“And I want it all back.” Leon started to type again. The robot arm suddenly clicked to life once more, making the old man jump. Leon shook his head.
“Thanks.” Forsyth put the money in his pocket.
“So, I gather we can’t expect any rent from you this month,” Leon said after a while.
“Jespersen says not.”
“Jespersen says not. Terrific.”
Forsyth looked at the screen in front of him. Relieved of input, Bogart was sitting in a cane chair in a large airy room. He was wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown. Atelier Dudek’s Bogart had been structured from private footage of the actor near the end of his life, already very ill. Leon had bought it a year or so ago from a man he had met in a bar in Hindenberg. It must have been a pirate; nobody would allow something like this to be released commercially.
“Don’t blame me,” said Forsyth. “Write to the Transport Ministry.”
“You’re full of shit. Just like everything in this country.”
Forsyth shrugged. “So go and work in Hollywood.” It was an old argument; they’d been having it almost as long as Forsyth had been living with Leon. “Crispin’s back.”
“Oh fuck.” Leon rested his fingertips on the tapboard and looked at Forsyth. “When?”
“A couple of days ago. When we went to the post office. He was in the flat when I got home. Didn’t you see him?”
Leon looked disgusted. “When I got back that night you were mumbling something about being half-man, half-sofa?”
Forsyth grinned.
Leon shook his head. “You were the only form of life in the flat. And I use the word ‘life’ in its loosest possible sense.”
Forsyth looked down the studio at the old man and the clicking, whirring arm of the camera. “He said he had to go back underground.”
“You have to go back underground,” Leon said without looking at him. “Or at least some of the men you represent.”
Forsyth shook his head. “It wasn’t work. It sounded more important.”
“God damn you, stand still!” Leon yelled.
2.
ALMOST THREE YEARS after the Ufa explosion, the Line was finally running a more or less normal service in western Europe, across territories which had finally accepted that the incident had been a terrorist attack and that Line trains were as safe as human ingenuity could make them. East of the Urals, though, service was patchy.
Not that Europe as a whole paid much attention. The blast had rendered the countryside uninhabitable for a hundred kilometres in every direction, but the news cycle was always hungry and nothing was happening there now the humanitarian effort in the area had bedded in.
Nobody had ever expected the Line to become a reality. Its partisans boosted it as a project greater even than the railroads that had been driven across America in the nineteenth century, a true post-Millennial undertaking, a great adventure, but when it came to actually building the thing a post-Millennial hangover set in. It had been fine in theory, erstwhile supporters whined, it was a wonderful dream, a marvellous thought-experiment. But nothing more.
Somehow, though, it did become reality. There was a TransEurope Rail Company. Later, when anyone thought about it, it seemed that there had always been a TransEurope Rail Company, but nobody could quite remember when it had appeared or where it had come from. It just seemed to spring into existence, fully-formed and ready to lay track, and that was what it proceeded to do.
The Line crept along, year after year. Six of the Company’s Chairmen were the victims of assassins, and four more met with accidents that might really have been accidents, if you were in a forgiving frame of mind. One vanished without trace on the journey between his home in Madrid and his office five minutes’ drive away. According to one online wag, the last public works project to have resulted in such loss of life was the Pyramids.
FLURRIES OF SNOW were dancing in the air when Forsyth got off the train in Poznan. He took a taxi from the station to the Poznaski, a little hotel just off the Market Square, went up to his room, and stood at the window watching the snow drift down. Winter was early; in a few days most Polish cities would be at least ankle-deep in polluted snow and filthy slush and the populace would be in the process of decamping to the ski-slopes of Zakopane and Szczyrk. Leon called it snow-frenzy and was proud to boast that he had never allowed his feet anywhere near a pair of ski-bindings.
Snow-frenzy. Forsyth smiled, went over to the phone on the bedside table, and dialled.
“What.”
“It’s me.”
“Oh, well, hello me,” Leon said in a bantering tone of voice. “Are we enjoying our holiday?”
“It’s snowing.”
“Don’t move, damn you!” Leon yelled. “Sorry,” he said in a quieter voice. “Not you.”
“Am I interrupting something important?” Forsyth asked, grinning.
“I’ve found this wonderful face; too good to lose. I might be able to recast Sobieski.”
Forsyth carried the phone back to the window and looked down into the street. A tram was just pulling into the stop across the road. The doors opened and disgorged figures with their shoulders hunched up against the snow and wind. The snow was making fuzzy haloes around the streetlights.
“Crispin came round this morning,” said Leon. “Just after you left.”
“What did he want?”
“Well... hard to tell,” Leon said. “He wasn’t speaking any language I’ve ever heard before.”
Forsyth laughed.
“It’s okay for you to laugh, you bastard,” Leon said. “You didn’t have to try and make sense of what he was saying. I mean, we talked to each other, but I think we were having two entirely separate conversations.”
“I’ll see him when I get back. Anything else?”
“Ewa phoned.”
Oh dear. “Is she back?”
“She’s back and she wants to know why you weren’t waiting at Gdanska with your tongue hanging out when her train came in.”
“She didn’t tell me when she was due back.”
