Europe in Autumn (44 page)

Two. There were at least two. One carried his upper body; the other one held his feet immobile, and in this way he was carried through the cottage, past the body of Halina, lying on the kitchen floor with her throat cut, and out into the moonlight.

Where the boy was already kneeling, his clothes torn and his face bloody, hands clasped behind his head. Paweł was dumped beside him, forced to his knees, and he felt the cold muzzle of a weapon brush the back of his neck. “Teach you to steal from
us
,” said a voice behind him.

The boy said something in a language Paweł did not recognise, and all of a sudden the clearing seemed to be full of bees and hot, sticky rain and the sounds of large things falling to the ground, and when it was over and he opened his eyes he saw five large black-clad men lying around the clearing, apparently chewed to death by something with millions of tiny teeth.

The boy turned to look at him, covered in blood, and unbelievably he was smiling. “You okay?” he asked cheerfully.

Paweł wiped blood off his own face and nodded mutely.

“Good.” The boy got to his feet and helped Paweł up, removed the tape around his wrists, and looked around the clearing. The wall of the Lodge nearest to them looked as if someone had attacked it with a huge cheese grater. “Better reload, just in case.” He limped up the steps into the Lodge, came back a few moments later with an aluminium stepladder and a couple of towels. He tossed one of the towels to Paweł, carried the ladder over to a tree at the edge of the clearing, and climbed awkwardly up as Paweł wiped gore off himself.

“Magic,” said the boy, reaching up into the branches of the tree to pluck something... invisible... “Magic guns.”

The sentry guns were matt spheres the size of grapefruit, and until the boy started to take them down from the trees they were completely invisible. Where his fingers touched them, irregular patches of mottled flesh-pink spread until, by the time he had finished reloading and resetting them, they were the colour of his hands.

There were more than forty of them, spread in a ragged ring around the Lodge, and the boy visited them all. As he replaced each one it began to disappear again, taking on the colours of its surroundings.

“I’m glad you wore your watch,” he told Paweł as he replaced the final device. “The guns are programmed to fire on my command at anyone who isn’t wearing one, but you could still have caught a couple of rounds if you hadn’t stayed still.”

Paweł said nothing.

The boy led the way back to the Lodge. In the dining room every piece of computer equipment had been smashed beyond repair. The boy stood in the doorway looking at it all.

“You’d better go,” Paweł told him. “Those five will have friends. They’ll be looking for you.”

The boy shook his head. “I’m not worried about that.”

“Well, don’t you think you ought to be?”

“They’re just hired muscle. I’ll be long gone before any backup arrives.” He sighed. “On the other hand, you’re right. Their friends will want revenge, just to save face. You should go, too.”

“Me?” Paweł laughed. “I’m not going anywhere.”

The boy tipped his head to one side.

“There’s most of an SS rifle division out there,” Paweł told him, gesturing beyond the windows to the forest. “Came here in 1942 looking for Jewish resistance fighters. Only three of them ever came out, and my father said they were all insane. No one ever found the bodies. You think I’m afraid of the
mafia
?”

The boy smiled. “I’ll leave you the guns, just in case.” He looked around the room. “You can have all the other stuff as well. Even the broken things can be sold for spares.”

“They said you’d stolen something from them.”

“Not true. I found something that someone else wanted. I’m going to do something with it. They hired the mafia to stop me. Or maybe not. Maybe it was someone else. I’m still filling in the blanks.”

“Who is this ‘they’?”

“Well, that’s the thing. I don’t know for certain. There are a number of possibilities. Lots of people, apparently. And possibly some people are in the background, helping me. I don’t know.” He beamed at Paweł. “Exciting, no?”

“Was it valuable, this thing you found?”

The boy thought about it. “You couldn’t go into a bank or a moneychanger’s or a pawnshop and get money for it.”

