“Let him through,” Marta said, and the official looked at her one more time and handed Rudi’s card back and Rudi wondered just what kind of arrangements the Zone had with the Czech Republic.
“Passport,” Marta said to him as the barrier slid aside.
Rudi smiled at her and walked away.
Ten metres along the tunnel, the guard at the Polish checkpoint examined his passport and enquired whether he had anything to declare. Rudi opened his rucksack and took out the bottles of Czech rum and Czech whisky he had brought with him, just in case the Package had needed a warming drink. The Customs man pulled a face.
“They all taste the same,” he said. “Christ only knows what they make them from.”
“They have great beer, though,” Rudi said, looking back along the tunnel. Marta was still standing at the Czech border post, a small figure in a big jacket. As he watched, she took her hand from her pocket and waved to him. In her hand was something small and green and rectangular.
“Happy New Year,” the guard said.
Rudi smiled at him. “And to you.” He laced up his rucksack again, slung it over his shoulder and walked away from the border.
APART FROM THE Polish street-names and shop signs, and a general air of dilapidation, there seemed very little difference between Cieszyn and its Czech counterpart. The snowy streets were busy with New Year revellers and people making their way to and from church. Rudi wandered along with them.
As he passed one church, he turned and pushed through the doors. The place was packed, and he had to stand at the back with a crowd of Poles, their feet squelching in melting slush. After a little while, Dariusz came in and stood beside him.
“They sold us to the Hungarians,” Rudi said quietly.
Dariusz shrugged. “Next time, they’ll sell the Hungarians to us,” he murmured. “The Zoners like to think they’re holier-than-thou, but they’re for sale like everyone else. It all equals out, in the end.”
Rudi looked at him. “They stole my passport.”
Dariusz nodded. “They always do that. We’ll get another one.”
“The Hungarians got the Package back.”
“That also happens sometimes.” He reached up and clapped Rudi on the shoulder. “You’re all right, though. That’s the important thing.”
“I’m not all right.”
“I know.” Dariusz looked sad. “I know. Let’s go home, eh?”
It was only later, sitting in the front seat of Dariusz’s Mercedes and watching the inadequately-cleared lanes of the motorway unwind towards Kraków, that Rudi put his hand in the pocket of his parka and realised that he had somehow left the hotel with Jan’s watch.
LEO’S LAST JUMP
1.
ON NOVEMBER 1, in defiance of global warming, a high pressure area swept down from Scandinavia, bearing on its close-packed isobars tiny particles of snow as hard as ground glass.
For three days, the many little states of Northern and Central Europe slowly disappeared beneath a coarse, glittering blanket. In some outlying or badly-administered areas, villages and sometimes even towns were cut off. People mostly battled to work, although in some places schools and offices were forced to close when their oil-fired boilers ran out of fuel because tankers were unable to get through to make deliveries.
At midnight on November 4, Mr Albrecht finished his shift and drove his creaky old orange tram into the new depot beside Potsdam-Stadt railway station.
For the past hour, the only other person on the tram had been a figure slumped in one of the rear seats, head leaning against the window, arms crossed over its chest, in an attitude of uncomfortable sleep.
Mr Albrecht left his driver’s cab, slung his satchel over one shoulder, and walked along the grime-spattered side of the tram to the rear doors.
Inside, he stood for a few moments looking down at his only passenger. The sleeping figure was bundled up in a long padded coat, its hem wet with slush and its hood pulled up. Within the hood, Mr Albrecht could see a scarf wrapped around the lower half of his passenger’s face. He reached down and took hold of one shoulder and shook gently.
“Hey, mate.”
The sleeping figure stirred. “Mm?”
“As far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome to stay,” said Mr Albrecht. “But this tram’s not going any further tonight.”
The figure looked up, blinked blearily. “Where?”
“Potsdam-Stadt depot.”
The eyes, which were all that Mr Albrecht could see, narrowed. “Shit. I was supposed to get off at Babelsberg. I have to get to Rosa Luxembourg Strasse.”
“You’ll have to get a taxi.”
The passenger shook his head. “I haven’t got any money for a taxi.”
Mr Albrecht sighed. He put his hand in his pocket and took out a folded five-mark note. “Here.” He pressed the note into his passenger’s gloved hand. “You can pay me back.” He gestured out into the big brightly-lit shed of the depot, the ranks of parked trams. “Just leave it at the main office and say it’s for Albrecht. Everyone knows me.”
The passenger mumbled thanks, took a big heavy-looking duffel bag from the floor under his seat, and got off the tram. Mr Albrecht watched him disappear by degrees into the white howl beyond the depot doors, and shook his head at the chances of finding a taxi in this weather.
It was almost one o’clock in the morning when he got back to his flat on Voltaire-Weg, overlooking the hated razor-wire border thrown up by those damned New Potsdamers to keep intruders out of their pocket kingdom, but his wife was still waiting, with the patience of long years’ experience, with his evening meal on the table.
Mr Albrecht had been asked never to speak of his other work, highly infrequent though it was, but he had sworn to himself on his wedding day that his would be a marriage without secrets, so when he had finished his meal and he was drinking a coffee he told his wife about the sleeping passenger he had driven to the depot.
“What was he like?” his wife asked.
Mr Albrecht had only seen the passenger’s eyes and heard his voice, but he had been driving a tram around Potsdam for twenty-three years and when you do that you see all types, and you learn some things.
“He was,” he said, “very young.”
IN A DOORWAY not far from the tram depot, Rudi took out the five-mark note the stringer on the tram had given him. Unfolding it, he tilted the note towards a streetlight’s illumination and squinted to read the time and place pencilled in tiny letters on its margin. Then he took a stamped and addressed envelope from his pocket, sealed the note inside, and left the doorway. On his way down the street, he dropped the envelope in a post box and let the German postal service dispose of the evidence.
OLDER THAN BERLIN by two centuries, Potsdam had started life as a Slavic fishing village on the banks of the River Havel. Its name – its Slavic name at any rate, Poztupimi – was first recorded when its charter was signed by Otto III in the year 993 AD.
Friedrich Wilhelm built himself a summer palace near the river in 1660, and linked it to Berlin with a road lined with lime trees. Frederick the Great gave the city Sanssouci, one of the age’s greatest palaces. In 1747, Bach came to play for him, and three years later he debated philosophy there with Voltaire.
Almost two centuries later, Allied bombers all but destroyed the heart of the town, and towards the end of the War Truman, Churchill, Stalin and Attlee met at the Schloss Cecilienhof and decided how postWar Germany should be parcelled out. Potsdam fell within the Soviet Sector, and in 1961 the Berlin Wall cut it off from the West, severing Friedrich Wilhelm’s road to Berlin where it crossed the Havel.