Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(103)
There was the familiar Polish ritual of signing and witnessing and stamping of documents – all of them on paper because that was how things were done. There was initialling and checking of identifications, in order to ensure that no interlopers had wandered in on the proceedings. Only when all this was accomplished to her satisfaction did the notary open the threadbare cardboard folder containing the will.
The reading took around forty minutes, during which time Rudi judged that the temperature in the office fell by roughly fifteen degrees. He carefully kept his eyes on the notary the whole time, but he could not fail to notice in his peripheral vision as heads were turned and harsh looks directed at him.
Returning to Florianska, they found that the street had been taken over by seemingly hundreds of dachshunds and their owners. Many of the dogs were in costume, and so were a lot of the people. Rudi experienced a surreal moment, until he realised it was the annual Jamnik Parade. Poles loved dachshunds, and the parade had been part of Kraków’s cultural calendar for almost a century. Rudi had forgotten all about it, but all of a sudden it seemed perfect for the general Kafkaesque tone of the day.
At the restaurant, Max’s cousin had brought in a team of outside caterers to provide the meal. Many of the other mourners were already gathered there, and Rudi could actually watch as word of the events at the notary’s office passed through the restaurant like a gust of wind through a field of barley.
He decided to concentrate on the food, arrayed on several pushed-together tables at one side of the room. There was barszcz – made up using powder from a sachet, he decided after tasting it. There were various quick and easy salads, cold meats, roasted chicken drumsticks, carp in jelly, sliced baguette going stale in baskets. Cocktail sausages. Rudi thought it was disrespectful. Max’s current chef was a preternaturally calm woman named Zuza; she and Rudi had exchanged a few words, professional courtesy in the manner of two gunslingers passing each other on the street of a Western town. She seemed more than capable of producing a funeral luncheon.
“She said she didn’t want any money spent,” she’d told him. “The widow. Cheap as possible, I was told.”
“This is a restaurant, for f*ck’s sake,” he’d said. “He deserved better than a buffet.” All she could do was shrug. Poles had a saying that went something like, ‘Not my circus; not my monkeys.’
He leaned on his cane and looked around the restaurant. All of a sudden, it seemed smaller than he remembered, and it needed redecorating. It was crowded with people, all chatting quietly. Some of them were eating, some not, but all of them were drinking. Max’s cousin, deep in choleric conversation with several older men and women, seemed to have taken particular advantage of the bottles arrayed on tables around the room. Rudi saw more harsh looks turned in his direction, heads shaken sadly.
At some point, he became aware of a presence beside him. He looked and discovered that Dariusz, Weso?y Ptak’s liaison with the restaurateurs of the area, had contrived to materialise soundlessly at his elbow, smoking a cigarette and holding a glass of vodka.
They looked at each other for a while, then Dariusz said amiably, “There was some debate about whether you would turn up, you know.”
Weso?y Ptak ran the protection rackets in this part of Kraków, and Dariusz was their representative on Earth, although he also worked as a stringer for Les Coureurs des Bois. Rudi had always wondered whether that meant the Coureurs actually ran Weso?y Ptak, or if the little mafioso was just moonlighting. That was one small mystery he didn’t have to worry about any more. He wondered among whom the debate had taken place.
“I wanted to pay my respects,” he said.
“And claim your inheritance,” Dariusz added.
Rudi shook his head. “No,” he allowed. “No, that was a surprise.”
Dariusz looked him up and down. “You seem well.”
And that statement could be parsed in any number of ways. But it seemed honestly meant, so Rudi decided to be charitable. “Thank you,” he said.
Dariusz lowered his voice a fraction. “My masters would like a word,” he said.
My masters. Rudi shook his head. Central was a self-fulfilling prophecy, the creation and sum of its citizens. From that perspective, Weso?y Ptak was almost certainly being run as an operation by one or more Coureurs for the purpose of raising funds for other, more unfathomable, operations. And so on, like a Matrioshka doll or the Mandelbrot Set, infinitely recursive. He’d done something similar himself, in the past. If Les Coureurs were a nation, as Kaunas had said, they were a nation like Europe. Splintered, Balkanised. I am a nation, he thought, and he found it simultaneously scary and empowering.
He wondered what Weso?y Ptak’s Coureur creators were up to, and how much trouble he had caused them down the years. He wondered what would happen if he made contact with them. He wondered whether he even wanted to. He said, “I’m done with them.”
“But they’re not done with you.” There was no sense of threat in the statement. Just two old colleagues meeting again after a separation of... how many years had it been?
“How long is it since we last saw each other?” Rudi asked.
Dariusz thought about it. “Fifteen years?” he asked. “Twenty?” He, himself, seemed not to have aged a single day, a testament to the preservative properties of the life of organised crime.