Parr, Solicitors And Commissioners for Oaths (est. 1893) occupied the top three floors above a laundrette in Tilbury in Essex, the final and rather humble stop on a month-long odyssey of safety deposit firms, lawyers and banks which had taken him halfway across Europe and back. At each stop there had been instructions for how to find the next, and keys or authentication codes to release the information held there. And at each stop there had been details of some kind of financial instrument or account involving a very large sum of money. Rudi, who had been keeping a running count in his head as he travelled, believed the sums amounted to a little less than a billion dollars. The money was in continuous motion across Europe and several offshore accounts in the Caribbean, sloshing back and forth like water in the bottom of a rowing boat as if afraid it would be found if it stayed still for too long. Every month, a tiny fraction of it was transferred into a bank in Southend, and from there it was paid out again by Leonidas & Parr, who believed they were acting on behalf of a trust fund amounting to no more than a few hundreds of thousands of pounds.

  He watched the solicitor leave the building and cross the street to a little café, then he went back to the desk and opened the red folder.

  There were half a dozen sheets of paper in the folder, some of them clearly very old. They were all covered in columns of five-figure groups. The decryption key, which he was clearly expected to have to hand, had not been in the chocolate box, or any of the safety deposit boxes he had visited. Suspecting one final betrayal by either his father or Juhan, Rudi sighed and took out his phone and quickly photographed the sheets, then he dialled a number.

  “You should have told me about Mundt,” Lev said.

  “You didn’t need to know,” Rudi said. “And hello to you, too.”

  “I have petabytes of data from the prediction engine, some of it involving a very exotic form of topology. The Community Man mentioned Mundt. You should have briefed me.”

  “Professor Mundt is dead,” said Rudi. “He’s not going to be bothering us again.”

  “Maybe not, but whoever has his research is going to be able to cause untold bother. Do you know what he was doing?”

  “I know what people were afraid he could do.” Rudi looked down at the encrypted sheets of paper. “Can you make any sense of what he was up to?”

  “It’s not my area of mathematics,” said Lev. “I can barely skim the surface; I don’t even know whether we have all of it. We need to show it to someone who understands this stuff.”

  Rudi shook his head. “No. Not unless we absolutely have to. Listen, I’m going to send you some images; I need to know if you can decrypt what’s on them, okay?”

  “Sure, I can do that.”

  “Good. What about the other thing?” Lev was winnowing the mass of data which had been transmitted by Bradley’s phone over the three days before it had fallen silent. Presumably the Englishman had, for routine operational reasons, destroyed it and replaced it with a new one. There was a surprising amount of data, and a lot of it was deeply encrypted; Bradley was obviously a busy man.

  “Nothing about the person you’re looking for yet, but I picked up a job request you might be interested in.”

  “I’m a bit too busy to take on a Situation, Lev.”

  “This one’s a request from a government.”

  “Les Coureurs don’t work for governments.”

  “I know, that’s why I’m telling you. It’s the Japanese.”

  Rudi looked around the office, thinking. Japanese? Why not? “All right, send me what you’ve got. Let me know when you know something about the decrypts.”

  He sent the images, then hung up and picked up the sheets of paper, trying to put all the pieces together in his head, the Ufa explosion, the Realm, the Community, his father’s involvement in a billion-dollar trust fund, Mundt’s murder. If none of it made sense, perhaps it was because none of it fitted together and he was chasing ghosts. Here he was, sitting in an office in a run-down little town in England, his hands on a quite colossal amount of money. He could just take that money and use it for... something. The problem was, it was already being used for something, something his father had been involved with for a very long time.

  Rudi slipped the sheets of paper back into the folder and closed the flap. He went back to the window and looked down on the sparse traffic going along the street. On the other side of the road, the solicitor was just emerging from the café. For almost a century money had been trickling down from the trust fund and his firm had been administering the disbursements quietly, calmly, efficiently, with English discretion. The whole edifice ran like clockwork; there was no need for anyone to intervene. What it was for, what it was doing, Rudi had no idea.

  His phone buzzed. He read the message Lev had sent him, details of the job the data-scraping operation had picked up, and he rubbed his eyes.

  1.

  IT WAS THE first Monday of the month again, and Forsyth went down to the post office to collect his parcel from home.

  Leon wasn’t doing anything that morning, so they drove down in his van, possibly the only right-hand-drive Ford Transit in the city, certainly the only one with s
cenes from Battleship Potemkin airbrushed on the sides, the pram bouncing forever down the steps on the pavement side to give pedestrians a really good chance to become incensed at the scenes of Bolshevik victory.

