The Fear Index

by Robert Harris

  Hoffmann slowed his pace, trying to get his bearings. He must have run almost to the Cornavin railway station, he realised, and into the red-light district. Finally he stopped outside a boarded-up nightclub covered in a flaking skin of peeling fly-posters: Le Black Kat (XXX, FILMS, GIRLS, SEX). Wincing, his hands on his hips, a sharp pain in his side, he leaned over the gutter trying to recover his breath. An Asian prostitute watched him from a shop parlour window no more than three metres away. She wore a black corset and stockings and sat cross-legged on a red damask chair. She recrossed her legs, smiled and beckoned to him until abruptly some unseen mechanism drew a blind across the scene.

  He straightened, conscious of being observed by the girls and their pimps. One rat-faced man, a bit older than the others, with pockmarked skin, was looking at him and talking into a mobile. Hoffmann set off back the way he had come, scanning the alleys and courtyards on either side in case the man had slipped into one of them to hide. He passed a sex shop, Je Vous Aime, and retraced his steps. The window contained a halfhearted display of merchandise: vibrators, wigs, erotic underwear. A pair of crotchless black panties was stretched out and pinned up on a board like a dead bat. The door was open, but the view of the interior was obscured by a curtain of multicoloured plastic strips. He thought of the handcuffs and ball gag the intruder had left behind. Leclerc had said they might have come from such a place.

  Suddenly his mobile chimed with an incoming text: ‘Rue de berne 91 chambre 68’.

  He stared at it for several seconds. He had just passed the Rue de Berne, had he not? He turned around and there it was, right behind him, close enough to read the blue street sign. He checked the message again. The sender was not identified; the originating number was unavailable. He glanced around to see if anyone was watching him. The fronds of plastic fluttered and parted. A fat, bald man wearing braces over a dirty vest emerged.

  ‘Que voulez-vous, monsieur?’

  ‘Rien.’

  Hoffmann walked back up the street to the Rue de Berne. It was long and shabby but at least it was busier – two lanes, with tram cables strung above – which made him feel safer. At the junction was a fruit and vegetable shop offering an outdoor display, next to it a forlorn little café with a few empty aluminium chairs and tables set out on the pavement, and a tabac advertising ‘Cartes telephoniques, Videos X, DVDs X, Revues X USA’. He checked the street numbers. They ascended to his left. He walked, counting them off, and within thirty seconds had migrated from northern Europe and entered the southern Mediterranean: Lebanese and Moroccan restaurants, swirls of Arabic script on the shop fronts, Arabic music blaring from tinny speakers, a smell of greasy hot kebabs, which turned his stomach; only the freakish absence of litter betrayed that this was Switzerland.

  He found number 91 on the northern side of the Rue de Berne, opposite a shop selling African clothes – a dilapidated seven-storey building of peeling yellow stucco, perhaps a hundred years old, with metal-shuttered windows painted green. The building was four windows wide, its name spelt out down the side, almost from top to bottom, by individual letters protruding over the street: HOTEL DIODATI. Most of the shutters were closed, but a few were half-raised, like drooping eyelids, the interiors hidden by a greyish-white cataract of thick net curtains with a floral design. At street level there was an ancient and heavy wooden door that reminded Hoffmann incongruously of Venice; it was certainly older than the building, and elaborately carved with what looked like masonic symbols. As he watched, it swung inwards and from the dim interior a man emerged wearing jeans and trainers, with a hood pulled over his head. It was impossible to see his face. He put his hands in his pockets, hunched his shoulders and set off down the street. A minute or so later the door opened again. This time it was a woman, young and thin, with fluffy dyed orange hair and a short black-and-white-checked skirt. She was carrying a shoulder bag. She paused on the doorstep and opened the bag, searched it, retrieved a pair of sunglasses, put them on and then moved off in the opposite direction to the man.

  There was never a moment when Hoffmann made a definite decision to go in. He watched for a while, and then he crossed the road and lingered outside the door. Eventually he pushed it open and peered inside. The place had a stale smell, emphasised rather than disguised by a joss stick burning somewhere. There was a small lobby with a counter, deserted, and a seating area with a black and red sofa with wooden legs and matching armchairs. In the gloom a small aquarium glowed brightly but it seemed devoid of fish.

