“They’ll kill you too. If they’re at all like you, they’ll come for me and shoot you in the process.”
“I know,” he replied. “I know.”
He knows but he does not care.
I can’t remember the last time I was willing to die.
“Why did you kill Josephine?”
“Orders.”
“Because she was a murderer?”
“Yes.”
“Because she killed people in Germany? Dr Ulk, Magda Müller–them?”
“Yes.”
I grabbed a fistful of shirt, pulled his face up towards mine. “It was a lie,” I hissed. “I did my research; I went over every inch of her life before making an offer. Your people lied. She killed no one, she was innocent! These are the fucking people you’d protect? What do they want?”
I could feel his breath on my face. It smelt of cheap toothpaste; when his mouth was mine, I hadn’t noticed. I let go; he dropped back on to the cobbles, lay breathless beneath me.
“What do you want, Mr Coyle?” I asked, squeezing my shaking hands tight. “Forget the ones who sent you, the ones who lied. What do you want?”
He didn’t reply.
“What would you do if I let you go?” I didn’t look at him as I asked the question.
“I’d put a bullet in your brain before you could touch another soul.”
“That’s what I thought.” Then, “I know about Alice.” An almost infinitesimal thing, a little pulling of muscles around the eyes, the chin, but it was as good a reaction as I was getting from him. “I went to see Gubler. He recognised me–you. Said you were nice, understanding, almost. Said you went to visit with Alice. You know, covert operatives shouldn’t leave their car registration number on the reception desk.”
His breath picked up a little speed. “You won’t find her.”
“Sure I will,” I replied. “And even if I don’t, she’ll find you. Wearing your face is the biggest come-hither I can conceive. Maybe she’ll tell me why Josephine died.”
I eased my weight off his chest, slipped down to the stones at his side. Coyle lay still on his back, hands cuffed in front of him, staring up into the rain. “I… followed orders.”
“I know,” I sighed. “You’re just the foot soldier.”
He opened his mouth to speak.
I grabbed his hand.
I couldn’t imagine he’d have anything interesting to say.
Chapter 33
A boat to Vienna.
The Danube’s flat silver waters are wide enough in places to mistake it for an inland sea. Travellers cross the border from Slovakia to Austria without noticing, passports merely glanced at by the conductor on the boat. Drowned wooden sheds for long-departed fishermen greet you along the waterside, in the waterside, the windows washed away by the flood. It is not fit for luxury yachts, but an industrial river, a practical river of great flatlands washed with silt. Factories feed off it; behind the fields squat little towns with long names where no one asks too closely the secrets of their next-door neighbours. The Austrians value their privacy, and so in silence the villages sit on the edge of the river, waiting for a change that never comes.
I shouldn’t have hit Coyle.
My face feels tender, red. In a few hours I’ll have a whopping bruise.
I have crossed into the Schengen zone, and can temporarily discard my passports as irrelevant. My spoken German is good enough, and if I was ever to disappear, this is the time. A new body, a new life, a new name. One dense crowd, perhaps leaving the cathedral or in a busy market, and I can switch bodies ten, fifteen times–untraceable, no matter how good your resources. Swallow poison and, before the drug can take effect, jump away, leave Coyle to his well-deserved fate. Move on to the next life, bigger, better than before. The next life is always better.
Josephine Cebula, dead in Taksim station.
I will not run.
Not today.
The boat moored just beyond Schwedenbrucke. On the west bank old Vienna, tourist Vienna, the city of spires, palaces, Sachertorte and Mozart concerts, ten a cent. On the east bank the antique rectangular windows of the city dissolved into the white concrete and iron-elevator apartment blocks of post-war Europe. I headed west, into the old city, past prim-buttocked matrons in their tight skirts walking pampered dogs on tight leashes through the immaculate streets. Past stiff-necked gentlemen with their briefcases polished black; hawking migrants selling DVDs from open rucksacks, chased away by the blue-capped police who know that drink and drugs are only a problem when the burgomasters of the city perceive them. I walked beneath the faces of stone cherubs, sad to see their streets defiled by the presence of uncouth strangers; past statues raised in stone to emperors and their steeds, empresses and their noble deeds, and dead generals famed for fighting Turks and civic dissent. I passed an art gallery showing an exhibition entitled Primary Colours: the Post-Modern Revival, whose posters explained that within you could find canvases painted entirely in red, blue, green, and, for those who were feeling radical, yellow, with a single pinpoint of white daubed in the bottom corner to draw the eye mystically in. Some had artistic titles–Aneurism Lover was a canvas of solid purple with a tiny tracery of blue just visible if you squinted. Others, such as two canvases of solid black, shown side by side, were simply Untitled.
I walked on by. I like to believe that I move with the times, but sometimes even I miss the 1890s.
An antique shop was tucked into the base of a great white mansion with a brass-plated door facing a square decked with a fountain of gurgling dolphins and raging ocean gods. When I pushed open the door, a small brass bell rang, and the air within smelt of old paper, feathers, copper and clay. A pair of Chinese tourists–never going to buy–stood examining a little marble statue bearing the face of a stern-eyed bishop with a sagging chin, but at my approach they giggled and put it down, like children caught fiddling with the keyhole in a vending machine. A man, his hair inclining towards grey, forest-green trousers faded to thin patches around the knees, stumbled out from behind a counter bedecked with skulls, pots, papers and the obligatory models of St Stephen’s spire, looked at me and stopped where he stood. “I told you already,” he blurted. “Go away!”
For a moment I forgot my body, and blushed, hot and suddenly ashamed. “Klemens,” I blurted. “I’m Romy.”
His hands, which had been flapping in the air, as if by wafting alone I could be propelled through the door, froze. His face tightened, lips peeling back. “You shit,” he spat, the thickness of his accent tying up around the word and making it greater. “I have nothing to say, and you come here like—”
“I’m Romy,” I repeated, stepping forward. “We went to the opera together, rode the Ferris wheel. You like green beans but hate broccoli. I’m Romy. I’m Di’u. I’m me.”
Chapter 34
Klemens and Romy Ebner.
They appear approximately one third of the way through the Kepler file.
They met in 1982 at a dinner in Vienna and were married five months later. She was Catholic, he was lapsed, but the service was before the eyes of God, and their dedication was absolute.
Their first child was born in 1984, and sent to boarding school at fourteen, to return to the family home no more than twice a year. Klemens loved walking in the forested hills that bounded Vienna; Romy did not, and so the walking boots stayed at home and he looked at the horizon from the windows of the Bruner-strasse tram on his way to work.
When he joined a choir, she said he sang like a chipmunk. When she started attending meetings at the local church hall, he enrolled in a cooking course, but his food, she said, was foreign muck and she had no time for it. When she retired, to dedicate herself to herself, he stayed working, longer and later to support their needs, and found that, alone in the evening gloom of the shop, he did not mind his own company.