Skinner

by Charlie Huston

  Dreams of Terrence. His mentor studying the intricacies of a giant knot. Great knot experts in lab coats and monk’s robes detail the impossibility of untying the knot, speak of the lessons it teaches, preach the wisdom of learning to live with the knot. Something moves in the knot. Locked in the threads, minuscule, twisted and choked, bodies, people, struggling. The knot experts tug at a thread or two, shrug, and turn their backs. Terrence reaches into the jacket pocket where his notebook is always at the ready and draws from it a sword, old, notched, but keen. He raises it and cuts, parting the threads of the knot, cleaving some of the people even as it frees the rest.

  He wakes outside Hamburg. The dream slipping away.

  They transfer trains in the dark. Not crowded at all on the Deutsche Bahn. Awake now. Jae diving back into Terrence’s USB. The dream coming back to Skinner as she does so. The sword Terrence wielded made a noise. Sharp edge sighing as it cut through the knot. Skinner, the blade whispered. He doesn’t need his subconscious to tell him he’s being used by his dead friend. But he’s interested in the detritus that washes up in there. A sword that whispers his name as it cuts. An image that may have been born when he was killing the men on the boat train. As he heard silent whispering in his mind all the while. Jae. Jae. Jae. For strength.

  They are quiet on the Hamburg train, night again. Jae lost in the data. Skinner lost in something else, wondering how long until he will be a sword again. He feels good.

  Later, in the Cologne Hauptbahnhof, things go bad.

  cathedral

  THE STATION IS empty.

  Coming down the steps from the platforms into the echoing concrete tunnels lined with gated shops. Those for whom the station is a final stop cluster together and hustle toward the main entrance and the cab stand beyond. Jockeying for position, desperate to grab one of the few taxis that will be lingering outside in this bleak hour lodged between midnight and dawn. The others, stuck here until departures resume at 0800, follow the faint sound of a techno beat coming from a glowing storefront down one of the branching tunnels that lead to the station’s concourse.

  Jae looks at Skinner and he nods toward the source of the music. They walk, Jae a half step ahead, lagging just behind the gaggle of stranded travelers. The glow and the music are coming from a sandwich shop. German iteration on Subway. Rolls of dense, dark bread stuffed with assorted wursts and pale cheeses, fringed with lettuce hued an unnaturally bright green. Everyone in their group queues up, all eyes on the espresso machine manned by a slender Turk with the accent of a Westphalia native; descendant of Gasatarbeiter parents who would have come here for the abundant factory jobs of the sixties. He moves in constant rhythm, some part of his body, neck, fingers, shoulders, knees, feet, always responding to the beats coming from the small silver speakers he’s cabled to the finger-smudged white case of his touch-wheel iPod. No longer supported by software updates, but serving its purpose well in this context, keeping the coffee boy in motion and awake on the graveyard shift. A staccato riff from the speakers, no midrange, bass qualities overmatched by the quantities of low end trying to pass through them, treble trying to carry all the information compressed into the MP3 file that emerges as music. Soundtrack in the modern age, tinny, slight, cranked-up, always referencing the past. The kid’s wrists pick up the stutter from the speakers, responding as it slows, letting it creep up his arms into his neck and shoulders. Carrier of the beat. He even takes orders to the beat, weaving his questions and nonverbal responses into his dance. Standing near the glass counter, holding their white ceramic saucers and demitasse cups, Skinner and Jae watch him.

  They are the last ones at the kiosk. Shouts come down the tunnel from where they can see it open into the concourse. A large, high-ceilinged space accustomed to the traffic of thousands, it feels haunted without them. Drunks approaching, in town from the suburbs, the party is now over, dumped here by exasperated taxi drivers. A group of five, two girls and three boys. Slight tension of uneven numbers. One of the boys is going without. Past midnight drunks drawn by the allure of junk food. Skinner finishes his coffee, takes Jae’s cup and saucer, places them on the counter with his own, the dancer nods, up-down bob to the beat. Then Skinner takes her arm and leads her away from the kiosk and the music and the dancer and the drunks, away from the concourse, down one of the tunnels, rolling gates pulled closed over shopfronts, walls pierced by stairs that lead up to the platforms. Gray. Gray walls and floor and ceiling, gray light. Scuff of their own footsteps on the filthy tile, drunken debate over what to order fading behind them, music gone.

