Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(29)
His department head, an exhausted-looking Latvian named Grigorijs, sighed and looked at the remains of their meal. He said, “Don’t be noble, Donatien. Everyone else has taken leave.”
“You haven’t,” Mr Pasquinel pointed out.
“The captain is always last to leave the sinking ship,” Grigorijs said.
“Is the ship sinking?” asked Mr Pasquinel.
Grigorijs thought about it. “A poor metaphor,” he admitted after a few moments. “But you take my meaning.”
Mr Pasquinel wondered if it hadn’t been more of a Freudian slip, but he kept that to himself. He said, “I still have some live work to finish. I can’t go away yet.”
Grigorijs nodded. He knew the work Mr Pasquinel was talking about, a matter of some delicacy involving Greater Germany. “How is that coming along, by the way?” he asked, even though Mr Pasquinel had memoed him a progress report the previous day.
Mr Pasquinel shrugged. “Germans,” he said.
Grigorijs topped up their glasses. They’d left the Consulate compound and driven into Charleroi, to a little Belgian restaurant on the Avenue Paul Pastur. Grigorijs had ordered stoverij, and Mr Pasquinel had elected to try the entrec?te with Stoemp. They were both drinking a rough and robust house red. Grigorijs liked to take his senior staff out for lunch every couple of months, to discuss work and other things informally, but he’d had to suspend the custom while the Republic was in lockdown. It was only since January that he had been able to resume his unhurried expense-account exploration of the local Wallonian eateries.
He said, “Is it anything we should be worrying about?”
Mr Pasquinel picked his glass up and took a drink. “The past year or so,” he said, “has rather reset the boundaries of worry.”
“Quite,” Grigorijs said. He looked at the window of the restaurant. Outside, flakes of snow were blowing in gusts down the street. “Do you have a sense that they’ll come round to our way of thinking, then?”
Mr Pasquinel shook his head. “The best we can expect is a compromise. And they know that. They will make an offer, we will make a counter-offer, they will counter our counter-offer... And so on. They’re pragmatists, and so are we. All we’re really doing is exploring the parameters of the compromise.”
“That’s not so bad,” Grigorijs mused. There were places, further to the East, where the Republic was finding compromise a much harder proposition.
“It’s bad enough. I’d hoped to have this finished by the end of last year.”
Grigorijs shook his head. “It’s the times we live in. Once upon a time the only people we’d have had to negotiate with were the EU and the Russians.”
Mr Pasquinel, who was something of a student of the unhappy history of the EU, grimaced. “I don’t see how that would have been any better.”
The little towns and cities of the Sillon industriel, the former heavy-industrial heartland of the former Belgium, had been spreading towards each other along the Sambre-Meuse Valley for centuries; now Charleroi and Liége were the two ends of a ribbon metropolis which some people with satirical intent called the Dorsale Wallonne. It was some considerable time since the area had been an industrial backbone, or much of an industrial anything. The steelworks along the Meuse had gone to their knees in one or other of the economic crashes of the first half of the century, been retooled, gone to their knees again during the Xian Flu, been retooled once more, and finally went bust in a spectacular flurry of union riots and corruption trials which had heralded the referendum that eventually broke the country up.
As metropoli went, the Dorsale Wallonne wasn’t much to call home about, a belt of rusting industrial plants and shabby towns through which the Line passed as efficiently as possible, casting off a branch just outside Charleroi to connect the polity to what had been intended to be its Belgian Consulate. Unfortunately, a year after the branch line and Consulate were completed, Belgium split in two, and now they were just another bone of contention for the perpetually-squabbling Flemish and Walloons.
Officially, the Independent Trans-European Republic held no view on what happened to the various territories it ran through. As far as it was concerned, if a country broke up after an Embassy was established, that was too bad. Unofficially, that kind of thing caused all manner of problems for the diplomatic staff, but as Grigorijs was fond of saying, no one ever joined the Diplomatic Service expecting a quiet life. The Belgian Consulate had been tooled up to represent the Republic’s interests in the whole of Western Europe, and following the Incident it had fallen to the staff there to smooth feathers among the nations under its purview through which the Line passed.
“Do you have a view on how long it will take?” he asked.
Mr Pasquinel shrugged. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”
“Human Resources have noticed a single glaring exception to our programme of leave.”
“Oh.” Mr Pasquinel sighed. “I’m sorry. Have there been memos?”
Grigorijs shrugged.
“I would just like to mention for the record that there was no sign of HR’s presence a year ago, when we were all working eighteen and twenty hour days,” said Mr Pasquinel, becoming irritated. “One of my staff worked three straight days without sleep; it was a miracle she didn’t suffer some kind of breakdown. It’s a miracle we all didn’t. Human Resources. Pah.”