by Brett Adams
Move.
Buzz: Hotter.
Empty cabin.
Buzz: HOTTER.
A glance along the corridor told me there were only two compartments left.
I threw myself against the glass of the first—HOTTER! But it only held the young family. In the second and last, the mortal combat couple now lay dozing on each other.
That was all of the compartments. No Hiero.
I stepped back against the corridor window, breath coming hard. From far off came the faint sound of my Medline warming up.
My phone buzzed once more.
I glanced at it and thumbed the message up:
FCUKING MOLT3N!! 8-X
What? We must be playing a different game.
I tilted my head back to rest on the glass, and felt the tracks thrum through my skull. A mixture of weariness and anxiety and frustration overwhelmed me.
And then realized I had not covered all the doors. There was one I had not checked. At the very end of the carriage, jammed at the head of the freight cars, was a toilet.
The toilet.
I slipped the phone into my pocket and padded to the toilet door.
There was no mistaking it now. My Medline was screaming at me to stop, sit down, chill out. Pass out.
Bugger that.
It didn’t matter if I burst in on Hiero and smashed his face in, or went into cardiac arrest. Both would bring the train’s cops. That’s all I wanted.
The toilet door knob displayed a little red tab.
I took a step back, lowered my shoulder, and threw myself at it. On impact, pain flared along my arm, and the door smashed open onto its hinges.
Momentum carried me into the tiny space. My head crunched on a mirror and I fell, sprawled with one leg hooked over the toilet seat, and an elbow in the sink. I felt a moment’s fascination that the mirror had cracked in a cobweb pattern, before the disappointment hit me.
It was empty.
Then an alarm filled the air and the shriek of metal on metal, and I was thrown forwards. The floor juddered, and momentum pinned me to the wall until finally the train jerked to a halt and let go.
There was a hiss of air as the exit nearest the toilet opened and a chill breeze carried a spatter of rain into the corridor.
And then silence.
A voice blared again over the speakers. It spoke German, some nicht verlassen-ing, but I didn’t need a translation to know it was harried and probably pissed. The speaker clicked off, and an excited chatter filled the silence.
My mind finally caught up to events. Someone had pushed the emergency brake.
I gathered myself up off the floor and hurried back into the corridor, which was rapidly filling with confused and angry passengers. Standing on tip-toes for vantage I scanned the corridor, but saw no sign of Hiero. With the doors open he could have easily slipped away. The train had halted a few hundred meters shy of the platform, but just beyond the open exit, on the far side of the shiny concrete barrier, lay a multistory parking lot, and a thousand holes for a man to disappear quick as water into a sponge.
I couldn’t believe it. I’d been so close.
I returned to the toilet and examined the door lock. The lock pin had been bent, and stuck to the inside by a piece of chewing gum, which had held the door shut.
I looked at myself in the mirror. My face was dissected by the fracture lines.
Played for the fool again.
My only consolation was that no one had died this time. I couldn’t say nothing had died. My self-respect had flat-lined.
22
Call it post traumatic stress syndrome. Call it deadly lassitude. Whatever it was, it kept my rear end stuck to the seat in my compartment. What was I going to do in Linz? Rush around asking if anyone had seen a guy jump from the train, and if so, where he might have gone?
I was hungry, but it was warm again in here. Cold out there.
So I sat.
The train wound up speed again for the minute it took to arrive at the station, and then slowed to a halt. When it had disembarked its transferring passengers, it wound up again for the long haul to Munich.
And through all that I sat.
I bought a sandwich from a man for five Euros and chewed without tasting it.
When I had finished, I retrieved my phone from my pocket and placed it on the fold-down table beneath the window. The last message from g-w still shone on its screen.
FCUKING MOLT3N!! 8-X, it said.
FCUKING MORON!! 8-X, is what it should have said.
“Why do you keep talking yourself down like that?”
