Europe at Midnight (38 page)

So I wound up at the Dragon’s Head with George and four of his friends. The beer was excellent, the ham sandwiches less so. As well as George there were two stout quiet men who reminded me a lot of the Farmboy, in demeanour if not in looks, and a slight, willowy young woman named Patricia who had brown hair and startling violet eyes and who worked with George at the University.

“Have you ever wondered what it’s like in Europe?” Patricia asked me when we were all settled and friends together.

“Of course,” I said. “Hasn’t everyone?” Unlike my people, the people of the Community were aware of their origins. They knew Europe was just a footstep away across the border, but by tradition they were not allowed to visit. There was a general distrust of the European neighbour, an assumption that there was nothing there worth having anything to do with. Generations of Presiding Authorities and Directorates had bred the urge to leave out of the people of the Community.

Patricia lowered her voice. “We were there two years ago,” she said. “George and I.”

I felt my heart thud in my chest. I had an enormous pity for these people, with their trusting nature and their appalling security; if Michael hadn’t wanted the entire group rounded up wholesale, Patricia and George would have been in one of the camps out to the East right now.

“Field trip,” she went on. “We were buying books.” She gave me a little ironic smile. “Keats, Wordsworth, Tom Paulin, Sylvia Plath, Ginsberg.”

“‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed’,” said George.

“I’m sorry?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. They sent us with a guide. He blindfolded us before he took us across the border, so we don’t know where it was.”

“We want to go back,” Patricia said.

“Why are you telling me this?” I said.

George sat back and took a drink of his beer and looked at me. Then he said, “Professor Delahunty knows how to cross the border.”

“Some people think he’s European,” Patricia put in. “They’ve come over before, and stayed. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“It’d be the first time any of them married into a Founding Family and wound up with a research post,” George grumped.

“I didn’t realise they’d come here,” I said.

“It’s been happening for centuries,” George said. “They come here, but we can’t go there.”

“But the border’s guarded...”

“The border is everywhere,” Patricia said. “It’s not just a line on a map, it’s discrete places, points of contact between us and them, pathways, railway lines, rivers. Nobody knows how many there are.”

Officially, the Directorate knew how many there were, but off the books even they admitted that they couldn’t be certain they knew of all of them. I said, “So where does Professor Delahunty come into this?”

“Well, you see,” said George, “it’s a little bit
delicate
for us to approach him,” which I thought was one of the larger understatements I had ever heard. George clearly thought I was a bit stupid, but I was way ahead of him. The bastards wanted to use me as a
cut-out
, a safety valve between them and Rafe. If anything went wrong, I would be the one who got blamed.

“I’m dying,” said Patricia.

I blinked at her.

“It’s a cancer,” she told me. “Not aggressive, but I’ve only got a couple of years, at best. Nobody here can treat it.”

“And you think they can in Europe?”

“Their medical science is
years
ahead of ours,” George said.

It was obvious they had never had any experience of the National Health Service. They must have thought you could just walk into a hospital in Europe and be treated for anything, without identification or social security credentials or money. It was lucky I couldn’t ask how they expected to get Patricia a National Insurance number and a GP, because their answer would probably have boggled my mind. I’d been treated free of charge in Nottingham, but that was because I had been an accident victim. A course of cancer treatment was something entirely different.

“So you want me to ask Professor Delahunty to take you across the border, right?” I asked, playing the part of a not-very-bright shopkeeper.

“Not in so many words, no,” George said. “And not straight out like that. You have to approach it sort of edgeways.”

“We’ll take you with us,” Patricia said.

“I don’t want to go,” I told her.

“Oh, come on,” George scoffed.

“I’ve heard terrible stories about it,” I said. “Wars, crime. I don’t want anything to do with all that.”

“We’ll pay you for your time, then,” George said, and I decided I didn’t like him at all. I didn’t like people who thought they could buy other people; I’d seen enough of them in my time here.

I thought about it, and named a price that was high enough to rock George back in his seat.

