Europe in Winter

by Dave Hutchinson

  “This man – his name was Mundt, by the way; does that sound familiar? No? Well, Mundt made something of a conceptual leap. His research led him to a way of manipulating landscape in a way which connected two distant points. Which suddenly made him interesting to a lot of people.”

  Forsyth shrugged. “So?”

  “Herr Professor Mundt was very interested in tunnels,” Rudi said. “And he lived in Dresden-Neustadt.”

  “The owners of which are rebuilding the Warsaw Metro. Which is mostly tunnels.”

  Rudi nodded. “Just so.”

  Forsyth thought about it. “So what are you saying? That the Warsaw Metro comes out in Moscow?” A few years ago, it would have sounded ridiculous. These days, with people taking weekend breaks in the Community, it actually didn’t sound unreasonable.

  “That would be something worth killing to protect, wouldn’t it?” Rudi said. He looked over Forsyth’s shoulder. In the far distance, one of the waiting staff was making the long, long journey towards their table. “If it were true.”

  “IT’S AN INTERESTING situation, when you sit down and think about it,” Rudi said, picking his way delicately between piles of equipment and building material.

  Forsyth stopped and miserably shone the beam of his torch on the tunnel walls, the roof, the trackbed. He wished Rudi would shut up. He wished he was somewhere else.

  “Why, for instance, would Crispin hide a map of the Warsaw Metro in the Warsaw Metro?” Rudi went on. “Apart from the poetic resonance, of course.”

  Forsythe glowered at him.

  “I’m not the person who was supposed to come and help you, you know,” said Rudi. “Leon got the Japanese government to contact Les Coureurs on your behalf; I’m running a data scraping operation at the moment, and that intercepted the job request.”

  “A what?” Forsyth couldn’t believe they were having this conversation.

  “Data scraping. I’m trying to locate Coureur Central; I have some questions I want to ask them.”

  “Aren’t you a Coureur? Don’t you know where it is?”

  “No, nobody knows where it is. Or who it is. And yes, I am a Coureur.” Rudi smiled at him. “If you think that sounds confusing, you ought to spend half an hour as me.”

  They started walking again. They’d entered the Metro two stations up the east-west line from Stare Miasto. Forsyth, already petrified to be back in Warsaw, had thought their excursion would come to a premature end at the station’s security measures, but the system had let them through unchallenged, and that was when Rudi had launched into a seemingly endless and random musing about... well, Forsyth kept losing track, so he wasn’t entirely sure what it was about any more.

  “The question is why a commercially-available map of the Warsaw Metro should be so important to so many people,” Rudi said. “And I don’t buy the idea that Crispin told his Georgian friends the hard drive contained nuclear launch codes, by the way; that would just be suicidal.”

  “You don’t know Crispin.”

  “True. But I’m making an assumption that he’s not stark raving mad.”

  Forsyth shook his head. “We should try not to make so much noise,” he said.

  “So if there’s nothing illegal or even faintly unusual on that hard drive,” Rudi went on as if he hadn’t heard, “why bother hiding it down here? Why bother hiding it at all?”

  “We’re going to get killed,” Forsyth said.

  Rudi thought about it. “No,” he said finally. “No, we’re not.” But he did at least shut up for a while.

  It was a long, difficult walk to Stare Miasto; Forsyth had forgotten just how tiring it could be walking along the unfinished tunnels. It was almost four in the morning before they reached the complex of ramps and cross-tunnels outside the Old Town station.

  Rudi wandered about the tunnel, shining his torch here and there. “You said they fired on you?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “A lot?”

  Forsyth, on the other side of the tunnel, glared at him.

  “Hm,” said Rudi. “Okay. Show me this phantom platform, please.”

  Forsyth led the way to the down ramp. The floor underfoot was gritty. They passed the opening which led to the north-south tunnel and the spiral of the ramp kept going down for another couple of turns and opened into a narrow, straight corridor. There was light at the far end. Rudi stopped, then walked back up the ramp to the north-south exit, shining his torch on the walls, then came back down to stand beside Forsyth.

  “And this shouldn’t be here?” he said.

  “I keep saying,” Forsyth murmured.

  “Okay.” Rudi turned off his torch and set off down the tunnel towards the light. After a few moments, muttering under his breath, Forsyth did the same.

  The light brightened as they approached the end of the tunnel, and then all of a sudden they were standing on a broad, deserted Metro platform. Rudi stood looking about him. He looked at the tracks, the walls. He stepped between a line of pillars and found himself in a long arch-roofed hallway. There was a sign on one of the pillars in Cyrillic.

  “Kitay-Gorod,” he read. His voice echoed down the empty hallway.

  “Now do you believe me?” Forsyth asked in a strained whisper.

  Rudi walked across the hall, between another set of pillars, and out onto the opposite platform. “I’ve never been to Moscow before,” he said.

  “Can we go now, please?”

  “Hm? Oh. Yes, of course.”

  Walking back up the tunnel – the entrance seemed to Forsyth to be concealed by some kind of optical illusion – Rudi said, “Do you remember I was telling you about Professor Mundt?”

  “Yes.”

