“He was tired.” Dariusz looked at him. “Fabio’s task was to teach you the basics of the trade, but instead he chose to operate to an agenda of his own, and he was not afraid to leave you behind to face the music. Don’t forget that. He had begun to wonder why he was a Coureur. Some do it for the money, some do it because it offers their lives a little harmless adventure. Fabio didn’t know any longer. We should not perhaps dwell too much on the subject of Fabio. And don’t ask me again.” Rudi himself had begun to get confused about where precisely the little mafioso belonged in the scheme of things. He understood that on certain edges Central and the criminal underworld blurred into each other along a line of constantly-renegotiated allegiances, but he couldn’t be certain if Dariusz was a criminal who liaised with Central, or a Coureur who liaised with Wesoły Ptak. He had the impression that Dariusz was no longer certain of the distinction either.
“Why do
you
do it?” he asked.
“I like to think that I am keeping alive the spirit of Schengen.” Dariusz tapped his cigarette against the crystal ashtray that was doubling as a paperweight to keep all the maps from rolling up. “Everyone, and everything, has the right of free access across national borders.”
“Everything? Drugs? Weapons? White slaves?”
Dariusz grinned at him. “
Particularly
drugs, weapons and white slaves.”
Whatever. Rudi found himself in agreement with Dariusz. He had started out for the
harmless adventure
, but the more he saw of them the more he’d begun to think that he really
really
hated borders and all the stupid bureaucratic paraphernalia that went with them.
Rudi took each of the filters out of the machine and banged them against the side of the sink to shake loose the debris that had been trapped at the bottom. It was amazing what happened to food after it had been through the machine. It was reduced to a lumpy pinkish-grey scum that eventually built up in the trays and blocked them, hindering the recirculation of hot water. In his early days, he had found items of cutlery in the trays – and more than once a cup or a glass – but he had learned how to arrange the cutlery in its baskets so the machine’s jets wouldn’t blast knives and forks off the conveyor to fall into the Hobart’s innards.
He had also learned that you could wedge items of crockery and cutlery between the tines of the conveyor so that the jets wouldn’t knock them loose. You could do that if there were just a few items to put through and the waiters were in a hurry for more clean cutlery, which sometimes happened when the restaurant was very busy and the guests were taking their time eating their meals.
After rinsing the trays, he left them beside the sink and went back to the machine and lifted the side panels. A cloud of hot, humid detergent-scented air billowed out. He reached inside and unhooked the spray nozzles and rinsed them in the sink as well.
Finally, he hooked a hose to the tap, took a squeegee from under the sink, and washed down the inside of the machine, which quickly grew a film of mucilaginous gunk if you didn’t hose it down every day. That done, he replaced the nozzles and filters, refilled the tanks with clean water, closed the machine up, and made a last tidying-up tour of the kitchen before putting on his parka and going out into the little loading bay for a cigar.
It was very cold and incredibly clear. Rudi had lived almost all his life in cities, where only the brightest stars managed to fight their way through the orange-yellow haze of streetlight pollution. Here, though, the sky was a depthless black, full of hard, untwinkling stars, the Milky Way a magnificent cloudy ribbon.
Beyond the little road that led up to the loading bay, the mountain tipped steeply down towards the tiny little constellations of towns winking down in the valleys beneath a filmy layer of pollution. Rudi saw these lights every evening when he came out for his last cigar of the day, but he had no idea what most of the towns were called. Jan had once pointed each one out and named it for him, but Rudi had forgotten the names.
Jan had also pointed a long, bony finger out into the far misty murky distance, and said, “Poland,” as if it was of great significance. Rudi had merely shrugged and thanked the Czech for showing him where everything was. There was something a little disquieting about Jan’s insistence that he had something to do with Poland, and he didn’t know quite what to make of it.
Up above him, someone opened a window and shouted, “Fucking Czechs! Fucking Czechs!” in Polish. Something – Rudi thought it might have been a chair – came flying down out of the night, hit the piled-up snow at the edge of the road, and bounced off down the slope.