  Hoffmann took a few steps over the threshold. He reasoned that if he was challenged, he could say he was looking for a room: he had money in his pocket, he could pay for it. They probably rented by the hour. The thick door closed behind him, cutting off the sounds of the street. Upstairs someone was moving around, music was playing; the thump of the bass line shook the thin partitions. He moved through the empty reception, across a floor of curling linoleum, and followed a narrow passage to a small elevator. He pressed the call button and the doors opened immediately as though it had been waiting for him.

  The elevator was tiny, lined with scratched grey metal like an old filing cabinet, with just about enough room for two people, and when the doors closed Hoffmann was almost overwhelmed by claustrophobia. The buttons offered him a choice of seven floors. He pressed number six. A distant motor whined, the elevator rattled and he began to rise very slowly. It was not so much a sense of danger he felt now as of unreality, as if he were back in a recurrent childhood dream he could not quite remember, from which the only way to wake was to keep on going until he found the exit.

  The elevator ride seemed to go on a long time. He wondered what might be waiting at the end of it. When at last it did halt, he put up his hands to protect himself. Jerkily the doors opened on to the sixth floor.

  The landing was deserted. He was reluctant to step out on to it at first, but then the doors began to close and he had to thrust his leg out to save himself from being reimprisoned. The doors juddered back and he moved out cautiously on to the landing. It was darker than in the lobby. His eyes had to readjust. The walls were bare. There was the same stale, almost fetid smell of air that had been breathed a thousand times and never refreshed by an open door or window. It was hot. Two doors were opposite him; more led off the passages to either side. An amateurish sign composed of movable coloured plastic letters, of the kind sold in toyshops, indicated that Room 68 was to the right. The clank of the elevator motor restarting behind him made him jump. He listened to the car descend all the way to the bottom. When it shut off, there was silence.

  He took a couple of paces to the right and peered slowly around the corner along the passage. Room 68 was at the far end, its door closed. From somewhere close by came a rhythmic noise of rasping metal, which at first he mistook for sawing but almost immediately realised was bedsprings. There was a thump. A man moaned as if in pain.

  Hoffmann pulled out his mobile, intending to call the police. But, curiously for the centre of Geneva, there was no signal. He put it back in his pocket and walked warily to the end of the passage. His eyes were at exactly the same level as the bulging opaque glass of the spyhole. He listened. He couldn’t hear anything. He tapped on the door, then put his ear to the wood and listened again. Nothing: even the neighbour’s bedsprings had ceased to creak.

  He tried the black plastic handle. The door wouldn’t open. But it was held by only a single Yale lock and he could see the door jamb was rotted: when he dug his fingernail into the spongy wood, he pulled away a wedge of crumbling orange flakes the size of matchsticks. He stepped back a pace, checked behind him, then barged against the door with his shoulder. It gave slightly. He moved back a couple of feet further and lunged at it again. This time there was a splintering sound and the door opened a couple of centimetres. He worked the fingers of both hands into the gap and pushed. There was a crack and the door opened.

  It was dark inside, with just a faint line of grey daylight showing where the bottom of the window shutter
had failed to close properly. He edged across the carpet, groped around and through the net curtain for the switch, pressed it, and noisily the shutter began to rise. The window looked out through a fire escape on to the back of a row of buildings about fifty metres away, separated from the hotel by a brick wall and adjacent yards full of waste bins, weeds and rubbish. By the thin light Hoffmann could see the room, such as it was: a single unmade bed on wheels with a greyish sheet hanging down over a red and black carpet, a small chest of drawers with a rucksack resting on top of it, a wooden chair with a scuffed brown leather seat. The radiator under the window was too hot to touch. There was a strong smell of stale cigarette smoke, masculine sweat and cheap soap. The wallpaper around the wall lights had been scorched brown by the bare bulbs. In the tiny bathroom were a small bathtub with a clear plastic shower curtain hung around it, a basin streaked greenish-black where the taps had dripped, and a WC with similar markings; on a wooden shelf was a glass mug with a toothbrush and a blue disposable plastic razor.

