Europe in Winter

by Dave Hutchinson

  “Well.” Forsyth put the alarm-jumper on the table. “It sounds as if your travels have been more interesting than mine, anyway.”

  Crispin nodded. His auburn hair had grown down to his shoulders and it didn’t look as if he’d washed it in months. He had the calm, trusting, unworried face of a child, and the eyes of a maniac. “Still living with the pornographer?”

  “Political film maker.”

  “Yeah, that.” Crispin thought about it. “This his place, yeah?”

  “Yes.”

  Crispin shook his head. “It’s not right. Man needs a place of his own. Landlords. I mean…”

  “Leon’s been really good to me,” Forsyth told him, as if Crispin didn’t know already.

  “Whatever.” Crispin waved his hand again. “Try this, man.” He pointed at the yellow rectangle.

  Forsyth picked up the pill and put it in his mouth. “What will it do to me?”

  Crispin shook his head emphatically. “Can’t remember. But I like it.”

  Forsyth swallowed and sat waiting for something to happen. All of a sudden the Enzyme Kings started up again. Against Leon’s protests, Forsyth had installed soundproofing, on the grounds that he needed to sleep occasionally, so the Ukrainians’ racket was reduced to a manageable level, but the first beat still knocked a print off the wall and made Crispin sit bolt upright, staring wildly about him.

  “Jesus fuck, I’ve been hearing that all afternoon!” he shouted.

  “Neighbours,” Forsyth said, feeling himself starting to sink through the substance of the sofa.

  “Oh wow,” Crispin said, relaxing. “I thought it was me...”

  Forsyth felt himself smile lazily, felt the sofa gently enfolding him, felt his molecules slipping into the spaces between the sofa’s molecules.

  “Hey.” Crispin jumped to his feet. “Hey, man. Did I show you this?”

  “What?” Forsyth asked, still smiling.

  Crispin was grinning maniacally. “You’ll love this. Just look what I learned to do.” He went over to the wall, put out his hand, and pressed the palm against the faded wallpaper.

  “Love it,” Forsyth giggled.

  “Not that,” Crispin said testily. “This.” And his arm sank into the wall up to the elbow.

  “Oh, shit,” murmured Forsyth, and the sofa took him far far away.

  IT WAS ONLY slightly harder to get into the site office than it was to get into the country. Fifteen floors up in the Pink Palace, the office was reached by a single private lift, the door in the foyer guarded by two large security men and a retinal reader and the entrance on the fifteenth floor guarded by two more large security men and an electronic door. The site office had seen some interesting times, before the security was put in.

  Forsyth showed his pass, bent down and stared unblinking into the reader’s cup until the machine gave a little bleep, smiled at the security boys, and went up.

  “Whatever you want, I can’t give it to you,” said Jespersen.

  “I don’t want anything,” Forsyth said.

  “All right. I can give you that. Have a seat. You look terrible; have you been eating properly?”

  Forsyth shrugged. “I’ve been eating.”

  Jespersen snorted. “Chemicals. Processed food. Fried food.”

  “I like fried food.”

  “You’ve come to the right country then.” Jespersen pushed with the heel of his hand at the control stick and his wheelchair hummed across the office. “Sometimes I think the Poles would fry salad if it occurred to them.”

  “I detect negative thoughts.”

  The wheelchair jerked to a stop by the window. Beyond the glass, Warsaw was spread out like a toy, fading away into flatlands that went all the way to the horizon and then on into Ukraine and Belarus, all fuzzed by the hydrocarbon haze.

  “I hate this view,” Jespersen muttered.

  “I always rather liked it.”

  “Hah.” The chair wheeled round. “You only see it when you visit. I get it every day, when the Reps leave me alone. That’s all I get all day, the view and Reps wanting to know when work’s starting again.”

  “Well, now you mention it...”

  Jespersen waved his permanently-clubbed fist at Forsyth. “I knew it. And I thought this time you might just want to see how I am.”

  “You brought the subject up, not me.”

