“Horst,” said Matron, and then, in heavy English, “Look who’s back.”
Horst Gubler rose from his single chair, put down his book–a much-thumbed swashbuckler of minimal merit, and looked at me. He held out a clammy hand and stammered, “P-p-pleased to meet you.”
“You remember Mr Coyle,” chided matron. “He came to see you not five weeks ago.”
“Yes. Yes. He did.” He must have, for Matron said he did and so it must be. “I h-hoped,” his tongue tangled on the word, but he scrunched his eyes up tight and then forced himself on, “you were from the embassy.”
“Horst–” a sad shake of the matron’s head was enough to bow Gubler’s eyes to the ground “–we’ve talked about this.”
“Yes, Matron.”
“Mr Gubler doesn’t remember things clearly, does he?”
“No, Matron.”
She turned to me, her voice ringing out for every ear. “It’s common among patients suffering psychotic episodes to seem lucid during the event but amnesiac following it. Mr Gubler’s psychosis–a belief in possession–is a fairly typical mechanism, thankfully less common among Western societies than it has been.” She beamed, a little chuckle swelling up from within her bosom as she added, for the ease of all concerned, “Things keep getting better, that’s what we say!”
I laughed because she laughed, and my eyes flickered to Gubler, who stood mute and still, head bowed, hands folded in front of him, and said not a word.
He sat on the edge of his bed, fingers clinging to it as if he might drop.
I closed the door as the matron walked out, then sat in the chair opposite him, studying his face.
I barely knew it. For weeks I had regarded it in the mirror, let it grow a shabby beard that blurred rather than enhanced its features. Yet even when searching for means to punish that face, striving with all my might to rip Horst Gubler to shreds, there had been a pride in the eyes, a crinkle in the lips which I could not erase. So long had I stared at that reflection that I had come to loathe it, for no matter how sad I waxed my features, how deeply I scrunched my eyes or wrinkled my nose, the glowing defiance of the man who got away with it always burst through.
No more.
I had done everything I could do to destroy this face, but only at the very end, when I stood before a stranger in a strange land and told a single truth–“I am possessed”–had I achieved my aims.
The face was broken now, my work concluded.
I said, “Hello, Mr Gubler.”
“H-hello,” he stumbled, not raising his head to look at me.
“Do you remember me?”
“Yes, Mr Coyle. My memory is better now. You came here with your p-partner.”
“Ah yes, my partner. Forgive me, I have several partners–can you remind me which partner I came with?”
His eyes flashed up, for this was a test, surely, a test of his mind, and he would not fail. “Alice. Her name was Alice.”
I smiled and shuffled a little closer to him on the edge of my chair. He flinched, head twisting away to one side.
“Do you remember what we talked about, Mr Gubler? The last time I came to see you?”
A dull, single nod.
“Can you tell me what it was?”
“You wanted to know about my h-history. It was a psychotic break,” he added, voice rising in case he had made a mistake. “I was not possessed; I had an episode arising from marital and work-related stress.”
“Absolutely,” I replied. “I remember you telling me about it. How did you say it began? A woman touched you. She had dark skin, a blue dress; she shook your hand and the next thing you knew…”
“Here.” His voice was a bare whisper. “I was… here.”
“Yes, you were.” I leaned forward, threading my fingers together between my knees. “And what else did you tell us? About being possessed?”
“Not possessed, not possessed.”
“There was something else, wasn’t there,” I murmured. “When you woke up here, your hand was in a doctor’s hand and you looked up at him, and what did he do next?”
“Not possessed,” he repeated sharply, knuckles white where they gripped the edge of the bed, spine curved, jaw slack. “Not possessed.”
“Did you tell me and Alice about the doctor? Did you tell them how he smiled at you?”
“Smiled, glad to see me, he smiled, taking care of me.”
“Did you tell us the doctor’s name?”
I was a few inches from Gubler now, my knees bumping his, fingers almost close enough to brush his, and as my hands swayed, he jerked back, springing off the edge of the bed and pushing himself against the wall. “Don’t touch me!” he screamed. “Bastard shit! Don’t fucking touch me!”
I recoiled, raising my hands, placating, palms out. “It’s OK,” I breathed. “I’m not going to touch you. No one’s going to touch you.”
Tears balanced on the rim of his reddened eyes, waiting to fall, his breath fast, body twisted into the wall away from me. “Doctor forgot,” he whispered, and his speech was fast, clear, and completely sane. “He forgot that he touched me. How’d they explain that? How’d they make sense of it?” His eyes rolled back to me, and there it was, just for a moment, the hardness that had haunted me in the mirror, cutting through the drugs. “You understood, sat there, she held the camera and you said you understood. You believed me. Did you lie to me? Did you fucking lie?”
“No,” I replied.
“Did you fucking lie?!”
“No. I don’t believe I did.”
“Are you… laughing at me?”
“No.”
“I’ve been waiting years. Friends, embassy… they’re cunts. They’re all fucking cunts. They say there’s a hold-up, the courts have a backlog. You said you’d make it better. What do you want?”
“Everything,” I breathed. “Everything you remember about me and Alice. I want you to tell me what I said, what she said, what I wore, what she wore. What language did I speak, was it Slovakian? Was she tired, did she look happy, sad, young, old? Everything.”
“Why?”
I looked down at my feet, then untangled my fingertips and stood up. I tucked my chair under the desk, ran my hand through my hair and sat down beside him, close enough to, very carefully, lay my hand on the leg of his trouser, feel the warmth of his calf underneath. I took a slow, careful breath, then looked him straight in the eye.
Our gazes met and, for the first time since I had walked into that room, he saw me.
My fingers tightened around his leg, pressing warm into his skin.
“Why do you think?” I said.
Chapter 25
Evening in Bratislava.
A computer in a café, bad coffee in my mouth, Coyle’s bags stuffed beneath my chair.
An email to an account I’d set up a lifetime ago and never closed down, from an individual who identified themselves as Spunkmaster13.
Times changed, but not Johannes Schwarb.
A report on the passports carried by Nathan Coyle–clean, save for the Turkish identity, which the Istanbul police were seeking. A man suspected of shooting a woman dead on Taksim station had hired a car under that name, then driven his escape vehicle all the way to Edirne in the night.
I made a mental note to burn the Turkish passport, and began to reply.
Spunkmaster13 was already waiting in the chat rooms, and he appeared before I could type more than a few words on to the screen.
Banal pleasantries were exchanged along with the panoply of smiley faces and vanishing ninja emoticons that seemed to form the greatest part of Johannes’ vocabulary, unticlass="underline"
Christina 636–I need you to do another check-up for me.
Spunkmaster13–Sure, what?
Christina 636–Registration number. It’s for a car driven by two people–a man called Nathan Coyle and a woman called Alice White. They visited an asylum in Slovakia, signed in at reception, logged the registration details of the vehicle they visited in. An inmate describes the woman as aged approximately 29–35, short blonde hair, 5’5–5’8, slim build, fair skin, blue eyes. Can you check?