  Hoffmann moved back into the bedroom. He carried the rucksack to the bed, upended it and emptied out the contents. It was mostly dirty clothes – a plaid shirt, T-shirts, underwear, socks – but buried among them was an old Zeiss camera with a powerful lens, and also a laptop computer which felt warm to the touch. It was in sleep mode.

  He put the laptop down and returned to the open door. The frame had splintered outwards around the lock but had not broken, and he found he was able to press the housing of the lock back into place and gently close the door. It would fall open again if pressure was applied from the other side, but from a distance it would look untouched. Behind the door he noticed a pair of boots. He picked them up between thumb and forefinger and examined them. They were identical to the ones he had seen outside his house. He replaced them and went and sat on the edge of the bed and opened the laptop. Then, from the bowels of the building, came a clang. The elevator was moving again.

  Hoffmann put aside the computer and listened to the whine of its long ascent. At last it stopped, and then came the rattle of its doors opening close by. He crossed the room quickly and put his eye to the spyhole just as the man came round the corner. He was carrying a white plastic bag in one hand and with the other he was fishing in his pocket. He reached the door and pulled out his key. The distorting lens of the peephole made his looming face seem even more skull-like than before, and Hoffmann felt the hairs rise on his scalp.

  He stepped back and looked around quickly, then withdrew into the bathroom. An instant later he heard the key inserted into the keyhole, followed by a grunt of surprise as the door swung open without needing to be unlocked. In the semi-darkness, through the crack between the bathroom door and the door jamb, Hoffmann had a clear view of the centre of the bedroom. He held his breath. For a while nothing happened. He prayed the man might have turned around and gone down to reception to report a break-in. But then his shadow passed briefly across Hoffmann’s line of view, heading towards the window. Hoffmann was on the point of trying to make a run for it when, with shocking speed, the man doubled back and abruptly kicked open the bathroom door.

  There was something scorpion-like in the way he crouched, legs apart, with a long blade held at head height. He was bigger than Hoffmann remembered, bulked out by his leather coat. There was no way past him. Long seconds elapsed as they stared at one another, and then the man said, in a surprisingly calm and educated voice, ‘Zurück. In die Badewanne.’ He gestured with the knife at the bath and Hoffmann shook his head, not understanding. ‘In die Badewanne,’ repeated the man encouragingly, pointing the knife first at Hoffmann and then at the tub. After another endless pause, Hoffmann found his limbs doing as they were bidden. His hand pulled back the shower curtain and his legs stepped shakily over the edge into the bath, his desert boots clumping heavily on the cheap plastic. The man came a little further into the tiny room. It was so cramped he took up almost all the floor space. He pulled the light cord. Above the sink a neon strip stuttered into life. He closed the door and said, ‘Ausziehen,’ and this time helpfully added a translation: ‘Take off your clothes.’ In his long leather coat he looked like a butcher.

  ‘Nein,’ said Hoffmann, shaking his head and holding his palms up in a gesture of reasonableness. ‘No. No way.’ The man spat out some swear word he didn’t understand and slashed at him with the knife, the blade passing so close that even though Hoffmann pressed himself back into the corner under the shower nozzle, the front of his raincoat was slashed and the lower part of it flapped down to his knees. For a ghastly moment he thought it was his flesh and he said quickly, ‘Ja, ja, okay. I’ll do it.’ The whole situation was so bizarre it seemed to be playing out at one remove from reality, to be happening to someone else. He quickly shrugged the coat off his left shoulder and then his right. There was hardly enough room for him to get his arms out of the sleeves and for a time it was stuck across his back and he had to struggle with it as if escaping from a straitjacket.

  He tried to think of something to say, to establish contact with his attacker, to shift this encounter on to a different and less lethal plane. He said, ‘You are German?’ and when the man didn’t respond, he struggled to remember what little of the language he had picked up at CERN: ‘Sie sind Deutscher?’ There was no answer.