  “Ah, shit,” Jespersen murmured, craning his head to look at the view again. “This fucking thing will never be finished.”

  “You’re too pessimistic, Jens,” Forsyth told him.

  “I could have dug this system quicker with a soup spoon,” said Jespersen. “The Poles don’t want a Metro; they just want to annoy the world’s tunnel engineers.”

  “I also want to use your terminal for a few minutes.”

  Jespersen sighed. “What for?”

  “I put out a contact string for some of my boys. I do that now and again, just to keep tabs on where they are, you know?”

  Jespersen nodded impatiently. “Yes, yes.”

  “Well I got a couple of notes yesterday. Do you remember Jonny Gee and Chris Harper?”

  “Chris? Jonny? Of course! Great guys! We were always out partying.” Jespersen drove the chair forward half a metre, then back again. “How many fucking people do you think are involved in this project? Do you think I’m a personal friend of all of them?”

  Forsyth smiled. It was too easy to annoy Jespersen; he really shouldn’t do it. He said, “Jonny’s wife hasn’t heard from him for five months. And Chris’s son hasn’t heard from him for almost a year.”

  “This is not the International Red Cross,” Jespersen warned in a strangled voice. “Terminal time costs money. I can’t just let you use it to reunite errant husbands and fathers with their families.”

  “The last I heard, they’d taken up a contract on the Line,” Forsyth continued patiently. Jespersen nodded wearily; they’d lost hundreds of men to the Line over the years. “And what with the explosion and everything...”

  Jespersen sighed. “There are days,” he confided, “when I truly wish I was dead.”

  “More negative thoughts. I expected better from the site manager.”

  Jespersen glared at him and steered the chair around behind his desk, punched clumsily with his thumb at the tapboard of his desktop, glared at the display. “There is a rumour that the Transport Ministry will grant us some funds to finish the station refurb at Mokotów.”

  “No good to me,” said Forsyth. “The platforms are finished at Mokotów. You need tilers, electricians, people like that. You need Kwak-Kwak’s boys.”

  Jespersen poked the tapboard one more time. “Doesn’t matter anyway; nobody knows when we’ll get the money. Could be this year, could be next. Probably will be never.” He sat back and looked at Forsyth. “Have you any idea how hard this job is?”

  “You’ve always described it very well.”

  “I must be the only site manager in Europe with eighty percent of his workforce scattered across a dozen countries at any one time. And of course they’re all just sitting on their hands waiting for one of the Reps to call and ask them to come back so they can stick up a few tiles or put in a metre or so of wiring before the Government decides it’s all costing too much and calls a halt to it again.” He glanced at the window as if he suspected the view was mocking him.

  “That reminds me. I saw Crispin a couple of nights ago.”

  Jespersen seemed to sag deeper into his chair. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know; I woke up the next morning and he was gone.”

  “All I needed to make my day complete was to know that maniac is wandering about the city again.”

  “He says he wants to work.”

  “No.” Jespersen shook his head emphatically. “Absolutely not. If you see him again, you tell him from me that if he goes within a hundred metres of any of the sites I’ll have him arrested.”

  “I told him that, more or less.”

  “Where�
�s he been, for heaven’s sake?”

  “We may have discussed that, but I lost track of the conversation.”

  Jespersen pulled a face. It made his whole head look like a wizened old cider apple. “And if I hear from any of the Reps that their men have been getting drugs from Crispin, I’ll have him deported. And them.”

  “I’m sure he realises that, Jens.”

  “Well just make it very clear to him. Oh, fuck.” Jespersen thumped the desktop. “What the fuck does it matter? Let him deal his dope. Let him go back underground. I don’t care. I’ll die and the fucking thing still won’t be finished.” He looked at Forsyth. “And you. Stupid Scotchman. Why do you stay in this godforsaken city?”

  “I like it here,” Forsyth said, and it was only the bald, honest truth. “Now, can I use your terminal?”