“Happy New Year,” he said, and ground the cigar out on the concrete with his toe.
R
UDI’S ROOM WAS
on the ground floor, off the lobby and down a side corridor lined with cupboards and tiny offices. It had the appearance of having once been a cupboard itself; there were marks on the walls where shelves might have once hung. There was a tiny little rectangular window of frosted glass high up on the back wall, and a narrow bed that was a fraction too short to sleep on comfortably. A line of clotheshooks along one wall comprised his wardrobe, and a low cupboard beside the bed held his toilet things. There was enough floor-space to move from the bed to the door without having to walk heel-to-toe, but only just. The room was always comfortably warm because it was directly over the hotel’s boiler, but Rudi didn’t want to be here in the summer, when it would probably be unbearable.
He grabbed a towel, soap, shampoo and a change of clothes and went down the corridor to the little staff shower-room. No matter how careful he was, he always ended the day as gunky and greasy as the machine he used, and it took a determined effort to get himself clean.
After his shower, he usually liked to have a couple of drinks in the downstairs bar before turning in for the night, but as he walked across the lobby he heard lots of shouting coming from the bar, and noticed a couple of policemen heading towards the source of the noise. He peeled off and went back to his room and sat down to read.
L
ATER,
M
ARTA KNOCKED
softly on the door and let herself in.
“The Poles smashed up the bar,” she said, taking off her housecoat and hanging it on the hook behind the door. “The police arrested six of them.” Ever since the coach parties began to arrive, she had been referring to her countrymen with a fine disdain, as if trying to distance herself from them.
Stretched out, as much as he could on the bed, Rudi looked over the top of his book and said, “Mm.”
Marta undid her black uniform dress and stepped out of it, hung it with the housecoat on the hook. Underneath she was wearing tights and a worn-out black bra. She was a plump, happy girl with long mousy brown hair that she dyed auburn.
“I thought you’d be hiding in here,” she said.
“We mustn’t speak Polish in public any more,” said Rudi. “Jan heard us the other day.”
Unhooking her bra, she stopped and looked at him. “We’d never say
anything
to each other in public if we did that.” She actually spoke pretty good English, but for some reason she felt embarrassed to use it. She rolled off her tights and panties and left them on the floor. “Move over.”
Rudi put his book on the cupboard and squashed himself up against the wall to let Marta slide under the covers beside him. Officially, Jan frowned mightily on personal relationships between members of staff, but unofficially he tended to turn a selectively blind eye, so long as the hotel’s routine wasn’t unduly disturbed.
“Why can’t we speak Polish?” Marta asked.
Rudi put an arm round her and sighed. “I didn’t say we couldn’t speak Polish. Just that we shouldn’t do it in public.”
“But why?”
There was no easy way to handle this. For Marta, every answer only sparked off another question; they had once spent nearly the whole night on a single question-and-answer string. Rudi had eventually forgotten what the original question had been, and in the end he had totally lost track of the conversation.
“I won’t lie to you, Marta,” he said.
“That’s what people usually say when they’re getting ready to lie,” she said, snuggling her head into the curve of his neck and shoulder.
Well, that was true enough. He had to give her that. “I can’t tell you why, Marta.”
She shrugged.
“I can’t tell you why because I don’t want you to get involved in it,” he said, which as it happened was the pure and simple truth.
“I don’t mind,” she said sleepily. “I love you.”
“That’s what people usually say when they’re getting ready to say something really silly,” he told her, but by then she was snoring gently, fast asleep. Jan worked all the maids far too hard, but the hotel was understaffed because people wanted to be with their families over Christmas and New Year.
Rudi smiled and kissed the top of Marta’s head. She had never asked if he was married, if he was already in a relationship, what he was doing in the Zone. When they made love they used a condom and a viricide, and that was the entire extent of her distrust of him. She was a simple, uncomplicated soul to whom nothing really bad had ever happened, just like ninety-nine percent of the population of Europe. He wanted to tell her how quickly and reasonably innocence could go sour, but he wasn’t sure how to explain it.
He hugged her, and felt himself fall away from consciousness like a scuba diver dropping out of a boat.
