Europe in Winter

by Dave Hutchinson

  “Whatever.”

  “You’d have tried to sleep with her,” Forsyth said, following him. “You always try to sleep with my girlfriends.”

  “No,” Crispin said, shaking his head. “Don’t remember that one, Snowy.”

  They walked for some minutes, picking their way past parked tunnel tractors and redundant pumps. A fat cable ran along the ceiling, supported by staples driven into the tunnel segments. It carried a line of daylight-emulation lamps but there was no power down here at the moment to light them. The only illumination came from the bobbing light of the torch as Crispin swung it left and right and up and down, seemingly at random.

  “You tried to sleep with Magda,” Forsyth said.

  “No I didn’t.”

  “Yes you did. After we got married she said you’d tried to talk her into bed, you bastard.”

  “Here,” Crispin said, shining the torch on the side of the tunnel.

  “Don’t deny it,” Forsyth said. “You tried to get Magda into bed, didn’t you?”

  “Snowy,” Crispin said with an irritable sideways glance. “Let’s keep our minds on the matter in hand, yeah?”

  “You dragged me down here,” Forsyth muttered. “I don’t see why you should have a good time.”

  Crispin stepped over to the wall of the tunnel, took a multitool from his pocket, and used one of its driver bits to start loosening an inspection panel from a utilities conduit. “I’m not having a good time.”

  “Did you ever try it on with Ewa?”

  Crispin laughed and carried on unscrewing the panel.

  Forsyth put his hands in his pockets and looked first one way then the other along the tunnel. The ribbed walls vanished into the darkness on either side. He whistled a few flat notes.

  Crispin lowered the inspection panel to the trackbed and reconfigured the tool as a wrench. He reached inside the inspection hatch and started to unbolt something.

  “How did you get into this, anyway?” Forsyth asked.

  “Get into what?”

  “Mixed up with Babykiller. The Georgians.”

  “These things just happen, Snowy.” Crispin gave a little grunt and Forsyth heard something fall and rattle inside the conduit. “Shit.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “What?”

  “How do ‘these things just happen’?”

  “Oh, I dunno.” Crispin was up on tiptoes now, both arms and his head and shoulders inside the inspection hatch. He had the torch inside as well, and his body was blocking most of the light. His voice sounded flat and dull inside the conduit. “Word gets about, the stuff comes down to me, I find a buyer, the money goes back up to Babykiller. That’s how these things just happen.”

  Forsyth looked at his watch, pushed the light button. He had to tilt it to make out the digits. “It’s getting late, Crispin.”

  “Are you charging me by the hour?”

  “Very funny.” Forsyth tapped his toes and whistled another couple of notes. “It’s taking a bloody long time, though.”

  “Jesus Christ, Snowy,” Crispin sighed from inside the conduit. “I think I preferred it when you were bitching about your women.”

  Forsyth went for a little walk. Half a dozen paces out, half a dozen paces back. “Did I tell you I saw Jens the other day?”

  “Yeah, I think so. How is the old bastard?”

  “Same as ever.” How much longer was this going to take?

  “Ever worry that it might happen to you?”

  “What might happen to me?”

  By the sound of his voice, Crispin was at full stretch inside the conduit. Occasionally there was a metallic rattle as something fell. “One day you’re working your happy little heart out, the next there’s some snafu and if you’re lucky you wind up in a wheelchair behind a desk.”

  Jespersen had had the misfortune to be working on Copenhagen’s metro when the belt of a spoil conveyor tore and one end whistled up the tunnel and broke his back. “Can’t say I ever thought very much about it,” Forsyth said.

  “Yeah. Well that’s always been your problem.”

  “I thought my problem was that I think with my dick.”

  “That too.” The light inside the conduit became stronger and stronger, and Crispin emerged from the hatch. In one hand he held the multitool and the torch. In the other was a small opaque plastic envelope. He grinned triumphantly.

  “Excuse me for saying so, but that doesn’t look like an awfully large amount of drugs,” Forsyth observed.

  “Who mentioned drugs?” said Crispin. “Did I mention drugs?”

