Flashback sb-2

by Ian Hocking

  ‘Originally, he was just a guy on my corridor at university,’ she said. ‘I came to Germany with no money. When I got into trouble—nothing too illegal—he said he’d help me. He’s charming, you know. After a few days of living in his flat, I realised that his… interests were more varied than I’d thought. He sold blow to students, hacked computers, and carried things here and there for people. That kind of thing. Plus porn—which he told me would be a quick way of making money. Well, I refused, and he insisted. That’s when he took my passport. Then someone told me about a lonely, well-connected woman called Saskia who sometimes took in strays.’

  ‘Who told you about me?’

  ‘I don’t know his name.’

  ‘I see,’ said Saskia, looking at her hard. ‘It’s not too late to call the police.’

  ‘We can’t,’ Jem replied. She tried to ignore the steady heat of Saskia’s regard. It made the story difficult to remember. ‘Wolfgang has connections with the police. I’m not the first person he’s done this to.’

  ‘Jem, what does he have on you, exactly?’

  ‘Enough.’

  ‘What will you do when we’ve got your passport back?’

  ‘Leave this country and start a new life somewhere, I suppose.’

  Saskia looked at Jem for a moment longer. Then she turned to the bar, smiled, and two waiters competed to reach their table. It hurt Jem to be so distant a runner-up. Saskia settled the bill in cash and spoke to the taller waiter in Turkish. He bowed.

  ‘Shall we?’ she asked. ‘It’s time.’

  Jem was afraid. Should she blow the story wide open? Forget the con? Confess?

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

  The fear passed, as she had expected, and she followed Saskia from the hotel. The air was cold. Buses and beige taxis choked the road. While they waited at the pedestrian crossing, the green man blinking, Jem was pushed by a surge of wind and rain. She looked at the church, whose blue illumination made inky silhouettes of the trees at its front.

  Saskia rose to tiptoes. ‘I see him,’ she hissed.

  Jem glanced around. There were fewer than a dozen people, and none looked like Wolfgang.

  ‘Where?’

  But Saskia was already crossing the road. The light was red, and the people waiting by Jem observed loudly that the woman would get herself killed. Jem panicked. She needed to stay with Saskia. She stepped into the road. A horn blared and Jem turned to see a beige taxi slide towards her and stop. She lifted her hand from the bonnet and looked for Saskia. Her friend had reached the platz and was crossing it in the precise bounds of a triple jumper. The wind surged again. It shook the trees and seemed to settle the darkness through which Saskia had run.

  She had vanished.

  ‘Shit.’

  ~

  As she ran, Jem’s heels scraped on the ground, but she stayed upright, waving her arms for balance. She felt absurd and as English as fish and chips. There was a young man standing at the far side of the road. He licked his lips at her. Jem reached the platz and, holding her calm, tried to walk. The knick-knacks in her shoulder bag rattled like a charity tin. She swore at herself. These fears were unfamiliar. She was not the kind of person who panicked like this. She could turn Arctic on demand.

  Saskia, she thought. In her head, the word was stretched and plaintive.

  ‘What’s she bloody doing?’

  ‘It’s better you don’t know,’ Wolfgang had told her.

  ‘Bastard.’

  ‘Pretend you don’t like the idea. I dare you.’

  The Trinity Church was a modern building of brown and white stone. The trees moved once more to reveal a slit at the church’s base. The door was ajar. Jem knew that the church was not open to the public tonight. Wolfgang had been sure about that. Saskia must have gone inside.

  As she approached the door, her apprehension began to build until it was an unbearable, tinnitus-like sensation that made it difficult to think. She put her palm against the wood and willed herself to breathe.

  A hand flashed out from the church.

  ‘Ssss,’ said Saskia, gripping her wrist. ‘The meeting has been and gone. Pre-empted.’

  ‘Pre-empted?’ asked Jem, not understanding.

  Saskia slid from the church and Jem knew, almost before their eyes touched, that this woman was more dangerous than anyone had guessed.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Been there, done it, got the passport.’

  She pushed something into Jem’s hand.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It’s in good condition.’

