by Claire North
“I’ll be fine. The important thing was stashing Coyle.”
“Is that his name?”
“No,” I replied. “But it’ll have to do.”
She looked me up and down, assessing my body, then said, “Is that your style now?”
“No,” I grumbled, picking my briefcase up in a sulky sweep. “And I’ve got athlete’s foot.”
Neat streets of neat houses. A neat bakery, selling neat loaves on neat trays. Cars, neatly parked, and bicycles politely dinging. Berlin is a city which knows how to keep up appearances.
I walked the few blocks to a neat yellow apartment block on a perfect right-angle corner. Up a cobbled path lined with bins for paper, tin, plastics and organic recycling, to a thick blue door. I looked down the list of names by the buzzer. Alice Mair hadn’t bothered to disguise hers.
Wheels rattled on cobbles. I turned to find an elderly lady behind me, a shopping trolley in her hands, hat low on her head. The curvature of her spine pushed her head out almost horizontally from her shoulders, and as I stood aside, she went into her pocket for her door keys. With a slight shudder of apprehension, I reached out and touched her hand.
I hate being old.
Switching from legs which swing along merrily to hips of crumbling calcium and not much hope of repair is a quick path to injury. I took a step and nearly fell over, misjudging the stability of my own bones. I took another far more conservative step and felt tremors rush up my knees and shake my spine. My left hand was curled around the keys in my pocket, and as I pulled them out I saw twitching fingers, skin like a withered date. Half-bending to get a better look at my keys, aches down my back, it occurred to me that to drop them now would be a minor catastrophe all of its own.
Behind me a confused man with a battered briefcase thought about asking me where he was, how he came to be there, but who asks doddery old ladies anything these days?
Alice Mair lived on the third floor.
I took the lift and left my trolley on the landing.
I buzzed a brass bell once, twice. No reply. I considered knocking, but my knuckles felt hollow and my arm no stronger than a roll of paper soaked in rain.
I buzzed again.
A voice called out in German, “Coming.”
The door opened an inch, on the chain. I fixed my face to a foolish, denture-filled smile and said, “Have you seen my keys?”
A single eye, sky blue, peeked through the gap in the door. “Your… keys?”
“I had them,” I explained. “But I lost them.”
The eye considered.
Everyone knows that ghosts are vain; why would we be anything else? I am told that the old do not notice that age has come upon them until they are in the full throes of pain, in much the same way as an asthmatic assumes that the breath they struggle to draw is the same struggle fought by all men. No ghost ever chooses to be old.
“A moment,” said the voice.
I heard the rattling of the chain, and the door swung wide. A woman, five foot five, with blonde hair cut short and a hint of freckle across her flushed cheek, stood in jogger’s T-shirt and Lycra shorts, and as she opened her mouth to offer some charitable advice to the ageing neighbour who stood on her doorstep, I smiled my most sublime of smiles and caught her by the hand.
I don’t think she even had time to be afraid.
“Ma’am,” I said as the old woman blinked before me, “do you need help getting your shopping into your flat?”
Chapter 45
Impressions of the body of the woman called Alice Mair.
Good teeth, chemically whitened; nice hair; unplucked softly curving eyebrows. A twinge in my shins that might be the result of too much running in cold weather. Eyes seem good and she’s wearing sensible shoes. Itchy nose. A relief to be young again.
I lock the door behind me and inspect my apartment.
Walls painted a shade of not-quite-white which designers probably dubbed “pearl”. Flat-pack furniture, cream curtains hanging down before the windows. A flat-screen TV, a couple of magazines about women’s boxing and the plight of the polar bear. On the wall a collection of semi-Impressionist paintings bought three for two at a clearance sale of inoffensive art. Alice’s bed was freshly made, with matching duvet and pillow covers, but her laptop in the kitchen by a gently cooling cup of coffee was passcode protected. I patted my hips and felt no pockets, then spotted the phone on top of the microwave. It too was passcode locked.
I opened drawers, rummaged through books and pieces of old paper, checked the trash, the recycling bag beneath the sink. No pictures of friends, address books, handy lists of Christmas presents bought for helpfully notated colleagues. No files, no folders, no holiday snaps – nothing in this apartment to indicate even the slightest kind of external existence, save, of course, for the nine-millimetre pistol in her bedside cabinet. Alice was not about to win any awards for hospitality.
I sat on a soft padded sofa in a cream padded room, drinking the remains of Alice’s coffee, and tried to think.
Of all the paths available to me – and they weren’t a highway of choices – only one seemed to have any particular merit in it. Even so, that merit was questionable.
Walk away?
No reason for Alice Mair to have more than a glimmer of a doubt about my occupancy of her body. I could knock on the old lady’s door right now, pick up the conversation where we left off, get out, get away. Someone would find Coyle eventually. I could be a long way away before anyone even bothered to look.
And somewhere in Istanbul Josephine Cebula would be buried in an unmarked grave, and the man who seemed to have nothing to say but Galileo, Galileo, Galileo would walk away unscathed.
(A little girl in St Petersburg – touch him and I’ll rip your eyes out and feed them to my pussy cat.)
