Europe in Autumn (36 page)

Despite himself, the Kapitan had to smile. “Fucker,” he murmured.

The Coureur stood up and started to fasten the front of his stealth-suit. “What about you?” he asked the Swimmer.

Again, that awful laughing noise. “I don’t have any future left. Word will get around if I turn up in any hospital in Europe and I’ll have an ‘accident.’ Florian’s people have done their best, but I’m on the edge of multiple organ failure. They can’t help me much longer. Go.”

The Coureur looked round the room and said, “Jesus Maria, Fabio.”

“Go,” said the synthesised voice. “Just go.”

The Coureur seemed to come to a decision. He grabbed the Kapitan and urged him over to the door. “You. I want this key he was talking about, and I want to know where these proofs are.”

“In my office.”

“Right. Let’s get them and get out of here.”

T
HEY STOPPED FOR
a few moments in the Kapitan’s office, where he unlocked his safe and took out an envelope and handed it to the Coureur. The Coureur stowed it in a pocket of his suit and then they were out again, running down corridors full of people panicking at the Revisionist attack. The Kapitan shouted some orders, tried to calm things down as he passed, but it did no good. “He has a
tank!
” someone shouted as they went by.

Instead of going down, they went up. Up endless flights of stairs, ascending into quieter and quieter parts of the building. At one point there was an almighty
bang
and the whole building seemed to shake dust off itself and the Kapitan found himself on his hands and knees, the Coureur dragging him back to his feet and urging him on through the stinking dusty corridors.

And then they were at the top of one final flight of stairs and the Coureur was throwing open a door onto a patch of late afternoon sky and they were on the colossal flat roof of the building.

“Seth!” the Coureur shouted over the sound of small-arms fire from far below on the Parade Ground, and a patch of air alongside a pile of boxes and metal bottles shimmered and became another stealth-suited figure.

They ran over to the figure, who pulled back its hood to reveal the anxious face of a young black man. “These people are not normal,” he said.

“Football fans,” said the Coureur. “Don’t know why they couldn’t just have got themselves lives.” He grabbed the Kapitan and planted him front and centre. “Get this piece of shit out of here.”

The second Coureur began buckling nylon straps all over the Kapitan. Then he snapped a harness to the straps. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

“I’ll meet you as arranged,” said the first Coureur. “I have to collect something first.”

“Right.” The second Coureur opened one of the boxes on the roof at his feet and snapped several lengths of line to his stealth suit. Then he stepped right up to the Kapitan and fastened their harnesses together so that they were face to face just inches apart. He grinned. “I understand you’re a right-wing racist bastard.”

The building shook again, and a wall of smoke billowed up from the side closest to the Parade Ground. “You two will have plenty of time to get to know each other,” said the first Coureur. “But we ought to get out of here.”

“Okey dokey,” said the second Coureur, and he pulled a cord and three of the boxes exploded as the balloons inside them suddenly inflated. He looked into the Kapitan’s eyes and beamed. “Run, you fucker,” he said quietly. And together, awkwardly, the big balloons above them tugging them up on their toes, they ran sideways towards the far edge of the roof as the first Coureur was still strapping himself into a harness.

At the very last moment a gust caught the balloons and swept them up into the sky, and for a few seconds, before their combined weight took over and began to drag the balloons in a slow arc that would eventually deposit them on the other side of the Landwehrkanal and safety, the Kapitan could see into the Parade Ground. Hundreds of people were fighting there. Hundreds more were lying on the ground, very still. And yes, Xavier did have a tank. Clever boy.

I
T WAS THE
same locker.

Rudi paused and looked at the number printed on the key given to him by Fabio’s nephew. Thirty-eight. He tried to remember the number of the locker he had looked into the last time he was at Zoo Station, and found that he could not. But it was the same one. He knew it was. There were no coincidences any longer; he was in the hands of what was, basically, a malicious God.

You cheeky bastard, Fabio...

He was also attracting attention, standing here like an idiot. He put the card into its slot and opened the door.

He half-expected to see Leo’s head, mummified and shrunken but still with that surprised expression on its face, but instead there was only Fabio’s burnbox, a calfskin-covered attaché case which would incinerate its contents at the first sign of unauthorised tampering. He grabbed the handle, pulled it out of the locker, swung the door closed, and limped out across the concourse.

At every step he expected to be shot, or stabbed, or mugged, or arrested. None of those things happened.

He left the station, went down the steps to the U-Bahn, got on a train to the Hauptbahnhof, and there boarded a train for Hannover.

Twenty hours later, he was sitting in an hotel on the Channel coast, a few miles from Dieppe. He was a thousand years older. Looking at himself in the flyblown mirror in his room, he thought it was a miracle that his hair hadn’t turned white.

1.

T
HIS YEAR WHEN
the season ended, Lev decided to kill himself.

He stood on the jetty and watched the last of the tourists being ferried back to their floating country and he put his hand in his pocket and felt the few drachmas and euros and dollars there and knew he couldn’t survive the winter. All of a sudden his legs felt watery. He sat down on a bollard and looked out over the bay and some of the younger fishermen laughed at him. The older ones, though, the ones who knew how quickly and completely a man’s life can fall apart, kept a grim and respectful silence.

The great white ship in the bay was simply called
Nation
. It was a country for tourists, a country
of
tourists, making a year-long tour of the Mediterranean and Aegean before wintering in dry-dock in Kiel. It was a nation of the aged and the wealthy from all over the world.

This year, the great vessel brought him Myrna, on a cruise to console herself over the death of her fifth husband. “Did it when Danny died as well,” she told him. “And George. And Charlie.” And she smiled, and Lev felt himself shrink inside. When she smiled, she reminded him of owls. Not the wise owls of legend, but the mouse-destroying birds of prey.