  CRISPIN CONTENDED THAT the Warsaw Metro was actually a diagram of Polish history. There had been plans for a Metro system as far back as 1918, but after some preliminary excavation work the Great Depression had come along and the project was shelved. The plans were resurrected in 1934, preliminary work began in 1938, the following year the Nazis invaded Poland, and that was that for quite some time.

  A number of Metro projects were started and promptly abandoned during the Cold War years, and it wasn’t until 1984 that work proper began, although technical difficulties and lack of funds meant that the tunnels crept along at no more than a couple of metres a day and it wasn’t until 1995 that the first section of the M1 line, between Kabaty and Politechnika, had opened.

  And so it went, year after year. Varsovians loved their slowly-evolving Metro, never suspecting that a storm of new lines, new stations and refurbished old stations lay just a few years in their future, an act of ambition Forsyth thought only Poles could be capable of.

  It had been heralded as the biggest civil engineering project in Europe since the Line, which was admittedly quite a high bar to clear. The new government had given it a blaze of publicity, a blizzard of advertising. Venture capital came in from all over the Continent. The virtual reality models were state-of-the-art or better, cutting edge stuff that cost millions to produce, a cats-cradle of multi-coloured lines rotating until they settled beneath the city then exploding outward to reveal a post-post-modern architect’s wet dream of stations. It was the most beautiful thing Forsyth had ever seen.

  The adverts had brought tunnel men in from all over the world; grizzled veterans who had in their youth worked on the final stages of the Honshu-Hokkaido tunnel, youngsters who had cut their teeth on the Straits Link. Older stations were refitted, new tunnels dug. Eighteen months later the Government changed, the money dried up, and the Metro ground to a halt. The private money disappeared into a fogbank of litigation over broken Government contracts.

  Most of the workforce evaporated to other projects, but some stayed. Forsyth found he liked Poland. He was married by then, to a Warsaw girl, and Tomasz, his son, was two months old. He stuck it out, and a year later the Government changed again, suddenly there was money to break ground in Powisle, and the private investors came out of hiding. Because he had remained in Poland, and kept up a more or less unbroken relationship with the permanent site office, Forsyth found himself promoted to the position of Rep, which meant that when new money was found to start work on the Metro again it was his job to track down the workers for it, wherever they happened to be. He turned out to be rather good at it, and it was better than running a loader fifty metres underground.

  Ground was broken in Powisle, and the Government resigned three months later and the new Government decided it had better things to spend its money on than the Metro.

  So it went. The tunnels extended metre by metre, year after year, station by station, Government by Government. By the time Forsyth’s marriage had been annulled he realised that Crispin might actually be right. Maybe he was involved in writing a secret history of a typically Polish political lunacy. Perhaps, drawn beneath the ground, there really was a secret symbol.

  Of course, Crispin also believed that when the Metro was finished the world would end...

  LEON CRUISED THE city endlessly, looking for faces. He went out in the early early morning, examining the heaps of rags and humanity huddled in doorways in the New Town, handing out packets of cigarettes and airline miniatures of vodka stolen for him by his cousin’s husband, who worked at Ok¸ecie. He walked through the Old Town, snapping tourists with his little Taiwanese digital camera, an antique he’d found at a flea market in front of the Palace of Culture. He was obsessed with finding the perfect face, some distillation of the Polish experience, but he had no clear idea what that would look like. He was so obsessed that he even thought he could find its reflection in the faces of the Japanese tourists who rampaged in crowds through the old Market Square, photographing everything and arguing with the taxi drivers.

  He was entirely shameless. Once, half-dozing in front of a film at home, a joint burning down to his knuckles, Forsyth had been jerked back to attention by the face of a ravaged old beggar in the act of hurling a dustbin through a shop window in an unexplained act of vandalism. His face. Just what you need to see at half past two in the morning when you’re stoned out of your head...

  That particular masterpiece, sneaking into the flat on a pirate feed based, as far as they could establish later, in Greater Germany, had been called Taste The Blood Of Wał¸esa. Leon said it was a political satire and was affronted that the Germans had aired it without paying for the rights. Forsyth took his word for it and threatened to smash his camera if Leon took any more pictures of him.

