“Can you?” she replied sharply. “And who are you to protect me? Because my husband could not do so much, even if he loved me enough to try. When all this has ended, perhaps you may come back to me, in some other shape.”
“I am your husband…”
“And I your wife,” she replied. “Though never before has either of us had need to say it.”
Ayesha bint Kamal.
She stood upon the banks of the river, one hand across her belly, a blue scarf across her head, her back straight and the serving boy crying silently at her side.
I left her as Cairo thundered to the roar of infidels.
Leaving is one of the few things I am good at.
Chapter 29
In 1798 by the banks of the Nile I wore the body of a man whose life no longer interested me. The waters of the river spilt out into the long grass until you believed that the water was without end, drowning the earth.
I took al-Mu’allim south, far from the French as they battled Mameluke cavalry before the slopes of the Pyramids. My body grew thin, my nails began to yellow and I would have abandoned it then and there, for it disgusted me, a withering corpse. Then I remembered my wife, and my oath to keep her husband safe, and I clenched my fists and lowered my eyes, and kept going.
Though the French were far from the higher reaches of the Nile, yet even here their deeds were condemned by the cataract-eyed imams, who cried, infidel, infidel, they violate us, they violate Egypt! The further from Cairo I went, the more violent the rumours became. The city was burned; the city was lost. Every woman was raped, every child butchered on the steps of the mosque. After a while I gave up contradicting the tales, as my veracity only served to mark me out as a traitor to the jihad rising in the sands.
I headed towards the coastal mountains of Sudan, until I came at last to the Red Sea where it looked out towards Jeddah. There, as news of a great naval defeat came whispering down the waters, I sat to watch the ocean and resolved at last to make a change.
There were few ports along the western coast of the Red Sea, but the battles in the desert and the chaos at the mouth of the Nile, where Nelson had shattered the French fleet, created a buzz among the tiny fishing craft and semi-piratical lateen-sailed skiffs. Excellent profits were made as they shipped, stole and scuppered war goods heading north towards the Mediterranean. One ship in particular caught my eye, an ancient schooner long past its retirement day. Its captain was a grinning Dinka chief, with a great sword on his belt and two pistols slung with piratical glee across his chest. His crew were as multicultural a melange as I had ever seen, from his Genoan lookout to the Malaysian pilot, who communicated through a mixture of poor Arabic, reasonable Dutch and obscene gesticulation. Of most interest to me, however, was the one passenger they were carrying for their crossing to India, who stood silently at the prow of the ship in a cloak of black, studying the waters and saying not a word.
He was a man barely into his twenties, tall and lean with perfect ebony skin, well-muscled arms and coiled black hair, who held himself aloft with the glory of a prince and was, upon interrogation of the crew, revealed to be precisely that: a prince of the Nuba travelling to India on a diplomatic mission.
“Does anyone know him?” I asked. “Does he have family or servants in attendance?”
No, no one knew him, except by reputation, and he had come to the ship without servants but with a vast quantity of cash. His personality was a closed book; his history, doubly so. It was with this in mind that I, still in the body of al-Mu’allim, followed him, the night before sailing, into the tiny port town. I trailed him between the crooked mud houses of the cliff-clinging streets, reached out to touch him on his arm, and as I went to jump, heard in my head the screaming of vampire bats, felt tiny vessels bursting behind my eyes, tasted iron on my tongue, and as I fell back, gasping from the attempt, the beautiful prince turned, his face also drained of blood, and exclaimed, in flawless Arabic:
“What the hell are you doing?!”
Chapter 30
Restless sleep, restless memories in an anonymous hotel room in…
where, precisely?
Bratislava.
What in God’s name am I doing in Bratislava?
Sleeping on top of a file that dissects the life of the entity known as Kepler. Rolling in sheets pulled too tight across the bed that wrap themselves around the body of the murderer called Coyle. I’d burned the Turkish passport, scattered the ashes down the toilet. I’d always known that I’d have to ditch an identity eventually; I was simply waiting to find out which one.
A thought, in the night. It hits so hard, so fast that I bolt upright, wide awake.
The Turkish authorities have no reason to track my British, Canadian or German passports, but that was because they didn’t know what to look for.
Whereas Coyle’s colleagues, whoever they might be, knew all of Coyle’s names.
A racing mind at 4 a.m. The street light is a yellow rectangle on my ceiling, the shape of the window. The rest of the room is deepest blue, the not-dark of the city.
I had been careful–so careful. Careful to avoid security, careful to slip over the borders quiet and fast, lest someone check my passports too particularly. Johannes had told me my Turkish passport was blown, and so it was destroyed. But buoyed up by that overconfidence I had let the hotel receptionist at the desk scan my German documents.
Was that enough?
I had trusted in border posts to be sluggish in their checks, for hotels to keep records rather than immediately search databases or contact the police. Were I merely evading a national agency, my precautions would be enough.
But I wasn’t just hiding from a police force. Whoever had given me the name of Kepler cared nothing for the sanctity of borders, the discretion of a hotel. And even if I were safe for tonight, having paid in cash, if someone looked hard enough
and for certain they would
as matters stood, the body of Nathan Coyle could be tracked.
A face in the mirror at 4.30 a.m., grey by fluorescent bathroom light. I’ve worn better faces, I’ve worn worse. I could get comfortable with these features, given time, but no amount of scrutiny can offer me the answers I need. The eyes are heavy, the mouth is slack, the scars tell me no more and no less than that the original occupant of this flesh wasn’t always great at making friends. Are the frown lines his or mine?
I gather up my belongings, put the handcuffs in my outer jacket pocket, key in my inner, and head out into the city, no rest for the wicked.
Chapter 31
She calls herself Janus.
On the shores of the Red Sea she wore the body of a Nuba princeling, and when I tried to move in on this most desirable of properties, we both came away with a stinking hangover.
Over a hundred and fifty years later she came to me in the body of a seventeen-year-old girl, and said, “I’m looking to relocate.”
We met in a bar on East 26th Street. Her body had been out in the sun, which was impressive, as in Chicago in the rain-soaked autumn of 1961 the only flushing I saw was from vodka and windburn.
The place had been a speakeasy once upon a time. The man with the greying chin and fading hair who stood behind the bar polishing a glass had once stood behind the very same long wooden counter cleaning coffee mugs with an old towel, ready for the cops to bust in and the clients to bust out. He still ran a quiet joint, one of the few left as the 1960s came roaring across the world, and still kept the good stuff in a locked cabinet, hidden away beneath the bar.
Janus wore blue, I wore Patterson Wayne, a businessman from Georgia I’d acquired the day after he liquidated his assets into a suitcase of cash, and the day before his company flopped, taking with it forty-seven employees and sixty-three private pensions. He was healthy, and of that age which the young respect and the old envy.