I pinched the bridge of my nose. “OK,” I breathed. “We need to get you walking in some higher heels.”
Chapter 40
A direct train runs from Vienna to Berlin. It is a white monster decked out with the square red letters DB–Deutsche Bahn. With its origami white cabins and stainless-steel sinks, the slick Berlin sleeper was a triumphant two fingers raised against the Balkans Express.
I had a two-bed berth to myself. With the mattresses folded into the wall, it was a bright white triumph of spatial engineering. Unfolded, you had to squeeze between bunk and wall like an eel through a cracked sluice.
Outside, the full romantic cliché of the German night became apparent, criss-crossed only by the light of the yellow-skimmed autobahn as we raced it north. Low moonlit mist clung to the fields; towns flared, puddles of whiteness; great rivers wound between black hills, little villas of white concrete and clean glass peeking out between the trees, where the stressed families of München and Augsburg went to relax. When the train began to curve east, it did so in a great sweep, luxurious as the painter’s brush drawing the final curve of a woman’s breast.
I watched the landscape go by, my bed made but untouched. Every body grows used to its own smell, but even I could tell that I stank. The water from my sink ran either too hot, or too cold, with no middle ground.
At 1 a.m. I heard the shuffle of the stewardess as she made her rounds down the slumbering train. I snapped a bracelet of my handcuffs on to my left wrist, leaned out of my door and whispered, “Madam?” Even at that hour, her smile had been engineered to dazzling perfection. “Madam,” I murmured above the heartbeat of the track beneath us, “could you help me?”
Of course, sir. It’d be a pleasure.
I gestured her into the cabin. She followed, eyes curious, smile open. With one person the cabin might have been called cosy; with two it became suffocating.
“May I…” she asked,
and I reached out, caught her wrist, jumped.
Nathan Coyle. He was getting better at recognising his own symptoms: as he swayed, dizzy at the release, he tried to lash out, flailing wildly, his hand striking the compartment wall with a thump that made him wince. I caught his hand and snapped the handcuffs to the rail on the higher bunk, waited for the dizziness to pass.
Pass it did. He felt the restraint on his left wrist, saw the handcuff, groaned and slouched back against the wall. “Right,” he grunted. “Where now?”
“Train to Berlin.”
He raised one drooping eyebrow to examine me. “What are you supposed to be? I thought you only went in for whores and garbage men.”
I smoothed down my uniform. “I think I look rather smart. You missed the joy that was Kapikule, or the Balkans Express, or Slovakian buses, so you probably lack the appreciation for a smiling face as it stamps your ticket that I have. Thankfully, you and I will both benefit from Deutsche Bahn’s breakfast tray with marmalade.”
“I hate marmalade.”
“I like it,” I retorted. “I could eat pots of the stuff.”
He straightened a little, turned to fully examine me. “Are you… threatening me with breakfast condiments?”
I tucked a loose strand of hair behind a delicate ear, and said, “I have an address for Alice Mair.”
His fists tightened. “She’ll be ready for you,” he breathed.
“I know. By now your friends will be scouring Europe for you–or rather me, or let’s say us. That they haven’t found us is something we can perhaps both be grateful for. I’ve been through the Kepler file and I can’t work out what deed I directly performed that could induce such personal hatred in you. Professional dislike and business animosity I can comprehend. In the last ten years I have worn prostitutes, beggars, criminals, liars, killers, thieves. I haven’t always been… I was not always what I am now, but surely you can see, I have tried my best.” I shivered, suddenly cold in my uniform shirt. “Your file is a lie. Perhaps you assume I’ve killed, that I’ve… worn a body for a night, ridden high on the sex and heroin, and left it to die of the overdose, alone on the hospital floor. I have lived longer than you know, and I have carved… turmoil through my past. You talked to my hosts. Were they unhappy? Were they left naked and alone? As samples of my species go, you must be able to see, you must know… I am a bad choice of target.”
He didn’t speak, didn’t move. I hissed in frustration, my thin arms wrapped tight across my bony chest. “You presume the high ground. Most murderers do. But it was me you should have killed, not Josephine.”
Was that hesitation in his face? A quiver of a thought more than hate? It was hard to tell. I had spent too much time in his features, not looking at them.
“Who is Galileo?” I asked and saw his weight shift, one foot to the other, then back again.
“How long has it been?” he said. “It was only a few minutes ago that I shot you in Taksim; a second ago you were a bin man in… some place. Somewhere else. How long has it been, really?”
I dredged my thoughts back. “Five days? And it wasn’t me you shot.”
“Yes, it was,” he replied, sharp as a tack through the toe. “It was you I shot; and a tragedy that it wasn’t you who died.”
“But your orders were to kill Josephine too.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“She was compromised.”
“By what?”
“You know.”
“I really don’t.”
“She killed our people.”
“She really didn’t, but I can see this argument getting circular.”
He tugged loosely against the cuff around his wrist, irritated rather than testing its strength. At last: “You must be very intimate with my body.”
“Yes.”
“What do you think?” he asked, twisting so I could admire it fully. “You have an unusual perspective. Do I fulfil your requirements? Is my face stern enough, are my legs of a suitable length, do you enjoy the colour of my hair?”
“A stern face is not the consequence of the body that bore it.”
“I cannot imagine my face in any shape other than the look I give it.”
“I can,” I retorted. “You’ve looked after yourself, that much is clear. Hard to say whether you’ve fallen foul of that fine line between fitness and vanity. I was curious about the scar across your stomach. Also you need to think about spectacles.” His mouth twisted in surprise. “Take it from an expert; you’ll be wanting reading glasses sooner rather than later.”
“My eyes are twenty twenty!”
Amazing, the indignant pride people invest in natural processes.
Astonishing, how deeply vanity is ingrained.
I tried to put my hands on my hips, but in the confined space of the cabin I could only manage one hand on one side. “Are you saying that to impress me?” I asked. “Because I imagine, having been in residence for a while, that you’re the kind of man to take pride in his physical prowess, but there’s no point being foolish when it comes to your eyesight. I’ve had cataracts, infections, long-sightedness, short-sightedness, partial blindness…”
“Not you!” he snapped. “Not you. Someone else’s eyes, someone else’s blindness.”
“Me,” I replied. “I, myself. These are the things I have experienced. I have walked bodies into courtrooms because they were too afraid to speak. I’ve held a skin down while they gave me the general anaesthetic because the tumour-ridden schmuck was too scared of hospitals to go through the treatment. Think whatever you want about who I am, but don’t waste your breath denying my experience.”