by Brett Adams
There was no reply, so I pressed it again.
When I was still dripping on the foyer tiles a minute later, I ran a hand across the buzzers. Voices came through the speaker like scattershot, and the door clunked open.
The building had no elevator, being only three floors high. I raced up the stairs, then along the second-floor corridor till I came to apartment 27.
I put my ear to the door and listened. I couldn’t be sure, but thought I heard the muted throb of a television. I knocked long and loud.
At last, I heard a shuffling tread approach the door, and heaved a sigh of relief.
The door opened to reveal a short woman with greying hair caught up in curlers and a vast bosom restrained by a faded pink nightgown.
“Was?” she said through a frown. Behind her, German voices droned in the universal language of soap opera.
“I wanted—do you speak English?” I said.
The frown deepened. The door began to close.
“Wait,” I said, and placed a palm firmly in its path. “I’m looking for Annika Kreider. It’s very urgent.”
She stopped pushing the door, and the frown eased.
“Annika?” she said.
“Yes, yes.”
The old lady disappeared, leaving the door ajar. She returned and thrust a slip of paper at me. I read it, and to my dismay realized it was a forwarding address. As I turned to leave, she said, “You are the second today.”
“I’m sorry?”
“An American,” was all she said, and shut the door.
The cold on the street was bracing after the stuffy building. The taxi driver had the engine running to keep warm, and a plume of exhaust was boiling from the rear of the car.
I slid onto the back seat and handed him the new address. He grunted, put away the paper he was reading, and drove.
I watched the cab fee readout rise, all the while thinking of my dwindling cash, which had already taken a hit when I converted my Hong Kong dollars to Euros at the airport.
The new address was within the old city, and frustratingly close to where we had passed not half an hour before. I again asked the driver to wait, and leapt onto the pavement and hurried to the door of a slim townhouse of five stories. Inside, I found the glass lobby door unlocked. I took the elevator to the fourth floor, muscles tense, and was soon rapping on the door of apartment 4c.
The door swung inward under the blows of its own accord. I ran my fingers along the door jamb and felt the sharp pain of a splinter. Someone had forced the lock.
Without thinking, I shoved the door back onto its hinges and entered.
Another quiet living room. Bars of muted winter light sheared the gloom in places, and revealed a clutter of tall, reserved leather couches and armchairs. Standing over them were pedestal lamps and dark bookcases, crammed together with barely enough space to maneuver. Beyond lay a kitchenette beneath a large, curtained window. Dark doorways gaped left and right—I thought of what I’d found in the bedroom in Hong Kong.
But to get to either, I would first have to wade through the wreckage strewn over the floor. Every bookshelf had been emptied, its books flung down. Vases and picture frames from a mantel had been swept into a heap, and I saw at least three paintings or prints that had been torn from their hooks and smashed on the coffee table.
I was looking at a thorough ransacking.
Or something meant to look like one.
I picked my way through the debris, hearing a crunch and tinkle under my feet more than once, and toward the left doorway. It led to a small bathroom. The mirrored door of the vanity cabinet hung at an angle from one hinge, and its contents had been smashed and spread across the tiles.
I returned to the living room, and tiptoed to the other doorway. It led to the bedroom, which had also been turned upside down, but was mercifully empty of dead bodies.
Back in the living room I swept a pile of magazines from the couch and sat. Unconsciously I sucked on the finger that ached dully at the splinter site. Dust motes drifted in the glancing light.
The taxi was waiting. The fare rising by the minute, but I needed to sit and clear my head.
Annika Kreider was home fresh from university. It was reasonable to guess she hadn’t found a job yet and slipped into a daytime routine. Had Hiero expected to find her here, and flown into a rage when he found the apartment empty?
On the wall a great, glass-fronted clock chimed the hour—ten chimes then fell silent. But the second hand kept winding around. Tick, tick... all the way to the heat death of the Universe, and the end of all clocks.
How many murders before we got there? One less if I got my backside into gear.
“What are the chances this break-in is a coincidence?” I said into the thin air.
—And was surprised when a voice like my own answered.
“Possible, but you’d be a fool to believe it.”
It was my voice.
No, it was my daughter’s voice. It was Tracey’s.
It was both. My voice in the still air of that wrecked apartment; and hers in the vault of my mind.
Okaaay.
It seemed my novel wanted out in any way it could, and if that meant hijacking real life, then so be it.
It had taken Kim and Tracey to leave my life for me to realize how much I talked to myself. My next thought was that perhaps I was finally going mad. The concoction of drugs I’d tried over the years to heal my idio-pathetic heart had finally congealed into a mutant mess that was eating me away from the inside.
Then I remembered that a young girl’s life was hanging by a thread.
So I decided to play along. What did I have to lose, except my mind?
“This has to be Hiero’s doing,” I replied.
“But why?” said Tracey with my voice. “He didn’t trash Li Min’s apartment. He just . . .”
I looked the room over, still rooted to the couch. It was every person’s nightmare, wasn’t it? To return home to find that a stranger had been in your house, in your space—the space in which you lived so much of your life. Had touched your things with their fingers. Leered at your photos. Tracked mud over your memories.