  “He modified one of the sewer tunnels under Dresden so that it connected with the Vienna sewers,” said Rudi. “I didn’t see that, but I understand it was quite straightforward – no vast expenditure of energy, no massive earthmoving project, no flashing lights or sound effects. Something deceptively modest. The borders with the Community are like that; half the time you’re not even aware you’ve crossed over.” They reached the bottom of the emergency ramp and started to walk up to the east-west main tunnel again. “Thank you for this, by the way.”

  “You’re welcome,” Forsyth said through gritted teeth.

  TWO HOURS LATER, they were back on the surface. They emerged from the station entrance to find early-morning traffic on the streets and crowds of people hurrying to work through blowing snow. No one paid them any attention. Instead of leaving, however, Rudi took out a phone and dialled a number.

  “Hello,” he said. He listened. “Yes.” He listened again. “Well, that’s real enough.” He looked over at Forsyth, who was debating whether or not to flee and take his chances on his own. “Either I can walk into it with my eyes open, or run away and never know what’s going on.” He shrugged. “Really? Where?” He listened for a long time. “Okay. Tell him to send me the details.” He looked at Forsyth again. “No, I’ll take him with me; we can find somewhere for him when I’m done. I don’t think he’s in any danger at all, but it’s not his fault he’s mixed up in this. Yes, all right.” He hung up.

  They stood looking at each other through the snow. Finally Forsyth said, “Well?”

  Rudi put his hands in his pockets and walked over until they were standing almost toe to toe. “Well,” he said, “what you saw is real enough, although I can’t think of any rational reason why anyone should do it. The rest of it... I’m not so sure. I think you’ve been the victim of a rather elaborate con. To what purpose, I don’t know. It’s interesting, though.”

  Forsyth looked helplessly around him. “What?”

  “I’m not going to abandon you,” Rudi promised. “There will be money and I will get you out of here. But you’re going to have to put up with Poland for a little while longer. There’s someone here I need to speak with.”

  1.

  ANIA’S ALARM WENT off at half past four in the morning. Long habit made her reach out and
switch it off before she was properly awake and before it could disturb her husband, Lech.

  Without turning on the light, she slipped out of bed. She used the bathroom, walked down the corridor to the kitchen, closed the door, turned on the extractor hood and the light over the cooker, and lit a cigarette while she switched on the coffeemaker – loaded and filled with water the night before so she didn’t have to mess around with spoons and containers and taps while she was still half asleep.

  She took butter and trays of sliced meats from the fridge, put them on the kitchen table with a plate and a knife and some scraps of cheese. From the breadbin she took the remains of yesterday’s loaf and cut a couple of slices, put them on the plate and buttered them. The coffeemaker sputtered; she put a mug under the spout and pressed the button.

  Sitting at the table, she piled meat and cheese onto the slices of bread and ate slowly, washing the food down with swallows of coffee while she looked at her reflection in the darkened window. Sometimes she thought she had been watching the passing of the years while looking at that reflection, a young woman who had slowly grown middle-aged and tired. A couple of years ago she had realised that what she was waiting for was to see resentment in her eyes.

  Breakfast over, she put the plate and knife in the dishwasher, returned the food to the fridge, and stood at the window with a second mug of coffee, smoking another cigarette. The flat was near the top of one of the old Soviet-era blocks in Skorosze, a couple of kilometres from the centre of Warsaw. The heating was a bit hit-and-miss these days, and last year someone had managed to get through the security doors and light a fire in the lift, but it was all she and Lech could afford. All they had ever been able to afford. Looking down from the window, she saw early-morning traffic at the big road junction, one of the first trams of the day rattling along its tracks into town, a group of drunks sitting quietly on a bench in the little park between the block and the street. It could have been any day, any year. Only the drunks changed, as they either dried out or died and someone new took their place.

  Her clothes, washed yesterday, were hanging on a drier in the living room. She dressed quickly in bra and pants and uniform, examined a pair of tights for runs before she put them on, slipped into a pair of comfortable flat-soled shoes, grabbed her bag and coat from the rack in the hall, and left the flat.

  Outside, there was still an early-morning smell of coal smoke on the air. There was frost underfoot, and it crunched as she walked around the back of the block to the garages. Approaching one of the rank of doors, she took a key fob from her bag and clicked it. There was an answering pinpoint blink of International Klein Blue from a little box near an upper corner of the door. After the flat, the garage’s defence system was the most expensive thing she and Lech had ever bought. It was more expensive than the car it was meant to protect, but without the car she wouldn’t be able to work. The system involved a number of sentry guns firing darts tipped with a neurotoxin which the security firm promised was nonlethal. The ammunition had to be swapped out every two months because the poison degraded, although Lech grumbled that it was just the firm’s way of continuing to charge them.

  The car was a hydrogen-cell Audi, five years old, the subject of many fierce arguments and much simmering anger. Their previous car had simply died of old age; there were so many things wrong with it, a local mechanic had opined at an annual service, that it was kinder to just sell it for scrap rather than keep replacing things. So they had done that, and gathered together what money they could and borrowed the rest from friends and family, and Lech had gone to a second-hand dealer and come back with the Audi. Ania had loved it at first sight.

