£7.99 (UK) ISBN 9781781081952
$7.99/$9.99 (US & CAN) ISBN 9781781081945
“Europe in Autumn is the work of a consummate storyteller and combines great characters, a cracking central idea, and a plot that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Excellent.” – Eric Brown
A fractured Europe, a cook-turned-spy, a mighty web of espionage – but what happens when conspiracy threatens to overwhelm even reality itself?
Europe in Autumn is a dystopian SF espionage thriller that evokes the Cold War novels of John Le Carré and the nightmarish world of Franz Kafka, taking place in a war and disease-torn Europe of hundreds of tiny nations.
Rudi is a cook in a Kraków restaurant, but when boss asks him to help a cousin escape from the country he’s trapped in, a new career – part spy, part people-smuggler – begins.
Recruited by the shadowy organisation Les Coureurs des Bois, Rudi is schooled in espionage. When he is sent to smuggle someone out of Berlin and finds a severed head inside a locker instead, a conspiracy begins to wind itself around him.
With kidnapping, double-crosses and a map that constantly re-draws itself, Europe in Autumn is a modern science fiction thriller like no other.
Europe in Autumn hits book stores tomorrow and to tease your literary taste buds, we are very pleased to present - for free and your reading pleasure - the first chapter...
Max's
Cousin
1.
The Hungarians came into the restaurant around nine in the evening, eight
large men with gorgeously-tailored suits and hand-stitched Italian shoes and
hundred-złoty haircuts. Michał, the maitre d', tried to tell them that there
were no tables free unless they had a reservation, but they walked over to one
of the large tables and sat down. One of them plucked the Reserved card
from the middle of the tablecloth and sailed it out across the restaurant with
a snap of the wrist and a bearish grin, causing other diners to duck.
Max, the owner, had a protection
deal with Wesoły Ptak, but instead of calling them or the police – either of
which would have probably resulted in a bloodbath – he seized a notepad and set
off across the restaurant to take the Hungarians' orders. This show of
confidence did not prevent a number of diners signalling frantically for their
bills.
The Hungarians were already
boisterous, and shouted and laughed at Max while he tried to take their orders,
changing their minds frequently and causing Max to start all over again. Finally,
he walked back from the table to the bar, where Gosia was standing frozen with
fear.
“Six bottles of Żubrówka, on the
house,” he murmured calmly to the girl as he went by towards the kitchen. “And
try to be nimble on your feet.”
Rudi, who had been standing in the
kitchen doorway watching events with interest, said, “Something awful is going
to happen, Max.”
“Cook,” Max replied, handing him the
order. “Cook quickly.”
By ten o'clock the Hungarians had
loosened their ties and taken off their jackets and were singing and yelling at
each other and laughing at impenetrable jokes. They had completed three courses
of their five-course order. They were alone in the restaurant. With most of the
meal completed, Rudi told the kitchen crew they could go home.
At one point, one of the Hungarians,
an immense man with a face the colour of barszcz, began shouting at the others.
He stood up, swaying gently, and yelled at his compatriots, who goodnaturedly
yelled at him to sit down again. Sweat pouring down his face, he turned,
grasped the back of a chair from the next table, and in one easy movement
pivoted and flung it across the room. It crashed into the wall and smashed a
sconce and brought down a mirror.
There was a moment's silence. The
Hungarian stood looking at the dent in the wallpaper, frowning. Then he sat
down and one of his friends poured him a drink and slapped him on the back and
Max served the next course.
As the hour grew late the Hungarians
became maudlin. They put their arms around each others' shoulders and began to
sing songs that waxed increasingly sad as midnight approached.
Rudi, his cooking finished for the
night and the kitchen tidied up and cleaned, stood in the doorway listening to
their songs. The Hungarians had beautiful voices. He didn't understand the
words, but the melodies were heart-achingly lonely.
One of them saw him standing there
and started to beckon urgently. The others turned to see what was going on, and
they too started to beckon.
“Go on,” Max said from his post by
the bar.
“You're joking,” said Rudi.
“I am not. Go and see what they
want.”
“And if they want to beat me up?”
“They'll soon get bored.”
“Thank you, Max,” Rudi said, setting
off across the restaurant.
