By now you’re probably heard all about how brilliant Dave Hutchinson’s murky sci-fi thriller Europe In Autumn is, what with all the award nominations and all.
This week, with the prestigious Campbell Awards coming up and Europe In Autumn in the running, we thought we’d celebrate with an exclusive Rebellion eBook Store sale on all thrillers – that’s right, you can pick up Europe In Autumn for only £1.99!
There’s a plethora of other titles to choose from, including Haterz by James Goss, Cannonbridge by Jonathan Barnes and Plastic by Christopher Fowler, all available for less than the cost of a pint.
For us Europe in Autumn was love at first read, and with a string of “best-of-the-year” reviews (including The Guardian, The Washington Post and Locus, among others) and as a huge thank you to everyone who has supported the title we thought now would be the perfect time to share with you the opening chapter of the next Fractured Europe Sequence….
EUROPE AT MIDNIGHT
In a fractured Europe new nations are springing up everywhere, some literally overnight.
For an intelligence officer like Jim, it’s a nightmare. Every week or so a friendly power spawns a new and unknown national entity, which may or may not be friendly to England’s interests. It’s hard to keep on top of it all. But things are about to get worse for Jim.
A stabbing on a London bus pitches him into a world where his intelligence service is preparing for war with another universe, and a man has come who may hold the key to unlocking Europe’s most jealously-guarded secret…
CHAPTER ONE
After The Fall
ON CHILL MISTY mornings, I liked to walk down to the river and fish for a while. I never caught anything, but that didn’t matter, particularly. It was relaxing just to stand on the bank and cast and watch the bright orange tip of my float drift downstream. Arblaster, my Residence’s Porter, provided me with sandwiches and a Thermos, and I could quite happily stay there all day. Sometimes I could almost forget about the other things I should have been doing.
One day the hook snagged on something huge and sluggish. I fought it up from the bed of the river, thinking about dead logs and old bicycles. There was said to be a huge pike on this stretch of the river, almost a century old and well over six feet long, but this wasn’t him. What bobbed to the surface instead was one of the Escaped, bloated up with rot, its thick coat stretched tight across the shoulders and punctured by six ragged holes.
I had that part of the river dragged, and four more bodies came to the surface, all of them similarly swollen, all of them similarly holed.
“There’s supposed to be some big old fucking pike around here somewhere,” John Holden told me as we watched his team casting the drag into the river again.
I nodded. “I heard that.”
“I bet we scared that old sod away today.”
“If he’s got any sense he’s gone somewhere else.”
I heard his waders make a sucking sound in the mud below the riverbank. “There’s fuck all to eat around here, that’s true enough. I don’t know why you bother fishing here.”
“It helps me think.”
John sucked on his pipe and watched his team scrambling around on their flatboat. The drag, mounted at the stern, consisted of a steam-driven winch from which dangled a long chain. At the end of the chain was an old brass bedstead with huge blunt hooks brazed to it. John and I had been standing here on the bank watching the operation for three hours, and in that time two of his students had fallen into the river and one of them had had to be taken off duty because the things that came up on the drag kept making him sick.
“Silly sods,” John said, shaking his head, and I didn’t know if he meant the students or the bodies we were bringing up out of the weeds.
“They might have made it,” I said, deciding to be charitable towards the boys and girls on the boat. “It was always worth a try.”
John shook his head. He took his pipe out of his mouth and gestured with it across the river. “Even the kiddies knew not to try a blitz here.”
A long time ago, someone had dubbed this part of the river Runway Four, a virtual highway of failed escape attempts even before I was born. The river was broad and slow here, easily swimmable. The meadows on the other side, prettily hidden beneath drifting horizontal panes of mist, were full of boobytraps that we still hadn’t got around to clearing. Thirty or forty miles beyond them was the Abbotsbury Forest, of which there may or may not have been maps somewhere in the Apocrypha, and which was similarly boobytrapped. And beyond them were the Mountains. From my office in the
Administration Building I could sometimes see, if the weather was right and the air was particularly still, snow on high peaks. Only a lunatic would have tried Runway Four. And the files I had inherited from my predecessor recorded that we had produced plenty of lunatics. More than seventy people had lost their lives here, or in the meadows, or in the forest, in the past two decades. Nobody had made it as far as the Mountains.
“I don’t understand why they kept trying,” I said.
John looked up at me. “What do you mean you don’t understand?”
Well exactly. I put in a request to the Apocrypha, and to my surprise within a month a slim extract file landed on my desk. Bound in a buff folder with a red Restricted stripe across one corner, it detailed the exploits of one ‘Escape Group 9’, who had decided to use the chaos of the Fall to cover their blitz.
It was a sad read. You had to take the Apocrypha with a pinch of salt, but if the file was even remotely accurate Escape Group 9 might have been our very last attempted escapees. If they had waited a few more weeks they might not have bothered, but I remembered those weeks and I couldn’t blame them for trying.
I put the folder away, thinking it would make a sad little footnote to our collective History, but at the next Board meeting Chris Davenport said, “If this was Escape Group 9, what happened to the other eight?”
Everybody looked at me, and I responded by groaning and leaning forward until my forehead touched the tabletop.
“You’re supposed to think about this kind of thing,” Rossiter told me mildly.
“Yes,” I said, sitting up and making a note. “Yes, I’m sorry.”
“Because the other eight might have made it,” Chris went on, not caring that he was further complicating my life, which was already complicated enough.
I made another note. “I’ll have the river dragged again.”
“I mean,” said Chris, “why call yourself Escape Group 9 if there haven’t already been eight of them?”
I looked around the table. Everyone was looking at me. “Why not?” I tried weakly.
Everyone started to talk at once, but Rossiter raised a hand for silence. When everyone had quieted down, he looked at me.
“All we’ve got is a reference,” I said. “It’s from an unattributed Residence History; we don’t know where it came from and we don’t have names.”
Rossiter caught on to what I was talking about, and he said, “No.”
I put down my pencil and clasped my hands on the table in front of me. “I can’t spare anyone, Richard, and I can’t do it myself. I’m busy.”
“We’re all busy,” he told me. “I’ve a stack of memos from Harry Pool wanting people to go out and deal with the flu thing on the South Side.”
“I’ll do it when I have time,” I promised.
“This is the sort of loose end that causes all kinds of trouble,” he said, looking at me over the top of his spectacles.
“Yes, sir.”
“And stop calling me ‘sir.’”
I DIDN’T HAVE time to worry about Escape Group 9. There was always too much to do, and every time I made anything more than tangential contact with my in-tray it seemed that there was more work waiting for me. I put in another request for the Apocrypha to be checked for anything and everything that might give us a clue to the names of EG9’s personnel, but nothing came up. A month or so after my ill-fated fishing expedition, it started to look as if EG9’s security had been better than most. Which made it all the more a shame that they hadn’t managed a home run.
It was around that time that I went back to the river. The first morning, watching the float bob gently on the surface, a rhythmic splash-splash from upstream announced the appearance of a young woman single-mindedly paddling a canoe. I sat where I was and the canoe shot past me and ran my float down.
The canoe splashed away downstream and out of sight round a curve in the river, and I was left to reel in. At the end of the line was nothing but an end of line, curling like a pubic hair. Hook, float, shot and about a foot of leader had been torn clean off.
While I was packing to go, the splash-splash came back. She paddled in to the bank and grabbed at a protruding root to stop herself floating away.
“Hey.”
“Hey what,” I said.
She gave a little jerk of the chin towards my fishing gear. “Catch anything?”
“Not a thing, no.”
She looked about her, at the river, at the bushes along the banks. “Ever catch anything?”
“Not a thing, no.”
She wrinkled her nose at me in a fashion I found rather attractive. “Not much of a fisherman, are you.”
I did up the buckles of my fishing bag and slung it over my shoulder. “There is a school of thought,” I told her, picking up my fishing rod, “which teaches that fish are actually more intelligent than people, but, having only short-term memories, keep forgetting how bright they are. The task of the angler is, therefore, to judge when the fish are at their stupidest and most easily caught.”
I’ll give her her due; she thought about it. “But that’s bollocks!” she said.
“There are also no fish in this part of the river. It helps me to think,” I added, in case she thought I was crazy. “Where were you going?”
“I’m looking for a job.”
“What do you do?”
“I teach Literature. Is there a post here?”
I laid my rod aside. “What’s your name?”
“Araminta Delahunty. What’s yours?”
“Rupert of Hentzau.” I’d been reading too much Anthony Hope in the recent past. I reached a hand down to help her from the canoe. “I’m sure we can find some space for you somewhere.”
I LEARNED TO regret my choice of introduction. She cracked seemingly inexhaustible jokes about The Prisoner Of Zenda. She refused to use my real name, preferring to call me ‘Rupe’ instead. She taught with a passion and ferocity which unnerved and entranced her students by turns. She wouldn’t sleep with me, but persisted in wandering naked about my rooms, and saw nothing out of the ordinary in coming into the bathroom and engaging me in conversation while I was on the toilet.
