by Claire North
“I wouldn’t hold your breath on that count. Do you know who this sponsor is?”
“No.”
“You know where to find him?”
Silence.
I squeezed the last dregs of lime into the bottom of my glass, watched the innards of the fruit pop between my fingers. “You’re wondering if I’ll kill him,” I breathed. “If this is all just part of one big trick. It’s a good instinct. It could keep you safe right up to that moment when your fear of being stabbed in the back means there’s no one left to watch it. So don’t ask yourself what I want or even who I am. Ask yourself only this: what could I do? Ten seconds are all I need to destroy a man. When you shot me on the steps in Taksim, I thought, Yes. Why not. I’ll be him, I’ll be her – I’ll be someone – and I’ll slit your throat. It’ll only take a moment, and when the cops take me away, blood still warm on my skin, I’ll be gone. All that your death would be to me, as I carried on with my life, was a few seconds. Consequences are for the flesh. Yet for some reason I couldn’t fully fathom at the time, I let you live. I could have run. I’m very good at running. Now, having had a while to consider it, I think I spared you, whatever-your-name-is, because in trying to kill me you performed the single most personal act anyone has done for me in… I don’t know how long. You tried to kill me. For all the things that I have done. I can barely describe the excitement of that feeling. So, here we are now, you and I, and I think you should know that my sentiments have perhaps evolved. Become a little more nuanced as, in the course of this merry round, I have come to know you, and, simply put, I love you. Curse me, hate me, spit on me, it’s all the same – an act of revulsion against my very soul. Not who I seem to be, but who I actually am. You are beautiful. And I would no sooner hurt you than I would walk barefoot to Aleppo in a leper’s skin.”
Coyle drained the last of his juice, looked into the empty glass. “Well,” he said at last, then stopped. “OK,” he went on, after a moment’s reflection. “Right.”
I waggled my empty glass at the barman. “Tequila. More tequila.”
“You haven’t had enough, Madame?”
“I’ll have had enough when I can’t walk. And my lovely friend here is going to help me home.”
The man shrugged as only a French barman can, all wisdom and apathy, and poured another glass. At my side Coyle had grown still. “And how am I helping you home, exactly?”
“What do you look for when you hunt my kind? Do you scour hospital records, looking for patients with sudden amnesia? Or is it financial blips, the poor man who suddenly starts buying, the rich man who gives it all away?”
“Both. We follow the carnage.”
“But amnesia can be caused by all sorts of things. A hit on the head. A shock to the system. A chemical cocktail perhaps, that too.”
“Kepler –” a note of warning, understanding seeped into his voice “– where is this going?”
“Every body I pick up, every body I leave behind, is someone else who can be traced. The car can be traced; Irena can be traced. Time to move on.”
“To what? Another cleaning lady? Or more hookers and thieves – that’s your style, isn’t it?”
“Usually, yes. But circumstances are different. Irena isn’t my only liability.”
The penny, which had been balancing on the edge for a while, dropped. “No way.”
“Coyle…”
“Don’t call me that. No fucking way!”
“Think about it…”
“Is this why you let me sleep? Patched me up?”
“I didn’t want you dead.”
“Or too uncomfortable.”
“A cooperative host, a willing body…”
“Chemically corrected for your pleasure…”
“Coyle!” I nearly shouted, pushed my hands into my lap, swallowed a lungful of cold dark air. “I can think of few bodies I would rather inhabit less than yours. I have rejected skins because they have itchy knees or their knuckles crack; do you really think I’d want to inhabit a body with a bullet wound if there was a better choice?”
“And if they find you?”
“I promise to do my very best to move into a more combat-ready skin at the earliest opportunity. What options do you have?”
“Plenty.”
“You’ve still got a bullet in your shoulder.”
“I can’t imagine you’ll be in a hurry to take it out.”
“Your own people…”
“I know!” He shouted now, hands slamming into the counter top, hard enough to make my glass jump, loud enough for heads to turn. He shrank down before the stares, seemed to curl in around his own core. “I know,” he murmured. “I know.”