The Hungarians' table looked as if
someone had dropped a five-course meal onto it from ceiling height. The floor
around it was crunchy with broken glass and smashed crockery, the carpet sticky
with sauces and bits of trodden-in food.
“You cook?” said one in appalling
Polish as Rudi approached.
“Yes,” said Rudi, balancing his
weight on the balls of his feet just in case he had to move in a hurry.
The Polish-speaker looked like a
side of beef sewn into an Armani Revival suit. His face was pale and sweaty and
he was wearing a shoulder-holster from which protruded the handgrip of a
colossal pistol. He crooked a forefinger the size of a sausage. Rudi bent down
until their faces were only a couple of centimetres apart.
“Respect!” the Hungarian bellowed.
Rudi flinched at the meaty spicy alcohol-and-tobacco gale of his breath. “Everywhere
we go, this fuck city, not respect!”
This statement seemed to require a
reply, so Rudi said, “Oh?”
“Not respect,” the Hungarian said,
shaking his head sadly. His expression suddenly brightened. “Here, Restaurant
Max, we got respect!”
“We always respect our customers,”
Max murmured, moving soundlessly up beside Rudi.
“Fuck right!” the Hungarian said
loudly. “Fuck right. Restaurant Max more respect.”
“And your meal?” Max inquired,
smiling.
“Good fuck meal,” the Hungarian
said. There was a general nodding of heads around the table. He looked at Rudi
and belched. “Good fuck cook. Polish food for fuck pigs, but good fuck cook.”
Rudi smiled. “Thank you,” he said.
The Hungarian's eyes suddenly came
into focus. “Good,” he said. “We gone.” He snapped a few words and the others
around the table stood up, all save the one who had thrown the chair, who was
slumped over with his cheek pressed to the tablecloth, snoring gently. Two of
his friends grasped him by the shoulders and elbows and lifted him up. Bits of
food adhered to the side of his face.
“Food good,” the Polish-speaker told
Rudi. He took his jacket from the back of his chair and shrugged into it. He
dipped a hand into his breast pocket and came up with a business card held
between his first two fingers. “You need working, you call.”
Rudi took the card. “Thank you,” he
said again.
“Okay.” He put both hands to his
face and swept them up and back in a movement that magically rearranged his
hair and seemed to sober him up at the same time. “We gone.” He looked at Max. “Clever
fuck Pole.” He reached into an inside jacket pocket and brought out a wallet
the size and shape of a housebrick. “What is?”
“On the house,” Max said. “A gift.”
Rudi looked at his boss and wondered
what went on underneath that shaved scalp.
The Hungarian regarded the
restaurant. “We break much.”
Max shrugged carelessly.
“Okay.” The Hungarian removed a
centimetre-thick wad of złotys from the wallet and held it out. “You take,” he
said. Max smiled and bowed slightly and took the money, then the Hungarians
were moving towards the exit. A last burst of raucous singing, one last bar
stool hurled across the restaurant, a puff of cold air through the open door,
and they were gone. Rudi heard Max locking the doors behind them.
“Well,” Max said, coming back down
the stairs. “That was an interesting evening.”
Rudi picked up an overturned stool,
righted it, and sat at the bar. He had, he discovered, sweated entirely through
his chef's whites. “I think,” he said, “you should renegotiate your
subscription to Wesoły Ptak.”
Max went behind the bar. He bent
down and started to search the shelves. “If Wesoły Ptak had turned up tonight,
half of us would have wound up in the mortuary.” He straightened up holding
half a bottle of Starka and two glasses.
Rudi took his lighter and a tin of
small cigars from his pocket. He lit one and looked at the restaurant. If he
was objective about it, there was actually very little damage. Just a lot of
mess for the cleaners to tackle, and they'd had wedding receptions that had
been messier.
Max filled the two glasses with
vodka and held one up in a toast. “Good fuck meal,” he said.
Rudi looked at him for a moment.
Then he picked up the other glass, returned the toast, and drained it in one
go. Then they both started to laugh.
“What if they come back?” Rudi
asked.
But Max was still laughing. “Good
fuck meal,” he repeated, shaking his head and refilling the glasses.
The Hungarians did not come back, which seemed to bear out Max's view that
they had just been out for a good time rather than intent on muscling in on
Wesoły Ptak's territory.
