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arrivals lounge.
    It transpired, between the arrivals gate and the taxi rank outside, that the English were having one of their periodic paranoid episodes – drugs, terrorism, immunisation, whatever – and Fabio had been held up while they confiscated and checked his passport and travel documents.
    “I mean, not allowing one in , I can understand that,” he fumed. “But not allowing one out . What sort of mind thinks like that?” He looked at the motley line of cars pulled up outside the terminal and shook his head. “No, I’m not getting into any of these taxis. I was completely ripped off the last time I got a taxi from this airport. I should have flown in to Katowice, I never had any problems with the taxi drivers at Katowice. We’ll take the bus into town. Follow me.”
    Rudi followed.
    “And they put me in that disgusting hotel at Heathrow while I waited,” Fabio told him.
     
     
    E VERY STUDENT NEEDS a teacher, Dariusz had told him, and Fabio was to be his. He was short and chubby and well-dressed enough to be mugged within minutes of setting foot on any street in Western Europe. His suit was from the cutting edge of the Armani Revival and his shoes had been sewn by wizened artisans in Cordova. His luggage cost more than a flat in central Kraków. He was, Rudi thought, one of the least covert people he had ever seen. He thought it was a miracle the English authorities hadn’t arrested Fabio and then just looked for a crime to charge him with, because he was almost a caricature of a Central European biznisman .
    Fabio had a dim view of Kraków’s hotels. The Cracovia wasn’t good enough for him. He refused to even cross the threshold of the Europa. He claimed the head chef of the Bristol was a convicted poisoner. He wound up staying at Rudi’s flat.
    “Forget all that fucking idealism about Schengen,” he told Rudi on his first evening, after hoovering down the meal Rudi had cooked for him. “People in this business care about two things only. Money and prestige. You get money by doing your job, and you get prestige by taking insane risks.” He drank his wine in one swallow and winced. “This is horrible.”
    “It’s a Mouton Rothschild ’41,” Rudi said.
    “’41,” said Fabio, narrowing his eyes at his glass as if it had done him a personal wrong. “What a disgusting year.”
    “It’s a vintage year.”
    “Not for me it wasn’t. Don’t you have anything else to drink? And that steak was overdone, by the way.”
     
     
    T HEY CALLED THEMSELVES Les Coureurs des Bois , and they delivered mail.
    Even before Europe had blossomed with new countries, there had been a healthy courier business, some of it legal, rather more of it not. Some things were just too sensitive or important or flat-out illegal to trust to the public mail or electronic transfer. In those days, a canny courier could wangle themselves a cheap flight anywhere on Earth if they chose their assignment well.
    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 nation B might be narrowminded enough to consider illegal.
    They were, in other words, smugglers, although when Rudi voiced this opinion Fabio pointed out that, as with so many things, the term depended very much on your point of view.
    Nobody knew who they were. Conventional wisdom had it that they were a phenomenon of the times, a gradual accretion of little courier firms into an entity which had things in common with the CIA and the Post Office. You got in touch with them the way you made that awkward first contact with a drug dealer, by knowing someone who knew someone who knew someone.
    Rudi thought the popular media had inflated them out of all proportion. They were just