by Brett Adams
Perhaps, if the target were German, I needed to translate it first? I opened another browser tab and entered Underway into a translator. The translation appeared: unterwegs.
That word tickled the back of my brain, but I had no idea why.
I poked around with it, using my limited German. Apparently it could mean on the way, on the road. Even on the run. Was Hiero going to murder on the run?
Two minutes passed this time before Matt responded, and then a list spewed onto my screen. It had to be twenty names long or more. This was getting me nowhere. Maybe the umlaut was just fly crap.
My mind returned to the murder template’s When. The first sheet had a time, albeit cryptic—‘Neath the Rising Sun. The second was simply vague: A celebration. But this sheet had no time at all. Nothing but TBD—To Be Decided. Big help.
Did I need to think more lateral? Maybe TBD stood for something else. I squeezed my mind sideways. Maybe it was an abbreviation for a time period, a celebration, a season . . .
I dragged my Skype connection with Matthew to one side, opened yet another browser tab, and searched for definitions of TBD.
The first result was something called TBD Fest. My pulse quickened. Clicking around the site I discovered that TBD Fest was “a multi-day festival that embraces creativity through music, art, design, food and ideas.”
Perfect.
My mind filled with a vision of students thronging a stage, surging half-seen to the music, and prowling at its edges in the near-dark, Hiero.
But after my initial excitement I saw that the festival was held in October, not September. And Sacramento, US, not Somewhere, Europe.
Returning to the results of my search I discovered that TBD might be a record label, a restaurant, an organic food importer or an accountancy firm. It could mean To Be Delayed, To Be Deleted, To Be Discontinued.
Equally well it might stand for Tick-borne Disease, Tibetan Book of the Dead, or Triazabicyclodecene (good for all your Horner-Wadsworth-Emmons reactions needs).
It could signify The Best Deceptions.
In short it could mean just about anything.
It could even mean Tipsy Borderline Drunk, which was becoming more appealing with every minute I sat in the internet café.
It took a memory of Li Min’s forever stilled body to snap me out of my self-pity.
Only then did I gain the presence of mind to step back. Perhaps I was being too lateral. Hiero’s second sheet, the one foretelling Li Min’s murder, had been figurative, slantwise. But the first sheet, detailing the attempted murder of Rhianne Goldman had been mostly straight down the line.
I activated Skype again and typed another message: “Give me the cities of all exchange students that did humanities last semester.” Li Min had returned to her home city at the end of semester. Perhaps Chalky, whoever he or she was, would too?
Scant seconds elapsed before another list rolled up my screen. It included many exchange students from Western Europe. Two girls and a guy from Strasbourg, which was French but might as well be German. Another girl from Copenhagen.
I scanned the cities listed there, until my gaze struck one: Vienna, Austria.
Vienna. Now I remembered why unterwegs had made my brain itch. Johann ‘Jack’ Unterweger. Best-selling Viennese author, TV host . . . serial killer.
A sudden chill stole over my body. What exactly was Hiero doing?
Not wanting the answer, I asked, “Which student lives in Vienna?”
“Annika Kreider,” came the reply.
Annika Kreider. The name caused a flash of recall. Didn’t she take my comparative literature course? A tall, blonde girl with serious eyes. She had come to me to discuss a project proposal—a taxonomy of narrative forms in early twentieth century Prussian literature. It had sounded deadly dull.
On a hunch I searched for that name and ‘chalk’, and was immediately rewarded: Kreider, derived from kreide, the German word for chalk.
Chalky. I’d found my man. Woman. It appeared Hiero was targeting females.
Jack Unterweger had killed twelve women over a span of eighteen years. Worse, he’d been convicted of the first murder, jailed, released, become a celebrity, and ‘helped’ police attempt to solve murders he himself had committed after his release from prison. All women. All strangled with their own brassieres.
Hiero was gunning for females. I could add that to the next search.
Next? Damn. For a moment I’d begun to think I was playing a game.
