Europe at Midnight (33 page)

“I’ve had my moments,” mused the Deputy Director-General. “But please,” he added to Jim, “come in and sit down. You’re not in any trouble.”

“Or rather, you’re in all the trouble in the world and it doesn’t matter anymore, so we may as well sit and speak as friends, eh?”

Jim closed the door behind him and sat down at the table with them. He put his briefing materials down in front of him and looked at his superiors.

“Would you like some tea?” asked the D-G. “We’re going to have tea.”

“Yes, please,” said Jim.

Tea was duly brought in, and a plate of biscuits. The D-G and Deputy D-G drank theirs black, with lemon. There was a brief period of that very English kind of smalltalk where nobody actually says anything at all, just mumbles and uses body language, then the D-G put down her cup and smiled at him.

“Well, Jim,” she said. “Firstly, we’d like to thank you for your efforts on behalf of the Service.”

The D-G was in her early fifties, a legend in the Service. There were tales of her exploits in Crimea, Moldova, Cornwall; all probably apocryphal, but still. She was attractive in a businesslike way, kind-looking but no-nonsense. She looked good in front of Parliamentary Committees and giving lectures on television. Jim had never met her, but he had seen her in the media many times, and this was the first time he had noticed that both she and the Deputy D-G had faint almost-West Country accents very much like Rupert’s.

“Perhaps,” she said, “you could begin by telling us what you know about Professor Mundt.” And Jim’s heart broke.

1

T
HE BELLS IN
the Town Hall were ringing nine o’clock as I arrived to open up. It was a lovely morning; swifts were darting across the Market Square, building their nests in the eaves of the old stuccoed buildings. I had sat outside Henderson’s with a cup of tea and a scone, watching the world go by, for an hour or so before moving on to work. I was pleased to see the swifts back.

The bell over the door tinkled as I stepped inside, and again I was struck by that wonderful smell of old books and worn lino and furniture polish and weathered leather upholstery. It was a joy to enter the shop. I opened the blinds and let what little light made it down into the alleyway into the shop, then I went and put the kettle on.

Christine arrived while I was making a pot of tea. She’d bought a bag of cheese savouries from a delicatessen on Charter Street, and we sat at the cash desk having early elevenses, as we always did. Christine was the owner of the shop, a tall, straight-backed woman in her sixties whose carriage and manner of speaking always suggested to me that she had been in the military at some point in her life, although I had never asked her. Christine and I were not friends, but we got along all right.

The postman arrived a little after half past ten, wheeling his little trolley up the alley, the chimes on its wheel hubs jingling on the uneven paving stones. He looked somewhat military himself, in his grey uniform and peaked cap. In his trolley, he had two boxes of books for us, and when he had gone we opened them and stacked the contents on the desk.

Customers started to drift in around eleven. We didn’t get any passing trade at all, because of where the shop was. All our customers were regulars; collectors, people looking for a specific volume, old folk wanting to just sit on our cracked and comfortable sofas and while away a few hours in a favourite book. Christine always dealt with the customers in the morning, while I catalogued and shelved whatever new stock arrived that day.

Today was a box of science books and a box of romances, none of them less than a century old. The romances were turgid potboilers with titles like
A Storm Of The Heart
and
Moorland Summer
. The science books were full of arcane equations and diagrams. I entered the titles and authors in the big ledger from the back office, then spent a couple of hours wandering contentedly along the shelves finding places for them. Rowland would have loved it here.

I always went for lunch first, unless Christine was meeting her sister for coffee. There was a little art gallery in the opposite corner of the Market Square with a café which offered a solid menu of pies and puddings and vegetables. For the first time in years, I was starting to look a little plump.

Afterwards, I usually had a wander around the centre of town, unless it was raining. The fashions in the shops were still tantalisingly familiar but strangely exotic. People in the Campus had dressed like this, in sensible, sober clothes. There was no denim anywhere in the Community, no crop tops. For all its noise and pollution and continually-fracturing nations, Europe looked like a place from a science fiction novel in comparison.

Sometimes, if I had time to spare, I took a tram out to Camberton, which had a nice little restaurant and a pleasant park I liked to stroll in. Camberton was a genteel place and the park was usually full of nannies in stiff black and white uniforms pushing their little charges in prams or shepherding toddlers along. It was also next to the Parliament of the Presiding Authority, a big seven-storey building with lots of windows and a hideous decorative fountain at the front. The Directorate’s offices were in one wing of the Parliament, and sometimes Michael came out to join me on my walk around the park, and we chatted about this and that and I told him who had been in the shop recently and he complained about departmental infighting and backstabbing.

The street we were on was really a narrow alley, just wide enough for two people to walk side by side without bumping into each other. It struck off from a corner of the Market Square, a double row of little clothes shops and ironmongers’, and just before it reached a dead end there was us. The shop didn’t even have a name. It was known locally as ‘Christine’s Bookshop,’ or just ‘The Bookshop’.

Christine liked to nap in the afternoons, so I took care of the customers for a couple of hours. Then she put on her hat and coat, bade me a good evening, and went home. Half an hour later, if there were no more customers, I closed the blinds, locked up the shop, and went home myself.

