Flashback sb-2

by Ian Hocking

  Slowly, she eased out of him.

  The new identity was that of a German flying ace who, Cory was amused to learn, had never existed beyond the sensational pamphlets of a junior clerk at the State Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. The Nazi phantom was known as Wittenbacher, der Vitvenmacher. Wittenbacher the widow-maker. Cory felt the man like a corpse laid out in the parlour of his mind.

  She turned his chin with a fingertip. Her eyes, at last, were soft. ‘Cory, the boy has always been dead. He was dead before he was born and he was dead after he died. His life is just a blip on a line: a two-dimensional irregularity on the forever one-dimensional. Here’s the secret: That blip gets smaller when you zoom out.’

  ‘You want me to think like that?’

  ‘I want you to face the fact that you’re going to kill him.’

  ‘You sound like Jackson.’

  Quietly, she said, ‘My poor, dumb Charlie. Your body made the small step, but your mind couldn’t make the giant leap.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘What’s new, soldier?’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Berlin

  Cory stumbled against some bins. It hurt to breathe. He pawed at the lids. Locked. He had spent the day asleep beneath a disused bandstand not far from the TV tower. Automated systems in his immortal blood were weaving new tissue, conjuring life, but it would not be enough.

  ‘Move it, Georgia,’ he growled, using the nickname given to him by his old Gunnery Sergeant. The rain drummed his shoulders. ‘Elbows and assholes.’

  Another step. The Ghost felt old beyond his eighty-eight years. The very clockwork at the centre of his cells had unwound. He was far beyond the help of contemporary medicine.

  He followed a green line visible to him alone. One hand kept him steady against the closed shopfronts. His feet sucked at the standing water. Some passersby slowed with horror. Others saw nothing. For them, he had taken on the invisibility of a man to look through. There was a litter bin on the corner. Cory found half a kebab in it and took two bites.

  The green line went on. The ground swayed and the Ghost recalled a young fisherman, Gomez, who had taken him out on a moonless Christmas Eve in 1949. The jewelled string of Montevideo had lain behind them. As Gomez and Cory dealt the nets, they stopped in wonder at the glowing green channel that crossed the ocean ahead of them. It was clear to Cory that this was phosphorescent algae churned up by the screws of the US Navy frigate that had cut through the bay an hour before, but Gomez was spooked by the colour. The sea’s dead are marching, he said, crossing himself. He would not listen to the reassurances of Cory. They gathered the nets and went home. Cory left South America before the next winter.

  One hundred metres on, the Ghost took a right turn. This, he knew, was the last turn he could take on this night. His muscles burned with the acids of prolonged labour. His eyelids trembled. He walked down an alley and fell against a painted wooden door. A sign read, Jesus hört dir zu. It flickered in his eye: his bodily repairs were taking priority over the translation. Then the meaning broke through: Speak and Jesus will listen.

  Help me, he thought.

  He heard a telephone ringing far away.

  Then there was a voice his head: Church of St Mary, Father David Hildegaard speaking.

  Cory already knew much about Father Hildegaard. He did not how he knew; but this man could heal him.

  I am at your door, thought Cory. I need a Samaritan.

  My friend, Hildegaard replied, it is late.

  Cory knew that Father Hildegaard had run a prison-visiting society in Copenhagen, under whose auspices he had raped young men.

  Father, please.

  He heard footsteps on the tiled floor beyond the door, the click of a light, and the clatters of locks being undone. The door swung inwards. The young priest wore a dark cassock, which soon gathered sequins of rain. A cordless phone was pressed to his ear.

  Cory said, ‘Listen,’ and reached out.

  Father Hildegaard’s breath blew white and a line of blood ran from his nose. He stood as though immobilised with pain. Cory sighed. He felt his health return like youth and purpose.

  ~

  Inspector Duczyński turned from his balcony and thought of the people he knew well—a civil servant, an artist, a singer, the young man in the apartment above who was, for his own reasons, in love with him—and wished them fairer fortunes. He looked at his empty hand and decided that it needed a drink. Perhaps Florian, his would-be amore in the apartment above, would care to join him. Duczyński’s grin was sickly. His sling was tight and his fingers had pins and needles.

