Touch

by Claire North

  My wife stood by, silent and straight. I turned to her, said, “What should I do?” and meant the question, for to become some French officer – the obvious recourse – would in that single breath, that second of transition, end the life I had, all that I had lived to obtain. “What should I do?”

  “Al-Mu’allim must not be found in this city,” she replied, and it was the first time in six years that she had looked at me, but spoken my body’s name. “If you remain, the French will take you and kill you. There are boats on the river; you have money. Leave.”

  “I could return…”

  “Al-Mu’allim must not be found,” she repeated, a flash of anger pushing at her voice. “My husband is too proud and lazy to run.”

  It was the closest she had come to admitting my nature, for though her fingers were in mine, her breath mixed with my breath, she spoke of my body as if it were some other place.

  “What about you?”

  “Bonaparte wants, even now, to prove that he is just. He puts up signs across the city, which proclaim ‘Do not put your hopes in Ibrahim or Muhammad, but put your trust in he who masters empires and creates men.’”

  “That doesn’t inspire me to believe in anything,” I replied.

  “He will not murder a widow. Our servants, wealth and friends will protect me.”

  “Or make you a target.”

  “I am only in danger while al-Mu’allim remains!” she retorted, the tendons pressing against her neck as she swallowed down a shout. “If you love me – as I think you do – then go.”

  “Come with me.”

  “Your presence here brings me danger. Your… who you are brings me danger. If you love me, you would not bring me harm.”

  “I can protect you.”

  “Can you?” she replied sharply. “And who are you to protect me? Because my husband could not do so much, even if he loved me enough to try. When all this has ended, perhaps you may come back to me, in some other shape.”

  “I am your husband…”

  “And I your wife,” she replied. “Though never before has either of us had need to say it.”

  Ayesha bint Kamal.

  She stood upon the banks of the river, one hand across her belly, a blue scarf across her head, her back straight and the serving boy crying silently at her side.

  I left her as Cairo thundered to the roar of infidels.

  Leaving is one of the few things I am good at.

  Chapter 29

  In 1798 by the banks of the Nile I wore the body of a man whose life no longer interested me. The waters of the river spilt out into the long grass until you believed that the water was without end, drowning the earth.

  I took al-Mu’allim south, far from the French as they battled Mameluke cavalry before the slopes of the Pyramids. My body grew thin, my nails began to yellow and I would have abandoned it then and there, for it disgusted me, a withering corpse. Then I remembered my wife, and my oath to keep her husband safe, and I clenched my fists and lowered my eyes, and kept going.

  Though the French were far from the higher reaches of the Nile, yet even here their deeds were condemned by the cataract-eyed imams, who cried, infidel, infidel, they violate us, they violate Egypt! The further from Cairo I went, the more violent the rumours became. The city was burned; the city was lost. Every woman was raped, every child butchered on the steps of the mosque. After a while I gave up contradicting the tales, as my veracity only served to mark me out as a traitor to the jihad rising in the sands.

  I headed towards the coastal mountains of Sudan, until I came at last to the Red Sea where it looked out towards Jeddah. There, as news of a great naval defeat came whispering down the waters, I sat to watch the ocean and resolved at last to make a change.

  There were few ports along the western coast of the Red Sea, but the battles in the desert and the chaos at the mouth of the Nile, where Nelson had shattered the French fleet, created a buzz among the tiny fishing craft and semi-piratical lateen-sailed skiffs. Excellent profits were made as they shipped, stole and scuppered war goods heading north towards the Mediterranean. One ship in particular caught my eye, an ancient schooner long past its retirement day. Its captain was a grinning Dinka chief, with a great sword on his belt and two pistols slung with piratical glee across his chest. His crew were as multicultural a melange as I had ever seen, from his Genoan lookout to the Malaysian pilot, who communicated through a mixture of poor Arabic, reasonable Dutch and obscene gesticulation. Of most interest to me, however, was the one passenger they were carrying for their crossing to India, who stood silently at the prow of the ship in a cloak of black, studying the waters and saying not a word.

