‘Hi there,’ he tried to say, but dizziness overcame him. He had the feeling that the objects around him were growing smaller and more compact. Everything was happening infinitely slowly. He opened his mouth to scream. Heard a noise. Felt as if he could actually touch the speed at which he was pursing his lips. When he fell out of bed and felt the floor beneath him without hearing the noise, when everything seemed normal again, he was filled with a sense of gratitude that immediately gave way to exhaustion.
16
He didn’t know the painting he was looking at. It depicted two mendwarfed by some windmills in the background and holding a big dog on a leash. A colourful picture. He’d never seen it before. The radio alarm clock on the bedside table was as unfamiliar to him as the bedside table itself and the old-fashioned bedside light, which he mechanically turned off.
The TV wasn’t his, nor were the curtains and desk. Nor was the bed. It wasn’t his bedroom, his home. Nothing here belonged to him except for the shoes beside the bed. He had no idea where he was or how he had got there.
The room had no personal touches at all. The TV was small and shabby, the bedding stiff as cardboard, the wardrobe empty. Lying on the window sill was a bible. A hotel room?
Jonas slipped his shoes on, jumped up and looked out of the window. A stretch of woodland met his eyes.
He tried the door. It was locked. The key was attached to a metal tag. It clattered against the lock as he rattled the handle. He unlocked the door and opened it a crack, looked left. A musty-smelling passage. He hesitated before opening the door wider and peering round the doorpost to the right. At the end of the passage he made out some stairs.
His door had a ‘9’ on it. He’d guessed rightly. On the way to the stairs he passed some other rooms. He tried the door handles, but all the doors were locked.
He went down the stairs and walked along a passage to a door at the end. Beyond it lay another passage. The walls were decorated with children’s drawings. The inscription beneath a sun with ears read: Nadja Vuksits, aged 6, from Kofidisch. A piece of cheese with smiling faces instead of holes was by Günther Lipke from Dresden, a kind of vacuum cleaner by Marcel Neville from Stuttgart, a farmhand wielding a scythe by Albin Egger from Lienz. The last picture, which had been painted by Daniel from Vienna, Jonas identified with difficulty as a sausage firing a bullet.
He turned the corner and nearly bumped into a reception desk. The drawer beneath it was open. On the receptionist’s chair was an open folder containing postage stamps. Lying on the floor, lit by the greenish glow from some neon tubes on the ceiling, were two glossy postcards.
The automatic door whirred open. Hitching up his trousers by the belt, Jonas went outside. His hunch was confirmed: he was in Grossram. He’d woken up in a motel room in the motorway service area.
Either someone else was responsible for this, or he himself was. But that he simply couldn’t believe.
It was cold and windy. Jonas, who was in his shirtsleeves, shivered and rubbed his arms. He lifted the flap of the letterbox next to the entrance and peered inside, but it was too dark to see anything.
The Spider was in the car park. He took the keys from his trouser pocket and opened the boot. The shotgun wasn’t there, but he hadn’t expected it to be. He removed the crowbar.
The letterbox didn’t have many good leverage points. He began by trying to force the flap the postman opened with a key, but the tip of the crowbar kept slipping out of the crack. Eventually he lost patience and inserted it in the mouth of the letterbox itself. Bracing his chest against the crowbar, he leant on it with all his weight. There was a crack, the crowbar gave way beneath him, and he fell flat on his stomach.
He swore, rubbing his elbows, and looked up. The top of the letterbox had broken off.
He fished out envelope after envelope, postcard after postcard, careful not to cut himself on the jagged metal. He read most of the postcards. Letters he opened, skimmed their contents and tossed away. The wind blew them over to the filling station, behind whose windows lights were burning dimly.
6 July, Grossram service area.
He stared at the card in his hand. He had written these words not knowing what lay ahead of him. This G with a flourish, he’d written it without having any idea how things were in Freilassing, Villach or Domzale. Twenty-five days ago he’d posted this card in the hope that it would be collected. This letterbox had been spattered with rain and scorched by the sun, but no postman had come to clear it. What he’d written had been imprisoned in the dark for over three weeks. In solitude.
