Dave Hutchinson - Europe in Autumn

“Did Max fire you?” the Hungarian inquired.

“Your Polish has improved,” Rudi observed.

The Hungarian inclined his huge shaggy blond head. “I find that if you work hard and pay attention, you can learn almost anything.”

Two more huge blond men appeared at the side of the road, toiling up the slope with the Package dangling between them. They lifted him over the piles of snow at the edge of the road and dragged him over to the Hungarian. The three of them proceeded to have a very brief whispered conversation, during which the Hungarian never took his eyes off Rudi, then the other two started to drag the insensible Package away along the side of the hotel.

“Now then,” said the Hungarian when they had disappeared from view around the front of the hotel. “What are we going to do with you?”

“He’s ours,” said a voice from the back of the loading bay. Rudi scowled.

“Is that so?” asked the Hungarian.

“That’s so,” Marta said, coming to the edge of the loading bay and looking down at them. She was wearing jeans and a big chunky sweater and hiking boots and a down-stuffed jacket. For a moment, Rudi didn’t know her. Her hair was tied back, and she had removed the makeup she customarily wore. She looked at once wide-eyed and innocent and capable and businesslike. “The Package is yours. The dishwasher is a resident of the Zone.”

The Hungarian grinned and winked at Rudi to let him know what he thought of the dishwasher pantomime. “It seems you have an admirer.”

Rudi looked at Marta and considered the number of ways in which he had been stupid. There were, he thought, too many to count.

The Hungarian went over and picked up the Package’s suitcase. It looked like a toy dangling from his massive hand. “Maybe I’ll come to Restauracja Max sometime and we can have dinner.”

“Don’t hurry,” Rudi told him.

The Hungarian looked hurt. “Ah well,” he said. He saluted Rudi, bowed to Marta, and walked away into the night.

When he had turned the corner of the building, Marta walked down the loading bay steps and stood beside Rudi. “Time to go,” she said.

Rudi picked up his rucksack. All of a sudden, he felt very heavy and tired.

A SHORT WALK down the mountainside, slipping and sliding through deep powdery snow, brought them to a narrow forestry road. A car was waiting, part of Rudi’s dustoff. Somehow, Marta had come across a spare set of keys. She drove.

Rudi sat and watched the tunnel of snow-laden trees advance on him in the car’s headlights. The forestry road hadn’t been cleared, and there were ten or twelve centimetres of snow on it. The car was moving at about five kilometres an hour. It would be easy to open the door and tumble out into the deep snow at the side of the road and make his escape, but he couldn’t see the point.

“It could have worked, if it’s any consolation,” she said.

He looked across at her. “What?”

“It’s always chaos up there on New Year’s Eve,” she said, squinting out at the road. “You might have made it, but they were following your man all the way.”

“Who?”

She shrugged. “There’s no way to be sure. They bought a certain degree of cooperation from us for a certain period of time.” She glanced at him. “Don’t look like that. It was an interesting plan.”

He watched her for a minute or so, steering the car carefully down the gentle slope of the road. “Are you from Zone counterespionage?” he asked.

She laughed. “Now there’s a grand title.” She shook her head. “What I wonder is, was that a real fight, or did you start it?”

“I was in the kitchen the whole time,” Rudi said. “Jan will vouch for me.”

“Not you personally,” she said. “Agents provocateurs, hired for the occasion – what do you call them?”

“Stringers. As you very well know.”

“Stringers, yes. I love Coureur terminology. It’s so quaint. What I wonder is, did you hire some stringers to start that riot and cover your departure?”

“Like you said,” Rudi murmured. “There’s always chaos up there on New Year’s Eve.”

They drove for another ten or fifteen minutes in silence. The slope of the road rose and fell, and finally the trees withdrew gently from either side and they were driving along a two-lane road, cleared enough for Marta to accelerate to around twenty kilometres an hour.

“Who was the Hungarian?” Rudi asked.

“He says his name’s Kerenyi. But you say your name’s Tonu, and I say my name’s Marta.” She shrugged her shoulders at this world where nobody could be certain of anyone else’s real name.

“You knew I was coming,” he said.

“We knew he was coming,” she said, meaning the Package. “The Hungarians told us where he would be and when he would be there.”

“And all you had to do was wait for me to turn up.” He rubbed his face. “What are you going to do with me?”

She was hunched so far over the steering wheel that her face was centimetres from the windscreen. “Wait and see.” The car hit a patch of ice and fishtailed for a moment. Rudi listened to Marta swearing as she fought the wheel. The prospect of sliding into the path of an oncoming truck seemed quite attractive, right then.

Finally, she got the car back under control and looked over at him, and her face was pale and a little sweaty in the light of the streetlamps.

“We’re not even particularly angry with you,” she said.

“No?”

“This sort of thing happens once or twice a year. Somebody’s intelligence service decides to mess around with somebody else’s intelligence service, and they decide to do it in the Zone.” She slowed the car for a set of traffic lights, the first they’d seen since leaving the hotel. “Tourism is our only industry, and in order to exploit it properly we have to be neutral.”

“It’s hard to be neutral.”

“No intelligence operations on our soil. If we find them, we blow them. Spoil everybody’s stupid little game. Eventually everyone will get the point.” She was almost shouting by this time. “I mean, why don’t you all just go and play in Baku or somewhere like that and leave us alone?”

“I just go where I’m sent.”

“The Nuremberg Defence,” she muttered. The lights changed. She put the car into gear and they moved off.

AFTER HALF AN hour or so they arrived at the border between the Zone and the Czech Republic. Marta slowed the car long enough to wave a laminated pass at the Zone guards, but she had to stop on the Czech side of the crossing for customs and passport checks.

Rudi hadn’t realised quite how warm it was in the car until he got out to allow the Czech customs man to look inside. He and Marta stood side by side watching the plump little Czech and his springer spaniel sniffer dog clamber around on the back seat. Rudi couldn’t be sure which of them was having the most fun.

“It’s not personal,” said Marta, and each word was a distinct little balloon of fog in the cold air. “I was only doing my job.”

“The Nuremberg Defence,” said Rudi.

She swore softly and turned up the collar of her jacket. “How long is this going to take?” she called in Czech, but there was no reply from inside the car and she crossed her arms and jammed her hands up into her armpits for warmth. Rudi wondered why she wasn’t wearing gloves. “I’ll take your passport,” she said to him.

“I was told to return it.”

“I don’t care what you were told. It’s the property of my government.”

He shook his head.

She glared at him. “I could take you back to the Zone and arrest you.”

“But you have no powers of arrest in the Czech Republic,” he pointed out. He nodded at the little customs man. “I could claim asylum.”