Europe in Winter

by Dave Hutchinson

  “Fine.” Ewa grabbed her shoulder bag and stormed out, shoving aside one particularly amorous drunk as she made her way to the door.

  Crispin beamed beatifically and waggled his fingers at her. “’Bye, Ewa.”

  “Thanks for that, Crispin,” Forsyth said. “Why couldn’t you have stayed over there with your mates, eh?”

  Crispin looked over his shoulder. The Georgians were drinking and shouting again. “Good ol’ boys,” he said, almost nostalgically.

  “Crispin, what do you want?”

  “Been looking for you,” Crispin said, waving to the Georgians.

  “I’ve been in Poznan.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Crispin turned to look at him, his expression suddenly serious. “Ever hear of Babykiller?”

  Forsyth put his hand to his face and said, “Oh.”

  “It’s his stash, man,” he heard Crispin say. “I put it down the hole last year. I have to get it back.”

  Forsyth looked up, suddenly tired. “You decided to get involved with Babykiller?”

  Crispin made a sour face. “I never expected the fucking government to resign, man.”

  “You should always expect the government to resign, Crispin.”

  “Ah,” Crispin waved a hand dismissively, “I thought they were there another eight, ten months at least. I had the stuff, I stashed it, then the government went tits-up and we were pulled out of the hole. I never got the chance to bring it up.”

  “Well, at least it’s safe,” Forsyth mused.

  Crispin gave Forsyth his hard stare. It made him look vaguely myopic. “Will you help me or will I have to do it myself?”

  “You’ll get yourself arrested.”

  “So help me.”

  Forsyth sighed. “How long do you have?”

  “Tomorrow morning. Then I’m hamburger.”

  “Well thanks for giving me so much time to get ready,” Forsyth said.

  “But you’ll help, right?”

  Forsyth looked at his watch. “Where is it?”

  “JESPERSEN SAYS HE’LL have you arrested if you go near any of the sites,” Forsyth said, his breath wisping in the air in front of his lips.

  “Fuck him,” Crispin muttered, each word a distinct little cloud of fog.

  Behind them, somebody laughed drunkenly. Forsyth looked round, but the street was too badly-lit to make out who had made the noise.

  “You’re some kind of fucking nutcase to get involved with Babykiller, Crispin.”

  Crispin grunted. “Not that you’re being judgemental or anything.”

  During its various travails, Poland had always thrown up dark legends, and Babykiller was the latest and possibly greatest of them all. Shadowy, vague, seemingly unarrestable. Possibly one man, possibly a collective of underworld masterminds, possibly neither. One story said he was a Lapp, from up North of Rovaniemi. Older Poles, who had never trusted their leaders no matter who those leaders happened to be, contended that Babykiller was government-sponsored, but did not specify which government in particular. Crispin was the only person Forsyth had ever encountered who claimed to have had personal dealings with Poland’s demon mastermind.

  “It was a dead drop,” Crispin muttered. “The stuff was left in a luggage locker at Centralna. I never met him. What, you think he’s stupid? You think I’m stupid?”

  “I don’t know about him,” Forsyth said. “You already know what I think about you.”

  “To see Babykiller is to die,” Crispin said stoically.

  “Must be tough on his barber.”

  “You’re so fucking funny.”

  “I’m also fucking helping you out of the kindness of my fucking heart, and don’t you fucking forget it.”

  “Yeah, all right, man,” Crispin said, all contrition. “I’m wound up, yeah? Got a lot riding on this deal, okay?”

  “Not least the continued custody of your balls.”

  Crispin laughed nervously. “Yeah. Right. See, the deal’s like this. Babykiller lets me have the stuff on account and I offload it on somebody. I got to offload it for a certain figure, right? But anything over that I get to keep. Can’t fail.”

  Forsyth could think of any number of ways it could fail. He said, “You’ve sold it to the Georgians, haven’t you.”

  Crispin smiled.

  Forsyth stopped on the darkened street and stared at Crispin. “How many times have I told you?” he shouted. “Russians, Chechens, Ingush, Georgians. They’re all the same. You can’t trust any of them.”