It was a nice routine. Calming and unhurried. I had been doing it for almost a year now, waiting for my moment of betrayal.

H
OME WAS IN
Oakford, one of the most poorly-named places I had ever encountered. There were no oaks in Oakford, just some stunted plane trees and silver birches along the High Street. It was run down and dirty and on Saturday nights it was full of drunks. My flat was on the ground floor of a shabby building off the High Street. It smelled of smoke because at some point in the past couple of years the flat above had been set alight by its occupants, but it was all right really. It was warm and cosy in the Winter. I didn’t dare open the windows in Summer because that would have been an invitation for someone to burgle me, but I’d got used to it.

The flat had a little kitchen with a gas stove and a fridge, but I had never learned to cook. I usually bought something from the chip shop down the street, or the pie and mash shop on the High Street. I really missed pizza.

Everyone in the Community was English. From one end of the Continent to the other. There were only English things here. There were no other languages, only regional dialects. No other cuisines but English. No other clothing styles but English. No other architectural styles but English. It was awful. After a year here I would gladly have lynched someone for a kebab. After two years, I would have committed mass murder for a portion of sweet and sour pork. The months living with Alison in Kentish Town had provided me with an indelible education in fast food, and I was now an addict. English cooking was stodgy and unimaginative and under-spiced. I had not found a single dish which employed garlic.

For entertainment in the evenings, there was the cinema or the theatre. Alison had also provided a crash-course in both, and the Community’s versions were worthy and insipid, a bit like the food. Drawing-room farces and historical dramas in the theatres, musicals and comedies and crime thrillers in the cinemas. In two hundred years, the Community had not provided a single playwright of any great note or a film which would have troubled an Oscar voter for more than a minute.

God was here, too. But it was not the many-faced God I had encountered in Europe. It was the English God, the God of cricket and landowners and drumhead services, stern and severe and patrician. Why the Whitton-Whytes had made the Campus godless, I had no idea, unless it had been to remove certain intellectual barriers to scientific thought. Maybe they just did it because they
could
.

The Community was dull. It was nice and it was quiet, if you lived in the right places, and there was full employment and nobody was starving and everybody was happy. It was no wonder people wanted to leave.

2

T
HE FIRST THING
Charles did when I got back to London was listen very carefully to my story. The second thing he did was have the Farmboy beat me up. The Farmboy wasn’t nearly as elegant as Eleanor had been, but he made up for that with sheer brute force, and when he was finished I had two broken ribs and needed another trip to the group’s pet dentist.

“You’re a disappointment, Tommy,” Charles told me.

“It was a catastrophe, right from the start,” I lisped. “There was a Russian. He shot Eleanor and then he shot Mundt.”

Charles looked at his notes. “Koniev,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Koniev, Alexei Mikhailovitch,” he read from another sheet of paper. “Freelance security consultant.”

“He didn’t say what he was. He just came down into the sewer with us.”

“What did he look like?”

I described Koniev again, remembered that last great bubble breaking on the surface of the sewage under Dresden-Neustadt, remembered the look on Eleanor’s face as she drowned him.

Charles sighed and shook his head. “I have to admit, I find it very hard to believe you managed to escape from Dresden.”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Very true. But it’s the
how
that bothers me, Tommy. The place is supposed to be impregnable.”

“The Coureur had a backup plan. In case everything went wrong.”

“Hm.” Charles leafed through his notes, held up a page, and read. He shook his head again. “Doesn’t work for me, I’m afraid.”

The best Leo had been able to come up with was a wild story about escaping unseen from the sewers somehow, then hiding out in the great underpopulated polity until we were able to find a rope and climb down the outside wall at dead of night, evading guards and motion sensors and listening devices and the railguns. I thought it was impossibly absurd. “The one advantage you have is that nobody will be able to prove it’s a lie,” he had told me when we parted at the ferry terminal in Holland.

“And the one disadvantage I have is that I won’t be able to prove it’s true.”

“You have the thing,” he reminded me. “They will want that; it should keep you alive long enough to convince them.”

“There was a lot of confusion,” I told Charles. “Eleanor wanted something from Mundt, the Coureur was shouting because we had intercepted Mundt’s letter to them and
he
wanted something from Mundt, Koniev was shouting because no one was taking him seriously and we were all standing up to our hips in shit and then Koniev started shooting.”

“Who killed Koniev?”

“I did. I hit him. Then I drowned him.”

“You see,
that
I can believe, Tommy,” Charles told me. “You have the look. Where is it? The something everybody wanted from Mundt?”

“It’s in a safe place.”

“I can make you tell me. Eventually.”

“I don’t doubt. But you can’t be certain you won’t kill me in the process, and then it’ll be gone forever. For the moment, it’s safe.”

“Well, I can’t blame you for wanting some kind of insurance, considering,” he said. “But I don’t believe you ever had it. Or if you did, you don’t know where it is now.”

“Solid state hard drive, two hundred terabyte,” I said, quoting Eleanor. I held up my finger and thumb. “About so big. Black, with a green stripe around one end. Mundt said it was the end of borders.”