I looked around at my silent companions. Thick gloves, long robes, no easy way in. A guard took a flame from the brazier, and as he laid it to the kindling the body on the stake saw me and screamed, “Heavenly father, help me, please!”
A gloved hand fell on my shoulder and a voice said quietly in French, “He did not touch you, did he, Father?”
I looked into a pair of eyes above a tight red mask and shook my head. “No,” I replied. “My robe protected me.”
The eyes narrowed, and it occurred to me that I had no reason to think the body I inhabited could speak French at all.
The Bible fell from my hands, and even as the robed man turned to his companions, I knocked the hat from his head and tugged the mask from his face, pulling one arm across his throat and pressing my other hand over his eyes and as he began to fight I
switched, spinning to drive my elbows straight into the belly of the black-robed priest. My body was tall, old but lean, and I had a dagger and a pistol on a black cord which now I pulled and fired at the first man who turned to fire at me. The flames were catching on the kindling beneath the pyre, black smoke rolling up as the body began to scream, but the red-robed men were moving, reaching for weapons, calling out in alarm, and I bent my head forward, put my elbows together and charged head first at the nearest man, slamming into his chest and knocking him to the ground. A gunshot rang out and something exploded inside me, tearing through lung and bone. I fell back, the echo of the shot ringing in my ears, not so much pain as shock opening inside my chest. The man who’d fired stood not fifteen feet away, reloading his pistol. I crawled on to my feet, felt blood swirl around me, and ran at him, pulling my glove free from my right hand, as he reloaded, raised his pistol again and fired.
The force of it spun me through a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree pirouette, and as I fell I reached for the nearest object I could find, which happened to be him, and my fingers tore the robes from his chest. I felt the warm touch of a collarbone and
blessed relief, blessed merciful relief I jumped
a body with its bones still intact
a bloodied corpse that clung to my collarbone clung no more, fell at my feet, lungs broken, chest shattered, face covered in its own blood.
Now men were shouting, pistols drawn and daggers raised, but in the confusion no one quite knew who to shoot at, so I turned and looked for the exit, for the way I had come, and as the flames rose behind me, I hurled my gun to the ground and ran.
Behind me, on the pyre, a man whose flesh was popping and hair was catching flame screamed as his legs began to sizzle in the heat.
I ran.
Chapter 24
I, whose enemies call me Kepler and whose body, as it boarded the 7.03 bus towards Bratislava, answered to the name of Coyle, have in recent years tried my best.
Which is not to say that the standard of my best is especially high.
In a small room in a small flat in a small town a girl with scars in her arms sat awake, and afraid, in a room she herself could not remember tidying, ready to live a life no one else but she could possibly live.
A blink of the eye, and all things change.
Consequences are only for the ones who stay behind.
The bus rattled through tiny villages, picking up an old woman here, a pair of teenage lovers there, no more than six or seven passengers at any time, heading through Slovakia.
My stop was unmarked, but the driver knew the place, pulling up by a shrine to St Christopher and a mud path framed by a tunnel of beech trees. The ground was soggy with the mulch of fallen yellow leaves as I walked to a grey tomb of a building surrounded by gardens of sloping grass and still lily-spotted ponds. A small fountain was dried up and clogged with moss by the front door. Metal grilles had been nailed on the outside of the windows. A wooden board proclaimed, DOMINICO HOSPICE, PLEASE SIGN IN AT RECEPTION.
Under communism mental health was easy. Depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or, worst of all, the manifestation of any views contrary to those held by the state were simply the expression of a diseased mind best kept isolated from the body politic. To be ill was to be at fault. You, said the state, you who weep when you look upon the harsh truths of this world, see so clearly the lies that people tell–you have done this to yourselves. And so must be thankful for whatever little mercy the country throws your way.
We call it a disease, a doctor once whispered to me in the back-streets of Vienna, but a disease is not nearly as easy to blame as people.
Communism had fallen, but ideas fall more slowly than men.
This I’d known when, all those years ago, having drained his accounts and disowned his family, I marched the body of Horst Gubler to the gate and proclaimed, help me, I think I am possessed.
The receptionist asked for my name.
Nathan Coyle, I said, in my best Canadian accent. It sounded almost identical to my American accent, except for my pronunciation of the letter ‘z’, a refinement entirely wasted on the Slovakian matron behind the desk.
I’m a nephew of Mr Gubler, I said. I’ve come to see my uncle.
She looked astonished.
Goodness, she said, you didn’t say you were his nephew the last time you were here, Mr Coyle!
Didn’t I?
Perhaps I wasn’t thinking straight.
Remind me when it was that I last dropped by?
There is a picture in the Kepler file of Horst Gubler.
It shows a man in his early sixties, sitting with his back to the window. He has two chins: the first sharp, pointed, the second longer, lower, sagging towards the base of his neck. His hair is salt-white, straight, cut short, his eyes grey; his nose is hooked and, on lesser men, might seem oversized but fits his features well. He looks away from the camera, half-turned towards some unseen stranger, wears hospital blue and seems surprised to have been caught there, framed by the setting sun. In another life he might have been a genial uncle, a teddy-bear Santa, or perhaps, had circumstances permitted, a trusted Congressman and abuser of women. Yet here, now, he was all that he was–a man of no wealth, friends or even citizenship, for he accused himself of many crimes, burned his US passport when he entered Slovakia, gave away his assets, dismissed his friends, and acted, indeed as he proclaimed when entering the mental home, as a man possessed.
I was led through halls smelling of disinfectant and boiled onions. Behind heavy metal doors that buzzed when opened the abandoned of the nation sat in silence, watching daytime TV. A recent donation from an unknown benefactor had bought an art studio, a small room with wide windows looking north, whose door stood locked–for the funding, while generous, could not support a teacher and the paints as well.
“We like the patients to be expressive,” explained the matron as she led me through the halls. “It helps them find themselves.”
I smiled and said nothing.
“I don’t approve,” said an old man, sitting in a chair alone, a knitted cardigan too small about his tiny shoulders, his lower lip thrusting forward until it nearly stuck out beyond the tip of his nose. “They don’t know. When they find out–that’s the day. Then they’ll come back just like I said.”
Of course they won’t, Matron smiled. You’re talking nonsense again.
A corridor up some stairs, a locked security gate. More doors of thin wood, most standing open. Outside each a rack for paperwork–records of appointments, blood pressure, medication, and a few scant photos for those who wanted to remember, of families who’d long since walked away, children who never came to visit, a home that the patient would never see again.
Horst Gubler’s door had no photos.
It stood ajar, and when Matron knocked, she didn’t wait for an answer before opening it.
A single bed, chair, desk, sink. A PVC mirror, carefully laminated and glued to the wall. A window with a grille over it, which looked west towards red-leaved trees growing bare with the coming cold.