“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.
“Fissile material?”
Dariusz shook his head.
“Espionage?”
“Best you don’t know,” said Max.
“A favour,” Dariusz told him earnestly. “You do us a favour, we owe you a favour.” He smiled. “That can’t be entirely bad, can it?”
It could be bad in any number of unforeseen ways. Rudi silently cursed himself. He should have just served the food and gone home.
“How do I make the delivery?”
“Well,” Dariusz said, scratching his head, “that’s more or less up to you. And it’s not a delivery.”
LATER THAT NIGHT, stepping out of the shower, Rudi caught sight of himself in the mirror over the sink. He took a towel off the rail and stood looking at his reflection.
Well, there he was. A little shorter than average. Slim. Short mousy brown hair. Bland, inoffensive face; not Slavic, not Aryan, not anything, really. No sign of the Lapp heritage his father had always claimed for the family. Hazel eyes. The odd nick here and there, medals of his life as a chef. That scar on his forearm from an overturned wok in Vilnius, the one just above it from the time he slipped in the Turk’s kitchen in Riga and the paring knife he was carrying got turned around somehow and went straight through his uniform sleeve and the skin and muscle beneath.
“Don’t run in my kitchen!” the Turk had shouted at him. Then he had bandaged Rudi’s arm and called for an ambulance.
Rudi lifted his right hand above his head and turned so he could see the long curving scar that started just above his hipbone and ended beside his right nipple. Not a kitchen accident, this one. Skinheads, the day he tried to find work in Warnemünde. He still didn’t know whether they had meant to kill him or just scare him, and he thought that even they had not been sure. He had taken it as an omen that his wanderings along the Baltic coast were over, and he headed inland, first to Warsaw, then Kraków.