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.
Chapter 16
As the train slowed into Belgrade, I checked my belongings.
Passports, money, weapons, mobile phone.
I put the battery back in the phone and thumbed it on.
It took a while to work out its location and then grudgingly conceded that yes, it was in Serbia, and sent me a text message to inform me of the same and ask me to enjoy my stay. I waited. Two new messages. The first was a missed call, no message, number unknown. The second was a text message. It read: SOS Circe.
Nothing more.
I thought about it a moment, then turned the phone back off, removed the battery and put them away at the bottom of the bag.
What may be said of Belgrade?
It is a bad city in which to be old or cantankerous.
It is a fantastic place to party.
The station is a monument to triumphant 1800s ambition, a palace of fine lines and handsome stones that put Kapikule to shame. Step outside and taxis honk, cars scrunch head to tail, trams and trolley carts compete for space beneath the spider’s web of overhead power lines feeding the transport system, and a couple of tower blocks stand still, grey and empty where once–not so long ago–NATO cruise missiles fell. A proper heart-of-city station, the smell of the rivers pushes back against exhaust and cigarette smoke as the Sava and the Danube collide, determined to prove that whatever meagre definition of ‘river’ you’ve been working on up to now, you ain’t seen nothing yet. It is easy to believe, when you stand on the shores of the Danube, that the world is an island after all.
By night the barges that hug the waterfront turn up the music and the disco lights, and the young come out to party. By day the pedestrianised streets of central Belgrade are swamped with the fashionable come to buy fashionable things, to sustain their sense of fashionability, while on the edge of the city the old folk sit, men with drooping cigarettes and time-sunken eyes, who stare at the swaggering world and are not impressed.
Cross the waters of the Sava, and long shadows are thrown by the tower blocks and industrial slabs of communist dreams with such catchy names as Blok 34, Blok 8, Blok whatever. It is a place perhaps more real than the dream of exclusive boutiques that line Prince Mihailo, where life is not glamorous, and fashion serves no purpose apart from provoking envy and contempt.
I checked in at a hotel that was one of a thousand hotels run by ten companies the world over. I used the German passport and the woman exclaimed in poorly accented Deutsch, “Ah! Welcome you here very much!”
My room, unlike in Edirne, had the space, uniformity and whitewashed luxury expected by any bug-eyed European traveller who is now too tired to want to think about where the kettle is or watch anything other than CNN sports reports or repeats of CSI. I locked my case away, put a few hundred euros in my pocket, tucked the Kepler folder under my arm and went in search of an internet café.
On page 14 of the Kepler file there was a photo of a man.
His hair was dyed black, his nose, chin, ears, jaw burst with pieces of metal, he wore a T-shirt with a white skull on it and, if it hadn’t been for the prescription-strength glasses on his nose and the textbook on Prüfungs Gemacht Physik in the background, I would happily have dismissed him then and there as your average happy punk.
The note in the file read: “Berlin, 2007. Johannes Schwarb. Short-term inhabitation, long-term association?”
Looking at the leering expression on the studded face, I shuddered to think that I had ever even considered habitation of that flesh, brief though it had been.
Chapter 17
He was sixteen, I was twenty-seven, and he was hitting on me in a Berlin nightclub.
“No,” I said.
“Come on…”
“No.”
“Come on, babe…”
“Absolutely not.”
“Come on…”
The bar was loud, the music was good, I was Christina and had a taste for mojitos, he was Johannes Schwarb and he was high.
He waggled his tongue at me like a flailing fish, revealing the stud protruding from its flapping pink surface. “Young man,” I said, “you are all of thirty seconds away from self-harm.”
My statement, true as it was, didn’t seem to be comprehended by Johannes, who kept on writhing whichever parts of his body he still had some sort of control over up and down against the stool by my side. He hadn’t mustered the courage to writhe against anything living, so the furniture would have to do. For a brief moment I contemplated doing the unthinkable, grabbing his face and putting my tongue down his throat, just to see what happened.
Odds were, he’d be so shocked he’d bite, and it seemed unfair to leave Christina with a swollen tongue and the taste of vodka.
Then his friend ran up, and she was fifteen, and she was crying, and she pulled at his arm and said, “They’re here!”
“Babe!” he wailed. “Can’t you see I’m…?” A gesture attempted to take in the curves of my body, the shape of my dress, the look of murder in my eyes.
“They’re here,” she hissed. “They want the money.”
Her eyes darted across the dance floor, and his followed, red capillaries wiggling through the whites, body half-falling as he twisted to see the source of the disruption.
Three men with the faces of those for whom a party was a source of profit, no more, were heading across the floor with the determination of a Roman road. Johannes whooped, stuck both his arms in the air, revealing a well-pierced midriff, and shrilled, “Hey! Motherfuckers! Come get it!”
If they heard this statement, the three gentlemen were unimpressed.
“You have to go. Please, run!” whimpered his companion, tugging at his arm.
“Fuckers!” he roared, face open with delight, eyes staring at some fantastical outcome only he could see. “Come on then, come on!”
I tapped the girl, tears still flowing down her face, politely on the shoulder. “Drugs?” I asked.
She didn’t answer, and didn’t need to. Johannes whooped. A blade flicked open in the fist of one of the approaching men.
“Right then,” I muttered, and put my hand on Johannes’ arm.
Jumping into an inebriated body is an entirely unpleasant experience. It is my belief that the process of getting drunk is a cushion to the actual reality of being drunk. Bit by bit the mind grows accustomed to swaying room, burning skin, churning stomach, so though every aspect of your physiology screams, poison, poison, it is the gentle and pleasant acquisition of the state that prevents the experience from becoming a thoroughly vile event.
Jumping straight from a reasonably sober body into one riding high on more noxious substances than I cared to guess at was like taking a standing jump from a trotting pony to a speeding train.
My body jerked, fingers tightening on the bar as every part of me tried to rearrange itself in some other place. I tasted bile, felt mosquitoes feeding inside my head. “Jesus Christ,” I hissed, and as Christina swayed and opened her eyes beside me, I pressed my hands against my skull and turned, and did my very best to run.
The skin of strangers as it touched mine was an electric shock that rippled through my arms, ran down to my stomach and made the sack full of puke I carried beneath my lungs swish like the ocean against a cliff. I heard the girl shriek and the boys run, staggered against a man with coffee skin and avocado eyes, beautiful in every way, and wanted to fall into him then and there, damn Johannes.