Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(22)
Smith saw her looking out of the cab window and said, “Bad part of town. Took me ages to find it.”
The taxi pulled in through an archway which led to a big dark space surrounded by flats. Some of the windows overlooking the space were illuminated, but not many. The taxi bumped along an uneven driveway at the bottom of one block, then abruptly came to a halt.
“This is us,” Smith said calmly. He paid the driver – in cash; Gwen had begun to notice things like that – and led the way to a door and then up several flights of steps to a darkened landing, where he opened another door, stepped inside, switched on the light. Gwen stood where she was. There was still time to make a run for it.
Smith, standing in the brightly-lit hallway unbuttoning his coat and unwinding his scarf, saw her standing there and said, “There’s a forecast of snow for tonight; you’re not dressed for it. You might make it to morning by moving from café to café, and you might even survive another night, but I wouldn’t bet on you seeing the weekend.”
Ah, f*ck it. Gwen stepped into the flat.
2.
IF THIS WAS a rich season for conspiracists, it was a decidedly thin one for Rudi. The Emergence had taken hold of the world and given it a good shake. His primary purpose, jumping citizens out of the Community, had blown away on the wind when the Presiding Authority selectively opened the borders and allowed anyone – within reason – who wanted to travel to Europe to do so. For a while, he had actually taken it personally. It was as if, unable to stop him doing what he did, the Community had finally decided to neutralise him by taking away the need to do it.
Coureur business in general had taken a knock. Once, someone would find themselves having to retain Coureur Central in order to transport a package across Europe’s constantly and trickily reconfiguring borders. These days there was a postal service which passed through the Community, neatly bypassing all those irritating little countries. True, there were still certain things – and people – which the Presiding Authority would not allow on their territory, but the bulk of Central’s business had always been the movement of perfectly ordinary mail, and that had dried up almost completely. Again, if Rudi was of a paranoid frame of mind – and he found paranoia a perfectly rational worldview – he might think that this was a deliberate attempt on the Community’s part to stifle Coureur Central.
The operation to infiltrate Dresden-Neustadt had really only been an attempt to satisfy a vague curiosity, to tie up some loose ends which nagged at him, to try to get a read on where Mundt might be and what his research might have entailed. There was no sense of any progress, and anyway, now it was over there was nothing much he could do but wait for Lev to come up with an analysis. In the meantime, all he could do was ask questions and poke and prod blindly, hoping something would happen, even if he didn’t know quite what.
Lost for something to do, feeling weirdly adrift all of a sudden, he had stood down his networks and gone back to Kraków and the kitchen of Restauracja Max, where Max had been making do with a series of agency chefs, unable to quite work himself up to making a decision to appoint a full-time replacement. Late at night, after the restaurant closed, Rudi watched the news networks as the Community emerged blinking into the mellow sunlight of media attention. Like every other European, he scoured the magazines for articles about the Community’s negotiations with various nations and polities, read interviews with the first citizens to be allowed free access to their neighbours. Unlike every other European, he wasn’t reading to learn about the Community – a handful of years ago he had known more about it than almost anyone else in Europe – he was looking for subtext, trying to read the Community’s body language, gauge its intentions.
He gave up in the end. His remaining contacts in the Community’s small and embattled dissident groups – which had more or less evaporated as soon as they were able to leave – were as clueless as anyone else. No one knew why the Presiding Authority had chosen to make itself known to Europe. Nobody knew what they wanted. Nobody knew what they were going to do next.
Incredibly, even cooking, the safe space he had so often retreated to in the past, did not satisfy any more. He caught himself in the middle of preparing meals, wondering.
“You’re bored,” Rupert said to him one evening.
“Mid-life crisis,” Seth said.
Seth was over from London, Rupert touching down from one of his long hungry tours of the Continent, so Rudi had taken them to Bunkier, over in Planty, where the food was basic but excellent and there was more beer than anyone could drink. Bunkier wasn’t, on the whole, a tourist place. It was a locals’ bar, really, for all its pretention, and he knew most of the faces in the crowd; students making use of the free wifi, people who had come to attend some evening presentation at the gallery, people meeting up with friends ahead of a performance at the theatre next door, people just out for a drink. And the three of them, sitting on Bunkier’s uncomfortable wooden chairs, the remains of three suspiciously artisanal burgers on pieces of slate in the middle of the table and glasses of Okocim in front of them. Rudi looked around the café and wondered sourly what people saw when they looked at him and his friends. Not the truth, certainly, which was that two of them were former Coureurs and the third came from another universe.
He said, “There’s something wrong. Do you not feel it?”