She said she had canoed almost a hundred miles from School 902, on the East Side, and she had something of the long vowels of the Eastern accent in her voice. She was always full of questions. She wanted to know how the Fall had taken place on this part of the Campus, what last Winter had been like, how the Residence records were organised. She had a terrible sense of direction – “The only way I got out of that fucking place was on the river, Rupe,” she told me one day. “You can’t get lost on a river.” – and gathered maps in bewildering numbers. “Just getting my bearings,” she called it.
From the East, she brought four changes of clothing and a locked metal briefcase. She read voraciously, putting in four and five hours in the Library after a full day of classes. She meditated in the mornings, and in the evenings she practiced a form of dance called something like ‘capybara,’ which she claimed was also a species of unarmed combat.
Meanwhile, the small sad mystery of Escape Group 9 was beginning to eat up an appreciable amount of my time. The fact that we still didn’t know the identities of the four bodies brought up from the river was an irritation, true, but the Fall had left us with hundreds of unidentified and often unidentifiable corpses, and I felt that I could live, if unwillingly, with the idea of four more. There has to come a point where you stop obsessing about the dead.
“THEY MADE THEIR run four days before the Fall,” I told the Board.
“Poor buggers,” said someone.
Rossiter looked at me for a few moments. “And?”
I checked my notes and shrugged. “And.”
“That’s it? After two months?”
“It’s all I could get out of the Apocrypha,” I told him, and we engaged in a brief staring contest, which I lost.
Joe Richardson said, “If Escape Group 9 wasn’t the first, and all the others were the same size, that’s thirty-six people. Thirty-two of whom are unaccounted for.”
“That’s if they were all the same size,” Ian Daniel put in, always eager to jump on a bandwagon. “Maybe we haven’t found all the bodies from Group 9 yet.”
“I had the river dragged again, and we didn’t find any more bodies,” I said. “Don’t you lads read my reports?”
“Gentlemen,” Rossiter warned.
“This is getting ridiculous,” I told him. “I haven’t got the time to spare for this. I’m still helping to prepare the case against the Arts Faculty.”
“I’d judge this is pertinent to your work then,” said Rossiter. “Runway Four was Arts Faculty territory.”
I sighed. It wasn’t going to go away, no matter how hard I tried. “All right, I’ll look into it. But I’ll need some help. The Librarians won’t wear this one, you know what they’re like. I’m understaffed, and what staff I do have are overstretched. I can’t plough through the whole of the fucking Apocrypha on my own.”
Rossiter nodded. “All right, you get your way. I’ll see to it that you get a Research Assistant.”
“Several Research Assistants.” We stared at each other for several seconds, but I knew it was no use and finally I just took a file at random from the pile in front of me and waved it wearily at him to demonstrate my ever-increasing workload.
He nodded at the file. “This,” he said, “is exactly the same as that.”
I suddenly realised what I was waving. “It is not,” I told him. I’d read the file that morning, and it was like nothing I had ever seen before.
He ran the tip of his tongue between his top lip and his teeth. “It’s all atrocity,” he said crisply. He started to gather up his notes. “We need all our available people to help with the reconstruction over on the East Side.”
“The East Side can wait.”
He looked at me and shook his head. He tut-tutted. “Shame on you. And you living with your bit of Eastern totty.”
“She is not my totty,” I said, and there was a ripple of laughter round the table, which was what Rossiter had wanted. The atmosphere in the regular meetings had become noticeably strained in recent weeks. Nobody looked as if they were getting enough sleep. The phrase mass execution had come up more than once in relation to the Old Board. We were all finding Democracy more difficult than we’d imagined.
Rossiter smiled. “I can’t spare you half a dozen people,” he said.
“Half a dozen wouldn’t have been enough anyway,” I muttered peevishly.
“You get a Research Assistant,” he said firmly. “Now. Drugs.”
I looked around the room. It was small and musty and smelled of cabbage, but from here the Old Board had ruled us for more than two hundred years. I tried to come here as little as possible, for any number of reasons. “Doesn’t anyone else here do anything?”
“You wanted the exciting job,” said Ian.
“I did not want the exciting job,” I told him. “I inherited the exciting job. And it’s not that fucking exciting.”
Rossiter took off his spectacles and polished them on the hem of his cardigan. “Drugs,” he said again.
“Some of the reconstruction gangs have been caught using pep pills,” I said. “Harry Pool says they’re not standard issue.”
“Science City,” Rossiter said, and there was an almost-comical moment when the other members of the Board tried to look busy with their notes in case they got drawn into the conversation and wound up having to do something about it.
“There’s nothing to link them to the Science Faculty, but I’m going to see Callum about it,” I told him.
“I wish you all the luck in the world with that,” he said.
“If anyone has a better suggestion, I’m listening,” I said, but no one did.
“I CAN’T REALLY see the problem,” Araminta said, picking a rag of wilted lettuce from the middle of her ham salad roll and dropping it delicately into the ashtray in the middle of the table. The slice of ham underneath was almost transparent, the roll of very poor quality. “You told me yourself that the Faculty registers are full of missing people. Your thirty-six missing escapers will be in there somewhere.”
I shook my head. “The registers aren’t complete. People got into some of the Faculty offices during the Fall and made bonfires with any documentation they could get their hands on. We did our best to stop it, but we couldn’t be everywhere.” I took a sip of my beer and winced. Unlike food in general, the Administration pub’s beer was cheap and plentiful. It was also virtually undrinkable, and even if you could stomach it, it was impossible to get drunk on.
“So what now? You check this Apocrypha thing?”
I started to take another drink of beer, but thought better of it. “The problem with the Apocrypha is that every bit of official, semi-official and unofficial paper the Old Board ever collected is there, and nobody understands their filing system. All you can do is start at Filing Cabinet A and just read the stuff until you bump into what you’re looking for. We were lucky to find that one mention of Escape Group 9.”
“So it might take a while to track the rest of the operation down, right?”
“Right.”
She shrugged and drank some beer; the appalling taste didn’t seem to bother her.
I said, “Are things this bad over on the East Side? I haven’t been there in years.”
“Missing people, you mean?” Her eyes took on a dreamy, sad expression. “Everybody knows someone who disappeared.”
“You too?”
She focused back on my face and she smiled a sad little smile. “Me too.”
This wasn’t the right time or place to ask who, so I said, “It’s a bad do. We’ll be years clearing up the mess they left.”
“I think you take too much on yourself, Rupe, you know?”
“I get it given to me.”
All of a sudden, she broke into a huge smile. “Oh, Rupe, sometimes I could just hug you, you’re such a good soul.”
I actually felt myself start to blush. “I’ve been called a lot of things…”
She laughed. “I’m sure.” Then she suddenly turned serious. “Rupe, am I cramping your style?”
“What?” She was always using unfamiliar words and phrases and sentence constructions, East Side slang. Another few years of the Old Board and we would have been speaking different languages.
“Having me living with you,” she said. She grinned slyly. “Some of my students say you’re pretty popular with the girls.”
“Oh.” I suddenly caught up. “Oh, no. No.” Shaking my head vigorously.
“I hear you have a reputation,” she said, still grinning.
“A reputation, perhaps. But no time.” I was starting to blush again. “I haven’t had time for that for a long while.”
She half-stood, bent forward across the table, and kissed me on the top of my head. “Bless you, Rupe, you’re a sweet lad.”
“Thank you,” I said, hoping nobody I knew was in the pub.
“Anyway,” she said, sitting down again. “Escape Group 9.”
“Yes.” I’d almost forgotten about them. I had also, at some point in the last couple of minutes while my attention was elsewhere, managed to drink all my beer without noticing, which was probably for the best. I looked at the bits of grey scum in the bottom of my glass. “Well, the Board are right.”
She tipped her head to one side, a gesture I’d learned to interpret as Araminta-speak for a question which did not need to be asked. You just had to work out for yourself what the question was.
“All right. Look. Four people – room-mates perhaps – take it upon themselves to try a blitz. They have a plan. They keep it to themselves, keep security tight, trust each other and no one else. Nine groups, all working on the same plan, would need an organising committee, access to workshops, secure caches of food and clothing, a whole infrastructure aside and apart from the people who were going to make the actual escape attempts.” I waved a hand in the air. “Another two or three dozen people who wouldn’t be leaving. They should still be here, and we can’t find them, or any mention of them. Good grief, they should be going around boasting about it.”
“Maybe Groups 1 to 8 were the infrastructure,” she suggested. “Maybe the whole organisation just took itself out in groups of four.”
I’d thought of that already, but the idea still made me scowl. “You can’t maintain security in a group that large. It’s impossible. Four is the classic scenario.”
