Europe in Winter

by Dave Hutchinson

  1.

  MR HANSEN FLEW in to Stansted on a Thursday morning. He was a tall, distinguished-looking businessman with a confident walk and a very fine suit, and his only luggage was a small overnight bag.

  He took a taxi into London. The driver was a young man whose grandparents, when they had only been a little older than him, had made the perilous journey from Syria to Turkey to Greece to Croatia to Austria to Germany to England. It had taken them a long time, and their children, born during their flight, grew up multilingual and stateless, citizens of crisis. With the carelessness of the young, the driver liked to joke that he had borders in his blood, and when he mentioned this to his passenger as they sped down the M11, Mr Hansen expressed the opinion that he understood exactly how that felt.

  The taxi dropped him outside a building opposite Liverpool Street station. The ground floor was a coffee shop, but the upper floors comprised suites of serviced apartments, available to rent at short notice for periods of as little as two nights. The entrance, to one side of the coffee shop, led into a lobby with a concierge and two lifts. Mr Hansen spent five minutes checking in, then continued up to the third floor. Here, at the end of a short corridor, he waved his phone at a door. The lock clicked open and he stepped inside.

  Long experience made him pause at the door, looking about him. The apartment was bright and airy and modern. There was a living area, with a sofa and armchairs and a coffee table and an entertainment set, an open-plan kitchenette and dining area off to one side. The apartment had only one bedroom, and from where he stood he could see, through its half-open door, the end of the bed and the door to the ensuite bathroom.

  Mr Hansen put his overnight bag down by the door and went over to the windows. Without lifting aside the net curtain, he looked down on the buses and traffic and pedestrians moving along Broadgate. He liked London; there was a sense here, for all its modern buildings, of history. He found it comforting.

  “It’s a place, not a name,” said a voice from the bedroom.

  He stood very still, considering the options. While he stood there, the bedroom door swung open and Rudi was standing there, leaning on a cane. His face was still boyish, but the passing years had marked him. He looked tired, worn down. He did not seem to be armed.

  “You’re not even Lithuanian, I think,” he said.

  Kaunas shrugged. “A nom de guerre. You know how it is. You’re looking well.”

  “That wouldn’t be hard; the last time you saw me I’d just been waterboarded by the Line’s security men.”

  “That was regrettable; I’m sorry that happened to you.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “I presume there’s no Situation here? You sent me that crash message?”

  “That was regrettable,” Rudi deadpanned. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

  “Oh, please,” Kaunas said irritably. “Don’t be childish.”

  Rudi walked into the living room. “I need to talk to Crispin,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Don’t,” Rudi told him. “Just don’t. The people Crispin works for are planning a strike against the Community; I can’t stop them by force so I’m going to have to talk them out of it.”

  Kaunas sighed. There was a part of him, he realised, which had always known this conversation was coming, but it’s human nature to avoid awkward conversations, to hope they won’t happen, and there was nothing anyone could do about that. “May I sit?” he asked.

  Rudi made an after you gesture, and Kaunas walked over to the sofa and sat down and clasped his hands across his stomach. “Perhaps,” he said, “you could begin by explaining to me why you think I can help you to contact this ‘Crispin’.”

  “Because Central was involved with the Realm.”

  Kaunas raised an eyebrow.

  “I had a contact who was going to sell me information about a Coureur operation in Luxembourg,” said Rudi. “He was going to sell someone else information about the Realm. At the time, I thought he was selling two different pieces of information, but he wasn’t. It was just different angles on the same thing.”

  Kaunas nodded. “Yes, we were hired for that Situation. Actually, not even hired. We owed Crispin a favour. Logistical support.”

  “Who is he?”

  Kaunas took a moment to gather his thoughts. “Europe is inherently unstable. It’s been in flux for centuries; countries have risen and fallen, borders have ebbed and flowed, governments have come and gone. The Schengen era was just an historical blip, an affectation.”

