“How’s Kraków?” Ivari asked, selecting another key.
“Waist-deep in English tourists.”
“I heard about the riot.”
Rudi had to think about that one, then he realised that Ivari meant the England-Poland football match two years ago.
“That was over the other side of town,” he said. “I don’t think we had one English person in the restaurant that week.”
“It looked bad on the news.”
It had been bad. One policeman had died and almost seven hundred fans had been arrested, both English and Polish. Rudi had been involved in a Situation in Alsace that week, and had returned to Balice in time to see groups of English fans being escorted out of the country by riot-suited platoons of police. He’d almost forgotten about it.
“It always looks worse on the news,” he said.
Ivari nodded, looked for the save key, and tapped it. The screen cleared, and he turned and looked at his brother. “Hungry?”
“Starving,” Rudi agreed.
IVARI AND HIS wife lived in one of the outbuildings on the Palmse estate – once the home of the von Pahlens, a merchant family who had departed Estonia for Germany after the First World War but left behind Palmse Mois – the Baltic Baroque manor house itself – and the distillery which now housed an hotel, and the old stables which housed the park’s visitor centre. Rudi remembered his father telling him that one of the von Pahlens – he couldn’t remember which one it was – had been an astronomer, and had a crater on the Moon named after him. His father had thought that was wonderful, having a crater on the Moon named after you. Rudi recalled being less than impressed, although thinking about it now, it wasn’t such a bad achievement, really. More of a lasting monument than a good meal, anyway.
When Frances saw him – as he was taking off his parka and his boots in the hallway and thus preoccupied – she shouted, “Rudi, you bastard!” She pronounced it barstard. Frances was large and lusty and Australian, and she favoured kaftans in a variety of hallucinatory patterns, and when she hugged Rudi to her considerable bosom he felt as though he was being crushed to death by a rather vigorous migraine.
She grasped him by the upper arms and propelled him out as far as her arms could reach – which was a distance – so she could tilt her head from side to side and look judiciously at him. “How long’s it been now?” she asked in good Estonian.
“It’s been a while, Frankie,” he admitted in English. He tried to shrug, but her hands held his upper body motionless. “Sorry.”
“You’d better be, sunshine,” she said. Then she smiled the radiant smile Ivari had once admitted to Rudi had stolen his heart and she tugged him gently back to her. “It’s good to see you, kid.”
“Good to be here,” Rudi said. He had a suspicion that Frances knew somehow about his work as a Coureur. She’d always been huggy and tactile, but after he started working for Central the quality of the hugs changed in some way he couldn’t quite define, as if she was afraid for his safety. Or maybe he was imagining it.
“So,” she said, finally releasing him so he could take off his other boot and search through the wooden box by the door for a pair of slippers, “how long will we be having the pleasure of you this time?”
She had never quite forgiven him for taking off after the wedding. “I’m here for the foreseeable future, actually, Frankie,” he said, finally finding his favourite pair of slippers and putting them on. He stood in the hall smiling at her, flatfooted after his boots but happy. “I’m on holiday. A sabbatical, really.”
Frances smiled and nodded as if she knew exactly what he was talking about. “Well, that’s great, because I’m sick of cooking for these two.”
Rudi felt a hitch in his chest. “Two?”
“Who’s that?” called a querulous voice from the living room, and with a shuffle of slippers a little old man wearing jeans, a sweatshirt two sizes too large for him, and a baseball cap with a hologram advertisement for Aeroflot on the front came out into the hallway. He was holding a tumbler half-full of an amber liquid which was almost certainly Chivas Regal, his signature drink. “Oh,” he said when he saw Rudi.
Rudi’s heart sank smoothly, like a recently-serviced lift. “Hello, Toomas,” he said to his father.
FRANCES ASKED RUDI to cook, and he didn’t have it in his heart to refuse, so he spent ten minutes rummaging in the fridge and the freezer and came up with some rolled pork loin he could slice up thickly and beat out into escalopes, and a couple of stale bread rolls for breadcrumbs. It wasn’t exactly cordon bleu, and it was a long way from being Estonian cuisine (and anyway, in his heart he could never have argued that Estonian cuisine had set the world alight) but he was tired and escalopes were something he could do with his mind in neutral.
“How long’s he been here?” he asked as he used a meat hammer on the pork.
Frances, peeling potatoes at the sink, glanced towards the door. “The old man? Couple of days.”
“Still living in Muike?”
She shook her head. “He moved to the special management zone at Aasumetsa a couple of years ago. Got himself a nice house there. Got himself a nice hausfrau to look after him, though I haven’t met her.”
From the living room, Rudi heard his father singing a Latvian folk song to Ivari. “That sounds about right,” he said.
Frances looked at him. “No offence, kid, but this is stuff you should be asking him yourself.”
Rudi shrugged. “We don’t talk about stuff like that.”
Frances put down the potato she was peeling and crossed her arms across her chest. “Well maybe you should, no?”
Rudi waved the meat hammer at her for emphasis, failed to come up with any words to go with the gesture, and went back to tenderising the slice of pork on the butcher-block chopping board in front of him.
“You must have thought there was some chance you’d see him while you were here,” said Frances.
“Every silver lining has a cloud,” Rudi muttered.
“We keep asking him to retire, but he won’t,” Frances said. “He loves this place. He just goes out pottering around the bogs and in the forests. Aarvo – that’s the new director – says the old man should go, but he doesn’t dare fire him.”
“Aarvo sounds like just the kind of balless wonder Toomas always took advantage of,” said Rudi.
She stopped peeling potatoes again and waved her knife at him across the kitchen. “Hey, sweetheart, don’t you forget the number of years your Dad’s got under his belt here.”
“My formative years, certainly,” Rudi said.
“He knows this place like the back of his hand,” she said, wagging the knife some more. “They never had anyone like him here before, and when he does retire they’ll struggle to get someone else who loves it as much as he does.”
“Every Estonian loves the rahvuspark, Frankie,” he said. “It’s part of our heritage. The Poles have the same thing with Białowieża.”
“Come again?”
“It’s a big forest on the border between Poland and Lithuania. The last stretch of ancient forest in Europe. The Poles love that place, Frankie. It’s got wild boar and bison and wild horses and beavers, and for all I know there are bears and magicians and little green men and Elvis and Madonna there too. It’s a symbol of national pride. Same with the Park.”
“Ivari says it wasn’t always like that.”
Rudi waved the hammer. “That was the Russians. Fuck ’em.” He looked at the piece of pork he was beating out and suddenly thought of Jan doing the same, at the hotel in the Zone. He was still wearing Jan’s watch, although in the intervening years the moments when he remembered it was Jan’s watch had grown rarer and rarer. Thinking of Jan made him think of the Hungarians, which made him think of Restauracja Max.