I
N
R
UDI’S OPINION
, whoever had set up the Coureurs had overdosed on late twentieth century espionage fiction. Coureur operational jargon, as passed on by Fabio, sounded like something from a John le Carré novel.
Legends
were fictitious identities.
Stringers
were non-Coureur personnel, or entry-level Coureurs, who did makework like scoping out locations in the field or maintaining legends.
Pianists
were hackers,
tailors
provided technical support,
cobblers
forged documents – Rudi knew
that
euphemism had been in use in espionage circles as far back as the 1930s. He thought it was ridiculous.
The business with Max’s cousin had been a test, that much was obvious. As Dariusz described it, Max’s cousin had already been in contact with the Coureurs, and had been presented with a menu of options for his escape from Hindenberg. All Rudi had done was relay his favoured option. Any stringer could have done it; Max’s cousin, in the face of postal problems and telephone and radio jamming and interception of emails, could have sent up smoke signals. It had been, more than anything, a test of nerve, a test of how Rudi would handle the problem.
It seemed he had passed the test. And Fabio was his reward.
“Never ever undervalue a stringer,” Fabio told him. “Consider a typical stringer – we shall call him Ralf. Ralf works in a delicatessen in Lausanne. He has a wife named Chantelle, some children, maybe a dog. For much of the time, he lives a normal life. He hates his boss. He fucks his wife. He plays with his children. He takes the dog for a walk.”
“Maybe,” said Rudi.
“You’re interrupting me,” Fabio warned.
“You said
maybe
a dog.” After two months with Fabio, Rudi had learned to take his pleasures where he could find them. “Now you’re telling me he takes his dog for a walk.”
Fabio narrowed his eyes.
“I just wondered whether we should take the dog as a given now,” Rudi said.
Fabio frowned.
“These things are important,” said Rudi. “You must agree.”
Fabio watched him a moment longer, then looked away into the distance. “But on occasion, Ralf is asked to do more
specialised
work,” he continued. “He is asked to renew a passport in a false name, to get a parking ticket, to take a lease on an apartment in Geneva. These are all things which contribute to the building of a legend. And Ralf knows
all the details
of these transactions. Invaluable operational intelligence. If Ralf should fall into unkind hands, and if he should tell all he knows, the information could bring any number of Situations crashing to the ground.”
It wasn’t just the jargon, Rudi thought. If Fabio was representative,
Les Coureurs
really considered themselves some form of espionage agency. Cloak and dagger, night-time streets in Central Europe, one-time pads, the whole thing. He wondered if he shouldn’t have another quiet chat with Dariusz.
Fabio looked levelly at him. “Now you can cook me my dinner,” he said. “And then I have some homework for you. And I don’t want any of that disgusting tripe stew you served last night; my insides still haven’t recovered.”
‘H
OMEWORK
’
TURNED OUT
to be an interminable round of offices and bureaucrats. A lease signed here, a driving licence applied for there, all in different names. He was expected to buy a car, renew a passport, take a train-ride to Sosnowiec and return with the ticket stubs, open a bank account in the name of Anton Blum, telephone a man named Grudziński and complain about the waste disposal unit in a flat. All the little tracks one leaves every day without thinking about it. And at one point, footsore and really not terribly impressed with the life of a stringer, he thought he saw the point of Fabio’s tale about Ralf and his maybe dog. He could conceivably ruin half a dozen different Situations. If he had the faintest idea what he was doing. And for whom. And why.
Max said, “I suppose you could just stop any time you wanted,” which was really Max-speak for ‘You’re spending too much time as a Coureur and I’m spending too much money on agency chefs.’
“It can’t last much longer,” Rudi told him. “Dariusz says once Fabio’s finished with me I might not be needed for another ten years.”
Max snorted. “Europe must be crawling with Coureurs then.”
Rudi had some vague idea that Max was, or had been at sometime in the past, involved in some way with Coureur Central, but it always seemed indelicate to ask. He said, “How many do
you
think there are, out of interest?”
Max laughed. “In my experience? You and Fabio.” Rudi had brought Fabio to the restaurant the night before for a meal. Not a happy event, for anyone.