I picked up Alice’s phone, pulled out the battery, grabbed her laptop and, on further reflection, a warm jumper, wallet, U-Bahn pass and gun, and headed out into the cold light of day.
Ghosts are vain.
We are also largely ignorant.
Want to be a rocket scientist? Hijack one for a few days, and if anyone asks you anything at all, say it “needs further investigation”.
Want to be President of the USA? He shakes a lot of hands on his way out of convention centres; if you are a particularly cute little girl in a pink flowery dress, your odds of receiving the blessed touch increase hugely. The same can be said of popes, though the language skills required for a popish possession exceed those for the White House.
Want to go to university? Freshers’ week – my God, but freshers’ week! What a glorious opportunity to acquire clean skins – a great mass of strangers far from home, grab yourself a handy history student and be spared the indignity of actually having to take A levels to get there.
Which is not to say that we don’t occasionally try. I have several bachelor’s degrees from reputable institutions and nearly half a medical degree. Any guilt I experience at having deprived my hosts of their university experience is offset by the thought that the first-class degrees I acquired in their name were a perfectly good academic outcome, better than the STDs and 2.2s they may have obtained without my intervention.
Though self-improvement is a ludicrous notion to those of us who switch bodies like a new pair of shoes, who leave behind every purchase and every obtainment on the instant we jump, yet I am not wholly ignorant.
Although I know my limits.
I am not, for example, a computer hacker.
Christina 636 – OK. I need your help again.
Spunkmaster13 – Waaay! Lets paaarrtyyy!
Chapter 46
Johannes Schwarb.
Encountering him face to face brought back the uncomfortable recollection of those few minutes I spent in his skin – of alcohol, drugs and fists in a dark corner of the night.
We met in the McDonald’s on Adenauerplatz, where the almost-Mediterreanean cafés, Teutonic bars and ubiquitous clothing outlets of Kurfürstenda
mm met the sharp offices of well-to-do solicitors and the grand apartments of big-time bankers, and where the taxis were never for hire.
The burgers were bad, the McCroissant unmentionable.
When Schwarb – Spunkmaster to his friends – walked in, I barely recognised him. Dressed in a black suit with grey pinstripes, his thin hair gelled back against his skull, his chin was neatly shaved and even the tiny diamond stud in his right earlobe seemed like a sad attempt at being radical by a man who had long since sold his revolution for guaranteed investment bonds. The fact that he ordered a double burger with extra fries, extra mayonnaise, extra everything, yeah! seemed a little more in character, and when I slipped into the booth beside him, he exclaimed, “Oh my God, you’re hot again! You’re… you’re so… you’re…” He gestured furiously up and down, and failing to find anything else, concluded, “You’re sexy!”
“How have you been?”
“Me? I’m immense. I’m ruling the world, you know?”
“I thought you were a financial adviser.”
“An independent financial adviser,” he corrected. “An immense independent financial adviser.”
“I had the impression that was a position of respectability, responsibility, of nine to five…”
He flattened his burger with the palm of his hand, creating a rich goo of processed vegetables squished against processed meat. “I get three hundred and fifty euros an hour to tell people stuff they could have got off the internet. I’m like – of course I’m good, I know what I’m talking about – but these guys, these money shits, they just want everything, you know? They want big returns on investment for no risk and I say you gotta spread your bets.”
There must have been something incredulous in my stare, for he added, “Hey – you looking for financial advice?”
“I’m really not.”
“Nah. You’re looking for computing shit, aren’t you? The digital age, twenty-first century, pow!” Before I could answer, he scooped up his burger and took a bite worthy of a shark.
I waited for the worst to pass, then: “I need three things. I need access to a laptop; I need access to a phone; and I’m going to need to access some password-protected machines, I think.”
“You think?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
“OK. Can’t we just do it remotely, hello the global age?”
“I don’t yet know where these computers are.”
“Right…”
“I’m sure I’ll spot them when I find them.”
“OK…”
“Can you just knock me up a USB stick or something?”
He stared at me in expert horror. “You’ve just got no clue, have you?”
Without consciously doing it, I realised I was batting my eyes. “That is why I came to an expert.”
Chapter 47
The sun was setting by the time I left Schwarb, Alice Mair’s fingers turning daisy-white in the cold. I had drunk tea as he tampered with laptop, telephone; played with software; tutted and cursed and performed the technological equivalent of summoning sagely demons and learned ghosts to help him in his enterprise.
After he had unlocked the laptop, he set about unlocking the mobile phone.
I sat with Alice’s computer on my knees and flicked through email, news sites and a small but respectable collection of strategy games.
Her email was personal, not professional.
A sister in Salzburg, forwarding a picture of her latest scan. An arrow drawn across the grainy image pointed to a bundle of white that might, in time, come to have a head, a pair of legs and a thumb it sucked in its mother’s womb.
A college reunion; ten years since we graduated, can you believe it? No? Have a drink with us and maybe you won’t have to.
A series of requests, notifications – this person on that network is looking to make a friend. This stranger wants to share a file. This person likes your online dating profile. You’ve used a false name and called yourself an account manager, but the picture you posted of yourself, Alice Mair, is beautiful. You wear a blue dress and seem surprised at your own femininity, delighted at how silly and free you feel, a moment captured by the lens.
