Chapter 5
My body.
The usual owner, whoever he was, perhaps assumed that it was normal for shoulder blades to tense so tight against the skin. He would have had nothing else to compare his experience of having shoulders with. His peers, when asked how their shoulders felt, no doubt came up with that universal reply: normal.
I feel normal.
I feel like myself.
If I ever spoke to the murderer whose body I wore, I would be happy to inform him of the error of his perceptions.
I headed for the toilets, and out of habit walked into the ladies’.
The first few minutes are always the most awkward.
I sat behind a locked door in the men’s toilets and went through the pockets of a murderer.
I was carrying four objects. A mobile phone, switched off, a gun in a shoulder holster, five hundred lira and a rental car key. Not a toffee wrapper more.
Lack of evidence was hardly evidence itself, but there is only so much that may be said of a man who carries a gun and no wallet. The chief conclusion that may be reached is this: he is an assassin.
I am an assassin.
Sent, without a doubt, to kill me.
And yet it was Josephine who had died.
I sat and considered ways to kill my body. Poison would be easier than knives. A simple overdose of something suitably toxic, and even before the first of the pain hit I could be gone, away, a stranger watching this killer, waiting for him to die.
I thumbed the mobile phone on.
There were no numbers saved in the directory, no evidence that it was anything other than a quick purchase from a cheap stall. I made to turn it off, and it received a message.
The message read: Circe.
I considered this for a moment, then thumbed the phone off, pulled out the battery and dropped them into my pocket.
Five hundred lira and the key to a rental car. I squeezed this last in the palm of my hand, felt it bite into skin, enjoyed the notion that it might bleed. I pulled off my baseball cap and jacket and, finding the shoulder holster and gun now exposed, folded them into my bundle of rejected clothes and threw them into the nearest bin. Now in a white T-shirt and jeans, I walked out of the toilets and into the nearest clothes store, smiling at the security guard on the door. I bought a jacket, brown with two zips on the front, of which the second seemed to serve no comprehensible purpose. I also bought a grey scarf and matching woolly hat, burying my face behind them.
Three policemen stood by the great glass doors leading from the shopping mall to the Metro station.
I am an assassin.
I am a tourist.
I am no one of significance.
I ignored them as I walked by.
The Metro was shut; angry crowds gathered round the harried official, it’s an outrage, it’s a crime, do you know what you’re doing to us? A woman may be dead, but why should that be allowed to ruin our day?
I got a taxi. Cevahir is one of the few places in Istanbul where finding a cab is easy, an attitude of “I have spent extravagantly now, where’s the harm?” lending itself generously to the cabbie’s profit.
My driver, glancing at me in the mirror as we pulled into the traffic, registered satisfaction at having snared a double whammy–not merely a shopper, but a foreign shopper. He asked where to, and his heart soared when I replied Pera, hill of great hotels and generous tips from naïve travellers bewitched by the shores of the Bosphorus.
“Tourist, yes?” he asked in broken English.
“Traveller, no,” I replied in clear Turkish.
Surprise at the sound of his native language. “American?”
“Does it make a difference?”
My apathy didn’t discourage him. “I love Americans,” he explained as we crawled through red-light rush hour. “Most people hate them–so loud, so fat, so stupid–but I love them. It’s only because their masters are sinful that they commit such evils. I think it’s really good that they still want to be nice people.”
“Is that so.”
“Oh yes. I’ve met many Americans, and they’re always generous, really generous, and so eager to be friends.”
The driver talked on, an extra lira for every four hundred merry words. I let him talk, watching the tendons rise and fall in my fingers, feeling the hair on the surface of my arm, the long slope of my neck, the sharp angle where it struck jaw. My Adam’s apple rose and fell as I swallowed, the unfamiliar process fascinating after my–after Josephine’s–throat.
“I know a great restaurant near here,” my driver exclaimed as we rounded the narrow stone streets of Pera. “Good fish. You tell them I sent you, tell them I said you were a nice guy, they’ll give you a discount, no question. Yes, the owner’s my cousin, but I’m telling you–best food this side of the Horn.”
I tipped when he let me out round the corner from the hotel.
I didn’t want to stand out from the crowd.
There are only two popular municipal names in Istanbul–the Suleyman restaurant/hotel/hall and the Ataturk airport/station/ mall. A photo of the said Ataturk graces the wall behind every cash counter and credit card machine in the city, and the Sultan Suleyman Hotel, though it flew the EU flag next to the Turkish, was no exception. A great French-colonial monster of a building, where the cocktails were expensive, the sheets were crisp and every bath was a swimming pool. I had stayed before, as one person or another.
Now, locked in the safe of room 418, a passport declared that here had resided Josephina Kozel, citizen of Turkey, owner of five dresses, three skirts, eight shirts, four pairs of pyjamas, three pairs of shoes, one hairbrush, one toothbrush and, stacked carefully in vacuum-wrapped piles, ten thousand euros hard cash. It would be a happy janitor who eventually broke open that safe and reaped the reward that would now for never be the prize of Josephine Cebula, resting in peace in an unmarked police-dug grave.
I did not kill Josephine.
This body killed Josephine.
It would be easy to mutilate this flesh.
There were no police yet at the hotel. There had been no identification on Josephine’s body, but eventually they’d match the single key on its wooden bauble to the door to her room, descend with white plastic suits and clear plastic bags, and find the pretty things I’d bought to bring out the natural curves in my
in her
body, a fashionable leaving gift for when we said goodbye.
The intermediate time was mine.
I toyed with going back to the room, recovering the money stashed there–my five hundred lira was shrinking fast–but sense was against the decision. Where would I leave my present body while I borrowed the housekeeper?
Instead, I went down a concrete ramp to a car park even more universally dull in its design than the Cevahir Starbucks. I pulled the car key from my pocket and, as I wound down through the foundations of the hotel, checked windscreens and number plates for a hire number, pressed “unlock” in the vicinity of any likely-looking cars and waited for the flash of indicator lights with little hope of success.
But my murderer had been lazy.
He’d tracked me down to this hotel, and used the parking provided.
On the third floor down, a pair of yellow lights blinked at me from the front of a silver-grey Nissan, welcoming me home.
Chapter 6
This is the car hired by the man who tried to kill me.
I opened the boot with the key from his
my
pocket, and looked inside.
Two black sports bags, one larger than the other.
The smaller contained a white shirt, a pair of black trousers, a plastic raincoat, a clean pair of underpants, two pairs of grey socks and a sponge bag. Beneath its removable plastic bottom were two thousand euros, one thousand Turkish lira, one thousand US dollars and four passports. The nationalities on the passports were German, British, Canadian and Turkish. The faces, alongside their endlessly changing names, were mine.