Dave Hutchinson - Europe in Autumn

“How would you like to do that kind of thing as a hobby?” he asked.

“All right,” said Rudi. “So long as it’s a well- paid sort of hobby.”

FABIO WAS FIFTEEN hours late coming in from London.

“Fucking English,” he said when Rudi finally met him at Jan Paweł II/Balice. “They spend about a thousand years trying to decide whether or not to join the Union, and when they do they become absolute fanatics. I mean, it’s totally offensive. Here, carry this.”

Rudi took Fabio’s carry-on bag, which was considerably heavier than it looked, and followed the little Swiss-Italian across the arrivals lounge.

It transpired, between the arrivals gate and the taxi rank outside, that the English were having one of their periodic paranoid episodes – drugs, terrorism, immunisation, whatever – and Fabio had been held up while they confiscated and checked his passport and travel documents.

“I mean, not allowing one in , I can understand that,” he fumed. “But not allowing one out . What sort of mind thinks like that?” He looked at the motley line of cars pulled up outside the terminal and shook his head. “No, I’m not getting into any of these taxis. I was completely ripped off the last time I got a taxi from this airport. I should have flown in to Katowice, I never had any problems with the taxi drivers at Katowice. We’ll take the bus into town. Follow me.”

Rudi followed.

“And they put me in that disgusting hotel at Heathrow while I waited,” Fabio told him.

EVERY STUDENT NEEDS a teacher, Dariusz had told him, and Fabio was to be his. He was short and chubby and well-dressed enough to be mugged within minutes of setting foot on any street in Western Europe. His suit was from the cutting edge of the Armani Revival and his shoes had been sewn by wizened artisans in Cordova. His luggage cost more than a flat in central Kraków. He was, Rudi thought, one of the least covert people he had ever seen. He thought it was a miracle the English authorities hadn’t arrested Fabio and then just looked for a crime to charge him with, because he was almost a caricature of a Central European biznisman .

Fabio had a dim view of Kraków’s hotels. The Cracovia wasn’t good enough for him. He refused to even cross the threshold of the Europa. He claimed the head chef of the Bristol was a convicted poisoner. He wound up staying at Rudi’s flat.

“Forget all that fucking idealism about Schengen,” he told Rudi on his first evening, after hoovering down the meal Rudi had cooked for him. “People in this business care about two things only. Money and prestige. You get money by doing your job, and you get prestige by taking insane risks.” He drank his wine in one swallow and winced. “This is horrible.”

“It’s a Mouton Rothschild ’41,” Rudi said.

“’41,” said Fabio, narrowing his eyes at his glass as if it had done him a personal wrong. “What a disgusting year.”

“It’s a vintage year.”

“Not for me it wasn’t. Don’t you have anything else to drink? And that steak was overdone, by the way.”

THEY CALLED THEMSELVES Les Coureurs des Bois , and they delivered mail.

Even before Europe had blossomed with new countries, there had been a healthy courier business, some of it legal, rather more of it not. Some things were just too sensitive or important or flat-out illegal to trust to the public mail or electronic transfer. In those days, a canny courier could wangle themselves a cheap flight anywhere on Earth if they chose their assignment well.

These days, things were more complicated. Border disputes often meant that delivering mail from polity A to nation B was impossible. So people contacted Les Coureurs , and the mail got through. Sometimes the mail consisted of people for whom the passage from polity A to nation B might otherwise be impossibly delicate. Sometimes it was items which nation B might be narrowminded enough to consider illegal.

They were, in other words, smugglers, although when Rudi voiced this opinion Fabio pointed out that, as with so many things, the term depended very much on your point of view.

Nobody knew who they were. Conventional wisdom had it that they were a phenomenon of the times, a gradual accretion of little courier firms into an entity which had things in common with the CIA and the Post Office. You got in touch with them the way you made that awkward first contact with a drug dealer, by knowing someone who knew someone who knew someone.

Rudi thought the popular media had inflated them out of all proportion. They were just couriers, and people had been couriering stuff around Europe since at least the Middle Ages, and smuggling things for considerably longer. They were also, if Fabio was representative, appalling houseguests. Among numerous other little personality quirks, Fabio had a thing about rearranging furniture. Every evening when Rudi got back to the flat he would find the furniture in some new configuration, and Fabio standing in the middle of the living room looking at it. He’d thought at first that the plump little Coureur was practising some bizarre Swiss form of feng shui, but after a week or so he had to wonder if Fabio wasn’t just the tiniest little bit deranged.

They went over and over his trip to Hindenberg, in obsessive detail. What he remembered, who he had spoken to, where he had been, what he had observed about the people he interacted with, from the border officials to the taxi driver in Breslau to the waiter who had served his breakfast at the Pension Adler the next morning.

“You kept it simple, which is good,” Fabio told him. “Simple is often best, but not always. Sometimes it’s necessary to make things as complicated as possible. And sometimes you just have to wing it.” He took a sip from his cup and pouted. “What do you call this?”

Rudi looked at the cup. “‘Coffee,’” he said.

Fabio returned his cup to its saucer. “Not where I come from, it’s not.”

“You’ve been drinking it all week.”

Fabio shook his head. “I can’t stand this ‘continental roast.’ What’s that supposed to mean? ‘Continental roast.’”

Rudi stood up. “I need some fresh air.”

“HE’S VERY GOOD,” mused Dariusz.

“He’s driving me out of my mind,” said Rudi.

Dariusz lit a cigarette. “What, precisely, bothers you about him?”

“How long do you have?”

Dariusz chuckled.

Rudi sighed. They were in Pani Halina’s on Senatorska. Because Rudi knew Halina’s chef, and because Dariusz was who he was, they had been given one of the restaurant’s private tables, away from the lunchtime crowd of students and tourists and out of work actors.

“Nothing I cook for him is any good,” he said.

Dariusz snorted goodnaturedly. “I think you’ll find that people do have their own tastes in food, Rudi.”

“Where I come from, it’s good manners not to criticise your host’s cooking.”

“Perhaps it’s different in Switzerland.” The little mafioso shrugged. “I don’t know, I’ve never been there. Next?”

“He rearranges my furniture.”

Dariusz looked at him and narrowed his eyes. Then he shrugged again. “Fabio is accustomed to a life of action, not a life cooped up in your flat. He sounds restless.”

“‘Restless’?”

“Look.” Dariusz waved Rudi’s misgivings away. “He’s here to teach you. He’s to be the… the Merlin to your Arthur. The Obi-Wan to your Anakin. We have to be indulgent of geniuses.”

“Must we let them move our furniture about?”

“If moving furniture about is what makes them happy.”