“I’m going to be busy then.”
“Looks that way,” Max sighed.
2.
M
ORE
‘
HOMEWORK.
’ P
HONE
calls, passports applied for, job interviews attended. One day he spent an entire morning in a very untidy flat in Sosnowiec. Eventually a policeman turned up and took the details of a burglary which had been reported at the flat. Rudi gave the policeman a list of missing possessions. The policeman left.
It occurred to Rudi that, while he was certainly getting a feel for the work of a stringer, Central was also getting its money’s worth out of him. He had lost count of how many legends he was contributing to. He opened bank accounts. He rented an office in Zabrze. Fabio gave him a slim attaché case and told him to place it in a safety-deposit box at a bank in Katowice.
Along with homework came
tradecraft
. And it was disappointingly run-of-the-mill stuff. Dead drops, brush passes, tips on how to drop a tail, tips on how to pick one up. It was straight out of Deighton or Furst. Almost comicbook stuff. Rudi doubted that even the security services still did this kind of thing.
Using maps, Fabio made him plan jumps from half a dozen Polish cities, peppering each one with alternate dustoffs. Then Fabio demolished each jump, one by one, in a high, hectoring tone of voice,
have you learned
nothing
? Am I getting
through
to you yet?
As time went on, Fabio began to disappear for days at a time. Rudi would wake up in the morning, and there would be a Fabio-shaped hole in his life. No complaining about the food or moving the furniture about. The first time it happened, he thought the Coureur had simply given up on him and gone home, but a day or so later Fabio was back, making obscene comments about Poles and daring Rudi to cook him a meal he could actually enjoy. More absences followed, at irregular intervals.
They had day-trips to neighbouring towns and cities, and Rudi was required to improvise jumps off the top of his head from this office building or that police station. Then Fabio demolished each one.
“This is a lot of fun,” Rudi admitted wearily on the way back from one trip, “but I have a real job to think about as well, you know.”
“Of course you do,” Fabio said. “And you are free to return to it at any time. And I can go somewhere else.” He smiled brightly. “Perhaps there will be decent food there. What do you think?”
What Rudi was thinking, increasingly, was
fuck you, Fabio
. “I think you’re going to be stuck with me for a little while longer,” he said.
Fabio sighed. “Of course. I was afraid of that.”
O
NE NIGHT, TEN
weeks after the beginning of his apprenticeship, Rudi was woken by a strange conviction that someone else was in his bedroom. He rolled over, opened his eyes, and saw Fabio standing beside the bed.
“Get dressed,” said the little Coureur. “We’re going on an exercise.”
Rudi looked at the clock. “It’s three o’clock in the morning.”
“You should have gone to bed earlier, then,” Fabio snapped.
Rudi, who had promised Max that he would make one of his increasingly-rare appearances at the restaurant today, said, “Can’t we do it tomorrow? Or Friday? Friday would be better.”
Fabio turned and headed for the door. “You want to go back to being a cook, fine,” he muttered. “I’ll pack and you can drive me to the airport and I can leave this stinky little town.”
Rudi felt a stirring of the spirit of resistance that Pani Stasia had lit within him. He got out of bed and pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. “I’m a
chef
, you ridiculous little bastard!” he shouted.
Fabio came back to the door and looked at Rudi. The bedroom was in darkness and the little Swiss was silhouetted by the hall lights, so Rudi couldn’t see his expression.
“And this is a city,” Rudi told him more quietly. “Not a town.”
Fabio turned away and went into the living room. “Town, city,” he said. “Whatever.”
T
HEY WALKED DOWN
to the end of the street, where Fabio had the keys to a parked Lexus. He had his heavy carry-on case with him. He put it in the boot and told Rudi to drive to Częstochowa.
At Częstochowa, Fabio directed Rudi to park the Lexus outside the station. He retrieved his case, and they walked for about forty minutes, at which point Fabio stopped beside a parked Mercedes, produced a set of keys, and said, “Get in. I’ll drive.”
“Are we going far?” Rudi asked.
Fabio snorted. “What do
you
care,
chef?
