Touch (15 page)

On the train to Berlin Coyle stood in silence, eyes half-closed as he digested my words. “You’re older than you seem.”

I shrugged. “I move with the times. My skin, my clothes, my body. I own an MP3 player, I have a piercing in my tongue. I choose to have piercings, tattoos, cosmetic surgery; I choose to be who I am, and a lot of the time I choose to be young. Youthful flesh induces a youthful character, since the physical pains and social responsibilities that temper a nature don’t usually affect a twenty-two-year-old with a penchant for punk. I like it that way; it suits my inclination.”

“What were you, originally?” he asked. “In… your body, your first body, I mean. Man, woman – what were you?”

“Does it matter?”

“I’m curious.”

“What do you think?”

“I thought man. It seemed… I don’t know what it seemed, perhaps it was something assumed, what we always assume.”

“And now?”

“Women were beaten to death in dark alleys as well as men,” he replied. “What’s your name?”

“Kepler will do just fine, as Coyle works for you.”

“You have no preference – for either sex, I mean?”

“I have a preference for good teeth and strong bones,” I replied. “I have a preference for clear skin and, I must admit it, I have something of a weakness for red hair, when I find it, and it’s real. Say what you will for the nineteenth century, at least you weren’t being continually wrong-footed by convincing dye jobs.”

“You’re a snob.”

“I’ve been enough people to recognise when they’re trying too hard to be something they’re not. I can help you,” I added. “If Galileo wore you, used you – if he’s your target – I can help you.”

“How would you do that?”

“You have something else?” He didn’t answer. “Who are you working for?”

Silence.

“Do you believe what they told you about Frankfurt? Do you believe they were trying to make a vaccine?”

Silence.

“Josephine was a host of convenience. We made a deal because she needed the cash and I wanted a change. My involvement need not equate to your employer’s destruction, but I need – I would like – you to give me some reason, some tiny shadow of a doubt as to why, when I find them, and find them I shall, I do not destroy them all.”

Our gazes locked. I had looked into Coyle’s eyes in the bathroom mirror for days, and all I had seen in them had been contempt. “They try their best,” he said. “The best that can be done.”

A scowl pulled at my lips – too pretty, too happy with the prospect of motherhood, assuming my body had noticed its fate, to be so distorted. “Not good enough,” I said, grabbed him by the hand and switched.

I lie awake on the sleeper train, and remember…

Marilyn Monroe.

What a bloody stupid idea that had been.

On a hot autumn evening in suburban LA I slipped into Louis Quinn, aspiring actor, model, full-time waiter, and, balancing a tray of champagne on my fingertips, went to visit the stars.

The house was a mansion, and the mansion – as with every building in LA – had a swimming pool. She was reclined beside it, champagne in one hand, hair unkempt and laughter shrill. They say that the camera adds five pounds to anyone it films. It is no more than we do to ourselves already, judging every fold of flesh as if it were a newborn monster. I have worn slim, beautiful creatures, stood naked before a mirror and suddenly seen that I am fat, or wrinkly, or somehow less than what I seemed to be when I beheld myself through the eyes of a stranger.

Marilyn Monroe was, to my mind, more beautiful off the screen than on it, for even with her chubby belly and bulbous chin, she dressed herself to the pleasure of her own eye, and that gave more satisfaction than any costumier could have achieved.

Except perhaps tonight. It seemed to me, looking at her spotted pants and loosely tied bikini, that someone had dressed for the character of Marilyn, rather than the woman she should have been, and it made her ugly.

I laid my tray down and slipped from my waiter into the producer queuing for her attention, and as the waiter staggered bewildered behind me I leaned down to whisper into Marilyn’s ear:

“Aurangzeb.”

Her features crinkled as if she’d bitten a sour plum. She rolled her head round slowly, fixed me with a glower and hissed, “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Might we have a word in private?”

“I’m with my friends!”

“Yes, you are. We should talk.”

“Fine.” She scowled, grabbing a towel and slinging it around her midriff. “It was getting dull here anyway.”

She led the way to the end of the garden, where green hedges had been trimmed into the shape of a squashed-nose cat, a dog with his paws raised, an umbrella in a cocktail glass and other such offences against topiary. When secluded behind the nearest of these, she rounded on me and snapped, “What?”

“It’s been five days,” I said. “In and out, we agreed – two days at most.”

“Jesus!” she exclaimed, throwing her hands up in a parody of frustration. “What the fuck is wrong with you? These people
love me
. They think I’m great – better than the real Marilyn. People have been asking what I’ve been taking, whether I’m seeing someone, I’m so much calmer than I was, so much more… you know… more!” She flapped, unable to find the words. “I just had John Huston
beg
me to do another film, said I’d be perfect.”

“And that’s delightful. But what do you plan on doing when they put you in front of a camera and you can’t act?”