  The whole inside of the van was lined with fur. The Poles had never quite got the hang of the Western anti-fur movement, declaiming that it was all right for the inhabitants of countries whose Winter temperatures rarely dipped below minus ten to protest against fur coats, but let them get a taste of real cold and they’d soon change their tune. Fake fur was still a novelty in Warsaw, and Forsyth was never quite sure about the lining of Leon’s van. The interior looked as if he had simply skinned some huge creature and stuck its fur up whole, and there was a faint, disturbing animal smell you noticed when you got in but stopped noticing after a while. Especially when Leon was driving.

  “Pedestrian,” Forsyth said.

  “Where?” Leon tapped the accelerator and the van zipped through an intersection as the lights were changing.

  “Somewhere back there.”

  “Points?” Leon loved Death Race 2000.

  “We were going too fast to see.”

  “Bastard.” The van almost tipped over on two wheels as it took a corner.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Forsyth said, knuckles popping as he gripped the sissy bar bolted onto the dash. “You missed her anyway.”

  “Music.” Leon punched at the music centre. The van began to thud as if someone was hitting it very hard and very rapidly with a huge rubber mallet. Leon had a directness of spirit that was unusual in contemporary Poles. He loved movies, acceleration, alcohol, loud music, and women, preferably all at once.

  Leon liked to introduce himself to people as a political film-maker, but he and his partner made bloodbath movies and hardcore porno remakes of classics. They had one proper Hollywood structure, a late-period Bogart programmed from home-ciné footage taken near the end of the actor’s life. Leon had to code everything else himself, from the Lucille Ball they’d used in Drink My Blood, Vampire Motherfucker, to the Pola Negri who had appeared in everything from The Erotic Life of Catherine the Great, to Jan Sobieski, the one straight historical drama they had ever attempted, which had been a resounding flop.

  “Post office!” he announced, and stood on the brake. The van left two long stripes of rubber on the asphalt and bounced to a halt.

  “Keep the motor running,” Forsyth advised, opening the door and jumping out.

  Leon gunned the engine. “Never take me alive, old boy,” he said in heavily-accented English.

  Entering the post office was like coming to a complete stop after travelling at the speed of light. Long queues at all the counters. Marble on the walls. Long dusty slants of sunlight from the windows. Old people everywhere. Only old people ever seemed to use the post office. Old people and him.

  As he stood there waiting he began to think that all those old people were watching him. He hadn’t done any drugs this morning... well, maybe a spliff or two after breakfast, but that was the only way to survive being driven anywhere by Leon... but it was like these old people all knew, like it was tattooed on his face or something, like he was incandescing from all that poor Belarusian grass. Shit. A minor paranoid episode and he hadn’t even picked up his parcel yet.

  He felt the stares all the way to the poste restante window. The girl behind the counter stared at him too. He handed over his ID and she went away to the big room at the back with all the shelves, and came back with the familiar fat yellow padded envelope. This time, there were also two flimsy blue email forms. Forsyth signed for everything, paid for the emails, and almost ran back out into the sunshine.

  “They were all watching me,” he said, climbing back into the van.

  “Hardly surprising,” Leon said. “You’re not wearing shoes.”

  “Bollocks.” Forsyth looked down into the footwell and wiggled his toes. “Bollocks. I’ve been living with you too long.” In Autumn, too. You could maybe understand it at the height of Summer, when the city baked in a kind of relentless dusty heat, but in Autumn…?

  “I didn’t make you come out without them,” Leon said, affronted. “English bastard.”

  “Scottish bastard,” Forsyth corrected absently, tugging at the envelope’s tear-strip.

  Leon thumped his foot onto the accelerator and the van leaped out into the traffic to a fanfare of horns. “So. What has Big Sister sent this month?”

  The strip finally came off and the envelope everted two packages into his lap. One was a kilo-bag of pear drops. Decades of Democracy, and you still couldn’t get pear drops anywhere in Poland. Forsyth used to get his monthly ration sent to the block where he lived, but then some lunatic started coming in and setting the communal post-boxes alight, and one morning he came down to find nothing in his box but a fist-sized lump of burnt sugar and charred packaging that stank of lighter fluid, and he’d got his sister to send any future mail poste restante.

