Touch (11 page)

A boat to Vienna.

The Danube’s flat silver waters are wide enough in places to mistake it for an inland sea. Travellers cross the border from Slovakia to Austria without noticing, passports merely glanced at by the conductor on the boat. Drowned wooden sheds for long-departed fishermen greet you along the waterside, in the waterside, the windows washed away by the flood. It is not fit for luxury yachts, but an industrial river, a practical river of great flatlands washed with silt. Factories feed off it; behind the fields squat little towns with long names where no one asks too closely the secrets of their next-door neighbours. The Austrians value their privacy, and so in silence the villages sit on the edge of the river, waiting for a change that never comes.

I shouldn’t have hit Coyle.

My face feels tender, red. In a few hours I’ll have a whopping bruise.

I have crossed into the Schengen zone, and can temporarily discard my passports as irrelevant. My spoken German is good enough, and if I was ever to disappear, this is the time. A new body, a new life, a new name. One dense crowd, perhaps leaving the cathedral or in a busy market, and I can switch bodies ten, fifteen times – untraceable, no matter how good your resources. Swallow poison and, before the drug can take effect, jump away, leave Coyle to his well-deserved fate. Move on to the next life, bigger, better than before. The next life is always better.

Josephine Cebula, dead in Taksim station.

I will not run.

Not today.

The boat moored just beyond Schwedenbrucke. On the west bank old Vienna, tourist Vienna, the city of spires, palaces,
Sachertorte
and Mozart concerts, ten a cent. On the east bank the antique rectangular windows of the city dissolved into the white concrete and iron-elevator apartment blocks of post-war Europe. I headed west, into the old city, past prim-buttocked matrons in their tight skirts walking pampered dogs on tight leashes through the immaculate streets. Past stiff-necked gentlemen with their briefcases polished black; hawking migrants selling DVDs from open rucksacks, chased away by the blue-capped police who know that drink and drugs are only a problem when the burgomasters of the city perceive them. I walked beneath the faces of stone cherubs, sad to see their streets defiled by the presence of uncouth strangers; past statues raised in stone to emperors and their steeds, empresses and their noble deeds, and dead generals famed for fighting Turks and civic dissent. I passed an art gallery showing an exhibition entitled Primary Colours: the Post-Modern Revival, whose posters explained that within you could find canvases painted entirely in red, blue, green, and, for those who were feeling radical, yellow, with a single pinpoint of white daubed in the bottom corner to draw the eye mystically in. Some had artistic titles –
Aneurism Lover
was a canvas of solid purple with a tiny tracery of blue just visible if you squinted. Others, such as two canvases of solid black, shown side by side, were simply
Untitled
.

I walked on by. I like to believe that I move with the times, but sometimes even I miss the 1890s.

An antique shop was tucked into the base of a great white mansion with a brass-plated door facing a square decked with a fountain of gurgling dolphins and raging ocean gods. When I pushed open the door, a small brass bell rang, and the air within smelt of old paper, feathers, copper and clay. A pair of Chinese tourists – never going to buy – stood examining a little marble statue bearing the face of a stern-eyed bishop with a sagging chin, but at my approach they giggled and put it down, like children caught fiddling with the keyhole in a vending machine. A man, his hair inclining towards grey, forest-green trousers faded to thin patches around the knees, stumbled out from behind a counter bedecked with skulls, pots, papers and the obligatory models of St Stephen’s spire, looked at me and stopped where he stood. “I told you already,” he blurted. “Go away!”

For a moment I forgot my body, and blushed, hot and suddenly ashamed. “Klemens,” I blurted. “I’m Romy.”

His hands, which had been flapping in the air, as if by wafting alone I could be propelled through the door, froze. His face tightened, lips peeling back. “You shit,” he spat, the thickness of his accent tying up around the word and making it greater. “I have nothing to say, and you come here like —”

“I’m Romy,” I repeated, stepping forward. “We went to the opera together, rode the Ferris wheel. You like green beans but hate broccoli. I’m Romy. I’m Di’u. I’m me.”

Klemens and Romy Ebner.

They appear approximately one third of the way through the Kepler file.

They met in 1982 at a dinner in Vienna and were married five months later. She was Catholic, he was lapsed, but the service was before the eyes of God, and their dedication was absolute.

Their first child was born in 1984, and sent to boarding school at fourteen, to return to the family home no more than twice a year. Klemens loved walking in the forested hills that bounded Vienna; Romy did not, and so the walking boots stayed at home and he looked at the horizon from the windows of the Brunerstrasse tram on his way to work.