Myrna. Ripped and exercised to the point of mutation, barely an ounce of fat on her, like a woman made entirely of twigs and the tufts of hair left by sheep on barbed wire fences. No way to tell how old she was, but old. She had wined him and dined him and consented to let him pleasure her, but she had been unwilling to bestow any more lasting gifts upon him. Gifts, for instance, which he could sell to pay his rent.

Gods but it was hot, even though winter was howling its way along the Med. This place was no good for Russians. Too hot. Too alien. The food tasted wrong and the alcohol was terrible, although one was able to overlook that if one drank enough of it.

He had come here four years ago, island hopping until his funds ran out and he could no longer afford a ferry fare. In Greek, the island’s name meant something like ‘The Place Where We Forgot Where We Were,’ which seemed appropriate. Lev’s arrival had coincided with
Nation
dropping anchor in the bay and disgorging its population, including Penny. Penny from Pittsburgh, who had taken a shine to Lev to the extent that when she left he was able to sell all the things she had given him and rent a single filthy room over a
taverna
in the Old Town and survive, somehow, until the next boatload of tourists came in.

Nation
’s next visit had brought Alice. Then Corinne. Between times, Lev scratched a living teaching English and Russian and proofreading guidebooks, although the material return for that was tiny. He began to regard
Nation
with the fervour of an eighteenth century cargo cultist.

But he supposed he had known, in his heart of hearts, that one day it would all have to end. Either the people who owned and ran
Nation
would suddenly decide to send her on a round the world cruise instead, or the ship would hit an iceberg and sink, or he would simply latch on to a woman who would take more than she gave. And so it had happened. Myrna, on her way to pastures new, glowing with memories of her Russian lover, while her Russian lover starved and was thrown out of his room and eventually just walked down to the harbour, picked up some very heavy object, and jumped into the water with it.

And why not, if he was going to be honest with himself, do it now? Why go through the inevitable pleading and begging and promising with Mr Eugenides the
taverna
owner when the result was in no doubt? He looked around the bustling quayside and spotted a small anchor lying on the stones. He wondered if he could hang on to it long enough to do the job. He wondered whether anyone would bother trying to save him.

He was actually in the process of standing to walk over to the anchor when a shadow fell across him.

“Professor Laptev?” asked a voice in Russian. “Professor Lev Semyonovitch Laptev?”

The speaker was a young man wearing jeans and a light cotton shirt, a hemp shoulder bag in one hand. He was leaning on a black cane, one of those things made of innumerable carbon leaves, thin as a little finger but capable of denting the roof of a car. He looked harmless, but Lev’s heart froze like a Siberian pond in winter.

“Who are you?”

The young man smiled. “My name’s Smith. I’m someone who would like to take you for a drink, perhaps even some
meze
.” His Russian was flawless, but Lev could detect a Baltic accent behind it.
Smith indeed
.

“Oh?” said Lev.

The Balt spread his hands. “No strings attached. I’d just like to ask your advice. I’m prepared to pay a consulting fee, if that would suit you.”

Fear and desperation fought it out in Lev’s heart. Desperation forged an alliance with hunger and won a bare victory. “Very well,” he said.

T
HEY WENT TO
one of the smarter
tavernas
over on the new side of the harbour, and Lev immediately felt dirty and dishevelled and out of place. The Balt insisted on ordering a little bit of everything, and when a huge platter was deposited in the middle of their table he smiled broadly and insisted that Lev tuck in, but Lev held back even though he was ravenous.

Had they finally caught up with him? Lev knew they used people like this,
spetz
operatives, young men with hard eyes and an outer layer of normality carefully shaped over a crystal core of ideology. But this one was different. He looked tired. No, actually, now Lev thought about it, that wasn’t quite right. He looked into the Balt’s eyes and saw a different
kind
of tired. It was not, he realised, the tired of someone who has stayed awake for a few days, travelled a few hundred kilometres, dealt with a few mildly complicated situations. It was the tired of someone who has gone right over the ragged edge of total exhaustion – physical, mental and emotional – and then somehow has found the space to begin to recover. Not completely yet, but enough to be functional for the moment, enough to do what needs to be done. Lev recognised that look. He had seen it, not all that long ago, in his own shaving mirror. And that was the only thing that made him relax, made him believe he could survive this. If Centre
were
to send an assassin to tidy up the tiny loose end represented by Lev Semyonovitch Laptev, they would not send someone who looked as though their entire world had been carved away. This boy was not an assassin; he was something else; something much rarer, much scarier.

“Eat,” the boy said. “It looks good.”

Lev looked at the platter. There was almost nothing on it that he would have chosen to eat unless he was, as he was now, utterly starving. “No it doesn’t.”

The boy sighed. “No, it doesn’t, does it. Tourist food. I could do better than this.” He poured them both drinks and put the bottle back on the table and sat back and regarded Lev. “I need a pianist.”

Lev shook his head and drained his glass. “I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong person. You see, I’m tone-deaf.”

The Balt smiled. “Not that kind of pianist, Professor Laptev. A
pianist
.”

Oh, a
pianist
... “We used to call them telegraphers.” Lev shrugged. “Unimaginative, I know...”

The Balt refilled Lev’s glass. “A telegrapher, then. A telegrapher who is an expert in codes.”

Lev grunted. “There are no more experts in codes, Mister Smith. Why do you think I’m sitting here on this filthy island instead of shining like a star in Moscow? Today there is only Kolossal, and Kolossal is unbreakable.”