  Saskia was out of breath. She straightened her jacket and winked at Jem. All the silences and thoughtfulness of the evening were behind her. ‘Come on. The police are almost here.’

  ‘Did you call them? How?’

  ‘He won’t be blackmailing anyone again. Not you or anyone else. I put instructions for a fertiliser bomb in his back pocket.’ Saskia smiled in the half-light. When Jem did not smile back, she seemed disappointed. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Wait.’

  ‘There’s no time.’

  Jem’s scalp prickled. ‘It’s not over for me. Do you understand? It isn’t finished. That man wanted to… sell me, I think.’

  Saskia tipped her head to one side. Jem could see that Saskia did not quite believe her, but, equally, there was no time to talk it over. Each watched the face of the other until Saskia backed away from the church, her feet silent as ever.

  ‘Alright, Jem. He can’t hurt you now. When you’ve done what you need to do, meet me outside the hotel.’

  Jem nodded. She put the passport in her knapsack and entered the church.

  ~

  The foyer was cramped and dark. Jem could smell flowers and wood polish. There were no artificial lights here or in the main chamber of the church, which she could see as a dim expanse through the interior door at the rear of the foyer. She walked through.

  ‘Wolfgang?’ she stage-whispered.

  The nave was lit only by stained light. Her heels clicked across the stone. When her eyes grew more accustomed, she noticed a dark bundle at the end of a pew.

  ‘Jem,’ he said. His voice was strained. ‘Jem, over here.’

  Wolfgang was sitting with his hands behind his back. His head lolled as she approached. He might have been a boxer in his corner, beaten. So much for the arch manipulator. Jem crouched alongside him.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Never mind. Help me out of these cuffs.’

  Jem put a hand on his chest, as fearfully as she had pressed her palm against the church door. ‘Wait. I think it worked.’

  ‘Worked? It’s gone wrong.’

  ‘She wasn’t sure I was telling the truth before. She is now. I can find out her system. I just need to get into the secure room.’

  ‘How are you going to do that?’

  ‘I’ll need to get closer to her. You know what I mean.’

  Jem saw him struggle to think through the pain. He nodded. ‘Good girl. One of us is still thinking straight. If you get in to that room, don’t waste your time tickling the keyboard. Find her desktop, and take it. If it’s secured, yank the hard drive and we’ll crack it at our leisure. The system has to be there.’

  ‘I’ll try. It could be dangerous. You saw what she did.’

  ‘Felt it, you mean. Be careful, but remember why we’re doing this. We get her system, place some bets, and retire. Operation Robin Hood. She’s rich and we’re poor. Remember?’

  ‘I remember,’ Jem said. ‘Listen, I have to go. You’d better check your back pocket. She put–’

  She heard a noise behind her. She turned and saw Saskia Brandt. Jem was transfixed by a return of the fear that had almost crushed her minutes before. Saskia’s green eyes were dead eyes. A predator more shark than eagle. Jem had wondered from what place Saskia drew the power to best Wolfgang, who was heads charming and tails violent. In Saskia’s expression she found its source.

  She fell upon Jem and seized her shoulder
.

  ‘Komm mit,’ she said, ‘du blöde Kuh.’

  Jem felt her shoulder give as Saskia lifted her away. She had time to look at Wolfgang a last time—he nodded—before Saskia hastened her into a jog. Her heels rang harshly on the stones once more. The sound refocused her. Instead of the fear, she felt exhilaration and anger.

  ‘Let go of me.’

  Saskia did not. Jem tripped but Saskia kept her upright until they reached the door.

  Jem said, ‘What did you hear?’

  ‘Shut up.’ Saskia stopped. She glanced through the door. ‘Catch your breath. Don’t speak. Calm? Walk with me and smile if you can. We’ve just come back from the cinema, where we saw Goodbye, Lenin.’

  Outside, there was a final surprise. A police car had stopped on the platz. It was parked at an angle, and Jem had the impression that it had skidded. As Saskia marched her away, Jem had time to see that the driver’s door was open. A policeman lay unconscious next to the car with one foot hooked in the seat belt. Soundlessly, the blue light flickered.