  Skinner has a gun in his hand.

  It’s the one he took from the first man he killed on the boat train. First man he killed. On the boat train. Double qualifier. Skinner has killed more than one man while she has been with him, and in more than one location. Without asking it to, her mind runs a tally, comes up with the number seven. Three at Oasis Two. One at Copenhagen Central. Three on the boat train. Could there be more that she doesn’t know of? Certainly there could be. Then her mind counts up the number of times they’ve had sex. Three times. Twice on the night train. Two sessions. They fucked twice the first time, and once, hurried before Lund, the second. Seven divided by three is? 2.33. She doesn’t know why her brain is crunching that particular number, but she feels it reaching for a memory of the number of times she had sex with Haven and shuts it down. She can do this, close an avenue of unwanted thought, by picturing her mom dying. It is more or less a mental self-destruct that obliterates the present moment, but she’s unwilling to let her brain dwell on the unlikeliness of her having taken both Haven and Skinner as lovers. It will lead down too many rabbit holes of paranoia. Places she does not want to go because she so desperately wants to trust Skinner.

  She comes back to the moment, the detonation of her mom’s death fading, as Skinner leads her to one of the stairs, cold, very cold air flowing down from the platform. He backs her onto the first step, moves her close to the wall. Her eyes are almost level with his now. He kisses her, small kiss.

  “Nothing will happen. And then everything will happen at once.”

  His hand moves between their bodies, finds her hand, gives her something that causes her almost to think of her mom again. She resists the urge. She needs to stay here now.

  “You’re too close to her, Skinner.”

  Man at the top of the stairs, backlit by a buzzing incandescent halo that flickers atop a pole. Dark clothes that fit him very well, rich blacks and browns, splash of red on his chest. He doesn’t seem to mind the cold at all. His gun is silver, a flat finish that dully reflects the flickering light. It has the appearance of something designed self-consciously to look retro. Circa WWII, but with all the modern comforts and efficiencies. Like a Wurlitzer housing an Internet connection to a vast digital catalogue of pop hits. His vanity is tangible. She’d be happy to shoot him. Or to watch Skinner do the shooting.

  He makes a vague gesture with the barrel of his ostentatious weapon, a short arc to his right, angled toward the ground.

  “Caren is going to shoot you in the head. Standing that close to your friend, Caren could miss and hit her. I doubt it, but things happen. Haven says not to kill her if we can avoid it. If you take a step back, that would make it a sure thing.”

  Jae looks over Skinner’s shoulder in the direction the man waved his gun, up the tunnel, where the stairs drop from the opposite platform. Holding her own pistol in the practiced manner of a target shooter, braced, one third of her body concealed by the corner of the wall, steady, two hands, a young woman dressed for a long hike. Short hair, nose piercing. The woman is over thirty meters away, but looking at the eyes sighting down the barrel of her gun, the aesthetic opposite of the fetish object the man at the top of the stairs carries, Jae believes she can see the clarity of their blueness.