  At last he had the ruined coat off. He let it drop around his feet. He slipped off his jacket and held it out to his captor, who gestured with his knife that he should throw it on to the bathroom floor. He started to unbutton his shirt. He would carry on removing his clothes until he was naked if necessary, but if the man tried to tie him up he resolved that he would fight – yes, then he would put up a struggle. He would rather die than be rendered completely helpless.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ he asked.

  The man frowned at him as if he were a slightly baffling child and replied in English: ‘Because you invited me.’

  Hoffmann stared at him, aghast. ‘I didn’t invite you to do this.’

  The knife was flourished again. ‘Continue, please.’

  ‘Listen, this is not right …’

  Hoffmann finished unbuttoning his shirt and let it fall on top of his jacket. He was thinking hard now, evaluating risks and chances. He grasped the bottom of his T-shirt and pulled it up over his head, and when his face emerged and he saw his attacker’s hungry eyes he felt his flesh crawl. But here was weakness, he recognised: here was opportunity. Somehow he forced himself to make a ball of the white cotton and to offer it to him. ‘Here,’ he said, and when the man reached out to take it he slightly adjusted his feet against the back of the bathtub so as to brace himself. He leaned forward encouragingly – ‘Here you are’ – and then launched himself at him.

  He landed on his assailant with sufficient force to knock him backwards, the knife went flying, and together they sank down so entwined it was impossible for either man to land a blow. In any case all Hoffmann wanted was to escape the horrible claustrophobia of that squalid bathroom. He tried to haul himself up on to his feet, grabbing at the sink with one hand and the light cord with the other, but both seemed to come away at once. The room went dark and he felt something round his ankle dragging him down again. He hacked at it with his other heel and stamped on it and the man howled with pain. He fumbled in the darkness for the door handle, at the same time lashing out with his feet. He was connecting with bone now – that ponytailed skull, he hoped. Kick a man when he’s down, he thought savagely, then kick him and kick him and kick him. His target whimpered and shrank into a foetal ball. When he no longer seemed a threat, Hoffmann pulled open the bathroom door and staggered into the bedroom.

  He sat down heavily on the wooden chair. He put his head between his knees and was immediately sick. Despite the heat of the room, he was shivering with cold. He needed to get his clothes. He returned cautiously to the bathroom and pushed at the door. He heard a scuffling noise inside. The man had crawled towards the lavatory bowl. He was blocking the door. Hoffmann gave it a shove and
the man groaned and dragged his body out of the way. Hoffmann stepped over him and retrieved his clothes and also the knife. He went back into the bedroom and quickly dressed. You invited me, he thought furiously – what did he mean, he had invited him? He checked his mobile phone but there was still no signal.

  In the bathroom the man had his head over the lavatory. He looked up as Hoffmann came in. Hoffmann, pointing the knife, gazed down at him without pity.

  ‘What is your name?’ he said.

  The man turned his face away and spat blood. Hoffmann warily came closer, squatted on his haunches and scrutinised him from a distance of half a metre. He was about sixty, although it was hard to tell with all the blood on his face; he had a cut above his eye. Overcoming his revulsion, Hoffmann transferred the knife into his left hand, leaned forward and opened the man’s leather coat. The man lifted his arms and allowed him to search around until he found an inside pocket, from which he withdrew first a wallet and then a dark red European Union passport. It was German. He flicked it open. The photograph was not a good likeness. The text identified him as Johannes Karp, born 14.4.52 in Offenbach am Main.

  Hoffmann said, ‘And you’re seriously telling me you came here from Germany because I invited you?’

  ‘Ja.’

  Hoffmann recoiled. ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘No, fucker, you are crazy,’ said the German with a flicker of spirit. ‘You gave me your house codes.’ Blood bubbled from the corner of his mouth. He spat a tooth into his hand and inspected it. ‘Ein verrückter Mann!’

  ‘Where is this invitation?’

  He gestured weakly with his head towards the other room. ‘Computer.’

  Hoffmann stood. He pointed the knife at Karp. ‘Don’t move, okay?’