Europe in Autumn (18 page)

“Clumsy but extremely effective,” Rudi said. “Particularly for Leo.”

Bradley heaved a huge, worldbreaking sigh, refusing this time to rise to the bait.

“What was the Situation Leo and I were supposed to be taking care of?” Rudi asked.

Bradley shook his head. “Not live any longer, old lad.”

“So there’s no reason why you shouldn’t tell me.”

The Englishman appeared to be thinking about it. He took another drink of his brandy. He shook his head again. “Sorry.”

“Was there a jump? Everything according to plan? Textbook dustoff?” He drained his glass in one gulp. “Fuck you, Bradley, tell me what Leo had his head cut off for!”

Bradley remained sitting, completely calm and even-humoured. “Please stop shouting, there’s a good lad. You’ll disturb Madame.”

Rudi snorted and turned to look out of the window again.

“What happened to Leo had nothing to do with the Situation you were supposed to be handling,” Bradley said. He was silent for a long time, thinking. “There was an incident in Hamburg back in October. Central and German counterintelligence tried to occupy the same space at the same time.” He sipped his drink. “A number of their officers were killed.”

Rudi turned and looked at him. “I beg your pardon?”

Bradley looked thoughtful. “It wasn’t a Situation. Just a stringer going about her business maintaining a legend. I don’t know what went wrong.” He shook his head. “A bad business. Very unprofessional.”

“Unprofessional,” Rudi repeated dully, his imagination refusing to construct a scenario where the routine maintenance of a false identity could result in multiple deaths. “Jesus Christ, Bradley.”

Bradley shrugged. “German counterintelligence take this kind of thing personally, of course. They’ve never been comfortable about us operating on their territory. It seems that Leo was a message.”

“They could have
emailed
us.”

Bradley chuckled sadly. “Well, I presume they decided an email wouldn’t have quite enough emotional weight.”

Rudi came back from the window, topped up his drink, and sat in the other armchair. “Is Central going to do anything about it?”

Bradley thought about it. “It’s possible that negotiations will be attempted. I can’t really say. It may be possible to come to some kind of accommodation.”

“Did you just say
negotiations
?”

“What you must understand is that Central won’t fight these people,” Bradley said. “It’s not what we’re about. Wiser heads than ours have decided to open a line of dialogue with them.”

Rudi closed his eyes.

“The alternative is that we kill one of their officers in retaliation for Leo. And they kill another Coureur. And so on and so on.”

“Good lord,” Rudi muttered.

“Take a holiday,” Bradley went on. “You’ve more than earned some time off; the jump you did in Potsdam was an absolute classic and you’ll be more than handsomely rewarded for it.”

“I had two Situations go bad on me in the space of two days, Bradley,” Rudi reminded him.

Bradley shook his head. “There was nothing you could have done in Potsdam. Your Package wanted to make their own way over the Wire; short of invading New Potsdam you couldn’t have helped.”

Rudi rubbed his eyes.

“You did the important thing,” Bradley said. “If you weren’t as good as you are, the briefcase would be in the hands of New Potsdam’s security forces or Old Potsdam’s City Council right now, instead of at its destination. You were absolutely professional in Potsdam and I, for one, am proud of you.”

Fuck you
, Rudi thought.

“And the Situation in Berlin was just taken entirely out of your hands by events.”

Rudi shook his head.

“Go away for a while,” Bradley told him. “Relax.”

“Just leave some contact numbers, right?”

Bradley positively beamed. “Absolutely.”

“Is this a roundabout way of saying that the Germans are looking for me as well?”

Bradley performed a very Gallic shrug. “Better safe than sorry, old son.”

“And Leo?”

The smile dimmed until it was hardly perceptible. He sighed. “That was entirely out of your control. Not your fault. Don’t think about Leo. Leo, to my eternal shame, is on my conscience.”

1.

O
NCE UPON A
time, the one thing he had wanted most in all the world was to be a chef.

He could even remember the day this obsession took root. It was the day of his eighth birthday, the day his father finally relented and installed a satellite dish. Which would make it two years to the day since his mother left them, appalled by his father’s decision to uproot the family yet again by taking a job as a ranger in the Lahemaa
rahvuspark
.

Rudi’s father had trained as an architect, but as far as Rudi knew he had never worked as an architect. Instead, he had embarked on a series of jobs for which he was both temperamentally and educationally unsuited. He worked on the docks in Tallinn. He worked as a guard on the railways. He retrained to be an air traffic controller. He lived in squats and anarchist colonies. He was even, family tradition had it, a politician for a short while; it would have been simple enough for Rudi to check this, but he had never bothered. True or not, what difference did it make?

In the family chronology, it was while he worked as a bus driver in Tallinn that Rudi’s father had met Rudi’s mother. Sometimes, when he was drunk, the old man would tell his two sons about the beautiful young woman he saw waiting every morning at the Pronski stop on Narvu maantee, just going home after her shift at the Hotell Viru, how she would fall asleep in her seat, threadbare coat covering her maid’s uniform. When he was very drunk, which was increasingly often when Rudi and his brother were growing up, he would wax lyrical about her hair, which was long and fine and the colour of polished mahogany, about her skin, which was the colour of milk and without any blemish, about her eyes, which had just the merest tilt at the edges to betray the Lapp heritage which lay far far back in her genes. Neither Rudi nor his brother could remember this extraordinary beauty, although they had once discovered in the back of their father’s wardrobe a series of photographs of a short, dark-haired, irritated-looking young woman in old-fashioned clothes. Surely, they reasoned, this must be some old girlfriend of their father’s.

