Spunkmaster13–In my sleep.
Christina 636–One more thing–the name Galileo mean anything to you?
Spunkmaster13–Dead white guy?
Christina 636–I was given names–Galileo and Santa Rosa.
Spunkmaster13–I got nothing.
Christina 636–Never mind. And thank you.
Chapter 26
Bratislava, as night fell.
The sky was turning the colour of a two-day bruise, a stripe of golden sunlight skimming the western horizon, trying to peep through beneath the promise of rain.
I hadn’t been to Bratislava for decades. Ten beautiful streets in the middle, a castle on a hill, trolley buses and a great deal of anonymous architecture beyond. It was a city that most tourists covered in two days. An hour from Vienna by boat, the same by train through flood plains, it was hard to shake the feeling towards this would-be national capital that there was somewhere a little more interesting nearby.
The internet café where I connected with Johannes served sweet pastries turning hard around the edges. The lights in the square outside were cold white over pale stones, and as it began to rain the gutters sparkled and shimmered with the rush of water to the riverside below.
I stepped out of the café into the downpour and regretted that I hadn’t stocked up on all-weather gear during those few breathless minutes in Istanbul when I had first met the body of Nathan Coyle. After all, I had no idea how long I was going to be in residence.
I scampered through the rain as it tap-danced on the sloping roofs and thundered down from the straining metal gullies. The solemn statues on the churches dripped from the ends of their chins and noses, angel wings shed waterfalls across the wooden doors of medieval monuments. The cables on the trolley buses snapped great white stars as they swung through the running streets, while the four-towered castle upon its hill vanished into a yellow rectangle of light hanging over the distorted darkness of the city.
I ran, my trousers soaking, my stomach empty, a bag of someone else’s secrets bumping on my back, past the half-shadowed faces of men with coats pulled across their heads, fighting for a cab; women with umbrellas turned inside-out, hair clinging to their pale, cold faces; teenage girls whose shoes were now too impractical for walking in, holding them by their heels as they waded through the riverine streets. And for a moment my fingers itched and my face was heavy with cold and I glanced at
a woman with beautiful black hair down to the nape of her spine, her shoulders bare, icy in the cold, the jacket that should have adorned it slung over one arm as she struggled unexpectedly into thicker clothes, a man at her back, the taste of chocolate on her lips, and she looked beautiful, and her life looked serene. Tonight, perhaps, she dines with the man she loves, and he loves her, and when the rain stops they will stand together on a balcony
–for certain she has a balcony–
and look down on the river in the cold night air and have no need for words.
She turned away, and I scuttled on, for everyone’s life is greener on the other side.
My hotel was a hotel for tourists, right on the river. A bar protruded out over the water’s edge, purple LEDs framing the balus trade, and the sound of glass chinked against its neighbour. The lobby was lined with pictures of old Bratislava, dead princes and noble kings; the receptionist spoke five languages, all fluently, all with a smile, and when I slid the key card into the lock to my room, the door slid open without a sound, into warmth that was a little too hot and an interior that smelt of fabric softener.
I had a bath.
As I sank deep into the tub I ran my fingers over the markings of a life lived. Round white scar on the left upper arm where, a long time ago, I’d had the BCG jab. I remembered a time when bodies carried smallpox scars; now they were marked by vaccinations. Another faded scar ran straight through the webbing between thumb and forefinger on my right hand, and there, below my ribcage, the prize-winner–a great pinkish slice, the zigzag of brisk stitching done by a busy hand still apparent around the grinning flesh. I traced the mark, felt the thickness beneath the skin, and guessed a knife, rammed in from the side and then slid across the stomach. The wound had long since healed, and I had to applaud Nathan Coyle for the density of functional muscle he’d built up in the intermediate time, but the scar remained, like a slag heap above an exhausted mine.
Horst Gubler had recognised Coyle, and that was good. My borrowed face had some utility after all.
More importantly, he’d given me a name, a partner, someone else to look for. I was in no great hurry to backtrack through the faces of my life, but if in doing so I could also trace the men who had ordered my death
ordered Josephine’s death
then I would do so.
And if this body, hot water running off its arm and seeping into the places between its toes, died in the attempt?
That didn’t bother me at all.
Chapter 27
Memories of ghosts.
Anna Maria Celeste Jones, sitting with her back straight and her eyes front.
I was worn, she said. As a skin.
Beauty is a hard attribute to measure. I have been a long-necked model with golden hair, my lips fresh, my eyes wide, my skin silk. And in this guise I found it hard to walk in my tight red heels, and bewailed how quickly my skin lost its sheen when not pampered with a regime more time-consuming than sense. The volume of my hair was lost after a single wash, the fullness of my lips cracked within a day. No more than a week was I this model of fine proportions before irritation at the maintenance drove me on to simpler pastures.
It is not beauty, in an eye, a hand, a curl of hair. I have seen old men, their backs bent and shirts white, whose eyes look up at the passers-by and in whose little knowing smiles there is more beauty, more radiance of soul, than any pampered flesh. I have seen a beggar, back straight and beard down to his chest, in whose green eyes and greying hair was such handsomeness that I yearned to have some fraction of him to call my own, to dress in rags and sweep imperious through city streets. The tiny woman, four foot eight of purple and pearl; the chubby mother, her bum heaving against denim jeans, her voice a whip-snap between supermarket aisles. I have been them all, and all of them, as I regarded myself in their mirrors, were beautiful.
In 1798, sitting upon the shores of the Red Sea, I first discovered this simple truth: that as one of us who move from flesh to flesh, life to life, I was not, in fact, alone.
Chapter 28
My name was Abdul al-Mu’allim al-Ninowy, and I had chosen the wrong side; or perhaps, fairer to say, the wrong side had chosen me.
I came to Cairo in 1792, as the Ottoman administration collapsed and Egypt fell to whichever Mameluke strongman could muster the sharpest sword. Abdul al-Mu’allim al-Ninowy was such a man, who lived away from the stink of the city in a white mansion with a courtyard of trickling fountains and kept three wives, one of whom I loved. Her name was Ayesha bint Kamal, and she had a fondness for song, wine, poetry, dogs and astronomy, and had been married off cheap and young by her father, who understood wine and dogs and disapproved of the rest.
I met her in the bathhouse, where I was a respected widow young enough to be physically comfortable, old enough to escape excessive pursuit for my wealth. In the steamy confines of the women’s room, away from the ears of men, she and I had laughed and talked. When I asked what her position was, a frown had played across her plucked eyebrows and she replied, “I am the junior wife of Abdul al-Mu’allim al-Ninowy, who sells wheat to the Turks and cotton to the Greeks and slaves to everybody. He is a great and a powerful man. I would be nothing, if I were not his.”