Dave Hutchinson - Europe in Autumn

KRAKÓW LOOKED DIRTY. There was no way around it; after Breslau, it looked dirty. Stately, beautiful, but filthy. Stumbling down from the train at Kraków Główny, he found himself noticing the pollution in the air for the first time in years. It was a gorgeous sunrise. Kraków had more than its share of gorgeous sunrises, because of the pollution. For the same reason, also it tended to have apocalyptic sunsets.

Rudi walked towards the centre of the city. Some of the pizza and kiełbasa stalls were already open in front of the Barbakan, and the smells of meat and hot oil on the morning breeze made his mouth water, but he walked past them. He thought that only tourists were foolish enough to risk buying a slice of pizza from one of the stalls.

Floriańska was almost deserted. Rudi let himself through Restauracja Max’s front door and locked it behind him.

Downstairs, the tables and chairs were stacked along the sides of the room and one of Max’s Filipina cleaning women was pushing an ancient Dyson vacuum cleaner across the carpet. Rudi waved hello to her and pushed through the swing-doors into the kitchen.

Max was standing among the tiled and stainless steel surfaces, clipboard in hand, ticking off the morning’s food delivery.

“That bastard Tomek’s light on his pork delivery again,” he told Rudi.

“Where’s Mirek?” Mirek was Rudi’s sous-chef, a sometime presence in the kitchen who Rudi was working himself up to dismissing.

Max shrugged. Unlike his mother, Max was at a loss when it came to the kitchen staff. In Rudi’s absence, Mirek should have been in charge of the kitchen, but Mirek was a force of nature, captious and unreliable. He was also, unfortunately, an outstanding chef, and Max’s customers were going to miss him, even if Rudi didn’t.

“I’ll phone Tomek,” said Rudi, stuffing his bag under one of the work-surfaces. Tomek had his own problems, mostly concerning suppliers and staff and kickbacks. The restaurant business had a lot in common with international relations; there was an awful lot of diplomacy, more often than not of the gunboat kind. He took off his jacket. “Have you missed me?”

“It would have been better if you had been here,” Max admitted.

“Does that get me a raise?”

Max gestured with the clipboard.

Rudi hung his jacket in a cupboard and rubbed his eyes. It seemed absurd to feel jetlagged after having travelled such a small distance. “I’ll sort out Mirek.”

“I had to get an agency chef in last night,” Max told him.

Which, in Rudi and Max’s world, was about the worst thing that could happen to a restaurant. Rudi thought of the smoothing of feathers he was going to have to do with his crew, and said, “Who was it?”

“Paweł Grabiański.”

Which was not the disaster it might have been, although Rudi’s crew should really have been able to cope without him and Mirek. He’d thought he had them organised better than that. There should have been a shuffling of the pecking order. Someone should have taken charge. He realised he was going to have to yell at them, something he had once sworn he would never do in his kitchen.

“Paweł’s a pretty good chef,” he said lamely.

“He just looks so sad all the time,” Max told him. “Like he’s going to burst into tears.”

“I’ve had days like that myself,” Rudi said, taking the clipboard from Max’s unresisting fingers. Max had only checked a couple of items from the stack of recycled plastic crates sitting in the middle of the kitchen.

“You look tired.”

“I’ll get everything cleared away and I’ll have a nap for a couple of hours, all right?”

“You should go home and sleep properly,” Max told him. “I’ll call the agency for today’s lunch service.”

“They might send Paweł again.”

Max’s face showed an agony of indecision.

“I’ll be all right,” Rudi said. He tucked the clipboard under his armpit and went across to get himself a cup of coffee from the espresso machine he’d bullied Max into installing in the kitchen.

Max was obviously struggling not to ask about what had happened in Hindenberg. Rudi said, “I saw him.”

“And how did he look?”

“It was dark; his face was in shadow.” Rudi wondered how long they were going to continue the charade about Max’s ‘cousin.’ He said, “I have to talk to Dariusz.”

“And so you shall,” Dariusz said, stepping out from the corridor that led into the courtyard behind Restauracja Max. “And the magic number is?”

“Fifty-seven,” said Rudi.

“You’re sure?” said Dariusz.

“Fifty-seven,” Rudi repeated.

“You’ve done very well,” said Dariusz, and he turned and went back down the corridor. Rudi heard the courtyard door open and close. He and Max looked at each other.

“Did he seem well?” Max asked.

Rudi poured himself a cup of coffee. “I told you; it was dark.” This was obviously not sufficient for Max, so he said, “He certainly sounded well.”

Max nodded. “Good,” he said, a little awkwardly, Rudi thought. He turned away and walked towards the swing-door of the dining room. “Good.”

AND THAT SEEMED to be the end of Rudi’s little adventure. Max didn’t mention it again, and Dariusz didn’t come back to the restaurant. It was as if nothing had happened, as if he had never taken the train to Hindenberg. He cooked, he watched sous-chefs arrive in the kitchen and then depart some days later shouting about minimum wages and unsociable hours. Max shook his head sadly, and they went on with their lives.

The chilly Polish spring gradually became the lush, oppressive Polish summer. The air conditioning in the kitchen broke down and the kitchen staff began to wilt, and in some cases to faint. Kraków began to bake in the heat. The city swelled with tourists.

One busy evening in July, one of the customers asked if he could give his personal compliments to the chef, and Rudi went out into the restaurant to receive them.

The customer was a tall wafer-thin man with gelled-back hair and a bushy walrus-style moustache of the kind you didn’t see very often in Central Europe these days. He was wearing an expensive German business suit, and his wife was wearing a startling off-the-shoulder backless – and very nearly frontless – purple evening dress.

Rudi sat and allowed the husband to pour him a drink and congratulate him. The wife smiled and complimented him on the meal and leaned forward to pat him on the knee and ask for his recipe for bigos, and he found that he could see down the front of her dress all the way to her pubic hair.

He looked away and saw Max and another man standing almost toe to toe in one of the darkest corners of the restaurant. They seemed to be having a very quiet, very intense conversation. He thought there was something familiar about the other man’s build and body language. Then he realised that it was familiar because all he had ever seen of him was his build and body language.

And then Max and the other man embraced each other. Just like long-lost cousins, in fact.

SOME WEEKS AFTER that – and Rudi thought later that they had actually given him time to think about it – Dariusz came into the restaurant and asked to see him.

“I thought you ought to know that Max’s cousin is very grateful to you,” said the little mafioso.

“Max mentioned it,” said Rudi.

Dariusz sat back and lit a cigarette and looked around the restaurant. “How would you like,” he said, “to do that kind of thing for a living?”

“I’m a chef,” Rudi replied. “For a living.”

Dariusz inhaled on his cigarette, held the smoke in his lungs for longer than Rudi would have thought was medically advisable or physically possible, then exhaled a tenuous aromatic haze.