“It’s supposed to be more difficult.”
The cobbler shook his head again. He rapped the phone with a knuckle. “With silicon, I can do everything in here. With paper... well, you must find the correct paper, the correct inks, the correct stamps... much more difficult.”
“Right,” said Rudi.
“My pianist took ten minutes to hack the Zone’s immigration computer and update your legend’s records. Where’s the security there?”
“Right,” said Rudi.
“Everyone should produce passports like this,” the cobbler went on. “Any pianist can hack a silicon passport, but it takes an artist to work with paper and ink.”
“Right,” said Rudi.
The cobbler glanced up from the screen. “You probably believe you know everything.”
“That’s the first time anyone’s accused me of
that
,” Rudi told him.
The window of the cobbler’s shop looked out over a landscape of sharply-pitched roofs broken by chimneypots and about a hundred different types of radio, television and satellite antennae. In the far distance, Rudi could see the cranes of the Gdańsk shipyards. The shipyards had gone bust sometime during the early part of the century, and the land was now occupied by trendy apartment blocks and studios for artists and those little design firms no one ever quite understands the purpose of. The cranes had been preserved, as historical monuments, although nobody could agree who was supposed to be maintaining them so they were slowly and quietly rusting away.
The cobbler’s shop itself was clearly one of Central’s myriad temporary spaces, rented by a stringer on a monthly basis for whatever brief occupancy circumstances dictated. A dusty boxroom right at the top of a tall brick-built rooming house, floored with lino that looked as if it dated back to the Second World War. A pile of teachests stacked over in one corner, an ancient wooden rocking-horse under the window. The cobbler’s equipment could be packed into two medium-sized attaché cases and moved from place to place as circumstances demanded. The cobbler himself was as anonymous as the room. Small, slight and middle-aged, with a receding hairline and battered, slightly old-fashioned clothes.
“You speak Estonian?” he asked, reading the laptop’s screen.
“I can get by,” said Rudi.
The cobbler nodded. “Your Polish is very good,” he said, looking at the screen again. “But you’re from up the coast somewhere; I can hear your accent.”
Rudi took a battered bentwood stool from a stack in the corner of the attic, set it right way up, sat down, and folded his hands in his lap.
“I know,” said the cobbler. “None of my business. Everyone in the Zone speaks English, anyway.” He took from his pocket a small parcel wrapped in what appeared to be chamois leather. Unwrapping it, he held up a thin little book with laurel-green covers. Its front cover was gold-stamped with an extremely stylised eagle and some writing.
“Worth more than its weight in gold,” he said. “Literally. Virgin; never used. Bring it back.”
“All right,” said Rudi.
The cobbler opened the passport and laid a thin sheet of transparent film over one of the pages. Then he fed the whole thing into one of the little boxes connected to the phone.
“We don’t get many of these,” he said, and Rudi wondered if he meant virgin passports or something else. He typed a couple of commands into the tapboard and a moment later the box ejected the passport. He stripped the film away and Rudi saw that his photograph and some printing were now embossed on the page.
“Actually,” he said, rooting around in one of his cases, “they’ve been very clever.”
Rudi tried to feign interest. “Oh?”
“Not many people these days have the paraphernalia to do work like this successfully.” He took from the case two stamps and two ink-pads. “I had to mix the inks myself. Specific fluorescences, magnetic particles. Very tricky.”
Rudi looked at his watch.
The cobbler carefully inked the stamps and inserted the residence visa and work permits. Then he took out a gorgeous antique Sheaffer fountain pen and dated and initialled the stamps. Then, with several other lovely pens, he signed several different signatures.
“Then, of course, they have to spoil it all.” He typed another couple of commands and another little box ejected a narrow length of plastic printed with a barcode. The cobbler stripped off the backing and pressed the barcode onto the final page of the passport.
Finally, he opened the passport at a number of different pages and flexed the spine back and forth. Then he closed it and bent it between his hands. Then he leaned down and rubbed both covers and the edges on the dusty floor.
“Congratulations,” he said, holding the passport out to Rudi. “You’re Tonu Laara.”