  It was an easy half-hour’s drive past Ok¸ecie – locals still hadn’t got around to calling it Warsaw-Chopin Airport, even after all this time – and down the E30 and 721 to Konstancin. Turning east at Piaseczno, Ania could see a bruised-looking lightening of the sky ahead of her, and the lights of aircraft turning for their final approach to the airport hanging in the air.

  By the time she reached Konstancin it was light enough for her to see the pines crowding the sides of the road and some of the old dilapidated buildings of the spa, their grubby stucco coming up out of the dimness. By virtue of its hot springs, Konstancin had been a spa for a couple of hundred years, a destination for the genteelly ill from many kilometres around. Many of the old houses built here by the wealthy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been abandoned and fallen into ruin, but there were newer structures here, built by the freshly-wealthy from the days when Poland had been a Slavic Tiger. The road took her past the old hospital in the growing daylight, and another kilometre or so brought her to the gates of the rest home.

  Although in truth, it was just another hospital, albeit one specialising in the elderly and infirm. Elderly and infirm and well-off – it cost a small fortune every year for someone to stay here – and the fact that there were so many permanent residents either spoke for the number of rich people in Poland, or the number of people desperate to dump their aged relatives on someone else. Sometimes that made Ania angry, but then she remembered her father’s stubborn insistence on looking after his ancient and demented mother at home and she saw the point.

  She parked at the side of the main building and walked round to the front entrance. The hospital looked like an old workers’ hotel from the Martial Law era; a long building five storeys tall, its flat roof festooned with satellite dishes and its face lined with walkways and doors and windows, its pale orange walls just starting to flush with the dawn.

  The lobby looked as if it belonged in a utilitarian hotel, too. It was big and airy, with twin staircases doglegging up from either side of a reception desk, behind which sat a smiling young woman in a smart suit. To one side there was a little fountain with a baffling post-modern sculpture standing in it, and to the other were the big double doors to the dining room, from which came the sounds of staff setting tables for breakfast for the residents who were capable of coming down and eating for themselves.

  Ania nodded hello to the girl at the desk and pushed through a door at the back of the lobby which opened onto a long tiled corridor. In the staff room at the end, she docked her phone so it could upload her day’s duties from the hospital’s expert system, and went to get a coffee from the machine in the corner. A few of the other day staff were already there, bitching about husbands, partners, children, money. Ania exchanged a few words, took her coffee out to the loading area at the back of the hospital to have her last cigarette before her midmorning break. Looking out into the forest beyond the fence, she watched a wild boar sow and half a dozen piglets rummaging unhurriedly through the ground litter. She’d lost count of how many generations of wild boars she’d watched from here, down the years.

  Back in the staff room, she pitched her cup into the waste bin and checked her phone’s downloads. An itinerary popped up; she gave it a quick once-over on her way back up the corridor to the pharmacy, where she docked the phone again to check out a trolley and the requisite morning medications. She wheeled the trolley down a side corridor to the service lift, pushed the button, and when the door slid open she took a deep breath and pushed the trolley inside to begin her day.

  2.

  THEY COULDN’T PRONOUNCE his name properly, so they called him ‘Johnny’. He habitually woke before dawn, no matter what time of year it was, wheeled his chair into the bathroom and had a shower, then sat watching the news until one of the nurses came with his pills. He was, according to his records, in his early nineties, but he presented as a well-preserved eighty, and until a couple of years ago he would even have passed as ‘sprightly,’ but his legs had started to go and now he found it difficult to get very far on his own without medication to alleviate the pain. The doctor who visited every day had said something about neurotransmitters and myelin sheaths and other things he didn’t understand. The doctor looked about twelve years old.

  This morning it was the chubby nurse, the one with ‘Ania’ o
n her nametag. She wasn’t as bad as some of them; at least she knocked before she came in, rather than just barging into the apartment.

  “Good morning, Johnny,” she said cheerfully, pushing the trolley over the threshold. “How are we today?”

  “We are very well, thank you, nurse,” he replied politely, as always.

  “And we’ve had our shower? That’s very good.”

  “I do wish you wouldn’t talk to me as if I was a child,” he told her.

  She was sorting out his medication, doublechecking its tags with the information on her phone. “I’m sorry?”

  He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Give me the pills.”

  There were two pills, both of them small and round. One was blue, one was beige. He had no idea what they were. Ania gave him a little cup of water to wash them down with, then she busied herself tidying up the bathroom while they took effect. When she came out, stripping off her surgical gloves, he was already standing by the bed, waiting for her to help him dress. The pills helped him stand and walk about, but he was still stiff and awkward in the morning. He was just too damned old. It was embarrassing.

  When he was dressed and his hair – at least he still had all his own hair and most of his teeth – was combed, he took up his cane and embarked on the long, slow trek along the walkway to the lift at the end. It was always a bit of an adventure early in the morning, but if he didn’t get down to the restaurant in fairly short order all the freshly-cooked food would be gone and he’d be left with stuff that had been sitting under heat lamps and he’d rather starve than eat that. He still had some standards.