“So you compartmentalise the operation, break it up into groups of four –”
I was shaking my head. “I can’t convince myself that it would work. It’s just too damn big, Araminta. If the first eight Groups made it, that’s thirty-two home runs. The biggest mass-blitz in the Campus’s history. They must have had a blazing good gag to get that many people out.” Especially if they used Runway Four; that wouldn’t just have been a good gag, it would have been a miracle.
She tipped her head to the other side.
I sighed. “What Rossiter and the rest of the Board are so exercised about is what the first eight Escape Groups imply. They imply that somewhere out there is a runway capable of taking at least thirty-two people out of here. Do you understand?”
Araminta smiled.
“It’s been four months since the Fall, and we’re still clearing boobytraps and digging out rogue Security men who don’t want to believe it’s all over. We still haven’t got anyone near the Far Fences, and we probably won’t this year, not without losing people. And here we are with Escape Group 9 and their friends and their foolproof way of getting out.”
“You could still find thirty-two bodies somewhere out there in those woods on the other side of the river,” she pointed out.
I shook my head. Somehow, I knew. Thirty-two people had escaped from the Campus, and we needed to know how they had done it.
“The thing that really worries me,” I said, “is that we can’t be certain Group 9 was the last group.”
THE JOB WAS not exciting, and I had not wanted it; I was bright enough to know that it would turn out to be a poison chalice. But I had wound up coordinating intelligence during the Fall, and when it was all over I had carried on doing that, but on a larger scale. Most of the Board members didn’t have a very high opinion of my work. One of them had called me the worst Professor of Intelligence the Campus had ever had. I was good enough that his comment found its way back to me, though.
Part of the problem was that we just couldn’t trust the few members of the Intelligence Faculty who were left alive, so I’d had to rebuild it from scratch, mostly with people who immediately changed their minds when they discovered that intelligence work was less like a John Buchan novel and more like being a particularly nosy village postmaster.
I had also wound up in charge of Security, and again that had to be rebuilt from the ground up, purged root and branch of Old Board sympathisers. My one great success, although to be fair it only looked like a success to me, and then only on good days, was in setting up a force of Sergeants to enforce civil law.
The other part of the problem was the Old Board, and what they had done, and what we were going to do with them, and that was what really gave me the nightmares.
“WELL, YOU SHOULD have let me know you were coming,” said Harry. “I’d have had a reception ready. Cheese and wine. A band. Stuff like that.”
I dropped the file on one of the stainless steel dissecting tables. It made a slapping sound that echoed off the room’s white-tiled walls. I’d waved the file at Rossiter earlier in the afternoon, without knowing which one I had taken from the pile in front of me on the table; it was three centimetres thick and bound in red with a blue Top Secret stripe and the designation MG42 on the cover.
Harry leaned over to look at the file. “Oh,” he said. He nodded. “Ah.” He looked at me with an indescribably sad expression.
“I want you to tell me this is all just idle speculation,” I said, tapping the folder with a fingertip.
“This is all just idle speculation,” he said without missing a beat.
“Shit.” I turned and leaned back against the table.
“What else would you like me to tell you?” he inquired.
“That you’re wrong.”
He shook his head. “No can do, old son. Sorry.”
The Old Board had left us, like a coming-of-age present, fifty-seven mass graves for our delight and delectation. Thirty-two thousand bodies, in great pits scattered about the Campus. Some of them were very old, perhaps over a hundred years old. Most were very recent, the grass and weeds still not properly established on the earth covering them, traces of the Old Board trying to erase their past.
Mass Grave 42 was one of the smaller ones, in the grounds of the Hospital. It contained the complete bodies of fifty-one people and enough body parts to construct about thirty more. It had been so fresh that you could still see the spade-marks in the earth.
The Medical Faculty had been the last to fall. The Faculty Members had fought down to the last man. The last few survivors had barricaded themselves into the Hospital and then dynamited the building around themselves. The ruins had burned for days. When MG42 was found, I had thought it might contain the bodies of prisoners tortured at the Hospital. That would have been bad enough. But I was wrong. It was worse.
Harry ran a hand through his thinning hair. “It’s just so sad,” he said, nodding at the folder. He put his hands in the pockets of his white coat and turned away. “There were always rumours, but I never believed them. Which shows you how wrong a chap can be.”
The wall at the far end of the room was entirely composed of large metal squares. Each one had a chunky chrome pull-handle. Harry chose one at random and pulled it, swinging the door open. He reached inside and pulled the tray out on its runners. On the tray was a long cloth-covered object. Harry turned the cloth back; underneath was the naked body of a young woman with a shaved head. There were peculiar meaty-lipped slits down her sides, from just under the armpits to just above the hips. Her face was a mass of torn meat, and her body was puffed up and discoloured by decay and silvered with frost.
I leafed through the file. “Gills.”
“Female, approximately twenty-five years of age,” Harry said. “Hair shaved, hazel eyes. Height five feet six inches, weight eight stone seven ounces.” I glanced down at the file. He was quoting the autopsy report from memory. I wondered what his nightmares must be like. “Structures on either side of her body which on dissection proved to be rudimentary gills, surgically implanted roughly eighteen months before her death.” He looked at the girl’s ruined face for a moment longer, then covered her again. “Cause of death, a single pistol shot to the back of the head.” He pushed the tray back into the fridge, closed the door, and turned to look at me. “Her lungs were full of fluid, but there were none of the usual post-mortem signs of drowning; they must have had her breathing water for months.”
“That’s not possible,” I said.
“If you thought that, you wouldn’t be here,” he said. He went over to one of the benches against the far wall of the room and started to move some glassware about.
I leafed through the file again. “Richard refuses to believe this.”
“Well, I don’t blame him.” Harry turned to face me. In his hands were two beakers with half an inch or so of pale amber liquid in them. “Drink?”
I nodded, and he came over and handed me one of the beakers. I sipped at the liquid. It made me cough. “What on earth is this?”
“I’m not supposed to tell anybody.”
I put the beaker down on the table, next to the MG42 folder. “Harry, where did you get this stuff?”
“Somebody out in Science City makes it.”
The day was just going from bad to worse; every time I talked to someone my problems multiplied. On the other hand, the whisky wasn’t half bad.
Harry sipped his drink. “There was a chap with wings, did you read about that?” I nodded, and he shook his head at the thought of it. “Never seen anything like it. I can’t believe he could ever have got off the ground, but you should see him. Breastbone like the keel of a boat to anchor the flight muscles. Pectorals like steel cables. And it wasn’t surgical implantation, either, like that poor girl. He was born that way. His bones were hollow. How did they do that?” He shook his head again. “There were others…” He shrugged. “I can’t even begin to guess what they were trying to do with them. I’ve got Anna Glasgow doing a priority search for the Faculty’s notes.”
“I wouldn’t mind having some of that priority search time for my own stuff, Harry.”
“This is really important,” he told me. “We need those notes. I don’t know what the Medical Faculty thought it was up to, but if these poor boys and girls are anything to judge by, it was something really fundamental.”
“Something that materially advances our situation?”
He looked at me. “I don’t blame you for being bitter,” he said. “But there’s more to life than politics.”
“You might mention that to the Board.”
He snorted. “I’ve been thinking of using it as a letterhead. Refill?”
“I haven’t finished this one yet.”
“Ah.” He went back to the workbench and poured himself another drink from a two-litre specimen jar.
“I didn’t put it in my report,” he said, coming back to the table, “but the way I see it is that they were trying to destroy the evidence. The bodies on the top layer had been doused with acid, but the ones on the bottom were more or less undamaged. You remember how the Hospital chimney was pouring smoke during the Fall? I reckon a lot of bodies were just piled into the incinerator, and when they overran its capacity they had to dig this big grave. Christ only knows what went up in smoke.” He looked at me. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“You look a bit pale.”
“It’s the smell.”
“Yes, well, we keep losing power, and the freezers… well.” He gave a nervous little laugh. “I’d tell you that you stop noticing the smell after a while, but you don’t.”
“I’ll try and get someone to take care of it.”
He took another drink. “It’s good of you, but I know you have too much to do already.”
“I’ll try to sort something out. Who else knows about this?”
“The autopsies? Just me and the boys and girls.”
‘The boys and girls’ were five medical students who had volunteered to help Harry. They had all been carefully vetted, but they still existed under an almost-tangible stigma, and they lived in a fortified Residence with armed guards. The Medical Faculty had had an appalling and well-deserved reputation and more enemies than anyone could count.
“They wouldn’t have told anyone else, would they?” I asked.
“I told them not to say anything.”
“And you trust them.”
Harry drained his beaker. “No, I don’t. But they all think they’re living under a stay of execution, so I think they’ll probably do whatever I tell them. What are you so worried about?”
I picked up the MG42 folder and tucked it under my arm. “If this gets out, there’ll be a pogrom. We’ll have members of the Old Board dragged out of custody and hanged from lamp standards.”