I glanced up and found Tracey seated opposite me. On the nape of her neck the pale sunlight illumined a tiny scar in the shape of a butterfly.
I was going crazy, but at least I had company.
“Because I let two girls die,” I said bluntly. “Probably three now.” I had decided the best remedy for the guilt building inside was to be honest. To only speak the truth—the raw, bleeding truth.
“No you didn’t, Dad.”
“Yes, I did,” I said, thinking it must be hard for her to hear, before remembering she was only a mental projection. Mental projection, yeah. That sounded saner than psychotic delusion. “If I’d only moved quicker when I saw the newspaper article about Hiero’s first assault. Or if I’d spoken different words to the detectives. Or gotten to Hong Kong sooner . . .”
She shook her head, brow creased into a frown.
“No, Dad. No one could have done more. You just like to beat yourself up. You’ve always done it.” She paused, and gave me what I knew to be her version of a significant glance. “Well, not always . . .”
That was true. She had me there.
“Since when did you get so wise?” I said, raising the ghost of a smile.
“I found God, remember?”
“Ah, yes,” I said, remembering the day Kim had told me on the phone. “Your mother said, ‘Tracey’s found God.’” I replied, ‘On Berkeley campus?’ Which faculty, Medicine?’”
“Typically smartarse Jack Griffen,” Tracey said. “That hasn’t changed.”
I laughed, despite myself. “I can’t help it. All day I’m reading Palahnuik and Bazell. Edgy, irreverent wisecracks are what pass for literature these days.”
“We got off the point,” she said, watching the Austrian Alps flow by outside, tipped rose by the rising sun. She still had the freckles.
“We had a point?” I said.
“Sure. The point in your life when you wriggled under a blanket of guilt,” she said. “And never came out.”
I mused, “The point.”
She was gone.
I knew the point. It was a day, nine years ago. A day when a seed was planted that grew into a tree that continued to bear bitter fruit. A day that had put me in Graylands Hospital, and given me a mental health flag—the same flag that in the eyes of Perth detectives made me a liar and a murderer.
Without meaning to, I remembered that day. I had a theory that if ever I succumbed to Alzheimer’s, this memory would be the last to go, the last to be eaten by my malfunctioning grey matter. It would be the last morsel of Jack Griffen—alive and condemning to the very end.
The day began like any other. Awake at 6:30. Breakfast of scrambled eggs, plenty of pepper, plenty of milk, and sourdough toast, on the balcony with the paper. I read the comics, the weather, and the sport, in that order, and usually only turned to the first pages if I was feeling particularly fortified. The paper was the only affected part of my morning routine—literature professors are meant to be redolent of the old world, but I drew the line at a pipe.
By 7:15 I was treading the riverside path to the university in my leather brogues, watching the early morning sun glint on the Swan River, hearing the hum of the distant freeway. I didn’t wear a watch in those days, and the Medline had yet to enter my life. If I was lecturing that day, and it was a new one, I’d turn the logic of the argument over in my head. If not, I might toy with the outline for
a short story—maybe a little tester for a new genre. If my mood was sour, I might recall the latest rejection letter for my thesis novel, and pick apart its grammar.
The special day was a ‘short story’ day. I’d had an idea for meshing star-faring science fiction with the ‘avenging prince returns’ of Monte Cristo. The sense of possibility at the beginning of a story is delicious. Ideas were still percolating through my mind when I got to my office. I had barely laid my briefcase down when the phone rang.
The moment I heard Kim’s voice I knew she had cataclysmic news.
Kim has always been collected. If she was wrathful, it was a measured wrath. If joyful, a rounded joy.
But that day she spoke in fragments with long pauses between.
She was talking about Tracey, our daughter. The last time I had seen Tracey, two days prior, bustling out the door with her bag for music camp, she had been her typical twelve-year-old self. A roaming one-girl flash theatre of tragicomedic musical; a tangle of summer-tanned limbs, freckles and smiles, and hugs that let you smell the sea in her hair; a body connected to the ground rail of the earth.