He tossed the crowbar into the boot and started the engine, but he didn’t drive off right away. His hands tightened on the steering wheel.
What had happened the last time he sat here?
When had he sat here last?
Who had sat here last?
Either someone else.
Or himself.
*
Although he noticed nothing unusual outside the block of flats on the Brigittenauer embankment, he was warier than normal. When the lift door opened he hid round the corner until he heard it close again. He only got in the second time. On the seventh floor he leapt out so as to catch any potential enemy off guard. He realised how stupid he was being, but it always helped him over the difficult moment of decision. The sense that he was being active, attacking, gave him some feeling of assurance.
The shotgun was leaning against the wardrobe. ‘Morning,’ he greeted it. He cocked it. The noise sounded good.
He glanced into the toilet and the bathroom. Went into the kitchen and looked round. All was as it had been. The glasses on the sofa table, the dishwasher open, the video camera beside the TV. The smell, too, hadn’t changed.
The change in the bedroom he spotted immediately.
A knife was sticking into the wall.
Protruding from the wall at the spot the Sleeper had thrown his weight against it in that recording was the hilt of a knife that looked familiar. Jonas examined it. It was his father’s knife. He tugged at it. It refused to give. He wiggled it. The knife didn’t move a single millimetre.
Jonas looked more closely. The blade was embedded, up to the hilt, in the concrete wall.
He took hold of the handle and tugged with both hands. They slid off. He dried them on his shirt, wiped the handle and tried again. No effect whatever.
How could anyone drive a knife so deep into a concrete wall that it couldn’t be pulled out?
He looked at the camera.
*
Jonas boiled some water. Leaving the herbal tea to brew, he cleaned his teeth in the living room. Doing it at the basin in the bathroom would have meant turning his back on the door.
He looked out of the window while the electric toothbrush was humming against his teeth. The clouds had moved on. It might be a good day to set up the cameras.
In the bedroom he leant against the doorpost and eyed the knife embedded in the wall. Perhaps it was a message. An order to go into buildings and search them thoroughly, to get to the bottom of things. The Sleeper wasn’t evil, he was just a well-meaning prankster.
He emptied his trouser pockets but found nothing that hadn’t been in them the day before.
Opening the freezer drawer, he took out the goose he’d got from the supermarket, which he planned to cook for dinner. He put it in a big bowl to thaw and made sure the casserole was clean.
He carried his herbal tea over to the sofa table, then went to get some sheets of cardboard, a pair of scissors and a pencil. He cut the cardboard into rectangles the size of visiting cards. Without giving any thought to the wording, which he promptly forgot, he wrote on them in quick succession. After a while he counted them. There were thirty. He put them in his pocket.
*
The tripods clattered together behind him as he pulled up. After a reassuring glance at his notebook he got out, taking two cameras with him.
The flat smelt bad. He held his breath until he was standing on the balcony, th
en set up the cameras as planned. One was looking down at the embankment road, the other in the direction of the Heiligenstädter Brücke. He’d left his watch at home, so he took out his mobile. It was midday. He checked the times on the camera displays. They tallied. Having estimated how long he would take to set up twenty-six cameras, he programmed these two to start recording at 3 p.m.
He made faster progress than he’d expected. By half past twelve he was setting everything up at Rossau Barracks, at a quarter to one he was driving back over the Danube Canal, and shortly before half past one he was outside his block of flats. He had over an hour to spare, and he was hungry. He wondered what to do. His goose wouldn’t be ready till late that evening.
*
The canteen of the Brigittenauer swimming baths smelt of rancid fat and stale tobacco smoke. Jonas looked in vain for a window overlooking the street, so that he could air the place. He put the contents of two tins in the microwave.