He put the beaker down on the dissection table. “That’s what’s going to happen anyway, isn’t it?”
I almost started to tell him that it was important to have everything done legally. A fair trial, witnesses for prosecution and defence, the accused having their day in court. But I knew he didn’t want to hear about that. Behind his spectacles, Harry’s eyes were bloodshot, and his face was grey with exhaustion. He was doing a job nobody else had wanted to do, and the New Board had worked him almost to death at it.
“People are starting to get ill,” he told me. “No one’s eating properly. You’re not; I can tell just by looking at you. There’s a flu outbreak down by 223.”
“Richard mentioned it.”
“Yes, well Richard won’t give me staff to go there and try to do something about it. There’s real malnutrition down there; people are going to die.”
“I’ll have to investigate this, you realise,” I said, nodding at my beaker.
“I think, compared to some of the things I’ve seen in this room, that this is pretty small beer,” he said. “Excuse the pun.”
“We can’t afford to be sloppy,” I told him.
He gave a forced little smile. “Well, that sounds familiar.”
If anyone else had compared me to the Old Board like that, I would have thumped them, or at the very least favoured them with some very harsh language. But of all of us, Harry had been brought face to face in the most basic way with the madness the Old Board had embraced, and some of it defied rational explanation.
I said, “It’s going to be all right, Harry.”
He snorted. “It’s never going to be all right.”
“It’s going to be all right,” I said again. “You wait and see.” He was right about one thing, though. The Old Board were going to get a fair trial. And then we were going to hang every single one of them.
Yesterday saw the release of the shortlist of nominees for this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award and, as anyone near our twitter feed will know, we were delighted to see our own Dave Hutchinson among the final six with break-out hit Europe in Autumn.
Speaking in the wake of yesterday’s shortlist announcement the series’ editor Jonathan Oliver had this to say:
“Science fiction is often talked about as the fiction of ideas, and nowhere is this more true than in Dave Hutchinson’s brilliant debut novel, . Part political SF and part near-future espionage thriller, I knew from my first read-through that we had a truly extraordinary book on our hands. That the novel is now short-listed for the Clarke award is testament to Hutchinson’s talent and incisive prose. I’ve already read his next novel, Europe at Midnight, and I can confidently say that this is a writer going places; and it’s an honour to be his editor.”
We’d also like to take this moment to thank everyone who has bought, read, reviewed and talked about Europe in Autumn over the last fourteen months. We’ve been so delighted to see the continued outpouring of love for the title, and the excitement ahead of our recent prequel announcement for Europe at Midnight.
Set in a fracturing Europe, Europe at Midnight sees two men embark on a decades-long intelligence operation to penetrate the mysterious Community. What they find will make them question the nature of their lives and of reality itself.
From an immense university held captive by its masters to the quiet rooms of the intelligence community, a terrible secret spanning worlds begins to emerge…
Europe at Midnight appropriately publishes on the 5th November this year.
The final winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award will be announce on the 6th May at Foyles Flagship store in London and here is the final list of nominees, we couldn’t think of a better group of people to be among:
The Girl With All The Gifts – M.R. Carey (Orbit)
The Book Of Strange New Things – Michel Faber (Canongate)
Europe In Autumn – Dave Hutchinson (Solaris)
Memory Of Water – Emmi Itäranta (HarperVoyager)
The First Fifteen Lives Of Harry August – Claire North (Orbit)
Station Eleven – Emily St John Mandel (Picador)
Dave Hutchinson was born in Sheffield in 1960 and read American Studies at the University of Nottingham, before going on to become a journalist. He’s the author of six collections of short stories and the editor of three more. His novella ‘The Push’ was shortlisted for the BSFA Award in 2010, and his novel Europe In Autumn was shortlisted for both the BSFA Award and the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2015. He is also the author of the novel The Villages. A follow-up to Europe In Autumn, Europe At Midnight, will be published by Solaris in November.
He lives in London with his wife and a number of cats.
Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson was the slow burn hit of 2014, a timely SF thriller that got everyone – from US Ambassadors to online bloggers – talking. Set in a balkanised Europe, divided by political divisions, economic crises and pandemic illness, Europe in Autumn proved especially poignant for the year which saw Scottish and Catalan referendums, the UK lose its AAA credit rating and Greece hit by EU sanctioned austerity measures.
A dystopian espionage thriller that evoked the Cold War novels of John Le Carré and the nightmarish world of Franz Kafka, Europe in Autumn is a dazzling SF tale of what happens when a conspiracy theory threatens to unravel reality itself. Publishing to critical applause, featured highly across the board on the annual best-of list round-ups and currently shortlist nominated for the BSFA award for best novel, Europe in Autumn was a genre highlight for 2014, leaving fans of the book clamouring for a follow up.
It is with great delight that we can today announce the 2015 publication of the follow up title Europe at Midnight:
Europe is crumbling. The Xian Flu pandemic and ongoing economic crises have fractured the European Union, the borderless Continent of the Schengen Agreement is a distant memory, and new nations are springing up everywhere, some literally overnight.
For an intelligence officer like Jim, it’s a nightmare. Every week or so a friendly power spawns a new and unknown national entity which may or may not be friendly to England’s interests; it’s hard to keep on top of it all. But things are about to get worse for Jim. A stabbing on a London bus pitches him into a world where his intelligence service is preparing for war with another universe, and a man has come who may hold the key to unlocking the mystery…
Europe at Midnight, the second title in the Fractured Europe Sequence series by Dave Hutchinson from Solaris Book, will publish November 2015 in UK print and worldwide eBook, with a US physical print edition to follow later.
“The author’s authoritative prose, intimate knowledge of eastern Europe, and his fusion of Kafka with Len Deighton, combine to create a spellbinding novel of intrigue and paranoia.” – The Guardian
Dave Hutchinson was born in Sheffield in 1960. After reading American Studies at the University of Nottingham, he became a journalist. He’s the author of six collections of short stories and two novels, and his novella “The Push” was shortlisted for the 2010 BSFA award for short fiction. He has also edited two anthologies and co-edited a third. His short story ‘The Incredible Exploding Man’ featured in the first Solaris Rising anthology, and appeared in the 29th Year’s Best Science Fiction collection. He lives in north London with his wife and several cats.
Press enquires for Europe in Autumn and Europe at Midnight should be directed to Lydia Gittins at PublishingPress@rebellion.co.uk
“The word nation is an enormously comforting one. A nation is safe, secure. It has borders and a currency and a means of defence and a place in the world. It gives us a sense of identity, a place to come home to when we’ve been away.
Similarly – notwithstanding the thoughts of UKIP – the word Europe conjures up solidity, a huge monolithic thing off the South Coast of England. Here too is identity, a place in the world.
Neither of these statements is quite true.
Europe is, of course, made up of numerous nations – not all of them yet in the European Union. It’s far from homogeneous; it’s big and fractious and unwieldy and full of strange languages and unusual food and people who quite often actively dislike the people living just the other side of the border.
And the nations themselves are less permanent than we would like to think, as any Pole will tell you. Borders shift, are imposed, shift again. If you go far enough back in history, many of the countries we now consider to be nations are actually accretions of smaller states. Germany, and Italy, as we know them, are actually quite recent things, historically speaking. Yugoslavia came into being in the years following the First World War, survived for a while, and then fractured into its component parts again. Similarly with Czechoslovakia. In Britain, we’re on the final run-up to a referendum which may see Scotland becoming an independent nation again, and in Ukraine the Russian invasion has given rise to something that styles itself The Autonomous Republic of Crimea.
Europe In Autumn imagines a Europe in the latter half of this century where the EU has, for various reasons, begun to crumble and new countries – some of them not much bigger than municipal housing estates – have begun to spring up. It’s a novel about borders and about crossing them. The ‘Autumn’ of the title is, to a large extent, a figurative one. This is a Europe in flux, a Union at the end of its days.
It sounds like science fiction, but it’s really not. I’m beginning to think that we live there. While I was doing background research for the book – and yes, I did do some – I came across the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the rights and duties of states, which lays out criteria for statehood. They’re surprisingly straightforward. ‘The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.’ The Convention goes on to say, ‘The political existence of the state is independent of recognition by the other states.’
Basically, if an entity fits the qualifications it can be regarded as sovereign even if no one else recognises it.
Naturally, I was delighted to come across this because it at least offers some kind of real-life guiding framework within which the numerous new states and polities and kingdoms and republics in Europe In Autumn can exist.
In addition, the concept of micronations is far from being a new one. You could argue – and I would – that Monaco is a micronation, but other real-life examples include Sealand, the old Maunsell fort off the Essex coast which declared its sovereignty back in the mid-1960s and which I was delighted to discover is still in existence, having gone through all the teething troubles of any large-scale nation, including an attempted coup. If an old sea fort can become a nation, why shouldn’t the fans of Günther Grass set up their own microstate in Pomerania? Why shouldn’t a national park in Estonia become a sovereign country, as Rudi and his brother discuss one drunken night?
