by Claire North
Of course you can’t, he exclaimed. The river is blessed!
Chapter 13
The body of Nathan Coyle.
Upon reflection, he’s not really my type. The muscles under my arms and across my back are a little too gym-built, maintained by the lifting and dropping of weights for no apparent purpose. Years of running have strengthened my cardiovascular system, but my left knee aches after too long motionless, and the pain grows steadily until relieved by stretching. I am a little long-sighted – undoubtedly excellent vision at a distance, but close to I find myself inclined to squint. I can find no sign of contact lenses or glasses in my bag. Perhaps he’d been meaning to go to the optician. More likely he simply hadn’t realised that squinting was not the norm, having no experience save his own.
A file labelled “Kepler” sat on my lap.
The bench on the Kapikule platform was cold, hard, metal. The wind was from the east, the smell of rain on the air, the Belgrade train running twenty minutes late.
I have no interest in going to Belgrade per se. My aim is to get out of Turkey, away from the police hunting my face. But Coyle’s passports are North American, north European, and there is a text on my phone which reads Circe, and a murder kit in my bag, and though it would be simple to kill this body and move on, I remember the feel of the bullet as it went through my leg, and though I ran and Josephine died
yet it was me he aimed to kill.
The file on my lap was laid out chronologically, photos and documents. An introduction lamented that no further information on entity Kepler was available than these thin pages of lives stolen, time lost. Not a footnote, appendix or watermark suggested who the author was.
I turned through sheaves of notes, stiff glossy photos, faces and names I barely remembered, until I reached the most recent photo – my photo. Josephine Cebula.
A copy of her Polish passport, found in the hands of her Frankfurt pimp. Her face, devoid of make-up and joy, was plain and grim, but no less than the face which had greeted me in the morning mirror.
A photo, snapped on a street corner, her face half-turned away as the photographer swept by, a moment captured, frozen, discarded.
The police record for the first time she was arrested, released nine hours later. She wore a short leather jacket that exposed her belly button, a skirt that barely covered her behind, and a bruise beneath her right eye as she glared at the camera.
The boarding pass I’d used when I caught the plane from Frankfurt to Kiev, ready for a languorous trip down the Crimea. I’d travelled business class, dressed in new, bright clothes, and as the stewardess poured me whisky I’d felt an itching and realised that Josephine was a smoker whose needs I had failed to indulge. Landing in Kiev and cursing all the way, I’d bought a box of nicotine patches and sworn that, by the time I gave her body back, she’d be clean, physiologically, if not mentally.
A picture of me, leaving the hotel in Pera, the sun on my face and phone in my hand, for I was young and rich and beautiful, and if these qualities lend themselves to one thing, it is the making of quick and easy friends. I remembered that day, that sunshine, that dress. It had been three days before I was gunned down on the steps of Taksim station, shot by a stranger. For three days they’d watched me leading my life, until they were ready to make the kill.
My nails dug into the palm of my hand, and I let them dig. A little blood, right now, wouldn’t go entirely amiss.
I flipped through to the report on Josephine. A violent mother who swore she loved her daughter and wept on Josephine’s shoulder every time she was released from jail. A boyfriend who’d told her that it was OK if she slept with his friends; in fact, he needed the money to pay for all the pretty things he’d bought her. A flight to Frankfurt, a flight from everything, thirty-two euros in her pocket and the author had no doubt she’d intended a better life, a good life for herself, but it seemed that Josephine’s situation was untenable until the entity known as Kepler arrived and offered her money for murder.
I stopped.
A list of the dead. Dr Tortsen Ulk, drowned in his own toilet. Magda Müller, stabbed to death in her kitchen by a stranger, her daughters asleep upstairs. James Richter and Elsbet Horn, found in each other’s arms, their eyes ripped out and insides spread across the floor of the cabin of the little boat they were sailing up the Rhine. Though the police had never linked the killings, lamented the author, we have done so, for these victims were part of us, and it was by Josephine’s hand, and at Kepler’s command, that they all died.
I read the words once and, not sure I had understood, read again.
They were no different on the second look, and no less lies.
The Belgrade train shrieked like a metal mother-in-law, white sparks bursting from its wheels as it crawled to a halt in Kapikule. A few lights were still on behind the blinds of the couchettes. Doors opened here or there, thick orange panels swinging out, metal stairs dropping down. The train had once been orange and blue, Bulgarian Railways’ finest. That colour was long since lost, obscured beneath layers of spray paint, the pride of the line overwritten by the pride of the kids who haunted the terminals at either end of the line. I smelt urine from the toilet that guarded the door, heard the illicit pressure pump of a passenger committing that ultimate offence – flushing while in the station – and turned to find my cubicle.
A cabin for six, four of the beds already taken. A husband, wife, teenage son occupied three; in the other was an old man who chewed something herbal with the circular grinding of a camel’s jaw and lay on his back to read articles about ancient cars and journeys through the east. The family had a makeshift feast, which they passed up and down the three-bunk tier they inhabited. Hard-boiled eggs, slices of ham, pieces of goats’ cheese, crumbling bread that shook golden shards across the floor. With every crunch of the knife through the loaf, the old man with the car magazine flinched, as if the blade were cutting bone.
I climbed into the top bunk as the train jerked into motion, put my bag of clothes beneath my head, my bag of weapons beneath my feet, and lay back to think. Metal bunk below, plastic ceiling above, the space between barely wide enough for a tomb.
No one came to check the passports.
Chapter 14
There are many ways to catch a ghost sitting in the body of a loved one. Basic questions – name, age, father’s name, mother’s name, university – can be answered by any well-informed inhabitant, but it takes a matter of minutes to probe a little deeper.
