Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(65)
“That reminds me. I saw Crispin a couple of nights ago.”
Jespersen seemed to sag deeper into his chair. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know; I woke up the next morning and he was gone.”
“All I needed to make my day complete was to know that maniac is wandering about the city again.”
“He says he wants to work.”
“No.” Jespersen shook his head emphatically. “Absolutely not. If you see him again, you tell him from me that if he goes within a hundred metres of any of the sites I’ll have him arrested.”
“I told him that, more or less.”
“Where’s he been, for heaven’s sake?”
“We may have discussed that, but I lost track of the conversation.”
Jespersen pulled a face. It made his whole head look like a wizened old cider apple. “And if I hear from any of the Reps that their men have been getting drugs from Crispin, I’ll have him deported. And them.”
“I’m sure he realises that, Jens.”
“Well just make it very clear to him. Oh, f*ck.” Jespersen thumped the desktop. “What the f*ck does it matter? Let him deal his dope. Let him go back underground. I don’t care. I’ll die and the f*cking thing still won’t be finished.” He looked at Forsyth. “And you. Stupid Scotchman. Why do you stay in this godforsaken city?”
“I like it here,” Forsyth said, and it was only the bald, honest truth. “Now, can I use your terminal?”
CRISPIN CONTENDED THAT the Warsaw Metro was actually a diagram of Polish history. There had been plans for a Metro system as far back as 1918, but after some preliminary excavation work the Great Depression had come along and the project was shelved. The plans were resurrected in 1934, preliminary work began in 1938, the following year the Nazis invaded Poland, and that was that for quite some time.
A number of Metro projects were started and promptly abandoned during the Cold War years, and it wasn’t until 1984 that work proper began, although technical difficulties and lack of funds meant that the tunnels crept along at no more than a couple of metres a day and it wasn’t until 1995 that the first section of the M1 line, between Kabaty and Politechnika, had opened.
And so it went, year after year. Varsovians loved their slowly-evolving Metro, never suspecting that a storm of new lines, new stations and refurbished old stations lay just a few years in their future, an act of ambition Forsyth thought only Poles could be capable of.
It had been heralded as the biggest civil engineering project in Europe since the Line, which was admittedly quite a high bar to clear. The new government had given it a blaze of publicity, a blizzard of advertising. Venture capital came in from all over the Continent. The virtual reality models were state-of-the-art or better, cutting edge stuff that cost millions to produce, a cats-cradle of multi-coloured lines rotating until they settled beneath the city then exploding outward to reveal a post-post-modern architect’s wet dream of stations. It was the most beautiful thing Forsyth had ever seen.
The adverts had brought tunnel men in from all over the world; grizzled veterans who had in their youth worked on the final stages of the Honshu-Hokkaido tunnel, youngsters who had cut their teeth on the Straits Link. Older stations were refitted, new tunnels dug. Eighteen months later the Government changed, the money dried up, and the Metro ground to a halt. The private money disappeared into a fogbank of litigation over broken Government contracts.
Most of the workforce evaporated to other projects, but some stayed. Forsyth found he liked Poland. He was married by then, to a Warsaw girl, and Tomasz, his son, was two months old. He stuck it out, and a year later the Government changed again, suddenly there was money to break ground in Powisle, and the private investors came out of hiding. Because he had remained in Poland, and kept up a more or less unbroken relationship with the permanent site office, Forsyth found himself promoted to the position of Rep, which meant that when new money was found to start work on the Metro again it was his job to track down the workers for it, wherever they happened to be. He turned out to be rather good at it, and it was better than running a loader fifty metres underground.
Ground was broken in Powisle, and the Government resigned three months later and the new Government decided it had better things to spend its money on than the Metro.
So it went. The tunnels extended metre by metre, year after year, station by station, Government by Government. By the time Forsyth’s marriage had been annulled he realised that Crispin might actually be right. Maybe he was involved in writing a secret history of a typically Polish political lunacy. Perhaps, drawn beneath the ground, there really was a secret symbol.
Of course, Crispin also believed that when the Metro was finished the world would end...
LEON CRUISED THE city endlessly, looking for faces. He went out in the early early morning, examining the heaps of rags and humanity huddled in doorways in the New Town, handing out packets of cigarettes and airline miniatures of vodka stolen for him by his cousin’s husband, who worked at Ok?ecie. He walked through the Old Town, snapping tourists with his little Taiwanese digital camera, an antique he’d found at a flea market in front of the Palace of Culture. He was obsessed with finding the perfect face, some distillation of the Polish experience, but he had no clear idea what that would look like. He was so obsessed that he even thought he could find its reflection in the faces of the Japanese tourists who rampaged in crowds through the old Market Square, photographing everything and arguing with the taxi drivers.