Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(105)

“I don’t want to add to your problems,” Rupert told him, “but that man over there is talking about having you killed.”

They both looked over to where Max’s cousin was becoming more and more animated, to the point where the people he was ranting at were trying to get him to calm down.

“How do you know what he’s saying?” Rudi asked. “You don’t speak Polish.”

“They’re speaking German. I understand enough German to know ‘I want that f*cker dead’ when I hear it.”

Rudi sighed. Hindenbergers. “It’s okay. He’ll be fine when he sobers up.”

“If you say so.”

“I’m in more danger from the food.” He looked around the restaurant again. It looked like the setting for a particularly complicated joke. People of many nationalities walk into a bar... There were Poles here, Silesians, Kosovars, Italian and French chefs, a Spanish restaurateur, the senior staff from Max’s Berlin restaurant, two English people, an Estonian, and the last citizen of the Campus. Micha?, the restaurant’s former maitre d’, had suffered a stroke some years previously, but there he was, supported by a powered exoskeleton and communicating with other mourners by typing his side of the conversation with his one good hand on a pad which spoke out loud for him. His support worker was slumped in a corner, sleeping off the three bottles of Wyborowa on the table in front of him. The wake was a patchwork of poor, dead Europe, all come to mourn poor, dead Max, who had simply dropped in his tracks one day while following his monstrous, manipulative, controlling bully of a wife around the supermarket with a shopping trolley.

Across the room, the widow, Iwona, was talking to a group of people Rudi didn’t recognise. She was managing to look at once piously bereaved and carnally available, which he thought was quite a trick. They had never met before; he knew nothing about her apart from Florianska gossip he’d picked up in the few days he’d been back, but as they left the notary’s office she had given him a look of such raw animal anger that he missed a step. It was a look which said you have the thing I want and I will kill you for it some day.

Well, it wasn’t as if people wanting to kill him was a new thing. Iwona was hardly the only person in Europe to have wanted him dead. She wasn’t even the only person in the room who wanted him dead. He’d been quite surprised by how one could get used to something like that, if one had to.

He had no idea what had gone on in Max’s head in the autumn of his years, but life was like that. It never tied things up neatly; no one ever got to see the whole story, and anyway the stories never ended, just branched off into infinity. You got used to that too, as a Coureur. You jumped a Package from Point A to Point B and you never knew what happened after that. Most of the time you never even knew what you were carrying. It was a bit like being a chef, really. Guests came into the restaurant and you often knew nothing about them – if you didn’t actually go out into the restaurant you never even saw them. They ate their meals and they went away and maybe they never came back. What were their stories?

Rudi shook his head and turned his back on Iwona.

He was not, even after everything, immune to the irony of inheriting the restaurant, the way he seemed to have inherited the Coureurs and the money Roland Sarkisian had stolen from the EU. Life is often absurd; all you can do is keep putting one foot in front of the other, looking for the joke in things – because there is always a joke, even if it’s bitter and sour – hoping for the best and trying not to be too broken when it doesn’t happen.





THE HUNGARIANS ARRIVED around nine in the evening, five huge men in exquisite suits. They were sober and respectful of demeanour, but the fifteen or so remaining mourners all moved as one out of their way and watched nervously as they sat down at one of the tables in the corner.

Their leader, a man who sometimes called himself Kerenyi and sometimes László Viktor, came over to where Rudi was standing talking to Seth and Rupert and Micha?.

“Well,” he said as he shook hands. “This is jolly.”

“I didn’t organise it,” Rudi told him.

“One would hope not, obviously. Why is that very drunk man glowering at you?”

Rudi didn’t need to look; for the past hour or so Max’s cousin had given up making threats in favour of sitting with a couple of his Hindenberger friends and applying himself to becoming insensible.

“He’s not a problem,” he said.

“You want I should do his knees, just to be sure, actually?” Kerenyi asked with avuncular sincerity.

For just a moment, the thought did appeal, but Rudi shook his head. “I think just seeing you with me will be sufficient, thanks.”

Kerenyi shrugged and pulled a sour face. “I remember when this place used to be fun.”

“That was when Max was alive.”

The Hungarian nodded. Then his face broke into a huge uncomplicated grin. “But hey,” he said, “you own this place now, yes?”

Bad news is like entangled atoms; it manifests itself faster than the speed of light, over large distances. Somehow, though, it had needed someone to say it out loud to make it real, rather than using careful allusion. He had, he realised, been hoping he had misheard the notary.

“Yes,” he said, with a genuine sense of surprise. “Yes, I do.”