Nothing happened.
Zurich Hauptbahnhof was no longer simply a station: it was, the signs announced, ShopVille-RailCity Zurich. He’d always found it philistine, a hasty euthanizing of the last romance of rail travel by a world that always needed something to buy. Now, he was glad of the shops. He ducked into one and bought a scarf and hat, winding the scarf high and pulling the hat low. The assistant was telling her colleague a long story about her flatmate and barely noticed him.
The commuters had gone home, but the shops still drew plenty of customers to the station. In the cavernous concourse, the lights were dim: they’d put up a screen and were showing an old movie. Paul skirted round the audience, row after row all staring forward at the black-and-white images projected on the screen. He might as well not have existed.
He took an escalator down to the lower concourse. The bright lights and low ceiling pressed down on him. Penitential bars of black and white marble striped the walls. He felt a headache coming on. The rows of luggage lockers, efficient blue, blurred together. He had to read the number three times. 247.
He put his hand in his pocket and took out the cigarette case. The metal throbbed against his skin; he could feel the tablet inside like a beating heart.
There is one condition.
He thought of everything he’d suffered to get it. The life he’d lost. He thought of Ari. The injustice burned him, that Ari would win and he would flee into permanent exile.
Everything’s hypothetical until you do it.
He entered his combination, shut the locker and headed for the exit, head down, forcing himself not to run. He counted his steps. Ten. Twenty. Forty. Up the escalator, out of the concourse, into the bright shopping arcade. He must be almost there.
‘Paul?’
He should have ignored it, carried on walking and pretended he hadn’t heard, that it wasn’t him. But he was primed. The switch tripped; he stopped dead.
‘Paul?’ said the voice again.
He couldn’t pretend now. He turned, his face frozen. A tall, stooping man with brown floppy hair poking out from under a bobble hat was waiting for him.
‘Marcel?’
‘Trying to escape?’ His nose was too big and his mouth too wide: it made his smile vaguely grotesque.
Paul opened his own mouth, but no sound came out.
‘The late antiquity colloquium.’ Marcel tapped him too-familiarly on the shoulder. ‘Hey, me too — it’s my fucking supervisor giving the talk, right?
He doesn’t know, Paul thought. His legs turned to water.
‘Where are you going?’ was all he could manage to say.
‘Beckenried. My girlfriend got a free pass. Ten centimetres of powder, this late in the year, it’s a crime to miss it, right?
Paul forced a smile. ‘Right.’
‘What’s your excuse?’
Another moment where time seemed to stutter. He tried to see a departure board, but there were none in sight. All he could think of was the last train he’d taken.
‘I’m going to Paris.’
From the corner of his eye, he saw two policemen slowly circuiting the station, submachine guns cradled in their arms. Sweat soaked his scarf; he edged around so that Marcel was between him and them.
Marcel had said something he hadn’t heard. He was frowning. Is there a problem?
‘Sorry?’
‘Didn’t you go there like a month ago?’
‘Where?’
‘Paris.’ Marcel’s eyes twitched, trying to follow Paul’s gaze over his shoulder. Paul forced himself to concentrate on Marcel.
‘The museum asked me to go back.’ Inspiration. ‘They want me to do a piece comparing our new Aphrodite with the Venus de Milo.’ He checked his watch. ‘In fact, I really ought to get on the train.’
‘For sure. Give my love to Venus, OK?’
‘Enjoy the skiing.’
Ten paces on, Paul looked back. Every fibre in his body warned him he’d see Marcel staring at a TV in a shop window, or getting the news on his phone, accosting a policeman and pointing him after Paul.
But he was gone.
The pressure release when he got in the car was so much he almost threw up in the footwell. He slumped down in the seat, head barely above the window.
‘Someone recognised me.’ He told her about Marcel. ‘The moment he sees the news, he’ll report me.’
‘He’ll tell them you’re going to Paris.’ Valerie crossed the river and piloted the car down a canyon of long, high buildings. She drove awkwardly, moving the gear stick with abrupt jerks, turning the wheel in short, angular motions. Paul guessed she was used to being driven.
‘Where are we going, anyway?’ she asked.
‘Frankfurt.’
She turned into a tunnel. ‘You have a friend there?’
‘No,’ he admitted. ‘I did an exchange there, so I know the city. And I speak German.’ That was all true. Also true: it’s connected with the whole of Europe. An easy place to leave. He didn’t say that. Now they were leaving Zurich, his terror was boiling away. What it left behind was hard, dry realism, no trace of sentiment. You must open your mind. Was this what she’d meant?
‘Are you excited?’
‘What kind of question…?’
‘About the future, I mean. Becoming someone else.’
‘Exciting’s not quite the word.’
‘You’re getting what everyone longs for, deep down. New life. Forgetting who you were.’
He remembered the way she’d caressed the statue in the museum, her ear pressed against the cold bronze. The sound of immortality, she’d said.
And maybe she was right. If he picked up the life he’d shed and examined it, was there anything there he’d miss? Work? Family? Colleagues? Not really — it was just an empty husk. Yesterday, that thought would have prompted hours of loathing self-analysis. Now it didn’t matter.
‘It’s not me who has to forget the truth. It’s everyone else.’
Valerie shook her head. ‘The truth is only what people remember. They will forget you. So, all that is necessary, the one remaining spark of evidence, is for you to forget yourself.’
‘OK.’
The tunnel ended and spat them out onto a dual carriageway heading east. He found a wheel that reclined the seat and dialled himself back.
‘You seem to know Zurich pretty well, considering you just arrived yesterday.’
‘I was here for finishing school.’
He laughed — and after a moment’s thought, she laughed with him. It was the first time he’d heard it, rich and solemn, like the lower register of a harp.
‘Don’t you think I’m the finished article?’ she teased.
‘You seem more like a work in progress.’
She liked that. He sat up a little straighter. The moment of intimacy only made him realise how little — nothing at all — he knew about the woman he’d trusted his life to.
‘Where are you from?’
She flicked her head. ‘I had a cosmopolitan childhood.’
‘Anywhere in particular?’
‘All over.’
Her tone said he wasn’t going to get anything more geographical. He tried a different angle.
‘If you were in my situation — if you had to choose one person to save your life — who would you choose?’
‘My sister.’ No hesitation.
‘Where’s she.’
‘I don’t know.’ Paul started to laugh; Valerie cut him short. ‘I’d find her. Or she’d find me. She’s very intuitive.’
‘OK.’
‘Anyway, you still haven’t answered that question yourself.’
‘I’d choose you.’ He’d rushed it, almost swallowing the words with a sudden fit of anxiety. So many things, and you’re nervous about this? marvelled the voice inside. He glanced across at her, wondering how she’d taken it.