  He stepped through his balcony door and shut it. The rain sound muted. Instead of a drink, he returned from the kitchen with a probiotic yogurt and a pill box. He sat in the dark. The rain drew his thoughts once more. He raised his yogurt.

  ‘Cheers.’

  Then he took the phone. It felt light and cheap next to his left ear. It was unusual for him to use the landline, but his mobile phone had disappeared during the day. Perhaps someone at the hospital had stolen it. In the morning, he would report it missing.

  ‘Who is it?’ asked his mother.

  ‘It’s Karel.’

  ‘Who?’

  He sighed. ‘Mama, I was shot today. In the shoulder. I’ll be fine, but I lost a suspect. I’m suspended and it’s probably the end of my career.’

  He told her everything. In the gaps between his words, he pictured an aeroplane carrying Jem, his only lead, back to England. Her face was pressed against a window. Duczyński’s Polish was slow, while his mother’s had flourished with age. When he cut the call, he noticed an unread answerphone message from a withheld number. He hit ‘play’.

  ‘Inspector, this is Danny Shaw. How’s the shoulder? I think we can help each other. My sister has done this before—run off, I mean—and I need to find her. I know where she’s going. What I really don’t need is to be arrested. If this sounds like something you can work with, call me back. You know the number, don’t you?’

  Duczyński smiled. He punched the number of his mobile into the telephone. After one ring, an English man answered.

  ‘Hello, Inspector. It’s Danny Shaw.’

  ‘Good evening. I would like to have my phone back.’

  ‘Of course you would.’

  ‘I wish to thank you for saving my life.’

  ‘You’re welcome. I should apologise for giving you the slip.’

  ~

  After the call, Duczyński went to a cardboard box and took out the Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms. He read:

  To escape from someone who is with you, following you, or watching you. Example: ‘There was a man following me when I left the office, but I gave him the slip on the crowded main street.’

  Duczyński opened the pill box. Inside was the white marble of unknown substance that the emergency doctor had cut from his shoulder. He watched it roll. It looked like no bullet he had ever seen. Then he placed it in the pocket of his long, black coat, laid the coat around his shoulders like a cloak, and left his apartment.

  ~

  Several hours later, as the red digits of the cooker clock approached midnight, the apartment door opened. Danny struck the light switch and marched Duczyński to the bedroom as he had conducted him from the club: steadily and without pause. Duczyński fell back upon his bed. Danny adjusted the sling to make sure his arm was comfortable.

  ‘How’s the injury?’

  ‘I can’t help you with your sister, Mr Shaw.’

  ‘Yes, you said.’

  ‘It breaks too may regulations. Technically, I should arrest you.’ A pause. Then, sleepily: ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m opening the bloody window. Your bedroom stinks. It’s the bachelor life for you, isn’t it?’

  ‘No. It’s too cold.’

  ‘Really.’

  Danny patted Karel’s chest. The man was already snoring.

  In the kitchenette, Danny rinsed the
dust from an apple and walked into the living room, where he had half a mind to catch up on the investigation into the air-crash in Bavaria. But Duczyński had no television. The apartment was undecorated and almost empty. It looked like the inspector had moved in the previous week.

  He moved to the balcony and ate the fruit as he considered the problem of Jem. A few minutes later, he found a pen and paper. He wrote on the reverse of a receipt:

  Fine, Karel. I’ll look for her without your help. See you around, Danny.

  He put the receipt on the telephone and opened the apartment door. He stopped on the threshold. The hallway was black and empty. Finding a hotel at this time of night would not be fun.

  ‘Fuck it.’

  He closed the door and stole one of the pillows from Karel’s bed. On the rug in the living room, parallel to the coffee table, he stretched out. The pillow was feathered and double the English size, but he made himself comfortable enough. His back ached like it used to in the days when he sculled. The bachelor life alright.