When he joined a choir, she said he sang like a chipmunk. When she started attending meetings at the local church hall, he enrolled in a cooking course, but his food, she said, was foreign muck and she had no time for it. When she retired, to dedicate herself to herself, he stayed working, longer and later to support their needs, and found that, alone in the evening gloom of the shop, he did not mind his own company.

When I met them, I was Trinh Di’u Ma, trafficked from her home aged just thirteen years old, whose parents, some five years later, had paid an estate agent to find her and bring her back. They had no money to give, so they bartered away the only currency they could think of – six months of their daughter’s body, in exchange for her safe return home. I had taken the deal and regretted it, for on acquiring Trinh from the brothel in Linz, I spent the best part of a month engaged in nothing but medical tests and detox. When the pain grew too great, I jumped from Di’u into the body of the nurse who watched her, and sat with my head in my hands as she screamed for heroin, please God, please, just give me what I need, I’ll do anything.

Even when the last opiate had been flushed from her system, and I walked wobbling from the hospital door, I felt the emptiness in her mind, longing in her blood, and wondered whether I, riding the mere echo of dependence, could make it to Vietnam without breaking.

Sitting in the departure lounge of Vienna airport, my arms around my knees, a fake passport in my pocket and caffeine buzzing around my head, I felt the avoidance of the well-dressed travellers more than the stares of the security guards. When the customs officers, having no better reason than my age, race and fading scars, took me to one side and strip-searched me, their hands running over every part of my body, their machines beeping at my bare goosebumped flesh, I stood with arms open and legs apart and said nothing, felt nothing but an overwhelming desire to get out.

I nearly left her then, abandoning Di’u with her ticket for Hanoi and no recollection of how she got there, until a man, seeing me hunched beneath the seats, came up to me and said in badly broken English:

“Are you OK?”

Klemens Ebner, in a yellow jumper and appalling beige trousers, knelt by the side of a shaking Vietnamese girl and said, “Miss? Ma’am? Are you OK?”

Behind him, Romy Ebner, stiff-backed in black and blue, exclaimed, “Get away from her, Klem!”

I looked up through Trinh Di’u Ma’s hazy eyes into the eyes of the only man in the world who seemed to care, and he was beautiful, and I was in love.

Two weeks later I knocked on a heavy black apartment door in Vienna, wearing the smart sandals and well-worked feet of the local postman, and said, “Delivery, please?”

Romy Ebner answered it, and as she signed the packet and returned my pen, I caught her by the wrist and jumped.

Back in the body of Nathan Coyle, I sat in the darkest corner of the tightest café in Vienna and ate lemon cake with a cherry on top while Klemens gripped his tiny cup of coffee and failed in his mission not to stare.

“How did you end up as him?” he asked, voice low against the customers coming in for lunch. “As this man?”

His crinkled eyes were enough to suggest dislike, his voice confirmed active hate. I shrugged, scooping purple cake on to the end of my fork, and tried not to take it personally. “He came looking for me,” I replied. “I take it you’ve met him before?”

“He came to the shop, asking about you,” he grumbled, sipping espresso a droplet at a time. “Not in terms of a name, or a description of your… your qualities. He knew my wife had had blackouts, a few days here, a few days there, and wanted to know if I had experienced the same.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said no.”

“What did you tell him about your wife?”

Klemens smiled, and immediately frowned, joy and guilt taking turns to wash across his features. “I told him that my wife seemed absolutely fine, and then said she couldn’t remember what she’d done yesterday. I told him that we’d been to the doctor a few times, but he couldn’t find anything wrong with her, and that I wasn’t very worried about it.”

“And was he… I mean, was
I
,” I grunted, “happy with this reply?”

“You were… neutral. Your partner seemed unconvinced.”

“Ah, my partner. Alice?”

“That was the name she gave.”

“What’s she like?”

He blew thin steam off the top of his coffee and considered. “She spoke German with a Berlin accent, liked to be in charge, walked around like a man, very tough, very proud. She was on her phone a lot, made notes, took a few photographs – I asked her not to – she had short blonde hair. She wanted to be tougher than anyone else in the room. I thought it weakened her, trying to be all that.”

“Are the two mutually incompatible? Femininity and toughness?” I asked, and to my surprise and secret pleasure, Klemens blushed. He had a good blush, which swelled up beneath his neck and circled round the rim of his ears.

“No,” he mumbled. “Not at all… Just I thought she was maybe trying too hard to be… something she didn’t have to be.”