  He was a man barely into his twenties, tall and lean with perfect ebony skin, well-muscled arms and coiled black hair, who held himself aloft with the glory of a prince and was, upon interrogation of the crew, revealed to be precisely that: a prince of the Nuba travelling to India on a diplomatic mission.

  “Does anyone know him?” I asked. “Does he have family or servants in attendance?”

  No, no one knew him, except by reputation, and he had come to the ship without servants but with a vast quantity of cash. His personality was a closed book; his history, doubly so. It was with this in mind that I, still in the body of al-Mu’allim, followed him, the night before sailing, into the tiny port town. I trailed him between the crooked mud houses of the cliff-clinging streets, reached out to touch him on his arm, and as I went to jump, heard in my head the screaming of vampire bats, felt tiny vessels bursting behind my eyes, tasted iron on my tongue, and as I fell back, gasping from the attempt, the beautiful prince turned, his face also drained of blood, and exclaimed, in flawless Arabic:

  “What the hell are you doing?!”

  Chapter 30

  Restless sleep, restless memories in an anonymous hotel room in…

  where, precisely?

  Bratislava.

  What in God’s name am I doing in Bratislava?

  Sleeping on top of a file that dissects the life of the entity known as Kepler. Rolling in sheets pulled too tight across the bed that wrap themselves around the body of the murderer called Coyle. I’d burned the Turkish passport, scattered the ashes down the toilet. I’d always known that I’d have to ditch an identity eventually; I was simply waiting to find out which one.

  A thought, in the night. It hits so hard, so fast that I bolt upright, wide awake.

  The Turkish authorities have no reason to track my British, Canadian or German passports, but that was because they didn’t know what to look for.

  Whereas Coyle’s colleagues, whoever they might be, knew all of Coyle’s names.

  A racing mind at 4 a.m. The street light is a yellow rectangle on my ceiling, the shape of the window. The rest of the room is deepest blue, the not-dark of the city.

  I had been careful – so careful. Careful to avoid security, careful to slip over the borders quiet and fast, lest someone check my passports too particularly. Johannes had told me my Turkish passport was blown, and so it was destroyed. But buoyed up by that overconfidence I had let the hotel receptionist at the desk scan my German documents.

  Was that enough?

  I had trusted in border posts to be sluggish in their checks, for hotels to keep records rather than immediately search databases or contact the police. Were I merely evading a national agency, my precautions would be enough.

  But I wasn’t just hiding from a police force. Whoever had given me the name of Kepler cared nothing for the sanctity of borders, the discretion of a hotel. And even if I were safe for tonight, having paid in cash, if someone looked hard enough

  and for certain they would

  as matters stood, the body of Nathan Coyle could be tracked.

  A face in the mirror at 4.30 a.m., grey by fluorescent bathroom light. I’ve worn better faces, I’ve worn worse. I could get comfortable with these features, given time, but no amount of scrutiny can offer me the answers I need. The eyes are heavy, the mouth is slack,
the scars tell me no more and no less than that the original occupant of this flesh wasn’t always great at making friends. Are the frown lines his or mine?

  I gather up my belongings, put the handcuffs in my outer jacket pocket, key in my inner, and head out into the city, no rest for the wicked.

  Chapter 31

  She calls herself Janus.

  On the shores of the Red Sea she wore the body of a Nuba princeling, and when I tried to move in on this most desirable of properties, we both came away with a stinking hangover.

  Over a hundred and fifty years later she came to me in the body of a seventeen-year-old girl, and said, “I’m looking to relocate.”

  We met in a bar on East 26th Street. Her body had been out in the sun, which was impressive, as in Chicago in the rain-soaked autumn of 1961 the only flushing I saw was from vodka and windburn.