I asked for her phone number in Vienna, but Matt could only find an address. I copied that down, and said, “Thanks, Matt. Hope you get your rollout done.”
“No probs, Professor,” he replied. “Glad to help.”
Professor? He never called me professor. Matt’s rollout mustn’t have been going so smoothly.
The last thing I did before logging off was to send Kim an email. They say communication is vital to marriage. A degree in literature doesn’t help any. My email simply said: “I’m in the shit.”
13
I crept up from the internet café and onto a street thick with nightclubbers, and an hour later, arrived outside a hotel that didn’t even have an English name.
From the number of barely dressed women that approached me on the street, I gathered the hotel charged by the hour. The receptionist took my cash and my name, Steve McQueen (mental note to come up with a fake name beforehand next time), and didn’t ask for ID.
When I stumped up the stairs and found my room, a cleaner’s cart was parked in the corridor outside. Inside I found a Filipino lady talking into a phone and jouncing a pillow from its cover with one arm. She glanced at me without stalling her conversation, pulled a fresh pillow cover onto the pillow with the phone pinched in the crook of her neck, and exited the room into the corridor, tugging the door shut behind her.
It wasn’t clear whether she had actually finished cleaning the room. I took a shower and found a wreath of hair clinging to the drain, but perhaps that was a feature. Like the paper sash they leave over toilets.
When I exited the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, I lay another towel on the bed. The bed had a spread on it, but its pattern was the kind that masks dirt and stains. The kind that can get away with being washed once a year.
From the bedside table I pulled the telephone and a slab-like phone book. Pages had been torn from it in many places, maybe for a phone number, maybe for a handkerchief, maybe for a lot of reasons. I flipped through it with only a vague notion of what I was looking for.
A lot of flipping later I stumbled onto my first pawnshop. It was called Happy Pawn.
I’d researched the dark side of pawnshops in Thailand and Taiwan for my novel, and hoped it would apply to Hong Kong. As my fingers punched the phone buttons, I couldn’t suppress a shiver of excitement to be calling one up now.
I called the listed number, and got a barrage of Cantonese. I said, “English?” and the party hung up. Placing a finger under the next pawnshop, I dialed again, with the same result. The third call reached an answering machine. Its message was in English, and was telling me about a number of businesses, including a pawnshop, when the message cut out and a dry voice said, “Huh?”
“Is this the Sing Ping pawn shop?”
“Huh,” said the voice, using the term now in the affirmative.
“I was looking to purchase an item, and wanted to know—”
“Huh,” said the voice again, the word now meaning, ‘Hurry the hell up and tell me what you want.’
“I wanted to buy a . . .” I found I had to cross a threshold to finish the sentence, like a hiccup that wanted out. “Passport,” I finished.
“Uh-huh,” said the voice.
Progress.
“What kind?” it continued.
“Australian,” I said.
“New or doctor.”
I gathered he meant an entirely new passport or an alteration to an existing one.
“I have a passport, but need to alter the details, the name and
number.”
“Doctor, uh-huh. Chip?”
“What?”
“It chipped?”
How could a paper booklet be chipped? I had no idea what Mr Huh was on about.
“I don’t know. How do I tell?”
“Feel cover. Is it fat or thin?”
I lugged my briefcase onto the bed beside me and retrieved my passport. I flipped open its blue cover and pressed it between my fingers.
“Thin, I think,” I said.
“Ha-huh,” said the voice. “Good. Easy. Cost $17999. Bargain.”
Eighteen thousand!
“Look, I’ve only got nine grand—nine oh-oh-oh—and I need half of that to buy a plane ticket.”
A pause.
“Okay, I do you budget.”
I had no idea what a budget passport was, but I said okay. He asked me if I wanted to courier it over and back, but I said I’d come—I had no way of guaranteeing I ever saw my passport again. He gave me directions and hung up.
