The Dying Game

by Asa Avdic

  He, too, looked cold and tired as he walked around with his carafe. I would have given anything to be lying around on a bed somewhere with him, hungover and watching old movies. Just as I had this thought, an uncanny certainty flowed through me and told me that this would never happen. It made me want to cry.

  “What’s more,” the colonel said, aiming a strict look at Jon, “I think we should be very careful about forming theories of guilt in this matter. If this turns into a witch hunt we are doomed; it is very important that we all remember that.” Franziska immediately raised more objections.

  As I stood there listening to them argue back and forth about what to do next, with not just one but two people missing and possibly dead, and how they would go about arranging a more thorough search of the house itself, I happened to be reminded that there actually was another way to communicate with the outside world, besides the communication radio in the medical station. Lotte’s satellite phone. The one I had seen her speaking on the night before. I watched as she paced back and forth across the room. Unlike Jon and Franziska, she wasn’t extravagantly clad in the least. The only aberration from her plain style was the large, shiny leather handbag she held on to almost desperately with both hands as she walked back and forth. To the window. To a chair. I assumed the satellite phone was in the bag and that was why she carried it with her at all times.

  I had received clear instructions from the secretary that my task was to observe and nothing more. Whatever happened, I was not to interfere in the course of events. But then again, the course of events had interfered with me in a way I wondered if the secretary had really foreseen. For one thing, I was now, to some extent, found out. Someone on the island knew that I had not in fact died on the first night and had done their best to neutralize me. Since my body hadn’t been discovered, he or she must also have realized that this had failed, and that I was still on the island, possibly hurt but still alive. For another, Katja was missing now too, and if she wasn’t dead she was at least seriously injured. There had been a lot of blood on the floor. I wondered if I ought to climb out of my hiding spot and tell the others what I knew, but I decided it was safer to keep hidden. So far, no one but me seemed to know that the Strategic Level existed or how to get into it, so I had that on my side for the time being. Furthermore, I considered the Chairman’s threat in the conference room on the fourteenth floor. Cutting the assignment short would have consequences I preferred not to think about. But maybe there was another possibility: I could try to contact the secretary, I thought as I watched Lotte hug her bag to her body as if it were a heating pad.

  The colonel suddenly pressed his hands to his knees and stood up laboriously.

  “We need to search the house again, thoroughly. If Katja is hiding or being hidden somewhere in this house, she must be seriously injured. I suggest we split up.”

  “I think we might need to have breakfast as well,” Henry said calmly.

  “Good. True.” The colonel cast him a grateful look. “You and Lotte stay down here, go through the ground floor first, and if you don’t come up with anything you can start preparing breakfast; the rest of us will search the rest of the house together as carefully as we possibly can. And let’s pray to God we find Katja before it’s too late.”

  With that, he gave Franziska and Jon an urgent look and then left the kitchen along with everyone else.

  I wondered how to handle the situation now that the group had divided into two, and in the end I decided to go down by the cameras so I would have an overview of everyone at the same time. For the next half hour, with the help of the screens, I studied the way the two groups searched and searched, in locations both likely and unlikely, how Lotte and Henry searched first the kitchen and then the parlor; then they moved on to all the cabinets and every nook and cranny between the two, while the colonel, Jon, and Franziska searched the upstairs rooms. Lotte carried her bag with her the whole time, into every room, putting it down only when she needed both hands. I thought I caught Henry sneaking a look at the bag once in a while when Lotte was busy elsewhere, and I assumed he was also thinking about the satellite phone. Maybe he was looking for the chance to take it out of the bag, or maybe he was just curious about it the same way I was. By all appearances, he never brought it up with Lotte, and eventually they stopped their search and vanished into the kitchen to prepare breakfast. After a while, the upstairs group joined them and I left the screens and followed them back into the kitchen wall. Not that there was much to listen to. The five people in the kitchen began to eat their breakfast under oppressive silence; all the while, the gray light outdoors slid imperceptibly into late morning, and the wind grew stronger.