“This is Hollywood! People will see the picture because I’m in it, not because of what I’m doing.”

“It’s not that I’m averse to you destroying a career, if it comes to it, but sooner or later people
will
talk, people
are
talking, and I will not be responsible for creating the single noisiest scandal that has ever affected our kind. If Marilyn Monroe loses a week of her memory, that’s OK. That’s practically par for the course in this town. If she loses six months, or a year, or five years, and wakes up at the end of that in some B-movie with her knickers on her head because that’s all you were capable of pulling, then we have a problem and I will not go down as the estate agent who brokered that. So I’m telling you now – get out. Find a different body.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.” Aurangzeb had worked hard on that pout. “I’m here now. I’m doing it. I can make this work.”

I stood back a pace. “That your final answer?”

“Yes.”

“All right.”

Her lips parted in surprise, then opened in a shriek of laughter. “That it? That all you gotta say to me?”

“That’s it,” I replied. “I’m going to find the waiter I walked in here in – he had nice hands – and get out. Might go somewhere chilly. Canada, perhaps. Alaska. See the Northern Lights.”

“Jesus, you
are
the lamest thing
ever
!”

“Sure. I’m lame. I’ve had the loud life and now I like the quiet. I’ve also spiked your champagne.”

The laughter forming on her breath froze, diminished, shrank. Her face twisted through a kaleidoscope of emotion, none pleasant. “You’re lying,” she blurted. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“Sure I would. I came in here as a waiter. If there’s one thing we’re good at – one thing we ought to
excel
at, you and I – it is blending with the crowd. Enjoy the stomach pump.”

I turned. I walked away.

“Hey!” she called after me. Then, “Hey… you!”

A void where my name should have been. If she’d paid more attention to the file I’d compiled for her, she could have found my picture right there, neatly annotated for her attention, but Aurangzeb was lazy, hadn’t bothered to do her homework. “Hey!” she shrieked, loud enough for people to turn. I smiled serenely, walked over to where my bewildered waiter was trying to gather his thoughts and, laying my hand on his arm, I murmured, “You all right, son?” and jumped.

Playing the violin, speaking French, an intimate knowledge of the Dodgers.

If all these fail, and you really, really want to know if your target is a ghost in hiding, gastro-enteritis is another great way to go.

Sleeper trains never pull into their final destination at a reasonable hour.

6.27 a.m. is not a good time to start the day.

No shops are open, no coffee is to be found except cheap brown sludge for the earliest of the early-morning commuters who are too harried or hung over to care. You can’t check in at a hotel, but must sit on what luggage you have in whatever café will take you and wonder why you didn’t fly.

The weather was notably colder. Over the last five days the skies had darkened with the soil, and as I shuffled blearily on to the glass-and-steel concourse of Berlin Hauptbahnhof, my breath condensed in the air.

I like Berlin.

I liked it before it was levelled, and I like the way it was rebuilt. The architects of the new Berlin didn’t fall into the trap of believing that all that went before must be perfectly resurrected, nor that the past as a whole should be buried. Rather they fused the best that had been with the best innovation had to offer, rejecting the concrete-tower-block solution adopted by so many 1950s town planners and instead embracing apartment living, broad streets and the planting of as many trees as their budget could buy. In West Berlin this created a wealth of greenery, grown up over the years into balmy groves lining genteel streets, and great parks where children could hide between the gnarled roots, sounds of the city lost through the undergrowth. In East Berlin the development had been less idyllic, and only now were the trees planted beginning to grow into their full leaf beneath the functional towers and sensible estates of the industrial planners in a hurry to get grinding.

I like the vegetables you can buy in Berlin, fatter and sweeter than the usual supermarket stuff; I appreciate how easy it is to be a cyclist in the city, with ways through the parks, pedestrianised roads and traffic that yields at every green light to the mob of two-wheeled commuters that has saturated the street before it. I like the schnitzel, the creamy potatoes, the beer, the noise where it should be noisy, the calm where it should be quiet. I have no time for boiled sausages, or boiled vegetables of any nature really, and cannot for the life of me comprehend why anyone would still insist on serving dishes whose whole cooking process consisted of exposure to water, to freely invited guests.

The fact that Alice Mair, partner of Nathan Coyle and a woman who would probably, if the company she kept was anything to go by, be quite content to kill me on sight, lived in this same well-ordered city only mildly dampened my spirits.

First task – a place to stash Coyle.

I bought the least bad coffee I could find and went in search of an internet café.

Estate agents have always existed for my kind, in one way or another. They are a useful tool when you are in a difficult situation: an expert in whoever you need them to be, they can salvage a body gone wrong, help you find your path to a body that will go right.

The estate agent in Berlin went by the name Hecuba.

I tried phoning her office, and the number was disconnected.

