Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(7)

“Good f*ck meal,” the Hungarian said. There was a general nodding of heads around the table. He looked at Rudi and belched. “Good f*ck cook. Polish food for f*ck pigs, but good f*ck cook.”

Rudi smiled. “Thank you,” he said.

The Hungarian’s eyes suddenly came into focus. “Good,” he said. “We gone.” He snapped a few words and the others around the table stood up, all save the one who had thrown the chair, who was slumped over with his cheek pressed to the tablecloth, snoring gently. Two of his friends grasped him by the shoulders and elbows and lifted him up. Bits of food adhered to the side of his face.

“Food good,” the Polish-speaker told Rudi. He took his jacket from the back of his chair and shrugged into it. He dipped a hand into his breast pocket and came up with a business card held between his first two fingers. “You need working, you call.”

Rudi took the card. “Thank you,” he said again.

“Okay.” He put both hands to his face and swept them up and back in a movement that magically rearranged his hair and seemed to sober him up at the same time. “We gone.” He looked at Max. “Clever f*ck Pole.” He reached into an inside jacket pocket and brought out a wallet the size and shape of a housebrick. “What is?”

“On the house,” Max said. “A gift.”

Rudi looked at his boss and wondered what went on underneath that shaved scalp.

The Hungarian regarded the restaurant. “We break much.”

Max shrugged carelessly.

“Okay.” The Hungarian removed a centimetre-thick wad of z?otys from the wallet and held it out. “You take,” he said. Max smiled and bowed slightly and took the money, then the Hungarians were moving towards the exit. A last burst of raucous singing, one last bar stool hurled across the restaurant, a puff of cold air through the open door, and they were gone. Rudi heard Max locking the doors behind them.

“Well,” Max said, coming back down the stairs. “That was an interesting evening.”

Rudi picked up an overturned stool, righted it, and sat at the bar. He had, he discovered, sweated entirely through his chef’s whites.

“Anyway, no one was hurt.” Max went behind the bar. He bent down and started to search the shelves, straightened up holding half a bottle of Starka and two glasses.

Rudi took his lighter and a tin of small cigars from his pocket. He lit one and looked at the restaurant. If he was objective about it, there was actually very little damage. Just a lot of mess for the cleaners to tackle, and they’d had wedding receptions that had been messier.

Max filled the two glasses with vodka and held one up in a toast. “Good f*ck meal,” he said.

Rudi looked at him for a moment. Then he picked up the other glass, returned the toast, and drained it in one go. Then they both started to laugh.

“What if they come back?” Rudi asked.

But Max was still laughing. “Good f*ck meal,” he repeated, shaking his head and refilling the glasses.





THE NEXT MORNING, Rudi got up before dawn, pulled on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and went out for a run. He liked the early-morning streets of Poland’s old capital, before the shoppers arrived. It was a landscape of beautiful old buildings and delivery drivers and early-morning workers huddled sleepily in trams. On the Market Square, three Stra?z miejska, civilian City Guards, were standing looking at a naked man who had been handcuffed to a rubbish bin. The naked man was looking up in fuddled incomprehension while two of the Stra?z shouted at him in Polish. The guardsmen didn’t seem in any great hurry to help him, or even tase him. Shouting, for the moment, appeared quite satisfactory. It was hardly the worst outcome of a stag weekend they’d ever seen.

He veered off across the square, along the front of the Sukiennice, the mediaeval Cloth Hall in the middle, and out towards the river. He skirted Wawel Hill, the Castle all spotlit high above on its crag, and through the riverside gardens at its feet. The Poles had recently repaired the statue of Smok Wawelski, the dragon supposedly slain – by feeding it a dead sheep stuffed with sulphur, which Rudi had always found a quintessentially Polish story – by Krak, the city’s legendary founder, and now it breathed a jet of flame every five minutes or so, via a hidden gas-pipe which emerged in its mouth. A series of unfortunate incidents involving the light toasting of drunken revellers and one small child had led to a large area in front of the statue being fenced off. Krakowians, because they were Krakowians, kept pulling the fence down, and the city authorities kept putting it back up; the whole thing had turned into a minor sport, with neither side prepared to back down.

Rudi liked the Poles for a lot of things like that; it was one of the reasons he stayed rather than moving on to another city and another restaurant. There was a building near the Mogilskie Roundabout whose construction, begun way back in the 1970s, had been permanently interrupted by lack of money and Martial Law in the ’80s. Once upon a time it had been the tallest building in Kraków. It had never been finished, but instead of knocking it down the Poles had turned it into a huge billboard display. They called it ‘Szkieletor,’ after a children’s cartoon character. Nobody now knew who owned it.

He did a threequarter-circuit of Wawel Hill, then back along Grodzka into the Market Square. The drunken tourist was still there, still being goodnaturedly yelled at by the guardsmen. There were more people about now; some of them had gathered to watch and make helpful suggestions. Others were walking across the Square, heading for work. As Rudi rounded the Mariacki Church, he saw from the corner of his eye someone standing on the opposite corner, watching him, and for a confusing moment there was something so familiar about their body language that he almost stumbled. By the time he regained his footing and managed to look properly, the figure was gone.