  The new project, as yet unnamed, was ostensibly a life of Stanisław August. The rushes Forsyth had seen were heavily pornographic, and Leon’s latest victim was an aged man with long filthy grey hair. He stood on the stage at the far end of Atelier Dudek and watched the camera click from position to position around him on its computerised arm.

  “Stand still, fuck you!” Leon yelled, typing furiously behind a bank of tapboards and monitors.

  The old man slowly took out a Golden American and lit it. Then he cursed Leon in an dialect so strong Forsyth could only pick out two or three words, none of them nice.

  “Actors, eh?” Forsyth said.

  “Some people have no gratitude,” Leon said. “I’ve given him a carton of cigarettes, a bottle of Wyborowa and a hundred euros, and he thinks he’s Laurence fucking Olivier. Stop doing that.”

  On the monitor in front of Forsyth, Bogart was doing handstands. Forsyth took his hands off the tapboard. “Sorry.”

  Leon brushed his fingertips across the editing space on his desk and the camera clicked a fraction of a centimetre to a new position. An image of the old man appeared on the screen, a fully-animated composite of hundreds of images taken over what must have been several sessions. “What about the face, though? What about the face?”

  Forsyth squinted down the room. The old man’s face was almost hidden by a huge untended explosion of beard. “Nice eyes.”

  Leon snorted. “You just don’t look. Here.” He air-typed a couple of short strings of commands and the beard vanished from the screen. Without it, the old man seemed much younger. He had a high-cheekboned, long-nosed face that would have been almost noble if he hadn’t looked so tired.

  “Nice eyes,” Forsyth said again.

  “Philistine.” The camera moved to a new position. “Just a few more!” Leon called down the studio. “Did you find your missing men?”

  Forsyth scratched his head, thinking about his afternoon trawl through the Line’s online presence. “It’s very odd,” he said.

  Leon glanced at him. “No luck?”

  Forsyth shook his head. “There’s no record of them ever going out there. You have to become a citizen to work on the Line, otherwise they won’t let you near it.”

  “So what are you going to do now?”

  “I suppose I’ll have to go over to Poznan and check the Consulate in person. I can’t see what else I can do.” He shrugged.<
br />
  “I thought all the Consulates and Embassies had closed.”

  “They reopened ages ago. Don’t you watch the news?”

  “Trains.” Leon shrugged.

  “Actually,” Forsyth said, trying to load his voice with just the right degree of innocent nonchalance, “I popped round to see if you had any spare cash.”

  Leon sighed, stopped typing and laid his hands in his lap. “Why?” he asked with exaggerated calm.

  “I’ll need the fare to Poznan.”

  “Now?” Leon said in a loud voice. “Right now?” At the far end of the studio, the old man had started to shuffle off the stage. “Stay there!” Leon shouted at him. The old man swore, but he stayed where he was.

  “It’s my job,” Forsyth said. “I’m supposed to look after my men.”

  “Yeah. But someone else is supposed to be paying you to do it,” Leon said briskly, starting to type again. “Not me.”

  “I’ll claim it as expenses when I get back,” Forsyth said amiably. “It’s just a loan.”

  “Just like last time?”

  Forsyth couldn’t remember the last time he’d borrowed money from Leon. Or rather, he couldn’t remember one single specific time. They all sort of ran into each other.

  “Just like last time,” he agreed, not wanting to argue too much with someone he was trying to borrow money from.

  Leon nodded. “Right. And last time I waited six weeks to get my money back.”

  Forsyth remembered the occasion now. He smiled at the old man, who was fidgeting uncomfortably on the stage. Eventually, all the images of him would be combined into a single programmable structure, infinitely manipulable, a virtual actor. It was possible, albeit trickier, to do the same thing with old film footage, but Leon said that involved hours of nitpicking coding and lacked subtlety anyway. Forsyth couldn’t tell the difference.

  Leon sighed, stopped typing, and pulled out his wallet. “Here,” he said, handing over a wad of euro notes. “How much is that?”

  Forsyth counted the money. “Four hundred.”