  SUDDENLY HENRY STOOD up and walked over to the window. He turned to the others.

  “What is that, moving out there?”

  The colonel came to stand beside him and looked out.

  “I don’t know; can someone hand me the binoculars? I thought I saw a pair in the hall.”

  Lotte rose and vanished out of my sight, returning after a moment with a pair of binoculars, which she passed to the colonel. He put them to his eyes and gave a little cry.

  “What on earth—that’s the pier!”

  Everyone darted from their chairs; the colonel grabbed his jacket and hurtled out the door. The others followed. Left behind, next to Lotte’s chair, was her handbag.

  I realized that this was my chance, now or never.

  WHEN I WAS totally certain that everyone had left the house to run down to the pier, I made my way through the chest freezer again and came up into the medical station. Without really thinking about what I was about to do, I hurried over to the shelf of medicine, found what I was looking for, and tucked the bottle in my pocket. Then I rushed out of the room. The house felt enormous now that no one else was in it. I ran into the kitchen, crouching so that I wouldn’t be visible through the window. I snatched Lotte’s large bag and had to fiddle with the closure mechanism for a moment before I got it open. She seemed to be the sort of person who kept everything but the kitchen sink in her bag. Wallet, keys, gum, printed bus schedule, tampons, Band-Aids, receipts held together with a paper clip, a half-eaten piece of chocolate, bobby pins, a dog-eared child’s drawing that depicted some sort of orange blob, a bracelet that looked like it had been purchased at a cheap trinket store.

  When I was little, Nour had a large briefcase she always carried with her. I wasn’t allowed to look inside it, which might be why I loved digging through it when she wasn’t paying attention. It was like a secret lexicon, a way to understand her.

  I gathered evidence, receipts from places she’d had coffee or items she had bought; I looked through her calendar to find out who she had met with. True to her paranoid ways, she often didn’t write down exact information, just an initial or a time. I stored all of this in my memory, collecting it in my inner war chest, as if I needed information I could hold over Nour although I didn’t quite know why.

  I went through Lotte’s bag in the same methodical manner, even though I realized right away that the satellite phone wasn’t there. I pocketed one of her bobby pins, closed the bag again, and put it aside. I cautiously looked out the window to make sure that no one was on their way back up to the house. Then I sneaked out of the kitchen, up the stairs, and down the hallway. I counted the doors on the left until I arrived at Lotte’s. I was prepared to pick the lock with the bobby pin (a skill I’d learned back in my childhood and later honed in Kyzyl Kum), but it turned out that the door was unlocked, so I stepped in. The light inside was dim, the blinds halfway closed and clothes tossed everywhere. A pair of white cotton panties, clearly used, were crumpled up in a pair of nylons, and the bed was unmade, as though someone had just thrown off the covers and run away. That was presumably exactly what had happened. If I’d felt unreal when I was sneaking around inside the walls, I was almost panicked now. It was in every way socially repellent to walk around a stranger
’s room, digging through her clothes and belongings, through her wardrobe, through her bathroom. I felt like a crazy person, someone who had crossed a line. And even though I had been hiding for only half a day, it felt unnatural to stand in the middle of a room, fully visible, instead of hiding in a dark corridor. I took a deep breath, pulled myself together, and began my search.

  I went through the room as methodically as I could, and now and then I cast a glance out the window. The others seemed fully occupied down by the cliff’s edge, and I crossed my fingers that they would be gone for a while longer. It took an unreasonably long time to search her room; my hands were still clumsy from the drugs Katja had given me hours before and from the blow to my head. Several times I found myself standing there with something in my hand, without really knowing how it had come to be there or how long I had been standing that way. I tried to be strategic and went so far as to look under the lid of the toilet tank, but no matter how hard I searched I couldn’t find the phone. Of course, it was possible that she had it on her, hidden on her body somewhere, but I thought it was unlikely since the phone was rather large and bulky. Carrying it around like that would be asking for someone to discover it. But suddenly another thought struck me. There was someone else who knew about Lotte’s phone—someone whose room shared a wall with hers.

