Touch (3 page)

This is the car hired by the man who tried to kill me.

I opened the boot with the key from his

my

pocket, and looked inside.

Two black sports bags, one larger than the other.

The smaller contained a white shirt, a pair of black trousers, a plastic raincoat, a clean pair of underpants, two pairs of grey socks and a sponge bag. Beneath its removable plastic bottom were two thousand euros, one thousand Turkish lira, one thousand US dollars and four passports. The nationalities on the passports were German, British, Canadian and Turkish. The faces, alongside their endlessly changing names, were mine.

The second, far larger, bag contained a murder kit. A carefully packed box of little knives and vicious combat blades, rope, masking tape and stiff white cotton bandages, two pairs of handcuffs, a nine-millimetre Beretta plus three spare clips and green medical bag containing a range of chemicals from the toxic through to the sedative. What to make of the full-body Lycra suit, thick rubber gloves and hazmat helmet, I really didn’t know.

I nearly missed the fat Manila folder tucked into an inner pocket, save that a corner of it had caught in the zip and showed brown against the black interior. I opened the folder and almost immediately shut it again.

The contents would require more attention than I felt able to give for the moment.

I closed the boot, got into the car, felt the comfortable fit of the seat, checked the alignment of the mirrors, ran my hand around the glove compartment to find nothing more exciting than a road map of northern Turkey and started the engine.

I am, contrary to what may be expected of one as old as I, not in the least bit old-fashioned.

I inhabit bodies which are young, healthy, interesting, vibrant.

I play with their iWhatevers, dance with their friends, listen to their records, wear their clothes, eat from their fridges.

My life is their life, and if the fresh-faced girl I inhabit uses high-powered chemical cocktails to treat her acne, why then so do I, for she’s had longer to get used to my skin, and knows what to wear and what not, and so, in all things, I move with the times.

None of which prepares you for driving in Turkey.

The Turks aren’t bad drivers.

Indeed, an argument could be made for their being absolutely superb drivers as only split-second instinct, razor-sharp skills and relentless determination to be a winner could keep you both alive and moving on the Otoyol-3 to Edirne. It’s not that your fellow drivers are ignorant of the concept of lanes, merely that, as the city falls away behind and the low hills that hug the coast begin to push and shrug against you, the scent of open air seems to provoke some animal instinct, and the accelerator goes down, the window opens to let in the roar of passing wind and the mission becomes go, go, go!

I drive rather more sedately.

Not because I am old-fashioned.

Simply because, even at the loneliest of times on the darkest roads, I always have a passenger on board.

The single most terrifying drive of my life.

It was 1958, she had introduced herself as Peacock, and when she whispered in my ear, “You want to go somewhere quiet?” I’d said sure. That’d be nice.

Five and a half minutes later she was sitting behind the wheel of a Lincoln Baby convertible, the roof down and the wind screaming, swooping through the hills of Sacramento like an eagle in a tornado, and as I clung to the dashboard and watched sheer drops twist away beneath our wheels she screamed, “I fucking love this town!”

Had I been experiencing any sentiment other than blind terror, I might have said something witty.

“I fucking love the fucking people!” she whooped as a Chevy, heading the other way, slammed on both its brakes and its horn as we barrelled towards the lights of a tunnel.

“They’re all so fucking sweet!” she howled, pins unravelling from her curled blonde hair. “They’re all so fucking, ‘Sweetie, you’re so sweet!’ and I’m all, ‘That’s so sweet of you’ and they’re all, ‘But we can’t give you the role because you’re so sweet, sweetie’ and I’m like, ‘FUCK YOU ALL!’”

She shrieked with delight at this conclusion and, as the yellow glow of the rock-carved tunnel enveloped us in its heat, pressed harder on the accelerator.

“Fuck you all!” she screamed, engine roaring like a baited bear. “Where’s your fucking bitter, where’s your fucking bile, where’s your fucking balls, you fuckers?!”

A pair of headlights ahead and it occurred to me that she was now driving on the wrong side of the road. “Fuck you!” she roared. “Fuck you!”

The lights swerved, and she swerved with them, lining up like a jousting knight, and the headlights swerved again, wheels screeching to get out of the way, but she just turned the wheel again, face forward, eyes down, no going back, and though I rather liked the body I was in at the time (male, twenty-two, great teeth), I had absolutely no intention of dying in it, so as we lined up for the kill, I reached over, grabbed her by the bare crook of her arm and switched.

The brakes gave off a primal scream of metal tearing metal, of tortured air and shattered springs. The car spun as the back wheels locked, until finally, as gentle and inevitable as the crash of the
Titanic
, the side of the car slammed into the wall of the tunnel and with a great belch of yellow-white sparks we scraped our way to a standstill.

The motion knocked me forward, my head bouncing down on to the hard steering wheel. Someone had tied little knots between all the neurons in my brain, making thick bundles of uncommunicative squelch where my thoughts should have been. I lifted my head and saw that I left blood on the wheel; I pressed a peacock-blue glove against my skull and tasted salt in my mouth. By my side the very pleasant young body I had been inhabiting stirred, opened his eyes, shook like a kitten and began to perceive for himself.

