Europe in Autumn

The restaurant business had a lot in common with international relations; there was an awful lot of diplomacy, more often than not of the gunboat kind.

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.

“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 Europ

The big thing in Europe these days was countries, and there were more and more of them every year. The Continent was alive with Romanov heirs and Habsburg heirs and Grimaldi heirs and Saxe-Coburg Gotha heirs and heirs of families nobody had ever heard of who had been dispossessed sometime back in the fifteenth century, all of them seeking to set up

“SMALL NATIONS ARE like small men,” said the cobbler. “Paranoid. Twitchy. Quick to anger.” “Mm,” said Rudi. “I wouldn’t call them nations anyway,” the cobbler went on. “Most of them break down after a year or so.

The train rocked and rolled slowly through grubby little industrial towns. The Fall of the Wall was just a distant misty memory now, but Eastern Europe still needed a good scrub and a lick of paint. Some of Poland’s most polluted towns had buildings of mediaeval splendour, but they were all crusted with centuries of soot.

These days, things were more complicated. Border disputes often meant that delivering mail from polity A to nation B was impossible. So people contacted Les Coureurs, and the mail got through. Sometimes the mail consisted of people for whom the passage from polity A to nation B might otherwise be impossibly delicate. Sometimes it was items which na

IT WAS SAID that if you were a criminal, a member of some tinpot political party, an agitator for a minority interest group, a drug addict, a property speculator, a forger or bootlegger of any kind, an artist, a fashion designer, a writer, underground film director, musician, or just plain crazy, Berlin was where you would eventually end up. It see

“You have time to visit a barber? Alter your appearance somehow. No one ever looks exactly like their passport photograph; it makes immigration officers suspicious if they do.”