  Henry.

  HENRY’S ROOM WASN’T locked either, and I stood in the doorway for a moment before I walked in. The room looked different in daylight, but one thing was the same: there was barely any evidence that he had been there. Unlike Lotte’s feverish absence, this room was as tranquil as a monastery cell. There was nothing in the room to indicate that he was staying there, that anyone was staying there, really. The bed was made as if by hotel staff, the sheets taut, and all belongings were stashed away, except for a paperback on the nightstand. I started by looking under the bed, where I found his empty suitcase. Apparently he had unpacked everything he’d brought with him, and then primly placed the plain, navy blue suitcase, with its filled-out luggage tag, under the bed.

  For reasons I didn’t quite understand myself, I found his neatness exasperating. I walked over to the wardrobe and opened it. His clothes, too, were arranged in perfect order. A pair of brown leather shoes on the floor. Two blazers. Dark pants. Freshly ironed shirts on hangers; a couple of undershirts. On a shelf lay two knitted sweaters in shades that recalled construction material. I recognized one of them from the first night. This unremarkable orderliness irritated me as well, but strangely enough, I also found it attractive. There was something sensual about looking at his clothes, touching them. Clothes that had lain against his skin, touched his chest, his arms. I put out my hand and stroked a blue-gray shirt, then bent forward to sniff it. There was a scent of fabric softener. The creases on the sleeves were so well ironed that they were almost sharp, and I absently wondered if he ironed his shirts himself or took them to a dry cleaner.

  Digging around in Henry’s wardrobe made me feel like I had the upper hand somehow, as if I could finally observe him as much as I wanted and he wouldn’t even know. I lifted up the sweater from our first evening and inhaled its scent. It smelled faintly of aftershave and human.

  For a split second I wondered if I should take it with me, but I quickly realized the absurdity in taking that sort of risk. I put the sweater back where it belonged and continued to browse through everything else at random. And then I found it. Behind the clothes was a cabinet that extended right into the wall. The door resembled that of a safe, but I tried it out and it wasn’t locked; I was able to open it. And even though it was pretty dark in the wardrobe, I saw right away what the cabinet contained. There was a bundle of papers—a personal dossier—with a photocopy of my passport on the front. And a pistol.

  I RECOILED AS if the door to the cabinet had burned me, and I let out a little screech. I took a few quick steps toward the window; to my dismay, I found that the others had started to make their way back up to the house, and quickly. Without really knowing why, I grabbed the gun from the cabinet, closed the safe door, pulled the clothes back in front of it, closed the wardrobe, left the room, and hurried back down the stairs. I heard the front door opening just as I was climbing into the chest freezer. Someone called, “Go down and get the warming blanket!” Steps were approaching; this time I managed to lock the chest on the first try. I lay as still as I could, heart pounding, as I heard someone rummaging around the room, clearly in a hurry. The person appeared to find what they were looking for, and I heard their steps jogging off and the door closing. I tried to focus by slowly counting to one hundred. Then I began my arduous journey through the hatch. I tried to move as silently as I could down the narrow stairs, and then I was back in my underground room, panting, the gun heavy in my hand.

  HENRY

  “WHERE IS HE? Where is he?” Lotte was shouting right next to my ear. It took every ounce of self-control to keep myself from telling her to shut up. Instead I kept fighting my way up the ladder in my ice-cold, heavy clothing; once I was up I fell on my back and tried to catch my breath again. I undid the clasp on my wet and unwieldy life jacket and wriggled out of it, then rolled onto my side and coughed. Salt water poured out of my mouth as I heaved. I rested my forehead on the muddy, trampled grass and tried to breathe normally. I almost hadn’t made it back to land.

  ABOUT FIFTEEN MINUTES earlier, we had all run down to the pier. Or, rather, to the lawn by the ladder, above the spot where the pier had once been. At the moment, the pier itself was rapidly floating away from land. Without it, a larger boat would never be able to dock, at least as long as the bad weather lasted. Which would mean we were truly isolated.

