Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(78)
“Like what?”
Leon shrugged. “Don’t know.”
“Well can you find out?”
“There’s no need to shout.”
Forsyth thought there was every need to shout, but he fought himself calm by an effort of what will he had left. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Can you find out?”
Leon scratched his head. “I can look for the more obvious things, but you really need a specialist.” He smiled. “Fortunately, I know a specialist.”
“Well… good,” Forsyth said.
“In fact, so do you.”
They looked at each other for a few moments, until it dawned on Forsyth who Leon was talking about. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” he said.
4.
FORSYTH HAD MET Leon’s friend Chudy a couple of times before, and had dismissed him as just another computer-mad kid who wanted to break into the movies. He kept coming round to the workshop with weird structures he’d programmed himself, bizarre confections constructed from bits and pieces of half a dozen different actors and actresses, up to and including an outrageous thing – Forsyth couldn’t think of any other way to describe it – with Tom Selleck’s head, Chesty Morgan’s breasts, the body of the Mighty Joe Young, the penis of John Holmes and the legs of Betty Grable. That this mess of bits and pieces worked at all spoke of some degree of skill on Chudy’s part, but Forsyth still thought the kid needed psychiatric help.
“You never used that structure I brought you last month,” Chudy said, gently rocking himself from side to side on his swivel chair.
“I keep telling you,” Leon said equably, “I’m looking for the right property to put it into.”
“You never use any of my structures.”
Leon gave a great graphic shrug meant to illustrate how hard it was to find high-quality properties these days. He smiled.
Chudy pouted. ‘Chudy’ was Polish for ‘thin,’ or ‘skinny’; Forsyth assumed the nickname was meant to be ironic, because Chudy was almost spherical, a short, fat, petulant teenager with greasy hair and spots. It was unusual to find this kind of kid in Poland these days, in spite of all the fried food. Poles, Forsyth thought, just had too much nervous energy to be fat.
“So,” Chudy said, casting a sly eye around his bedroom, “you need my help, do you?”
Forsyth got up off the bed. “I’ve had enough of this.”
Leon took hold of his arm and pulled him back. “Sit down. Chudy and I are just negotiating. Isn’t that right, Chudy? Just like film men all over the world.”
This was a compliment which clearly struck home with Chudy. He ran his fingers through his hair and grinned. “Yeah,” he said. “Negotiating.”
“Good God,” Forsyth muttered.
Chudy lived with his parents in a flat in Wola, a district of monolithic high-rise blocks, poor sandy soil and scrubby pollution-stricken trees out on the northwestern edge of the city. The door of his bedroom was plastered with adolescent notices of the ‘Keep Out, Genius At Work’ variety, and it was clear to Forsyth that his parents heeded them because the room was a disaster area. The walls and ceiling were entirely covered with posters, in places stuck haphazardly one on top of the other two or three deep, a mural of rock groups and centrefolds and fast cars and aircraft, occasionally all on the same poster. The floor was a sort of archaeological treasure-trove of discarded clothing, training shoes, magazine printouts, pens, sheets of paper, little plastic boxes, wrapping materials, ancient paperback software manuals, food-encrusted plates, items of cutlery, mugs, glasses, antique audio and computer CDs and DVDs and their boxes, suspiciously stiff twists of Kleenex, stuffed toys with the stuffing bulging in a sinister fashion out of missing arms and legs. Forsyth had found himself having to walk on tiptoe to reach the bed and sit down, although sitting down on the bed involved sweeping more bits of detritus onto the floor and rearranging the smelly duvet that had been stuffed down between the bed and the wall.
“So how about it?” Leon asked.
“How about what?” Chudy said with the sly look he clearly now associated with negotiation.
Leon shrugged. “You help me out, I help you out. That’s how these things work, isn’t it?”
Chudy affected to look more sly. Forsyth thought it made him look simple-minded, but he didn’t say anything.
The bits of Chudy’s room that weren’t given over to apocalyptic mess and piles of pornographic magazines comprised the reason for Forsyth and Leon’s presence here: a row of four impressive-looking computer systems along one wall, sitting on little folding wooden picnic tables, each with its own printer and three or four different drive formats. Chudy had card drives, old read/write optical disc drives, three sizes of antique floppy drives, external hard drives stacked one on top of the other. One of the monitors was running a scene from Debbie Does Dallas, except it appeared to involve Louise Brooks, Brad Pitt and the golden robot from Star Wars whose name Forsyth could never remember. He was finding it distracting, so he got up and tiptoed across to the window while Leon buffed up Chudy’s vanity.
Chudy’s parents’ flat was up on the eleventh floor of one of Wola’s blocks. His bedroom window looked out on a misty distance of factories and scrubby waste ground and the faraway skyline of central Warsaw. Forsyth could remember much the same view from Agatka’s flat, the girl he had very nearly married and whose father had wanted him to work at the Ursus tractor factory. She had lived somewhere around here. He wondered if she was somewhere close by, in one of the other huge blocks. He wondered if his life would have been any different if he had married her and not Magda. Right on the horizon, between two buildings, he thought he could detect a speck of hot pink, like a street sign pointing at just how different his life would have been. All of a sudden, he found himself wanting to scream.