Europe in Autumn (5 page)

“I had to get an agency chef in last night,” Max told him.

Which, in Rudi and Max’s world, was about the worst thing that could happen to a restaurant. Rudi thought of the smoothing of feathers he was going to have to do with his crew, and said, “Who was it?”

“Paweł Grabiański.”

Which was not the disaster it might have been, although Rudi’s crew should really have been able to cope without him and Mirek. He’d thought he had them organised better than that. There should have been a shuffling of the pecking order.
Someone
should have taken charge. He realised he was going to have to yell at them, something he had once sworn he would never do in his kitchen.

“Paweł’s a pretty good chef,” he said lamely.

“He just looks so
sad
all the time,” Max told him. “Like he’s going to burst into tears.”

“I’ve had days like that myself,” Rudi said, taking the clipboard from Max’s unresisting fingers. Max had only checked a couple of items from the stack of recycled plastic crates sitting in the middle of the kitchen.

“You look tired.”

“I’ll get everything cleared away and I’ll have a nap for a couple of hours, all right?”

“You should go home and sleep properly,” Max told him. “I’ll call the agency for today’s lunch service.”

“They might send Paweł again.”

Max’s face showed an agony of indecision.

“I’ll be all right,” Rudi said. He tucked the clipboard under his armpit and went across to get himself a cup of coffee from the espresso machine he’d bullied Max into installing in the kitchen.

Max was obviously struggling not to ask about what had happened in Hindenberg. Rudi said, “I saw him.”

“And how did he look?”

“It was dark; his face was in shadow.” Rudi wondered how long they were going to continue the charade about Max’s ‘cousin.’ He said, “I have to talk to Dariusz.”

“And so you shall,” Dariusz said, stepping out from the corridor that led into the courtyard behind Restauracja Max. “And the magic number is?”

“Fifty-seven,” said Rudi.

“You’re sure?” said Dariusz.

“Fifty-seven,” Rudi repeated.

“You’ve done very well,” said Dariusz, and he turned and went back down the corridor. Rudi heard the courtyard door open and close. He and Max looked at each other.

“Did he seem well?” Max asked.

Rudi poured himself a cup of coffee. “I told you; it was dark.” This was obviously not sufficient for Max, so he said, “He certainly
sounded
well.”

Max nodded. “Good,” he said, a little awkwardly, Rudi thought. He turned away and walked towards the swing-door of the dining room. “Good.”

A
ND THAT SEEMED
to be the end of Rudi’s little adventure. Max didn’t mention it again, and Dariusz didn’t come back to the restaurant. It was as if nothing had happened, as if he had never taken the train to Hindenberg. He cooked, he watched sous-chefs arrive in the kitchen and then depart some days later shouting about minimum wages and unsociable hours. Max shook his head sadly, and they went on with their lives.

The chilly Polish spring gradually became the lush, oppressive Polish summer. The air conditioning in the kitchen broke down and the kitchen staff began to wilt, and in some cases to faint. Kraków began to bake in the heat. The city swelled with tourists.

One busy evening in July, one of the customers asked if he could give his personal compliments to the chef, and Rudi went out into the restaurant to receive them.

The customer was a tall wafer-thin man with gelled-back hair and a bushy walrus-style moustache of the kind you didn’t see very often in Central Europe these days. He was wearing an expensive German business suit, and his wife was wearing a startling off-the-shoulder backless – and very nearly frontless – purple evening dress.

Rudi sat and allowed the husband to pour him a drink and congratulate him. The wife smiled and complimented him on the meal and leaned forward to pat him on the knee and ask for his recipe for bigos, and he found that he could see down the front of her dress all the way to her pubic hair.

He looked away and saw Max and another man standing almost toe to toe in one of the darkest corners of the restaurant. They seemed to be having a very quiet, very intense conversation. He thought there was something familiar about the other man’s build and body language. Then he realised that it was familiar because all he had
ever
seen of him was his build and body language.

And then Max and the other man embraced each other. Just like long-lost cousins, in fact.

S
OME WEEKS AFTER
that – and Rudi thought later that they had actually given him time to think about it – Dariusz came into the restaurant and asked to see him.

“I thought you ought to know that Max’s cousin is very grateful to you,” said the little mafioso.

“Max mentioned it,” said Rudi.

Dariusz sat back and lit a cigarette and looked around the restaurant. “How would you like,” he said, “to do that kind of thing for a living?”

“I’m a chef,” Rudi replied. “For a living.”

Dariusz inhaled on his cigarette, held the smoke in his lungs for longer than Rudi would have thought was medically advisable or physically possible, then exhaled a tenuous aromatic haze.

“How would you like to do that kind of thing as a hobby?” he asked.

“All right,” said Rudi. “So long as it’s a well-
paid
sort of hobby.”

1.

F
ABIO WAS FIFTEEN
hours late coming in from London.

“Fucking English,” he said when Rudi finally met him at Jan Paweł II/Balice. “They spend about a thousand years trying to decide whether or not to join the Union, and when they do they become absolute fanatics. I mean, it’s
totally
offensive. Here, carry this.”

Rudi took Fabio’s carry-on bag, which was considerably heavier than it looked, and followed the little Swiss-Italian across the arrivals lounge.

It transpired, between the arrivals gate and the taxi rank outside, that the English were having one of their periodic paranoid episodes – drugs, terrorism, immunisation, whatever – and Fabio had been held up while they confiscated and checked his passport and travel documents.

“I mean, not allowing one
in
, I can understand that,” he fumed. “But not allowing one
out
. What sort of mind thinks like that?” He looked at the motley line of cars pulled up outside the terminal and shook his head. “No, I’m not getting into any of these taxis. I was completely ripped off the last time I got a taxi from this airport. I should have flown in to Katowice, I never had any problems with the taxi drivers at Katowice. We’ll take the bus into town. Follow me.”