Confusion became anxiety, anxiety panic, and panic, having only a choice between rage or terror, went for the latter option as he screamed, “Oh God oh God oh God who are you who the fuck are you where am I where am I oh God oh God…”

Or words to that effect.

The other car, whose intended role had been the agent of our sticky demise, had pulled itself to a stop some twenty yards from us, and now the doors were open and a man was barrelling out, red-faced and cavern-skinned. As I blinked blood from my eyes I looked up to see that this gentleman, white-collared and black-trousered as he was, carried a small silver-barrelled revolver in one hand and a police badge in the other. He was also shouting, the great roaring words of a voice which has forgotten how to speak, words of my family, my car, police commissioner, going to burn, going to fucking burn…

When I had nothing to contribute on this subject, he waved the gun at me and roared at the boy to throw him my handbag. It too, like all things to do with me, was peacock-blue, adorned with green and black sequins, and glistened like the fresh skin of a shedding snake as it tumbled through the air. The man with the gun caught it awkwardly, opened it up, looked inside, and dropped it at once with an involuntary gasp.

Now no one was shouting, only the
tick-tick-tick
of the car engine filling the hot gloom of the tunnel. I leaned over to see what contents could possibly have induced this blissful respite from head-pounding noise.

My fallen handbag had spilt its contents in the road. A driver’s licence which informed me that my name was, in fact, Peacock, a curse clearly bestowed upon me by parents with a limited sense of ornithological aptitude. A tube of lipstick, a sanitary towel, a set of door keys, a wallet. A small plastic bag of unknown yellowish powder. A human finger, still warm and bloody, wrapped in a white cotton handkerchief, the edges ragged where it had been sawn away from the hand.

I looked up from this to see the man with the gun staring at me with open horror on his face. “Damn,” I rasped, pulling my gloves free from my hands one long blood-blackened length of silk at a time, and holding out my bare wrists for the cuffs. “I guess you’d better arrest me.”

Problem with moving into a new body, you never quite know where it’s been.

I judged myself to be halfway to Edirne by the time the sun began to set, a hot burst lighting the tarmac rosy-pink before me. Close the window of the car for even a few minutes, and the rental smell crept back in, air freshener and chemical cleanliness. The radio broadcast a documentary on the economic consequences of the Arab Spring, followed by music about loves lost, loves won, hearts broken, hearts restored once again. Cars coming from the west had their headlights on, and before the sun could reach the horizon, black clouds swallowed it whole.

I pulled into a service station as the last of the day began to fade, between two great pools of white halogen light. The station promised fast food, petrol, games and entertainment. I bought coffee,
pide
and a chocolate bar containing a grand total of three raisins, sat in the window and watched. I didn’t like the face that watched back from the reflection. It looked like the face of someone without scruple.

Otoyol-3 was a busy highway at the best of times, and though the signs promised Edirne as you headed west, they could equally have offered directions to Belgrade, Budapest, Vienna. It was a road for bored truckers to whom the mighty bridge from Asia to Europe across a plunging gorge was no more and no less than a tedious bottleneck, and the sight of Aya Sofia on the banks of the Golden Horn nothing more than a mental tick box proclaiming,
Only ten more hours to home
…

Families, six to a five-seater car, tore through the station like prisoners freed from their cells. The parents and one regrettable grandmother who’d insisted on coming too bickered, while the children whooped, their eyes opened to the irresistible truth that what they’d needed their whole lives was a plastic water gun and a pair of x2 magnification binoculars.

I needed to ditch my car, sooner rather than later.

When had the face in the window made this decision? I wondered.

Probably around the same time it chose not to swallow a slow-acting but incurable poison.

Possibly the same instant it received a text message on an unused phone:
Circe
.

The moment it realised it wasn’t alone.

A man asked me if I had the time.

I did not.

Was I going to Edirne?

I was not.

Was I OK? I looked… different.

I was fine. Dealing with some personal stuff.

Everyone always respects a guy who’s dealing with personal stuff.

He left me alone.

In the half-gloom of the parking lot a pair of lovers screamed at each other, their blooming romance destroyed by the trauma of trying to map-read in the dark. I got back into the car, turned the radio up high, wound the windows down to let in the cold and headed north, towards Edirne.

I’ve always liked Edirne. Sometime the haunt of princes and kings, in recent decades it had fallen into grubby disrepair, worn like an old man who knew that the holes in his cardigan were a badge, not of shame, but thrifty pride. In winter slush turned grey in the gutters of the straight dual carriageways, while in summer boys and men gathered to compete in the annual wrestling tournament, buttocks shining, oiled torsos gleaming, clawed hands locked across the arched backs of their beefy opponents as they rolled in the sand. I have never been tempted to participate, even in the skin of champions. For sure, the city lacked any of the great “come-hithers” of Istanbul, save for a silver-capped mosque built by yet another Sultan Selim with a penchant for marble, and a pleasant-looking hospital founded by a Beyazid who loved to both conquer and repent – but for all that it had a proud integrity of purpose and design which invited the visitor to remember that Edirne didn’t need to be flashy to be great.