First place you lived when you left the family home?
Name of your primary school headmistress.
First girl you ever kissed.
Or – my personal favourite – can you play the violin?
The delight with that particular enquiry is of course when the ghost, relieved to be asked something it can successfully answer, stands up and rattles off five favourite tunes in the key of G, only to be informed upon the final semibreve that the body’s natural owner has never held a violin in all her life.
First skin I ever jumped to, the first question I was ever asked, I failed.
I was an empty-bellied killer, and the constable who pinned me to the watchtower floor wanted to know my name.
So I told him.
“Not that name,” he growled. “Not the poor soul you killed. I want to know your name.”
I had beaten a stranger to death, and that stranger, me.
I was a killer caught with blood on my hands.
“What’s your name?!”
I was a flake-skinned youth, the weight of a club across my neck, the pressure of a knee against my back, two ribs cracked, one eye swollen, never to see right again. And like the men who beat me, I too was curious to find the answer to that most thorny of questions.
What’s your name, bastard? Murderer, butcher, liar, thief. What’s your name?
When they threw me into Newgate, in the hot pits where the masses went, fifty to a room – forty-seven and three bags of flesh by morning – I l
aughed the hysterical laughter of a mind too shattered to remember that it should weep. When the judge sentenced me to hang by the neck until dead, my knees buckled, but my face was empty and my soul was calm. When Fat Jerome, king of the underbelly of the prison, tried to get there first, his great wet paws around my throat, I didn’t fight him. I threw up no defence, made no noise, but consigned my soul to Satan, to whom, it seemed, it had no choice but to go.
Yet it transpired I did not want to die, so with Fat Jerome murdering the murderer who had murdered me
rather inevitably, upon reflection,
I looked back into my murderer’s face from Fat Jerome’s eyes, and forgot to squeeze.
My killer fell to his knees, gagging for air, his face red, eyes popping. A small crowd had gathered, pinioning us together, body to body, sweat to sweat, and one voice said, “Why didn’t you finish him, Jerome? Why’d you let him live?”
I couldn’t speak.
“I’ll do it, Jerome!” piped up another, a crooked-lipped thief with a brand on his hand who desperately wanted to impress the king of the cellar, the lord of the throng.
My silence was taken for consent, and with a little whoop the spry-limbed convict leaped forward and drove the end of a spoon into the socket of my killer’s eye.
Chapter 15
Sleeper train is a misnomer.
Starting-awake-in-the-night train is more apt.
As drivers change and carriages are shunted in and out of platforms in the dark, the journey towards Sofia is a stop-start of teeth-grinding screeches and head-bobbing rattles. You do not sleep on a sleeper train, but rather doze in and out of a fitful sense of unconsciousness, aware that this is not awareness, that the thoughts with which you think this are not thoughts at all, and so infused with so profound an understanding of your condition, you sleep to wake again ignorant that you slept at all.
We reached Sofia at 4.23 a.m. I would not have known, but the lone passenger had set his alarm to buzz at 4.15 a.m. precisely. It made the sound of a nuclear siren, a klaxon that knocked the entire compartment awake with a clenching heart. He rolled out of his bunk dressed in yesterday’s clothes, picked up his bag and left without a word. I tweaked the blind back as we passed into the station. The sun was still down over the city. A lone luggage handler waited on the deserted platform. I pushed my wafer-pillow higher against the back of the bed and rolled over to sleep.
The blind stayed down as we pulled away from Sofia. A city, its history and people, its stories and its tragedies, holds no interest to me at 4.23 a.m.
The Serbians did check passports.
At Kalotina-Zapad a team of fresh hard-jawed officials boarded the train, while the grimy-eyed crew of the previous night disembarked, wheeling their little cases to the opposite platform and the journey home. The new officials wore smart peaked hats and scuffed blue coats. As we pulled away from the station, they knocked on every compartment door, calling out, “Tickets, passports!”
Tickets and passports were taken away for inspection. I handed over my Turkish identity, the name newly learned, and lay back in the bunk, wishing we could open more of the window as the Bulgarian countryside flashed by. I had no great fear of detection this side of the border. No matter how good the Turkish police, international arrest warrants take time.
As my details were inspected and my tickets stamped, I flicked through the file marked Kepler.
Nearly a hundred photos and names, faces, glimpses of old CCTV pictures, arrest warrants, family photos. Records of interviews and documents logged, emails sent and phones hacked. Some of the faces in the file I barely remembered; others had been part of me for years at a time. There the beggar I had met in Chicago whose face, when shaved, turned out to be barely a boy’s, and whose body I enrolled, as my very last act in it, on a catering course in St Louis, reasoning there were worse places to begin again. Here the woman from St Petersburg whose companions had loved her and left her, and who I’d found wandering the streets without the money to get home, and who hissed, “Vengeance against all false friends…” There the district attorney in New Orleans who, sitting beside me in the bar, had said, “If he testifies, I can blow this case wide open, but he’s too goddamn scared to come to court.” And I’d replied, “What if I could get him there?”
Here, over ten years of my life, laid out in neat chronological order, every jump, every switch, every skin, tracked and documented and filed for future reference, right up to the very last page, and Josephine.
Someone had spent years tracing me, monitoring my every move through records of amnesia, the testimonies of men and women who had lost an hour here, a day there, a few months at a time. It was a masterpiece of investigation, a triumph of forensic detection, right up to the point where, without explanation, it took it upon itself to lie shamelessly and brand both me and my host murderers.
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.
