Dariusz paused. Then he said, “You’re angry, but I need to know what you told them.”
Rudi looked at him. “What?”
Dariusz reached out and touched his arm. “I need to know what you told them.”
“Fuck off, Dariusz.” Rudi turned away from him.
“It’s important,” Dariusz continued gently. “You don’t know much, but what you do know could compromise… certain things.”
Rudi turned back to look at him. “I kept your name out of it, if it’s any comfort. But I dropped Fabio in the shit as much as I possibly could.”
Dariusz sat back and nodded, as if hearing confirmation of something. “Something terrible has happened,” he said. “But it had nothing to do with the Coureurs. It was about as off-piste as it’s possible to be. You must understand that.”
“Must I?” Rudi struggled into a sitting position, punching the pillows down behind him. “Must I? You brought me a teacher and he almost got me killed. Must I understand that?”
“Fabio was operating outside orders,” said Dariusz. “He was running his own operation. What he did wasn’t sanctioned by Central. He took you into the Consulate as a patsy to gain time for his own dustoff.”
A patsy. “Well, great.”
Dariusz took his time asking his next question. He watched Rudi’s face. He looked around the room. He looked back at Rudi. He said, “Do you still want to be a Coureur?”
“I beg your pardon?” howled Rudi, loud enough to bring a brace of nurses running to see what all the fuss was about. By which time, of course, Dariusz was gone.
BORDERLIGHT
1.
“SMALL NATIONS ARE like small men,” said the cobbler. “Paranoid. Twitchy. Quick to anger.”
“Mm,” said Rudi.
“I wouldn’t call them nations anyway,” the cobbler went on. “Most of them break down after a year or so. Look at me. Don’t smile.” He pointed a little camera at Rudi, paused a moment to frame the shot, and took four pictures. The camera was cabled, along with a number of other little devices and anonymous boxes, into a battered-looking old Motorola phone. “Thank you. In my opinion they don’t have the right to call themselves nations until they’ve been about for a century or so.”
“Is this going to take long?” Rudi asked. “I have a train to catch.”
The cobbler looked at him. “Getting in and out of the Zone is child’s play,” he said soberly. “Residence visas and work permits are much more difficult.”
“I know,” said Rudi.
“My regular pianist wasn’t available; I had to hire someone out of my own pocket.”
“I’m sorry,” Rudi said, hoping the stand-in pianist was trustworthy.
The cobbler kept looking at him. “You’re very young.”
This seemed impossible to argue with. Rudi shrugged.
“Change the colour of your hair,” said the cobbler. “Grow a moustache.”
“I don’t have time to grow a moustache.”
“Well have your hair cut,” the cobbler said testily. “You have time to visit a barber? Alter your appearance somehow. No one ever looks exactly like their passport photograph; it makes immigration officers suspicious if they do.”
“Perhaps I could wear a hat,” said Rudi.
The cobbler looked at him for a few moments longer, then shook his head sadly. He went over to the phone and started to fiddle with its little roll-up tapboard. “And of course the Zone has these paper passports,” he said, looking intently at the phone’s screen. He shook his head at something, poked the tapboard several times. “Silicon is so much easier.”
“It’s supposed to be more difficult.”
The cobbler shook his head again. He rapped the phone with a knuckle. “With silicon, I can do everything in here. With paper… well, you must find the correct paper, the correct inks, the correct stamps… much more difficult.”
“Right,” said Rudi.
“My pianist took ten minutes to hack the Zone’s immigration computer and update your legend’s records. Where’s the security there?”
“Right,” said Rudi.
“Everyone should produce passports like this,” the cobbler went on. “Any pianist can hack a silicon passport, but it takes an artist to work with paper and ink.”
“Right,” said Rudi.
The cobbler glanced up from the screen. “You probably believe you know everything.”
“That’s the first time anyone’s accused me of that,” Rudi told him.
The window of the cobbler’s shop looked out over a landscape of sharply-pitched roofs broken by chimneypots and about a hundred different types of radio, television and satellite antennae. In the far distance, Rudi could see the cranes of the Gdańsk shipyards. The shipyards had gone bust sometime during the early part of the century, and the land was now occupied by trendy apartment blocks and studios for artists and those little design firms no one ever quite understands the purpose of. The cranes had been preserved, as historical monuments, although nobody could agree who was supposed to be maintaining them so they were slowly and quietly rusting away.
The cobbler’s shop itself was clearly one of Central’s myriad temporary spaces, rented by a stringer on a monthly basis for whatever brief occupancy circumstances dictated. A dusty boxroom right at the top of a tall brick-built rooming house, floored with lino that looked as if it dated back to the Second World War. A pile of teachests stacked over in one corner, an ancient wooden rocking-horse under the window. The cobbler’s equipment could be packed into two medium-sized attaché cases and moved from place to place as circumstances demanded. The cobbler himself was as anonymous as the room. Small, slight and middle-aged, with a receding hairline and battered, slightly old-fashioned clothes.
“You speak Estonian?” he asked, reading the laptop’s screen.
“I can get by,” said Rudi.
The cobbler nodded. “Your Polish is very good,” he said, looking at the screen again. “But you’re from up the coast somewhere; I can hear your accent.”
Rudi took a battered bentwood stool from a stack in the corner of the attic, set it right way up, sat down, and folded his hands in his lap.
“I know,” said the cobbler. “None of my business. Everyone in the Zone speaks English, anyway.” He took from his pocket a small parcel wrapped in what appeared to be chamois leather. Unwrapping it, he held up a thin little book with laurel-green covers. Its front cover was gold-stamped with an extremely stylised eagle and some writing.
“Worth more than its weight in gold,” he said. “Literally. Virgin; never used. Bring it back.”
“All right,” said Rudi.
The cobbler opened the passport and laid a thin sheet of transparent film over one of the pages. Then he fed the whole thing into one of the little boxes connected to the phone.
“We don’t get many of these,” he said, and Rudi wondered if he meant virgin passports or something else. He typed a couple of commands into the tapboard and a moment later the box ejected the passport. He stripped the film away and Rudi saw that his photograph and some printing were now embossed on the page.
“Actually,” he said, rooting around in one of his cases, “they’ve been very clever.”
Rudi tried to feign interest. “Oh?”
“Not many people these days have the paraphernalia to do work like this successfully.” He took from the case two stamps and two ink-pads. “I had to mix the inks myself. Specific fluorescences, magnetic particles. Very tricky.”