I parked the car by a fountain decked with giant metal sunflowers.

I took the bags from the boot, put a hundred lira and one of the passports in my pocket, snapped one bracelet of a pair of handcuffs on to my right wrist, popped the key in my inside jacket pocket, pulled the sleeve down to hide the steel, slung the bags across my back and walked away through the quiet Edirne night.

Sodium lamps stood out from the walls where once torches had burned, the pinkish bulbs captured in old iron hooks. Magnolia apartment blocks squatted between ornate 1800s mansions, now transformed into flats for busy families, the grey-blue light of the TV flickering behind the balconies. A cat hissed from behind a laundry line. A speeding bus parped its hooter at a neglectful motorbike. A restaurant owner waved goodbye to his favourite customers as they staggered home through the night.

I headed towards the white-lit walls of the Selimiye mosque, for where there are great monuments to regal expenditure, there are hotels.

The receptionist was dozing off in front of a TV drama, the story of identical twin brothers played by a single actor. In the final scene they stood together and shook hands upon a hill. On the left side the weather was overcast, oppressive. On the right it was cool and fair. Where their hands met, a line sliced through the sky and the earth, tearing it in two. The credits rolled, the receptionist stirred. I laid my Canadian passport down on the table, and said, “Room?”

The receptionist read the name in the passport carefully, trying not to lose any syllables.

“Nathan Coyle?”

“That’s me.”

Everyone loves a Canadian.

The hotel was three floors in total, in a once-wooden building now fused into a mixture of brick and timber. There were no more than twelve guest rooms, nine empty, and silence in the corridors.

A girl with baggy eyes, straight black hair down to the small of her back and a jutting chin showed me to my room. A double bed dominated a small floor beneath a sloping ceiling. A window opened on to two inches of balcony. A radiator sat beneath a wooden bracket supporting a small TV. A bathroom, whose four walls I could touch by standing in the middle, smelt faintly of lemon and toilet products. The girl stood in the door and said, in heavily accented English, “It OK for you?”

“Perfect,” I replied. “Can you show me how to use this?”

I waved the TV remote at her. She barely managed to suppress the rolling of her eyes.

I smiled a toothy smile of North American doubt and confusion. Her hand came out to take the remote, and as it did, I reached behind me, snapping the free bracelet of the handcuffs shut around the radiator pipe on the wall. The sound caused the girl’s eyes to rise, and as they did, I pressed my left hand against hers, wrapping the fingers round the remote, and switched.

My fingers jerked.

The TV popped on.

A newsreader laughed at an unheard punchline, lost to the airwaves. A weather map appeared behind him, and as if to confirm that nothing could be quite as wonderful as the weather, he laughed again, at grey skies and falling rain.

The man before me, 25 per cent of whose passports declared him to be Nathan Coyle, Canadian national and no bother to anyone, staggered, one knee buckling. He tried to climb back up, the handcuffs clattering on the radiator, turning blearily to blink at the metal bracelet holding him down.

I watched. His breathing, the sharp in-out of a body suddenly shocked and confused, slowed. His nostrils flared, and I counted the two, three long breaths he took, and by the time they were done, so was he, body tense, head high, respiration back under control.

I said, “Hello.”

He pressed his lips together and stared up at me, and it seemed to me that he saw

not me, not I that-is-she-who-lives-at-the-hotel, but me

I, myself

and I felt my breath catch in my throat.

He looked without speaking from his crouch on the floor, right arm half-pulled back behind him as he strained against the handcuffs. I hovered outside his arms’ reach and said, “You’re going to eat poison.”

Silence from the floor.

“Two questions are keeping you alive. First: who do you work with, and will they keep coming? I’m assuming that they will. People like you always do. Second: why did you kill Josephine Cebula?”

He stared up at me like a wounded cat and said nothing.

My body had been on its feet too long, the taste of cigarette smoke in its mouth, the weight of a day pulling my spine out and down. My bra was uncomfortable, done up too tightly at the back, and the piercing in my left ear was fresh, throbbing from a gently escalating infection.

“You’re going to eat poison,” I repeated to no one in particular. “All I want are answers.”

Silence from the floor.

“This relationship is going to be difficult for us both,” I said, then, “Left pocket.”

A flicker of his eyebrows. His free hand turned instinctively towards his left pocket, then hesitated, and before he could consider further, I reached down and grabbed his fingers.

Switched.

The girl with the optimistically tight bra staggered. I reached into my jacket pocket, pulled out the keys stashed therein, unlocked the cuffs and, as she reeled forward, I rose, caught her under the arms said, “You OK, miss? You came over dizzy.”

Incredible, the willingness of the human mind to believe in that which doesn’t scare it.

“Perhaps you need to sit down.”