Wesoły Ptak – the name meant Happy
Bird – was a deeply diversified organisation. Its many divisions included
prostitution, drugs, armed robbery, a soft-drink bottling factory on the
outskirts of Kraków, a bus company, any number of unlicenced gambling dens, and
a protection racket centred around Floriańska Street, just off the Market
Square of Poland's old capital.
They were not, on the whole, known
for their violent nature, preferring to apply force with surgical precision
rather than in broad strokes. For instance, a restaurateur or shopkeeper who
tried to organise his neighbours against the gang might find himself in
hospital with anatomically-novel joints imposed on his legs. The other rebels
would get the point, and the uprising would end. Another gang might be more
likely to launch a massive firebombing campaign, or a wave of spectacularly
bloody killings, but Happy Bird were content with a less-is-more approach.
In the wake of the Hungarians' visit
to Restauracja Max, some of the other businesses began to wonder out loud just
what they were paying Wesoły Ptak for. This went on for a day or so, and then
the son of one of the owners suffered a minor accident at school. Nothing
life-threatening, just a few bumps and scrapes, and after that the grumbling
along Floriańska subsided.
A week or so later, Dariusz, Wesoły
Ptak's representative, visited Restauracja Max one evening just before closing.
All the staff but Rudi and Michał had gone home. Max asked Rudi to prepare two
steak tartares, and he and Dariusz took a bottle of Wyborowa and a couple of
glasses over to a table in the darkest corner of the deserted restaurant.
When Rudi emerged from the kitchen
with the components of the steak tartares on a tray, Max and Dariusz were deep
in conversation inside a cloud of cigarette smoke dimly-illuminated by the
little sconce on the wall above their table.
As Rudi approached with the food,
Dariusz looked up and smiled. “Supper,” he said.
Rudi set out on the table the trays
of anchovies and chopped onions, the little bowls of pickled cucumbers, the
condiments, plates of rye bread, saucers of unsalted butter, the two plates of
minced beef, each with an egg yolk nestling in a hollow on top.
“We were discussing your visitors of
last month,” Dariusz said.
“It was an eventful evening,” Rudi
agreed, swapping the table's ashtray for a clean one. “Have a good meal.”
“Why don't you sit and have a drink
with us?” Dariusz asked.
Rudi looked at Max, sitting at the
other side of the table like a smoothly prosperous Silesian Buddha, hands
clasped comfortably against the broad expanse of his stomach. Max was smiling
gently and looking off into some faraway vista. He nodded fractionally.
Rudi shrugged. “All right.” He put
the tray and the dirty ashtray on the next table, pulled up a chair, and sat.
“A busy night,” Max rumbled, picking
up a fork.
Rudi nodded. Takings had gone down
for a couple of days after the Hungarians visited, but they were back up now.
Earlier in the week, Max had murmured something about a raise, but Rudi had
known him long enough not to take it seriously.
“I was wondering about Władek,” Max
said.
Władek was the latest of a long line
of alleged cooks to arrive at Restauracja Max and then discover that they were
not being paid enough for the long hours and hard work.
“He seems keen,” Rudi said, watching
Max use the edge of his fork to mash up the egg and beef on his plate.
“They all do, at first,” Max agreed.
“Then they get greedy.”
“It's not greed, Max,” Rudi told
him.
Max shook his head. “They think they
can come here and be ready to open their own restaurant after a month. They
don't understand the business.”
Max's philosophy of the restaurant
business shared certain features with Zen Buddhism. Rudi, who was more
interested in cooking than philosophy, said, “It's a common enough
misconception.”
“It's the same in my business,”
Dariusz said. Rudi had almost forgotten the little man was at the table, but
there he was, mixing anchovies and chopped onion into his beef with a
singleminded determination. “You should see some of our recruits, particularly
these days. They think they'll be running the city in a year.” He smiled sadly.
“Imagine their disappointment.”
“Yes,” Rudi said. “The only
difference is that it's easier for a sous-chef to leave a restaurant than it is
for someone to leave Wesoły Ptak.” Max glanced up from his plate, sighed, shook
his head, and went back to mashing his meal together with his fork.
