Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(64)

“Love it,” Forsyth giggled.

“Not that,” Crispin said testily. “This.” And his arm sank into the wall up to the elbow.

“Oh, shit,” murmured Forsyth, and the sofa took him far far away.





IT WAS ONLY slightly harder to get into the site office than it was to get into the country. Fifteen floors up in the Pink Palace, the office was reached by a single private lift, the door in the foyer guarded by two large security men and a retinal reader and the entrance on the fifteenth floor guarded by two more large security men and an electronic door. The site office had seen some interesting times, before the security was put in.

Forsyth showed his pass, bent down and stared unblinking into the reader’s cup until the machine gave a little bleep, smiled at the security boys, and went up.

“Whatever you want, I can’t give it to you,” said Jespersen.

“I don’t want anything,” Forsyth said.

“All right. I can give you that. Have a seat. You look terrible; have you been eating properly?”

Forsyth shrugged. “I’ve been eating.”

Jespersen snorted. “Chemicals. Processed food. Fried food.”

“I like fried food.”

“You’ve come to the right country then.” Jespersen pushed with the heel of his hand at the control stick and his wheelchair hummed across the office. “Sometimes I think the Poles would fry salad if it occurred to them.”

“I detect negative thoughts.”

The wheelchair jerked to a stop by the window. Beyond the glass, Warsaw was spread out like a toy, fading away into flatlands that went all the way to the horizon and then on into Ukraine and Belarus, all fuzzed by the hydrocarbon haze.

“I hate this view,” Jespersen muttered.

“I always rather liked it.”

“Hah.” The chair wheeled round. “You only see it when you visit. I get it every day, when the Reps leave me alone. That’s all I get all day, the view and Reps wanting to know when work’s starting again.”

“Well, now you mention it...”

Jespersen waved his permanently-clubbed fist at Forsyth. “I knew it. And I thought this time you might just want to see how I am.”

“You brought the subject up, not me.”

“Ah, shit,” Jespersen murmured, craning his head to look at the view again. “This f*cking thing will never be finished.”

“You’re too pessimistic, Jens,” Forsyth told him.

“I could have dug this system quicker with a soup spoon,” said Jespersen. “The Poles don’t want a Metro; they just want to annoy the world’s tunnel engineers.”

“I also want to use your terminal for a few minutes.”

Jespersen sighed. “What for?”

“I put out a contact string for some of my boys. I do that now and again, just to keep tabs on where they are, you know?”

Jespersen nodded impatiently. “Yes, yes.”

“Well I got a couple of notes yesterday. Do you remember Jonny Gee and Chris Harper?”

“Chris? Jonny? Of course! Great guys! We were always out partying.” Jespersen drove the chair forward half a metre, then back again. “How many f*cking people do you think are involved in this project? Do you think I’m a personal friend of all of them?”

Forsyth smiled. It was too easy to annoy Jespersen; he really shouldn’t do it. He said, “Jonny’s wife hasn’t heard from him for five months. And Chris’s son hasn’t heard from him for almost a year.”

“This is not the International Red Cross,” Jespersen warned in a strangled voice. “Terminal time costs money. I can’t just let you use it to reunite errant husbands and fathers with their families.”

“The last I heard, they’d taken up a contract on the Line,” Forsyth continued patiently. Jespersen nodded wearily; they’d lost hundreds of men to the Line over the years. “And what with the explosion and everything...”

Jespersen sighed. “There are days,” he confided, “when I truly wish I was dead.”

“More negative thoughts. I expected better from the site manager.”

Jespersen glared at him and steered the chair around behind his desk, punched clumsily with his thumb at the tapboard of his desktop, glared at the display. “There is a rumour that the Transport Ministry will grant us some funds to finish the station refurb at Mokotów.”

“No good to me,” said Forsyth. “The platforms are finished at Mokotów. You need tilers, electricians, people like that. You need Kwak-Kwak’s boys.”

Jespersen poked the tapboard one more time. “Doesn’t matter anyway; nobody knows when we’ll get the money. Could be this year, could be next. Probably will be never.” He sat back and looked at Forsyth. “Have you any idea how hard this job is?”

“You’ve always described it very well.”

“I must be the only site manager in Europe with eighty percent of his workforce scattered across a dozen countries at any one time. And of course they’re all just sitting on their hands waiting for one of the Reps to call and ask them to come back so they can stick up a few tiles or put in a metre or so of wiring before the Government decides it’s all costing too much and calls a halt to it again.” He glanced at the window as if he suspected the view was mocking him.