A cabin for six, four of the beds already taken. A husband, wife, teenage son occupied three; in the other was an old man who chewed something herbal with the circular grinding of a camel’s jaw and lay on his back to read articles about ancient cars and journeys through the east. The family had a makeshift feast, which they passed up and down the three-bunk tier they inhabited. Hard-boiled eggs, slices of ham, pieces of goats’ cheese, crumbling bread that shook golden shards across the floor. With every crunch of the knife through the loaf, the old man with the car magazine flinched, as if the blade were cutting bone.
I climbed into the top bunk as the train jerked into motion, put my bag of clothes beneath my head, my bag of weapons beneath my feet, and lay back to think. Metal bunk below, plastic ceiling above, the space between barely wide enough for a tomb.
No one came to check the passports.
Chapter 14
There are many ways to catch a ghost sitting in the body of a loved one. Basic questions–name, age, father’s name, mother’s name, university–can be answered by any well-informed inhabitant, but it takes a matter of minutes to probe a little deeper.
First place you lived when you left the family home?
Name of your primary school headmistress.
First girl you ever kissed.
Or–my personal favourite–can you play the violin?
The delight with that particular enquiry is of course when the ghost, relieved to be asked something it can successfully answer, stands up and rattles off five favourite tunes in the key of G, only to be informed upon the final semibreve that the body’s natural owner has never held a violin in all her life.
First skin I ever jumped to, the first question I was ever asked, I failed.
I was an empty-bellied killer, and the constable who pinned me to the watchtower floor wanted to know my name.
So I told him.
“Not that name,” he growled. “Not the poor soul you killed. I want to know your name.”
I had beaten a stranger to death, and that stranger, me.
I was a killer caught with blood on my hands.
“What’s your name?!”
I was a flake-skinned youth, the weight of a club across my neck, the pressure of a knee against my back, two ribs cracked, one eye swollen, never to see right again. And like the men who beat me, I too was curious to find the answer to that most thorny of questions.
What’s your name, bastard? Murderer, butcher, liar, thief. What’s your name?
When they threw me into Newgate, in the hot pits where the masses went, fifty to a room–forty-seven and three bags of flesh by morning–I laughed the hysterical laughter of a mind too shattered to remember that it should weep. When the judge sentenced me to hang by the neck until dead, my knees buckled, but my face was empty and my soul was calm. When Fat Jerome, king of the underbelly of the prison, tried to get there first, his great wet paws around my throat, I didn’t fight him. I threw up no defence, made no noise, but consigned my soul to Satan, to whom, it seemed, it had no choice but to go.
Yet it transpired I did not want to die, so with Fat Jerome murdering the murderer who had murdered me
rather inevitably, upon reflection,
I looked back into my murderer’s face from Fat Jerome’s eyes, and forgot to squeeze.
My killer fell to his knees, gagging for air, his face red, eyes popping. A small crowd had gathered, pinioning us together, body to body, sweat to sweat, and one voice said, “Why didn’t you finish him, Jerome? Why’d you let him live?”
I couldn’t speak.
“I’ll do it, Jerome!” piped up another, a crooked-lipped thief with a brand on his hand who desperately wanted to impress the king of the cellar, the lord of the throng.
My silence was taken for consent, and with a little whoop the spry-limbed convict leaped forward and drove the end of a spoon into the socket of my killer’s eye.
Chapter 15
Sleeper train is a misnomer.
Starting-awake-in-the-night train is more apt.
As drivers change and carriages are shunted in and out of platforms in the dark, the journey towards Sofia is a stop-start of teeth-grinding screeches and head-bobbing rattles. You do not sleep on a sleeper train, but rather doze in and out of a fitful sense of unconsciousness, aware that this is not awareness, that the thoughts with which you think this are not thoughts at all, and so infused with so profound an understanding of your condition, you sleep to wake again ignorant that you slept at all.
We reached Sofia at 4.23 a.m. I would not have known, but the lone passenger had set his alarm to buzz at 4.15 a.m. precisely. It made the sound of a nuclear siren, a klaxon that knocked the entire compartment awake with a clenching heart. He rolled out of his bunk dressed in yesterday’s clothes, picked up his bag and left without a word. I tweaked the blind back as we passed into the station. The sun was still down over the city. A lone luggage handler waited on the deserted platform. I pushed my wafer-pillow higher against the back of the bed and rolled over to sleep.
The blind stayed down as we pulled away from Sofia. A city, its history and people, its stories and its tragedies, holds no interest to me at 4.23 a.m.
The Serbians did check passports.
At Kalotina-Zapad a team of fresh hard-jawed officials boarded the train, while the grimy-eyed crew of the previous night disembarked, wheeling their little cases to the opposite platform and the journey home. The new officials wore smart peaked hats and scuffed blue coats. As we pulled away from the station, they knocked on every compartment door, calling out, “Tickets, passports!”
Tickets and passports were taken away for inspection. I handed over my Turkish identity, the name newly learned, and lay back in the bunk, wishing we could open more of the window as the Bulgarian countryside flashed by. I had no great fear of detection this side of the border. No matter how good the Turkish police, international arrest warrants take time.
As my details were inspected and my tickets stamped, I flicked through the file marked Kepler.
Nearly a hundred photos and names, faces, glimpses of old CCTV pictures, arrest warrants, family photos. Records of interviews and documents logged, emails sent and phones hacked. Some of the faces in the file I barely remembered; others had been part of me for years at a time. There the beggar I had met in Chicago whose face, when shaved, turned out to be barely a boy’s, and whose body I enrolled, as my very last act in it, on a catering course in St Louis, reasoning there were worse places to begin again. Here the woman from St Petersburg whose companions had loved her and left her, and who I’d found wandering the streets without the money to get home, and who hissed, “Vengeance against all false friends…” There the district attorney in New Orleans who, sitting beside me in the bar, had said, “If he testifies, I can blow this case wide open, but he’s too goddamn scared to come to court.” And I’d replied, “What if I could get him there?”
Here, over ten years of my life, laid out in neat chronological order, every jump, every switch, every skin, tracked and documented and filed for future reference, right up to the very last page, and Josephine.
Someone had spent years tracing me, monitoring my every move through records of amnesia, the testimonies of men and women who had lost an hour here, a day there, a few months at a time. It was a masterpiece of investigation, a triumph of forensic detection, right up to the point where, without explanation, it took it upon itself to lie shamelessly and brand both me and my host murderers.
I pulled a few pictures from the file.
A woman, sitting in the window of a café in Vienna, her cake untouched, her coffee growing cold.
A man in a hospital gown, a tawny beard spreading across his round sagging belly, staring out of the window at nothing much in particular.
A teenage boy, his hair stuck up in ozone-destroying spikes, giving two fingers to the camera as he waggled his pink pierced tongue. Definitely not my type but perhaps, given the circumstances, his presence in my file was fortuitous after all.