“Well, maybe if you had a phone like everyone else she’d have been able to let you know she was coming.”
“You know how I feel about phones,” Forsyth said.
“Fucking dinosaur.”
“Was she very angry?”
“I learned some new swearwords,” said Leon.
Oh well. “I’ll see her when I get back, too.”
Silence, at the other end of the line.
“I’ve got a job to do, Leon,” Forsyth said after a while. “Don’t give me a hard time.”
“Oh, stop whining,” Leon said, and hung up.
OFFICIALLY, MOST EUROPEAN governments affected an air of enlightened bemusement when it came to matters pertaining to the Line. It seemed to serve no rational purpose; it carried freight but hardly enough to pay its operating costs, and passengers had to take out citizenship before they could even set foot on a platform. It was just there, nobody knew why.
Unofficially, there was a certain cachet involved in having a Line station on your territory. It was irrational, if you thought about it, but there was something about the Line which made it seem important. Most countries had at least two Line Consulates. Some polities had three. Poland had one.
Polish television still had the charming habit of broadcasting debates from the Sejm, and in his long hours of inactivity Forsyth had become something of a student of them. While nothing was ever said straight out – which was unusual in itself in Poland – it was obvious to him that it annoyed Poles to have only one Line Consulate – and that not in the capital. It was, he thought, regarded as something of an insult, as if the Line saw Poland as just a couple of borders to be crossed on the way from Greater Germany to Ukraine and points east, and the Consulate in Poznan little more than a necessity, unpalatable but unavoidable.
As if determined to rub it in, the Line hadn’t even bothered to be subtle about its incursion into Poznan; they had just bou
ght one of the old inner-metropolitan stations and a couple of hundred hectares of land around it, demolished most of the surrounding buildings, thrown several tens of kilometres of smartwire around the whole thing, and declared it sovereign territory. Forsyth sometimes wondered if the Line’s rulers occasionally tuned in to the Polish version of Today In Parliament, and if they chuckled to themselves when they did.
Apart from Hindenberg, the ethnic Silesian homeland in Upper Silesia, and the Pomeranian Republic, there were no polities on Poland’s territory. Poland’s borders had been going backward and forward for hundreds of years. For quite a large part of its history, the country hadn’t existed at all as a geographical entity, and Poles liked to remind everyone that it was here to stay now and ready to take its rightful place in Europe. They also took a certain delight in the irony that, just as Poland consolidated its nationhood after so many years, Europe was fracturing around it. The media liked to gesture casually but with no small smugness at Greater Germany, which was a continually-simmering landscape of volatile little nations.
To the Polish Government, the Line was an abomination, a foreign country that had come here in the guise of a railway track, literally laid across their territory sleeper by sleeper and rail by rail. And the continuing diplomatic snubs only made matters worse.
Forsyth had a sneaking admiration for the Line. It was, when you boiled off all the diplomatic bollocks, an astounding work of civil engineering, a Grand Gesture from a continent which seemed to be putting most of its energies these days into subdividing itself into progressively smaller and smaller states. He thought that one day the Line might be the only thing holding all those little states together, like the cord running through a string of pearls.
“NO,” SAID THE official.
“Beg pardon?” asked Forsyth.
The official, a little Iberian with a cast in his left eye and an expensive wool-knit suit, looked up from the pad on his desk. “No,” he said again.
“I don’t understand.”
The Iberian sighed patiently. “We have no record of these men,” he explained.
Forsyth thought about it. He’d been kicking his heels for three days at the Poznaski, waiting for someone from the Line to see him, and while Poznan was a nice enough town and the food at the hotel was excellent, he was running out of money.
“They told their families they were enrolling for work on the Line,” he said finally.
The Iberian gave a little wince. “The records of the TransEurope Rail Route,” he said, emphasising the name for Forsyth’s benefit, “show no mention of these men.” The Line actually existed as two entities. One, the sovereign nation, was the Independent Trans-European Republic; the other, the TransEurope Rail Route, was the infrastructure, the tracks themselves. It was sometimes easy to mix them up.
Forsyth rubbed his face. The room they were sitting in was small and modern and unfashionably bare. Its only furniture was a desk and two upright chairs. He had the impression it wasn’t used very often. Through the window behind the Iberian, he could see a seething curtain of windblown snow that occasionally drew aside to reveal another building across a dreary courtyard, all net-curtained windows and dreary balconies.
“Why would they tell their families that they were going to work on the TransEurope Rail Route if they weren’t?” he asked.
The Iberian shrugged and spread his hands.
“They were going to work on the extension in Magadan,” Forsyth ventured. “It’s a long way away. A bit wild.”
The Iberian nodded sadly, as if disappointed to find a suspected character flaw in the man sitting opposite him. “You must appreciate, Mister Forsyth, that a project on the scale of the TransEurope Rail Route could not hope to continue if its farthest-flung sites were hopelessly out of contact with its central authority.” He clasped his hands on top of his pad. “We are aware of every citizen working for the Company.” He lifted his clasped fists and lowered them slowly back onto the pad. “And these two men are not among them.”
Forsyth sat where he was on the uncomfortable chair.