Not worth anything, then. Paweł lost interest in the subject. “You should go now,” he said, thinking of the components in the smashed computers. He could get them to Nowak by this evening, and be back here the next morning with a big wad of cash. Maybe he could buy himself a new sleeping bag.

T
HEY TOOK SHOVELS
from the Lodge’s outhouse and went back into the clearing to bury the bodies. The boy searched the dead men, removed shredded wallets and lacerated phones, dropped them all in a plastic bag. They buried Halina too. It was slow, dirty, backbreaking labour but the boy did more than his share of the work, despite the obvious discomfort from his leg. It was almost dawn before they’d finished. Paweł leaned on his shovel and looked around the clearing, which looked exactly like someone had buried a number of bodies in it.

“There’s a phrase the Stasi used to use,” the boy said. “Something about washing a bear.”

“Washing the bear without getting wet,” Paweł said. Then he scowled.

The boy grinned. “Why, Mr Pawluk. Who would ever have guessed you’d be familiar with a Stasi saying?”

Paweł had a sudden sense that the boy knew everything about him, including the time he’d spent in Berlin in his youth, a couple of years before the Fall. “It means to carry out a dangerous task without exposing one’s self to risk,” he said. He said it without shame. He had done nothing to feel ashamed about during those last heady days of the Berlin Wall; he’d told himself that often enough to accept it as fact.

The boy nodded. “Indeed it does.”

Paweł looked about the clearing. “But you seem to be exposing yourself to a
certain
amount of risk.”

The boy leaned down until their faces were just inches apart and looked him in the eye. In that moment, Paweł thought he saw a high triumphant gleam of madness on the boy’s face. “This,” he said, “is not really
risk
at all. This is just a bunch of hired thugs. The particular bear I’m trying to wash entails a whole different order of risk.”

Paweł raised an eyebrow. “Is it worth it?”

The boy smiled. “Shall we see?” he said.

Paweł was about to reply when he heard voices coming from the track that led deeper into the forest. Looking in that direction, he saw dim lights bobbing along. For a moment he thought the thugs’ friends had arrived, but as the voices came closer he heard their accents and relaxed. It was just the English.

“Well,” said the boy, brushing dirt and twigs and leaf-litter off his clothes. “We’re hardly in a state to receive guests, but I don’t think they’ll mind too much, considering. Would you like to meet them?”

There were four of them, three men and a woman. They were carrying torches and they had rucksacks on their backs and hiking boots on their feet. The men were all in their late fifties or early sixties; the woman was younger, perhaps forty. They were all dressed in that irritatingly old-fashioned way the English dressed; tweeds, shirts and ties. The woman was wearing tweed trousers and jacket over a big chunky fishing sweater. They all looked terrified.

“It’s all right,” the boy told them in English. “You’re out now; you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

One of the men stepped forward hesitantly and put out his hand. “You have no idea how long we’ve waited for this,” he said in that English accent Paweł’s son had once described as ‘mummerset,’ a kind of ham actor’s version of a West Country accent. It just sounded like English to Paweł.

“I know,” said the boy.

All of a sudden a patch of forest seemed to shimmer into life, like the monster in that Schwarzenegger movie Paweł had seen once, and a figure wearing a sort of all-over suit of grey rags stepped into the clearing. It pulled back the hood of its suit, revealing the face of a young black man. Just behind him two more figures phased into existence, huge blond men carrying automatic weapons.

“Problems?” asked the young man, looking at the churned-up earth where Paweł and the boy had buried the thugs.

“Nothing we didn’t expect,” the boy told him. “You?”

The young man shook his head while looking suspiciously at Paweł. “The map’s accurate; they were waiting for me at the dustoff. All we had to do was walk back.”

The boy nodded and Paweł thought he saw a huge weight lift off his shoulders. “All right, then. Take everyone inside and get them cleaned up. There’s a change of clothes for everybody. Excuse the mess.”

“Is this going to happen every time we do this?” asked the young man.