But the girl I found stretched on a bed at Subiaco St. John of God Hospital seventeen minutes after Kim hung up barely looked human.
She lay in the intensive care unit, pale and inert. Sensor wires snaked over her body, and IV drips were plumbed into both wrists. Her eyes were closed above an oxygen mask. Kim sat beside her, one hand holding Tracey’s limp wrist. Only Kim’s frantic eyes marked her as not just an extension of the body on the bed. Her face was pale, too, and lacking make-up.
That became the first of the ten most tortuous days of my life. I watched as Tracey vomited, fainted, groaned, and made confused utterances, and Kim went with her every spasm in vicarious torment. I watched as her forearms became spotted with a junkie’s train tracks as her cannulas were constantly moved as her veins collapsed. When she was conscious enough to joke, she said they were curing her with acupuncture.
I watched. I went home to shower—somehow never quite washing away the sweat stink of that first day’s mad dash, or shrugging off the buzzing sound that seemed to be in my ears and eyes. I put food in my mouth, chewed and swallowed. And I thought.
If my life was a 200-ton locomotive cruising the line, Kim’s call had been the rail spike laid on that line by fate. Isn’t it scandalous that half an ounce of steel can derail and send lancing, tumbling, careening over the ballast, a 200-ton piece of clockwork perfection?
The rail spike in this case had a name: Meningococcal Septicemia.
It is caused by the proliferation of a little buttocks-shaped bacteria a micrometer wide, Neisseria meningitidis, that lives up the noses of one in ten adults. Once in the blood stream, the bacteria population explodes, causing widespread vascular damage, hemorrhaging, thromboses, cell death, and the telltale non-blanching rash. If not treated, within hours it can lead to multiple organ failure, permanent disability and death.
That’s the clinical explanation of the disease. The mechanism of the microscopic war that ravages the body, which can leave a person stone dead in hours.
But the cause, the reason why? Why Tracey, why my daughter? Why now? No one could tell me. No one knows.
Ten days later Tracey emerged from under the wires and tubes, fully restored to health. The only physical legacy of her ordeal, courtesy of a skin graft, was a small scar on the nape of her neck in the shape of a butterfly. Some people paid for tattoos, so Tracey thought she got a good deal. The butterfly’s symbolism of emergence occurred to my writer’s sensibility.
Kim came out of that time, pausing only to pick up the pieces of herself, and entered life again.
I came out of those ten days a different man. Though I didn’t know it at the time.
23
Hours after my imaginary conversation with Tracey, I was staring through the window at the passing sights of Paris as we approached Gare de l’Est.
Paris.
“It hung before me this evening, the vast bright Babylon, like some huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differences comfortably marked. It twinkled and trembled and melted together; and what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next.”
Well, that was Paris according to Henry James in The Ambassadors.
I don’t think James was describing Paris crawl by on the other side of a window smeared with greasy handprints, hard-pressed by a gnawing hunger and suffocating in a cloud of guilt.
I was feeling about as low as you can go, when my phone buzzed.
Without thinking, I retrieved it and picked up the call. I wanted company, even if the company told me I was in big trouble.
“Thomas,” I said.
“No, Mr Griffen. This is DCS Collins of the London City Police. I’ve been talking to our Interpol liaison.”
Interpol.
“Nope,” I said to myself. “I can go lower,”
“I’m sorry?” said Collins.
“Nothing,” I said. “What can I do you for, Mr Collins?” Cup of sugar? Dogsit? Signed confession?
“Mr Griffen, Detective Thomas of Perth, Australia, initiated contact with Interpol. We need to talk to you. In person.”
His voice sent a thrill of hope through me. It sounded reasonable. In control. Calm, but serious.
“I’m listening.”
“It’s concerning Hieronymus Beck. Detective Thomas shared your information with us and we believe he means to murder again.”
