THE INDEPENDENT SILESIAN State of Hindenberg – formerly the Polish cities of Opole and Wrocław (formerly the German cities of Opeln and Breslau – formerly the Prussian towns of… etc, etc) and the areas around them – existed as a kind of Teuton island in a Slavic sea. Poland, having been forced by the EU, UN and NATO to accede to an ethnic Silesian homeland, had refused to cede more territory to give the young state a land-bridge to Greater Germany. Hindenberg had responded by imposing draconian visa requirements for Poles, to which Poland had responded by pegging the exchange rate of the złoty and the Hindenberg mark artificially low.
There had been border disputes, frontier actions, Polish war games within yards of Hindenberg’s border fence. Hindenberg unofficially offered its services as a haven for some of Poland’s wealthier and more powerful mafia bosses, and refused to sign an extradition treaty with its Slavic neighbour.
The latest tit-for-tat involved Hindenberg’s railway authority changing the state’s track gauge. The Polish response had been to embargo postal deliveries to the Silesian state.
Eventually, accepted wisdom suggested, things would settle down. Until then, Poles wishing to visit Hindenberg had to pay thousands of złotys and wait six months for a visa, Hindenbergers visiting Poland found that one H-Mark was worth about four groszy, Polish trains could not run across Hindenberg on their way to Poznań and the Greater German border, and postal deliveries into Hindenberg were in a state of chaos.
While the Poles and the Hindenbergers squabbled, telephone and data cable lines were tapped or cut altogether and radio, television and satellite frequencies were scrambled. Nobody living within five kilometres of the Polish side of the frontier could watch television or use any kind of wifi.
Rudi thought it was a ludicrous but somehow very Polish state of affairs. There was an old saying that the Poles weren’t truly happy unless someone was telling them what to do. Rudi had observed that what actually made Poles happy was listening to someone telling them what to do, and then doing the exact opposite.
BAHNHOF BRESLAU WAS full of light, a colossal wedge of glass and tubular steel inserted into the heart of the old Polish-German city. It was awesomely clean. Rudi actually heard his footsteps echo on the marble floor as he walked from the platform to the main entrance. Just outside the automatic doors, he stopped and stared.
It wasn’t just the station. The whole city was full of light.
Though Greater Germany had given up its constitutional claim to the lands in Western Poland long ago, there was a tacit understanding that Berlin was in fact quite pleased that the ethnic Silesians had finally found a home. Greater Germany was no longer quite as great as it once was, having begun to fission into ever-smaller and progressively more anarchic autonomous regions, so the prospect of extending German influence eastward seemed rather attractive. So much so that a very large amount of D-Marks had found their way into the Hindenberg National Bank, and the Hindenbergers had used them to erase Polish Wrocław and start again.
So Breslau – and Opole, and much of the land inbetween – strongly resembled Berlin; a great mass of office buildings and apartment buildings, interspersed with what mementoes of Prussian architecture had survived two world wars, fifty years of Communist occupation and six decades of Polish administration. The road in front of the station was bustling with cars and buses, and across the road rose the shining monolith of a Marriott. Rudi thought that pretty much said it all; when the hotel chains moved in you could more or less bet that a polity was there to stay.
A line of BMW taxis stood waiting outside the station. Rudi got into one and gave the driver the name of the hotel where he had booked a room for the night, and the car quietly whisked him away.
RUDI HAD READ his share of spy thrillers, so the situation he found himself in seemed familiar. More than familiar, actually; it smacked of cliché. Cloak and dagger, clandestine meetings on darkened streets in Central Europe. He didn’t feel nervous, particularly. Faintly embarrassed, perhaps, but not nervous.
When the taxi turned onto Freytag Allee, not far from the hotel, Rudi leaned forward from the back seat and said, “Tell you what, mate, drop me here. I can walk the rest of the way.”
The driver pulled over to the side of the road, then turned in his seat and looked at Rudi around the head-rest.
“I’m here on holiday,” Rudi said. “It seems stupid to drive everywhere.”
“There’ve been a lot of muggings around here recently,” the driver said, not sounding particularly concerned.
“I heard that Hindenberg had conquered crime.”
The driver laughed. “That’s good,” he said, taking Rudi’s fare. “Conquered crime. Very good.” He was still laughing as he drove off, leaving Rudi standing on the pavement. Rudi waited until the taxi turned a corner. Then he walked back up the street.
Freytag Allee was not, he was delighted to find, that darkened street in Central Europe. It was a brightly-lit shopping street, and it was still busy with pedestrians and traffic. Everyone seemed well-dressed and prosperous and happy, which was not what he was used to in Kraków. Rudi wandered along, looking in shop windows, not hurrying. He stood for five minutes in front of a Peugeot dealership, behind whose faintly-green bulletproof glass windows stood a dozen immaculately-clean cars. He looked at the prices, did the conversion from marks to złotys, and estimated that he would have to work in Max’s kitchen for the next hundred and fifteen years if he wanted to buy a Peugeot in Hindenberg.
He wandered on, taking his time. A little further on, about a hundred paperscreen televisions were stuck to the inside of a huge window, all of them tuned to the same football match. From the shirts the players were wearing, Rudi gathered it was the Hungary-England international, and from the action on the pitch and on the terraces he gathered it was a spectacularly ill-tempered game.
After about five minutes, a man came along the street and stood beside him, and together they watched the match.
“That was never a goal,” the man said in German after a while.
“It might have been,” Rudi said. “I don’t think anybody understands the offside trap any more.”
“That’s true,” the man conceded. “I certainly don’t.”
Rudi glanced sideways, saw a stout, bulky figure well wrapped up against the cold evening. He was wearing a long overcoat with its collar turned up, and a hat with a broad brim pulled down over his brows. He also appeared to be wearing a scarf wrapped around his neck and lower face, so that all Rudi could see of him were his eyes and his body language.
“This is a very sad city,” said the man.
“Many cities are,” Rudi agreed, as Dariusz had told him to.
The bulky figure beside him seemed to relax. “Fifty-seven,” he said.
“Fifty-seven,” Rudi repeated.
The man put his hands in his pockets and started to walk away. After a few steps, he stopped, turned, and looked at Rudi.
“You’re very young,” he said.
Rudi tried to remember whether Dariusz had given him a response for this particular phrase. He decided that it was actually a bona fide scrap of conversation, and he found to his surprise that he was completely flatfooted by it. “I’m sorry,” he said.