”
They looked at each other over the roof of the car. “Maybe I can get some sleep,” Rudi said.
“Maybe I’d like that better.” Fabio unlocked the driver’s door. “Get in.”
T
HEY CHANGED CARS
again at a deserted-looking farm outside town. This time it was a battered-looking hydrogen-cell Simca. Fabio waited for a long time before driving back to the main road, and he waited again before driving back into Częstochowa and then driving around town for another forty minutes or so. Rudi dozed off, and when he opened his eyes they were out on the open road again and he had no idea which direction they were heading in.
They drove for hours. The roads were in an appalling state, many of them laid by the conquering Germans in the 1940s and inadequately repaired ever since, kilometre after kilometre of dips and bumps and potholes. Poland had never had enough money for public works, certainly not enough for the scale of public works needed to bring the country up to the level of, say, Greater Germany, which had roads of a lascivious smoothness. Hindenberg, which had only been in existence for a decade or so, was in comparison a Western European nation.
A lot of it had to do with Poland’s stubborn membership of the EU. They had waited so long to be admitted, Rudi thought, that they had decided nothing was going to dislodge them. The only way Poland was going to leave the Union was feet first, and so the country was continually being stung for subsidies and tariffs and finding itself dragged along with the EU’s seeming determination to pick trade wars with anything that had a head of state.
“Poles,” Fabio muttered when Rudi mentioned this in an attempt to make conversation. “Who knows?”
“A wise view, Obi-Wan,” Rudi said.
Fabio glanced briefly at him. “What?”
Rudi dozed. Fabio refused to tell him where they were going, so it was pointless offering to share the driving. Towns and villages went by, pools of light in a great darkness. Half the road signs he saw were featureless pink rectangles in the Simca’s headlights, the grass and asphalt beneath them spattered with pink paint.
“
Armia Różowych Pilotów
,” Rudi said when Fabio complained about the pink signs.
“What the fuck’s that?” Fabio did not admit to speaking much Polish, so they spoke English.
“The Army of the Pink Pilot. I thought it was just a Warsaw thing.”
“Some kind of homosexual rights organisation.”
Rudi laughed. The Pink Pilot was a bona fide homegrown Polish legend, occupying a territory somewhere between Sikorski and Jan Sobieski.
“It’s the Palace of Culture,” he said. When Fabio frowned across at him he said, “In Warsaw. The Palace of Culture. A gift from Stalin and the Workers of the Soviet Union to the Workers of Poland. One of the ugliest buildings in Europe.”
Fabio snorted, as if to say that Europe was
teeming
with buildings that offended
his
aesthetic sensibilities.
It was said that the only good thing about the Palace of Culture was that it was visible from everywhere in Warsaw. Of course, that was the worst thing about it as well, but at least it meant you could never get lost. After the Fall, there had been much debate about what to do with this offensively Stalinist monolith, and, as with most things Polish, in the end nothing much had been done.
And then one night there was the sound of engines in the sky, a miasma of paint fumes over central Warsaw, and when the city awoke the next morning it found that the Palace of Culture had been given a makeover.
Meanwhile, over on the southern edge of the city, in the middle of a field, sat a MiL helicopter retrofitted with a crop-spraying rig, from which hot-pink paint was still sizzling onto the grass, and leading from it out across the field a line of pink bootprints growing fainter and fainter as the Pink Pilot walked away into myth.
In time-honoured fashion there were angry recriminations in Parliament. There were resignations, mostly among air traffic controllers who had failed to notice the flight of the Pink Pilot.
Varsovians, on the other hand, loved the Palace’s paint-job. They claimed it made the thing so fucking
obvious
that they didn’t notice it any more, and when a few weeks later the Government attempted to have it cleaned there was a small riot.
This had all happened a year or so before Rudi arrived in Kraków, and he hadn’t visited Warsaw yet, but he’d seen it from time to time on various items in the news, and no matter where in the city the pictures came from the Pink Palace had seemed to lean into the background like one of those obnoxiously-drunken guests at a wedding party. Rudi thought it looked uncomfortably
carnal
.