Rudi looked at his brother and tipped his head to one side. “Are you all right?” Ivari looked at him and sighed. He ground his cigarette out in the ashtray. “Paps.” “Well, yes,” said Rudi. Ivari shook his head. “He’s…he wants the park to declare independence.” “I beg your pardon?” “He wants the park to secede. Become an independent nation. A…what do you call it?” “Polity,” Rudi said, feeling numb. Ivari made a half-hearted gotcha gesture. “Polity. Yes.” “You talked him out of it, though?” said Rudi. He saw the look on his brother’s face and put his hands up. “Sorry. Pretend I didn’t ask that.” Ivari lit another cigarette. “A park in Lithuania did it a couple of years ago, I don’t remember the name.” Rudi nodded, though he couldn’t remember the name either. But it included part of the great primeval forest he had been telling Frances about earlier. “It didn’t last long,” he said. “Yes, well, the old man says they were a bunch of amateurs. He says he’s got it all thought out.” Well, at least that would be true enough. Rudi rubbed his face. “He can’t possibly make it work. He needs a big percentage of the population to agree to his proposal in the first place, before he goes anywhere with it.” “There aren’t more than seven hundred people living in the park these days, Rudi,” said Ivari. “Most of them are as pissed-off as he is that the Government keeps all our tourism revenue.” “And gives it back,” said Rudi. “Upkeep of the Manor and the visitor centre. The tram-line. Maintenance of the roads.” Ivari shook his head. “He’s right about that, at least. We only ever see a fraction of it. We get the absolute minimum that we need. We’re having to cannibalise one of the humvees just to keep the others going. The rest of it?” He shrugged. “It wasn’t always like that,” said Rudi, thinking back to when he was young and they moved here for the first time. “The Government used to hurl cash at us. You remember President Laar? ‘Estonia’s most precious natural resource. We will never neglect it.’” “Laar was a long time ago. We were just kids, Rudi. Back then Paps could go to the Ministry and ask for anything his black little heart desired, and they’d give it him. Not any more. Now we’re a big tourist cash-cow, and most of the cash goes into someone else’s pockets.” “It sounds as if the old man’s got you convinced.” “He’s got a point about the money,” Ivari insisted. “When I took over from Paps as head ranger, we got on all right with the Government. They didn’t let us bathe in asses’ milk, but they granted us funds for a lot of projects. Nowadays I spend half my time in Tallinn with my cap in my hands.” He poured himself another drink and looked at the glass. “Oh, sure, the President comes up here a lot. The Prime Minister, as well. Lots of ministers. And what do we get?” He knocked back the drink in one swallow. “Flowers. Fruit. Fluffy toys.” “Governments change, Ivari.” “Nah,” Ivari said, pouring another drink. He held up the bottle. “You want?” “Yes,” said Rudi, taking the bottle from his brother. He topped up his drink, put the bottle on the floor by his feet, out of Ivari’s reach. “Nah,” Ivari said again. “It’s institutionalised now. This arsehole, he’s made everyone realise just how much we can help them feather their own nests.” Rudi shook his head. “It can’t work. The park can’t possibly earn enough from tourism to be self-supporting.” “Paps is talking about getting the Laulupidu moved out here.” “The song festival? That’s never going to happen.” Ivari looked at him. “Why not? It wasn’t in Tallinn originally; it was in Tartu.” “But the Festival Grounds are there, the Lauluväljak. It’s where the Singing Revolution happened. Nobody’s going to move the festival from there.” Ivari looked sourly at him. “With Paps’s contacts in the folk-song community? All it takes is his pals to decide to boycott the Festival and come here and have a rival one of their own.” He shook his head. “Not even difficult. Those old guys love him, Rudi. They’d walk into hell if he asked them to. Nah.” He shook his head again. “All he has to do is say the word, and the Laulupidu happens right here. Let Tallinn keep the Lauluväljak for heavy metal concerts.” One of the biggest song festivals along the Baltic. Tens of thousands of people. If they could turn it into an annual event, rather than every five years, it might generate enoughrevenue to make a difference. If they could build a suitable venue for it here. Rudi said, “He has to go to the UN with the proposal. Their fact-finding study alone could last ten years.” “He’s got a precedent.” Rudi felt his blood chill. “That place in Berlin. The one with the anarchists.” “New Potsdam,” Rudi said dully. Ivari nodded. “That was a spontaneous thing. Paps thinks that if it happens spontaneously enough here, the UN will concede to it, just like they did with New Potsdam.” “The Government could keep him in a UN Special Court for the rest of his life, arguing about that,” Rudi said, grasping at straws. “True. But in the interim, the UN has no power to prevent a provisional Government being set up here. We’d have to accept Peacekeepers, but let’s face it, they might come in handy.” Rudi put a hand to his face and rubbed it in a horrified, circular motion, as if trying to erase his features. “The old bastard,” he said, not without admiration. “He wants to hand the UN a fait accompli and let them sort it out.” “And by the time they do have it sorted out…” “…this is a functioning country and they have no right to abolish it. They have to recognise it.” Rudi blinked. “Fucking hell.” It was, he thought, either the work of a genius or a madman. With his father, it was usually impossible to tell which. “Of course, we’d have to prove that we were a functioning country, in the interim,” said Ivari. “But Paps has it all costed out. He’s got spreadsheets, he’s got presentations, he’s got the results of divinations from the entrails of chickens. God only knows what he has. He’s bent the figures so far out of shape they don’t even look like numbers any more. He’s got a Constitution and a Parliament. In an emergency he’s got a Government that looks a lot like the Divine Right of Kings.” Ivari held his hand out flat, about a metre above the floor. “He’s got a stack of notes and proposals and suggestions this high.” “Could it work?” “I don’t know. I’ve seen all his paperwork. Half of it looks as though it was written by Aleister Crowley. On a costings level? We’d have a few tight years in the beginning, then we’d start to show a profit. We’d licence settlers, sell visas. Make the visas really arty so people would regard them as souvenirs. We should have a park mascot. Villem The Bear. Everyone loves bears. Especially if we design him right.” Ivari put his hand to the side of his head as though massaging away a pain. “There aren’t enough people here to defend the borders,” Rudi said. “Haven’t you been listening?” Ivari shouted, taking his hand from his head. “The United Nations will do that for us.” Rudi raised a hand. “Okay. My mistake.” Ivari sighed. “Can I have a drink, please?” Rudi looked at the bottle of Scotch. After a while he picked it up and passed it over. Then he sat back and lit another cigar. “Either he’s going to be the saviour of the park,” Ivari said, pouring a very large measure of whisky into his glass and carefully putting the bottle down where he could get at it when he needed it again, “or he’s going to destroy us.” He picked up his glass and took a big drink. “And I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know which it’s going to be.” Rudi looked at his brother, caught between a rock and a hard place. “We could always kill him,” he suggested.
One of the things I didn’t really address in Europe In Autumn is the human cost of all this. The creation of new nations, the imposition of new borders, causes tremendous upheaval. People wind up displaced. Families are torn apart. The Treaty of Rapallo, which in part codified the new nation of Yugoslavia, cut off about a quarter of Slovene territory and left around half a million Slavs in Italy. As Rudi, Max and Dariusz discuss in the book, after the Second World War the populations of German towns like Breslau and Oppeln suddenly found themselves living in the Polish towns of Wrocław and Opole, as part of the ‘compensation’ for the incorporation of the formerly Polish lands to the East – including Lwow – in the Soviet Union. It’s not often a painless process.
The Schengen Treaty aimed to remove border controls within the European Union. As someone who once spent five hours on a coach waiting to cross the Polish-German border, I can only applaud the sentiment. But Schengen, like all treaties, is a fragile thing. The borders could come back.
The Twentieth Century in Europe saw borders come and go, saw nations assembled and then dismantled. I don’t see why the Twenty-First Century will be any different. Some commentators have described the world in Europe In Autumn as dystopian. Personally, I’d beg to differ. The world in Europe In Autumn is actually what we would get if we were quite lucky. It is, at least, a world which is mostly at peace. I think the world we live in now is the dystopia.”
About the author
Dave Hutchinson is the author of SF near-future spy thriller Europe in Autumn which is out now from Solaris and is also available in print and ebook from Amazon in the UK
and in North America.
He is the author of five collections of short stories and one novel, and his novella “The Push” was shortlisted for the 2010 BSFA award for short fiction. He has also edited two anthologies and co-edited a third. His short story ‘The Incredible Exploding Man’ featured in the first Solaris Rising anthology, and appeared in the 29th Year’s Best Science Fiction collection. He lives in north London with his wife and several cats.