I grinned and had to resist the urge to put my hand on his. His eyes met mine, then looked away, down into the blackness of his coffee cup. “She left me a card. An email address, contact number. Would it help you?”

“Yes. Christ,
yes
, it’s exactly what I need.”

“Then it’s yours,” he said. “Just… use it well.”

A single rectangle of card with just three lines of text – email address, phone number, name: Alice Mair. He pulled it from the mess of his wallet, from cards he’d never used and memberships he’d forgotten he owned, and as he pushed it towards me, our fingers touched, I lingered, and he shied away.

“This is… unexpected,” he admitted.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to visit like this.”

“It’s… fine. I know that it’s you. There must be reasons. This man you’re… this man you’ve become. Did he hurt you?”

“Yes.”

“I thought as much,” he murmured. “You don’t strike me as someone to do something for no good reason.”

“He killed… someone close to me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He was aiming for me.”

“Why?”

“It’s something that happens,” I replied. “Every few decades someone new learns of our existence, realises all that we could do and gets scared. This time…”

“This time?”

“This time there were orders to kill my host, as well as me. That’s never happened before. My host was an innocent. I made her an offer and she said yes. Now she’s dead and the people who are coming for me invented lies to justify it.”

He was leaning away, a motion he probably didn’t notice himself perform. My face belonged to a murderer, and though it wasn’t to a killer that he spoke, yet some reactions are ingrained deep in decent men. “What will you do?”

“Find Josephine’s killer. This body pulled the trigger, and for that… but it was also following orders. Someone gave orders that she had to die. I want to know why – the real why.”

“And then?”

Silence between us. I smiled, and it didn’t reassure. “More coffee?”

“No. Thank you.”

His eyes were locked on to his coffee cup, reading the future in its depths.

“How’s your wife?”

A flicker to my face, then away. “Good. Well. Busy. She’s always very busy.”

“And… you’re happy?”

A brief flicker of his gaze, a shift on his face, gone as quickly as it had arrived. “Yes,” he said softly. “We’re happy.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

“You?” he asked. “Are you… happy?”

I thought about it, then laughed. “All things considered… no. Not at all.”

“I’m… sorry to hear that. What should I call you?”

“I’m called Nathan.”

“I… will try to call you that. Is it your name, or is it…” A flicker of fingers at my borrowed skin.

“It’s his,” I replied. “I lost my name a long, long time ago.”

Klemens Ebner.

He is, if you look through the weariness, the slouched shoulders and the abandoned dreams, a very easy man to love. It is perhaps the simplicity of his affection, the patience of his understanding and loyalty that makes him too easy to love, for his love is taken for granted by many, who give back nothing in return.

I came to him first in the body of his wife. I did my research, for if nothing else I was a good estate agent, and knew how to pick up a life that was not my own, move it about like so much money on a Monopoly board. The first night that I wore Romy Ebner I said, let’s go out for dinner. Let’s have something Thai.

Klemens Ebner loved Thai food, so we had a platter of spicy treats: duck stewed with cashew nuts, coconut rice, prawn crackers, rice noodles, tofu steamed on a bed of garlic and mushrooms. When we were done I said, come on, there’s a concert round the corner, and it was Brahms and I held his hand as the violins played.

At home, in the dark, we lay together in a creaking bed, and made love like teenagers just discovering their own flesh, and in the morning he held his arms around me and said, “You are not my wife.”

Of course I’m your wife, I exclaimed as my heart started in my chest; don’t be foolish.

No, he replied. My wife hates the things I love, because she hates that I can love anything besides herself, and when we make love, it is to appease me, because sex is dirty and flesh is vile and it is only because men are weak that such things must be so. You – this woman in my arms – you are not my wife. Who are you?

And to my surprise, I told him.

I am not Romy Ebner. I am not Nathan Coyle, I am not Trinh Di’u Ma, sobbing in her father’s arms even as I slip away from her body, relieved to be gone. I am not Josephine Cebula, dead in a Turkish morgue, al-Mu’allim lost by the Nile, or the empty-eyed girl sitting in a village in southern Slovakia, scars on her arms and drugs in her veins, do you want to try something kinky tonight?

Once every few years I return to Klemens Ebner and his wife, who he will never leave, and for a few nights, preferably over a weekend with no social obligations, he commits delightful adultery with the woman he married, and we sail the river and ride the Ferris wheel and live as tourists do, hand in hand, until I leave, and he loves the body I leave behind.

My file calls me Kepler.

It will have to do.