Europe in Autumn (22 page)

In the kitchen, Ivari and Frances were sitting on opposite sides of a pointed silence. Frances kept glaring. Ivari kept grimacing. Rudi walked through it and grabbed a mug from the draining board, filled it from the coffeemaker, and kept spooning sugar into it until he felt better. The remains of a loaf of rye bread sat on a board on the worktop. Rudi cut himself a slice.

“So,” he said, “how are we all?”

Frances made a snorting noise and, with a final glare at Ivari, got up and stormed out.

“I detect negative waves,” Rudi said. He took a bite out of the slice of bread.

Ivari looked at him and rubbed his eyes.

“What time did we go to bed?” asked Rudi.

Ivari shrugged.

“Don’t blame me,” Rudi said. “You’re the one who brought out the whisky.” He took another bite of bread, washed it down with a mouthful of coffee. “Is the old man up?”

“He’s been up for hours,” Ivari muttered. “He’s gone up to the coast.”

“You’re kidding.”

Ivari shook his head. “The old bastard isn’t human.”

Rudi leaned back against the worktop and nibbled his slice of bread. “Do you know where he went?”

“He took a Hummer and said he was going to have a look at the Gulf, that’s all,” Ivari said.

Rudi nodded. That at least sounded familiar. He swigged some more coffee. “Do you have any spare Hummers?”

Ivari turned to look at him. “They’re all out,” he said. “But a couple of the quad-bikes aren’t signed out today. You’re welcome to one of those.”

Rudi drained his mug. “Yes, well,” he said. “You could try to be a bit more supportive,
brother
,” he said.

Ivari gave a great hungover shrug.

A
QUAD-BIKE WAS
basically a car without any creature comforts. Or a motorcycle without the ever-present fear of losing one’s balance. Rudi had been riding them since he was fifteen years old. He checked one out of the visitor centre’s garage and gunned it up the trails through the forest towards the coast.

And there, at the end of the trail, on a promontory overlooking the Gulf of Finland, stood his father, like a figurehead.

“So, boy,” Toomas said in English.

“So, father,” Rudi replied in kind.

Toomas took a long deep breath, held it, and let it out. “Smell that?” he asked. His English was almost accentless. “No smell like the smell of the Baltic wind. Guaranteed to cure a hangover, every time.”

“You must come out here quite a lot, then,” said Rudi.

Toomas looked at him and smiled. “Very good,” he said. “You can do cynicism in English. Very hard to do cynicism well in a foreign language, you know.” He switched to French. “How about in French?”

“In French, I find I’m more laconic than cynical,” Rudi said in French.

“Of course, you’re a cook,” said Toomas. “You’d have to know French.”

“Well, I never worked under any French chefs, but I take your point.”

Toomas asked a nearly-unintelligible question in Lithuanian.

“
Paps
,” Rudi said, “you know I don’t speak Lithuanian.”

Toomas looked taken aback. “How am I supposed to know that?”

“Because I told you last night when you were holding up your part of the conversation in Lithuanian.”

“Ah. Okay.” Toomas went back to English. “But you’re good. You really are. You and I, we have an ear for languages. I’ll bet you speak pretty good German, too.”

“I’ve been practising a lot, recently. Some people say I sound
Berlinerische
, but I wouldn’t know about that.”

“You see? Ivari doesn’t have it. I love him like a son, but he’s hopeless with languages.”

“Ivari
is
your son, father. Unless there’s something else you haven’t been telling us all these years.”

Toomas waved it away. “A figure of speech.”

“One would hope.”

His father looked at him. “Why did you come back?”

“I missed you.”

Toomas nodded irritably. “Okay, okay, you can do cynicism in English. I got the point. Why did you come back?”

“I needed a break,” Rudi said, deploying the legend effortlessly. “I’ve been opening a new restaurant in Berlin and things got a bit hectic. I was starting to shout at the kitchen crew.” He shrugged. “Time to take a few days off.”

“Your own restaurant?”

Rudi shook his head. “My employer’s. In Poland.”

“A Pole is opening a restaurant in Berlin?”

“Max thought it was time to repay the favour for 1939. He’s Silesian, anyway. That’s sort of German.”