The pawnshop was nothing like what I’d imagined, and neither was the man to whom I’d spoken. His shop, which was in actual fact for electronic appliances—stereos, camcorders, laptops—was well-lit and polished, glass and chrome, on the third level of a shopping mall. The man himself was clean-cut in a grey suit. He wore a red bow tie, and gold cufflinks gleamed beneath his suit sleeve. A wisp of grey hair floated above the dome of his head, a failed comb-over. When I arrived he was speaking to customers browsing in the shop, which was how I recognized him.
Two anxious minutes later the customers left, and I sidled up to the counter and whispered, “Passport?”
He said, “Audio?” and walked me through to a booth that formed an alcove in the store for listening to headphones. He gestured toward a seat, and as I sat, took the passport I held out to him. He disappeared into a back room, and without missing a beat reappeared a moment later to talk to other customers.
Sing Ping Electronics was utterly unlike the image of passport-forging pawnshops I’d formed from researching the black market for my novel. Maybe it was just Hong Kong.
To look the part, I clasped a set of noise-cancelling headphones over my ears and ramped the volume up on the attached device. Its buttons were no bigger than pimples, the whole device swallowed in the grip of an anti-theft vice.
An hour later, while crooning, trance-inducing vocals told me I couldn’t outrun some guy’s bullet, I was getting restless. I crossed and re-crossed my legs, and my gaze kept hunting for the store owner, looking for a sign that my passport was done.
He floated through the room ignoring me, impeccably dressed, unflappably smiling.
By coming here I had thought I would be able to safeguard my passport. But what if it simply disappeared? I wasn’t about to go to the police.
As if on cue, a pair of police officers strolled past the shop front. My eyes were drawn to the steel bulk of the gun holstered on the nearest officer’s hip. If it was standard issue, it was probably a Smith & Wesson 10, a six-shot, double-action revolver.
Guns have always fascinated me in the same way snakes do, and I had researched them for my novel in unwarranted depth.
They come in so many varieties, but all boil down to one simple, efficient mechanism. The hammer strikes a combustive powder, which explodes in a pressure wave that is channeled along a (possibly rifled) tunnel to fling a small, dense object or objects through the air and into flesh, which is crushed and torn by the impact.
Typically blood leaks out of the target, taking with it the magic that turns the universe’s most complex arrangement of atoms into pig chow.
A crude mechanism. But like the combustion engine, wrapped up in shining steel it seems modern, even elegant.
I realized with a start that I had been staring at the gun. When I glanced up I found the officer’s eyes on me. I swiveled on my chair and attempted to dig the music.
Forty-five minutes later I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to be greeted by the benevolent gaze of the pawnshop owner. In his hand was a parcel, which he gave to me. When I had counted out the money—and he had double-checked my counting—he said, “Thank you, sir. Shop here again.” He turned away, paused, and turned back to me long enough to say, “Dress down a little,” and gave me a wink.
I am dressed down, I thought. I’m not wearing a tie.
In a toilet cubicle around the corner from the shop I tore open the package—and breathed a sigh of relief when inside it I found my passport. Well, a passport. It no longer claimed to be the passport of Jonathan Donald Griffen. The photo was still me, but the name alongside it said Trevor Scott Williams. The number had been altered too, and inside I found a rash of immigration stamps for Hong Kong and cities scattered throughout Southeast Asia that hadn’t been there before. Trevor was younger than me by four years (mental note to put a spring in my step). Clipped to the passport, a barely legible note said, “Expat in Hong Kong.”
Back at the hotel I stayed long enough to cut my hair with a beard trimmer I’d picked up from a convenience store near the hotel. When I was done I bowed my head toward the mirror and strained my eyes to check the job. The shave had revealed a white crescent of scar tissue carved into the side of my skull. A memory of the fall that had caused it flashed through my mind—a dive into deep snow and the numbing strike of a ski blade. And Kim’s voice, “Jack, are you—”
I shook it off.
My cheeks were disappearing beneath a thick, salt-and-pepper stubble, and I touched the trimmer to it before deciding to leave it.
