...וַיַּרְא, וְהִנֵּה הַסְּנֶה בֹּעֵר בָּאֵשׁ…
Two years earlier
Ninety minutes northeast of Marseille, among lavender fields and vineyards of great age and reputation, basks the picturesque hamlet of Les Philmes. Here, where old men can still be heard speaking Provençal at the village bakery and retired Englishmen sit under olive trees to enjoy the last flower of alcoholism, a world-renowned tobacco company—one of three remaining private-sector employers within a twenty-kilometer radius—still grows its crop in the brilliant sunshine, processes it by hand, and packs it in old whisky barrels for export. Since 1863 Swiss military officers, Hong Kong financiers and Swedish furniture designers alike have endorsed Snuff des Philmes for its unparalleled power to revive the stamina with the "smoothness that invigorates" during sixty-mile marches, 2 AM pai gow matches, and reviews of this year's model of BLÖPP coffee tables.
"Un verre de Château Houellebecq et un espresso, s'il vous plaît."
The wizened barkeep retrieved a bottle of Château Houellebecq, A.O.C., and poured a not-particularly-generous glass of its contents while his wife awakened an ancient espresso machine. Von Pfiff, his frame portly but by no means flabby, cast his eyes about the bar at unhurried intervals.
"Attendez-vous quelqu'un?" Quelqu'œung. He really was in Provence.
The light from the doorway darkened momentarily.
"Un vieil ami, c'est tout."
A man even taller and beefier than von Pfiff sauntered in and sat down next to him, claiming a rickety old stool on which a Gestapo agent had once succumbed to a doctored glass of pastis.
"Imaš te veči?" von Pfiff asked, sipping his wine calmly. Do you have the stuff?
"Imajo u tom avtovoža. A buckü?" I've got it in the truck. And the barrels?
"Juž izurbotitü. Ne strašo dorbo plačač čam zvojim ljudim." Already taken care of. They don't pay their people too well.
Von Pfiff knocked back his espresso and dropped a €200 bill next to the quarter-full glass of Château Houellebecq. He accompanied Splut to a small truck waiting down the road from the tavern, clambered into the passenger seat, and rode five kilometers to a neglected farm halfway to Cagots-Pendus where his own truck, its cargo already unloaded into the barn, awaited him along with a gaggle of listless truants from the local lycée.
"Excellent, excellent," von Pfiff announced in French even less accented than his Slorbian. "Well, I think this should only take an hour or so. You will all receive 250 euros each, as promised. I rely, of course, on your discretion. Don't rush, but there may be a little bonus for everyone if we finish early."
The truants set to work retrieving a series of jute bags from Splut's truck, carrying them inside the barn and emptying the fine brown powder within into stout barrels marked Snuff des Philmes while their patrons retired to the side of the building.
“I thought you said you’d found a dozen,” von Pfiff said stiffly.
“Two no-showed. They’re skipping school, they’ll skip this if they’re being really lazy. Ten should be enough.”
"In any case,” von Pfiff remarked, keeping a watchful eye on the truants, “at this rate your brother-in-law is growing more than I can handle. Teenagers talk, even if they don't mean to. Their barrel-maker warned me that we might need to take a pause for a year or two to let things cool down."
Mladekar Splut tossed his cigarette butt in the vague direction of a thick stand of dusty garrigue, parched in the heat of early September. "I keep telling you. Just ship the barrels to Slorbia."
"And I keep telling you I can't. It's not part of Schengen and they'll get checked at the Bulgarian border."
"Go through Macedonia, then."
"We'll be able to pull that off maybe two or three times before they figure out what we're up to and bribes eat up the entire profit margin. And then we'd have the same problem at the border out of Schengen. It's too risky."
"So we meet halfway. Find an old warehouse in Romania or eastern Hungary."
Von Pfiff shook his head. "I'm assigned to France. Vienna will ask questions."
All of a sudden von Pfiff noticed a new and unusual note that he had never before tasted from a pack of Grubi Tabak—wooden, almost, like a bush fire. He directed his attention momentarily away from the delinquent schlepping the third-to-last bag of Grubi Šnuf out of Splut's truck.
It was a bush fire.
"Mač Hrista!" swore Splut. "INCENDIE! INCENDIE! Everybody get back in the back of my truck!"
The delinquents abandoned their posts and moved somewhat more quickly now as the smell of smoke grew. Von Pfiff slammed the back door of the truck while Splut revved up the engine. No sooner had von Pfiff opened the passenger door than Splut slammed his foot on the ignition, ejecting von Pfiff's sunglasses off of his face onto the dusty track.
"God. Those were fifteen hundred euros."
"Those were three hundred thousand euros!" said Splut, taking a hand off the steering wheel and gesturing towards the trailer.