If Dariusz was offended, he gave no
sign. “We're a business, like any other,” he said.
“Not quite like any other,”
said Rudi. Max looked at him again. This time he frowned before returning his
attention to his steak.
Dariusz also frowned, but the frown
was barely discernible, and it was gone after a moment. “Well, we do less
cooking, it's true,” he said, and he laughed. Max smiled and shook his head.
Rudi sat back and crossed his arms.
Wesoły Ptak was nothing out of the ordinary; he had encountered organisations
like it in Tallinn and Riga and Vilnius, and they were all alike, and Dariusz
didn't fit the demographic. He looked ordinary, a slim little middle-aged man
with a cheap haircut and laugh-lines around his eyes. If he was armed, his
unprepossessing off-the-peg business suit hid it wonderfully well.
“Should we worry about the
Hungarians?” Rudi asked.
Dariusz looked up from his meal, his
eyebrows raised in surprise. “Worry?” he asked. “Why should you worry?”
Rudi shrugged and watched Max
working on his steak. Rudi hated steak tartare. The customer did all the
preparation themselves, and they took up table space while they did it. Poles
in particular seemed to regard it as a social occasion. They took forever about
it, tasting over and over again and minutely adjusting the seasoning. When he
had his own restaurant, steak tartare would not be on the menu.
Dariusz reached out and touched
Rudi's forearm. Rudi noticed his fingernails were chewed. “You mustn't worry,”
Dariusz said.
“All right,” said Rudi.
“This kind of thing happens all the
time.”
“Not to me it doesn't.”
Dariusz smiled. “You have to think
of us like nations. Poles and Hungarians are the criminal princes of Europe.”
“And the Bulgarians,” Max put in
goodnaturedly.
Dariusz shrugged. “Yes, one must
include the Bulgarians as well. We must constantly visit, check each other out,
put our toes in the water,” he told Rudi. “It's a matter of diplomacy.”
“Do you mean what happened here the
other night was a diplomatic incident?” said Rudi.
“It might well have been, if wiser
heads had not prevailed.” Dariusz nodded at Max.
“You haven't got a drink,” Max
observed. He looked across the restaurant and Michał, responding with a maitre
d's telepathy, brought a clean glass over to the table for Rudi and then
retreated behind the bar. Max filled the glass with vodka and said, “They were
just looking for a good time, but nobody would give them one because everyone
was afraid of them.”
“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.
The first thing Max did after
concluding his job interview was hold out a mop.
“I've done all that,” Rudi
protested, pointing to the envelope containing his references which Max was
holding in his other hand. “Riga, Tallinn…”
“You want to work in my kitchen,
first you clean it,” Max told him. “Then we'll see.”
Rudi really considered walking out
of Restauracja Max right there and then, considered going out onto Floriańska
and walking back down to the station and catching a train away from this
polluted little city, but he was low on cash and the job came with a cramped
little room up ten flights of stairs above the restaurant and he was just tired
of travelling for the moment, so he took the mop, telling himself that this was
only temporary, that as soon as he had adequate funds he'd be off again in
search of a kitchen that appreciated him.
He pushed that mop for eight months
before Pani Stasia, Max's fearsome chef, even allowed him to approach food. By
then he was locked into a battle of wills with the wizened little woman, and
the only way he was going to leave Max's kitchen was feet first.
Looking back, it seemed astounding to
him that he had stood so much. He'd done this for Sergei in Tallinn, and for
The Turk, and for Big Ron in that appalling kitchen in Wilno, but for Pani
Stasia there was something gratingly personal about it, as if she had
made it her life's work to break him. She yelled constantly at him. “Bring
this, bring that. Clean this, clean that. So you call this clean, Baltic
prick? Hurry, hurry. Don't run in my kitchen! Faster! Faster!”
He was by no means the only member
of the crew to catch Pani Stasia's wrath. She treated everyone equally. One of
her hip joints was deformed, and she walked with the aid of a black lacquered
carbon fibre cane as thin as a pencil and as strong as a girder. Everyone, even
Max, had heard the whistle of Pani Stasia's cane at some time or other as it
described a swift arc towards the backs of their legs.
