“Perhaps the key will turn up further on in the text itself,” Lev theorised. “Although that would be quite unsecure.” He added, “I don’t want you to think I’m milking this job.”
Rudi broke into a broad smile. “Why on Earth would I think that?”
Lev gestured at the decrypts.
Rudi shook his head. “Whatever is going on here, it’s not your fault, Lev. Stay around; let’s see if we can make any sense of this, okay?”
Lev nodded. “Okay.”
ALTHOUGH MAKING SENSE of it was easier said than done. The Gazetteer ended, and the notebook began to yield up a history and description of a country which did not exist.
Taking as its jumping-off point the typewritten fiction which Lev had first translated, the notebook’s unknown writer went on to speak of a nation he called The Community. The Community was the Whitton-Whytes’ greatest dream, a country mapped over the top of the whole of Europe and entirely populated by Englishmen. It sounded like the setting for an enormous Agatha Christie mystery, all county towns and vicarages and manor houses. Rudi thought it was a blessing that Fabio hadn’t lived to see just how worthless his great prize had been.
On the other hand…
Lev’s laptop delivered three pages of decrypts a day. After the twelfth day, Rudi began to feel a vague unease, and for no reason he could have articulated and against Lev’s loud protests, he booked them out of the hotel and moved them to another island.
A week later, he located the source of his unease.
One night, going through the contents of the burnbox, he took out the map of the Line again, rolled it out onto the floor of their room, weighted the corners down with ashtrays and beer bottles, and got down on hands and knees to examine it properly.
He had, he realised, been going about this the wrong way. Fabio had risked his life – had risked both their lives – to steal what appeared to be a perfectly standard map, one you could buy at most post offices in most countries. Fabio was eccentric and irresponsible, but he was not stupid. Therefore, it must not be a perfectly standard map. This much should have been obvious to him immediately, and probably would have been if the decrypts hadn’t captured so much of his attention.
“I’m ashamed of myself,” he told Lev. “The map should have been the first thing I looked at. And me a Coureur.”
Lev, who was sitting on the sofa reading the day’s product and drinking vodka, only grunted.
Here was the Line, and if you had any reservations about its name, here was the proof. It really was just a line, a stitch that ran across Europe, a country thousands of kilometres long but only ten kilometres across at its broadest point. Here were the towns it ran through, the marshalling yards and embassies and consulates, branch lines, maintenance depots… branch lines…
Rudi leaned down until his nose was a few centimetres from the surface of the map. The Line needed branches for shunting, and for repair crews, and to connect it to some embassies and consulates, as in Poznań, and to bring supplies in from the countries it passed through. In a lot of ways, it was less independent than it liked to pretend. Running his finger along the twin tracks of the main Line, Rudi could see dozens of branches curling off, to a depot here, a town there.
And some of them seemed to curl off into nowhere.
At the end of one branch, just before the border between Greater Germany and Poland, was a word he recognised: Stanhurst.
Rudi got up and picked up the previous day’s decrypts. And there it was. Stanhurst, a beguiling county town, contains one of the greatest cathedrals in the Community.
He grabbed the railway timetable and began to page through it, and within a minute there it was. Train times from Paddington to Stanhurst.
Lev looked up from his reading. “What?”
“Pack,” Rudi told him. “Pack quickly. We’re leaving. It’s not a novel. It’s a guidebook.”
IT WAS A guidebook to a country which did not exist.
With what Rudi later described as an act of kneejerk sarcasm, Lev instantly dubbed it The Baedeker. For want of any other name, its anonymous author became Baedeker.
The Community stretched from the Iberian peninsula to a little east of Moscow, a country of some fifteen million souls back in 1918, when the notebook had been written. It had cities and towns and a railway system, but Rudi didn’t recognise any of the names of the towns and cities. It was as if Baedeker had, on a whim, invented a country, and then simply copied it onto Continental Europe. Or rather the Whitton-Whytes and their descendants, not being satisfied with creating their own English county, had simply rewritten Europe and then proceeded, very quietly, to conquer it. However they had achieved it, they had not lacked ambition. According to Baedeker, the Community had a university the size of an English county.
“No,” Lev said, already more than a little annoyed at having to move for the fourth time. “No.”
“What else could it be?” said Rudi.
“An invisible country? Made up of bits and pieces of other countries? Created by a family of English magicians?” Lev snorted. “It could be anything else.”
Rudi looked at the piles of decrypts. “There’s nothing here about them being magicians,” he said. “They talk about landscapes containing all possible landscapes. That doesn’t sound like magic to me.”
“You’ve obviously had a more interesting life than I have, then,” Lev said sourly, pouring himself another drink. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “Look at me. No, look at me. Look me in the eyes. Good. Now, say after me, ‘landscapes do not contain all possible landscapes.’” He sat back. “You’re not going to say it, are you,” he muttered sourly, and drained his glass.
Rudi looked at the printout pages, the Baedeker, the railway timetable which said that back in 1912 you could have caught a train from Paddington Station to a nonexistent town somewhere to the west of London, the map of the Line that said you could still get to that same nonexistent town by going up a branch line in Germany. He tried to reassemble it in his head, but the pieces would only go together in one configuration.
This was what Fabio had stolen from the Line’s consulate in Poznań. Three proofs of the existence of a parallel universe. And a map showing how to get into it.
The Community was a topological freak, a nation existing in the same place as Europe but only accessible through certain points on the map. Its capital, Władysław, occupied more or less the same space as Prague, but the way Baedecker described it, it sounded more like a mixture of Kraków, Warsaw, Paris and Geneva. Fifteen million people, back when Baedeker wrote his guidebook. How many people were there in the Community by now? What were they all doing?
Was that a secret worth protecting? Worth killing for? Rudi thought it probably was.
ONE NIGHT, WHILE they were eating dinner – something quite inedible involving squid and aubergines and a sauce made from tinned tomatoes – Rudi looked across the room and saw Fabio’s burnbox sitting beside the coffee table. It occurred to him that this thing which Fabio had risked his life to safeguard had become so familiar that he hardly saw it now; it was just somewhere he stuffed the documents and decrypts and Lev’s computer when they changed hotels. He still set the locks, just in case, though he had no way of knowing if the device even worked after all this time.
“What,” Lev said, watching him stand up.