Break-ins. Police statistics listed them in the category Crime Against Property. They should be listed under Crime Against Person, Grievous Spiritual Harm.
“He wanted to scare Annika,” I said.
An image of Tracey leapt from my mind and into that room. She turned her green eyes toward me. She had freckles again. (Why did I give her childhood freckles?)
She shook her head. “It’s wrong. Hiero doesn’t scare. He charms.”
“Then maybe there is something here he wanted.”
I carefully retraced my steps through the wreckage, while in my mind’s eye, Tracey probed among the fallen books. Strangely, I felt glad for the company.
I lingered, looking for a pattern, a detail at odds with the chaos of destruction.
But nothing jarred. If it had hung, it had been torn down; if it could be moved, it had been flung. The only exceptions were the largest breakables, vases, a mirror, a porcelain lion. They had not been smashed.
I touched a large vase of modern design.
“Why isn’t this on the floor in pieces?”
“Noise?” suggested Tracey.
Noise? I looked again at the vase and realized it would have been impossible to break without making a tremendous racket. Looked at from that perspective, every broken item in the room was small—small enough to crush beneath, say, a muffling couch cushion. Suddenly the destruction appeared too controlled to be the result of a temper tantrum.
I winked at Tracey. “Clever girl,” and wondered if that was a kind of arrogance.
My mind now primed to think of sound, I noticed, tucked into a corner of the bookcase, a sleek silver stereo that had also avoided destruction. Its speakers put out a faint hum and I turned the volume a notch down to prompt an electronic readout. Crisp green digits indicated it was set very high.
Maybe Hie
ro had broken in, turned the stereo up high for cover, then carefully, methodically, smashed every one of Annika Kreider’s belongings that could safely be destroyed without raising the alarm.
Wonderful. But why?
Snaking through the wreckage at my feet was a cord. Lifting it with a finger, I traced it to where the telephone lay smothered beneath books.
“You sure you want to do that?” said Tracey. Her heart-shaped face held a wry grin. I decided I would handle it alone from here. She disappeared and I was alone.
I scooped the phone from the floor and tapped the hook till I got a dial tone. Then I called international, Australia, and the directory by heart. I asked for Price, suburb of Subiaco. The female voice said she had found the number, and would I like to be put through.
I said yes, and waited.
It was the middle of the night in Perth, Australia. Matt had probably only just made it to bed. Too bad for him.
While I waited I thought about the long shot I was trying. It had taken Hiero less than a day to write up the murder of Li Min, judging by the timestamp on his blog post. What if he was even now blogging his actions? If I could find Hiero before he got to Annika, and forestall him, I wouldn’t even need to find her.
A voice came on the line, male. I began to speak, then realized it was not Matt’s voice. It was his father’s. And this was an answering machine.
I waited for the beep, and said, “Matt, it’s me, Jack. I need you to get me the password to that blog again. The one you gave me stopped working. Please hurry. This is urgent.” I paused. “Deadly urgent.”
I hung up and, with a last glance at the wrecked apartment, left.
I emerged from the townhouse into the heart of Vienna to discover the taxi gone, lured away by a better fare.
It was cold. Sunlight glittered on runnels of rainwater racing along the sidewalk. I jammed my hands in my pockets, hunched my shoulders and walked just to be moving. Shopfronts came and went, venting warm air across my path, each burst full of the aromas of perfume, or pastries, or frying meat. I turned a corner, and then another, and a great plaza opened before me. At its center, standing massive and solid, was a building large as a fairytale keep. A sign told me it was in fact the Cathedral of Saint Stephen, which had stood on that spot for 900 years—battered by the passions of war, and the steady gnawing of the elements, but erect still. Knots of tourists were scattered across the plaza, taking photos, or craning necks to take in the cathedral’s vast roof.
Any other day I would have joined the gawkers. But from the corner of my eye, I spied an internet café. I hurried toward it, with the rueful acknowledgement that the internet was fast becoming my chief vice. I had been surrounded by strangers now for 72 hours straight (barring hallucinations) and was hankering for friends. Hell, acquaintances would do.
Inside the warm café, I began drafting an email to Kim—an argument really, for my sanity—when a message arrived in my inbox.
It was from Matt Price.
I stuck the message for Kim into the drafts folder and brought up Matt’s.
Had he got my voice message already?
He made no mention of it. It appeared we had crossed wires. He said,
Jack.
You’re right, the password has been changed.
I checked back on the server for evidence my own hack had been spotted. That looks okay, but I realized the password I gave you would have expired an hour at most after I gave it to you. Whoever set up that server is some tight ass. A chron job randomly cycles the password every hour and SMS’s it to a phone number. It would be a great system, if he’d locked the server down properly. >-)
I’ve set up my own silent service to copy the password to your email account, so you can login to the blog any time. Hope that’s okay.
Later, Matt.
No sooner had I closed Matt’s message, than another appeared. I opened it and found a single alphanumeric word, the latest password: p3QUod4u.
