He sat down on the floor, which was littered with shavings and sawdust, and surveyed the living room. Bare though it was, it made a warmer impression than before.
*
Jonas had stopped worrying about red lights and one-way streets long ago. He drove down the wrong side of the ring road at high speed, turned off into Babenberger Strasse, and came out on Mariahilfer Strasse.
Vienna’s main shopping area had never appealed to him. He disliked hustle and bustle. When he pulled up outside a shopping centre, the only sound to be heard was the ticking under the bonnet. The only moving object in sight was a scrap of paper scudding across the asphalt at the next intersection, blown by the wind. It was hot. He made his way over to the entrance. The revolving door activated itself.
Armed with two suitcases taken from a boutique on the first floor, he rode the escalator up to a shop selling electrical goods. It was so stuffy he could hardly breathe. The sun had been beating down on the glass roof for days, and every window in the building was shut.
In the electrical shop he went behind the counter and opened his suitcases. Further along the aisle he found a digital video camera he knew how to operate. The cabinet contained eight boxed examples of the same model. Eight would be enough. He stowed them in one of the suitcases.
The tripods were harder to find. He could only lay hands on three. He put them in the second suitcase together with two small radio cassette recorders, an answerphone and some blank audio tapes and videotapes. Then he shut the suitcase and tested the weight. No problem.
In the radio section it took him some time to locate the most powerful short-wave receivers. He also helped himself to a Polaroid camera, plus another as a spare. He remembered the Polaroid films last of all.
The air was so stale he couldn’t wait to leave. He stretched. He had a stiff back from carrying the suitcases around and from the hard work in his parents’ former flat. It made him think of his masseuse, Frau Lindsay, who had a lisp and talked incessantly about her child.
*
He wolfed down his freezer fish and spooned some potato salad out of a jar. After cursorily rinsing the plate and the frying pan, he unpacked his cases. His flat didn’t have enough wall sockets for the cameras’ adapters, he saw. But he’d intended to take the tape recorders to the neighbouring flats in any case.
He forced his immediate neighbour’s rickety door with ease. Having often crossed swords with him over his habit of playing music late at night, he’d expected to find himself in a bachelor pad littered with pizza cartons and CD sleeves. To his surprise, the place was empty. A ladder stood propped against the wall in one of the rooms. Beside it was a bucket with a tattered floorcloth draped over the rim.
He felt uneasy as he went from room to room. He hadn’t noticed any sign of a move.
The longer he thought about it, the uneasier he became. Did this vacant flat possess some significance? Did it indicate that something crucial had escaped his attention?
He checked the other flats on his floor. Again to his surprise, few of the doors were locked. His neighbours had obviously been trusting souls. Only two doors resisted the crowbar. Behind all the others he found ordinary homes whose occupants might simply have been out shopping.
He returned to the empty flat, taking the adapters and batteries with him. There were seven wall sockets. He plugged adapters into six of them, reserving the seventh for one of the new tape recorders. The power had not been cut off; the displays came on.
He turned on the radio. With this model he should be able to pick up stations in places as distant as Turkey and Scandinavia. He selected a frequency and waited. Radioed a call for help, stated his location, spoke in German, English and French. He counted silently up to twenty, then changed frequencies and repeated his request to get in touch.
An hour of this convinced him that there was no radio traffic in Europe.
He turned on the short-wave receiver.
White noise from the BBC’s World Service. From Radio Oslo, from Central Europe, from the Middle East, from Germany, from Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. No reception, just white noise.
The sun was now so low that he had to switch on the light. He turned on the TV. Started the Love Parade video, pressing the mute button as usual. He adjusted the short-wave receiver to the Radio Vatican wavelength. White noise.
*
He awoke around midnight, having slid off the sofa and banged his knee. The TV screen was flickering, the radio hissing. It was hot inside the room.
With the shotgun in one hand and the tape recorder in the other, he went out into the passage. He listened. Something was bothering him. Hurriedly, he turned on the landing light. He listened some more.
He padded barefoot over the cool stone floor and into the adjoining flat, shouldering the splintered door aside. He stared into the darkness ahead. Just then he thought he felt a draught.
‘Hello?’
A narrow strip of light from the passage was shining on the door between the hallway and the living room. The door seemed to be ajar.
Again he felt a draught, this time on the back of his neck.
He went back into his flat and put the tape recorder down. Before going out into the passage again he peered in both directions and listened. Having locked the door behind him, he stole down the stairs holding the gun.
The light went out just as he reached the third floor.
He froze. Engulfed in darkness, all he could hear was his own irregular breathing. Seconds or minutes later — he couldn’t have said which — he gradually shook off his inertia. With his back to the wall, he felt for the light switch. The bulb shed a dim glow. He remained where he was, straining his ears.
He found the street door closed. Although it could only be opened from outside with a key, he locked it. He looked out at the street through the glass panel. Not a sound. Absolute darkness.
Back on the sixth floor, he turned on all the lights in the flat next door without letting go of the gun.
He couldn’t remember leaving the door between the hallway and the living room ajar. However, he didn’t find anything suspicious. Everything seemed to be just as he’d left it. The windows were shut. He couldn’t explain where the draught had come from.
Perhaps he’d imagined them both, the draught and the position of the door.
He fetched the tape recorder and put in a blank tape. Making a note of the time, he pressed the record button. He tiptoed out of the flat.
The neighbours on his floor had their own tape decks, so he didn’t have to use the other tape recorder. He put tapes in the decks in seven other flats, started them off, and wrote down the times and flat numbers in a notebook. The tapes had a playing time of 120 minutes.
Back inside his own flat, he locked the door and rewound the video. He left the sound turned off. Then he got the remaining tape recorder ready and switched off the short-wave receiver, which was hissing and crackling to itself beside the window. After that, he stretched out on the sofa with his notebook and a glass of water. Apathetically, he watched the Berliners repeat their silent dance towards the Victory Column.
He glanced at the clock when his eyelids started to droop. Twelve thirty-one. He noted it down, then pressed the record button.
*
Another cloudless day.
Jonas loaded the video cameras and all their accessories into the Spider. He’d left the windows open overnight, so the interior wasn’t as unbearably hot as usual.
During the drive he tried to contact various people by phone. Marie in England, Martina at home and at the office, the police, Radio Austria, his father.