  The place had been a speakeasy once upon a time. The man with the greying chin and fading hair who stood behind the bar polishing a glass had once stood behind the very same long wooden counter cleaning coffee mugs with an old towel, ready for the cops to bust in and the clients to bust out. He still ran a quiet joint, one of the few left as the 1960s came roaring across the world, and still kept the good stuff in a locked cabinet, hidden away beneath the bar.

  Janus wore blue, I wore Patterson Wayne, a businessman from Georgia I’d acquired the day after he liquidated his assets into a suitcase of cash, and the day before his company flopped, taking with it forty-seven employees and sixty-three private pensions. He was healthy, and of that age which the young respect and the old envy.

  She said, “I’m absolutely divine, make no mistake. Have you felt my skin? It’s brushed silk, and my complexion! Do you know I don’t wear any make-up? I don’t need to! It’s just sensational.”

  Her skin was indeed very smooth, and though she had to be the only woman in downtown Chicago who wasn’t adorning her features with the garish colours of the decade, yet the absence of paint only served to draw the eye, novelty in a crowd.

  “There’s just one problem,” she murmured, head tilted away from the lone proprietor and his eager ears. “When I picked this skin up, I thought she looked just radiant. It was at the bus stop, and she was heading north anyway, and I thought… why not? It’s obvious no one’s interested in the girl, except for the usual, so a few months, a few years, it could be delightful. Only the problem…” A conspiratorial palm pressed gently into her own belly. “I know,” she whispered, her voice quivering with delight at its conspiratorial outlay, “why I had to leave in the first place, and I reckon it’s only five months more until I pop.”

  I pushed my bourbon to one side, rested my elbow on the bar, pulled a slim black notebook from my inside jacket pocket and a stub of pencil. “What precisely are you looking for?”

  Janus sucked in her lips judiciously. “Male, unmarried, twenty-five, I think – although I can go with younger so long as he looks like he can hold his own, I won’t be having boys – thirty-two at the maximum, any older just isn’t worth the effort. Unmarried, naturally. I’m not interested in excessive body hair. I don’t mind the regular shave, but the all-over carpeted look is very 1880s. I’d love it if he has a place to live already, no further west than Princeton; if there’s a mortgage that’s fine, but I don’t want to handle the paperwork on an initial purchase.”

  I licked the end of my pencil-scrubbed fingertip, turned the page of my notebook. “Any academic qualifications, career prospects?”

  “Absolutely. I’m looking at a long-term investment. I want to start a company, I want to have a family, I want… what do you want, Mr Patterjones Wynne?”

  The question came so suddenly, at first I wasn’t sure I’d heard it. “Me?”

  “You. What do you want?”

  I hesitated, pencil balanced on the edge of the page. “Is that relevant?”

  “First time we met you wanted… whatever her name was.”

  “Ayesha,” I murmured, and was surprised how quickly the name was on my lips. “Ayesha bint Kamal. She was… but I had to go.”

  “A woman,” she concluded with a twitch of a shoulder. “A wife. A normal life. What do you want now?”

  I considered, then laid my notebook down, looked her in the eye and said, “I want what everyone wants – something better.”

  “Better than what?”

  “Better than whatever life it is I happen to be living right now.”

  A moment which could have gone any way at all.

  Then Janus grinned, slapped me on the shoulder and exclaimed, “You’re gonna be really busy with that. Good luck!”

  I sighed and picked up my notebook. “What else were you looking for? Acceptable health issues, inoculations…?”

  She shrugged, shoulders swelling, elbows tucked in. “OK,” she said. “You want to talk shop, that’s fine. No fallen arches.” She jammed her finger into my thigh with each vital word. “You may call it petty, but I have no time for them. I don’t mind spectacles – lend a certain dignity – but tinnitus, eczema – any sort of sense or skin disorder – absolutely out, and I don’t want any surprises in the sexual area again, thank you very much.”

  “Height?”

  “Over five foot six, but I don’t want to be a freak. At six two you’re respectable, at six five people start to wonder.”

  I made a note. “I take it we’re looking at years, not months?”

  “Yeah. You could say that.”