  Chapter Fifteen

  In the Zoologischer Garten underground station, Jem stopped as she noticed two uniformed police officers twenty feet away from her. They were eating curried sausages near an information desk. She hid behind a postcard carousel, thinking, Don’t be so obvious… don’t be so… so fucking Clouseau. She felt the strain of predation, but its pressure could be transferred: it was potential energy, like that of a coiled spring, and when released she would launch and lose them all. Her eyes hurried over the options as they were served on the departure board. Three hours to Hamburg, door to the North Sea. Four hours to Cologne, the Rhineland city she had visited with her school as a teenager. Four hours to Frankfurt—a blank space on her internal map. Munich, six hours. But why limit herself to Germany? There were night trains to Scandinavia. In short hours, she might part the curtains in her sleeper compartment to view the sea beyond the Danish peninsula. What was that called? The Baltic? Scapa Flow?

  ‘Scarper,’ she said, testing the word.

  She gave a euro to the woman who tended the ladies’ toilet. Inside, she found a disabled stall. Jem put her plastic bag on the cistern and dealt her tools across the seat: hair clips, plastic gloves, towels, and a hand mirror. She re-checked the chemical names on the reverse of the hair dye and asked Ego to reassure her that Wasserstoffperoxid was hydrogen peroxide and Ammoniaklösung ammonia. She smiled as she thought back to the girls in that crappy little hairdresser’s in Exeter.

  Twenty minutes later—hair witchy black—she passed the cleaner and dropped a second euro on the plate. It would not cover the damage she had done to the sink. She put her prepaid mobile phone into a bin and bought a second, including a Bluetooth earpiece. She loaded the earpiece with a battery and slipped it over her ear, careful not to touch her hair.

  ‘Ego?’

  ‘Jem,’ said a voice in the earpiece, ‘I have booked your flight.’

  ‘I don’t want to fly.’

  ‘That is your best option. Other forms of transport are less safe.’

  ‘Less safe? From Cory?’

  Ego paused. ‘I’m afraid he is certain to find you. He is focused on locating the information that he believes Saskia possessed. If he can’t have Saskia, he will have you.’

  The coldness came. Jem tried to picture a life on the run from Cory. She could not.

  ‘There’s still the computer in her apartment.’

  ‘According to the German AP, an apartment on Dublinerstrasse was destroyed by fire in the early hours of this morning. I’m certain it was Saskia’s.’

  ‘Did Cory do it?’

  ‘Or incendiary countermeasures triggered by his attempts to access the computer.’

  ‘What will I do when he finds me?’

  ‘Imply that Saskia was carrying copies of her important documents on her person when the plane went down. That will give him something to go on—something to leave you for.’

  ‘If he thinks that I believe that, then I should be travelling to Saskia myself when he finds me. I’ll tell him I want her gambling system.’

  ‘Is that a lie or the truth?’

  ‘Up yours.’

  ‘It might be important, given that Cory might have enhanced sensory capabilities.’

  ‘He’ll be able to tell when I’m lying?’

  ‘Just so. Now, I will book you on five trains over the next two days. This should cause confusion. Begin by collecting your ticket from the information desk on your right.’

  ‘I have to get my gear first. I stashed it here this morning.’

  She located the bank of lockers near the first platform and took the key from her pocket. The rucksack was still there.

  ‘Your train will leave from Gleis 4 in half an hour,’ said Ego. ‘Please collect your ticket.’

  ‘I’ll pretend to be French. You know, just in case they’re looking for an English woman.’

  ‘Pouvez-vous parler comme une personne native de France?’

  ‘Que?’

  ‘Try Lithuanian.’

  ‘Get bent, K9.’ She hefted the rucksack. ‘What about Danny?’

  ‘There is some chatter on the police network concerning Danny and Inspector Duczyński. Danny cannot be located and the Berlin police have instructions to detain him for questioning. However, their physical description is inaccurate. This is due to some nuisance phone calls on my part.’