“Europe in Autumn is the work of a consummate storyteller and combines great characters, a cracking central idea, and a plot that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Excellent.” – Eric Brown
A fractured Europe, a cook-turned-spy, a mighty web of espionage – but what happens when conspiracy threatens to overwhelm even reality itself?
Europe in Autumn is a dystopian SF espionage thriller that evokes the Cold War novels of John Le Carré and the nightmarish world of Franz Kafka, taking place in a war and disease-torn Europe of hundreds of tiny nations.
Rudi is a cook in a Kraków restaurant, but when boss asks him to help a cousin escape from the country he’s trapped in, a new career – part spy, part people-smuggler – begins.
Recruited by the shadowy organisation Les Coureurs des Bois, Rudi is schooled in espionage. When he is sent to smuggle someone out of Berlin and finds a severed head inside a locker instead, a conspiracy begins to wind itself around him.
With kidnapping, double-crosses and a map that constantly re-draws itself, Europe in Autumn is a modern science fiction thriller like no other.
Europe in Autumn hits book stores tomorrow and to tease your literary taste buds, we are very pleased to present – for free and your reading pleasure – the first chapter…
Max’s Cousin
1.
The Hungarians came into the restaurant around nine in the evening, eight large men with gorgeously-tailored suits and hand-stitched Italian shoes and hundred-złoty haircuts. Michał, the maitre d’, tried to tell them that there were no tables free unless they had a reservation, but they walked over to one of the large tables and sat down. One of them plucked the Reserved card from the middle of the tablecloth and sailed it out across the restaurant with a snap of the wrist and a bearish grin, causing other diners to duck. Max, the owner, had a protection deal with Wesoły Ptak, but instead of calling them or the police – either of which would have probably resulted in a bloodbath – he seized a notepad and set off across the restaurant to take the Hungarians’ orders. This show of confidence did not prevent a number of diners signalling frantically for their bills. The Hungarians were already boisterous, and shouted and laughed at Max while he tried to take their orders, changing their minds frequently and causing Max to start all over again. Finally, he walked back from the table to the bar, where Gosia was standing frozen with fear. “Six bottles of Żubrówka, on the house,” he murmured calmly to the girl as he went by towards the kitchen. “And try to be nimble on your feet.” Rudi, who had been standing in the kitchen doorway watching events with interest, said, “Something awful is going to happen, Max.” “Cook,” Max replied, handing him the order. “Cook quickly.” By ten o’clock the Hungarians had loosened their ties and taken off their jackets and were singing and yelling at each other and laughing at impenetrable jokes. They had completed three courses of their five-course order. They were alone in the restaurant. With most of the meal completed, Rudi told the kitchen crew they could go home.
At one point, one of the Hungarians, an immense man with a face the colour of barszcz, began shouting at the others. He stood up, swaying gently, and yelled at his compatriots, who goodnaturedly yelled at him to sit down again. Sweat pouring down his face, he turned, grasped the back of a chair from the next table, and in one easy movement pivoted and flung it across the room. It crashed into the wall and smashed a sconce and brought down a mirror. There was a moment’s silence. The Hungarian stood looking at the dent in the wallpaper, frowning. Then he sat down and one of his friends poured him a drink and slapped him on the back and Max served the next course. As the hour grew late the Hungarians became maudlin. They put their arms around each others’ shoulders and began to sing songs that waxed increasingly sad as midnight approached. Rudi, his cooking finished for the night and the kitchen tidied up and cleaned, stood in the doorway listening to their songs. The Hungarians had beautiful voices. He didn’t understand the words, but the melodies were heart-achingly lonely. One of them saw him standing there and started to beckon urgently. The others turned to see what was going on, and they too started to beckon. “Go on,” Max said from his post by the bar. “You’re joking,” said Rudi. “I am not. Go and see what they want.” “And if they want to beat me up?” “They’ll soon get bored.” “Thank you, Max,” Rudi said, setting off across the restaurant. The Hungarians’ table looked as if someone had dropped a five-course meal onto it from ceiling height. The floor around it was crunchy with broken glass and smashed crockery, the carpet sticky with sauces and bits of trodden-in food. “You cook?” said one in appalling Polish as Rudi approached. “Yes,” said Rudi, balancing his weight on the balls of his feet just in case he had to move in a hurry.
The Polish-speaker looked like a side of beef sewn into an Armani Revival suit. His face was pale and sweaty and he was wearing a shoulder-holster from which protruded the handgrip of a colossal pistol. He crooked a forefinger the size of a sausage. Rudi bent down until their faces were only a couple of centimetres apart. “Respect!” the Hungarian bellowed. Rudi flinched at the meaty spicy alcohol-and-tobacco gale of his breath. “Everywhere we go, this fuck city, not respect!” This statement seemed to require a reply, so Rudi said, “Oh?” “Not respect,” the Hungarian said, shaking his head sadly. His expression suddenly brightened. “Here, Restaurant Max, we got respect!” “We always respect our customers,” Max murmured, moving soundlessly up beside Rudi. “Fuck right!” the Hungarian said loudly. “Fuck right. Restaurant Max more respect.” “And your meal?” Max inquired, smiling. “Good fuck meal,” the Hungarian said. There was a general nodding of heads around the table. He looked at Rudi and belched. “Good fuck cook. Polish food for fuck pigs, but good fuck cook.” Rudi smiled. “Thank you,” he said. The Hungarian’s eyes suddenly came into focus. “Good,” he said. “We gone.” He snapped a few words and the others around the table stood up, all save the one who had thrown the chair, who was slumped over with his cheek pressed to the tablecloth, snoring gently. Two of his friends grasped him by the shoulders and elbows and lifted him up. Bits of food adhered to the side of his face. “Food good,” the Polish-speaker told Rudi. He took his jacket from the back of his chair and shrugged into it. He dipped a hand into his breast pocket and came up with a business card held between his first two fingers. “You need working, you call.” Rudi took the card. “Thank you,” he said again. “Okay.” He put both hands to his face and swept them up and back in a movement that magically rearranged his hair and seemed to sober him up at the same time. “We gone.” He looked at Max. “Clever fuck Pole.” He reached into an inside jacket pocket and brought out a wallet the size and shape of a housebrick. “What is?” “On the house,” Max said. “A gift.” Rudi looked at his boss and wondered what went on underneath that shaved scalp. The Hungarian regarded the restaurant. “We break much.” Max shrugged carelessly. “Okay.” The Hungarian removed a centimetre-thick wad of złotys from the wallet and held it out. “You take,” he said. Max smiled and bowed slightly and took the money, then the Hungarians were moving towards the exit. A last burst of raucous singing, one last bar stool hurled across the restaurant, a puff of cold air through the open door, and they were gone. Rudi heard Max locking the doors behind them. “Well,” Max said, coming back down the stairs. “That was an interesting evening.” Rudi picked up an overturned stool, righted it, and sat at the bar. He had, he discovered, sweated entirely through his chef’s whites. “I think,” he said, “you should renegotiate your subscription to Wesoły Ptak.” Max went behind the bar. He bent down and started to search the shelves. “If Wesoły Ptak had turned up tonight, half of us would have wound up in the mortuary.” He straightened up holding half a bottle of Starka and two glasses. Rudi took his lighter and a tin of small cigars from his pocket. He lit one and looked at the restaurant. If he was objective about it, there was actually very little damage. Just a lot of mess for the cleaners to tackle, and they’d had wedding receptions that had been messier. Max filled the two glasses with vodka and held one up in a toast. “Good fuck meal,” he said. Rudi looked at him for a moment. Then he picked up the other glass, returned the toast, and drained it in one go. Then they both started to laugh. “What if they come back?” Rudi asked. But Max was still laughing. “Good fuck meal,” he repeated, shaking his head and refilling the glasses.
The Hungarians did not come back, which seemed to bear out Max’s view that they had just been out for a good time rather than intent on muscling in on Wesoły Ptak’s territory. Wesoły Ptak – the name meant Happy Bird – was a deeply diversified organisation. Its many divisions included prostitution, drugs, armed robbery, a soft-drink bottling factory on the outskirts of Kraków, a bus company, any number of unlicenced gambling dens, and a protection racket centred around Floriańska Street, just off the Market Square of Poland’s old capital. They were not, on the whole, known for their violent nature, preferring to apply force with surgical precision rather than in broad strokes. For instance, a restaurateur or shopkeeper who tried to organise his neighbours against the gang might find himself in hospital with anatomically-novel joints imposed on his legs. The other rebels would get the point, and the uprising would end. Another gang might be more likely to launch a massive firebombing campaign, or a wave of spectacularly bloody killings, but Happy Bird were content with a less-is-more approach.