It
was understood in the business that great chefs could be violently temperamental,
and if one wanted to study under them one had to endure all kinds of invective
and physical violence. The Turk, who was an outstanding chef, had once knocked
Rudi unconscious with a single punch for overcooking a portion of asparagus.
Pani Stasia was not an outstanding chef. She was a competent chef working in a
little Polish restaurant. But something about her fury lit a slumbering
resistance in him which told him that this nasty little old woman was not going
to drive him from her kitchen, was not going to wear him down.
So he mopped and cleaned and washed
up and the skin on his hands reddened and cracked and bled and his legs hurt so
much that some nights he could barely climb up to his cubbyhole in the attic.
He kept going, refused to give in.
Pani Stasia, sensing the one-man
resistance movement which had sprung up in her kitchen, focused her attention
on Rudi. This made him popular with the other staff, who no longer had to
suffer quite so much.
One day, for some imagined slight,
she chased him from the kitchen in an access of rage extraordinary even by her
standards, limping after him surprisingly quickly and labouring him about the
head and shoulders with her cane. One whistling blow split his left earlobe and
left him deaf in that ear for hours. One of the cooks ran out into the
restaurant and told Max that Pani Stasia was killing Rudi, and when Max did
nothing the cook went to the phone in the entranceway and called the police,
who decided that their assets were best deployed elsewhere that evening and
didn’t bother to respond to the call.
Max found Rudi sometime later
squatting down in the alley beside the restaurant, the shoulder and arm of his
whites spotted with blood.
“You'd be better off leaving,” Max
told him.
Rudi looked up at the owner and shook
his head.
Max watched him for a few moments,
then nodded and reached down a hand to help him up.
It went on and on, until one night
after closing time he was mopping the floor and she came up behind him almost
soundlessly and raised her cane and he turned and caught it as it whistled
towards him and for almost a minute she squeaked and struggled and swore and
tried to pull the cane from his grasp. Finally, she stopped struggling and
swearing and looked up at him with hot, angry eyes.
He let go of the cane and she snatched
it back and stood looking at him for a few moments longer. Then she turned and
stomped across the kitchen towards the exit.
The next morning, Max greeted him with
the news of a pay rise and a promotion.
Not that this made much material
difference. He still had to mop and clean and fetch and carry, and he still had
to suffer Pani Stasia's fury. Now, however, she expected him to learn to cook
as well.
She punished every mistake, no
matter how small. Once, half conscious with exhaustion, he put a fresh batch of
salad into a bowl with some which had been standing already prepared for some
minutes, and she almost beat him black and blue.
But he did learn. The first thing he
learned was that, if he wanted to remain in Pani Stasia's kitchen, he was going
to have to forget his four-year drift along the Baltic coast. The things he had
learned from The Turk and the other chefs he'd worked under meant nothing to
the little old woman.
Fractionally, month after month, her
periods of displeasure grew further and further apart, until one day, almost
eighteen months after he first set foot in Restauracja Max, she allowed him to
prepare one cover.
She wouldn't allow it to be served,
however. She prepared a duplicate cover herself and sent it out into the
restaurant instead, and then set about tasting Rudi's attempt.
As Rudi watched her he became aware
that the whole kitchen had fallen silent. He looked around and found himself
overwhelmed by what he thought of as a movie moment. Everyone in the
kitchen was watching Pani Stasia. Even Max, standing just inside the swing door
that led into the restaurant. It was, Rudi, thought, that moment in a film
where the callow greenhorn finally gains the grudging respect of his mentor. He
also knew that life wasn't like the movies, and that Pani Stasia would spit the
food out onto the tiled floor and then beat him senseless.
In the event, life and the movies
converged just enough for Pani Stasia to turn and lean on her cane and look at
her audience. She would, she told them finally, perhaps consider feeding Rudi's
service to her dog.
All the crew applauded. Rudi never
heard them. He thought later that he was the only one of all of them to notice
just how old Pani Stasia suddenly seemed.
She died that Summer, and Rudi
simply took over. There was no formal announcement from Max, no new contract,
nothing at all. Not even a pay rise. He simply inherited the kitchen. He and
Max were the only mourners at the funeral.
“I never found out anything about
her,” he said as they watched the coffin being lowered into the ground.
“She was,” Max said, “my mother.”
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