Europe in Autumn (2 page)

“Well,” Max said, coming back down the stairs. “
That
was an interesting evening.”

Rudi picked up an overturned stool, righted it, and sat at the bar. He had, he discovered, sweated entirely through his chef’s whites. “I think,” he said, “you should renegotiate your subscription to Wesoły Ptak.”

Max went behind the bar. He bent down and started to search the shelves. “If Wesoły Ptak had turned up tonight, half of us would have wound up in the mortuary.” He straightened up holding half a bottle of Starka and two glasses.

Rudi took his lighter and a tin of small cigars from his pocket. He lit one and looked at the restaurant. If he was objective about it, there was actually very little damage. Just a lot of mess for the cleaners to tackle, and they’d had wedding receptions that had been messier.

Max filled the two glasses with vodka and held one up in a toast. “Good fuck meal,” he said.

Rudi looked at him for a moment. Then he picked up the other glass, returned the toast, and drained it in one go. Then they both started to laugh.

“What if they come back?” Rudi asked.

But Max was still laughing. “Good fuck meal,” he repeated, shaking his head and refilling the glasses.

T
HE
H
UNGARIANS DID
not come back, which seemed to bear out Max’s view that they had just been out for a good time rather than intent on muscling in on Wesoły Ptak’s territory.

Wesoły Ptak – the name meant
Happy Bird
– was a deeply diversified organisation. Its many divisions included prostitution, drugs, armed robbery, a soft-drink bottling factory on the outskirts of Kraków, a bus company, any number of unlicenced gambling dens, and a protection racket centred around Floriańska Street, just off the Market Square of Poland’s old capital.

They were not, on the whole, known for their violent nature, preferring to apply force with surgical precision rather than in broad strokes. For instance, a restaurateur or shopkeeper who tried to organise his neighbours against the gang might find himself in hospital with anatomically-novel joints imposed on his legs. The other rebels would get the point, and the uprising would end. Another gang might be more likely to launch a massive firebombing campaign, or a wave of spectacularly bloody killings, but Happy Bird were content with a less-is-more approach.

In the wake of the Hungarians’ visit to Restauracja Max, some of the other businesses began to wonder out loud just what they were paying Wesoły Ptak for. This went on for a day or so, and then the son of one of the owners suffered a minor accident at school. Nothing life-threatening, just a few bumps and scrapes, and after that the grumbling along Floriańska subsided.

A week or so later, Dariusz, Wesoły Ptak’s representative, visited Restauracja Max one evening just before closing. All the staff but Rudi and Michał had gone home. Max asked Rudi to prepare two steak tartares, and he and Dariusz took a bottle of Wyborowa and a couple of glasses over to a table in the darkest corner of the deserted restaurant.

When Rudi emerged from the kitchen with the components of the steak tartares on a tray, Max and Dariusz were deep in conversation inside a cloud of cigarette smoke dimly illuminated by the little sconce on the wall above their table.

As Rudi approached with the food, Dariusz looked up and smiled. “Supper,” he said.

Rudi set out on the table the trays of anchovies and chopped onions, the little bowls of pickled cucumbers, the condiments, plates of rye bread, saucers of unsalted butter, the two plates of minced beef, each with an egg yolk nestling in a hollow on top.

“We were discussing your visitors of last month,” Dariusz said.

“It was an eventful evening,” Rudi agreed, swapping the table’s ashtray for a clean one. “Have a good meal.”

“Why don’t you sit and have a drink with us?” Dariusz asked.

Rudi looked at Max, sitting at the other side of the table like a smoothly prosperous Silesian Buddha, hands clasped comfortably against the broad expanse of his stomach. Max was smiling gently and looking off into some faraway vista. He nodded fractionally.

Rudi shrugged. “All right.” He put the tray and the dirty ashtray on the next table, pulled up a chair, and sat.

“A busy night,” Max rumbled, picking up a fork.

Rudi nodded. Takings had gone down for a couple of days after the Hungarians visited, but they were back up now. Earlier in the week, Max had murmured something about a raise, but Rudi had known him long enough not to take it seriously.

“I was wondering about Władek,” Max said.

Władek was the latest of a long line of alleged cooks to arrive at Restauracja Max and then discover that they were not being paid enough for the long hours and hard work.

“He seems keen,” Rudi said, watching Max use the edge of his fork to mash up the egg and beef on his plate.