I tried emailing her from a dummy account, and the message pinged back immediately: not recognised, no one home.

I deleted the email account with which I had attempted contact and moved cafés before continuing my search.

I sent out a few emails to a few contacts – Fyffe, Hera, Kuanyin, Janus. Only Hera replied and no, she hadn’t heard from Hecuba for years.

I even tried Johannes Schwarb, who replied immediately that no, that site had been taken down, and hey, you in Berlin, you wanna hang out?

Thanks, Spunkmaster13, I replied. I’ll let you know.

Hecuba was nowhere to be found.

Irritated, I tried a few more mundane sources. The process was slower, and the euros ebbed away as I trawled through vague memories of half-heard names and faces, until I stumbled on one which was familiar. She’d got herself a haircut, a brand new suit and some fifteen years of experience, but Ute Sauer was still my skin.

I called her up from a payphone.

I don’t do that any more, she replied.

Wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. Willing to beg, I said.

She was silent a long while on the end of the line. Then, “Zehlendorf,” she said. “I’ll pick you up. Who do you look like today?”

Zehlendorf is twee.

From its still-standing buildings of old Germany through to its semi-detached houses framed with grass and running water, Zehlendorf is the place to buy hemp handbags, straw sunhats and a sense of organic, universal belonging. In summer it is the Berlin countryside without the inconvenience of leaving the city. In winter the sounds of happy children’s choirs are inflicted on innocent shoppers as they shuffle through snow-crusted streets. Ute picked me up from the U-Bahn. She drove a silver hybrid, and as she pushed the passenger door open with one hand, with the other she swept a pile of CDs on to the back seat, Mozart quintets and
Little Songs For Happy Children
. I ducked in beside her, and as we pulled away her car wheedled at me, demanding seatbelts be worn.

“I hate it when it does that,” grumbled Ute. “I can’t put my shopping in the front seat any more. It’s like we’re all fucking children, being told by machines what we can and can’t do. Ridiculous, just ridiculous.”

Ute Sauer.

When I first met her, she was seventeen, lived in East Berlin, and her father had been arrested by the Stasi.

Get me to the West, she’d said, and my body is yours.

That it is, I replied, but not perhaps in the way you think.

A few years later the Wall fell, but Ute remained on the books of the local estate agent as what she was – a clean willing skin, perfect for short-term engagements or quick reconnoitring trips. She charged an hourly rate for her body and was prepared to let you borrow her car if you promised to obey the speed limit and not double-park. The ideal body to wear on the way to being someone else, Ute prided herself on her dignity, clean health and modest dress. When I left Berlin, she’d stayed on Hecuba’s books, running errands for ghosts about town, waiting on the sidelines as Will had waited for me in LA; save that Ute had made a profession of the occupation.

Now we drove through Zehlendorf as the sun rose over the shedding trees, and she said, “I have to pick the kids up at 2.30 from school. Will this take long?”

“Possibly. I tried calling Hecuba, but there wasn’t an answer.”

Short auburn hair, square face, Ute must have been a stubborn child, evolved now into a mother who knew how to get her way. “Hecuba is dead,” she said. “The office was raided, wiped out.”

“Who did it?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t look. I have children now.”

“You’re safe?”

“No one has come after me, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“That’s exactly what I’m asking.”

“Then I am safe.”

“Do you recognise my body?” I asked.

She glanced at it from the corner of her eye. “No. I’ve never seen you before. Should I have?”

“No,” I breathed, sinking back into the seat. “You shouldn’t. I need a place to stash this body for a while.”

“Why?” Her voice harder than the tarmac beneath our wheels.

“I don’t believe this body to be a threat to you – he’s primarily interested in me. But he has attempted to kill me, and if that’s a problem, please, say so, and I’ll go and there’ll be no hard feelings.”

Her lips curled in, as she tasted, chewed and digested the idea. Then, a single brisk shake of her head. “My husband sells real estate. There’s a house we can keep him. Can we sedate you?”

“Yes.”

“Good. We stash, we sedate, you run your business, and I’m at the school gate by 2.30 p.m. Do we understand each other?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“There will be no charge. You… and I have an understanding. For services previously rendered.”

“That’s very kind.”

“Half past two,” she said. “The clock is ticking.”

The house was a square mansion of timber and glass with architecturally immense windows built on to balconies of terracotta. Empty rooms were waiting for happy people, white walls too bright to be besmirched, a kitchen too clean to cook in, and a bathroom of polished black stone. I rummaged through my bag for the handcuffs and Coyle’s medical kit of needles and blades. I pulled my sleeve up, disinfected the hollow of my elbow, rubbing to bring up the vein, and injected the sedative straight in. The fluid was cold as it entered my body, then warm as it spread. I handcuffed myself to the nearest radiator, both hands behind my back, while Ute disposed of the needle. She knelt down beside me and said, “Is it working?”