Toomas rubbed his face. “You see, I can’t understand why you wound up there when there are perfectly adequate restaurants in Estonia.”

“Well, that’s the important phrase, isn’t it? ‘Perfectly adequate.’ Not ‘really excellent.’”

“Will you invite me to the grand opening?”

“Would you come?”

“To Germany?” Toomas made a spitting sound.

“Well then.”

Toomas looked out over the Gulf of Finland and took another deep breath. “I suppose Ivari told you.”

“Told me what, father?”

Toomas looked at him. “Don’t do that ‘told me what, father?’ You’re not a good liar.”

“I certainly didn’t inherit
that
from you.”

His father grinned. “I’ll bet you thought that would make me angry, eh?”

“I’ll bet it does, too. You’re just a better liar than me.”

The grin went away. “We’re fighting for our very existence here.”

“Oh, please.”

“Really. It’s not like things were when we first came here. Governments always loved the park, they gave us anything we wanted. They understood it’s the heart of every Estonian.”

Rudi snorted. “It’s a very large and picturesque area of otherwise not very useful land, father.”

Toomas thumped his chest. “The heart!” he cried.

Rudi looked out over the sea.

“But now we have this band of brigands in Tallinn,” Toomas went on. “All they see is an opportunity to suck us dry for their own benefit.”

“You’re just pissed off because they won’t give you everything you want, old man,” Rudi said. “I know how you work.”

His father shook his head. “We get a UN Heritage Grant. Or we should. I know how much that grant is, to the penny. It’s been two years since we saw any of it. And it hasn’t been for want of asking.”

Rudi glanced at him. “You’re sure?”

“Do me a favour. I trained as an accountant.”

“You trained as an architect.”

“And some time after that I trained as an accountant. Don’t look at me like that. I know how to read a balance sheet. I asked the UN Heritage Organisation for their disbursements and they emailed them back to me the same day. I asked the Ministry about them and I still haven’t heard back.” Toomas hard-landed a fist in his palm. “It’s graft on a colossal scale. It’s a national disgrace.”

“So go to court.”

“In this fucking country?” Toomas yelled. He waved the prospect away. “Please, don’t mention that again.”

“This fucking country being the country you love so much, and everything.”

Toomas drew himself up to his full height and adjusted the bill of his baseball cap. The Aeroflot logo protruded from his forehead like the horn of a mythical beast. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.

“If you
really
knew what I was thinking, you’d already be running,” said Rudi.

Toomas ignored him. “You’re thinking this is the last act of a lonely, bitter old man, a last stab for immortality after a wasted life.”

Rudi shrugged. “Crossed my mind,” he admitted.

“And there’s some currency in that,” Toomas admitted. He spread his hands. “I mean, how much longer do I have, realistically?”

“Stop that,” Rudi snapped. “Just stop it. I’ve been listening to that bullshit since I was eight years old and I don’t have to listen to it any more.”

Toomas sighed. Then he sighed again, and for a long time he didn’t say anything and they stood side by side watching the Baltic lap unhurriedly at the edge of their homeland.

“I love it here,” Toomas said finally, and it was as though all the bullshit had been stripped from his voice. “I spent my entire life looking for somewhere to belong, and I found it here. And we had a lot of good years after that. And then the pirates moved in. They’ve been nibbling away at the edges of the park for the past two years. New towns, developments, sports arenas. Nothing I say does any good, the land just gets eaten up, year after year, hectare by hectare. One day there’ll be nothing but a line of hotels where we’re standing now. It’ll all be gone. Because greedy men came to power in Tallinn.
They
don’t care about our heritage. All
they
care about is their foreign partners, the ones who are coming in to build the sports arenas and the hotels. We’re just an irrelevance. Something to be swept aside in the name of
progress
.”

Rudi looked about him. “You’d have to be out of your mind to build an hotel here,” he said.

Toomas shook his head. “That’s not you talking,” he said. “That’s how you feel about
me
talking.”

Rudi thought about it. “Fair point,” he said finally. “So this is why you want to secede.”

Toomas pouted. “No one listens, boy.”

“I do wish you’d stop calling me
boy
, you know?”

“No one listens,
Rudi
,” Toomas said loudly. “So I’m going to take it away from them.”