  “I think you’re a bigot, you know?” Crispin said calmly.

  “At least I’m not wandering around Warsaw in fear for my life from Babykiller and the Georgians. Oh Christ.” Something had just occurred to Forsyth. “Not a fucking war.”

  Crispin shrugged. “Dunno if you could call it a war.”

  “Well what in Christ’s name would you call it?”

  Another shrug. “I guess they have a lot of old scores to settle. Hey, I only sell the stuff. If they sell it on and use the proceeds to buy weapons of mass destruction, that’s their business. I don’t get involved with the end-user thing.”

  Forsyth raised his hands in surrender. “Sorry, Crispin. I’m not getting involved in financing a ruddy war.”

  “Oh man,” Crispin said sadly. “They don’t like the fucking Russians. I don’t like the fucking Russians. You don’t like the fucking Russians, as I recall.”

  Forsyth remembered a long couple of months working on the Moscow Metro extension. Chandeliers and all. He stood listening to the night.

  “I know you loved the Moscow Metro, man,” Crispin said, “but this is business.”

  “You can’t trust the Georgians, Crispin,” Forsyth said. “All they want to do is kill Russians.”

  “I’m not going to blame them for that,” Crispin sniffed. “Evil empire and etcetera, right? Just doing my bit for the Cold War a few years too late, right?”

  If anything was guaranteed to piss Forsyth off, it was people trying to play Central European politics. He had hated that sort of thing even before he had come to Poland. He said, “Nobody wins in a situation like this, Crispin.”

  Crispin laughed. “You poor sap, Snowy. Everybody wins. Babykiller gets his money and is happy, I get my money and am happy, the Georgians get their guns and get to kill Russians and are happy.”

  “You’re just spreading sunshine around Central Europe, in other words,” Forsyth said.

  “This is a complicated region,” Crispin allowed sagely.

  “Well, thank you, AJP Taylor.”

  “Don’t try to talk me out of this, Snowy,” Crispin said seriously. “I’m in too deep.”

  “And stop calling me Snowy. You know I hate that.”

  STARE MIASTO, THE Old Town Station, had turned out to be the most contentious of the stations in the Metro project. In 1944, after the Uprising, the Germans had taken their anger out on the Old Town and completely rubbled it. When the War was over, the Poles had rebuilt the Old Town. The original plans had been destroyed, the story had it, so they did it from Canaletto paintings. Poles could work miracles when they put their minds to it, although the reconstruction was undertaken using cheap materials and the area was starting to take on a rather shabby look. Still, hundreds of thousands of tourists still came each year, took their photos, and left again, believing they had been looking at the original buildings.

  Varsovians tended to be protective of the Old Town, and hands were flung in the air when the plans for Stare Miasto Station were produced. The original plans had called for extensive excavation and selective demolition, and a ghastly faux-mediaeval edifice to house the station concourse. Escalators. Beltways. Forsyth couldn’t remember who the architects were – some Swedish firm, he thought – but he thought the place should have won them some kind of award for the collision of kitsch with state-of-the-art transport technology.

  After a number of rowdy public meetings and demonstrations, the Swedes had had
the contract taken away from them. A new firm – Forsyth didn’t have a clue who they were – came in with a huge amount of capital and produced plans which involved the minimum of disturbance. Everything underground; discreet entrances; no beltways. Work was begun – got quite a long way, relatively speaking – and then the Government changed, and after a few weeks the workers Forsyth represented began to drift away across Europe to other projects.

  Forsyth and Crispin walked across the Square to one of the station entrances. The entrance was covered with a small, notionally temporary, concrete blockhouse, its sides decorated with brightly-coloured but unimaginative graffiti and peeling flyposters advertising films and rock bands Forsyth had never heard of.

  There was a box mounted on one wall of the blockhouse at about head height. Forsyth checked the lock’s slot to make sure nobody had poured superglue into it, then swiped his key-card through it.

  “High tech, man,” Crispin murmured. “Fucking love it.”

