Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(73)

Forsyth laughed.

“You may think it’s funny, man,” Crispin said. “I thought the bastards were coming for me. You know that Mankind’s sixth sense is self-preservation? Well I exercised it. Goodbye, au ’voir, etcetera.”

“What did they look like?” Forsyth asked. “Yellow? Lots of feathers?” Crispin had once confided that he had seen Big Bird in one of the unfinished stations out in Skorosze. Although, as Leon had later pointed out, that was at a time when you were more likely to see Big Bird than a Metro train out there.

“Black cammo suits,” Crispin said in a serious voice. “Those little f*cking machine pistols that can turn a car into a colander.”

Forsyth shook his head. The Metro wasn’t organised to have a standing staff of security guards; it relied on electronic security, which was considerably cheaper and never slept. The idea of armed men wandering around in the tunnels was hilarious. He remembered a previous paranoid episode of Crispin’s, which had involved an absolute certainty that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had come to Warsaw to assassinate him.

“I have no idea why you’re still my friend,” he said to the figure walking in front of him, remembering other paranoid moments, other early-morning excursions for vaguely-explained purposes.

“You collect strays,” Crispin said, which was not the answer Forsyth had been expecting.

“I’m sorry?”

“You collect strays. That’s why you became a Rep. You like to look after people who have nowhere else to go.” He said it with such certainty that Forsyth didn’t know how to respond. “This way,” said Crispin, turning right when they reached the Eastbound platform.

Forsyth paused at the entrance and watched the bobbing light of the torch silhouette Crispin. He looked around the platform. Crispin was right, Kwak-Kwak’s gang of itinerant Japanese tilers and platform men had done good work here. Kwak-Kwak’s boys were real artisans. Tiling work had some sort of Zen significance for them. You couldn’t hurry them, but they always came in under budget and ahead of schedule, and they came out of the hole at the end of every shift smiling secret little smiles, as if they had just solved some intensely personal puzzle.

“Hey.”

Forsyth looked along the platform, suddenly aware that he was in almost total darkness. At the far end, the light of Crispin’s torch lit a circle of tile and track and the black throat of the Metro tunnel.

“Are you playing with yourself or something back there?” Crispin called irritably.

“No,” Forsyth said, and his voice echoed along the platform.

“I mean,” Crispin said, turning away and shining his torch into the Metro tunnel, “I thought we came here for a purpose or something.”

Forsyth wandered along the platform until he was standing just behind Crispin. “Will this take long?”

Crispin shook his head.

“Only I’ve got a hot date with Ewa. Or I did until you turned up.”

“Your problem, Snowy,” Crispin said, hopping down off the platform and onto the trackbed, “is that you think with your dick.”

“That’s not true.”

“Oh yes it is.” Crispin shone the torch up at him. “Remember that girl over in Wola? What was her name?”

“Agatka.”

“Yeah. Agatka.” Crispin swung the torch down and shone it directly into the tunnel. The light picked out stacks of rail, piles of concrete sleepers, equipment lockers. “You nearly lost your head over that one, remember?”

“No I didn’t.” Forsyth jumped down beside Crispin.

Crispin said, “Hah!” and his voice echoed dully along the empty station. “Her daddy was some bigwig at Ursus and there was this job going and you were going to take it and spend the rest of your life making f*cking tractors, man, I remember. Tractors! Take more than love to make me do that.”

Forsyth shrugged. “You never met her.”

“Good thing, too. I’d have read her the Riot Act.” Crispin set off into the tunnel. “Trying to take a man out of the hole and put him onto a production line. Jesus.”

“It was a managerial job,” Forsyth said. “I wouldn’t have been on the production line.”

“Whatever.”

“You’d have tried to sleep with her,” Forsyth said, following him. “You always try to sleep with my girlfriends.”

“No,” Crispin said, shaking his head. “Don’t remember that one, Snowy.”

They walked for some minutes, picking their way past parked tunnel tractors and redundant pumps. A fat cable ran along the ceiling, supported by staples driven into the tunnel segments. It carried a line of daylight-emulation lamps but there was no power down here at the moment to light them. The only illumination came from the bobbing light of the torch as Crispin swung it left and right and up and down, seemingly at random.

“You tried to sleep with Magda,” Forsyth said.

“No I didn’t.”

“Yes you did. After we got married she said you’d tried to talk her into bed, you bastard.”

“Here,” Crispin said, shining the torch on the side of the tunnel.

“Don’t deny it,” Forsyth said. “You tried to get Magda into bed, didn’t you?”