In the wake of the Hungarians’ visit to Restauracja Max, some of the other businesses began to wonder out loud just what they were paying Wesoły Ptak for. This went on for a day or so, and then the son of one of the owners suffered a minor accident at school. Nothing life-threatening, just a few bumps and scrapes, and after that the grumbling along Floriańska subsided. A week or so later, Dariusz, Wesoły Ptak’s representative, visited Restauracja Max one evening just before closing. All the staff but Rudi and Michał had gone home. Max asked Rudi to prepare two steak tartares, and he and Dariusz took a bottle of Wyborowa and a couple of glasses over to a table in the darkest corner of the deserted restaurant.
When Rudi emerged from the kitchen with the components of the steak tartares on a tray, Max and Dariusz were deep in conversation inside a cloud of cigarette smoke dimly-illuminated by the little sconce on the wall above their table. As Rudi approached with the food, Dariusz looked up and smiled. “Supper,” he said. Rudi set out on the table the trays of anchovies and chopped onions, the little bowls of pickled cucumbers, the condiments, plates of rye bread, saucers of unsalted butter, the two plates of minced beef, each with an egg yolk nestling in a hollow on top. “We were discussing your visitors of last month,” Dariusz said. “It was an eventful evening,” Rudi agreed, swapping the table’s ashtray for a clean one. “Have a good meal.” “Why don’t you sit and have a drink with us?” Dariusz asked. Rudi looked at Max, sitting at the other side of the table like a smoothly prosperous Silesian Buddha, hands clasped comfortably against the broad expanse of his stomach. Max was smiling gently and looking off into some faraway vista. He nodded fractionally. Rudi shrugged. “All right.” He put the tray and the dirty ashtray on the next table, pulled up a chair, and sat. “A busy night,” Max rumbled, picking up a fork. Rudi nodded. Takings had gone down for a couple of days after the Hungarians visited, but they were back up now. Earlier in the week, Max had murmured something about a raise, but Rudi had known him long enough not to take it seriously. “I was wondering about Władek,” Max said. Władek was the latest of a long line of alleged cooks to arrive at Restauracja Max and then discover that they were not being paid enough for the long hours and hard work. “He seems keen,” Rudi said, watching Max use the edge of his fork to mash up the egg and beef on his plate. “They all do, at first,” Max agreed. “Then they get greedy.” “It’s not greed, Max,” Rudi told him. Max shook his head. “They think they can come here and be ready to open their own restaurant after a month. They don’t understand the business.” Max’s philosophy of the restaurant business shared certain features with Zen Buddhism. Rudi, who was more interested in cooking than philosophy, said, “It’s a common enough misconception.” “It’s the same in my business,” Dariusz said. Rudi had almost forgotten the little man was at the table, but there he was, mixing anchovies and chopped onion into his beef with a singleminded determination. “You should see some of our recruits, particularly these days. They think they’ll be running the city in a year.” He smiled sadly. “Imagine their disappointment.” “Yes,” Rudi said. “The only difference is that it’s easier for a sous-chef to leave a restaurant than it is for someone to leave Wesoły Ptak.” Max glanced up from his plate, sighed, shook his head, and went back to mashing his meal together with his fork. If Dariusz was offended, he gave no sign. “We’re a business, like any other,” he said. “Not quite like any other,” said Rudi. Max looked at him again. This time he frowned before returning his attention to his steak. Dariusz also frowned, but the frown was barely discernible, and it was gone after a moment. “Well, we do less cooking, it’s true,” he said, and he laughed. Max smiled and shook his head. Rudi sat back and crossed his arms. Wesoły Ptak was nothing out of the ordinary; he had encountered organisations like it in Tallinn and Riga and Vilnius, and they were all alike, and Dariusz didn’t fit the demographic. He looked ordinary, a slim little middle-aged man with a cheap haircut and laugh-lines around his eyes. If he was armed, his unprepossessing off-the-peg business suit hid it wonderfully well. “Should we worry about the Hungarians?” Rudi asked. Dariusz looked up from his meal, his eyebrows raised in surprise. “Worry?” he asked. “Why should you worry?” Rudi shrugged and watched Max working on his steak. Rudi hated steak tartare. The customer did all the preparation themselves, and they took up table space while they did it. Poles in particular seemed to regard it as a social occasion. They took forever about it, tasting over and over again and minutely adjusting the seasoning. When he had his own restaurant, steak tartare would not be on the menu.
Dariusz reached out and touched Rudi’s forearm. Rudi noticed his fingernails were chewed. “You mustn’t worry,” Dariusz said. “All right,” said Rudi. “This kind of thing happens all the time.” “Not to me it doesn’t.” Dariusz smiled. “You have to think of us like nations. Poles and Hungarians are the criminal princes of Europe.” “And the Bulgarians,” Max put in goodnaturedly. Dariusz shrugged. “Yes, one must include the Bulgarians as well. We must constantly visit, check each other out, put our toes in the water,” he told Rudi. “It’s a matter of diplomacy.” “Do you mean what happened here the other night was a diplomatic incident?” said Rudi. “It might well have been, if wiser heads had not prevailed.” Dariusz nodded at Max. “You haven’t got a drink,” Max observed. He looked across the restaurant and Michał, responding with a maitre d’s telepathy, brought a clean glass over to the table for Rudi and then retreated behind the bar. Max filled the glass with vodka and said, “They were just looking for a good time, but nobody would give them one because everyone was afraid of them.” “I can’t blame them,” Dariusz said. He tasted his steak, winced, reached for the tabasco bottle and shook a few drops onto the meat. “A bunch of drunken Hungarians, armed to the teeth, wandering into restaurants and bars. What’s one to think?” “Indeed,” Max agreed. “It would be their own fault if someone was to over-react,” Dariusz went on. He tasted his steak again, and this time it was more to his liking. This time he actually lifted a forkful into his mouth and chewed happily. “And nobody would want that,” Max said. Apparently, his steak was also prepared to his satisfaction. He started to eat. “Well, precisely,” said Dariusz. “Something like that could start a war.” He looked at Rudi and cocked his head to one side. “You’re from Tallinn, yes?” “I was born in Taevaskoja,” Rudi said. “But I’ve lived in Tallinn.” “I’ve never been there.” Dariusz looked at his glass, but it was empty. “What’s it like?” Rudi watched Max filling Dariusz’s glass. “It’s all right.” “You speak very good Polish, for an Estonian.” Rudi picked up his own glass and drained it in one swallow. “Thank you.” Dariusz put down his fork and burst out laughing. He reached over and tapped Max on the shoulder. “I told you!” he said. “Didn’t I tell you?” Max smiled and nodded and went on eating. Rudi uncapped the Wyborowa and poured himself another drink. Michał had told him that Wesoły Ptak took their name from a song by Eugeniusz, one of a long line of Polish sociopolitical balladeers to rise briefly to fame before drinking themselves to death or being shot by jealous husbands or jilted lovers. The bird sings in its cage and its owners think it’s happy, Michał had told him, but the bird is still in a cage. The reference had completely baffled Rudi. “We were discussing geopolitics,” Dariusz told him. “Do you think much about geopolitics?” “I’m a cook,” Rudi said. “Not a politician.” “But you must have an opinion. Everyone has an opinion.” Rudi shook his head. Dariusz looked disbelievingly at him. He picked up his glass and took a sip of vodka. “I saw on the news last week that so far this year twelve new nations and sovereign states have come into being in Europe alone.” “And most of them won’t be here this time next year,” said Rudi. “You see?” Dariusz pointed triumphantly at him. “You do have an opinion! I knew you would!” Rudi sighed. “I only know what I see on the news.” “I see Europe as a glacier,” Max murmured, “calving icebergs.” He took a mouthful of his steak tartare and chewed happily. Rudi and Dariusz looked at him for a long time. Then Dariusz looked at Rudi again. “Not a bad analogy,” he said. “Europe is calving itself into progressively smaller and smaller nations.” “Quasi-national entities,” Rudi corrected. “Polities.” Dariusz snorted. “Sanjaks. Margravates. Principalities. Länder. Europe sinks back into the Eighteenth Century.” “More territory for you,” Rudi observed. “The same territory,” Dariusz said. “More frontiers. More red tape. More borders. More border police.” Rudi shrugged. “Consider Hindenberg, for example,” said Dariusz. “What must that have been like? You go to bed in Wrocław, and you wake up in Breslau. What must that have been like?” Except that it hadn’t happened overnight. What had happened to Wrocław and Opole and the little towns and villages inbetween had taken a long, bitter time, and if you followed the news it was obvious that for the Poles the matter wasn’t settled yet. “Consider the days after World War Two,” Rudi said. “Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin meet at Yalta. You go to bed in Breslau and wake up the next morning in Wrocław.” Dariusz smiled and pointed his fork at him, conceding the point. There was a brief lull in the conversation. “I have a cousin in Hindenberg,” Max mused. Dariusz looked at him. “For that matter,” he said, “why don’t you live there yourself? You’re Silesian.” Max grunted. “Do you see much of your cousin?” Dariusz asked. Max shrugged. “Travel is difficult. Visas and so forth. I have a Polish passport, he is a citizen of Hindenberg.” “But he telephones you, yes? Emails you?” Max shook his head. “Polish Government policy,” he rumbled. Dariusz pointed at Rudi. “You see? You see the heartache such things can cause?” Rudi poured himself another drink, thinking that this discussion had become awfully specific all of a sudden. “So,” Dariusz said to Max. “How long is it since you were in contact with your cousin?” “Some time,” Max agreed thoughtfully, as if the subject had not occurred to him for a while. “Even the post is uncertain, these days.” “A scandal,” Dariusz muttered. “A scandal.” Rudi drank his drink and stood up to go, just to see what would happen. What happened was that Dariusz and Max continued to stare off into their respective distances, considering the unfairness of Hindenberg and Poland’s attitude towards it. Rudi sat down again and looked at them. “So here we are,” he said finally. “Two men with Polish passports who would find it difficult to get a visa to enter Hindenberg. And one Estonian who can practically walk across the border unmolested.” Dariusz seemed to regain consciousness. His expression brightened. “Of course,” he said. “You’re Estonian, aren’t you.” Rudi sucked his teeth and poured another drink. “Rudi’s an Estonian, Max,” Dariusz said. Rudi rubbed his eyes. “Is it,” he asked, “drugs?” Dariusz looked at him, and for a moment Rudi thought that, under the correct circumstances, the little mafioso might be quite a scary person. “No,” said Dariusz. “Fissile material?” Dariusz shook his head. “Espionage?” “Best you don’t know,” said Max. “A favour,” Dariusz told him earnestly. “You do us a favour, we owe you a favour.” He smiled. “That can’t be entirely bad, can it?” It could be bad in any number of unforeseen ways. Rudi silently cursed himself. He should have just served the food and gone home. “How do I make the delivery?” “Well,” Dariusz said, scratching his head, “that’s more or less up to you. And it’s not a delivery.”