“I can get you to New York.”
“How?”
“I can get you to your sponsor. I won’t hurt him. Have I lied to you? Have I killed?”
“You killed Eugene. In Berlin – you did that.”
“Alice killed Eugene,” I retorted. “She shot him because I was there, but he died and I lived. He’d have lived if you’d left me alone. I can get you to Galileo.”
“I… don’t know. I need to think. You’ve… drugged me. Talked. Jesus, you talk. I need to think.”
I laid my hand gently on top of his.
“That’s great,” I said. “But I’m going to throw up, and we’re all out of time.”
His hand twitched, but he was far, far too late.
Chapter 78
I said, “Hi.”
Coyle opened his eyes, licked his lips and said, “Where am I?”
“Dentist’s.”
His eyes wandered across the low ceiling, the white tiled floor, to me. “Who are you?”
“I am Nehra Beck, married, two kids, loyalty card for the local coffee shop, fastidious – some might say obsessive – collector of receipts.”
“What time is it?”
“Midnight, give or take. I – or rather you – explained that it was an emergency and you’d pay, and when Nehra realised that I had a bullet in my shoulder he became a little distressed and I had to explain that my emergency wasn’t so much about teeth, and then… Well, here we are.”
“Which day?”
“Same day,” I replied. “Only a few hours gone. I’m sorry about just jumping in like that, but you were getting unreasonable and I was really very, very drunk. But once in I realised that this whole stoical thing you’ve been doing was actually secondary to the fact that the bullet has got to come out.” I picked a pair of industrial-sized tweezers off the metal table at my side, clicked them together thoughtfully. “I figured a dentist might have enough happy drugs to ease the experience a little. I, for one, am looking forward to the after-effects.”
Chapter 79
And then Coyle opened his eyes and I said: “I’m Babushka. Actually, I’m almost certainly not Babushka, but all I’ve got in my handbag is eighty euros cash, a set of front-door keys, a half-bottle of vodka, four condoms, a pack of paracetamol, pepper spray and these.”
I tossed the cards on to the bed where Coyle lay. He looked from them to me and back again, and said, “You look… surgical.”
“Do I?” I ran my hands around the expansive shape of my body, my platinum-blonde hair draping down the side of my podgy white neck. “Well, yes, the breasts feel silicone and a bit undercooked, but I’d say that my face was all my own, wouldn’t you?”
Coyle, lying on his back on the cheap hotel bed, scrutinised the copious quantities of bare flesh I sported, and said, “This is some sort of punishment, isn’t it? Divine retribution?”
“Nonsense!” I exclaimed, flopping on to the bed beside him and sliding the cards back into my bag. “Babushka seemed a very pleasant woman. Cheap too. Fifty euros for two hours. You don’t get rates like that in Paris, I can tell you. How are you feeling?”
Flinching with every press of his fingertips, he fumbled around the fresh bandages across his shoulder. “I don’t remember much.”
“That would be because you were s
toned!” I sang out brightly, testing the rubbery ends of my bright white fingernails. “I knew you were stoned because I was the one who threw the drugs at you, but it took picking up Babushka here to realise just how high I – you – am. Are. You are. Enjoy it while it lasts. I was only checking in, so actually…” I reached out towards the soft skin of his cheek.
“Wait!”
I waited, eyebrows raised. Babushka had sensational plucked eyebrows, and I enjoyed raising them. Coyle sucked in a long slow breath. “You told me… you wanted a willing body. Someone who wouldn’t scream, wouldn’t run. And cheap though your… your Babushka is, if you take her anywhere outside this hotel room her pimp will come running, and you’ll have more trouble than you want. So you need me, and you need me to cooperate. So just wait.” I waited as Coyle pressed his fists against his forehead and drew in another shuddering breath. “Tell me how you get me to New York.”