There were no photographs of the wedding – at least, none that Rudi ever saw. He had to make do with his father’s stories of the hundreds of guests who came to the ceremony, the big room at the Viru booked for the reception, his mother walking like a queen through the room she would return to after the honeymoon dressed in her cleaning clothes, pushing a floor-waxing machine.

In many ways it was a miracle that his father had got married at all, even more so that he had consented to settle down in Tallinn and stay in his bus-driving job for longer than a year. There was the wedding to pay for – his parents and her parents were dead – and the flat to pay for, and after a year or so there was Rudi’s big brother Ivari, and when Ivari was a year old his father’s patience snapped and he moved the family to Tartu, where he had found a job as a train driver.

Tartu was also where Rudi’s father’s long, uncomplicated love affair with the Baltic languages began, at the University’s Song Festival. He said that he had listened to the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian singers at the Festival with tears running down his cheeks. Ivari, who could remember attending that particular festival even though he had only been four years old, contended that the old man had been roaring drunk the whole time.

Whatever. By the time Rudi was born, the family was living in a three-room flat in Pärnu, where the old man worked on building sites to fund his growing collection of language books. At some point during this period, Rudi came along – entirely unplanned, Ivari liked to taunt him – and the old man found himself once again nailed to the spot by a family he couldn’t afford to uproot.

When he thought about it, which wasn’t so often these days, Rudi wondered why his mother hadn’t done something. He vaguely remembered a stoic woman, patiently enduring each family upheaval, each arbitrary change of job. Surely she could have done something, he thought. He was sorry he couldn’t remember her very well; he thought she must have been a remarkable woman, to stand it for so long.

They stayed crammed in the flat in Pärnu for six and a half years, which was the longest his father had stayed in one place since he graduated, and then one fateful evening his father came home from his shift on the building site, ate his dinner, sat down in front of the television, opened the paper, and saw an advertisement for park rangers. And, Rudi presumed, the temptation had just been too much for him.

I
T WAS EASIER,
these days, to get out to the National Park than it had been when Rudi was growing up. In those days the country was still a little punch-drunk from its years as a Soviet satellite and money was tight and you had to drive or take a number of buses from Tallinn, or get the train to Rakvere or Tapa and then get a bus.

Nowadays there was a dedicated tram-line all the way from Tallinn to the visitor centre at Palmse. It was a two-hour journey, but at this time of the year the tram was almost empty apart from some locals on their way back from shopping trips and a couple of New Zealanders huddled together down at the front, identical in their cold-weather gear and hiking packs. Rudi sat at the back with an overnight bag stuffed under his seat, periodically wiping condensation from the window in order to look at the snowy landscape passing by outside.

He couldn’t remember how long it was since he last saw this countryside. Four years. Five, maybe. He’d simply lost track. What had happened to him since then? He’d seen a lot of the Continent, moved a fair number of Packages, made a reasonably good living for himself. Cooked a lot of services at Restauracja Max. Found a severed head in a Berlin luggage locker.
That
would be a good one to drop into conversations.

He closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat. Maybe he’d been a Coureur for too long; all the Situations were starting to blur together. He couldn’t remember what he had done after leaving here last time. Back to Max’s kitchen, certainly, but then what? Where? Andorra? Padania? Ulster? Maybe he could ask Bradley; Central would have his records somewhere. He could tell them he wanted to write his memoirs.

Christ. He wasn’t thirty yet and he felt ready for retirement.

Wet snow was settling on Palmse as the tram pulled into the terminus. On the pavement, Rudi stood for a few moments. The old manor house, with its salmon-pink walls and red slate roofs, seemed not to have changed at all. It occurred to him that it had been at least four years since he had heard another voice speak a single word of his own language.

He went around to the side entrance of the visitor centre and typed the code into the door. He smiled and shook his head; they hadn’t changed the number in ten years.

The door to Ivari’s office upstairs was wide open. His brother was sitting at his desk, concentrating on a document he was writing on a very large and out-of-date word processor. He was not very tall, but he was very solid, like an oak table. He was wearing his ranger’s blue uniform jumpsuit, its collar open, and he was squinting at the WP’s screen as he typed, two-fingered and painfully slowly, picking each letter deliberately. Rudi cleared his throat and Ivari looked up, and for a few moments neither of them spoke, although Rudi shrugged awkwardly.

“Come on in,” Ivari said, turning back to the keyboard. “I’ve got to finish this.” He waved a hand towards a corner of the room. “Have some coffee.”

Rudi put his bag down by the door and went over to the coffeemaker and poured himself a mug. Ivari began typing again. Rudi wandered around the office. On the walls were framed posters advertising the park, printouts of articles about the park, photographs of Ivari with various celebrities and worthies. The photos were interesting, because in most of them Ivari was striking the same pose. In one photo he was standing beside the President and Prime Minister somewhere out in the wilds of the park, pointing at something off in the distance. In another he was standing very close to Emma Corcoran, the English actress, and pointing at something off in the distance. In a third he was with Witold Grabiański, the Polish fifteen hundred metre Olympic champion, and pointing at something off in the distance.

“What are you pointing at in all these photos?” Rudi asked.

Ivari’s shoulders hunched as he applied himself to the task of typing. “Anything. Nothing. The cameramen just tell me to point into the distance and look
intrepid
.” He snorted. “Intrepid. I ask you.”

“What’s Grabiański like?”

Ivari shrugged. “Seemed all right. I don’t think we said more than five words to each other.”

“What about the President?”

Ivari snorted again and kept typing, one letter at a time, squinting alternately at the screen and the keyboard.

“You’ve had the place painted,” Rudi said, looking around the office.