  Rudi walked across the room and sat at the dining table.

  “Governments, nations, borders, they’re all surface, they always have been,” Kaunas went on. “The real structure underlying it all is money, and the institutions which control it. Finance houses, banks, organised crime; if you drill down deep enough, it’s all the same. Money has no nationality, no allegiance. While nations rise and fall, it remains the same. It’s the most powerful polity of all.”

  “And that’s a very pretty metaphor, but it doesn’t tell me who Crispin is.”

  “The European Union didn’t just go away,” Kaunas said. “It splintered, and then it splintered again and again, but a thing like that doesn’t just wither and disappear. It’s still there. The institution still exists, and so does its money.”

  Rudi remembered something Chief Superintendent Smith had told him, something about the EU having very few members but lots of money. “Are you telling me Crispin works for the EU?”

  “Crispin runs the EU.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Kaunas sighed. “I wish it were. I’ve had dealings with him in the past; he’s hardly conventional.”

  “He’s a fucking tunnel worker.”

  “Well, clearly he is not, is he. I told you; he’s not normal.”

  Rudi scowled.

  “Basically, Crispin is a CEO. Or an emperor.”

  “He seems quite... hands-on,” Rudi mused. “For an emperor.”

  “He does like his little jokes.”

  Rudi snorted. He was still trying to put together a structure of reasoning where Roland Sarkisian’s Patrons mutated into the European Union, and then into the entity which had built the Line, and then selected Crispin as its capo di tutti capi.

  “I know what you’ve been doing,” Kaunas said. “I’ve been watching you, and I’ve really been very impressed. The business in Hungary was quite inventive; it took me a while to work out what you’d done.”

  “What I was doing was trying to find out what the fuck Coureurs were doing rubbing shoulders with Community intelligence officers in Luxembourg.”

  “It was... complex. Les Coureurs do not take sides; sometimes that leads us into unusual situations.”

  “I don’t care about that any more. We can discuss it later. I need Central to put me in contact with Crispin.”

  “Well, that’s not going to happen,” Kaunas told him. “Because Coureur Central doesn’t exist.”

  “Oh, fuck off. I’m tired of this.”

  “The natural assumption everyone makes about an organisation is that someone is running it,” said Kaunas. “But that assumes that there is an organisation. Les Coureurs des Bois is not an organisation. If you really need a metaphor, I suppose the closest I could come would be to say that Les Coureurs are an anarchy. Oh, I don’t doubt that once upon a time, back in the misty distance, there was a group of individuals sharing a common aim, but that hasn’t been true for many years.”

  “So who’s giving the orders?” asked Rudi.

  “Nobody is.” Kaunas shrugged. “Or rather, everybody is. Everyone is part of everyone else’s operation; the people you employ are part of your operation, you’re part of someone else’s operation, they’re part of someone else’s, and so on. It’s a perfect, self-sustaining whole, a nation without a figurehead, without borders.”

  “There’s a hierarchy,” Rudi insisted.

  “No, there isn’t.”

  “What about you? What about Br
adley?”

  “We have an overview, of sorts. We fight fires. Someone has to. I expect it looks as if we’re quite high up in the hierarchy, and from time to time it suits us to pretend we are, but really we’re not. We just go where we’re needed, to keep things running smoothly. We’re... diplomats, if you like; a point of contact between Les Coureurs and governments.”

  “Where does the money go? Who does the book-keeping?”

  “There are some centralised accounts, and Coureurs assigned to maintain them, but mostly everything runs itself. You’d be surprised. It’s quite a sturdy edifice, but massively distributed. The mythology surrounding Les Coureurs has become hugely rich and complex; it’s impossible to know where it ends and History takes over.”

  “History,” Rudi said, a great bleakness overtaking his heart like an oncoming snowstorm. “That’s a grey area.”

  “It depends who you ask.”

  “Whose operation am I part of?”