  “Well, no. I just sort of –”

  “You just sort of assumed, Snowy.” Crispin waved the torch at him. “You just sort of assumed that because Good Old Crispin was involved it had to be drugs.”

  “It seemed a pretty safe bet,” Forsyth agreed.

  “Well,” Crispin said, and then Forsyth was lying on the trackbed, his ears ringing, with no clear memory of how he had got there.

  He swallowed a couple of times to try and clear his ears, and the ringing diminished slightly. He lay very still, feeling bruised places on his back and legs. The torch was lying a few metres away, and in its beam he could see the plastic envelope wedged under the wheels of a loader. Crispin was gone.

  Forsyth sat up very slowly, completely at a loss. One moment Crispin had been talking to him, the next he was lying on the ground. His head and chest hurt and he could taste blood in his mouth, and there was a wet, earthy smell in the air that hadn’t been there earlier.

  He got up and went over and picked up the torch. He shone it around, but there was no sign of Crispin, though there were some fresh-looking marks on some of the tunnel lining. He retrieved the envelope and stuffed it in a pocket.

  “Crispin?” he called. A bolt of pain went up one side of his neck, making him wince, but he called Crispin’s name again. “You utter bastard!” he shouted, but no reply came. “Crispin!”

  He listened, and this time he thought he heard someone moving in the stationward section of tunnel.

  “You fucker, Crispin,” he muttered, starting to walk towards the noise. It was then that he happened to glance down and saw a tiny ruby-red dot dancing on his chest. He was so puzzled by this that he didn’t watch his footing, and he tripped over something and went headlong onto the trackbed, and at the same moment the tunnel exploded with hammering noise and light.

  “Fuck!” Forsyth screamed, and rolled behind a skip. “Fuck!” The tunnel was full of ricocheting fragments of concrete and metal, and Forsyth tried to curl himself into a ball of zero size and mass.

  At length, the storm abated and silence fell again on the tunnel, though Forsyth’s ears had begun to ring once more. Very slowly, he put his head around one side of the skip, and in the gap between it and the tunnel wall he could see the bobbing light of torches back towards the station. Very carefully, trying not to make any noise and at the same time trying to keep the skip between himself and whoever was in the station, he began to move back down the tunnel. He couldn’t stop thinking about Crispin’s story of the cammo dudes, men with little guns that could perforate a motor car like a teabag.

  At first he moved on hands and knees, but that wasn’t anything like quick enough to suit him, so he got up in a kind of crouching run, checking frequently for any more of those red dots of light on his body. The tunnel curved twenty metres or so outside the station, and when he had the bulk of the tunnel wall between him and whoever was back there he got up from the crouch and started to run. Very quietly.

  Stare Miasto was an interchange station between the east-west and north-south lines. There were utilities tunnels every hundred and fifty metres, connections between the east-west and north-south main tunnels in case of fire or some other disaster. Forsyth ducked into one of them, switched off the torch, and pressed himself up against the wall, listening. No sound behind him, no light in the main tunnel.

  He picked his way carefully down the cross-tunnel, checking eac
h step before he put his foot down. Once he thought he heard a sound behind him, and froze against the curving wall. He waited for a very long time, trying to control his panting breath, but there were no more noises, and he set out again, feeling each step with his toes for obstructions.

  His hand encountered a gap in the tunnel wall, and he felt a breath of cold damp air on his face from somewhere down below. This was one of the connections between the four tunnels, a ramp down to the north-south tracks. He stepped through the entrance. The ramp was a spiral, broad enough to allow purpose-designed emergency vehicles to go up or down with casualties or emergency workers. He went down the ramp, listening all the time for sounds behind him.

  Whatever had happened, whoever was in the east-west part of the station, he seemed to have left them behind. No sounds except for his ragged breathing. He stopped for a moment and his knees suddenly refused to respond to conscious commands and he slid down onto the tunnel floor. All of a sudden he was exhausted. It was all he could do to keep his head from nodding and his chin from sinking down onto his chest. What he wanted, most of all, at a truly fundamental level far far below conscious thought, was to go to sleep and wake up tomorrow in his own humble but warm and secure bed and know that this whole evening was a nightmare...