“I can walk you through customs,” I replied simply. “I can ignore your boarding pass, stamp your passport, fail to search your bags. I could wear anyone I want to New York, fly first class, stretch my legs. But I’ll get you there, if you let me.”
“And what then? I wake up handcuffed to a radiator?”
“Or in a comfortable hotel room next to a lovely lady.”
“Have you looked at yourself in the mirror?”
“No,” I confessed. “But I took a good long stare at me when I came through the door. I was promising all sorts of wonderful delights – sexual thrills and erotic mysteries. I implied that I was very athletic.” I stretched my legs, feeling the pull beneath my thighs and calves, and, curious, reached down and tried to touch my toes. My fingertips barely made it past my knees before tendons locked, muscles objected, and with a sigh I relaxed again. “Maybe I exaggerated. But I thought I had a tender smile. It laughed, but at itself. I think I am quite wonderful, in my way.”
“Do you do this a lot? You hear about people who establish… relationships with people like you. I was never sure I could believe it.”
“It’s true. I’ve had a few in my time – gofers, if you will. Don’t worry; I was always very well behaved. A cooperative body isn’t something to be taken for granted. I’d never drive dangerously or have unprotected sex in a gofer; it wouldn’t be professional. Never have sex at all, in fact, in a gofer – not without permission. A relationship like that is about someone who’s willing to get you to the next appointment without all the fuss of jumping from waiter to chef to driver and back again. And a good gofer is… can be a friend. If they want to be.”
“Did you love them too?”
“Yes. Of course I did. They knew what I was and trusted me. They trusted me with their naked skin. If that isn’t an act of love, I don’t know what is. I love all my hosts. I loved Josephine.” His eyes glinted in the low tungsten light of the room, and he said not a word. “There was a time when I took everything I wanted by force. You – the actions of your kind – have somewhat resurrected that experience, those memories. But Josephine Cebula knew what she had agreed to. She and I made a bargain in the international departures lounge of Frankfurt airport, once I had proved to her all that I could do. I would wash her body, run my hands through her hair, over her naked flesh. I would dress her in brand-new clothes, stand before a mirror and turn myself this way and that, wonder if my bum looked big in red, small in blue. I would laugh her laugh, fill her belly with food, run her tongue along my teeth, kiss with her lips, caress with her fingertips, pull a stranger down on to her body in the quiet of the night and in her most secret voice whisper tales of romance in my lover’s ears. All this I did, all this she permitted me to do, because I asked and did not take, and I… loved her. There is no giving greater than the gift she gave me, nor that I… meant to give her. A new life. A new her. A chance to be whoever she desired, and all this for a term of time no longer than the jail sentence given to a petty thief. But you killed her, Nathan Coyle. Whoever you are. You killed her.”
I did not think I had heard a silence that ran so deep, burying itself in the very bones of the night.
He said, “I…”
And stopped.
Said, “It wasn’t…”
Stopped again.
Some words on the tip of his tongue. Justifications perhaps, excuses. Following orders. Justice. Retribution. Poor decisions, too little time, too much pressure. Past history – poor Nathan Coyle, he’s been hurt, he’s been traumatised by events gone by, don’t judge, not him, not for his actions freely taken.
The words rose to his lips and died before they could be expressed.
I watched them dissolve into him, burning as they burrowed deep into his flesh, until he looked away and said nothing at all.
I paced the room, turned on the TV.
Reports of…
… someone else’s problems.
Turned the TV off again.
Waited.
Then he said, I want to brush my teeth.
Bathroom’s right there. Knock yourself out.
He rose, painfully, testing the bandages across his arm and chest, feeling that they were good.
The bathroom door stood ajar, and from the bed I watched him move in and out of view against bright white light. When the tap had finished running, I eased back the bathroom door so that I might see him fully, and there he stood, hands pressed down on the edge of the sink, staring up into the mirror as if he too were only just seeing his face, he too was trying to solve the question of what shape it might become. I leaned against the door frame, a surgically skinned prostitute in a town where the rates were bad, the pimps difficult, the secrets of my trade hidden beneath new-washed cobbled streets. His eyes didn’t move to me, didn’t wander from the hypnotic weight of his own stare.