The Iberian unclasped his hands and twitched one shirt cuff to reveal a silver Piaget. “I am sorry we could not be of more assistance,” he said, squinting at the watch. “And I am afraid I have another meeting scheduled.”
“I know these two men,” Forsyth said, leaning across the desk, tapping the pad, and enjoying the Iberian’s unexpressed displeasure. “They’re reliable, hard-working men. If they said they were working on the Line, that’s where they were.”
The Iberian stood. “Mister Forsyth,” he said stiffly, “the citizenship list of the TransEurope Rail Route is a matter of public record.” This was not entirely true. If you looked closely enough at the citizenship list, and were prepared to do some intensive cross-referencing, many of the names turned out to be sockpuppets and aliases. The Line welcomed the wealthy and hard-working, and was sometimes not too fussy about their pasts. “If your missing gentlemen are not included in it, they were never citizens. And if they were never citizens, they never worked for us.”
“Surely it’s better to let their families know what’s happened. That would be the most important thing. In the case of compensation, I’m sure we could reach an understanding.”
The Iberian shook his head and scooped the pad up from the desk. “Understanding.” He dropped the pad into a jacket pocket. “These men were never citizens of the TransEurope Rail Route, Mister Forsyth. We do not know who they are or where they are. I suggest you consult their families and their creditors for possible reasons for their disappearance.” He walked to the door and opened it. “It has been our experience that many people who wish to escape their familial and financial responsibilities give us as their last address.” He favoured Forsyth with a frosty little smile. “It seems that we have become, in the popular imagination at least, a modern Foreign Legion, a place where people go to forget, or at least to become forgotten. It is rather tiresome, if I may be frank with you.” He consulted his watch again. “And it takes up more of our time than we can spare.”
Forsyth sat where he was. He was a tall man with hunched shoulders and a full head of prematurely-white hair. He had found that sometimes his physical presence could be intimidating if he remained still and looked determined.
The Iberian said, “It cannot have escaped your attention that the Independent Trans-European Republic is experiencing a period of flux.”
That much was an understatement. “I’m grateful for your time, if that’s what you mean,” said Forsyth.
“There is no work in Magadan at the moment,” the Iberian continued. “Our citizens there have been redeployed to carry out routine maintenance in other parts of the Republic while this situation continues. If your missing men were ever in Magadan, they are not there now.”
“If they have been redeployed, there must be records.”
“There are,” said the Iberian. “And their names are not among them.”
Forsyth got up from his chair. “I didn’t get your name,” he said.
“Perfectly true,” said the Iberian.
3.
THE ENGLISH PUB on Senatorska had draught Guinness and seventeen different brands of vodka. Marek, the owner, had spent a year behind the bar of a pub in Darlington. He had returned with a shining vision of what an English pub should be like, but he’d been unable to get hold of most of the requisite fixtures and fittings. The seating was upholstered in an awful scarlet velour and there was a dart board, but he’d had to take the darts away after one particularly horrific brawl. He’d wanted a pool table, but the nearest one was in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder and would have cost half his annual income.
“Why do we always come here?” asked Ewa.
“Reminds me of home,” Forsyth said.
“You told me you hated your home.”
“That’s what I meant.”
Ewa was Forsyth’s occasional girlfriend. She painted huge abstracts on panels of plasterboard in an abandoned fla
t in the east of the city, and sold them for unlikely amounts in the galleries on Nowy swiat. She was just back from an exhibition in Berlin, and as usual when she returned home she was full of loathing for Poland.
Not that it was difficult to loathe Poland, sitting in the English Pub. The place was full of the usual career drinkers, a few sharp-suited young entrepreneurs, a couple of tourists who had taken a wrong turn or got on the wrong tram and were sitting wondering where they were and what the hell they were doing there. Over in a corner, a little group of Georgians, with wan, hard faces and huge moustaches, was drinking for free. Marek paid them a tenth of his monthly takings and as much free vodka as they could drink, in return for them not making his elbows bend in the wrong direction.
“Stop staring at them,” Ewa said. “They’ll come over.”
“I’m not staring.” Forsyth said, but he’d been watching the Georgians almost all night, because the only one of the little group without a moustache was Crispin.
“I hate that man,” said Ewa.
“Mm,” Forsyth replied. “Pardon?”
Ewa snorted. She downed her glass of Wyborowa in one swallow and glared at him. She had been glaring at him ever since he got back from Poznan. Ewa liked to be met at the station or the airport when she returned from her foreign trips.
“I already told you I was sorry,” Forsyth reminded her.
“Yes,” she said, unimpressed. “And stop watching that horrible man, or I will leave.”
Crispin was laughing and shouting, completely relaxed. He was pouring drinks, joining in jokes. Now he got up. One of the Georgians got up too. They hugged. They kissed. Crispin came over to Forsyth and Ewa’s table and pulled up one of the velour-covered stools.
“Hey, Ewa,” he said. “How they hanging?”
“I’m going home,” Ewa announced, standing up.
“Um,” said Forsyth.
Ewa looked down at him. “Well?”
Forsyth looked from Ewa to Crispin, back to Ewa. “I need to talk to Crispin.”
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