  A noise lifted him out of his faint, so suddenly that he jerked his head back and banged it against the tunnel wall. It was such a familiar noise that if some remote corner of his mind hadn’t been keeping track of where he was he might have ignored it altogether. It was the sound of an underground train, coming up the ramp from below. Except, as that remote corner of his mind reminded him, there were no underground trains on this stretch of line.

  He struggled to his feet and carried on down the ramp. He had been walking for a couple of minutes before he realised he could see the walls of the ramp; there seemed to be a faint, lambent glow somewhere ahead, and the sound of another train, and voices...

  At the bottom of the ramp he stepped out into warm yellow light, and heard an amplified voice speaking in Russian, and he lost his mind for a moment. Or for a minute. Or for an hour, he was never able to be sure afterwards. All he could be certain of was that he had ceased to be rational for some period of time, and when that period of time came to an end he was on his hands and knees on Juliana Bruna Street, down in Mokotów, being sick onto the pavement and trying to scream at the same time while someone shouted at him to be quiet from one of the flats along the street. He remembered that he had hallucinated someone speaking urgently to him in Russian, then he toppled over on his side and passed out.

  “NO,” SAID THE speaker grille of the security lock.

  “I need your help, Ewa,” Forsyth gasped, trying to crush himself out of sight in the doorway.

  “You should have fucking thought about that earlier, when you went off with that fucking degenerate.” The speaker system reduced Ewa’s voice to something that George Lucas might have used for those charming robots in the Star Wars films.

  “Ewa,” Forsyth said, desperately summoning what small reserves of macho remained to him, “let me in.”

  “Fuck off.”

  Forsyth looked out of the doorway. Ewa lived in a pretty nice, quiet street, a place the city’s recent epidemic of muggers and car thieves had so far overlooked, but suddenly every tree and waste-bin and doorway seemed to have too many shadows. Forsyth pressed Ewa’s button again and again, but she refused to answer. He saw a tram trundling along the main street, and began to run towards the stop.

  “GRANT, GRANT,” MAGDA said, shaking her head.

  “I need a place to stay,” Forsyth said, sitting forwards on the edge of the sofa and clasping his hands between his knees.

  Magda smiled. She was tall and black-haired, with high, Slavic cheekbones and a nose that had been broken as a child when, just to feel the breeze across the spokes, she had put her face too close to a rotating bicycle wheel that her father had been repairing.

  “You have no right to do this,” said Wojtek, Magda’s husband.

  “I know,” Forsyth said. “I know. But I’m desperate. I think I’m in a lot of trouble.”

  Wojtek was tall and blond and broad-shouldered. He was smoking a gorgeous Meerschaum pipe and regarding Forsyth like a scientist looking at a particularly disgusting tissue culture. “If you’re in trouble we want nothing to do with you,” he said. “This is a law-abiding household.”

  “It always was,” Forsyth said, annoyed. “What do you think it was like when I was living here?”

  “I didn’t mean that,” Wojtek said equably. Forsyth thought that Magda could have done worse in her choice of second husband. Wojtek was an architect, and one of the most reasonable men Forsyth had ever met. He was so reasonable he made Forsyth feel nauseous.

  “Well what the fuck did you mean?” he demanded.

  Magda sighed. “Grant, please.”

  Warsaw, more than most cities and polities of the Continent, was a place of taxis. It seemed that as soon as they were old enough to drive and managed to accumulate enough money to bribe the driving instructors, Varsovians passed their test, installed an antique two-way radio in their cars, and called themselves taxi drivers.

  Forsyth had ignored all those taxis, on the grounds that he felt safer with lots of members of the public around him, and the bus ride out to Magda and Wojtek’s flat in Ursynów had still been a nightmare. He thought perhaps he was starting to come out of the shock a little, finally beginning to think a little more clearly, but alarmingly it didn’t seem to be helping his situation at all.

  “I just need a place to stay tonight,” he said, and he heard himself begging, the imperfect ex-husband. “I need to sit and think for a while.”

