Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(76)
“You have no right to do this,” said Wojtek, Magda’s husband.
“I know,” Forsyth said. “I know. But I’m desperate. I think I’m in a lot of trouble.”
Wojtek was tall and blond and broad-shouldered. He was smoking a gorgeous Meerschaum pipe and regarding Forsyth like a scientist looking at a particularly disgusting tissue culture. “If you’re in trouble we want nothing to do with you,” he said. “This is a law-abiding household.”
“It always was,” Forsyth said, annoyed. “What do you think it was like when I was living here?”
“I didn’t mean that,” Wojtek said equably. Forsyth thought that Magda could have done worse in her choice of second husband. Wojtek was an architect, and one of the most reasonable men Forsyth had ever met. He was so reasonable he made Forsyth feel nauseous.
“Well what the f*ck did you mean?” he demanded.
Magda sighed. “Grant, please.”
Warsaw, more than most cities and polities of the Continent, was a place of taxis. It seemed that as soon as they were old enough to drive and managed to accumulate enough money to bribe the driving instructors, Varsovians passed their test, installed an antique two-way radio in their cars, and called themselves taxi drivers.
Forsyth had ignored all those taxis, on the grounds that he felt safer with lots of members of the public around him, and the bus ride out to Magda and Wojtek’s flat in Ursynów had still been a nightmare. He thought perhaps he was starting to come out of the shock a little, finally beginning to think a little more clearly, but alarmingly it didn’t seem to be helping his situation at all.
“I just need a place to stay tonight,” he said, and he heard himself begging, the imperfect ex-husband. “I need to sit and think for a while.”
Wojtek looked at Magda, and then at Forsyth. “You can have an hour. Then we want you out of here.”
Forsyth glared at him, but there was no force behind it. It was impossible to hate Wojtek. He had made Magda happy, had become Tomasz’s father in a way that Forsyth had never been. On the few previous occasions that they had met, Forsyth had wanted to hit him.
Magda said, “Grant, you can’t stay here. You have to leave.”
“Please, Magda.” He started to think about the long, long bus journey back into the centre of Warsaw and his very last hope.
“I don’t know what trouble you’ve got yourself into, but we don’t want any part of it. And don’t shout.”
“I wasn’t shouting.”
THE PINK PALACE had not always been the Pink Palace. Once upon a time it had been Pa?ac Kultury, the Palace of Culture, a gift to the workers of Poland from the workers of the Soviet Union. Forsyth, who had seen a lot of ugly buildings in his travels, thought that on the evidence of the Palace of Culture the workers of the Soviet Union must have really hated the workers of Poland.
After the collapse of the Communist government in Poland, and the subsequent fragmentation of the Soviet Union, Varsovians had been faced with the dilemma of what to do with the immense Stalinist-Baroque monolith that had been landed on their city like a chunky Amazing Stories spacecraft. Should they demolish it? Should they build a pleasing fa?ade over the hateful Soviet one? Competitions were held, to try and find a solution, but without success. The one good thing, the people of Warsaw said, about the Palace of Culture was that you could see it from more or less everywhere in the city, rendering it almost impossible to get lost.
The debate went on beyond the Millennium, and might have meandered on, in the manner of Polish debate, for decades, had the Pink Pilot not taken the initiative, fitted a Heath Robinson paint-spraying rig to a stolen Russian helicopter, flown it low over central Warsaw one night, and ended the debate for ever.
Forsyth thought it was a typically Polish gesture, wild and romantic and expensive and completely futile, but in the days following the Palace of Culture’s unscheduled paint-job the Pink Pilot became a national hero. Nie ran a straw poll which suggested that the Pilot would wipe the board if he (or she, Political Correctness having taken some small root in Poland by then) chose to run for President. The news networks ran endless items theorising on the Pilot’s origins and suggesting a certain amount of official collusion because of the apparent failure of Warsaw’s Air Traffic Control to spot the maverick aircraft. Others dredged up the story of Matthias Rust, who flew a Cessna right into Red Square, to demonstrate that such things were not only possible but had a precedent.
Forsyth, kicking his heels that Autumn while the Government argued over the construction of the termini out in Wola, had sat in the flat and watched all the news programmes and thought he could feel the whole city – the whole country – breathe a sigh of relief.
The relief was so tangible that protest marches were mounted when attempts were made to remove the pink paint. When the city authorities tried to repaint the Palace in battleship grey there was a riot. The Pink Palace became a symbol of everything Polish, of the final humiliation of the Soviet enemy. Forsyth thought the whole business was stupid and he found his admiration for the Poles increasing every time he happened to look up while wandering around town and saw the pink edifice.
At any rate, he used to. He could see the Palace from the windows of Atelier Dudek, all lit up and pink, and all of a sudden it seemed sinister and hot, diseased somehow. He shuddered and drank some more vodka.