"It was your fucking cigarette," von Pfiff snapped. "You're the one who's got some explaining to do to your brother-in-law."
"Oh, I think we'll both have some explaining to do," retorted Splut. "But at least my brother-in-law was studying agronomy in Brussels while the head of the security services was doing his master's."
Von Pfiff looked out the rearview mirror to see flames licking the side of the barn, then erupting from its ancient roof. The scent of burning chaparral became infused with the unmistakable tawdriness of Grubi Šnuf, then grew imperceptibly fainter and fainter. Splut turned onto the regional highway, passing a firetruck with sirens already blazing, then made for the exit to Les Philmes and parked behind the village tavern.
"Hopefully everybody is safe," said von Pfiff, reaching into his suit pocket for a roll of banknotes. "We are—terribly sorry about this. Here's 500 euros for each of you, and as we all know, if anybody asks—"
"We were playing video games at my house," replied the least dimwitted of the truants, whose parents were known in the wider district to go on ill-defined business trips to Spain for weeks at a time.
"Precisely."
The truants scattered as von Pfiff and Splut returned to the bar for a much-needed glass of anaesthetic.
"This year's, I'm afraid, is going to be a bumper crop," remarked Splut.
"I am overjoyed to hear it," replied von Pfiff, his teeth gritted.
"So—"
"Nope. Not after this."
"I'd promised—"
"Your problem."
"My sister's got a condo on Zakynthos to pay for."
"It's a bumper crop!" said von Pfiff, clasping Splut on the shoulder. "You'll find buyers."
Splut took another sip of pastis and shrugged.
"Of course," he said, "I am good friends with the Slorbian ambassador in Vienna."
Von Pfiff stared at him. "I remind you that it takes two people to do business."
"Maybe so," said Splut, "but the Slorbian security services pay their officers six hundred euros a month and are very understanding. The Austrians, perhaps, not so much. But then you guys are much richer than we are."
Von Pfiff's eyelid twitched.
"So long as we don't take money from the Russians or Turks, at least," Splut added.
"Then I'm sure they'd be very interested in your business dealings with MEHMET. von. Pfiff." The f's of his surname exploded with spittle.
"Do you have a Turkish passport?"
"I could apply for one. I won't. The American passport from being born in Miami made things hard enough."
"Well," said Splut, swirling the remaining pastis in his glass, "I think Pjetr will be understanding enough if we lay low for this year's crop. But I'll call you up next year."
Von Pfiff's eyelid twitched again, then relaxed. Fine. Château Houellebecq didn't buy itself.
"Deal."
"I'll be happy to eat the invoice from my brother-in-law. It was, as you pointed out, my cigarette."
Splut dropped a fifty-euro note on the counter, skulked out the door into the baking heat of Provence in late summer, and was gone.
“Sie wollten mi sprechen, Herr Doktor?”
Mehmet von Pfiff entered through the heavy oaken door into the office of Dr. mult. Dr. h. C. Johann Maria Haldebert Gessler von und zu Wettsburg, Vice Undersecretary to the Head of the Austrian Diplomatic Service and, much to his underling's chagrin, von Pfiff's boss. Wettsburg, his figure deformed by decades of indulgence in leaden sausage dishes and pear brandy, rested his swollen hand momentarily on an enormous desk covered in folder after exquisitely organized folder of documents.
Von Pfiff found his eye wandering from Wettsburg's gaze towards the pine plywood body of the desk, whose once-convincing mahogany stain now evoked the rouge of a middle-aged nymphomaniac at half past one on a Wednesday morning. As his attention returned to his superior and the oversized pleather armchair from which he reigned, it occurred to von Pfiff that the dignity and taste of the house of Wettsburg had taken a greater beating since 1919 than that of many lineages far less august.
Wettsburg removed his reading glasses and bade von Pfiff sit down.
“Herr von Pfiff”, he began, in a Viennese drawl that exceeded even von Pfiff’s own, “I've been made aware of a fairly serious incident involving your person.”
“Really? What would that be?”
“The consulate in Marseilles is busy holding the local Gendarmerie at bay because there’s been a fire at a hamlet known as...let me see here...Les Philmes.”
“How curious.”
“Most curious indeed. Upon extinguishing the fire, the local authorities recovered a good 850 kilos of snuff tobacco.”
Von Pfiff cursed internally. Of course that Slorbian crap was shipped moist enough to slow down the fire.
“The product had all been smuggled into the country, of course. There were no clues as to its provenance until one of the local delinquents made a scene when the police moved to secure the evidence, saying that it belonged to one Monsieur von Feef. The gendarmes were pretty quick in tracing the only person of that name in the country to us.”
Wettsburg wiped the sweat off his brow. Von Pfiff was unsure whether his boss was about to fly into a rage or merely exhausted from the mere act of speaking; his usually splotchy face, in any case, turned a more uniform red.