  Wojtek looked at Magda, and then at Forsyth. “You can have an hour. Then we want you out of here.”

  Forsyth glared at him, but there was no force behind it. It was impossible to hate Wojtek. He had made Magda happy, had become Tomasz’s father in a way that Forsyth had never been. On the few previous occasions that they had met, Forsyth had wanted to hit him.

  Magda said, “Grant, you can’t stay here. You have to leave.”

  “Please, Magda.” He started to think about the long, long bus journey back into the centre of Warsaw and his very last hope.

  “I don’t know what trouble you’ve got yourself into, but we don’t want any part of it. And don’t shout.”

  “I wasn’t shouting.”

  THE PINK PALACE had not always been the Pink Palace. Once upon a time it had been Pałac Kultury, the Palace of Culture, a gift to the workers of Poland from the workers of the Soviet Union. Forsyth, who had seen a lot of ugly buildings in his travels, thought that on the evidence of the Palace of Culture the workers of the Soviet Union must have really hated the workers of Poland.

  After the collapse of the Communist government in Poland, and the subsequent fragmentation of the Soviet Union, Varsovians had been faced with the dilemma of what to do with the immense Stalinist-Baroque monolith that had been landed on their city like a chunky Amazing Stories spacecraft. Should they demolish it? Should they build a pleasing façade over the hateful Soviet one? Competitions were held, to try and find a solution, but without success. The one good thing, the people of Warsaw said, about the Palace of Culture was that you could see it from more or less everywhere in the city, rendering it almost impossible to get lost.

  The debate went on beyond the Millennium, and might have meandered on, in the manner of Polish debate, for decades, had the Pink Pilot not taken the initiative, fitted a Heath Robinson paint-spraying rig to a stolen Russian helicopter, flown it low over central Warsaw one night, and ended the debate for ever.

  Forsyth thought it was a typically Polish gesture, wild and romantic and expensive and completely futile, but in the days following the Palace of Culture’s unscheduled paint-job the Pink Pilot became a national hero. Nie ran a straw poll which suggested that the Pilot would wipe the board if he (or she, Political Correctness having taken some
small root in Poland by then) chose to run for President. The news networks ran endless items theorising on the Pilot’s origins and suggesting a certain amount of official collusion because of the apparent failure of Warsaw’s Air Traffic Control to spot the maverick aircraft. Others dredged up the story of Matthias Rust, who flew a Cessna right into Red Square, to demonstrate that such things were not only possible but had a precedent.

  Forsyth, kicking his heels that Autumn while the Government argued over the construction of the termini out in Wola, had sat in the flat and watched all the news programmes and thought he could feel the whole city – the whole country – breathe a sigh of relief.

  The relief was so tangible that protest marches were mounted when attempts were made to remove the pink paint. When the city authorities tried to repaint the Palace in battleship grey there was a riot. The Pink Palace became a symbol of everything Polish, of the final humiliation of the Soviet enemy. Forsyth thought the whole business was stupid and he found his admiration for the Poles increasing every time he happened to look up while wandering around town and saw the pink edifice.

  At any rate, he used to. He could see the Palace from the windows of Atelier Dudek, all lit up and pink, and all of a sudden it seemed sinister and hot, diseased somehow. He shuddered and drank some more vodka.

  “Careful with that,” Leon said.

  “Do me a favour,” Forsyth muttered, screwing the top off another airline miniature of Wyborowa and emptying it into his glass.

  Without taking his feet down off the mixing desk, Leon looked over his shoulder at the closed-circuit monitors along the opposite wall. They showed various surrealistically-tilted panes of grey-scaled urban landscape around the building, but no people.

  “Show me,” he said.

  Forsyth took the plastic envelope from his pocket and tossed it across. Leon caught it and made a face. “Is this blood here?”

  “I think so.” Forsyth drained his glass and opened another miniature. The ride from Ursynów into the centre of town had totally unnerved him, on top of everything else that had unnerved him tonight. The one good thing that had happened to him in the last six hours was finding Leon still at the workshop and willing to let him in.