Europe in Autumn (35 page)

The Grandsons had reversed that. They had reopened the kindergartens, turned the cafés into spartan but passable canteens. They had even taken down the shutters on some of the shops, mainly to use them as fronts for fencing stolen goods or marketing drugs. With a potential army of almost two thousand people ready to repel any action by the authorities, the
polizei
were reluctant to intervene and start a war, so the shops flourished. Outwardly, the Municipality had come back to life in rather sprightly fashion. You just had to ignore the all pervading air of criminality.

Hearing something behind him, the Kapitan turned in his seat and looked across the refectory, but could see no one. Just ranks of empty chairs and tables.

He finished his coffee and took the cup back to the counter – discipline in all things – and went down ten flights of stairs to the building’s foyer. The foyer was dimly lit by battery-powered lanterns – the great glass wall which had given a view out onto the central space of the development had been boarded up and barricaded and reinforced – and a team was stationed there at all times with a Gatling railgun in case the Revisionists tried a frontal assault. All the windows on the lower floors – up as high as the fifth floor – had been bricked up and the rooms sown with antipersonnel mines. The Kapitan presumed Twenty had ordered similar measures on the other side of the Parade Ground. He chatted with the railgun team, offered some words of encouragement, made sure they were being well-supplied with food and coffee, and moved on across the foyer to a set of stairs leading down to the basement.

The ground under the blocks was wormed with networks of utility tunnels and rooms. At one time they had all connected up, so one could move from block to block without ever seeing daylight. In the wake of the outbreak of hostilities, the Kapitan had ordered large amounts of builder’s rubble to be trucked in and piled up in the tunnels leading to the Revisionists’ blocks, and here too he had stationed railgun teams. As in the foyer, he spoke with each of the teams, hearing their reports – Twenty’s people periodically tried to clear a way through the piles of brick and earth and concrete filling the tunnels – and here too he had the itchy sensation that he was being followed.

Finally fed up with it, he went up to the twentieth floor of Building 1 and consulted with Doktor Rock.

“It’s hardly a surprise,” said Doktor Rock. “You barely sleep, you don’t eat properly, and your enemies are trying to kill you. A little paranoia’s to be expected.”

Kapitan Todt shifted uncomfortably on the chair in the doctor’s consulting room – a former hairdressing salon. “Can you give me something for it?”

“Almost certainly. You probably wouldn’t be able to function effectively for days afterward, though.”

“Fuck you.”

“And fuck you too, Kapitan.” Doktor Rock was sixteen years old, his face inflamed with acne. He took out a small joint and lit it – as the only doctor in the building he was exempted from the rules about on-duty substance abuse. It was the only way he could keep going. “Alternatively, I prescribe a holiday.”

The Kapitan snorted. “Malta?” The doctor was obsessed with Malta, for some reason.

The doctor inhaled on his spliff, held the smoke for longer than was probably medically advisable, and breathed out. “There are worse places.”

“I should hear your report, while I’m here.”

Doktor Rock sat back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk. “I’m short of everything. End of report.”

The Kapitan looked levelly at the doctor.

The doctor sighed. “Field dressings,” he said. “I have none left; we’re tearing up T-shirts and boiling them to make them sterile. Antibiotics. Hardly any. Surgical sutures – well, let’s just say that I’d rather no one needed surgery. Painkillers. Rationed. Anaesthetics. Ditto.”

“Noted. What about the general health of the population?”

The doctor looked at him. “When did we last have one of these little chats?”

“Last week.”

“Well, nothing much has changed since then, Kapitan.” He took his feet down off the desk and leaned forward. “I expect to start seeing scurvy quite soon. It’s a miracle we haven’t had typhus and cholera yet, but when they start they’ll go through the blocks like a fire through a dry eucalyptus forest. Pubic lice are at epidemic levels. I’m noticing a lot of nervous skin complaints, insomnia, short tempers, listlessness...” He sighed. “This has gone on too long. People are just falling ill from being cooped up in this place. Eventually we’ll have cases of rickets among the children, and then, dear Kapitan, I am off.”

Kapitan Todt regarded the doctor for a long while. Despite his youth, Doktor Rock was a more than competent medic. He and his team of ad hoc nurses worked tirelessly. “We need one last decisive strike,” he said.

