Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(8)

At the restaurant, there was much activity following the previous night’s excitement. One of Max’s many relatives was standing on a stepladder replacing the smashed sconce, and a small team of professional cleaners was using a machine which resembled a stunted Dalek to clean the trodden-in mess of food and broken glass and crockery from the carpet. Max was standing near the bar, dolefully regarding a broken chair.

“Can’t find one to match it,” he said when Rudi arrived, freshly-showered and ready for the day. “The firm that made them went bust two years ago.”

“And you didn’t know?” asked Rudi.

Max looked at him. “Do I look like a man who pays attention to every furniture manufacturer who goes out of business?”

“So we’re down one place setting now.”

“I’ll find something similar,” said Max. “Put it at one of the tables over in that corner. No one will ever notice. And if they do, no one will ever mention it.”

Rudi thought this was somehow emblematic of Max’s attitude to the restaurant business; he had a laudable faith in the power of good food cooked well to bring in customers, but everything else was a struggle for him. It was at times like this – and really only at times like this – that Rudi missed the presence of the sainted Pani Stasia, the restaurant’s former chef and Max’s mother.

He said, “At least we have replacements for all the broken tableware.”

Max looked at the chair again and shrugged. Tableware was constantly having to be replaced; there were boxes of plates and cups and saucers and cutlery in one of the storerooms, bought cheap in large quantities at a bankruptcy sale a couple of years ago. Eventually, that was going to start running out too, Max would equivocate about replacing it, and then another bankruptcy sale would come along and solve the problem. You never had to wait long for a bankruptcy sale in the catering business, these days.

Rudi left Max to puzzle out the chair problem. It would, as these things usually did, become his problem soon enough. He went into the kitchen, where the crew were prepping for the day’s service.





THE DAY PASSED as they always did. There were minor crises and minor triumphs. Out in the restaurant, a child, unwillingly dining with his parents, enacted a spectacular temper-tantrum which Max defused with nothing more sophisticated than native charm and a lollipop. Max found the nuts and bolts of being a restaurateur a bit of a chore, but he was wonderful with people, particularly children.

As the afternoon diners were gradually replaced by the evening crowd, most of them coming in for an early dinner before going on to the theatre or a club, Rudi went out to the loading bay in the courtyard behind the building for a smoke. The courtyard was small and narrow, just wide enough for a van to reverse through the archway at the other end for deliveries. It was surrounded by tall, old buildings, and on rainy days he felt as if he was standing at the bottom of a chimney lined with windows.

Stubbing out his cigar in the bucket of damp sand beside the back door of the restaurant, he had the strangest sense of being watched. He looked across the courtyard and thought he caught the barest scrap of movement, but it was gone so quickly that he couldn’t be sure. He walked across to the archway, stepped through into the street, and looked left and right, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. Just another day when you think people are looking at you; everyone has them, now and again.

There was a brief lull in custom around seven. Rudi had a quick dinner of kotlet schabowy and potatoes with pickled red cabbage and apple at the private table by the kitchen door, and when he got up to take his plate back into the kitchen he looked across the restaurant and found himself looking at himself.

For a few moments he stood there, completely flatfooted, all manner of scenarios running through his head. Then the person sitting at the table on the other side of the restaurant smiled and beckoned cheerily, and he felt as if a trapdoor had opened beneath his feet but he hadn’t yet quite fallen through it.

He shouldered the kitchen door open, put his plate and coffee mug on the worktop just inside, and walked across the restaurant and stood beside the newcomer’s table.

And it really was him. Or rather an older, slightly more worn-out him, with wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and grey in his hair. There was a cane propped against the table beside him, and he was partway through a bowl of flaczki. Rudi felt that sense of standing on thin air even more acutely.

“Oh, sit down,” said the older him in an avuncular manner. He indicated the bowl of tripe stew in front of him. “This is really good, but you’ve got to stop putting so much pepper in it; not even the Poles like it with this much pepper.” He smiled. “Sit.”

Rudi sat. “Who are you?”

The older Rudi was buttering a slice of rye bread. “I’m you,” he said, “obviously.”

“No you’re not.” It was the only thing he could think of to say.

“Yes I am. A version of you, at any rate.”

Rudi shook his head. “No, I’m sorry,” he said, “this doesn’t make any sense.” He made to stand, but the older Rudi waved him down.

“Some of what I’m about to tell you will be quite hard to believe,” he said, laying the slice of bread down on a side plate and picking up his wineglass. He took a sip of wine. “Actually, pretty much everything I’m about to tell you will be hard to believe.”