“Now hang on,” he protested quietly, and I saw the two silent men start to tense up. George made a discreet sign with his hand, and they relaxed again. He said to me, “That’s a lot of money.”

“It’s a lot of risk I’m taking, if the Professor decides to take my questions the wrong way,” I said, cementing my image as a venal tradesman. “And what’s to stop me going straight to the Constabulary when I leave here?”

Patricia reached out and put a long, slender, pale hand gently on my arm. “You won’t do that, though. Will you?”

“No, miss,” I told her. “No, probably not. But it
is
a big risk.

She squeezed my arm gently. “Then you’ll try? For me?”

I looked into her eyes. She had beautiful eyes, and I saw fear there, and hope, and a terrible loneliness, and I said, “Yes, miss. I’ll try.”

“S
HE’S NO MORE
got cancer than I have,” Michael snorted. “Bloody woman.”

“They seem sincere, that’s all I can tell you.”

“Oh, of course they’re
sincere
. That’s why we’ve been watching them.” He looked around the park. “Ah, perhaps we should just let them go, eh?”

“Can we do that?”

“It would make everyone’s life more simple.”

“It would certainly make my life more simple.” The situation was not without its amusing side. The Security Service had sent me to spy on the Community. In turn, the Community had sent me to spy on its citizens. And in their turn, the citizens were asking me to spy on a European. All I needed now was for Rafe to ask me to spy on the Security Service and my life would be complete. “What do you think I should do?”

“Delahunty has connections. Not just through his wife, either. He did a lot of research work for us when he first came here; he’s well-regarded by the Committee, they won’t be pleased about him being mixed up in this, however tangentially.”

“He’s not under suspicion, though. The dissidents just want me to ask for his help.”

“He’ll report you the moment you ask him,” Michael said. “You’ll be arrested and we’ll have to arrest the others. Damn.” He grimaced. “We haven’t identified them all yet; the ones we don’t get will just scatter.” Michael was a keen gardener; he knew the importance of not only getting rid of weeds but their root systems as well.

“So tell him. Make him aware of the operation. You don’t have to tell him who I am, just say someone’s probably going to approach him about crossing the border and everything’s fine and you have it all under control.”

Michael presented a fair facsimile of an agony of indecision before shaking his head; he’d already decided what to do, of course. “No,” he said. “The less people know about this, the better. I’d rather take our chances.”

I said, “You don’t think some of the
Committee
are involved in this, do you?”

“The Committee have access to the maps,” he said. “Half of them have been to Europe at some point or other. If they were mixed up in it, George and poor sick Patricia wouldn’t be approaching Delahunty.” He looked at me. “Ask him. It’s a step towards establishing your bona fides with the dissidents; if the wheels do come off, we’ll just arrest the ones we know about and see if anyone else makes a run for it. Bloody operation’s been running long enough as it is. What are you thinking about?”

I was mentally making a list of the number of ways in which this whole thing could go wrong. It was a long list.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’ll be glad when this is all over.”

“Me too, old man,” he said. “Me too.”

7

T
HE WHOLE THING
had started with a walk-in, someone approaching the Directorate out of the blue with information about a dissident group centred around some of the Arts Faculty staff at the University. The Directorate had already made its own inquiries and identified a number of persons of interest and had been keeping them under surveillance for some months before Michael called me in for a chat.

“There’s some evidence that they’re going to start using a bookshop on Poe Street as a rendezvous,” he told me. “You know about selling books, don’t you.”

“I’m hardly an expert,” I protested.

He waved it away. “You’re a quick learner. All you have to do is be there, anyway. Get close to them, see what they’re planning. I’ve had a word with the editor of the
Intelligencer
and let him know you’re taking a bit of a sabbatical.”

“Oh, thank you.”

“Don’t be insubordinate, there’s a good chap.”

I contrived to look grumpy.

“It’ll all be over in a couple of weeks, anyway,” he said.