The history of Alice’s life is on this computer, ready to be read.
The story of her job, however, is not.
Only one file, still lingering in the “Recent Downloads” folder. She hasn’t yet wiped it, watched it from a temporary file and then forgot it was there.
A video.
A CCTV camera catching a moment, a woman in a hood and miniskirt. She’s taken off her high-heeled shoes and carries them by their straps between the spread fingers of her left hand. She’s on a path by a river, maybe a canal; the water is still and the bank is low, I can’t tell from this angle. She walks quickly, then slowly, seems to feel the gaze of the CCTV camera on her, looks up, looks round, smiles at what she sees, smiles into the camera. Her hands are smudged with something dark. She kneels down before the screen and runs her hand across the tarmacked path. Sometimes she stops, running her fingers across her palms, around her wrists. She’s writing. Ink is darker than that, paint is thicker, but the liquid staining her skin, darkening her tights, smeared across her face, is suitable for the challenge. It isn’t her blood, which is why she stops occasionally to scrape a little bit more on to her fingertips from the streaks across her flesh.
When she stands, the words she has written are just about visible.
Do you like what you see?
Josephine Cebula’s eyes linger on the camera, asking the question that is written at her feet.
She walks away.
I check the date/time stamp on the video.
Schwarb checks it as well, looking for a forgery beneath the image.
I look for associated files, find a list of names.
Tortsen Ulk, Magda Müller, James Richter and Elsbet Horn.
Murdered in Frankfurt. Their deaths were not clean; it was not assassination or burglary gone astray which killed them. They suffered before they died, and their killer enjoyed the experience.
Coyle blamed Josephine, but I had studied her life and knew she had not done it.
A face frozen on the screen, staring up at the camera.
Do you like what you see?
I closed the laptop, told Schwarb to keep it hidden.
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
I left his office as the sun went down. In my pocket was a USB stick, its rubber sheath cut into the shape of a cheerfully waving penguin.
I went to a department store at the eastern end of Kurfürstendamm. When the Wall fell, East Berliners had flocked to these hallowed walls of commerce, their priorities clear: smelly soap and soft socks. I bought a pair of trousers, pulling them over the Lycra jogging pants. It was all very well looking like you could run the marathon, but how useful pockets were.
I bought two cheap mobile phones with a few euros’ credit in each and headed east, towards Potsdamer Platz. At the old Checkpoint Charlie a museum had been built to the great Mauer which had eaten its victims whole, but at Potsdamer Platz it was hard to believe that the concrete monster had ever stood at all. Reflective glass was lit up by brilliant splashes of light; LED screens ran constant shimmering shapes round the curves of the overhanging buildings; the sound of voices fought against the clatter of feet beneath the shop windows and the calls of waiters as they pushed their restaurant doors wide to offer sushi, pad thai, prawn crackers, mulled wine, venison stew, hot dumplings and vodka. Beneath the origami-steel roof of the Sony Centre your only purpose was to buy, spend and make merry, as brightly and as lavishly as you possibly could.
With the winter coming on, the authorities had built not only an ice rink but a small ski slope and “Winter Wonderland”, where children screamed and nervous couples worried about the safety of their ankles. I bought myself a ticket to the ice rink, and was caught short when asked what size boots I wanted.
“Do you… want to check?” asked the w
oman behind the counter when my silence grew too long.
“Thanks,” I mumbled. “I can never remember.”
A pair of ice skates later, I sat on a hard wooden bench at the side of the rink while music played and lights spun in magenta blobs across the ice. Hundreds were already skating, thick gloves pulled up high. None were professionals; professionals would not have been seen dead at Potsdamer Platz. Teenagers clung to each other for support and whooped when one fell, only for the collapse of one to topple a neighbour, who toppled the next, until with a swosh of metal on ice the whole pack went tumbling, feet up, bums down, faces wet with laughter. Around the edge of the rink those who had always known they didn’t want to skate, had never wanted to skate, didn’t want to skate now, clung to the wall, shuffling one foot over another while their sleeker, more prepared companions whooshed up and down.
I did up the last knot on my boots, patted my pockets to check that all I needed was there and turned on Alice’s phone.
Notifications began to appear – calls missed, messages received – a dozen in total. I put the phone in my pocket and pushed my way on to the ice. I joined the circling mass of the crowd, laughed when they laughed, turned when they turned, and felt the sense of companionship that can only be found from doing a ridiculous thing with those who are as ridiculous as yourself. In that moment I loved Berlin, I loved the cold, the ice beneath my feet, the laugh that came from my throat, beautiful and vibrant, and I loved Alice Mair.
The best things cannot last for ever. Reality interferes like a bullet in the back.
After a few laps, the heat rising beneath my jumper even as my face grew numb, I felt the phone ring. I swung to the edge of the rink and answered.
“Hello?”
“Where the hell are you?” barked a voice – male, irritated, a strong French accent lacing his German.
“Potsdamer Platz. Skating.”
“What are you doing skating?”