  The second item was enclosed in that new packaging he’d been reading about, a sort of plastic bag with hollow ribs crisscrossing the outside. You put your fragiles inside, sealed the mouth of the bag with some heat-sealing gadget, and then used a little hand-pump to evacuate the air. As you squeezed the handle some of the air was diverted to inflate the hollow ribs, and what you wound up with was a vacuum-sealed package as rigid as a brick. Forsyth had seen it on a German satellite channel. They’d packed a crystal vase in the stuff and driven a bus over it with no ill-effects.

  He held the package up. Inside were six sausage rolls. He smiled. You couldn’t get proper sausage rolls in Poland, either; if you could get them at all they were made with frankfurters and short-crust pastry, which wasn’t right. He turned the package over. There was supposed to be a little button you pressed to release the vacuum, but you had to be careful because...

  There was a pop and the sensation of hundreds of tiny things falling on his head and shoulders.

  “Jesus Maria!” Leon yelled, and almost crashed the van into a tram.

  FORSYTH AND LEON shared a flat in the block that Kieslowski had made famous in Dekalog. It had been fashionable, back in the days when Poland was a Slavic Tiger, but it had slowly gone downhill ever since, just like everything else. The lifts never worked and the corridors were covered with derivative graffiti in half a dozen Continental and two African languages. A Ukrainian ragga band calling themselves the Enzyme Kings had taken over the flat next door. Leon loved ragga. The Enzyme Kings’ amplifiers didn’t have enough volume stops to suit him.

  Entering the lobby, Forsyth could hear The Enzyme Kings rehearsing, ten floors above him. The vibrations grew worse as he made his way slowly up the stairs, clutching his bag of pear drops and the remains of the envelope; there was usually a letter inside but he didn’t like to read it until he’d had at least one drink.

  By the time Forsyth reached his floor, the vibrations of the band were so strong he could feel them in the pit of his stomach. One of the other residents came down the corridor, wagging a finger and talking to him in a presumably angry voice, but Forsyth couldn’t hear what she was saying, and he mimed a helpless shrug as they passed. Ukrainians. I mean, who knows?

  As he reached his flat, one of those strange moments of synchronicity occurred. The music suddenly cut off, and at that very moment he noticed his front door was open. It was all terribly sinister. He poked his head through the doorway.

  “Thought I’d missed you,” said Crispin.

  “And we couldn’t have that, could we,” Forsyth said, propping himself against the doorframe and crossing his arms.

  Crispin was busy with a game on the coffee table which resembled Go but involved arranging numerous tiny coloured spheres, ovals, octagons and assorted ’hedrons on the tabletop. He wasn’t doing very well because every time he got a pleasing pattern he popped one of the shapes in his mouth, spoiled the pattern, and had to start over again.

  “You started dyeing your dandruff or something?” he asked, looking up and frowning.
<
br />   Forsyth brushed flakes of puff pastry off his shoulders. “You wouldn’t believe me.”

  Crispin shrugged. “You say so.”

  “So. They let you back into the country, eh?”

  “I have to go down the hole, man,” Crispin said, going back to his game.

  “They’ll never let you,” said Forsyth. “They’ve got your eyes recorded on every security system on every building site between here and the Tatras.”

  Crispin shook his head. “I have to, man.” He selected a red sphere, put it in his mouth, and crunched down. “Real important.”

  “I hear the Ivans are extending the Moscow Metro,” Forsyth suggested.

  Crispin made a sour face. “Moscow Metro. Shit, man. Been there. Chandeliers.” He looked up. “I mean, chandeliers?”

  Forsyth shrugged.

  “This is good,” Crispin said, poking a yellow rectangle out of the pattern he was making. “I like this one.”

  Forsyth walked over to the sofa and sat down beside Crispin. “What does it do?”

  “Can’t remember.”

  Forsyth sat back with his pear drops in his lap. “How did you get in here?”

  “Mister Bones let me in.” Crispin took from the back pocket of his jeans a little leather case and unzipped it to let Forsyth see the skeleton keys and lockpicks inside. “Say hello to Mister Bones.”

  “What about the alarm?”

  “Ah, shit, man.” Crispin reached into a pocket of his greasy combat jacket and took out something that looked a little like an old-fashioned electric shaver, with two long wires terminating in tiny complicated-looking silver plugs dangling from it. “Say hello to Ol’ Sparky.”

  Forsyth took Ol’ Sparky and turned it over in his hands. “Have you been mixing with criminal elements?”

  Crispin grinned a grin that was more gold than enamel. “Chechens. Technical boys.”

  “Violent boys.”

  Still engrossed in his game, Crispin waved a hand.