I giggled and didn’t know why. A flicker that might have been a smile – and I hadn’t yet seen her smile – passed across her lips. “I’ll take that as a yes,” she said, slipping her hand into mine. “Shall we?”

“… dance?”

Her voice, my words.

I looked down on Nathan Coyle as he opened his eyes. I pulled a sock and a roll of gaffer tape from his bag, stuffed the first in his mouth and wrapped the other across as an indignant blare of sound tried to push up from between his lips. Ute’s body was older than the last time I’d worn it, her knees creaked, cartilage wearing thin. Coyle kicked against the floor, strained against the radiator. His eyes moved without focusing, and he tried to snarl again, the sound deteriorating before it had a chance to grow.

“Bye,” I said to the rolling whites of his eyes.

I drove back into town in Ute’s car. It seemed to me unimaginable that Ute had a single point on her driving licence, and to sully this record induced a childish fear in me. Getting your body a parking ticket and walking away without paying the fine is the height of rudeness.

There was something numb in my chest, a weight I couldn’t explain. It was not pain, nor discomfort, nor chills nor an irritant to be scratched. I was halfway up Schönhauser Allee before I realised it was the emptiness left by a surgical scar, a place where flesh had been cut away. Had I focused any awareness on it, it could have dominated my senses, but the need to drive safely and not disturb any of Berlin’s highly pedantic policemen pulled my senses away from full understanding.

Ute had not spoken of her scars, and I would not ask.

I parked the car round the corner from Pankow, left the key in the ignition and waited for a dark-skinned businessman to walk by. His hair was short, his shirt was long, his shoes were smart, and as he passed I said, “Excuse me, do you have the time?”

His stride faltered in merely considering whether or not to answer, and as he looked to his watch, my hand curled around his wrist, and I jumped.

Ute swayed a little, supporting herself against the side of the car. I caught her by the shoulders, dropping my briefcase to the ground, and waited for her gaze to come back into focus.

“It’s… been a while,” she said.

“You all right?”

“Fine. I’m… fine. How am I doing for time?”

“Plenty. And thank you.”

She glanced at her watch, scrunching and unscrunching her face as the hands shifted back into focus. “I can wait one more hour,” she said. “If you need me.”

“I’ll be fine. The important thing was stashing Coyle.”

“Is that his name?”

“No,” I replied. “But it’ll have to do.”

She looked me up and down, assessing my body, then said, “Is that your style now?”

“No,” I grumbled, picking my briefcase up in a sulky sweep. “And I’ve got athlete’s foot.”

Neat streets of neat houses. A neat bakery, selling neat loaves on neat trays. Cars, neatly parked, and bicycles politely dinging. Berlin is a city which knows how to keep up appearances.

I walked the few blocks to a neat yellow apartment block on a perfect right-angle corner. Up a cobbled path lined with bins for paper, tin, plastics and organic recycling, to a thick blue door. I looked down the list of names by the buzzer. Alice Mair hadn’t bothered to disguise hers.

Wheels rattled on cobbles. I turned to find an elderly lady behind me, a shopping trolley in her hands, hat low on her head. The curvature of her spine pushed her head out almost horizontally from her shoulders, and as I stood aside, she went into her pocket for her door keys. With a slight shudder of apprehension, I reached out and touched her hand.

I hate being old.

Switching from legs which swing along merrily to hips of crumbling calcium and not much hope of repair is a quick path to injury. I took a step and nearly fell over, misjudging the stability of my own bones. I took another far more conservative step and felt tremors rush up my knees and shake my spine. My left hand was curled around the keys in my pocket, and as I pulled them out I saw twitching fingers, skin like a withered date. Half-bending to get a better look at my keys, aches down my back, it occurred to me that to drop them now would be a minor catastrophe all of its own.

Behind me a confused man with a battered briefcase thought about asking me where he was, how he came to be there, but who asks doddery old ladies anything these days?

Alice Mair lived on the third floor.

I took the lift and left my trolley on the landing.

I buzzed a brass bell once, twice. No reply. I considered knocking, but my knuckles felt hollow and my arm no stronger than a roll of paper soaked in rain.

I buzzed again.

A voice called out in German, “Coming.”

The door opened an inch, on the chain. I fixed my face to a foolish, denture-filled smile and said, “Have you seen my keys?”

A single eye, sky blue, peeked through the gap in the door. “Your… keys?”

“I had them,” I explained. “But I lost them.”

The eye considered.

Everyone knows that ghosts are vain; why would we be anything else? I am told that the old do not notice that age has come upon them until they are in the full throes of pain, in much the same way as an asthmatic assumes that the breath they struggle to draw is the same struggle fought by all men. No ghost ever chooses to be old.

“A moment,” said the voice.