The doctor looked exasperated. “I can’t treat the casualties from
any
kind of strike, Kapitan. Haven’t you been listening? We’ve reached a point where even something as straightforward as a burst appendix will be fatal because I just won’t be able to operate, or give even the basics of post-operative care. If you’re planning some kind of
strike
, better make sure none of our people gets hurt.” He stubbed the joint out in an old tobacco tin on the table. “And you’d better win.”

L
UNCH WAS A
solitary bratwurst, eaten at his desk, with another cup of coffee. Food was running low; it was days since he had been able to spare anyone for a foraging expedition. The sausage was of poor quality. One of the kitchen staff knew some English and joked with him that they were ‘down to the worst of the wurst.’ The Kapitan made a mental note to move the man to a work gang.

He finished his sausage, drank his coffee, then sat up straight behind the desk and said, “I know you’re there. Show yourself.” It was, if anything, an act of absurd faith.

But it was rewarded. A patch of shadow in one corner of the room rippled and shimmered, and all of a sudden a figure was standing there, apparently dressed in rags and an unusual-looking motorcycle helmet. It moved its hands and from the folds of the rags emerged the muzzle of a small semiautomatic rifle.

“Not a move,” said the figure quietly. “Not a sound.”

The Kapitan sat where he was and prepared to die.

“Florian Grüber,” the figure said. “Styling himself Kapitan Todt.”

“Yes,” said Kapitan Todt.

“I’ve been sent to help you escape from here.”

The Kapitan processed this statement. Apparently he wasn’t going to die just yet. He said, “If you’re the chef, you’re more than a year late.”

The figure removed its helmet, revealing the face of a young man, his brown hair tousled. “What?”

There had been a point, a day or so into the civil war, when he had believed that he was going to lose, and the Coureurs had become a real option. He had no qualms about this; he needed to survive, to recover and regroup, if he was to finally defeat Twenty.

The Swimmer had counselled patience. “Let me set it up for you, Florian,” he said. “I know how to do this kind of thing.”

And so the Swimmer had made connections and organised things, and Kapitan Todt had waited and waited, and the Coureurs didn’t come but some victories did. Now, he was in a position to make off from the Municipality himself, any time he wanted. He thought he might even be able to get across the Greater German border into Switzerland, where he had family. Thoughts of daring Coureur-aided escapes had faded from his mind. And now here was one of them, standing before him.

“The Swimmer wants to talk to you,” he said.

The Coureur raised his gun. “I want to know what’s going on.”

“The Swimmer will tell you. May I stand up?” When the Coureur made no response, the Kapitan said, “All I have to do is raise my voice and a dozen armed people will come in here and kill you.”

“Not if I kill you first, you scumbag.”

The Kapitan shrugged, but he stood up anyway. “You were supposed to be here more than a year ago. What happened?”

“I got sidetracked. Who’s the Swimmer?”

“I’ll take you to him. You might want to... disappear again first, though. I’d find it hard to explain you.”

The Coureur thought about it. Then he put his helmet back on, seemed to
shrug
, and vanished into the shadows once again. “I’ll be right behind you,” said his voice from the corner of the room.

“Good. Follow me, please.”

T
HERE WAS A
room deep in the heart of Building 2. It had once been a community centre, a space big enough for parties and dances and the like. The Kapitan had ordered it reinforced to what some of his people privately regarded as a ridiculous degree. Deep courses of reinforced brickwork and breezeblocks had been laid inside the existing walls and on the floor. Thick plastic sheeting had been stapled over every flat surface and then sprayed with a thick, durable layer of white paint, and into this newly-white and well-nigh impregnable room they had installed the Swimmer.

He lay in the middle of the room in a glass-walled tank filled with a clear medicated gel. Almost every inch of his body was terribly burned, and the machines and devices and bottles of fluid and gas which kept him alive lined the walls, clear plastic tubes running everywhere across the floor. A bulky mask was strapped to his face, feeding some kind of oxygenated fluid into his ruined lungs.

Only Kapitan Todt and the doctor had keys to this reinforced room. The Kapitan let himself in, stepped inside to allow the invisible Coureur to enter, then closed and locked the door behind them.