Again!
“What information?” I said, pressing the phone against my ear. “And can you be precise about what you think Beck has done?”
“I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, Mr Griffen, but we suspect Mr Beck committed assault in Perth, murder in Hong Kong, and attempted murder in Vienna. We need—”
“Wait a minute. Back up. Attempted murder?”
“The victim, Miss Kreider, was admitted to hospital and remains in a critical condition. For now, it is attempted murder.”
“Thank God for that,” I breathed. The line was silent a moment. “Tell me what to do.”
“You’re bound for London, correct? I have your itinerary as arriving in Paris late tonight, Gare du Nord, departing tomorrow morning on the 9:03AM Eurostar.”
By ‘itinerary’ I guess he meant Hiero’s blog. But it was Gare de L’Est I could see through the windows, not Gare du Nord. And London? Who said anything about London? My intention was to find a bottle in Paris to drown in. Collins’ certainty was a slap in the face.
Suddenly alert, I swallowed the correction. A memory of my Skype contact with a fake Matthew Price sprang to mind. “Wait. How do I know you are who you say you are?”
“Call Detective Thomas. He will confirm my identity.”
“I will.” I hesitated. “And yes, I’ll be there,” thinking it would be easy to call back with the truth if Collins checked out.
“Meet you at the station,” he said and hung up.
The phone’s active-call icon had barely vanished before I dialed Thomas.
“Griffen,” he said.
“I got a call from a Collins working for London Police. Is he for real?”
“You mean is he a real cop or a pen pusher?”
Thomas sounded ticked off, but he’d answered my question.
“Whatever,” I said. “No offence, but we’re finally getting where we should have been a week ago. Which is great, except we’re down a girl on where we should be.”
“One and not two, eh, Griffen?” said Thomas, and there was an odd, grim satisfaction in his voice. “Bet that pissed you off.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The girl in Vienna. Pushed her in front of a train, but you didn’t get her square on, did you? Looks like she’s got an even chance of pulling through.” He sounded gleeful. “No pretending you didn’t know this one, Griffen. She was in your class. You interviewed her for a project barely a month ago.”
I couldn’t believe it. The idiot still thought I was the one doing the murdering.
My mind made a dozen false starts on putting Thomas in his place, before I settled for: “Whatever. I’ll be playing with the grown-ups from now on. They believe me.”
“They haven’t seen you,” he spat.
Looked like I’d finally gotten under the detective’s implacable calm.
He went on at full tilt rant. “To think the government pays to grow psychos like you. You sit there in your little offices divorced from real life and read all that amoral crap written by other men in little offices and your brains rot and life becomes a game.”
I said, “I’m hanging up n—”
But Thomas barreled on: “I mean, what the hell do you want with her hair?”
Pure confusion made me answer.
“What?”
“Her hair. You snuck in after you nearly killed her and took a lock of her hair. What’s the matter? Did you grow a conscience at the sight of her with her chest caved in and her face a mess? Couldn’t bear to finish the job, so you took a trophy?”
What the hell?
“I’m gunna hang up,” I said. “But do me a favor—No: Do yourself a favor, and check if Li Min from Hong Kong has all her hair.”
I hung up.
Everything Thomas had said swirled through my mind. I was losing track of it all. No way seemed up anymore. Hair? I tried to remember Li Min. Had her hair looked odd? But I hadn’t really looked. I’d touched her just the once, to arrange one leg by the other. The integrity of her haircut hadn’t been front and center.
I began to call up Collins’ number to fix my arrival time, when I heard again the note of grim satisfaction in Thomas’s voice. For all his froth, he sounded like he was speaking to a man who was about to get his.
I removed my finger from the phone. The cautious guy in my head nodded his approval.
Something was still jabbing me in the brain. Collins had got my timetable wrong, but he’d known I was on a train from Vienna to Paris, and assumed I was heading to London.
And then I guessed the answer.