  “Shut up, Crispin,” Forsyth said. The front of the box hinged down, exposing a keypad, half a dozen or so little black cubes and the grey rubber cup of a retinal reader. Forsyth typed his security code into the keypad and put his eye to the cup. There was the customary flash of blood-red light that left him blinking away afterimages. After a moment there was a snap of magnetic locks and a little door popped open low on the side of the blockhouse.

  “Open sesame,” Crispin said triumphantly. “Fuckin’ A, Snowy.”

  “I told you, don’t call me that.” He unplugged one of the little black memory modules and pocketed it. “Come on.”

  They ducked through the doorway and Forsyth pulled the door shut behind them while Crispin took a heavy rubberised torch from the charging rack on the wall. “Down here,” he said, waving the beam of the torch towards the escalators.

  “Just a second.” Forsyth popped the cover off the alarm box and switched the system off. “Okay.”

  They walked down the escalators to the big drum-shaped concourse. The torchlight shone on bright white tile.

  “Nice work,” Crispin said, looking about him. “Kwak-Kwak’s boys do this?”

  Forsyth nodded. “Some of them. He lost a lot of them to the Denver Metro.”

  Crispin snorted. “Yeah, well, at least that had a fifty-fifty chance of getting finished, didn’t it.”

  “Why didn’t you go back for that one?”

  “Ah.” Crispin, his face cast in planes of light and shadow by the torch, looked sad. “Persona non grata back home.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not that I’d want to go back. I mean, who wants to go to Colorado?” He gestured in the direction of the escalators grouped in the middle of the booking hall. “Down there. Eastbound platform.”

  “I didn’t think you ever got this far into town,” Forsyth said as they went deeper into the station.

  “I didn’t,” said Crispin. “I was two stations up the line, got in on one late shift and walked down the tunnel.”

  Forsyth thought about it. “That’s, what, two kilometres?”

  “Almost three. I figured if anybody ever found the stuff they’d never be able to connect it to me. Nobody would be crazy enough to walk that far just to stash something.”

  “It’s a long walk,” Forsyth agreed. The tunnels were full of machinery and equipment and usually ankle-deep in water until the walls had been properly sealed. A six klick round-trip under those conditions would have taken most of the night.

  “Well, a man’s gotta do, et cetera.” Crispin shone the torch on the white-tiled curve of the escalator shaft. “That really is a lovely shape,” he said. “Who got the design contract in the end?”

  “No idea.”

  “The Swedes got shafted, yeah?”

  Forsyth nodded.

  “I met one of their guys once, when they were surveying.” Crispin shook his head. “Fucking spooky, man. So fucking clean, you know what I mean?”

  “I never met any of them.”

  “Wow.” Crispin’s eyes widened at the memory. “Everything was ironed. I never saw so many sharp edges on a man. It wasn’t natural.”

  They were at the bottom of the escalators now. A series of low, arched tunnel entrances fanned out along a lovely curved wall of white tile. Forsyth gestured towards the one that led to the Eastbound platform and they walked through it.

  He’d only been here a couple of times before, and he still hadn’t quite managed to work out how the unknown architects had achieved this little miracle here under the streets of Old Warsaw. All the foot tunnels leading off from the bottom of the escalators were exactly the same length. They led away from each other in absolutely straight lines, neither rising nor falling, at roughly thirty-degree intervals. And each one ended in a different Metro platform. Forsyth had seen the design drawings, and it still seemed to him that by rights all four foot tunnels should emerge on the same platform. He couldn’t work it out.

  Sometimes, when he thought about it, he remembered the first time he ever went underground, digging the London Underground extension out to Reading, and that solid dread of working with hundreds of tonnes of earth between him and sunlight. The foot tunnels at Stare Miasto made him feel the same way, as if he was in an alien environment.

  “Why did you up and leave like that, by the way?” he asked.

  “Weird shit,” Crispin muttered, which was his shorthand for anything he didn’t like. “Really weird shit.”

  “Oh.”

  “I was out at Mokotów one shift and the place was full of cammo dudes.”