  ‘Is the inspector hurt?’

  ‘It appears that Inspector Duczyński is not severely injured. He received a concussion and a flesh wound. He will be discharged from the UKB hospital later today. He has, however, been suspended pending disciplinary action for involving Wolfgang and losing Cory.’

  ‘Who, let me guess, is nowhere to be found.’

  ‘Correct.’

  The crowd flowed around her stopped body and cold air touched the last of the water on her neck. She thought of Cory watching the flames in Saskia’s apartment.

  Pyrene. ‘They make fire extinguishers. Ironically.’

  Fire: Did it roll up the cabin of the aircraft as it dived? Burned jeans and cowgirl boots. And in the jeans: the pink sheets of an unbeatable gambling system, edges charred.

  ‘Where might Cory be?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  Jem remembered the sensation that had overwhelmed her the previous night, just after she had returned to Saskia’s apartment, when Cory walked into the kitchen: the silence had been so complete that she had questioned her perceptions of the man. Was Cory even there? Had she imagined him?

  ‘Jem,’ said Ego. ‘We must go to the library on Fasanenstrasse to locate a book called Resources and Parsing.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It is one of the few books in that library that has never been borrowed. It will make an effective hiding place.’

  ~

  Jem walked to the end of the platform, where the long train began to curl. She entered the tenth couchette and found an empty compartment. Its four beds had been folded out. The mattress on each was hard. The pillows, at least, were English in size and shape. Thick curtains covered the window and the door to the corridor. The compartment smelled of feet. Jem finished her baguette, screwed up the paper bag, and put her bottle of water on the small table beneath the window. There was a ladder against the bunk. She put an elbow on a rung.

  ~

  As the train pulled away, she was watching her expression in the mirror of a washroom. The configuration of her eyes and mouth—the triangle one might draw between them—seemed different. Perhaps this was due to her hair. It was now black, not blue, and the loss of the gas-flame colour was like misplacing an enjoyable book half-read.

  She returned to her compartment. No late-boarding passengers had joined her. This part of the couchette was empty, though she could hear a group of Dutch students at the far end playing a drinking game. She twisted the door lock and pressed the switch that toggled between the ceiling light and the lights in each berth. She fell across her mattress and climbed, fully cl
othed apart from her skirt, beneath the thin sheet. It was stitched along one side to make a bag. She lay there, thinking. Raindrops made slick diagonals on the window. There was a cord to pull the curtains but she wanted to keep the night close. Outskirts of Berlin. Factories. Endless flatness. Did Regensburg mean ‘city of rain’? She had no-one to ask. She tugged the string and the curtains shut.

  ~

  She dreamed of a castle whose walls moved at night. Saskia was there. She knew its secret passages. Her eyes were swollen and her hair long—the hair of the dead grew—and her lips were like meat on a barbecue, part-cooked and split.

  ~

  When she awoke, it was still night, but the train had stopped. She plumped her sweaty pillow and waited for the beat of the wheels to resume. After some minutes, they did, and she let the movement wash her to the edge of sleep. But she had a headache where the plates of her skull met, at her crown, and the pain in her abdomen refused to let her move from doziness to true sleep. Her eyes wandered over the sooty shapes in her room and she named them, in order, as the overhead luggage basket, the laminated fire safety poster, and the door. A glimmer winked from the lock. The other beds, the bottle of water, the ladder. Her eyes returned to that glimmering lock. Something was wrong.

  Like the sudden falling away of the sea before a tsunami.

  Like everything was about to go wrong.

  The tab was vertical. Unlocked.

  She heard a sound from her nightstand. In the pile of coins she had scooped from the pocket of her duffle coat and placed there, an unnoticed bead the size of a breath freshener rolled—impossibly—over the raised edge and bounced twice on the carriage floor. She heard it cross to the door.

  Blood hissed in her ears. Her muscles reeled tight. She could not move anything but her eyes. She found a shape in the darkness. Incidental light shifted in the tell-tale pattern of another person, reaching down to pick up the white bead.