While eating he leafed through a 3 July edition of the Kronen Zeitung. Stale breadcrumbs crackled between the pages, many of which were spotted with gravy. The crossword puzzle was half completed, the five mistakes in the picture puzzle had been marked with a cross. In other respects this edition didn’t differ from the ones he’d come across in other places. An article on the Pope on the foreign news page, rumours of a cabinet reshuffle in the home news section. The TV pages carried a profile of a popular presenter. He had read all these pieces dozens of times without discovering any allusion to unusual events.
As he read the article on the Pope he couldn’t help remembering a prophecy that had appeared in various magazines and programmes since the end of the 1970s, sometimes seriously, mostly ironically: that the present Pope would be the last but one. This prediction had scared Jonas even as a boy. He had tried to work out what it meant. Would the world come to an end? Would a nuclear war break out? Later on, as an adult, he’d speculated that the Catholic Church might undergo a fundamental reform and dispense with an elected leader. He had to try and remember if the prediction had come true.
It hadn’t.
He was convinced that St Peter’s Square in Rome looked no different from the Heldenplatz in Vienna or the Bahnhofsplatz in Salzburg or the main square in Domzale.
Jonas pushed the empty plate away and drained his glass of water. He looked down through the window at the indoor pool. The muffled, regular lapping of water reached his ears. The last time he’d been here was with Marie. That was where they’d swum together, down there.
He wiped his lips on a paper napkin, then wrote Jonas, 31 July on the menu board.
*
At 2.55 p.m. he parked the Spider in the middle of the Stifter-strasse– Brigittenauer embankment intersection. He wanted to be on the move by the time he came into shot. So as not to be filmed as he set off, he had programmed the camera at this intersection to start recording at two minutes past three. A window of two minutes would be enough.
He ambled round the car with his hands in his pockets, kicked the tyres, leant against the bonnet. A strong wind was blowing. Above his head, an unsecured window hit the wall beside it with a crash. He looked up at the sky. Clouds had gathered once more, but they were far enough away, hopefully, for him to collect the cameras in good time. As long as the wind didn’t blow them over.
2.57 p.m. He got into the car and dialled his home number.
The answerphone cut in.
2.58 p.m. He dialled Marie’s mobile number.
Nothing.
2.59 p.m. He dialled a twenty-digit made-up number.
Number unobtainable.
3 p.m. He floored the accelerator.
Between Döblinger Steg and the Heiligenstädter Brücke he reached a speed of over 120 k.p.h. He had to brake hard to make it round the bend leading to the bridge. Tyres screaming, he raced down to the Heiligenstädter embankment. He accelerated, changed gear, accelerated, changed gear, accelerated, changed gear. Although he had to concentrate on the road, he caught a glimpse of the camera as he roared beneath it a split-second later.
The speedometer was reading 170 as he passed the Friedensbrücke and 200 just before Rossau Barracks. The buildings beside the road were just blurred shapes. They loomed up and were there, but he’d left them behind before he could take them in.
On the Schottenring he had to slow down to avoid skidding off the bend and ending up in the Danube Canal. He headed for Schwedenplatz at 140, braked at the last moment and raced across the bridge. His heart was pumping the blood so furiously through his body he started to suffer from a stabbing pain behind the eyes. His stomach tied itself in knots, his arms twitched. Sweat was streaming down his face, and he only breathed by fits and starts.
More bends here, so ease off, was the message sent him by the rational part of his subconscious.
He trod on the accelerator and changed up.
Twice he nearly lost control of the car. He felt he was seeing everything in slow motion. Yet he felt nothing. It wasn’t until he got the car back on track that something inside him seemed to snap. Desperately, he put his foot down even harder. He was perfectly aware that he’d crossed a line, but he was powerless. He could only watch, eager to see what he would do next.
He had thoroughly familiarised himself with the place where the embankment road and Obere Donaustrasse diverged. If he wanted to avoid crashing at the Gaussplatz roundabout, he shouldn’t be doing more than 100 k.p.h. at the intersection before it. He glanced at the speedometer as he passed the traffic lights. 120.