I called up Hiero’s blog and entered the password, hunt and peck on the keyboard.
The screen filled with the latest entry. I was in.
More than that. My long shot had struck.
Then I read the title properly and my heart sank, suddenly a deadweight in my chest.
The topmost entry was titled: The human body, such a fragile organism.
Cathartic.
That’s the word. It was tremendously cathartic to rip Chalky’s apartment to shreds. To grasp every item—no matter the item—and hurl it down. She was such a prissy person. Perhaps I should have let her live long enough to see the mess. The sight of it might have killed her.
Ah well, can’t unwind the past. The person formally known as Annika Kreider is now one hundred and forty pounds of ground meat. Witness the amazing transformation, from life and warmth and voice, to inertness, a cluster of ruptured organs, food for microbes.
And the alchemy that turns this gold of life into the lead of death? A simple shove. But it has to be the right shove at the right time.
And how had I, the magician, learned the secret of invoking this correct shove? From the train timetables secreted in Chalky’s apartment.
—Train timetables? Of course. Hiero had broken into Annika’s apartment to learn everything he could about her movements. He’d ransacked the place to cover his purpose. Heavy with foreboding, I read on.
Yes, Chalky is prissy. And very orderly, bordering on Obsessive Compulsive. Always first to class, with her notepad and pens arranged on her desk with millimeter precision.
I found her stash of timetables, and no doubt she carried another copy with her. The ones I found were neatly marked with her travel plans in color-coded, ruled highlights. From them I learned which train line and station she would be using today.
But I don’t think she intended to catch the train in the manner she actually did. I found her poised on the lip of Platform 5, almost inviting destruction. It was the essence of simplicity to nudge her in the small of the back as the train approached. Her flight through the air was reminiscent of Piggy’s in Lord of the Flies. Even to the shattered spectacles. So too was the way her body crumpled on impact. (Air Control: Achtung, junge Dame! You are not cleared for flight!)
But the very next paragraph confused me. It began:
But I think she intended to catch the train, not the platform.
I blinked, started again, and read the whole paragraph.
And my heart flared with hope.
But I think she intended to catch the train, not the platform. She paused to survey the platform below, which was thick with moiling passengers. Her train had already arrived, and she hurried toward the stair, handbag jouncing against her hip.
Helpful guy that I am, I gave her a hand reaching the platform. Straight over the edge of the railing, and thirty death-dealing feet to the concrete. Her flight through the air was reminiscent of Piggy’s...[PASTE]
Hiero had just described how he murdered Annika.
The very next line, he began again, described the same murder. Almost. The details were different. My hope lived in the space between.
I sat back and frantically tried to corral my thoughts. Hiero’s latest blog entry described him murdering Annika—twice. First by shoving her in front of a train. And then again by pushing her over the edge of a concourse. Both “blunt-force trauma.”
Two murders. But only one could be true.
Or neither.
This blog entry felt fresh, as if I’d caught Hiero mid-edit. And if it described two ways he might murder Annika, two contingencies, it would mean she still lived. For the moment.
The idea was electric. I gathered my things and leapt out of my chair.
On the street I collared an elderly man in a long coat.
“Vienna Hauptbahnhof. Do you know it?”
“But, of course,” he said and pointed at his feet.
I doubted very much I was standing on the rail hub of a major European city, and my skepticism must have shown.
> “Fifty meters down,” he said, “and then five minutes by U-Bahn.”
I tore off in the direction indicated. If I had to pitch a tent and stake out the station for the rest of the week, I would. I only hoped I didn’t arrive to find an ambulance, and police and, well . . . chalk.
19
My first miscalculation was that Vienna Hauptbahnhof was impossibly huge.
I knew it would be big, but when I asked my mind for an image of a railway station it handed me the familiar picture of one of Perth’s provincial patches of concrete. Not the sprawling, multi-level hub of a European city.
This would be haystacks and needles unless I could narrow my search. Then I remembered Hiero’s blog post. He hadn’t just said Vienna Hauptbahnhof, he had recorded the platform. I found a digital information board and looked up Platform 5.
As I wove through the dense crowd I tried to think calm thoughts. Calm thoughts. I would find Annika. She would be surprised to see me. Then I would tell her how close she had come to death. And she would believe me. It seemed to me that it wasn’t just her life I was racing to save; I was racing to save mine, too.
But on reaching the platform, I found no sign of her. Or him. There was no train at the platform, so I went back and forth along the lip of the platform scanning the waiting commuters, until the weight of curious stares forced me to stop.
Escalators connected every platform to the concourse above, which had to be a thirty-foot drop. Far enough to kill, barring a miracle. A drunk might fall that far and live, something to do with relaxed muscles. I prayed that Annika was plastered.
Farther down the platform, an elevator rose in a transparent shaft. It was a third contingency Hiero didn’t seem to have covered. If Annika rode the elevator to reach the platform when the train had already arrived, then he wouldn’t have the opportunity to push her in front of it or off the concourse. In that case, she and I could board the train together, where she would be a captive audience, and would have no choice but to hear me out.