Later that night, stepping out of the shower, Rudi caught sight of himself in the mirror over the sink. He took a towel off the rail and stood looking at his reflection. Well, there he was. A little shorter than average. Slim. Short mousy brown hair. Bland, inoffensive face; not Slavic, not Aryan, not anything, really. No sign of the Lapp heritage his father had always claimed for the family. Hazel eyes. The odd nick here and there, medals of his life as a chef. That scar on his forearm from an overturned wok in Vilnius, the one just above it from the time he slipped in The Turk’s kitchen in Riga and the paring knife he was carrying got turned around somehow and went straight through his uniform sleeve and the skin and muscle beneath. “Don’t run in my kitchen!” The Turk had shouted at him. Then he had bandaged Rudi’s arm and called for an ambulance. Rudi lifted his right hand above his head and turned so he could see the long curving scar that started just above his hipbone and ended beside his right nipple. Not a kitchen accident, this one. Skinheads, the day he tried to find work in Warnemünde. He still didn’t know whether they had meant to kill him or just scare him, and he thought that even they had not been sure. He had taken it as an omen that his wanderings along the Baltic coast were over, and he headed inland, first to Warsaw, then Kraków.
The first thing Max did after concluding his job interview was hold out a mop. “I’ve done all that,” Rudi protested, pointing to the envelope containing his references which Max was holding in his other hand. “Riga, Tallinn…” “You want to work in my kitchen, first you clean it,” Max told him. “Then we’ll see.” Rudi really considered walking out of Restauracja Max right there and then, considered going out onto Floriańska and walking back down to the station and catching a train away from this polluted little city, but he was low on cash and the job came with a cramped little room up ten flights of stairs above the restaurant and he was just tired of travelling for the moment, so he took the mop, telling himself that this was only temporary, that as soon as he had adequate funds he’d be off again in search of a kitchen that appreciated him. He pushed that mop for eight months before Pani Stasia, Max’s fearsome chef, even allowed him to approach food. By then he was locked into a battle of wills with the wizened little woman, and the only way he was going to leave Max’s kitchen was feet first.
Looking back, it seemed astounding to him that he had stood so much. He’d done this for Sergei in Tallinn, and for The Turk, and for Big Ron in that appalling kitchen in Wilno, but for Pani Stasia there was something gratingly personal about it, as if she had made it her life’s work to break him. She yelled constantly at him. “Bring this, bring that. Clean this, clean that. So you call this clean, Baltic prick? Hurry, hurry. Don’t run in my kitchen! Faster! Faster!” He was by no means the only member of the crew to catch Pani Stasia’s wrath. She treated everyone equally. One of her hip joints was deformed, and she walked with the aid of a black lacquered carbon fibre cane as thin as a pencil and as strong as a girder. Everyone, even Max, had heard the whistle of Pani Stasia’s cane at some time or other as it described a swift arc towards the backs of their legs.
It was understood in the business that great chefs could be violently temperamental, and if one wanted to study under them one had to endure all kinds of invective and physical violence. The Turk, who was an outstanding chef, had once knocked Rudi unconscious with a single punch for overcooking a portion of asparagus. Pani Stasia was not an outstanding chef. She was a competent chef working in a little Polish restaurant. But something about her fury lit a slumbering resistance in him which told him that this nasty little old woman was not going to drive him from her kitchen, was not going to wear him down. So he mopped and cleaned and washed up and the skin on his hands reddened and cracked and bled and his legs hurt so much that some nights he could barely climb up to his cubbyhole in the attic. He kept going, refused to give in. Pani Stasia, sensing the one-man resistance movement which had sprung up in her kitchen, focused her attention on Rudi. This made him popular with the other staff, who no longer had to suffer quite so much. One day, for some imagined slight, she chased him from the kitchen in an access of rage extraordinary even by her standards, limping after him surprisingly quickly and labouring him about the head and shoulders with her cane. One whistling blow split his left earlobe and left him deaf in that ear for hours. One of the cooks ran out into the restaurant and told Max that Pani Stasia was killing Rudi, and when Max did nothing the cook went to the phone in the entranceway and called the police, who decided that their assets were best deployed elsewhere that evening and didn’t bother to respond to the call. Max found Rudi sometime later squatting down in the alley beside the restaurant, the shoulder and arm of his whites spotted with blood. “You’d be better off leaving,” Max told him. Rudi looked up at the owner and shook his head. Max watched him for a few moments, then nodded and reached down a hand to help him up.
It went on and on, until one night after closing time he was mopping the floor and she came up behind him almost soundlessly and raised her cane and he turned and caught it as it whistled towards him and for almost a minute she squeaked and struggled and swore and tried to pull the cane from his grasp. Finally, she stopped struggling and swearing and looked up at him with hot, angry eyes. He let go of the cane and she snatched it back and stood looking at him for a few moments longer. Then she turned and stomped across the kitchen towards the exit.
The next morning, Max greeted him with the news of a pay rise and a promotion. Not that this made much material difference. He still had to mop and clean and fetch and carry, and he still had to suffer Pani Stasia’s fury. Now, however, she expected him to learn to cook as well. She punished every mistake, no matter how small. Once, half conscious with exhaustion, he put a fresh batch of salad into a bowl with some which had been standing already prepared for some minutes, and she almost beat him black and blue.
But he did learn. The first thing he learned was that, if he wanted to remain in Pani Stasia’s kitchen, he was going to have to forget his four-year drift along the Baltic coast. The things he had learned from The Turk and the other chefs he’d worked under meant nothing to the little old woman. Fractionally, month after month, her periods of displeasure grew further and further apart, until one day, almost eighteen months after he first set foot in Restauracja Max, she allowed him to prepare one cover. She wouldn’t allow it to be served, however. She prepared a duplicate cover herself and sent it out into the restaurant instead, and then set about tasting Rudi’s attempt.
As Rudi watched her he became aware that the whole kitchen had fallen silent. He looked around and found himself overwhelmed by what he thought of as a movie moment. Everyone in the kitchen was watching Pani Stasia. Even Max, standing just inside the swing door that led into the restaurant. It was, Rudi, thought, that moment in a film where the callow greenhorn finally gains the grudging respect of his mentor. He also knew that life wasn’t like the movies, and that Pani Stasia would spit the food out onto the tiled floor and then beat him senseless. In the event, life and the movies converged just enough for Pani Stasia to turn and lean on her cane and look at her audience. She would, she told them finally, perhaps consider feeding Rudi’s service to her dog. All the crew applauded. Rudi never heard them. He thought later that he was the only one of all of them to notice just how old Pani Stasia suddenly seemed. She died that Summer, and Rudi simply took over. There was no formal announcement from Max, no new contract, nothing at all. Not even a pay rise. He simply inherited the kitchen. He and Max were the only mourners at the funeral. “I never found out anything about her,” he said as they watched the coffin being lowered into the ground. “She was,” Max said, “my mother.”
