“HE’S VERY GOOD,” mused Dariusz.
“He’s driving me out of my mind,” said Rudi.
Dariusz lit a cigarette. “What, precisely, bothers you about him?”
“How long do you have?”
Dariusz chuckled.
Rudi sighed. They were in Pani Halina’s on Senatorska. Because Rudi knew Halina’s chef, and because Dariusz was who he was, they had been given one of the restaurant’s private tables, away from the lunchtime crowd of students and tourists and out of work actors.
“Nothing I cook for him is any good,” he said.
Dariusz snorted goodnaturedly. “I think you’ll find that people do have their own tastes in food, Rudi.”
“Where I come from, it’s good manners not to criticise your host’s cooking.”
“Perhaps it’s different in Switzerland.” The little mafioso shrugged. “I don’t know, I’ve never been there. Next?”
“He rearranges my furniture.”
Dariusz looked at him and narrowed his eyes. Then he shrugged again. “Fabio is accustomed to a life of action, not a life cooped up in your flat. He sounds restless.”
“‘Restless’?”
“Look.” Dariusz waved Rudi’s misgivings away. “He’s here to teach you. He’s to be the… the Merlin to your Arthur. The Obi-Wan to your Anakin. We have to be indulgent of geniuses.”
“Must we let them move our furniture about?”
“If moving furniture about is what makes them happy.”
“Dariusz, there’s something wrong with him.”
Dariusz shook his head. “Indulge him, Rudi. Listen and learn.”
IN RUDI’S OPINION, whoever had set up the Coureurs had overdosed on late twentieth century espionage fiction. Coureur operational jargon, as passed on by Fabio, sounded like something from a John le Carré novel. Legends were fictitious identities. Stringers were non-Coureur personnel, or entry-level Coureurs, who did makework like scoping out locations in the field or maintaining legends. Pianists were hackers, tailors provided technical support, cobblers forged documents – Rudi knew that euphemism had been in use in espionage circles as far back as the 1930s. He thought it was ridiculous.
The business with Max’s cousin had been a test, that much was obvious. As Dariusz described it, Max’s cousin had already been in contact with the Coureurs, and had been presented with a menu of options for his escape from Hindenberg. All Rudi had done was relay his favoured option. Any stringer could have done it; Max’s cousin, in the face of postal problems and telephone and radio jamming and interception of emails, could have sent up smoke signals. It had been, more than anything, a test of nerve, a test of how Rudi would handle the problem.
It seemed he had passed the test. And Fabio was his reward.
“Never ever undervalue a stringer,” Fabio told him. “Consider a typical stringer – we shall call him Ralf. Ralf works in a delicatessen in Lausanne. He has a wife named Chantelle, some children, maybe a dog. For much of the time, he lives a normal life. He hates his boss. He fucks his wife. He plays with his children. He takes the dog for a walk.”
“Maybe,” said Rudi.
“You’re interrupting me,” Fabio warned.
“You said maybe a dog.” After two months with Fabio, Rudi had learned to take his pleasures where he could find them. “Now you’re telling me he takes his dog for a walk.”
Fabio narrowed his eyes.
“I just wondered whether we should take the dog as a given now,” Rudi said.
Fabio frowned.
“These things are important,” said Rudi. “You must agree.”
Fabio watched him a moment longer, then looked away into the distance. “But on occasion, Ralf is asked to do more specialised work,” he continued. “He is asked to renew a passport in a false name, to get a parking ticket, to take a lease on an apartment in Geneva. These are all things which contribute to the building of a legend. And Ralf knows all the details of these transactions. Invaluable operational intelligence. If Ralf should fall into unkind hands, and if he should tell all he knows, the information could bring any number of Situations crashing to the ground.”
It wasn’t just the jargon, Rudi thought. If Fabio was representative, Les Coureurs really considered themselves some form of espionage agency. Cloak and dagger, night-time streets in Central Europe, one-time pads, the whole thing. He wondered if he shouldn’t have another quiet chat with Dariusz.
Fabio looked levelly at him. “Now you can cook me my dinner,” he said. “And then I have some homework for you. And I don’t want any of that disgusting tripe stew you served last night; my insides still haven’t recovered.”
‘HOMEWORK’ TURNED OUT to be an interminable round of offices and bureaucrats. A lease signed here, a driving licence applied for there, all in different names. He was expected to buy a car, renew a passport, take a train-ride to Sosnowiec and return with the ticket stubs, open a bank account in the name of Anton Blum, telephone a man named Grudziński and complain about the waste disposal unit in a flat. All the little tracks one leaves every day without thinking about it. And at one point, footsore and really not terribly impressed with the life of a stringer, he thought he saw the point of Fabio’s tale about Ralf and his maybe dog. He could conceivably ruin half a dozen different Situations. If he had the faintest idea what he was doing. And for whom. And why.
Max said, “I suppose you could just stop any time you wanted,” which was really Max-speak for ‘You’re spending too much time as a Coureur and I’m spending too much money on agency chefs.’
“It can’t last much longer,” Rudi told him. “Dariusz says once Fabio’s finished with me I might not be needed for another ten years.”
Max snorted. “Europe must be crawling with Coureurs then.”
Rudi had some vague idea that Max was, or had been at sometime in the past, involved in some way with Coureur Central, but it always seemed indelicate to ask. He said, “How many do you think there are, out of interest?”
Max laughed. “In my experience? You and Fabio.” Rudi had brought Fabio to the restaurant the night before for a meal. Not a happy event, for anyone.
“I’m going to be busy then.”
“Looks that way,” Max sighed.
2.
MORE ‘HOMEWORK.’ PHONE calls, passports applied for, job interviews attended. One day he spent an entire morning in a very untidy flat in Sosnowiec. Eventually a policeman turned up and took the details of a burglary which had been reported at the flat. Rudi gave the policeman a list of missing possessions. The policeman left.
It occurred to Rudi that, while he was certainly getting a feel for the work of a stringer, Central was also getting its money’s worth out of him. He had lost count of how many legends he was contributing to. He opened bank accounts. He rented an office in Zabrze. Fabio gave him a slim attaché case and told him to place it in a safety-deposit box at a bank in Katowice.
Along with homework came tradecraft. And it was disappointingly run-of-the-mill stuff. Dead drops, brush passes, tips on how to drop a tail, tips on how to pick one up. It was straight out of Deighton or Furst. Almost comicbook stuff. Rudi doubted that even the security services still did this kind of thing.
Using maps, Fabio made him plan jumps from half a dozen Polish cities, peppering each one with alternate dustoffs. Then Fabio demolished each jump, one by one, in a high, hectoring tone of voice, have you learned nothing? Am I getting through to you yet?