But it wasn’t over in a couple of weeks. Either Michael’s intelligence was incorrect, or the dissidents had decided not to use the bookshop immediately, but I waited months for them to turn up.

There was, on the whole, not a great deal of unrest in the Community. Partly this was because life in the Community was actually quite nice. There was a rigid class system, but everyone knew their place and was, on the whole, satisfied with it. There wasn’t a lot of fuss.

The Directorate was also very good at its job. It had sources in every area of private and public life, kept a watch on everything, and was prepared to move quickly – but calmly – to nip trouble in the bud before it got out of hand. After two centuries, these factors had combined to produce a populace which was too
polite
to protest or oppose, on the whole. The Presiding Authority was stern but avuncular, and so long as it continued to give the people what they wanted nothing was going to change. The people of the Community were, with a few exceptions, sheep. Sheep with nuclear weapons.

I
GOT MY
chance to speak to Rafe a week or so after meeting George and Patricia. He came into the shop late one afternoon; Christine had gone to meet up with her sister and I was there on my own, cataloguing new titles and entering them in the ledger.

He had a new list of books he wanted. We had a couple of them in stock, which pleased him, and I promised I would try to track down the others over the next few days.

As he made to leave, his new purchases tucked under his arm, I said, “May I ask a personal question, sir?”

“Of course you can, Tommy,” he said, smiling. “There’s never any harm in
asking
.”

I paused, thinking about it, and it wasn’t entirely an act. I was surprised to discover how nervous I was. Finally, I said, “I was chatting with some of the lads in the pub the other night and your name happened to come up.”

He didn’t stop smiling. There are some men who really don’t like being discussed, and some who enjoy it far too much. Rafe was the latter. “Oh yes?”

“One of them said you’re from Europe.”

The smile dimmed, but only by a fraction. I was really starting to have trouble connecting this rather vain man with Araminta. He said, “He did, did he?”

“I’m sorry if I’m speaking out of turn, sir,” I said.

“Not at all.”

“So it’s true then, sir? You really are from there?”

He nodded gravely. “I’m from London, originally. I came here nine years ago.”

Six, you silly sod,
I thought.
You came here six years ago.
I said, “What’s it like?”

“Well,” he said, enjoying being the centre of attention, “it’s a lot bigger than Władysław, obviously. And there are far more people. It’s very busy. Not like here.” He was speaking to me the way a parent speaks to a small child about some particularly difficult topic, and just for a moment he reminded me of Araminta, telling me that my world was only two hundred miles across.

I took a breath and stepped over the precipice. “I think I’d like to see that,” I said.

He chuckled. “I don’t think so, Tommy. You’re better off here.”

“Why?”

He looked at me soberly. “It’s a very violent place,” he said. “The people are uncivilised, there’s a lot of crime, a lot of damage to the environment.” He shook his head. “Not a nice place to visit. That’s why I live here.”

I thought about it, decided that was enough for now. “Not sure I can blame you, sir,” I said. I looked at my watch. “I’m going to have to lock up now, though.”

He looked a little confused for a moment, then he smiled and bade me a goodnight. I locked the door behind him, turned the OPEN sign around, and stood staring out at the ironmongers’ across the alley and wondering what was going to happen next.

W
HAT HAPPENED NEXT
was nothing very much. The next time George and Patricia came into the shop, I told them that I’d broached the subject of the borders with Rafe and he hadn’t called the Constabulary on the spot. They told me to take it one step at a time, which was more or less the same advice Michael gave me when I reported to
him
. Presumably, if I had ever managed to communicate with Baines and Bevan they would be telling me the same thing. Hurry up and wait. In Intelligence, nothing ever happens quickly.

I didn’t push it. The next few times Rafe came into the shop, I didn’t mention Europe to him at all, and he gave no sign that we had ever spoken about it.

A couple of months later, however, he popped into the shop with something for me. “I’m having a party at the weekend at Hemingsley,” he told me. “Just a few friends. I wondered if you might like to come.”