“No,” said the boy. “Sometimes it might be really dangerous.”

The young man snorted and went to chivvy the English, who were standing huddled nervously together, into the lodge. One of the big blond men said, “This is a lot of bloodshed for what was supposed to be a routine job.”

The boy shrugged. “I think we’ve flushed out another player.” He tossed the big man the bag containing the wallets and phones. “They’ll have transport somewhere nearby; search it and then get rid of it. Then see if you can find out who they were and who they were working for.”

The big man held up the plastic bag and squinted at the contents. “Shouldn’t be hard; if they were carrying ID they weren’t professionals.”

The boy nodded. “That’s what I thought. Anyway, I want to be out of here in half an hour. Send someone out to sweep for backup and I’ll meet you all back at the rendezvous point in two days.”

“Okay.” And the two men pulled up their hoods and disappeared again. For such large men, they moved almost soundlessly across the forest floor; Paweł could barely hear them leave.

When they’d gone, the boy said, “So, how long have you known about them?”

“The English?” said Paweł. He shrugged. “All my life.”

“Do you know where they’ve come from?”

Paweł shrugged again. “I’m a gamekeeper.”

“Apart from the Berlin Years.”

“I’m a gamekeeper,” he said again. “My father was a gamekeeper, and his father. We go where we want to in the forest. Sometimes we meet English gamekeepers.”

The boy looked into the woods. “Well, it’s forest on both sides of the border,” he said, half to himself. “I suppose sometimes it can be hard to know which side you’re on.” He looked at Paweł.

For quite a long time, they stood looking at each other. There seemed, Paweł thought, no point in denying it. “They say you can have these,” he said finally, nodding at the Lodge. “Try and take any more out, and you’ll be stopped.”

“And this message is from...?”

“Does it matter?”

“From the same people who sent the mafia boys?”

“No. That was someone else. I don’t know who and I don’t know why.” Paweł watched the boy thinking about this. “You seem to have many more enemies than friends.”

“That is hard to argue with,” the boy agreed. He looked at Paweł and said, “How old are you, by the way?”

Which was such an unusual question, considering the situation, that Paweł didn’t even think of lying. “I’m almost ninety,” he said.

“You’re ninety-eight,” said the boy. “And you don’t look a day over sixty. Life in the forest seems to agree with you.”

Paweł scowled.

“You know,” the boy went on, “about eighteen months ago I met a man who swore blind that time passes more slowly on the other side of the border. I thought that was bullshit. How can time pass more slowly in one place than in another? But maybe he was right. Maybe you’ve spent quite a lot of time over there. Hm?”

Paweł glared at him.

The boy nodded. “Thought so. Now
that
would be a secret worth killing to protect.” He rubbed his face. “Okay, Mr Pawluk. We’ll be leaving soon and you can go back to keeping an eye on the paths. The next time you see whoever it is you work for, tell them this isn’t over.”

“You
will
be stopped,” warned Paweł. “Come on; you got four out. That’s a victory in itself. Isn’t that enough?”

“
Enough
?” said the boy. “Mr Pawluk, in the past ten years I have been chased around Europe, kidnapped, beaten up, shot at and lied to by virtually everyone I’ve trusted.” He turned, picked up his shovel and started to carry it back towards the Lodge. Paweł thought he suddenly looked exhausted. “A lot of people have died,” he went on without looking round. “Including my brother. All because someone, somewhere, wants to stop
these people
going where they want.” He paused and gestured at the Lodge with the shovel. “Or because someone else wants to know how to get into the Community. Or because someone else wants to stop people finding out about the Community. I honestly don’t know any more and I’m sick of it. I’m sick of being ridden around like an old pony.” He looked at the shovel for a moment as if only now realising it was in his hand, then he threw it into the undergrowth and went tiredly up the steps to the front door of the Lodge.

“Tell your friends I haven’t even started yet,” he said, and he went inside.