  ‘Christ, Saskia. Did you beat up a policeman?’

  ‘Come.’

  They left the platz and pushed through the group of passersby who had stopped to look at the scene. Saskia led them down the road until, beneath the shuddering bough outside Café Barbar, she stopped and gazed, moonstruck, at the sky. A moment later, she turned to Jem and nodded. Somehow, Jem understood. They began to run. Saskia’s long hair bounced. They passed beyond the lights of the restaurants to the stretch of Pestalozzistrasse where it grew dark.

  They slowed. Jem looked over her shoulder to see if more police cars were converging on the church. Her heel snagged on something—perhaps a raised pavement slab—and she spilled to the ground, rolling twice. She remained still for a moment. Then she pushed herself upright and looked for Saskia. She was jogging back to her. Jem touched the white skin through her blistered tights. When Saskia asked her if she was injured, Jem looked at her through a thickening dizziness. Saskia put a hand to her cheek. ‘I’m sorry, Jem. But we have to keep moving.’

  Jem ignored the stinging and the aches. She resolved to match Saskia in her energy. ‘I should apologise, not you. Especially after what you’ve done for me.’

  ‘Did it help?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘To see him again.’

  Jem spun the lie with an expertise that startled her. ‘I had the questions but he didn’t have the answers. Like old times.’

  Saskia nodded to the street. ‘Here is the second police car. Act like you are drunk. Come on, laugh. Aren’t you enjoying this just a little?’ The question was so unexpected that Jem did laugh, and Saskia looked satisfied, as though she were a doctor confirming a diagnosis. ‘There’s an underground station just down this road and to the left. We’ll be home in time for a Schnaps before Friends. How does that sound?’

  Like Wolfgang will be delighted, thought Jem. She looked at the offered hand and grasped it, weaving her fingers. Her palm was grazed. She focused on that pain. I guess this is Plan B.

  Chapter Five

  Berlin, a month before

  On the Friday mornings of her new life, Saskia collected Die Zeit, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and The Guardian from a kiosk on Müllerstrasse. From there, she walked to her favourite café, ordered an espresso, and lingered over the columns and terse leaders, though she could read each word in parallel and be gone before her coffee arrived. Her quiet Fridays were rocks of habit. She considered her loneliness a success.

  Six months earlier, she had entered Germany on an illegal passport and made her way to Berlin. She found an empty apartment in Wedding and filled it with second-hand furniture. She had little knowledge of German history and her life became that of an autodidact. Her discovery of Germany was, she believed, a discovery of herself.

  It was an August night when she first saw footage of Checkpoint Charlie. She learned there had been Checkpoints Alpha and Bravo at Helmstedt and Dreilinden. Each name a military fingerprint on the map. And there was the Wall. She watched flag-waving young men and women axing and hammering at its grafitti’d face, assaulting it with feet, pressing with the weight of their bodies until a section fell like a concrete drawbridge. East and West together. Past and present combined. And Saskia, viewing the video, had cried with those young men and women from fourteen years before. Now, it was 2003. The protagonists of that night were well into their lives; the length of a generation had passed. But Saskia saw it for the first time.

  ~

  An eddy caught her newspaper and brushed it shut. Saskia looked up to see that a customer had entered the café. She scowled at him and pinned the newspaper with her elbows. Kaspar came to her with a second espresso and shut the door. He nodded to her and she smiled back.

  She sipped her coffee and watched the winter crowd through the glass wall.

  There was a game she played. She picked two people at random and counted the degrees that separated their lives. With nothing more than a sense of curiosity about a person’s mobile phone number, that number would enter her attention as though whispered in her ear. Or a face. Who? she would think, and, moments later, a pixelated image from a driving licence application would fall across her mind’s eye. From this data Saskia could step to, say, the person’s first school, his employment history, criminal record, credit transaction history, and bank account. Once the first person was known, she selected a second. The only rule was that one of the pair had to be visiting Berlin. On average, a person would have one-hundred close friends and several hundred acquaintances. A pool of contact. Where there was potential for the pools to overlap, intermediate lives were stepping stones. In this way, she knew that the sister of Ibrahim, the kiosk owner, had been to school with the bank manager of her café waiter’s third girlfriend. Saskia made the steps and counted the stones.

