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couriers, and people had been couriering stuff around Europe since at least the Middle Ages, and smuggling things for considerably longer. They were also, if Fabio was representative, appalling houseguests. Among numerous other little personality quirks, Fabio had a thing about rearranging furniture. Every evening when Rudi got back to the flat he would find the furniture in some new configuration, and Fabio standing in the middle of the living room looking at it. He’d thought at first that the plump little Coureur was practising some bizarre Swiss form of feng shui, but after a week or so he had to wonder if Fabio wasn’t just the tiniest little bit deranged.
    They went over and over his trip to Hindenberg, in obsessive detail. What he remembered, who he had spoken to, where he had been, what he had observed about the people he interacted with, from the border officials to the taxi driver in Breslau to the waiter who had served his breakfast at the Pension Adler the next morning.
    “You kept it simple, which is good,” Fabio told him. “Simple is often best, but not always. Sometimes it’s necessary to make things as complicated as possible. And sometimes you just have to wing it.” He took a sip from his cup and pouted. “What do you call this?”
    Rudi looked at the cup. “‘Coffee,’” he said.
    Fabio returned his cup to its saucer. “Not where I come from, it’s not.”
    “You’ve been drinking it all week.”
    Fabio shook his head. “I can’t stand this ‘continental roast.’ What’s that supposed to mean? ‘Continental roast.’”
    Rudi stood up. “I need some fresh air.”
     
     
    “H E’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.”
     
     
    I N R UDI’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