“If I say no?” he asked.
“Then I’ll leave. I’ll run to where my file on Aquarius will be. I’ll tear them apart from the inside out and leave you alone.”
“To die? Is that the threat?”
“I won’t hurt you. Aquarius, Galileo… your guess is as good as mine. But I won’t hurt you.”
He nodded once at his own reflection, then looked down into the depths of the sink, shoulders hunched, back bent, suddenly old before his time. “Do it,” he said. “Do it.”
I reached out, then hesitated, my fingers hovering above the bare skin of his back. “Do it!” he snarled, lips twisting, eyebrows knotted together and I pressed my fingers against his skin and, instinctive before his rage,
jumped.
I am Nathan Coyle. Here, the pounding of my heart. The heat in my eyes, the aching in my chest.
I am Nathan Coyle, standing hurt and breathless, a bewildered woman with an implausible name reeling in the doorway of the bathroom.
I am Nathan Coyle, looking up into the mirror at eyes that wanted to weep.
And for a moment, as I regard my reflection staring back at me, I wish to God that I were anyone else in the world.
Chapter 80
There are no planes from Lyon to New York.
Back on to the trains.
Passengers on a train are harder to track than cars.
The TGV, the push of acceleration, the roar of tunnels, the flat fields of northern France.
Back to Paris.
The passenger next to me, at a table of four, was an old man with an oversized newspaper.
I read the articles over his shoulder for a while, but his reading speed was slow, mine fast, and I was tired, and bored, and lonely, so I put one hand on his wrist and
jumped.
Coyle stirred by my side, saw the window, the countryside grey-green outside, heard the engine, smelt overpriced railway coffee and at last, his hand still on mine, saw me.
“We’re not there yet?”
“Not yet.”
“What is it?”
“I… wanted to say hello.”
“Why?”
“I thought you might… want to know how we were doing?” He stared at me, incredulous. “S
orry,” I mumbled. “I… was just trying to be nice.”
I jumped back through the hot palm of his hand.
Back in Gare de Lyona, nd for a few seconds I left Coyle, who staggered, catching his weight against the side of a ticket machine.
“What is it now?”
“We’re low on money,” I replied, fumbling in my pockets for my wallet. “Here – take this.” I pulled all the notes save one from my wallet, held them out for Coyle.
He looked down with the contempt of a bishop for a fallen devil, then folded the money into his fist. “Who are you?” he asked as I put my far lighter wallet back into my pocket.
“Right now I’m a man who met a stranger and shook him by the hand. So shake my hand, Nathan Coyle, and let’s move on.”
Slowly he uncurled his fingers and shook me gently by the hand.
I rode the train to the airport, then the humming twin-carriaged shuttle to the terminal. A woman stood opposite me, her hair fair, her skin tanned, a green dress tied shut across her waist, her laugh as she chatted with a friend on the phone dazzling and bright. She was going to the car park, I decided, having returned from a sun-soaked holiday in some southern clime, and for her tomorrow held no dread of work or fear of jet lag, but rather a delight that having departed, she was now returning to her waiting family and friends, who would all cluster about to see her.
My fingers itched to brush her skin and have that laugh to call my own, as my mother, father – perhaps even some adoring siblings who as a child I squabbled with but are now all grown up and fraternally in love – crushed me to their sides and called me their little pumpkin, their dearest girl.
Then I looked round, and saw Nathan Coyle’s reflection staring back at me from the window panes, and the doors opened, and she was gone.
One ticket to New York, coming up.
And I was…
“Passport, please?”
Coyle blinked up at me, felt his hand upon my own, peeking through the little gap in the screen where weary travellers must place their passports upon attempting to leave this land. I smiled at him and said in cheerful, chatty French, “I’m going to look at your passport now, Mr Coyle,” and prised my fingers free from his.