“Thank you,” Rudi said, taking the passport. “And it’s pronounced
Tonu
.”
The cobbler smiled. “There. I like a man who knows how to pronounce his Christian name.”
2.
T
HE
P
OLES BEGAN
to arrive a couple of days before New Year’s Eve.
First to arrive, on the 29th, were about a dozen in three cars with skis strapped to their roof-racks. They all seemed to know each other, booked into their rooms, and went straight back out onto the slopes.
Early that evening, a coach arrived bearing about thirty more, all of them loaded down with ski equipment. From his hatchway Rudi watched them at the evening meal, deriding the food and calling good-natured insults to each other.
The next day, more cars and another coach. It was a package tour organised by some firm in Upper Silesia, Jan confided.
“They stop off in town and buy up all the alcohol in the supermarket and then come up here and drink like madmen,” he said.
“Why?” asked Rudi.
Jan gave a great expansive shrug as if to demonstrate that the motivations of Poles were as mysterious to him as the workings of the cosmos.
Whatever. Most of the first coachload of Poles left the hotel and strapped on their skis almost as soon as the sun came up over the far peaks the next morning. The rest stayed in their rooms and began to drink their purchases, and when the second load arrived in the early afternoon, already loudly drunk, there were some fights between the two groups.
Rudi was familiar with some of these people. The skiers were just ordinary Poles, here to have a good time on the slopes and spend a nice New Year’s Eve. The drinkers were in their mid-twenties and well-dressed, young Polish entrepreneurs who had made a lot of money very quickly and wanted to take their girlfriends on a cheap, loud, boozy holiday. At dinner that evening there was a lot of shouting and some food was thrown. Later on there were more fights, discharged fire extinguishers, weeping girlfriends running screaming down the corridors with their mascara smeared in long black teary streaks.
In the kitchen, Rudi put basket after basket of dirty crockery onto the conveyor of the ancient Hobart dishwasher, walked round to the other end, and took baskets of clean crockery – heated to just short of the melting point of lead, it felt like – off. After three months handling red-hot plates and cups his fingertips had blistered and peeled and he was almost bereft of fingerprints, which he thought was an interesting effect.
“It was the same last year,” Jan said morosely, perched on one of the stainless steel worktops. “Fights, alcohol poisoning. They even let fireworks off in the hotel. I had to call the police.”
“But imagine the income,” Rudi said, slinging another basket of coffee cups into the Hobart.
Jan shrugged. He was actually the hotel’s manager, and there were always pressing demands on his time, so that he rarely went to bed before three in the morning. But he had begun his career in the hotel trade as a humble kitchen porter – Rudi’s post – and seemed to feel more at ease in the kitchens than anywhere else. He had studied at the London School of Economics and spoke very good English, which was Rudi’s second language. This was fortunate because Rudi’s Czech – based mainly on the language’s similarities to Polish – was on the poor side of rudimentary.
“Income,” said Jan as if the prospect was the most depressing he could imagine. “And for what? We only spend it repairing the damage. I wanted to ban Poles after last year, but the owners said I couldn’t. You speak very good Polish, don’t you?”
“Not me,” Rudi said. “Not a word.”
“I heard you talking to that girl Marta the other day. The one on the evening cleaning shift. It sounded like Polish you were speaking.”
“You heard wrong, Jan.” Operationally, Rudi wasn’t keen to let anyone know where he had come from. On a practical level, he was even less keen to get roped into some situation where he was called on to try and calm down a gang of fantastically-drunk Poles, which was bound to happen if Jan thought he spoke the language with any great facility.
“Ah, maybe so.” Jan heaved a sigh and looked at his watch. There was a faint, muffled thud from far overhead in the hotel, and distant shouting, audible even over the rumble of the Hobart’s conveyor and the hiss of its water-jets. “Christ, they’re still at it.”
“They’re only kids with too much money,” Rudi said, walking around to the end of the dishwasher and lifting the basket off.
“Too much money?” Jan said. “You try getting them to pay for the damage they cause. Then you’ll see how much money they have.” He looked at his watch again. “Time for my rounds,” he said unwillingly. “You’re sure you don’t speak Polish?”