In a bag on the bed lay a few other items I had procured with my precious cash. A t-shirt, blue jeans, joggers. I stripped off my shirt and trousers and dressed in the new clothes. When I looked again into the mirror I saw the image of a man attempting to cling to a childhood long faded. Fine.
I tilted my chin up and stared the man down. That man wasn’t just any guy; he was a gypsy poet. A rambler, a collector of experiences, one whose senses were flung wide open to any morsel of life that might happen to fall within his reach.
For a fleeting moment an urge took me, stronger than the desire to reach Annika Kreider before Hiero. I wanted to write. I felt it deep as my bones. The upswell of the Muse missing for so long. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that if I could sit at my laptop, or over a notebook, I could knit the sentences that would diagnose my life.
Strange, that I picked that moment to finally come clean on the reason for the embryo of a novel I had brooded over so long: it was not to stake claim to professional kudos, or even for the creative joy. I wanted to write—needed to write—to work out how the hell my life had run off the tracks, and parted company with the two people in seven billion I cherished most of all.
14
It is physically impossible to make yourself not be nervous. To be aware you are nervous causes nerves.
This realization came to me at the airport as I was striding toward the metal detector standing between me and my departure lounge. Sweat sprang out on my forehead, and tickled me behind the ears.
What if the police had circulated my photo? What if the passport alterations were obvious? I had no way to tell they weren’t. What if my face tugged three ways when I tried to lie to immigration?
By chance I caught my own reflection in a mirror before I joined the end of the queue for the metal detector. My scalp was freshly shorn, my face grizzly, my clothes down-played, but hanging at the end of my arm was something that jarred with everything else: my briefcase.
Without breaking stride I veered into a restroom as if that had been my intent all along.
I placed my briefcase on a bench, snapped its catches back, and opened it. Its contents were a mess of the paraphernalia of a professional academic. I retrieved the remaining papers from Hiero’s leather folder, folded them, and jammed the wad into a jeans pocket. Then I pawed through the papers piled in the base of the briefcase—a couple of bad essays I hadn’t returned to their authors because I’d written expletives in the margins, a jou
rnal paper on yet another interpretation of Beowulf, a form letter from the university extolling its new workload management system, and a parking ticket I’d fought hard to have waived. I dug through the litter and back through time until I reached the faux-leather bottom and saw the stain left by a banana that had once, long ago, lain there forgotten for weeks.
Why did I never clean this crap out?
I gathered it up and dumped it into a bin.
Tucked into pouches and pockets on the inside of the briefcase lid were smaller items—pens, a thumbdrive, a photo of Kim and Tracey, conference name badges, and a tangle of rubber bands that were beginning to crack with age. I took the thumbdrive, photo, and the Sheaffer pen engraved with my name, a gift from the university for fifteen years of mind-strain. The rest I tossed into the bin.
The inside of the briefcase was bare now, but for the lint collected in its corners and creases, and a pack of business cards held together by a bull-clip. I picked up the cards and squeezed the clip jaws open.
I flipped through the cards, reading them one after the other. There were mementos from GPs, physicians, sleep specialists, dieticians, endocrinologists, cardiologists—this set I called the Meds. Then came the psychologists and a psychiatrist (who tried to convince me I was thinking my heart into a terminal velocity)—this set I called the Heads. I had a more productive conversation with the acupuncturist. He at least recognized I was the nail that had been hit with a variety of hammers, and made me a cup of tea. He, together with a herbalist and a naturopath, made up the last set—the Teds (most lovable and cuddly) and rounded out the deck. The Joker was an engineering consultant, a friend, with whom I’d worked to build the—at the time—cutting edge application of tech that was my Medline. There were better devices on the market now, but that was mine. I’d helped design it. I knew what was in it.
If the paper in the base of the briefcase was the sedimentary record of my working life, this pack of cards was the same for my dance with the medical fraternity.