  “We have to try and get it!” I shouted to the others. The wind had whipped up even harder, and if this continued it would soon be a true storm. The rain was lashing sideways.

  “There’s a rubber boat in the boathouse,” Jon called.

  “Go get it!” I shouted back, and he returned a minute or two later, dragging a large, inflatable navy-style dinghy with a tiny outboard motor. When the wind caught it, it almost hurled him over the cliff. Lotte dashed over to help him, and together they began to lower it down. The wind tossed it about, and it nearly knocked me off the ladder a couple of times. Once I made it down to the thin strip of beach, I took hold of it with difficulty and managed to set it in the water in the little lee afforded by the cliff.

  “Are you coming?” I called to the colonel. He looked at me hesitantly, but then he made up his mind and began to climb down. Jon made a move as if to follow him.

  “It’ll be too heavy! Wait here!”

  Jon stopped on the first rung of the ladder and climbed back over the top. A flicker of relief washed over his face. The colonel stepped into the boat, stooped past me, and sat in the stern. I took the oars from the bottom of the boat; once we had struggled to row a few meters away from the cliff wall I turned on the motor, and then we steered out onto the choppy sea and toward the pier, which was floating farther and farther away on the waves.

  Once we were at a safe distance from the sharp rocks and definitely out of earshot, I adjusted my position, hoping to use my back to block the others from seeing us.

  “I have to talk to you,” I half shouted to him, turning off the motor and moving closer.

  ONCE I’D SAID what I had to say, I took a deep breath and awaited the colonel’s reaction. His gaze was steady as he looked into my eyes. There was nothing left of his watery, absent gaze, and I realized how much respect he must have commanded earlier in his life. He was a man who knew what had to be done.

  “Are you absolutely certain about this?” he asked.

  “Absolutely certain,” I said, hoping it would turn out to be true.

  He looked away, gazing at the beach and letting out a small laugh.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  Then his body swayed, and with a deft motion, as if he had done this many times before, he o
verturned the boat and we both went into the ice-cold water.

  ANNA

  ONCE I HAD calmed down in my basement it became clear to me that it had truly not been a stroke of genius to take the gun. I risked rousing Henry’s suspicions, because of course the weapon couldn’t have taken itself from the cabinet, as he would doubtless realize. But—and I couldn’t keep these uncomfortable questions at bay any longer—why did Henry have a gun, and why did he have a file about me? And why hadn’t I taken that too, as long as I was taking the gun?

  I cursed myself for having thought both quickly and slowly at the same time. Apparently Henry was not just a candidate for the position; his presence on the island seemed to have something to do with me. Without really reflecting on it, I had assumed all along that I could trust him, had assumed we were on the same team. But the sight of the gun and the personnel file together in the cabinet, hidden behind his clothes, felt like finding a back door into his brain, and what I found inside was something I had neither wished for nor expected.

  I placed the gun on the desk before me and began to inspect it. It was a type of handgun I hadn’t seen before, but that didn’t really mean anything, since the only guns I’d seen up close were old Mauser rifles, revolvers, and Soviet AK-47s belonging to the military in Kyzyl Kum. This gun looked nothing like those; it looked much more modern. It was slim and mechanical with bullets in a magazine; there were none of the rustic details I associated with civilian hunting weapons. I thought it looked much more military in nature. I knew Henry had once been in the military, of course; he had told me so himself long ago as we discussed the project that paved the way for the trip to Kyzyl Kum. But many people had that sort of background; it didn’t necessarily mean anything. Unless he was still part of it. A spy? I took a sharp breath. There had always been something unusual about his reticence, something that seemed almost pathological. Or professional. I thought about his ridiculously neat room, his plain dress, his discretion. The fact that I really didn’t know anything about him but the few things he had told me himself. Until now. My thoughts whirled every which way. It was impossible to say whether I was being paranoid or naive; I had nothing useful to compare this to. There were no guidelines, no conventions, for how to react in this sort of situation.