Rudi scratched his head. “If what you say is true and so much money’s at stake here, they’ll try to stop you.”

“Oh, that’s started already.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes. We’ve had some vandalism in the park over the past few weeks. Nothing dreadful, certainly nothing we haven’t had before from drunken lads out on a dare, but this is different. It’s too careful, too well-executed. It’s not about to make me stop, and
they
know that. It isn’t supposed to make me stop; it’s just to open a conversation with me, let me know they’re ready and waiting.”

Rudi looked at him. “People are going to get hurt.”

“Is that supposed to deter me?”

“Well, it might make most normal people at least stop and think about what they were doing, but no, I was just stating a fact. People
are
going to get hurt if this thing goes any further.”

Toomas rammed his fists into the pockets of his parka hard enough for Rudi to hear stitching break. He walked away a few steps.

“It’s the
government
, Dad,” said Rudi. “They can’t get the Ministry to fire you because that would be too obvious, but there’s a lot of other stuff they can do. You have no idea.”

“Maret found child pornography on our computer,” said Toomas.

Rudi regarded his father levelly.

“Oh,” Toomas waved his hand irritably, “
not
mine. Planted there. Another part of the conversation.”

“What did you do?”

Toomas shrugged. “Formatted the drives and then took them out and physically destroyed them.”

“I hope you destroyed them thoroughly.”

“I put them through a woodchipper.”

“That’ll do it,” Rudi allowed.

Toomas glared at him. “You’re enjoying this.”

“It’s not without its humorous side, but no, I’m not really enjoying it. That won’t be the end of it, you know. There’ll be some stuff in secure online storage somewhere that leads back to you, with passwords only you’d know.”

“I know. They were just letting me know it’s ready and waiting for them to use to discredit me, if they think they have to.” Toomas sighed. “Maret... Maret said she believed me when I told her I knew nothing about it. She said she believed me when I told her it was planted there. But I saw the look in her eyes, and she wasn’t sure.”

“Oh.” Rudi scowled and rubbed his face.

“Those motherfuckers have come between me and my partner,” said Toomas. “Coming after me, I could accept that. I’m a big boy now and I know the rules of the game. But involving Maret...” He shook his head. “No. I won’t stand for that.”

“It might have been a move to provoke you into doing something stupid,” Rudi warned. “Make you do most of their work for them.”

“Why would they care about that? They have plenty of resources.”

“It limits their exposure. The less they have to do, the less there is for nosey journalists to discover after it’s all over.”

Toomas’s shoulders slumped. “So what should I do?”

“About the pornography? There’s nothing you
can
do. There’s no way to find it because we don’t know where it is. We can’t just google your name and ‘child pornography’ and there it’ll be, sitting on a server in a cupboard in Dushanbe or Buenos Aires. You’ll have to be proactive. Write to the news channels. Tell them what you found on your computer. Tell them you suspect there’s another stash out there, just waiting to be ‘found’ to blacken your name.”

“They’ll deny it.”

“Of course. But it makes it a little harder for them to suddenly ‘find’ it and make it look credible. And it gets you into the conversation.” Rudi ran a hand through his hair. “Listen to me. I came out here to talk you out of this madness and I’m giving you advice instead.”

“Can you and your friends help?”

Rudi felt a chill touch him. “I’m a chef, Dad. Most of my friends are chefs. We could do the catering for you.”

“Frances says you’re with Intelligence.”

Oh, so
that
was it. He breathed a barely-detectable sigh of relief and then burst into real laughter. “No, Dad, I’m not with Intelligence. I just cook food.”

Toomas’s face fell. “I thought...”

“No,” said Rudi, for the first time in many years feeling anything approaching sympathy for his father. “Just a cook.”

Toomas grimaced. “Ach, you’d have to say that.”

Rudi spread his hands in exasperation. “Just a cook,” he said again. “And if I
were
with Intelligence, I’d be working for the Government and I’d be the very last person you’d want to ask for help.”

“So it’s true? You’re a cuckoo in my nest, then?”

Rudi slapped his forehead. “Dad,
no
! I
don’t
work for Intelligence. I’m a
chef.
” He rubbed his eyes. “The only way to get out of this thing is to stop it.”

Toomas shook his head. “Won’t happen.”