Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(83)

“There now,” Leon said to Forsyth. “Now do we have your attention?”





6.





“HAVE YOU EVER,” asked Rudi, “tried to tie up some of your life’s loose ends?”

“I’ve thought about it,” Forsyth said. “Now and again.”

“A bit of advice. Don’t. Some loose ends are better off left untied. I tried that.”

From the tone of his voice, it seemed to Forsyth that his unlikely rescuer had found the exercise ill-advised at best.

“Did you know, for example, that the people who built Dresden-Neustadt were also involved in building the Line?” Rudi asked. “And that some of them – quite possibly all of them – are involved in building Stare Miasto station?” He thought about it. “Actually, they’ve been involved in the whole Metro project, right from the beginning. The joint-venture scheme the Polish government runs is quite unusual; I have a suspicion the funding structure wasn’t wholly their idea, but you can’t tell with governments here. It’s difficult to work out who the private investors are; they seem to come and go, individually or collectively, down the years.”

Forsyth shrugged. “They’re expensive projects; there can’t be that many organisations who can afford to do that.”

“Very true. The question I’ve been asking myself is why. Why are these very rich people sinking so much money into civil engineering projects? Has it ever occurred to you, for instance, to wonder why anyone would want to rebuild what was already a perfectly good Metro system?”

“It’s what happens with Metro systems. They always need upgrading and extending.”

“On this scale?”

“The Poles want the best Metro in the world. It’s like having the tallest building in the world; it gives you bragging rights.”

Rudi rubbed his eyes. “I’ve been looking at this all wrong,” he said. “It’s not about trains, it’s about tunnels.”

They were a long way from Warsaw, in a resort hotel just west of Sopot, a glowering Brutalist structure like a Mayan pyramid faced with hundreds of balconies, where one could, if one wrapped up warmly, stand and gaze out towards the Winter-whipped Baltic a kilometre or so away. The place was almost empty; the season was late and the Christmas and New Year guests wouldn’t be arriving for another month or so. Even after all these years, Forsyth couldn’t work out what would possess Poles to want to spend Christmas in a place like this.

“Your friend mentioned something about Russians,” Rudi mused, looking around the cavernous dining room on the hotel’s third floor. There was enough glass in the backward-sloping floor-to-ceiling windows to cover a football pitch, but the view they looked out on was a vista of sand dunes and hardy grass and sleet; the weather was so bad today that the sea was barely visible.

“You mean the Georgians?”

“No. When you were in the Metro tunnels. He said you heard Russians.”

“I was scared out of my wits,” Forsyth told him. “I don’t know what I heard.”

Rudi smiled and leaned forward a little and put his elbows on the table on either side of his soup bowl. “But you do,” he said. “You do know what you heard, don’t you.”

Forsyth looked at him. “There was a train,” he said finally. “The ramp I was on led down to another platform. There were lots of people there, and there was a train.”

Rudi raised an eyebrow.

Forsyth sighed. “Before I became a Rep, I did a lot of work at Old Town Station,” he explained. “I know that place really well. And there isn’t a platform there. And even if there was, there was no power to run a train and the lights. It was as if...” He shook his head.

“It was as if you weren’t in Old Town Station any more,” Rudi suggested. “As if you weren’t in the Warsaw Metro at all.”

Forsyth looked blankly at him.

“Have you ever heard of Stendhal Syndrome?”

“What?”

Rudi looked up at the many hundreds of lights hanging far up on the dining room’s ceiling. “There are documented occurrences of people visiting the Uffizi in Florence and becoming... overwhelmed by the beauty of the place. Dizziness, fainting. Stendhal Syndrome.

“Anyway, there was a man – I never met him, but I know someone who did, which is how I know this particular story – who was interested in Stendhal Syndrome. He found examples of similar symptoms in other places – the Maine coast, parts of Cornwall – and he started to wonder if there was something about the topographical structure of these places that was making people unwell. Fortunately, he had access to a fabulous amount of computing power and quite a lot of time on his hands, and eventually he came to the conclusion that there are some places where the landscape is just the wrong shape, simply too intense for human perceptions.

“This man – his name was Mundt, by the way; does that sound familiar? No? Well, Mundt made something of a conceptual leap. His research led him to a way of manipulating landscape in a way which connected two distant points. Which suddenly made him interesting to a lot of people.”

Forsyth shrugged. “So?”

“Herr Professor Mundt was very interested in tunnels,” Rudi said. “And he lived in Dresden-Neustadt.”