  “Now, that is the interesting question. May I?” Rudi nodded, and Kaunas stood and went over to a corner table, on which stood several bottles of mineral water and some glasses. He opened one of the bottles. “Les Coureurs des Bois are highly compartmentalised. Partly that’s for operational security, but mainly it’s because that’s all there is. Compartments. Doing what they do, which is move things across borders. Everyone’s freelance, working only when they have to.” He filled a glass with water, recapped the bottle, set it down, turned to face Rudi. “Then you started to use those resources for something else. You started giving orders, started coordinating things. For all practical purposes, you’re Coureur Central.” He took a sip of water.

  “Now wait just a moment,” Rudi said. Then he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “You could just step down at any time,” Kaunas told him. “Everything would simply go back the way it was. But you’ve given Les Coureurs a purpose, for the first time in their history, and that has made you relevant to Crispin’s interests because quite a large amount of Coureur operational funds come from organised crime.”

  “What?”

  “Money has to come from somewhere,” Kaunas said. “You’ll find, if you look hard enough, that a lot of Europe’s mafias – the smaller ones, at any rate – are run as Coureur fundraising operations. It’s quite an elegant solution, if you think about it.”

  Rudi looked about the room, trying to process everything and failing.

  “Of course, organised crime in Europe belongs to Crispin as well, and so you and he find yourselves at the heart of a Venn diagram. Which makes you interesting to him.” Kaunas drained his glass and put it back on the table and smiled at Rudi. “There,” he said. “Happy now?”

  Rudi tried to concentrate. “You and I are going to talk about Les Coureurs later,” he said. “Right now I need to talk to Crispin. One emperor to another.”

  “I really don’t see what you could possibly do to stop him doing whatever he wants,” Kaunas said.

  “Can you contact him or not? Because if you can’t you’re no use to me.”

  Kaunas thought about it. “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, I can contact him.”

  “Then tell him I want to talk. Tell him not to do anything until I’ve spoken with him, otherwise... oh, I don’t know, threaten him with something, I don’t care what.”

  Kaunas raised an eyebrow. “He’s not going to respond to threats. Would you?”

  “I don’t care,” Rudi said angrily, walking over to the door and opening it. “Just contact him. Call me when you’ve set up a meet. And don’t you dare go anywhere.”

  SETH FELL INTO step beside him as he stomped along the corridor towards the lifts. “Well?”

  “Don’t talk to me,” Rudi muttered. “Don’t ask questions, don’t make jokes, don’t talk to me.”

  Seth, who had seen Rudi angry before but never quite this angry, missed a step. “Okay,” he said.

  They reached the lifts, none of which appeared to be in any great hurry to stop at their floor. Rudi waved at the call buttons, and when that didn’t seem to work he punched them a couple of times. Then he punched them again. He’d lived so long with the image of a faceless Coureur Central as part of the cabal of tormentors who had taken over his life that the discovery that Coureur Central did not exist – or worse, that he was Coureur Central – was making his head spin a little.

  One of the lifts finally stopped and Rudi marched in, trailed by Seth. He waved for the ground floor and stared at himself in the mirrored wall as the door closed and they started to descend. He looked, he thought, quite deranged, and he wondered how long he had been like that.

  On the ground floor, he took off at a fast walk across the foyer, wanting nothing more than to submerge himself in the city, become anonymous, try to work out what to do next, but when he stepped out onto the pavement there was a shiny grey people-carrier pulled up to the kerb, and beside it were two large beefy men in smart suits, and between them, dressed in jeans and a black hoodie and with his hair bound into a ponytail, was Crispin, and all the anger drained straight out of Rudi.

  “Hello, Crispin,” he said with a sinking heart.

  “Is Snowy okay?” Crispin asked.

  “He’s safe and sound and enjoying a new life,” Rudi said.

  “Good. I hate collateral damage.”

  “How’s Professor Charpentier?”

