And at his smile something twisted beneath my stomach and he said, “Why hello. I remember you very well,” and, though I was perfectly functional and my body liked to exercise two or three times a week and eat sensible food, I tasted bile. Quickly, I reached out towards his smiling, wobbling face, palm up and replied, “Yes you do.”
He shook me by the hand.
Later, when asked to recall Horst Gubler’s speech at the museum, kinder listeners would report that he seemed rather strange in the minutes leading up to it, hardly himself at all. Harsher listeners–and the press–would report that he was clearly drunk, there being no other explanation for his actions.
Everyone, regardless of personal bias or inclination, would remember the first thing he said upon taking the stand, immortalised in journals across the state.
“Hiya, all!” the body of Gubler cried, silencing the audience with the jingling of a silver spoon upon a crystal glass. “So glad you could all be here, so glad! There’s just one thing I’d like to say before we kick off with the evening’s festivities. President Obama–what a faggot.”
Three days later I was on a plane to Slovakia, Horst Gubler’s passport in my hand, credit cards in my pocket. Of his assets–which turned out to be a mere 1.8 million dollars and a great deal of bluff–twenty thousand dollars went into a Swiss bank account for an unnamed roaming traveller, eighty thousand went to an ex-wife, and the remainder was bequeathed, along with any outstanding assets, to a charity dedicated to the victims of rape, violent crime and domestic abuse. They were so grateful, they sent me a plaque, framed in brass, which I forwarded on to Maria Anna Celeste, with my compliments.
Chapter 21
Slovakian?
Not a word.
I speak French, German, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, English, Swahili, Malay, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, Farsi and Italian. Based on these I can roughly comprehend a wide range of locally similar languages, though comprehension is never the same as being able to reply.
Hungarian? Czech?
Not a clue.
Only a few borrowed words–toilet, TV, credit card, internet, email–that sprung up too fast and too late for the linguists of their nations to have any better idea.
I got off the train a few stops short of Bratislava.
When first I visited Slovakia it was a beautiful land of mighty rivers, great fields across fertile plains, pine tree hills rising on the horizon and the distant jingling of cattle bells from the blue-grey walls of the evening valleys. There may even have been some traditional dress–though at the time tradition was a concept yet to be romanticised into its knee-kicking glory.
Communism, as always, had not been kind to this idyll. With as much tenderness as a tank in a trench, villages of rustic stone and tiny cared-for chapels now boasted squat apartment blocks and concrete industrial zones, fallen into disrepair almost as soon as they had risen. Rivers, once running clear, now flowed sluggishly through the flatlands, their surfaces decked with thick green scum that grew back as quickly as it was cleared. The land still held much beauty, but it was spotted through with the remnants of an industrial ambition stretched too far.
I stopped in a bed and breakfast in a town with an unpronounceable name. A bus ran every three hours to Bratislava, twice a day on Sundays. One church, one school, one restaurant, and on the edge of town one supermarket, which sold, as well as cured meats and fish, garden furniture, bathroom parts and small electric cars.
The owners of the bed and breakfast were a husband and wife, and only one other room was occupied by a pair of Austrian cyclists come to pedal the gentle low roads of Europe. I waited for the building to go to bed, then let myself out into the night.
The one-church town was also a one-bar town.
The one bar was playing 1980s pop songs from one CD. On the dance floor teenagers desperate to get out, get away, writhed against each other, too horny to go home, too frightened of their companions to actually have sex.
I looked for the one person who might be interested, and found her, sitting back from the dance floor, watching in the dark. I sat down opposite her and said, you speak English?
A little, she said.
But for what she did, a little was more than enough.
I bought her a drink, which she barely touched.
Her English was better than she claimed, and her French, we eventually discovered, was superb. She said, where are you staying?
The boarding house.
That won’t do at all, she replied. If you’re interested, I know somewhere quiet.
Quiet was perfect.
Quiet was exactly what I needed.
She lived on the very edge of town. The front door locked heavy behind us, the walls were hung with photos of ancient grandmothers, their hands resting proudly on the shoulders of their sons.
Her room consisted of a bed, a desk, a couple of hand-me-down works of art put up by a tenant generations ago who hadn’t liked them enough to take them away and left hanging by a lazy landlord. Under the bed were books on economics, chemistry, mathematics. On the small crooked desk, old plates gathering mould, and pieces of foil, stained with powder. She kicked the books aside, took off her jacket and said, you ready?
The track marks in her arm were faint but visible. The thin white scars across her wrists were in neat little rows, running up to her elbow, fading and old but made worse by scratching. I said, how old are you?
She shook her head.
Are you ready?
I smiled and replied, something a little kinky?
I gave her the key before I pulled out the handcuffs. It never serves to give the wrong impression. She looked briefly shocked, but her professionalism managed to restore her smile quickly enough and, gesturing at the bed she said, come on in.
I lay down on the bed, let her cuff my right hand to the bedstead, and as she lent back to admire her handiwork, I caught her left wrist with my free hand and
jumped.
“Hey there,” I said, as the body beneath me blinked bleary, unfocused eyes. “I think we should talk.”
Chapter 22
The scars on my arms itched.
Hidden beneath my tights were fresher scars on the inside of my thighs, still burning, crying out for the scalpel and the antiseptic wipe.
Nathan Coyle–or at least the man whose Canadian passport so proclaimed him to be–lay handcuffed to the bed beneath me. I sat down beside him, crossed my legs, put my chin in the palm of my hand and said, “You’ve got some text messages.”
His eyes focused on me, and with clarity of vision came clarity of thought.
Clarity of thought, it seemed, was not impressed with its conclusions.
His jaw tightened, his fingers tensed.
“I’m guessing,” I said, “that they’re security checks. The first was Circe, the second Aeolus. Having no idea who to reply to or what to say, I didn’t respond. Your colleagues must know by now that you’re in trouble. Good news for you, unless they shoot you like you shot Josephine.”
He lay motionless. Flat. The angle of his arm cuffed to the bedhead couldn’t have been comfortable, but he was a tough guy. Tough guys don’t fidget.
“I read the Kepler file,” I added, fighting the urge to scratch my arms. “It’s mostly correct–I’m impressed–but you don’t appear in my file, and based on what I can remember I’m reasonably confident I never touched your body, right up to the point you shot me with it. So it can’t be personal. Met any ghosts before now, Mr Coyle?”
Silence.
Of course.
Tough guys, they wake up handcuffed in strange places, gun down women in stations, get possessed and marched halfway across Europe by an invading consciousness, but it’s nothing they can’t handle.