  Forsyth stopped. “Beg pardon?”

  “Cammo dudes,” Crispin said. More shorthand. He sighed. “Uniformed men with weapons,” he translated for Forsyth’s benefit.

  “Oh, come on,” Forsyth said, suspecting a heavily chemically-promoted hallucination.

  “I’m telling you. I saw these guys down in the tunnel at Mokotów and I thought the Poles had brought the Army in to clean the place up.”

  Forsyth laughed.

  “You may think it’s funny, man,” Crispin said. “I thought the bastards were coming for me. You know that Mankind’s sixth sense is self-preservation? Well I exercised it. Goodbye, au ’voir, etcetera.”

  “What did they look like?” Forsyth asked. “Yellow? Lots of feathers?” Crispin had once confided that he had seen Big Bird in one of the unfinished stations out in Skorosze. Although, as Leon had later pointed out, that was at a time when you were more likely to see Big Bird than a Metro train out there.

  “Black cammo suits,” Crispin said in a serious voice. “Those little fucking machine pistols that can turn a car into a colander.”

  Forsyth shook his head. The Metro wasn’t organised to have a standing staff of security guards; it relied on electronic security, which was considerably cheaper and never slept. The idea of armed men wandering around in the tunnels was hilarious. He remembered a previous paranoid episode of Crispin’s, which had involved an absolute certainty that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had come to Warsaw to assassinate him.

  “I have no idea why you’re still my friend,” he said to the figure walking in front of him, remembering other paranoid moments, other early-morning excursions for vaguely-explained purposes.

  “You collect strays,” Crispin said, which was not the answer Forsyth had been expecting.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You collect strays. That’s why you became a Rep. You like to look after people who have nowhere else to go.” He said it with such certainty that Forsyth didn’t know how to respond. “This way,” said Crispin, turning right when they reached the Eastbound platform.

  Forsyth paused at the entrance and watched the bobbing light of the torch silhouette Crispin. He looked around the platform. Crispin was right, Kwak-Kwak’s gang of itinerant Japanese tilers and platform men had done good work here. Kwak-Kwak’s boys were real artisans. Tiling work had some sort of Zen significance for them. You couldn’t hurry them, but they always came in under budget and ahead o
f schedule, and they came out of the hole at the end of every shift smiling secret little smiles, as if they had just solved some intensely personal puzzle.

  “Hey.”

  Forsyth looked along the platform, suddenly aware that he was in almost total darkness. At the far end, the light of Crispin’s torch lit a circle of tile and track and the black throat of the Metro tunnel.

  “Are you playing with yourself or something back there?” Crispin called irritably.

  “No,” Forsyth said, and his voice echoed along the platform.

  “I mean,” Crispin said, turning away and shining his torch into the Metro tunnel, “I thought we came here for a purpose or something.”

  Forsyth wandered along the platform until he was standing just behind Crispin. “Will this take long?”

  Crispin shook his head.

  “Only I’ve got a hot date with Ewa. Or I did until you turned up.”

  “Your problem, Snowy,” Crispin said, hopping down off the platform and onto the trackbed, “is that you think with your dick.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Oh yes it is.” Crispin shone the torch up at him. “Remember that girl over in Wola? What was her name?”

  “Agatka.”

  “Yeah. Agatka.” Crispin swung the torch down and shone it directly into the tunnel. The light picked out stacks of rail, piles of concrete sleepers, equipment lockers. “You nearly lost your head over that one, remember?”

  “No I didn’t.” Forsyth jumped down beside Crispin.

  Crispin said, “Hah!” and his voice echoed dully along the empty station. “Her daddy was some bigwig at Ursus and there was this job going and you were going to take it and spend the rest of your life making fucking tractors, man, I remember. Tractors! Take more than love to make me do that.”

  Forsyth shrugged. “You never met her.”

  “Good thing, too. I’d have read her the Riot Act.” Crispin set off into the tunnel. “Trying to take a man out of the hole and put him onto a production line. Jesus.”

  “It was a managerial job,” Forsyth said. “I wouldn’t have been on the production line.”