“They all do, at first,” Max agreed. “Then they get greedy.”

“It’s not greed, Max,” Rudi told him.

Max shook his head. “They think they can come here and be ready to open their own restaurant after a month. They don’t understand the business.”

Max’s philosophy of the restaurant business shared certain features with Zen Buddhism. Rudi, who was more interested in cooking than philosophy, said, “It’s a common enough misconception.”

“It’s the same in my business,” Dariusz said. Rudi had almost forgotten the little man was at the table, but there he was, mixing anchovies and chopped onion into his beef with a singleminded determination. “You should see some of our recruits, particularly these days. They think they’ll be running the city in a year.” He smiled sadly. “Imagine their disappointment.”

“Yes,” Rudi said. “The only difference is that it’s easier for a sous-chef to leave a restaurant than it is for someone to leave Wesoły Ptak.” Max glanced up from his plate, sighed, shook his head, and went back to mashing his meal together with his fork.

If Dariusz was offended, he gave no sign. “We’re a business, like any other,” he said.

“Not
quite
like any other,” said Rudi. Max looked at him again. This time he frowned before returning his attention to his steak.

Dariusz also frowned, but the frown was barely discernible, and it was gone after a moment. “Well, we do less cooking, it’s true,” he said, and he laughed. Max smiled and shook his head.

Rudi sat back and crossed his arms. Wesoły Ptak was nothing out of the ordinary; he had encountered organisations like it in Tallinn and Riga and Vilnius, and they were all alike, and Dariusz didn’t fit the demographic. He looked ordinary, a slim little middle-aged man with a cheap haircut and laugh-lines around his eyes. If he was armed, his unprepossessing off-the-peg business suit hid it wonderfully well.

“Should we worry about the Hungarians?” Rudi asked.

Dariusz looked up from his meal, his eyebrows raised in surprise. “Worry?” he asked. “Why should you worry?”

Rudi shrugged and watched Max working on his steak. Rudi hated steak tartare. The customer did all the preparation themselves, and they took up table space while they did it. Poles in particular seemed to regard it as a social occasion. They took forever about it, tasting over and over again and minutely adjusting the seasoning. When he had his own restaurant, steak tartare would not be on the menu.

Dariusz reached out and touched Rudi’s forearm. Rudi noticed his fingernails were chewed. “You mustn’t worry,” Dariusz said.

“All right,” said Rudi.

“This kind of thing happens all the time.”

“Not to me it doesn’t.”

Dariusz smiled. “You have to think of us like nations. Poles and Hungarians are the criminal princes of Europe.”

“And the Bulgarians,” Max put in goodnaturedly.

Dariusz shrugged. “Yes, one must include the Bulgarians as well. We must constantly visit, check each other out, put our toes in the water,” he told Rudi. “It’s a matter of diplomacy.”

“Do you mean what happened here the other night was a diplomatic incident?” said Rudi.

“It might well have been, if wiser heads had not prevailed.” Dariusz nodded at Max.

“You haven’t got a drink,” Max observed. He looked across the restaurant and Michał, responding with a maitre d’s telepathy, brought a clean glass over to the table for Rudi and then retreated behind the bar. Max filled the glass with vodka and said, “They were just looking for a good time, but nobody would give them one because everyone was afraid of them.”

“I can’t blame them,” Dariusz said. He tasted his steak, winced, reached for the tabasco bottle and shook a few drops onto the meat. “A bunch of drunken Hungarians, armed to the teeth, wandering into restaurants and bars. What’s one to think?”

“Indeed,” Max agreed.

“It would be their own fault if someone was to over-react,” Dariusz went on. He tasted his steak again, and this time it was more to his liking. This time he actually lifted a forkful into his mouth and chewed happily.

“And nobody would want that,” Max said. Apparently, his steak was also prepared to his satisfaction. He started to eat.

“Well, precisely,” said Dariusz. “Something like that could start a war.” He looked at Rudi and cocked his head to one side. “You’re from Tallinn, yes?”

“I was born in Taevaskoja,” Rudi said. “But I’ve lived in Tallinn.”

“I’ve never been there.” Dariusz looked at his glass, but it was empty. “What’s it like?”

Rudi watched Max filling Dariusz’s glass. “It’s all right.”

“You speak very good Polish, for an Estonian.”