“He finally turned up, Uncle,” he said.

Behind him, the Coureur shimmered into visibility again and took off his helmet. A few seconds later a synthesised voice from a pair of speakers beside the tank said, “Well, you took your time about it,
cook
.”

The Coureur stared at the tank. “
Fabio
?”

T
HE
S
WIMMER HAD
come to the Municipality at an inauspicious time. The Kapitan had been watching Twenty closely for years, and he saw the signs. His lieutenant was schmoozing other members of the hierarchy, whispering in ears, making promises.
Anschluss
, the Kapitan’s late father would have called it. Tensions between the two men had been heightening for weeks. The Kapitan was starting to believe that the only way he could possibly survive this situation was to make a bold statement, drive Xavier into the ground like a tentpeg.

And then, late one night, a large van had turned up at Building 1, and inside, accompanied by several large, silent men, was the Swimmer, encased in a kind of gel-filled transparent body-bag, clearly close to death. He had a voice-synthesising computer which he somehow controlled by eye movement, and using this he was able to make his demands.

When the Kapitan called his senior officers together to tell them of the situation, Xavier was having none of it. The Kapitan over-ruled him and made arrangements to have the Swimmer installed in Building 2, and Xavier and his co-conspirators attempted a coup.

“Twenty didn’t want anything to do with this,” said the Kapitan. “He said it was
espionage
. He said it would bring down on us all kinds of unwanted attention. Really, though, all he wanted was an excuse to try and take over.”

The Coureur was sitting on an old kitchen stool in front of the tank, where the Swimmer could see him by using a mirror strung overhead. He seemed to be in the grip of several powerful emotions at the same time.

“What the hell happened to you?” he said.

There was a pause, while the Swimmer’s eyes picked out the words. Then the speakers said, “I was
fired
.” And then they made a horrible noise which the Kapitan had decided was laughter. When that died away, the Swimmer said, “I was made an example of. I wasn’t supposed to survive, of course, but I’m not without resources.”

The Coureur appeared to be at a loss for words.

“I won’t apologise for what happened to you in Poznań,” the Swimmer continued. “That would be an insult to your intelligence. There was something I needed at the Consulate, and you were a means to obtaining it.”

“You utter
bastard
,” said the Coureur. “They nearly killed me.”

“It was a chance I needed to take. It was nothing personal.”

“You set up this jump too, didn’t you. Off-piste. For him.” He gestured at the Kapitan.

“My sister’s boy. Little Florian. She married an Austrian. A bad lot. He gave me shelter when I was in need; it was the least I could do to try and help him. Tell me, why has it taken you fifteen months to get here? I taught you better than that.”

The Coureur stared at the burned man in the tank. He said, “I was in New Potsdam. I got a crash message for a new Situation. I was supposed to meet up with a partner. When I found him he’d been murdered. I went to ground and things have been going very wrong for me ever since. Is this all to do with
you
?”

“And it’s taken you this long to find out what the Situation was? I really am disappointed.”

“Fabio, you prick, I’ve been running all over Europe. I’ve been kidnapped. My brother’s been killed. My life has been destroyed. Is this all to do with you?”

“I took three proofs from the Consulate,” said the Swimmer. “Florian knows where they are. He’ll give you the key. Use them as you see fit. Powerful people want these things, want to know how to use them, want to stop them being used. I place them in your hands. Now go. Take Florian with you; he’s a criminal little shit with the morals of a slime mould but he’s still family.”

“No,” said the Coureur. “No. I’m not moving from this stool until you explain this to me.”

“No explanations,” said the Swimmer. “You wouldn’t believe me. You have to see it for yourself.”

“See what? What do I have to see? Who did this to you?”

“Central wanted the proofs. They wanted to stop them falling into the wrong hands. I wouldn’t tell them where they were.”

“Wrong hands? Whose?”

“Yours, for one. Now go.”

The Coureur glared at him, then tipped his head slightly to one side. His eyes unfocused and he seemed to be listening. Then he said, to no one in particular, “All right, we’re coming out.” He looked at the Kapitan. “Your little bum-boy’s decided to make a move in broad daylight.”