Rudi followed.

“And they put me in that
disgusting
hotel at Heathrow while I waited,” Fabio told him.

E
VERY STUDENT NEEDS
a teacher, Dariusz had told him, and Fabio was to be his. He was short and chubby and well-dressed enough to be mugged within minutes of setting foot on any street in Western Europe. His suit was from the cutting edge of the Armani Revival and his shoes had been sewn by wizened artisans in Cordova. His luggage cost more than a flat in central Kraków. He was, Rudi thought, one of the least covert people he had ever seen. He thought it was a miracle the English authorities hadn’t arrested Fabio and then just looked for a crime to charge him with, because he was almost a caricature of a Central European
biznisman
.

Fabio had a dim view of Kraków’s hotels. The Cracovia wasn’t good enough for him. He refused to even cross the threshold of the Europa. He claimed the head chef of the Bristol was a convicted poisoner. He wound up staying at Rudi’s flat.

“Forget all that fucking idealism about Schengen,” he told Rudi on his first evening, after hoovering down the meal Rudi had cooked for him. “People in this business care about two things only. Money and prestige. You get money by doing your job, and you get prestige by taking insane risks.” He drank his wine in one swallow and winced. “This is horrible.”

“It’s a Mouton Rothschild ’41,” Rudi said.

“’41,” said Fabio, narrowing his eyes at his glass as if it had done him a personal wrong. “What a disgusting year.”

“It’s a vintage year.”

“Not for me it wasn’t. Don’t you have anything else to drink? And that steak was overdone, by the way.”

T
HEY CALLED THEMSELVES
Les Coureurs des Bois
, and they delivered mail.

Even before Europe had blossomed with new countries, there had been a healthy courier business, some of it legal, rather more of it not. Some things were just too sensitive or important or flat-out illegal to trust to the public mail or electronic transfer. In those days, a canny courier could wangle themselves a cheap flight anywhere on Earth if they chose their assignment well.

These days, things were more complicated. Border disputes often meant that delivering mail from polity A to nation B was impossible. So people contacted
Les Coureurs
, and the mail got through. Sometimes the mail consisted of people for whom the passage from polity A to nation B might otherwise be impossibly delicate. Sometimes it was items which nation B might be narrowminded enough to consider illegal.

They were, in other words, smugglers, although when Rudi voiced this opinion Fabio pointed out that, as with so many things, the term depended very much on your point of view.

Nobody knew who they were. Conventional wisdom had it that they were a phenomenon of the times, a gradual accretion of little courier firms into an entity which had things in common with the CIA and the Post Office. You got in touch with them the way you made that awkward first contact with a drug dealer, by knowing someone who knew someone who knew someone.

Rudi thought the popular media had inflated them out of all proportion. They were just couriers, and people had been couriering stuff around Europe since at least the Middle Ages, and smuggling things for considerably longer. They were also, if Fabio was representative, appalling houseguests. Among numerous other little personality quirks, Fabio had a thing about rearranging furniture. Every evening when Rudi got back to the flat he would find the furniture in some new configuration, and Fabio standing in the middle of the living room looking at it. He’d thought at first that the plump little Coureur was practising some bizarre Swiss form of feng shui, but after a week or so he had to wonder if Fabio wasn’t just the tiniest little bit deranged.

They went over and over his trip to Hindenberg, in obsessive detail. What he remembered, who he had spoken to, where he had been, what he had observed about the people he interacted with, from the border officials to the taxi driver in Breslau to the waiter who had served his breakfast at the Pension Adler the next morning.

“You kept it simple, which is good,” Fabio told him. “Simple is often best, but not always. Sometimes it’s necessary to make things as complicated as possible. And sometimes you just have to wing it.” He took a sip from his cup and pouted. “What do you call this?”

Rudi looked at the cup. “‘Coffee,’” he said.

Fabio returned his cup to its saucer. “Not where I come from, it’s not.”

“You’ve been drinking it all week.”

Fabio shook his head. “I can’t stand this ‘continental roast.’ What’s that supposed to mean? ‘Continental roast.’”

Rudi stood up. “I need some fresh air.”

“H
E’S VERY GOOD
,” mused Dariusz.

“He’s driving me out of my mind,” said Rudi.

Dariusz lit a cigarette. “What, precisely, bothers you about him?”

“How long do you have?”

Dariusz chuckled.

Rudi sighed. They were in Pani Halina’s on Senatorska. Because Rudi knew Halina’s chef, and because Dariusz was who he was, they had been given one of the restaurant’s private tables, away from the lunchtime crowd of students and tourists and out of work actors.

“Nothing I cook for him is any good,” he said.

Dariusz snorted goodnaturedly. “I think you’ll find that people do have their own tastes in food, Rudi.”

“Where I come from, it’s good manners not to criticise your host’s cooking.”

“Perhaps it’s different in Switzerland.” The little mafioso shrugged. “I don’t know, I’ve never been there. Next?”

“He rearranges my furniture.”

Dariusz looked at him and narrowed his eyes. Then he shrugged again. “Fabio is accustomed to a life of action, not a life cooped up in your flat. He sounds restless.”

“‘Restless’?”

“Look.” Dariusz waved Rudi’s misgivings away. “He’s here to teach you. He’s to be the... the Merlin to your Arthur. The Obi-Wan to your Anakin. We have to be indulgent of geniuses.”

“Must we let them move our furniture about?”

“If moving furniture about is what makes them happy.”

“Dariusz, there’s something
wrong
with him.”

Dariusz shook his head. “Indulge him, Rudi. Listen and learn.”