Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(67)

“Thanks.” Forsyth put the money in his pocket.

“So, I gather we can’t expect any rent from you this month,” Leon said after a while.

“Jespersen says not.”

“Jespersen says not. Terrific.”

Forsyth looked at the screen in front of him. Relieved of input, Bogart was sitting in a cane chair in a large airy room. He was wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown. Atelier Dudek’s Bogart had been structured from private footage of the actor near the end of his life, already very ill. Leon had bought it a year or so ago from a man he had met in a bar in Hindenberg. It must have been a pirate; nobody would allow something like this to be released commercially.

“Don’t blame me,” said Forsyth. “Write to the Transport Ministry.”

“You’re full of shit. Just like everything in this country.”

Forsyth shrugged. “So go and work in Hollywood.” It was an old argument; they’d been having it almost as long as Forsyth had been living with Leon. “Crispin’s back.”

“Oh f*ck.” Leon rested his fingertips on the tapboard and looked at Forsyth. “When?”

“A couple of days ago. When we went to the post office. He was in the flat when I got home. Didn’t you see him?”

Leon looked disgusted. “When I got back that night you were mumbling something about being half-man, half-sofa?”

Forsyth grinned.

Leon shook his head. “You were the only form of life in the flat. And I use the word ‘life’ in its loosest possible sense.”

Forsyth looked down the studio at the old man and the clicking, whirring arm of the camera. “He said he had to go back underground.”

“You have to go back underground,” Leon said without looking at him. “Or at least some of the men you represent.”

Forsyth shook his head. “It wasn’t work. It sounded more important.”

“God damn you, stand still!” Leon yelled.





2.





ALMOST THREE YEARS after the Ufa explosion, the Line was finally running a more or less normal service in western Europe, across territories which had finally accepted that the incident had been a terrorist attack and that Line trains were as safe as human ingenuity could make them. East of the Urals, though, service was patchy.

Not that Europe as a whole paid much attention. The blast had rendered the countryside uninhabitable for a hundred kilometres in every direction, but the news cycle was always hungry and nothing was happening there now the humanitarian effort in the area had bedded in.

Nobody had ever expected the Line to become a reality. Its partisans boosted it as a project greater even than the railroads that had been driven across America in the nineteenth century, a true post-Millennial undertaking, a great adventure, but when it came to actually building the thing a post-Millennial hangover set in. It had been fine in theory, erstwhile supporters whined, it was a wonderful dream, a marvellous thought-experiment. But nothing more.

Somehow, though, it did become reality. There was a TransEurope Rail Company. Later, when anyone thought about it, it seemed that there had always been a TransEurope Rail Company, but nobody could quite remember when it had appeared or where it had come from. It just seemed to spring into existence, fully-formed and ready to lay track, and that was what it proceeded to do.

The Line crept along, year after year. Six of the Company’s Chairmen were the victims of assassins, and four more met with accidents that might really have been accidents, if you were in a forgiving frame of mind. One vanished without trace on the journey between his home in Madrid and his office five minutes’ drive away. According to one online wag, the last public works project to have resulted in such loss of life was the Pyramids.





FLURRIES OF SNOW were dancing in the air when Forsyth got off the train in Poznan. He took a taxi from the station to the Poznaski, a little hotel just off the Market Square, went up to his room, and stood at the window watching the snow drift down. Winter was early; in a few days most Polish cities would be at least ankle-deep in polluted snow and filthy slush and the populace would be in the process of decamping to the ski-slopes of Zakopane and Szczyrk. Leon called it snow-frenzy and was proud to boast that he had never allowed his feet anywhere near a pair of ski-bindings.

Snow-frenzy. Forsyth smiled, went over to the phone on the bedside table, and dialled.

“What.”

“It’s me.”

“Oh, well, hello me,” Leon said in a bantering tone of voice. “Are we enjoying our holiday?”

“It’s snowing.”

“Don’t move, damn you!” Leon yelled. “Sorry,” he said in a quieter voice. “Not you.”

“Am I interrupting something important?” Forsyth asked, grinning.

“I’ve found this wonderful face; too good to lose. I might be able to recast Sobieski.”

Forsyth carried the phone back to the window and looked down into the street. A tram was just pulling into the stop across the road. The doors opened and disgorged figures with their shoulders hunched up against the snow and wind. The snow was making fuzzy haloes around the streetlights.

“Crispin came round this morning,” said Leon. “Just after you left.”

“What did he want?”