  Today, she did not play this game. In her pocket was a betting receipt worth more than one-hundred thousand Euros, which she planned to redeem within the hour. The victories survived only as trivia in the year 2023; they had been passed to Saskia by her dear friend, David Proctor, in the fast moments before she entered a time machine bound for 2003. She intended to work through this list and finance her life with winning bets. The receipt for one-hundred thousand Euros represented a risk, but a minimal one. The pink sheets on which the sporting victories were scrawled remained in her pocket at all times. They connected her physically to the future.

  Someone in the crowd had stopped walking. It was a young woman with blue hair. She turned to look at Saskia.

  Na, Schlumpf? thought Saskia. The Smurf had a looseness to her frame. A scarf flickered around her neck, smoky and silent. Her blouse was open on a T-shirt with the logo ‘cool as fcuk’. The woman’s skin was cloud white. So who was she?

  Something inside Saskia assaulted the Internet.

  (A match from a photo taken at Maynard School, Exeter, 1998: Jem Shaw, British)

  Saskia smiled. The woman smiled back: relief. She entered the café as though the meeting were arranged.

  Before the Smurf joined her, Saskia thought, Tell me more. Data rushed through her. She noticed an email attachment from a therapist registered in Exeter and stopped it with a twitch of thought. It began:

  Jem Shaw: There is this anxiety in the background… like the hiss of a TV tuned to a dead channel.

  Me: This hiss actually comes from the music box, doesn’t it?

  JS: (is startled) How did you know about that?

  Me: You mentioned it yesterday, when you were under.

  JS: Perhaps it comes from the music box, yeah.

  Me: Do you know the name of the tune?

  JS: No, I never did.

  Me: Sing it.

  (JS hums a tune which I think is Bach’s ‘I call to thee, Lord Jesus Christ’)

  Saskia blinked. Ich ruf zu dir, she thought, Herr Jesu Christ.

  Me: Tell about feeling split in two.

  JS: Split in two?

  Me: Feel
ing like two people.

  JS: Two people. Well.

  Saskia lingered over those words.

  Two.

  People.

  She thought back to a letter she had written earlier in the summer.

  ~

  To whom it may concern:

  My name is Saskia Brandt but I am living under an assumed name in Berlin. Use the attached information to contact me. It is the year 2003, some twenty years before the summer of my departure, the Indian summer of 2023.

  As per the instructions of my representatives, this note should be delivered by hand to my friend Professor David Proctor or his daughter, Dr Jennifer Proctor, no earlier or later than September of 2023. I choose paper and ink because digital media are ephemeral, and I choose plain English because this letter might require the involvement of a third party. This third party should be a close professional associate of either David or Jennifer in the event they cannot be contacted.

  Please: To the Proctors—or the person reading in lieu of them—if the technology to travel in time has not been lost or suppressed, I request and require that you make all reasonable efforts to rescue me. I claim this as the right of the second person in history to travel in time. To convince a third party for whom my story is unfamiliar, I will outline my circumstances and how I came by them.

  Today, somewhere in Germany, is a little girl no more than five or six years old who will grow up to become the same person who writes this letter. This fact alone makes me sad in a way unique to me.

  There was a hope that the time traveller would arrive in some parallel version of their past.

  This has not happened. There is one world.

  I began this letter with the statement of my name. You should know that my mind is a fusion—I can find no other word—of two people. Some time in the spring of 2023, a woman was convicted of multiple murders. Her name was Ute Schlesinger. This woman was forced to undergo a surgery in which her brain was emptied of all but the deepest structures of her being. Then, a glass bead containing some form of nanoprocessor was implanted near her brain stem. My attempts to identify the source of this nanoprocessing wetware device have come to nothing. It is, I believe, an experimental technology whose existence may not be widely known beyond a few individuals.