O
N
N
EW
Y
EAR’S
Eve, the Poles had a disco.
Jan wanted to throw them all out of the hotel, but the owners stubbornly refused to let him. The Zone was renowned for taking anyone, anytime, no matter how disgusting their behaviour. It existed to attract tourists, and if word got about that the hotels had started to sling people out for such minor misdemeanours as gang fights in the corridors, fire extinguishers let off in the bar, and the forcible ejection of furniture from seventh-storey windows, the Zone’s economy might suffer.
Here, Jan and the hotel’s owners parted company in terms of philosophy. Jan wanted to run an hotel; the owners wanted to make money. In an ideal world, they would have found some kind of mutually acceptable accommodation. In the real world, Jan – and all the other hotel managers – had to suffer. It would take some unusually disgusting behaviour for a guest to be permanently barred from a Zone hotel. This made the Zone a rather raucous place much of the time, but not particularly unbearable, apart from public holidays.
The disco was part of the Poles’ package. And it was a package which seemed to date from the early years after the fall of Communism. A trip to the Zone, a visit to the supermarket down in the valley, skiing for those who wanted it, and a disco and meal on New Year’s Eve. There was also, Rudi had begun to realise, an extramural part of the package, one which involved violence and colossal amounts of alcohol and was entirely beyond the control of the reps who accompanied the tour.
From the hatchway between the small dining room and the kitchen, Rudi watched dinner being served. Jan’s patience with the Poles, tenuous at the best of times, had finally evaporated, and he had instructed Chef to take care of the other guests in the big dining room. Then he had taken off his manager’s jacket, donned an apron and a chef’s hat, and set about cooking for the Poles himself.
All afternoon he had been beating cheap cuts of pork senseless with a meat hammer, dipping them in flour and egg and coating them in breadcrumbs. Coming on for his shift, Rudi found him loading trays of breadcrumbed cutlets into the fridge ready for the evening meal.
The Poles were all dressed up. The hardcore troublemakers, the ones who had been picking fights and letting off fire extinguishers and pitching furniture out of the windows, were the best-dressed of all, in wonderfully-cut expensive suits of soft black fabric. Their girlfriends were wearing Paris dresses that this year were mostly chiffon and big lace panels. Rudi had seen people like this in Kraków, early in the evenings, getting out of chauffeur-driven limos outside the casinos. What they were doing here, paying a pittance to mix with poor people, when they could have block-booked a floor in a Marriott anywhere in Europe, was beyond him. He’d long ago given up trying to second-guess Poles.
In the kitchen, Jan laboured, frying the prepared pork cutlets, slinging them still sizzling with fat onto plates, topping each one with a fried egg, and adding boiled potatoes and string beans. The manager’s face was shining with sweat and there was a look in his eyes that Rudi thought was a kind of deranged gleefulness, serving this kind of crap to the Poles. Rudi wanted to tell him the Poles loved stuff like this; to them it was good solid home cooking, virtually national cuisine, and Jan was making a fool of himself.
But he didn’t say anything. The evening was going to be difficult enough without having to field the manager’s questions about Poland. As cups and glasses and plates began to come back through the hatch, Rudi fired up the Hobart and began loading trays.
He didn’t usually drink until he came off duty, but because this was New Year’s Eve Jan had allowed a bottle of Becherovka in the kitchen, and between courses and rushes of dirty crockery they perched on a worktop and added tonic water to the bitters to make the drink Czechs called ‘concrete’ and toasted each other.
“Na zdraví,” Jan said, raising his glass.
“Cheers.” Rudi checked his watch. Ten past eleven, and the noise in the dining room already sounded like that caused by the crowd at an important football match.
Jan drained his glass and wiped his forearm across his forehead. “I’d forgotten how much fun this was.”
Rudi grinned. “How do you feel about swapping jobs?”
“What?” Jan laughed and waved his glass at the Hobart. “Go back to working on that thing? I’ve worked for years so I wouldn’t ever have to do that again.” He topped up their glasses. “I was pretty good, though.”