"Kraków runs on pierogi, trumpet calls, and free shots that are never really free"
Hannah Brooks, a 911 dispatcher from Parma, Ohio, has been sober for three hundred and seventy-one days, and she is going to spend the three hundred and seventy-second in a building called The Vodka Dorm. It has a 9.6 rating, a free walking tour, a cellar bar that was once an illegal communist-era vodka den, and a Wi-Fi password that reads YouWontRememberThis. "Yeah," Hannah says. "I will, though." She has an exit plan for every night, her sponsor's number, and her drink order memorised in Polish. Kasia, the bartender everybody loves, makes her a cherry kompot with a star anise in it and writes it on the board.
Her dorm fills up the way hostel dorms do. Liam Doyle from Cork sings his way through the gate in an Irish-flag cape and recruits her as Team Ireland's official witness for Friday's Vodka Olympics. There is Oona, a Finnish tango teacher who does not smile; Luana, a Brazilian tram-brake engineer doing every tram in Europe; Nigel, a retired Latin teacher who came for one week in 2019; and 'Emil from Liège', who wears sunglasses at night, isn't from Liège, and says somebody may be trying to kill him. Meanwhile the guests who sit on the VIP Stool keep losing their nights: a Spaniard wakes on a footbridge, and a stag-do best man is carried home at 3:47 a.m., completely limp, to find thousands of złoty charged at a club he has never heard of. The cleaner keeps a notebook of names. Warsaw head office answers with 'Mindful Drinking' posters. An Indian police inspector named Anjali Naik checks in on paper and refuses to download the app.
By Friday the courtyard has Olympic rings made of bread, a beer-crate podium sprayed gold, and a shark-print paddling pool full of ice and vodka. Hannah is the only clear head in the building, and she is counting. Then the app picks Liam for the VIP Stool, and he asks her to draw a box on the back of his hand and put a line in it for every drink. Somebody has to remember it, he says, when Ireland wins.
Age: 23
Type: Night-shift 911 dispatcher, one year sober
Fatal Flaw: Writes down everything, including the thing you said at 19:08
Role: Protagonist
Age: 26
Type: Singing Corkman and Team Ireland captain
Fatal Flaw: Keeps every promise, right up until the crowd starts chanting
Role: Victim
Age: 31
Type: Software QA tester from Lille, travelling as 'Emil from Liège'
Fatal Flaw: Has worn the same bucket hat for nineteen days
Role: Ally
Age: 38
Type: Goa police, seconded to an Interpol working group
Fatal Flaw: Refuses to download the app, or drink the tea she orders
Role: Investigator
Age: —
Type: Receptionist, walking-tour guide and unfinished PhD
Fatal Flaw: Offers history to people who came for vodka
Role: Ally
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "Na Zdrowie"
Mateo Ruiz woke up because a bronze man was hanging over him by one foot.
He looked at it for a long time. The bronze man was upside down, arms flung wide, balanced on a steel cable strung between the girders of a footbridge, and he was wearing nothing at all except a greenish patina and an expression of calm, acrobatic joy. Fog moved around him. Beyond him, where a sky should have been, there was only more fog, grey and wet and faintly orange from a streetlamp somewhere.
That's not good, Mateo thought, a naked man in the sky, and then his body caught up with his brain and reported, in order: cold; very cold; his cheek stuck to metal; a taste in his mouth like he had licked a battery and then eaten the battery; and a headache so enormous and so evenly distributed that it felt less like a headache and more like a new climate.
He sat up. That was a mistake. The bridge tilted, righted itself, tilted again. He grabbed the railing, and a thousand padlocks clinked under his fingers like wind chimes. Love locks. Hundreds of them, thousands, clipped to the mesh of the railing in every colour: brass and red and pink hearts, names scratched on them in marker and Tipp-Ex and nail polish. KASIA + TOMEK. ANNA I PIOTR NA ZAWSZE. J & M 4EVER. BRAD HEARTS STACY (LOL).
Below the bridge, a river moved, black and slow and steaming slightly in the cold.
He was on a bridge. He was on a bridge over a river in a city, and the city was Kraków, and he knew that because he could see, through a tear in the fog, a hill with a castle on it: a long pale wall and red roofs and a gold dome, lit from below, floating above the water like a ship that had run aground in the sky.
Wawel, he thought. The castle. With the dragon. He'd done the walking tour. On — Friday? He'd done the walking tour on Friday. Today was —
He didn't know what today was.
He patted his jacket. Left pocket: phone. Right pocket: nothing. Back pocket of his jeans —
He patted it again. He patted it a third time, the way everyone does, as though the wallet might be shy.
"No," he said aloud, in Spanish, to the naked bronze man. "No, no, no. Venga ya."
Fictional reviews of the fictional Vodka Dorm, quoted from the book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Kasia at the bar is an ANGEL" — FreeToWander guest
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Kasia at the bar is a star / she makes you a kompot, not a scar." — Liam Doyle, Team Ireland
☠ "the vodka olympics are fully booked. some guests will remember them longer than others. risk accepted. ☠" — @HostelReaper