For a second he kept his foot hard down. Then he stamped on the brake pedal with all his might. According to the driving course he’d completed during his national service, the pedal had to be pumped, in other words, depressed and released alternately. Centrifugal force and muscular cramp prevented him from bending his leg. The Spider grazed a parked car and skidded. Jonas wrenched at the wheel. He felt a violent impact and heard a crash. The car went into a spin.
*
He mopped his face.
Looked left and right.
Coughed. Put on the handbrake. Released his seat belt. Pressed the central locking button. He tried to get out, but the door was jammed.
Leaning forwards, he found he’d come to rest on the roundabout’s tramlines. The clock on the dashboard was showing twelve minutes past three.
His fingers trembled as he scratched a dried gravy stain off his trousers. He put his seat belt on again and drove down Klosterneuburger Strasse.
As he passed the Brigittenauer swimming baths he decided to do the whole circuit again. He accelerated away, but he failed to reach the speeds he’d managed on his first tour. It wasn’t the car’s fault. His testosterone level had dropped and he was feeling dazed. Going too fast had lost its charm for him. He found 100 k.p.h. enough.
After rounding the Danube Canal between Heiligen-stadt and the city centre for a second time, driving at a more moderate speed, he set about collecting the cameras, which he’d numbered so he wouldn’t get the tapes mixed up later on. When he got out on the Brigittenauer embankment in order to collect the two cameras from the balcony of the flat, he stumbled. But for a rubbish skip, which he clung to in the nick of time, he would have fallen over.
He circled the Spider. The nearside tail light was smashed and the offside rear bodywork dented. The front of the car had suffered the worst damage. Part of the bonnet had been torn off and the headlights were shattered.
He dragged himself to the entrance on legs like cotton wool and took the lift up. He didn’t bother to inspect the cameras, just pressed the stop button and turned them off.
*
It occurred to him, as he lifted the dripping goose out of the bowl and put it down on the work surface, that his airbag hadn’t inflated after the crash. He wasn’t sure he remembered all the details correctly, but the state of the car said it all. The impact must have been considerable. The airbag should have inflated.
Product recall campaign, he thought. He couldn’t help laugh
ing.
He got out some salt, pepper, tarragon and other herbs, chopped some vegetables, rinsed the casserole dish and preheated the oven. Then he dismembered the goose with poultry shears. It hadn’t thawed out completely, so he had to use a lot of force. He slit open the stomach and cut off the wings. Jonas wasn’t a very skilful cook, and before long the work surface was a scene of devastation.
He stared at the drumsticks. The wings. The parson’s nose.
He stared into the maw.
He surveyed the carcass in front of him.
Dashed to the toilet and vomited.
After cleaning his teeth and washing his face, he took a big shopping bag from the hall cupboard. Without looking too closely, he swept the bits of goose off the work surface and into the bag, which he tossed into a neighbouring flat.
He switched off the oven. The chopped vegetables caught his eye. He took a carrot and put it in his mouth. He felt tired. As if he hadn’t slept for days.
He sank onto the sofa. He would have liked to check the door. He tried to remember. He was pretty sure he’d locked it.
So limp. So tired.
*
He surfaced abruptly from a welter of confused, unpleasant images. It was after 7 p.m. He sprang to his feet. He mustn’t sleep, he had things to do.
While packing he floated around the flat like a sleepwalker. If he needed two things that were lying side by side he would pick up one and leave the other. He went back as soon as he noticed his oversight, only to think of something else and leave it lying there again.
Even so, he was ready in half an hour. His needs were few, after all. T-shirts, underpants, fruit juice, fruit and vegetables, blank tapes, cables and leads. He went into the deserted flat next door, where he’d dumped the cameras after his drive. He selected five of them and removed the tapes, which he marked with the numbers of their respective cameras.
Night Work Page 17