Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(68)

“Well... hard to tell,” Leon said. “He wasn’t speaking any language I’ve ever heard before.”

Forsyth laughed.

“It’s okay for you to laugh, you bastard,” Leon said. “You didn’t have to try and make sense of what he was saying. I mean, we talked to each other, but I think we were having two entirely separate conversations.”

“I’ll see him when I get back. Anything else?”

“Ewa phoned.”

Oh dear. “Is she back?”

“She’s back and she wants to know why you weren’t waiting at Gdanska with your tongue hanging out when her train came in.”

“She didn’t tell me when she was due back.”

“Well, maybe if you had a phone like everyone else she’d have been able to let you know she was coming.”

“You know how I feel about phones,” Forsyth said.

“Fucking dinosaur.”

“Was she very angry?”

“I learned some new swearwords,” said Leon.

Oh well. “I’ll see her when I get back, too.”

Silence, at the other end of the line.

“I’ve got a job to do, Leon,” Forsyth said after a while. “Don’t give me a hard time.”

“Oh, stop whining,” Leon said, and hung up.





OFFICIALLY, MOST EUROPEAN governments affected an air of enlightened bemusement when it came to matters pertaining to the Line. It seemed to serve no rational purpose; it carried freight but hardly enough to pay its operating costs, and passengers had to take out citizenship before they could even set foot on a platform. It was just there, nobody knew why.

Unofficially, there was a certain cachet involved in having a Line station on your territory. It was irrational, if you thought about it, but there was something about the Line which made it seem important. Most countries had at least two Line Consulates. Some polities had three. Poland had one.

Polish television still had the charming habit of broadcasting debates from the Sejm, and in his long hours of inactivity Forsyth had become something of a student of them. While nothing was ever said straight out – which was unusual in itself in Poland – it was obvious to him that it annoyed Poles to have only one Line Consulate – and that not in the capital. It was, he thought, regarded as something of an insult, as if the Line saw Poland as just a couple of borders to be crossed on the way from Greater Germany to Ukraine and points east, and the Consulate in Poznan little more than a necessity, unpalatable but unavoidable.

As if determined to rub it in, the Line hadn’t even bothered to be subtle about its incursion into Poznan; they had just bought one of the old inner-metropolitan stations and a couple of hundred hectares of land around it, demolished most of the surrounding buildings, thrown several tens of kilometres of smartwire around the whole thing, and declared it sovereign territory. Forsyth sometimes wondered if the Line’s rulers occasionally tuned in to the Polish version of Today In Parliament, and if they chuckled to themselves when they did.

Apart from Hindenberg, the ethnic Silesian homeland in Upper Silesia, and the Pomeranian Republic, there were no polities on Poland’s territory. Poland’s borders had been going backward and forward for hundreds of years. For quite a large part of its history, the country hadn’t existed at all as a geographical entity, and Poles liked to remind everyone that it was here to stay now and ready to take its rightful place in Europe. They also took a certain delight in the irony that, just as Poland consolidated its nationhood after so many years, Europe was fracturing around it. The media liked to gesture casually but with no small smugness at Greater Germany, which was a continually-simmering landscape of volatile little nations.

To the Polish Government, the Line was an abomination, a foreign country that had come here in the guise of a railway track, literally laid across their territory sleeper by sleeper and rail by rail. And the continuing diplomatic snubs only made matters worse.

Forsyth had a sneaking admiration for the Line. It was, when you boiled off all the diplomatic bollocks, an astounding work of civil engineering, a Grand Gesture from a continent which seemed to be putting most of its energies these days into subdividing itself into progressively smaller and smaller states. He thought that one day the Line might be the only thing holding all those little states together, like the cord running through a string of pearls.





“NO,” SAID THE official.

“Beg pardon?” asked Forsyth.

The official, a little Iberian with a cast in his left eye and an expensive wool-knit suit, looked up from the pad on his desk. “No,” he said again.

“I don’t understand.”

The Iberian sighed patiently. “We have no record of these men,” he explained.

Forsyth thought about it. He’d been kicking his heels for three days at the Poznaski, waiting for someone from the Line to see him, and while Poznan was a nice enough town and the food at the hotel was excellent, he was running out of money.

“They told their families they were enrolling for work on the Line,” he said finally.

The Iberian gave a little wince. “The records of the TransEurope Rail Route,” he said, emphasising the name for Forsyth’s benefit, “show no mention of these men.” The Line actually existed as two entities. One, the sovereign nation, was the Independent Trans-European Republic; the other, the TransEurope Rail Route, was the infrastructure, the tracks themselves. It was sometimes easy to mix them up.