“Send them a message. Tell them you’re prepared to compromise.”
“No compromise.”
“Tell them...” He searched for the words. “Tell them you’ll back down if they guarantee the status of part of the park in perpetuity. Tell them you’ll settle for that, they can have the rest for their hotels and arenas.” He spread his arms wide. “It’s a
big
park, Dad.”
Toomas had not stopped shaking his head. “No. No. No. No compromise. No surrender. They don’t get their filthy hands on another square millimetre of this place. They’ve driven a wedge between me and Maret and I’m not going to sit down and let that pass. One of us gets the entire park, the other gets nothing. That’s how it will end.”
“It will end with you dead,” Rudi said.
Toomas abruptly stopped shaking his head. He looked at his son and then he walked back towards him until they were almost chest-to-chest. “You think I care about that,
boy
?” he snarled.
“There’s going to be a catastrophe here if you carry on,” Rudi snarled back. “Seriously. And it won’t just involve you. It’ll involve Ivari and Frances and Maret and everyone you ever cared about.”
Toomas tipped his head to one side and looked at Rudi. “You think we have a chance.”
Rudi glared at him. “From what Ivari told me, yes, you have a chance.
They
think you have a chance, otherwise they wouldn’t be opening a
conversation
with you.”
Toomas poked Rudi in the chest with a bony forefinger. “They’re scared!” he shouted triumphantly. “And scared people make mistakes. We can win this, boy.”
“If they
are
scared, they are very
powerful
scared people, and those are the worst kind,” Rudi said. “If you keep provoking them they’ll just squash you and carry on as if you never even existed.”
“You think I’m afraid?”
“I think you ought to be.”
Toomas looked at his son for a long time without speaking. Finally, he shook his head. “I’m not stopping now. We’re having a meeting in the Conference Centre on Wednesday night. You should come.”
“I’m going into Tallinn on Wednesday,” Rudi said. “I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
Toomas shrugged. “Please yourself.” And he turned and walked back to the Humvee.
Rudi heard the motor start up, heard the old man bully the big vehicle into what sounded like a fifteen-point turn before driving back down the track. He waited for the sound of the engine to die away. Then he waited another couple of minutes, just watching the sea. Then he took out his phone and dialled a number.
When it was answered, he said, “I’m afraid Laurence has food poisoning and won’t be able to attend this evening.” Then he hung up and stood watching the sea for a long time.
I
T HAD BEEN
a while since he’d been to Tallinn. He didn’t count flying into Ülemiste the other night and getting a cab straight to the Palmse tram. He didn’t know whether to be mildly pleased or mildly irritated that nothing seemed to have changed. The city looked more or less the same as he remembered. Maybe a few more big office buildings. The harbour hadn’t changed at all, and neither had the Old Town. Even the semi-drunken English stag parties were still coming here. Walking past the Hotell Viru, he spotted half a dozen young men in cold-weather clothing and colourful woolly hats stumbling singing out of the front doors of the Soviet-era edifice. He stopped across the street and watched them them go. Then he looked up at the façade of the old Intourist hotel. Legend had it that the KGB had bugged every room in the place, back when certain people thought these things mattered. He wondered if it was true; certainly someone would have checked, after the Russians left.
He took a couple of buses. Had a drink in a bar down by the harbour. Stood and watched one of the big supercats boom in from the Gulf, forty-five minutes from Helsinki to Tallinn and completely impervious to the weather. Nordic Jet Line boasted that their catamarans could sail through the eye of a hurricane, although that had not been required of them yet.
He took another couple of buses. He paused outside the Zoo, insanely large considering how relatively small the city was, but decided not to go in. He took another bus out to Kadriorg and spent an hour or so walking in the grounds of the Palace. He took some photographs. Then he took another bus back towards the centre of town.
In the Old Town, he wandered for a while, looking in shop windows. He bought himself a couple of sweaters and a tin of small cigars. Feeling peckish, he wandered from restaurant to restaurant, checking menus, before deciding to eat at Troika.
Troika hadn’t changed, either. From the vaulted cellar ceilings to the brightly-costumed staff to the menu, it was exactly the way it was the last time he’d been there, two days before he left Estonia for his long odyssey down the coast towards Restauracja Max.