  Crispin smiled and nodded. “A genuine fucking pain in the ass. Also, you and I are going to have to have a conversation about all that money you keep throwing around.”

  “Kaunas gave me a précis.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Crispin nodded. “Get in the car. We’re going for a ride.”

  “No we’re fucking not,” said Seth.

  Crispin looked at him, then at Rudi. “I don’t do shoot-outs in the middle of crowded city streets,” he said. “Not any more. Messy.”

  “Collateral damage,” Rudi noted.

  “Exactly. So you come with me, you don’t come with me, it’s no skin off my spavined ass. But you might learn something.”

  Rudi thought about it. He had, he thought, been learning rather too much recently. “Get in the car,” he told Seth. “Let’s hear what he has to say.”

  THERE WAS, HOWEVER, very little conversation in the car for quite a while. Crispin sat in the front. They sat in the back, sandwiched between the bodyguards. Rudi watched late afternoon London pass by beyond the windows.

  At one point, Crispin’s phone rang. He took it out, looked at the screen, put it to his ear, and said, “Hi.” Pause. “Yes, I know.” Longer pause. “Yes, I have.” Pause. “Yes, I was.” Pause. “No, you can’t.” Short pause. “And fuck you, too.” He hung up and put the phone away. “You guys are just fucking divas, you know that?” he said.

  When nobody else in the car responded, Rudi said, “Oh?”

  “Fucking Kaunas,” Crispin said. “Trying to order me around.”

  “He told me who you are, by the way,” said Rudi.

  “I just represent a group of interests,” Crispin said without missing a beat. “I’m a CEO.”

  “That’s not what Kaunas says.”

  Crispin made a rude noise. “Coureurs,” he said. “You know what you are? Really? You started out running Syrians across the Mediterranean in boats I wouldn’t have put on the Chicago River. You packed Afghans and Libyans fifty-deep into trucks and drove them out of Izmir headed for the Greek border, and half the time they suffocated before they got there. You’re criminals, plain and simple.”

  “Whereas you are...?”

  “All that fucking Cold War romanticism,” Crispin went on. “Situations and jump-offs and dead drops and Packages. Doesn’t change what you are.”

  “This may all be true,” Rudi said, managing to keep his temper with an effort, “but you’ll excuse me if I’m a little affronted to be called a criminal by you.”

  There was a silence at the front of the car.
Then Crispin chuckled. “Affronted,” he murmured.

  “Whatever you’re planning to do to the Community, you have to stop,” Rudi said.

  “Says who?”

  “Millions of people are going to die.”

  Crispin shrugged. “Millions of people are going to die anyway, eventually. Billions. In a hundred years or so everyone on Earth right now will be dead. So it goes.”

  Rudi said, “Please. Don’t do it.”

  Crispin turned in his seat and looked into the back of the car. “You see, that’s one of the reasons I like you,” he said appreciatively. “If this was a James Bond movie, you’d kill my two guys here with some lethal gadget disguised as a pen,” the two bodyguards looked at Rudi as if daring him to try, “and then you and I would have a climactic battle, at the end of which I’d die horribly and you’d foil my evil plan. But this is real life, and all you’ve got left is please, and you still don’t stop.”

  They had left central London now, making their way down a traffic-choked main road through faceless and mostly blameless suburbs. In the distance to the west, a catenary of lights hung in the early evening sky like a special effect for a 1970s alien encounter film. Aircraft queuing up to land at Heathrow.

  “There used to be a village called Heath Row,” Crispin said, apropos of nothing, apparently. “It’s still somewhere under the airport. Thousands of years from now, people are going to excavate at Heathrow and they’ll find this buried village and wonder what the fuck was going through people’s minds way back then.”

  “It was a hamlet,” said Seth, who was still annoyed enough to be argumentative. “Not a village.”

  “Hamlet, schmamlet,” said Crispin. “Are you guys listening to me?”