“I would have noticed.” Rudi started to take the crockery out of the tray. He barely felt the residual heat now; the first time he’d done it he’d shrieked and flung a plate across the kitchen.
Jan shook his head. “I can’t understand what brings a man like you to a place like this.”
“Life is full of infinite variety,” Rudi said. It had become his catchphrase since arriving in Pustevny.
Jan smiled. “Okay, Mister Estonian.” He hopped down off the worktop and ran his hands down the legs of his trousers to smooth them. “You carry on throwing pots and pans into the dishwasher. I know you’re running away from something.”
In the beginning, Rudi had been terrified that Jan was onto him, but he had come to realise that Jan was one of the world’s worst students of human nature; the manager simply suspected everybody, on the grounds that he was bound to be right some of the time.
Rudi grinned. “I like it here, Jan. I just like it here.”
And really it was the truth. After months living under the cloud left by Fabio’s catastrophic visit to Poznań, his life had become incredibly simple. Get up, wash dishes, go to bed. Wait for the Package to arrive and make themselves known.
The Beskid Economic Zone was not a polity as such. It was more of an autonomous national park devoted to stripping tourists of their money. It paid rent to the rump of the Czech Government for use of its land, but the rent was a fraction of the megatonnes of francs, schillings, marks, złotys, euros, sterling and dollars that cascaded into the area every year. This part of northeastern Czechoslovakia had always been a popular skiing destination for the population of neighbouring nations. Even when it began issuing visas – for a small gratuity – and imposing entry and exit taxes on top of the prices of ski-passes it remained popular. It was a big mountainous snowy machine for making money, and one of the wealthiest junk nations in Central Europe.
It was perfectly placed. The Polish border was only three-quarters of an hour away by road, Prague wasn’t much further in the opposite direction, Vienna only another couple of hours or so away. The Zone was making money hand over fist, and Rudi thought that coachloads of drunken Poles were a small price to pay.
The last tray-load of cutlery washed for the night, he shut down the machine and started to go through the cleaning procedure. This involved draining the Hobart’s tanks and removing the stainless steel filter-baskets and rinsing the crap out of them. It was routine and boring and somehow comforting.
As the cobbler had told him, getting into the Zone was simplicity itself. He had shown his passport, just another Zone resident coming back after a holiday, and the immigration officer had waved him through without even bothering to scan the barcode and without charging him the entry tax imposed on tourists.
No one was sure how many Coureurs were drifting around what used to be Europe. Could have been a hundred, maybe a thousand, maybe ten times that. The nature of their work made them hard to find; popular legend had it that they would find you, arriving on your doorstep one dark night when you needed them most, with their stealth-suits hidden under long black trenchcoats, fedoras tilted in best
noir
fashion to shadow the eyes. This was ludicrous, of course, as anyone could have told you if they really thought about it: anybody who went about dressed like that would deserve to be arrested.
What really happened was a lot less structured and a lot more secretive. Central liked to keep these things vague; even the Coureurs themselves didn’t usually know who had brought them into a Situation. There were tangles of code words and dead drops and mobile pickups and callbox routines, none of which Rudi had yet encountered.
Fabio’s departure had left him without a teacher, and Dariusz had stepped into the breach, flawlessly delivering tradecraft to him in a succession of restaurants and safe houses. Lists of word-strings to memorise, dead drops planned with the help of town plans and photographs, brush-passes to practise. It was almost like working under Pani Stasia again.
“You’ll probably never need to use any of this,” Dariusz told him one evening in a flat over a bar in Częstochowa. “Most Coureurs do nothing more complicated or illegal than deliver mail.”
“So why do I have to remember all this stuff?” Rudi asked.
“Because one day you may need it.”
“To deliver mail?”
Dariusz shrugged. “Better safe than sorry, wouldn’t you say?”
“By the way,” Rudi asked casually, leafing through a sheaf of Zakopane street maps, “what has happened to Fabio?”
“Fabio has retired,” Dariusz said, and lit another cigarette.
“You said he was good.”