  “Any goals I should be made aware of?”

  She considered. “Well,” she said at last, “I wanna build a life, marry a girl, find a house and have a baby. If you can get me someone who’s been to Harvard, that’d be just peachy.”

  Chapter 32

  Fifty years later I walked through the pre-dawn streets of Bratislava, bag over my shoulder, handcuffs in my pocket, and I was angry.

  It was that blue-grey hour of deepest cold when any heat from yesterday has finally dissolved in the night, nothing to replace it but the hope of sunrise yet to come. In the doorway of a supermarket, shutter down over the windows, slept a beggar man, dead to the world, blue bag pulled up around his head. From the slumbering square of Mileticova a garbage truck roared and grumbled as it scooped up and crushed the tatty remnants of market day, its yellow lights spinning off the grey-white walls. On the Danube a cargo ship of orange paint and rusting sides, riding high in the water, chugged and churned its way towards Vienna. I headed towards the swooping arch of Apollo Bridge and saw beneath it a single street sweeper sitting on a bench, his trolley resting while he had a fag, his eyes gummy and bags full of fallen leaves.

  He glanced up as I approached, but saw no threat in me. I reached into my pocket, pulled out the handcuffs, snapped them round my wrists, pinning them in front. At the sound, he looked up again in time for me to put my hands across his shoulder, press my fingers into the soft skin where collarbone met neck and switch.

  Nathan Coyle swayed as I rose to my feet, and before he could move I punched him, not particularly hard, but hard enough, in the shoulder. He stumbled and tripped over his own retreating feet, tried to brace his fall, found his hands cuffed and landed badly. I knelt on top of him, my right knee cracking, my body sticky and warm beneath its protective jacket, and before he could speak I laid my arm across his throat, pressed one hand against his cheek and hissed: “Who are you working for?”

  I wanted to shout, but the river caught all sound, spun it outwards, bright and clear for all to hear, so I pressed harder against his neck and snarled, “Why did you kill Josephine? Who are you working for?!”

  I’d caught one of his arms beneath my knee; now he tried to break free of my weight, rolling to the side, but I drove my fist across his face, pressed the full weight of my body on to his chest and screamed without screaming, roared without the lion’s lungs, “What do you want?!”

  “Kepler…” The word barely made it out through my weight on his throat, rattling like sand down a mountain. “Galileo.”
/>   “Who’s Galileo? What’s Galileo?”

  “Santa Rosa.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Santa Rosa. Milli Vra. Alexandra.”

  “What are these? What does it mean?”

  He tried to move again, and at the curl of my lip he desisted before that mistake could go any further. “He kills because he likes it,” he whispered. “He kills because he can.”

  “Who? Galileo?”

  He didn’t answer, and he didn’t deny. I pressed my elbow against his trachea until his eyes boggled. “I am not a killer,” I hissed. “All I want is to live.”

  He tried to speak, tongue waggling, and for a moment I thought about it. This face that had looked back at me from the mirror, now animated with someone else’s fear. This face had killed Josephine Cebula.

  His cheeks were flushing swollen red, now heading for purple blue.

  I pulled back with a snarl, letting him gasp for air, head bouncing in an effort to inhale. “Who are you working for?” I breathed, pressing my fingers into fists inside their heavy, smelly gloves. “Who’s coming for me?”

  He lay and wheezed, and said nothing.

  “They’ll kill you too. If they’re at all like you, they’ll come for me and shoot you in the process.”

  “I know,” he replied. “I know.”

  He knows but he does not care.

  I can’t remember the last time I was willing to die.

  “Why did you kill Josephine?”

  “Orders.”

  “Because she was a murderer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because she killed people in Germany? Dr Ulk, Magda Müller – them?”

  “Yes.”

  I grabbed a fistful of shirt, pulled his face up towards mine. “It was a lie,” I hissed. “I did my research; I went over every inch of her life before making an offer. Your people lied. She killed no one, she was innocent! These are the fucking people you’d protect? What do they want?”