Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(17)
“How was the trip?” Lewis asked that evening over the phone.
“It was fine,” Gwen said, desperately scrolling through last-minute tickets to Luxembourg on her pad. “Stansted was busy.”
“What’s the hotel like?”
Gwen glanced around her flat. “Pension,” she said. “It’s not a hotel, it’s a pension. An auberge maybe, at a pinch.” She wondered whether she’d turned off the location data option on her phone. She thought she had, but she couldn’t remember. Did it make a difference that Lewis had called her, rather than the other way round?
“What’s it like?” Lewis asked again patiently.
“It’s all right. It’s a chain. These places all look alike.”
“How’s the weather?”
How was the flight? What’s the hotel like? How’s the weather? Was Lewis just trying to make conversation, or did he suspect something? Fortunately, Gwen had had the foresight to open a cam window on her pad; at the moment it was showing the view from one of L?tzebuerg’s many, many traffic cameras. “Raining,” she said. “Chucking it down.”
“Okay,” said Lewis. “Well, get some sleep. You’ve got a busy day tomorrow.”
You have no idea. “Yes, okay.”
“Let me know when it’s done.”
“Sure,” said Gwen, heart sinking as she saw the only flight tomorrow with any seats available. “Sure.”
THERE WERE THOSE, supposed to know about these things, who said that Luxembourg was the most stable nation in Europe. Roughly translated, the Grand Duchy’s national motto was, ‘We want to stay the way we are,’ and it had certainly shown no signs of breaking up into smaller and crazier polities like other Continental nations. It had the highest GDP per head of population of anywhere on Earth, and the Luxembourgers were not about to do anything to jeopardise that. Gwen’s first impression, staggering out of Arrivals at Luxembourg Findel at six o’clock in the morning having had hardly any sleep the previous night, was of a rank of taxis emerging from a drizzly sunrise which could have been anywhere in Northern Europe.
One of the taxis drove her the short distance to the pension. There was no telling where she was. It could have been Germany, it could have been France. It could, at a pinch, have been Wallonia. The streets were full of coffee chains and burger franchises, and the people making their way to work through the drizzle were mostly conservatively-dressed. Her flight had lasted barely an hour; it seemed ridiculous to feel jetlagged after such a short journey.
The pension was just outside town, beside what appeared to be a brand-new ring road. Gwen supposed that at one time the building might have sat in the middle of acres of landscaped grounds, maybe out in a forest. Now it looked as if the Luxembourgers were building an industrial park next door and were eyeing the land the pension occupied with some covetousness.
It turned out not to be part of a chain. Or if it was, it was a chain which held back demolishing modernity with fin de siècle furnishings, wood-panelled walls, and the horns of what must once have been a magnificent twelve-point stag adorning the wall above the fireplace in the lobby. At the front desk, Gwen filled in an actual registration card and then paid for her stay by waving her phone at a contactless reader set discreetly into the desktop. The concierge, a young woman in a smart black business suit, loaded the room’s key-code into the phone with a swipe of a stylus and summoned a liveried porter to carry Gwen’s overnight bag up the deeply-carpeted stairs to the second floor.
Alone in the room, Gwen went through the time-honoured routine of the international business traveller. She jumped up and down and found the floor to be solid. She rapped on the walls and found that they, too, were of more than satisfactory thickness. She’d stayed in hotels where her room had been separated from the adjoining one by not much more than a plywood partition and someone walking across the room above her had made the ceiling bow. She sat on the bed and bounced up and down, went to the window and looked out on the expectant scrubland of the nascent industrial park, looked in the bathroom and noted that the shower was free of mould and that there was a small selection of complimentary bathroom goods, examined the entertainment set and was disappointed to discover that it only had a touchscreen interface. The wardrobe disclosed a rack of wooden hangers and half a dozen mysterious objects comprising two small shaped wooden blocks connected by a length of springy metal. After ten minutes’ consideration, she still had no idea what the objects were, so she took a photo of one with her phone and image-searched it, and a few moments later was informed that it was a shoe-tree. She read the description, shrugged, and put the shoe-trees back in the wardrobe.
Less mysterious were the room’s refreshment facilities. Everything – kettle, cups, tea and coffee sachets, spoons, milk pods, packets of biscuits – was shrink-wrapped for her hygiene and convenience. In one corner there was a small ironing board with a disposable catalytic iron clipped to it, and beside that was a trouser press. There was always a trouser press, no matter where she stayed. She had never used one. She wondered if anyone had, ever.
A check of the drawers in the bedside tables revealed a Gideon Bible, a Qur’an, a Book of Mormon, and a leather-bound two-volume biography of L. Ron Hubbard. None of these books – actual books – appeared ever to have been opened, let alone read. She sat on the bed and riffled through the Bible. Then she held it upside down by the spine and shook it over the bed, and a leaf of tissue-thin paper no larger than a Rizla fluttered down from between the pages and settled on the duvet.