He ordered
pelmeni
, and asked the girl who took his order who the chef was, these days, and when she told him he smiled and said, “And tell him I want proper
pelmeni
. Not the insipid crap he serves to the tourists.”
She looked at him and smiled uncertainly. “I’m sorry?”
“Let me write it down,” Rudi said, gently taking her order pad from her and scribbling a note. “And make sure he gets that. I’ll know if he doesn’t and I won’t give you a tip.”
She went away and Rudi poured himself a glass of water and lit a cigar and waited.
Five minutes later, a small, red-faced man in chef’s whites came storming through the restaurant, shouting at the top of his voice in Russian. The waiting staff fled as he approached Rudi’s table. Rudi stood up and the chef came right up to him and flung his arms around him.
“Sergei Fedorovich,” said Rudi, returning the hug.
Sergei let him go and took a step back to look at him. “You lost weight,” he said critically. “You don’t eat well, wherever you are.”
“I’m in Poland,” said Rudi.
“Pah. There you are, then.” Sergei snapped his fingers at one of the waitresses, who were just coming out of hiding. “You. Stolichnaya and two glasses.” He looked at Rudi again and shook his head. “You don’t eat well,” he said again.
They sat and Sergei raided Rudi’s cigars and lit one. “So,” he said. “You came back.”
“I’m on holiday,” said Rudi.
“You got your own restaurant yet?”
Rudi shook his head. “I’m working for someone. In Kraków. It’s a good place; you should come down sometime.”
Sergei sniffed. “To Poland? Those guys got long memories.”
“And we don’t?”
Sergei took a drag on his cigar and blew out a stream of smoke. He smoothed a hand over his thinning hair. “Things are not so bad here these days, you know?” Anti-Russian sentiment had run deep in the Estonian soul, even after the Soviets left. Estonia’s small but vocal ethnic Russian community had felt somewhat embattled ever since. “I’m not saying things are perfect now, but it’s better, you know?”
Rudi nodded and sat back in his chair. Troika had been the first professional kitchen he’d ever worked in, Sergei the first professional chef he’d ever worked under. He’d thought the little man was an unequal mixture of magician and ogre. Sergei had been the first chef ever to hit him. With a roasting pan.
“Now I’m going to make things awkward for you and ask why you didn’t stay in touch,” said the Russian.
Rudi didn’t feel at all awkward; he’d rehearsed this the night before. He shrugged. “I was travelling. I was working all hours God sent. By the time I had a chance to write...well, it would have been embarrassing.”
Sergei tipped his head to one side. “You’re different.”
Rudi laughed. “I’m a better chef now.”
“I should bloody well hope so, all this time gone by.” Sergei narrowed his eyes. “No, you’re different. Some bad stuff happen to you.”
“I’m a chef, Sergei Fedorovich. Bad stuff happens to me all the time.”
“That’ll be true,” Sergei admitted. The waitress returned with a frost-rimed bottle of vodka and two glasses and then departed again. Sergei poured them both a drink and then held up his glass. “Fuck your mother,” he said and knocked his drink back in one.
“Fuck your mother,” Rudi said, and knocked back his vodka.
“Okay.” Sergei refilled their glasses and then snapped his fingers at another waitress. “You. Black bread, butter, pickled cucumbers, some of that venison sausage.”
Rudi held up a hand to stop her. “I’m meeting someone, Sergei. But after they’re gone, I’ll have a proper drink with you. I didn’t want to sit here and be rude by not saying hello.”
“Sure. No problem.” Sergei stood and held up his glass. “Fuck your mother.”
“Fuck your mother,” said Rudi. They drank their drinks.
“Okay,” said Sergei. “I’ll go and make sure your
pelmeni
are the worst you ever tasted.”
“And I’ve eaten some pretty bad
pelmeni
,” Rudi said. “Many of them here.”
“Pah,” said Sergei. “I’ll see you later.”
A minute or so after Sergei had left, someone came over and sat in the vacated chair. “Well,” said Bradley in English, “that was touching.” He put his brandy glass down on the table and smiled at Rudi. “Enjoying our holiday?”
“Visiting old friends.”
“Can’t beat it,” said Bradley.
“I need some help,” said Rudi.