Rudi picked up his own glass and drained it in one swallow. “Thank you.”

Dariusz put down his fork and burst out laughing. He reached over and tapped Max on the shoulder. “I told you!” he said. “Didn’t I tell you?”

Max smiled and nodded and went on eating. Rudi uncapped the Wyborowa and poured himself another drink. Michał had told him that Wesoły Ptak took their name from a song by Eugeniusz, one of a long line of Polish sociopolitical balladeers to rise briefly to fame before drinking themselves to death or being shot by jealous husbands or jilted lovers. The bird sings in its cage and its owners think it’s happy, Michał had told him, but the bird is still in a cage. The reference had completely baffled Rudi.

“We were discussing geopolitics,” Dariusz told him. “Do you think much about geopolitics?”

“I’m a cook,” Rudi said. “Not a politician.”

“But you must have an opinion. Everyone has an opinion.”

Rudi shook his head.

Dariusz looked disbelievingly at him. He picked up his glass and took a sip of vodka. “I saw on the news last week that so far this year twelve new nations and sovereign states have come into being in Europe alone.”

“And most of them won’t be here this time next year,” said Rudi.

“You see?” Dariusz pointed triumphantly at him. “You
do
have an opinion! I knew you would!”

Rudi sighed. “I only know what I see on the news.”

“I see Europe as a glacier,” Max murmured, “calving icebergs.” He took a mouthful of his steak tartare and chewed happily.

Rudi and Dariusz looked at him for a long time. Then Dariusz looked at Rudi again. “Not a bad analogy,” he said. “Europe is calving itself into progressively smaller and smaller nations.”

“Quasi-national entities,” Rudi corrected. “Polities.”

Dariusz snorted. “Sanjaks. Margravates. Principalities.
Länder
. Europe sinks back into the eighteenth century.”

“More territory for you,” Rudi observed.

“The
same
territory,” Dariusz said. “More frontiers. More red tape. More borders. More border
police
.”

Rudi shrugged.

“Consider Hindenberg, for example,” said Dariusz. “What must that have been like? You go to bed in Wrocław, and you wake up in Breslau. What must that have been like?”

Except that it hadn’t happened overnight. What had happened to Wrocław and Opole and the little towns and villages inbetween had taken a long, bitter time, and if you followed the news it was obvious that for the Poles the matter wasn’t settled yet.

“Consider the days after World War Two,” Rudi said. “Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin meet at Yalta. You go to bed in Breslau and wake up the next morning in Wrocław.”

Dariusz smiled and pointed his fork at him, conceding the point.

There was a brief lull in the conversation.

“I have a cousin in Hindenberg,” Max mused.

Dariusz looked at him. “For that matter,” he said, “why don’t you live there yourself? You’re Silesian.”

Max grunted.

“Do you see much of your cousin?” Dariusz asked.

Max shrugged. “Travel is difficult. Visas and so forth. I have a Polish passport, he is a citizen of Hindenberg.”

“But he telephones you, yes? Emails you?”

Max shook his head. “Polish Government policy,” he rumbled.

Dariusz pointed at Rudi. “You see? You see the heartache such things can cause?”

Rudi poured himself another drink, thinking that this discussion had become awfully specific all of a sudden.

“So,” Dariusz said to Max. “How long is it since you were in contact with your cousin?”

“Some time,” Max agreed thoughtfully, as if the subject had not occurred to him for a while. “Even the post is uncertain, these days.”

“A scandal,” Dariusz muttered. “A scandal.”

Rudi drank his drink and stood up to go, just to see what would happen.

What happened was that Dariusz and Max continued to stare off into their respective distances, considering the unfairness of Hindenberg and Poland’s attitude towards it. Rudi sat down again and looked at them.

“So here we are,” he said finally. “Two men with Polish passports who would find it difficult to get a visa to enter Hindenberg. And one Estonian who can practically walk across the border unmolested.”

Dariusz seemed to regain consciousness. His expression brightened. “Of course,” he said. “You’re Estonian, aren’t you.”

Rudi sucked his teeth and poured another drink.

“Rudi’s an
Estonian
, Max,” Dariusz said.

Rudi rubbed his eyes. “Is it,” he asked, “drugs?”

Dariusz looked at him, and for a moment Rudi thought that, under the correct circumstances, the little mafioso might be quite a scary person. “No,” said Dariusz.