Dave Hutchinson - Europe in Autumn

“He’d probably have a heart attack if you did.”

“Worth a try, though.”

She shook her head. “We have an extradition treaty with the Czechs. We’d have you out of here in two hours.”

He looked down at her. “Two hours?”

“Maximum.”

He thought about it and shook his head again. “I was told to bring it back.”

“Your people will never be able to use the Tonu Laara legend again.”

“Oh, I imagine there’ll be somewhere it will be useful.” He smiled at her. “Baku, maybe.”

The customs officer said, “You can go.”

Marta looked at him and drew herself up to her full height. “If that dog’s pissed in my car, I’ll make you wish you’d never been born,” she said. “You and the dog.”

THEY DROVE FOR another hour or so, to the crossing at Český Tĕšín. Marta pulled the car out of the line of traffic queuing for the border and drove around behind a row of brick buildings. Rudi looked out and shook his head. Hectares of concrete and asphalt flooded with white light, dotted with brick buildings and checkpoints, and surrounded by high fences. Home again.

“I’ll walk with you,” Marta said, opening her door.

Outside, the wind blew down from the mountains and across all that slushy asphalt and concrete and cut right through his parka. He shouldered his rucksack and followed Marta through the shadowless illumination between ranks of coaches whose passengers looked down at them incuriously as they passed. Across the concrete, a trucker was standing beside his twenty-wheeler and having a spirited argument with a Czech Customs officer.

“If you don’t mind my saying so,” he told her, “you have a very unusual way of doing things.”

“We’re the Zone,” she said brightly. “What did you expect?”

There was a tunnel of razor-wire and high fencing that angled away from the lorry-park and led down to the border. There was a checkpoint about halfway along.

“Don’t you hate this light?” Rudi asked, looking up at the lamp standards that stood every ten metres or so along the path. “It’s the same all over Europe. Probably all over the world.” He shook his head.

“The frontier actually runs through the middle of the town,” Marta said. “On this side, it’s Český Tĕšín. Just down there, on the other side of the wire, it’s Cieszyn. Polski Cieszyn, they call it. Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“As if you were going to give me that Coureur speech about Schengen and free movement across borders. You people always do that. I hate idealists.”

“As ideals go, it isn’t a bad one.”

“You’re young,” she told him. “You’ll change.”

He smiled at her. “You’re young too.”

She punched him in the shoulder hard enough to hurt. “Passport.”

“No.”

She held out her hand.

“How am I going to get into Poland without it?”

“You can use the passport that says your name is Jan Paweł Kaminski.” They stood looking into each other’s eyes for a few moments. “It was stupid to hide it in your room. Poor tradecraft.”

It occurred to him that he was lucky to have escaped from this Situation with his life. “I think tradecraft is the least of my problems right now.”

“How many of these things have you done?” she asked.

If you included the business with Max’s cousin, and whatever the hell it was that Fabio had been trying to pull off in Poznań, this had been Rudi’s fourth live Situation. “A few,” he said in what he hoped was a wise tone of voice.

“I think you ought to stop doing it,” she told him. “You’re not very good.”

At this precise moment, there seemed no way to argue with that. He shrugged and headed for the checkpoint.

Rudi’s Polish passport was a plastic card embossed with his photograph. The Czech border guard slipped the card into a slot and the machine read the embedded chip. Rudi put his thumb on the reader, the guard looked at his screen, then looked at Marta.

“It’s the dishwasher,” Rudi said. “The water’s too hot. It blistered my fingerprints off.”

“Let him through,” Marta said, and the official looked at her one more time and handed Rudi’s card back and Rudi wondered just what kind of arrangements the Zone had with the Czech Republic.

“Passport,” Marta said to him as the barrier slid aside.

Rudi smiled at her and walked away.

Ten metres along the tunnel, the guard at the Polish checkpoint examined his passport and enquired whether he had anything to declare. Rudi opened his rucksack and took out the bottles of Czech rum and Czech whisky he had brought with him, just in case the Package had needed a warming drink. The Customs man pulled a face.

“They all taste the same,” he said. “Christ only knows what they make them from.”

“They have great beer, though,” Rudi said, looking back along the tunnel. Marta was still standing at the Czech border post, a small figure in a big jacket. As he watched, she took her hand from her pocket and waved to him. In her hand was something small and green and rectangular.

“Happy New Year,” the guard said.

Rudi smiled at him. “And to you.” He laced up his rucksack again, slung it over his shoulder and walked away from the border.

APART FROM THE Polish street-names and shop signs, and a general air of dilapidation, there seemed very little difference between Cieszyn and its Czech counterpart. The snowy streets were busy with New Year revellers and people making their way to and from church. Rudi wandered along with them.

As he passed one church, he turned and pushed through the doors. The place was packed, and he had to stand at the back with a crowd of Poles, their feet squelching in melting slush. After a little while, Dariusz came in and stood beside him.

“They sold us to the Hungarians,” Rudi said quietly.

Dariusz shrugged. “Next time, they’ll sell the Hungarians to us,” he murmured. “The Zoners like to think they’re holier-than-thou, but they’re for sale like everyone else. It all equals out, in the end.”

Rudi looked at him. “They stole my passport.”

Dariusz nodded. “They always do that. We’ll get another one.”

“The Hungarians got the Package back.”

“That also happens sometimes.” He reached up and clapped Rudi on the shoulder. “You’re all right, though. That’s the important thing.”

“I’m not all right.”

“I know.” Dariusz looked sad. “I know. Let’s go home, eh?”

It was only later, sitting in the front seat of Dariusz’s Mercedes and watching the inadequately-cleared lanes of the motorway unwind towards Kraków, that Rudi put his hand in the pocket of his parka and realised that he had somehow left the hotel with Jan’s watch.

ON NOVEMBER 1, in defiance of global warming, a high pressure area swept down from Scandinavia, bearing on its close-packed isobars tiny particles of snow as hard as ground glass.

For three days, the many little states of Northern and Central Europe slowly disappeared beneath a coarse, glittering blanket. In some outlying or badly-administered areas, villages and sometimes even towns were cut off. People mostly battled to work, although in some places schools and offices were forced to close when their oil-fired boilers ran out of fuel because tankers were unable to get through to make deliveries.

At midnight on November 4, Mr Albrecht finished his shift and drove his creaky old orange tram into the new depot beside Potsdam-Stadt railway station.

For the past hour, the only other person on the tram had been a figure slumped in one of the rear seats, head leaning against the window, arms crossed over its chest, in an attitude of uncomfortable sleep.