When I met them, I was Trinh Di’u Ma, trafficked from her home aged just thirteen years old, whose parents, some five years later, had paid an estate agent to find her and bring her back. They had no money to give, so they bartered away the only currency they could think of–six months of their daughter’s body, in exchange for her safe return home. I had taken the deal and regretted it, for on acquiring Trinh from the brothel in Linz, I spent the best part of a month engaged in nothing but medical tests and detox. When the pain grew too great, I jumped from Di’u into the body of the nurse who watched her, and sat with my head in my hands as she screamed for heroin, please God, please, just give me what I need, I’ll do anything.
Even when the last opiate had been flushed from her system, and I walked wobbling from the hospital door, I felt the emptiness in her mind, longing in her blood, and wondered whether I, riding the mere echo of dependence, could make it to Vietnam without breaking.
Sitting in the departure lounge of Vienna airport, my arms around my knees, a fake passport in my pocket and caffeine buzzing around my head, I felt the avoidance of the well-dressed travellers more than the stares of the security guards. When the customs officers, having no better reason than my age, race and fading scars, took me to one side and strip-searched me, their hands running over every part of my body, their machines beeping at my bare goosebumped flesh, I stood with arms open and legs apart and said nothing, felt nothing but an overwhelming desire to get out.
I nearly left her then, abandoning Di’u with her ticket for Hanoi and no recollection of how she got there, until a man, seeing me hunched beneath the seats, came up to me and said in badly broken English:
“Are you OK?”
Klemens Ebner, in a yellow jumper and appalling beige trousers, knelt by the side of a shaking Vietnamese girl and said, “Miss? Ma’am? Are you OK?”
Behind him, Romy Ebner, stiff-backed in black and blue, exclaimed, “Get away from her, Klem!”
I looked up through Trinh Di’u Ma’s hazy eyes into the eyes of the only man in the world who seemed to care, and he was beautiful, and I was in love.
Two weeks later I knocked on a heavy black apartment door in Vienna, wearing the smart sandals and well-worked feet of the local postman, and said, “Delivery, please?”
Romy Ebner answered it, and as she signed the packet and returned my pen, I caught her by the wrist and jumped.
Chapter 35
Back in the body of Nathan Coyle, I sat in the darkest corner of the tightest café in Vienna and ate lemon cake with a cherry on top while Klemens gripped his tiny cup of coffee and failed in his mission not to stare.
“How did you end up as him?” he asked, voice low against the customers coming in for lunch. “As this man?”
His crinkled eyes were enough to suggest dislike, his voice confirmed active hate. I shrugged, scooping purple cake on to the end of my fork, and tried not to take it personally. “He came looking for me,” I replied. “I take it you’ve met him before?”
“He came to the shop, asking about you,” he grumbled, sipping espresso a droplet at a time. “Not in terms of a name, or a description of your… your qualities. He knew my wife had had blackouts, a few days here, a few days there, and wanted to know if I had experienced the same.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I said no.”
“What did you tell him about your wife?”
Klemens smiled, and immediately frowned, joy and guilt taking turns to wash across his features. “I told him that my wife seemed absolutely fine, and then said she couldn’t remember what she’d done yesterday. I told him that we’d been to the doctor a few times, but he couldn’t find anything wrong with her, and that I wasn’t very worried about it.”
“And was he… I mean, was I,” I grunted, “happy with this reply?”
“You were… neutral. Your partner seemed unconvinced.”
“Ah, my partner. Alice?”
“That was the name she gave.”
“What’s she like?”
He blew thin steam off the top of his coffee and considered. “She spoke German with a Berlin accent, liked to be in charge, walked around like a man, very tough, very proud. She was on her phone a lot, made notes, took a few photographs–I asked her not to–she had short blonde hair. She wanted to be tougher than anyone else in the room. I thought it weakened her, trying to be all that.”
“Are the two mutually incompatible? Femininity and toughness?” I asked, and to my surprise and secret pleasure, Klemens blushed. He had a good blush, which swelled up beneath his neck and circled round the rim of his ears.
“No,” he mumbled. “Not at all… Just I thought she was maybe trying too hard to be… something she didn’t have to be.”
I grinned and had to resist the urge to put my hand on his. His eyes met mine, then looked away, down into the blackness of his coffee cup. “She left me a card. An email address, contact number. Would it help you?”
“Yes. Christ, yes, it’s exactly what I need.”
“Then it’s yours,” he said. “Just… use it well.”
A single rectangle of card with just three lines of text–email address, phone number, name: Alice Mair. He pulled it from the mess of his wallet, from cards he’d never used and memberships he’d forgotten he owned, and as he pushed it towards me, our fingers touched, I lingered, and he shied away.
“This is… unexpected,” he admitted.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to visit like this.”
“It’s… fine. I know that it’s you. There must be reasons. This man you’re… this man you’ve become. Did he hurt you?”
“Yes.”
“I thought as much,” he murmured. “You don’t strike me as someone to do something for no good reason.”
“He killed… someone close to me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He was aiming for me.”
“Why?”
“It’s something that happens,” I replied. “Every few decades someone new learns of our existence, realises all that we could do and gets scared. This time…”
“This time?”
“This time there were orders to kill my host, as well as me. That’s never happened before. My host was an innocent. I made her an offer and she said yes. Now she’s dead and the people who are coming for me invented lies to justify it.”
He was leaning away, a motion he probably didn’t notice himself perform. My face belonged to a murderer, and though it wasn’t to a killer that he spoke, yet some reactions are ingrained deep in decent men. “What will you do?”
“Find Josephine’s killer. This body pulled the trigger, and for that… but it was also following orders. Someone gave orders that she had to die. I want to know why–the real why.”
“And then?”
Silence between us. I smiled, and it didn’t reassure. “More coffee?”
“No. Thank you.”
His eyes were locked on to his coffee cup, reading the future in its depths.
“How’s your wife?”
A flicker to my face, then away. “Good. Well. Busy. She’s always very busy.”
“And… you’re happy?”
A brief flicker of his gaze, a shift on his face, gone as quickly as it had arrived. “Yes,” he said softly. “We’re happy.”
“Good. I’m glad.”
“You?” he asked. “Are you… happy?”
I thought about it, then laughed. “All things considered… no. Not at all.”
“I’m… sorry to hear that. What should I call you?”
“I’m called Nathan.”
“I… will try to call you that. Is it your name, or is it…” A flicker of fingers at my borrowed skin.