There was a discreet knock at the door. Rudi turned at the sound, and when he didn’t say anything the knock sounded again. Obviously, they knew he was up and about, but they were determined to be polite. He said, “Hello?”
He didn’t hear a key turn in the lock. The door opened and a young woman wheeled a trolley covered with a grey sheet into the room. She had auburn hair tucked up in a bun and an outdoorsy flush to her cheeks. She was wearing a long fawn corduroy skirt and a white blouse clasped at the throat with a silver brooch in the shape of a little owl. She was smiling sunnily.
“Morning,” she said breezily. “How are we feeling today?”
Rudi hurriedly ran through the options, loaded his English with an Estonian accent and his body language with as much outrage and confusion as he could, and said, “Who are you? Where am I? What are you doing with me?”
The woman just kept smiling and wheeled the trolley into the middle of the room, where she removed the sheet. On the top was a small soup tureen, a bowl and a spoon. On the shelf underneath were some cloth packages.
“You must be hungry, you poor thing,” she said. “We thought you’d like some chicken soup.”
“Who are you?” he said again. “What is this place? What do you want?”
“Oh, you don’t need to worry about any of those things,” she said cheerfully as she ladled soup into the bowl and carried it over to a table by one of the windows. The soup smelled wonderful, but Rudi stayed where he was.
“I don’t want soup,” he said. “I want to know what’s going on. Why am I being kept prisoner here? Who are you?”
“You can call me Jane, if you like,” she said. She turned from the table. “You should eat, you know. Keep your strength up.”
“I’m not hungry,” he said, although he was.
“You can cook something for yourself, of course,” said Jane. “We just thought you’d prefer something made for you this morning.”
Rudi took a deep breath. “Who are you?” he yelled. “What is happening?”
Jane looked so sad that Rudi immediately felt guilty for shouting at her. She looked as if she was about to burst into tears. “Look, if you don’t want the soup…” Her bottom lip actually trembled.
Rudi sighed. “Yes. Yes, I want the soup. Thank you. Sorry.”
Her smile brightened a little, as if someone had turned an invisible rheostat up a degree or so. “That’s the way,” she said, in a subdued-sounding voice.
“I want to know what’s happening to me,” he said more calmly.
“Of course you do. And someone will be in to tell you soon. I promise.” She moved away from the table and went past him to the door, giving him a wide berth as she did so and not meeting his eyes. “There are some clean clothes on the trolley,” she added. “I’ll be in later to clear the soup things away.” And she let herself out.
After she had gone, Rudi stood for a while where he was in the middle of the room, trying to parse what had just happened. He seemed to have been completely disarmed by a teary English girl. He wondered whether he was still drugged.
He went to the door and tried to open it, but the handle wouldn’t turn, though he hadn’t heard it being locked. He sighed and went over to the table, picked up the spoon, and looked at the bowl of chicken soup. It was clear and golden, with just a sheen of fat on the surface, and tiny fragments of carrot and swede and celeriac floating in it. He dipped the spoon into it and lifted it to his lips. It was the best chicken soup he had ever tasted. Possibly the best chicken soup that had ever been made. He sat down and started to eat.
THE CLOTHES TURNED out to be a beautifully-cut pair of jeans, boxer shorts, socks, a plain black T-shirt, and a light-grey fleece that zipped up the front. They were the best-fitting clothes he had ever worn, and that was starting to become irritating. A part of his mind was delirious with pleasure at all this fantastic stuff. Another part was annoyed by the thought that while he was unconscious someone must have poked and prodded and measured him in order to outfit him this well. Another part was actually quite angry, now he thought about it, to be so transparently manipulated. And even more angry to discover how easily he could be bought by a comfortable bed.
He ate the entire tureen of soup with several thick slices of rye bread. It crossed his mind, halfway through the third bowl, that the soup might be drugged, but by then it was too late and he considered the possibility of being drugged worth it just to eat this marvellous soup. When it was finished, he dressed. Then he wandered around the suite again.
At the entertainment centre, he waved up the interface again and went through the most common hacks he could remember. They would be expecting him to do this, so there was no point not bothering. None of the hacks worked. None of them confirmed his location; none of them allowed him to phone or email or SMS or tweet out. None of them allowed him to post on any bulletin board or social network.
He gave up and tried the news. There was what appeared to be local rolling news, and yes, it did appear to be in Finnish. Although there were also American, French, Italian, German, Spanish and British channels, and none of them seemed to have been assigned a priority.
He sketched a menu ring in the air in front of him, put his finger through it, pulled down, and on the screen a white infosheet dropped down with a list of options, all in English. He pointed at ‘Internet’ and Google came up as the homepage, along with a keyboard representation. He cocked his hands in front of him and air-typed ‘Palmse.’
There were reports – not very many and mostly on Estonian news sites – of the riot at the Conference Centre. The Government were presenting it as a bunch of proto-separatist thugs smashing up the Conference Centre as an act of defiance against Tallinn. A few bloggers – citizen news gatherers, in modern coinage – were posting their suspicions that the ‘proto-separatist thugs’ had actually been bussed into Palmse by the Government to break up the meeting. One, who called himself ironrabbit – Rudi was fairly sure it was a young man – even said he had interviewed one of the rioters, who had told him they had been paid for their efforts that evening. Ironrabbit hadn’t posted anything since then.
As leader of the proto-separatists, his father featured quite heavily, at least in the local news stories. They all got his age wrong and one spelled his surname incorrectly. He was in hospital with serious but not life-threatening injuries. Of Ivari, not a word. Rudi checked the park’s website, but the news section hadn’t been updated for over a month. He googled Ivari’s name. Nothing but a few pages of old photographs of his brother with various celebrities in the Park, pointing into a mythical distance and looking intrepid. He looked at the photographs for a while. Then he closed everything down and went and stood at one of the windows. It had started to snow again.
BY THE THIRD day, he was bored.
It was all very well shouting at young English people and demanding answers and being difficult, but the whole act just bounced right off them. They were so painfully polite that he felt bad about offending them. Some of the girls became teary. It was utterly surreal, and in the end quite pointless.
Finally, he said to Jane, who had come to the suite to inquire whether he needed anything, “All right. I am a Coureur. I would like to speak with a representative of my organisation. A man named Kaunas, if at all possible.”
She didn’t reply, other than with her usual pleasantries, but an hour later a response arrived, in the serene, pudgy, septuagenarian shape of a gentleman who introduced himself as Gibbon and who settled himself into one of the armchairs in Rudi’s suite, unzipped one of those old-fashioned leather document folders, extracted an antique fountain pen, and blinked at him.