  When she shoots at the woman, Jae aims for her torso. Impossible shot, bringing from between their bodies the pistol Skinner pressed into her hands when they were kissing, firing from t
he hip. It’s a blind shot, and it misses the woman by several meters, hitting the wall, spraying concrete chips that cause her to blink as she pulls the trigger of her own weapon. Her shot is also off target, just over their heads, close enough to hear the impact, feel their faces peppered with concrete dust and slivers. Jae’s gun bucks harder than she expected, years removed from the last time she pulled a trigger, nearly jumps from her hand, her other hand tries to help out, coming away from the warmth between their bodies into the cold, managing to keep the gun from dropping to the ground just as Skinner shoves her and she starts to fall against the steps. Another gunshot, she doesn’t know who has fired (not her), and there is blood now, in her left eye, and she feels the trigger under her finger again and holds tighter and squeezes it three times, pointed, she thinks, in the direction of the young woman named Caren, then she hits the steps hard and the gun is out of her hand, bouncing onto the tile floor of the tunnel. She looks for Skinner. There he is, moving away from her, gun in his hand, the one Terrence sent to him, firing, down the tunnel, evenly spaced shots, very professional, walking briskly to the opposite wall. Jae wants to pick up her gun. Skinner is shooting at Caren, someone needs to shoot at the asshole at the top of the stairs. She looks for the gun, sees it, lunges for it. She’ll look for the asshole when she has the gun. But before she has the gun, the asshole’s body comes down the steps, a slow, boneless slide, face down, forehead hitting each step with a sound that is lost in the constant gunfire being exchanged by Skinner and Caren. Jae thinks she must have missed something, a phase in the gun battle when Skinner shot the fancy-pistol-asshole. Her brain wants to rebuild the sequence, find the missed beat, somehow relate it to the coffee kid’s spontaneous choreography. It takes a wrenching mental twist to force her brain in another direction, toward the gun on the floor. But is it the asshole’s blood in her left eye? He was on her right. Whose blood is in her eye? Her hand is on the gun. Funny that it feels so familiar already, fits her grasp, finger snakes around trigger. It’s in her hand. Something to shoot at? But the shooting has stopped.

  Skinner is gone. Caren is gone.

  Jae turns and crawls up the stairs to the platform, into the flickering light. Drizzle, barely falling, a density just greater than mist. The lights up and down the platforms glow vaguely. Jae stretches over the top stairs, edges of concrete digging into her shins, thighs, stomach, breasts; arms outstretched, hands together, holding the gun. Shadows and lights on the opposite platform. Dark shelters plastered with ads for kitchenware and video games and calling cards. She wonders how long the German police take to respond to reports of shots fired. Her brain takes this as an invitation and summons a comparison of violent crimes in the EU in the years before and after the economic collapse. Connects that to cash for cars programs in Germany. Somewhere in there, a section covering replacement of vehicles in government motor fleets. Rüsselsheim is less than two hundred kilometers away; Opel corporate headquarters. Cologne police mostly drive Opels. Souped-up Opels painted green and something. No. Silver and blue. No more regional police colors in Germany, they all use silver and blue.

  Gunshot.

  She never wiped the blood from her left eye and now it’s crusted shut and she can’t scrape it clean without taking a hand off the gun and that shot came from her left side and she can’t see shit over there. She turns her head. Mist and darkness between the platform lights.

  Gunshot.

  A spray of gunshots. Flare of muzzle flash, burr of a machine pistol, bullet impacts, shattering glass. One of the shelters on the opposite platform disintegrates. Jae aims at the ghost images the flare left on the vision of her right eye and starts firing before it can begin to float, before she can think about what a person looks like when she is shot and what it will mean if she makes someone look that way. She shoots before she can remember if Skinner took the Uzi the tall man was carrying on the boat train and whether or not he might have somehow been carrying it since then. Before any of that she empties the remaining rounds in her pistol, waiting for Caren to draw a bead on her own muzzle flashes, return fire, and take off the top of her head, and only stops shooting when the slide locks back on the empty clip. She drops the gun and writhes back down the steps, wiping at the crust of blood over her eye, realizing that it is coming from a deep cut on her forehead.

  “Fräulein?”

  The dancer from the sandwich shop, descendant of Turkish immigrant workers, peeking around the corner of the tunnel. Looking from her to the corpse of the asshole and back to her.

  “Sie okay, fräulein?”

  Footsteps on tile, the dancer turns, sticks his hands into the air. Jae thinks about doing the same but decides to wait until the police actually tell her to do so. Arms too heavy to lift unless someone forces the issue.

  Skinner comes into view at the foot of the stairs, gun in hand, suit damp, hair a mess. He looks at Jae, touches his forehead over his left eye.

  “Okay?”

  She nods.

  He holds out his empty hand.

  “Let’s go.”

  The dancer still has his hands in the air, eyes only for Skinner’s gun. Jae comes down the steps, stops.