“Have you no shame, von Pfiff?!” Wettsburg exploded, sour spittle flying into von Pfiff’s face and besmirching an officious-looking notice of repatriation for a ring of Uzbek mafiosi. “Smuggling tobacco on a diplomatic posting, like some sort of common criminal? Do you mean to turn the heirs of Metternich into the laughing-stock of the entire continent?"
Von Pfiff remained unmoved. A thorough training in stoicism, it turned out, had its uses with your own country's diplomats as well as foreign ones.
"Brussels and NATO have been sniffing around our dealings with the Russians for years anyways. If we get a reputation for smuggling—I mean, my God, man, do you work for Austria or Nepal? Have you been leaking internal documents to Foggy Bottom and MI6 as well? Why, I always knew it was a mistake to give this post to a–”
Wettsburg’s mouth closed abruptly as he came to the sudden realization that he had made a fatal mistake. Von Pfiff pretended not to notice.
“A what, Herr Doktor?”
“Well, let me—”
“Surely you weren’t about to say ‘a Turk?’”
“I didn’t mean–”
“I will remind you that when Jacob von Wettsburg was made Landgraf after the Siege of Vienna, it was because Erhard Freiherr von Pfiff had held off the Ottoman troops assaulting his sector of the walls. But if that isn’t Austrian enough a heritage for Herr Doktor, perhaps we can return to the topic of things one should and should not be doing as a diplomatic official. I’m sure, for example, that the Bundesregierung would not at all be amused to learn about the… materials… you have been–”
Wettsburg's countenance froze into a portrait of white-hot but impotent rage.
“Are you threatening me, von Pfiff?”
“Not at all, Herr Doktor. I am simply announcing my intention to step down from my post."
A moment of prickly ceasefire followed as Wettsburg struggled to compose his thoughts.
"You have…my most full-throated endorsement," he replied icily.
"I do think it would be in our mutual interest if you accepted my immediate resignation and perhaps arranged a coffee date with one of our backchannels to Paris to smooth out any ruffled feathers. That way we can both be spared seeing our faces on Page One of Der Standard or becoming campaign fodder for Gerhard Pickl.”
Von Pfiff rose, satisfied by the draining of color he observed on his now ex-boss’s face. Having dirt on people was always bound to come in handy in this business.
“I certainly accept your resignation,” said Wettsburg, “and apologize for my temper. As you know, all diplomacy ultimately boils down to optics, and we could find ourselves in…a sticky situation…if you were to remain on staff as a regular consular officer.”
“I understand entirely.”
“That said, we may have some contract work for you in the future depending on the circumstances…you were the best Sinhalese speaker at the embassy in Colombo, after all.”
“I’m flattered to hear you say so.”
“Do keep in touch.”
“Auf Wiedersehen, Herr Doktor,” he said, closing the door behind him. After collecting his belongings from his office and mailing his diplomatic credentials back to the government, he bought a one-way ticket, first class, to Miami, and began packing up his apartment.
Splut's phone rang in the Uber to Charles de Gaulle. He answered to hear a familiar voice.
"Mladža," it said, "an official from the Austrian diplomatic service just came in for a chat and told me that you were—doing some sort of import-export tobacco business on the side with one of their guys? Is this true?"
"Ah, Paval, good to hear from you. Yes, a spark plug on my truck shorted and caused a wildfire. I believe the local fire department dealt with it."
"The Austrians were pretty peeved. Of course these things do happen, Mladekar, but, ah..."
"I assure you it was strictly side business."
"Of course. I had a similarly narrow escape in Finland back in the early 2000s with Estonian booze. You live and learn."
"Yes, I think that'll be the end of that little line of business for a while."
"We do appreciate it. Oh, you are also persona non grata in Austria for the next ten years."
"Understandable. Of course, if I'm coming in from Germany or Czechia..."
"Well, just don't get caught doing anything odd if you do. That would be an issue. You will of course be fined three months of pay."
"An appropriate punishment," Splut agreed. "And the French?"
"I gather that there was a gentlemen's agreement under which Herr von Pfiff has resigned permanently from the Austrian diplomatic corps for personal reasons with no further action taken. What Paris doesn't know won't hurt it, of course. Just another minor incident in a sleepy corner of a rural département. Happens all the time, really."
"It does indeed," said Splut. "When do you get back to Kruvigora?"
"Week after New Year's. I've got to make the usual social rounds."
"Dinner chez moi?"
"Of course," said Paval. "Keep me posted. Got to go, one of ours studying chemistry at TU Wien got caught distilling spirits without a license."
"Cheers."
The line hung up and Splut exited the Uber into the great glass cathedral of modern travel.