Bradley spread his hands. “I’m all ears, old son.”
Rudi had also rehearsed this conversation last night, but now he felt as though he hadn’t rehearsed quite enough. “My father’s a ranger at the national park up at Lahemaa,” he said.
Bradley nodded. “I know.”
Rudi looked at the Coureur. Of course he knew. “He wants to turn the park into a polity.”
“I know,” Bradley said again. When he saw the look on Rudi’s face, he said, “We haven’t been keeping tabs on your family, but when you had that spot of bother in Berlin we did some checks.” He held up a hand to stop Rudi’s protest. “We just wanted to know who you were, what your background was. That’s all.”
Rudi scowled at the Englishman. “Is there anything we can do to help?”
Bradley looked nonplussed. “‘We,’ old son?”
“Central. Is there anything Central can do to help?”
Bradley looked around the restaurant, just starting to fill up with the lunchtime crowd of tourists. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. Advice?”
Bradley sighed and picked up his brandy snifter. He looked at it and put it down again. “Operational security forbids that I tell you where I was when we got your crash signal,” he said thoughtfully. “But it was quite a long way away, I’ve not had a very good journey, and I’ve spent all day following you around waiting for you to settle in order for us to have this meeting. So it would be nice if you could tell me I’m not here just because your dear
papa
has decided to set up his own country.”
Rudi sat and looked at him.
Bradley shook his head and picked up his glass again. This time he drained it. “You were given that number and that string in case of dire emergency,” he said, putting the glass down and twirling the stem back and forth. “Not to ask Central to help your father become a pocket Emperor.”
“I–”
Bradley shook his head again. “Central does not do that,” he said calmly. “Central does not facilitate in any way, shape, or form, the creation of any type of quasi-national entity. How can they? We must remain impartial, and we can’t do that if we help people set up their own nations.”
Rudi opened his mouth to say something. Closed it again.
“Best of luck to your father,” said Bradley, “and if he’s successful then we’ll be happy to do business with him or anyone in his new nation. But until then, we have to stay out of it. And I advise you to stay out of it, too.”
“He’s going to get himself killed,” Rudi said.
“That will be sad, obviously.” Bradley stood. “I’m not going to apologise for Central’s position on this, because it’s not a position which needs apologising for. But we will not help your father, and you shouldn’t have asked. And the next time you use that crash code, everyone would appreciate it if it was a genuine emergency.”
“Fuck you, Bradley,” said Rudi.
Bradley came over to Rudi’s side of the table and leaned down close so he could speak in Rudi’s ear. “And I meant it about your not becoming involved,” he said quietly. “I can’t force you, but I strongly recommend that you have nothing at all to do with your father’s nationbuilding activities. If someone were to discover that a Coureur was involved, it would call into question the activities of all Coureurs. No one would trust us any more. You think about what that would mean.”
Rudi turned his head to look at Bradley. “Have a nice trip,” he said.
Bradley straightened up. “You’re good at what you do,” he said. “You don’t think so, that’s obvious from our conversations. But you
are
good. You could help a lot of people who really need your help. You can’t do that if people don’t trust you.” He put a hand on Rudi’s shoulder and squeezed gently. “Don’t get involved in this business.” And then he was gone.
Rudi poured another vodka and drank it. Eventually Sergei himself came out of the kitchen with a plate full of
pelmeni
and brought it to Rudi’s table.
“Did your friend not turn up?” he asked, putting the plate down in front of Rudi.
“Something came up,” Rudi said. “He couldn’t stay.”
“That’s a shame.”
Rudi smiled. “Yes.” He picked up his knife and fork and regarded the plate of dumplings, boiled in meat broth as usual, a nod to Sergei’s Siberian heritage. “Let’s see if you’ve got any better at making these, shall we?”
N
OT ENTIRELY SOBER
, but not nearly as drunk as he would have liked, Rudi made it to the last tram for Palmse. In the summer they ran until almost midnight, but out of season the last tram left at eight and he had to move smartly to get to the stop in time. The whole tram was empty. He clambered into the last car, waved his phone at the reader to pay for his ticket, curled up on one of the seats, and fell asleep.
He was woken, sometime later, by someone gently shaking his shoulder and saying, “Hey, mate.”