“Yes.”
“How?”
“Contrary to popular opinion, not every ghost you meet is inclined to once-every-twenty-years outbreaks of psychopathic extermination,” I replied. “Those that are, you tend to re member.”
“Tell me!”
“Why?” I breathed, and saw him almost flinch. “You are hellbent on killing me. You killed Josephine, and for all that this is a perfectly friendly little encounter, give or take my hormonal condition and the handcuffs, I find it hard to simply forget the turbulent nature of our relationship. You’d kill me, Mr Coyle, because a ghost nearly killed you. I am not that ghost. You’d kill me for what I am. Why should I help you find Galileo?”
His lips thinned; he turned away, then as quickly turned back. “Because if you didn’t help me, knowing anything at all, it would prove that you are the monster I think you are.”
“You think that anyway. Give me something more. Why did you kill Josephine?”
“Orders.”
“Why?”
“Because I respect the men that give them. Because the file said…” His tongue tangled on the words. “Because the file said she murdered four of our researchers. She did. Not you–her.”
“Why?”
“She attempted to infiltrate one of our projects. A medical trial. You should know this.”
“I know some. She needed money, a medical trial in Frankfurt, something for the common cold. They rejected her when they realised she was a hooker. I did my research too, before making a deal with Josephine Cebula.”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t for the common cold.”
“You astonish me. What was it?”
“Vaccinations.”
“Against?” He didn’t answer. A thought. I leaned back, feeling the idea settle like dusty cobwebs on clean skin. “Oh. Against us. You were trying to find a vaccine against us. Did it work?”
“Not with four of our researchers murdered.”
“Wasn’t me.”
“But it was Josephine. I saw footage, CCTV. I saw her with blood on her hands. Then you came to Frankfurt, made her an offer. What were we to think?”
I inhaled the words. I wasn’t sure if I trusted myself not to have a violent physical reaction. My fingers pressed over my belly. “You believe… that I became Josephine because of some medical trial? You think she and I launched some kind of attack against your people? Conspired to murder Doctor whoever-it-was and all his happy brood?”
He thought about it. “Yes. That is what I believe.”
Smell of detergent on my fingertips, a memory of fruit tea at the back of my throat. I counted backwards from ten slowly, and said, “You’re wrong.”
Coyle did not reply.
The train was slowing, carriages clunking against each other as we decelerated towards a siding. I wondered how this body would cope with pregnancy. It seemed a stick-skinny thing, frail ankles and tight waist. I wondered if fruit tea was any use against morning sickness.
“Who do you work for?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“You know I’ll find out.”
“Tell me about Galileo.”
“I’m going to keep on wearing your body, Mr Coyle, until someone shoots me in it. You want a happy outcome, I’m going to need more information.”
“You need information?” His voice was a half-laugh, having nothing better to do with itself. “Ten minutes ago it was midday in Istanbul. A man touched me on the train and I was somewhere else, wearing new clothes, talking to someone new. You’ve stripped me naked, talked with my tongue, eaten with my mouth, sweated and pissed and swallowed my spit, and you need information? Fuck you, Kepler. Fuck you.”
Silence.
The train bounced across an uneven set of points, slowing now, the engine winding down. Perhaps there was a station nearby, a midnight traveller looking for a ride. Perhaps a siding where we might sit for a few hours while the driver had a cup of coffee, smoked a cigarette on the side of the track. The engine chunked to itself, unwilling to sleep.
I felt my hands on my belly and wondered what my child would grow up to be.
Perhaps he’d work on the railways like mum?
Perhaps she would dream of being something more.
A politician, perhaps, who in thirty years’ time would stand before the nation and proclaim, “My mother rode the tracks between Berlin and Vienna to support me in my youth, so that the future I could make would be better than the life she lived.”
Or maybe none of the above.
Maybe my child would grow up quiet and alone, a mother perpetually travelling, postcards from abroad, a sense that her life was not her own.
“Galileo,” I said, staring at nothing in particular. “You want to know about Galileo?”
An intake of breath, his eyes on my face.
I told him.
Chapter 41
St Petersburg in 1912, and you could almost believe the Romanovs had got away with it. I had heard the rifles crack in 1905, seen barricades in the street and believed, as had many others, that the dynasty’s days were numbered. The social reforms could not keep up with the demands of economics; the political reforms could not keep up with the changes in society, and so, kicking its way into the twentieth century, it had seemed inevitable that some part of Russia would get caught on the wire.
Yet in 1912, dancing beneath the chandeliers of the Winter Palace, silk gloves rolled to my elbows and hair held high with silver and crystal, I could believe that this world would last for ever.
I was Antonina Baryskina, seventh daughter of a grand old duke, and I was there to demonstrate an eligibility that my host singularly lacked. Antonina, sixteen years old, was already branded a flirt, a harlot in the making, and worst of all the kind of woman who would sleep with a proletarian largely because her daddy forbade her from doing so. No coercion, wheedling or downright threat had yet coaxed Antonina into reforming her ways. As rumours threatened to burst into flame, a Moscow estate agent by the name of Kuanyin approached me with an unusual commission from the father.
“Six months,” she said. “Beautiful woman, beautiful life. There is, I think, no existence on this earth more refined than the Baryskina girl.”
“And in return for this… refined existence?”
“It is asked that you manifest a maturity worthy of the rewards that are bestowed.”
“To what purpose?”
“To prove to the world that Antonina Baryskina is open for business.”
I loved being Antonina Baryskina. She had a beautiful bay mare who I rode every morning regardless of the cold; owned a cello which she had almost never played but whose strings, when pressed, sang like the weeping of an widowed god, and as I danced, and laughed, and discussed the current political climate and the state of the weather, the rumours of Antonina-that-was fell away, and across St Petersburg eligible men queued to catch a glimpse of this reformed heiress.
The bores I ignored; the handsome and the witty I permitted to visit me in my mansion on the banks of the canal, feeding them coffee and Turkish delight. Several brought prepared verse and song to entertain me, and I clapped my hands and felt really quite giddy at the rapt adulation of so many noblemen. I have waved my banners with the suffragettes, marched for civil rights and the equality of man, and still feel a flush of excitement at the recollection of handsome men reciting verses to my honour.
In time, my father came to me and said, “You are receiving a great many eligible visitors to this house, and I think the time has come to discuss marriage prospects.”
He had never known how to speak to his daughter. He knew even less how to speak to the mind that now wore his daughter’s flesh. I said, “The commission was to keep me away from treasure-hunting lieutenants and unwise sexual behaviour long enough to undo the potential smirch on my name. Nowhere did our arrangement extend to finding marriageable material.”
It takes the full force of a magnificent Russian beard to truly bristle, and bristle it did. “I do not suggest that you marry the gentlemen!” he retorted. “Simply that we must start laying the groundwork for my daughter.”