  “Polizei?”

  The dancer shrugs.

  “Yah.”

  Jae nods, turns to Skinner.

  “The police are coming.”

  Skinner bends and picks up the asshole’s silver pistol, frowns at it, sets it back down as if rejecting it as an unsound premise, not bothering with the shtick of wiping fingerprints. The station is filled with CC cameras.

  Jae remembers the Israeli hit squad in Dubai. The local police used security camera records from across the city to track their steps from the moment they entered the country until they left it after assassinating Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. With a modicum of international help the German police will have little trouble tracing them back to Stockholm, the flight from Miami. Jae traveled on her real passport. She imagines a tectonic event, something like the one that demolished Haiti, shaking her life into rubble and dust.

  She looks at Skinner.

  “Can we run now?”

  He tucks his gun under his jacket.

  “Yes.”

  They do. Down the tunnel, past the gaping drunks, through the concourse, under the giant clock, out onto a vast plaza of gray slabs, light pillars casting pools of greenish light, drizzle falling heavier now. Cologne Cathedral, Gothic spires and arches, spiny and ominous in the dark, looming. The cab stand, three drivers clustered, smoking, one turning toward them, Middle Eastern, bundled against the alien cold and damp. He points at the first cab in line and Skinner nods at him.

  “Flughafen Köln.”

  Said loud enough for all the drivers to hear.

  But two blocks from the station, sirens in the air, Skinner shows his gun to the driver. An expression of extreme displeasure, he slaps the side of the wheel, pulls over, starts to say something about how little money he has. Skinner points his gun at the door. The driver slaps the wheel again, once more, shakes his head, zips his jacket to his chin, pulls on the hood, and gets out as Skinner and Jae both open their own doors and move to the front seats. The driver last seen in the mirror, hands in pockets, stamping his feet on the pavement. A kilometer away, on a tree lined street of apartment buildings, Skinner pulls up next to a man just about to unlock the door of his Mercedes, briefcase under one arm, travel mug in hand. They interrupt his morning commute ritual, leaving him in a state not unlike that of the taxi driver.

  Only once they are in the Mercedes and under way does Jae look at her backpack and see the large hole in it, edges melted. She unzips it and finds that the hole continues through Skinner’s laptop, enters her Toughbook, and stops somewhere inside of it.

  “Who shot me?”

  Skinner glances at the Toughbook in her hands.

  “I don’t know. You went down on the steps.”

  She makes certain Terrence’s USB is in an inner jacket pocket, looks through the pack. Nothing important. She
doesn’t want to carry anything.

  “I thought you pushed me down.”

  “No. The bullet.”

  She touches the scabbing cut on her forehead.

  “How did I?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He’s driving back toward the center of Cologne, they cross the Rhine.

  Jae thinks about the bullet that almost found its way into her back.

  “Did I shoot Caren?”

  He takes them around a traffic circle.

  “No. You got her attention. But you didn’t shoot her.”

  “Did you?”

  “I killed her.”

  “Oh.”

  He stops on a bridge and they dump the contents of the backpack into the river and the backpack itself and their phones and Skinner’s old ID and credit cards, and then they get in the car and drive southwest.

  Paris. The cimetière Montmartre. Destination.

  Hoping for a message left by the dead.

  PART FIVE

  politics

  THE SENA MEN have come.

  No one is surprised. Something is happening in the slum. There are no secrets from the Shiv Sena in the slums. Even now, after the death of the patriarch Bal Thackeray, as their hold on power in Bombay (Mumbai, insist the Sena) has finally eroded after over fifty years, they cannot be ignored. You do not ignore the bully and his friends at the end of the alley. You can only hope they do not see you. The Sena need the slums, the votes of the slums. Dharavi with its Muslims and immigrants, this was once where the Sena came to run riot with swords and lathis, cutting and beating. And with jars of gasoline. A favorite gesture of the Sena, dousing a man or woman in gasoline and burning him or her alive. David’s father tells the story of a Sena in the ’93 riots setting fire to a Muslim news agent, undoing his fly and pissing on the burning man, laughing at the hissing sound it made.