Touch (9 page)

Evening in Bratislava.

A computer in a café, bad coffee in my mouth, Coyle’s bags stuffed beneath my chair.

An email to an account I’d set up a lifetime ago and never closed down, from an individual who identified themselves as Spunkmaster13.

Times changed, but not Johannes Schwarb.

A report on the passports carried by Nathan Coyle – clean, save for the Turkish identity, which the Istanbul police were seeking. A man suspected of shooting a woman dead on Taksim station had hired a car under that name, then driven his escape vehicle all the way to Edirne in the night.

I made a mental note to burn the Turkish passport, and began to reply.

Spunkmaster13 was already waiting in the chat rooms, and he appeared before I could type more than a few words on to the screen.

Banal pleasantries were exchanged along with the panoply of smiley faces and vanishing ninja emoticons that seemed to form the greatest part of Johannes’ vocabulary, until:

Bratislava, as night fell.

The sky was turning the colour of a two-day bruise, a stripe of golden sunlight skimming the western horizon, trying to peep through beneath the promise of rain.

I hadn’t been to Bratislava for decades. Ten beautiful streets in the middle, a castle on a hill, trolley buses and a great deal of anonymous architecture beyond. It was a city that most tourists covered in two days. An hour from Vienna by boat, the same by train through flood plains, it was hard to shake the feeling towards this would-be national capital that there was somewhere a little more interesting nearby.

The internet café where I connected with Johannes served sweet pastries turning hard around the edges. The lights in the square outside were cold white over pale stones, and as it began to rain the gutters sparkled and shimmered with the rush of water to the riverside below.

I stepped out of the café into the downpour and regretted that I hadn’t stocked up on all-weather gear during those few breathless minutes in Istanbul when I had first met the body of Nathan Coyle. After all, I had no idea how long I was going to be in residence.

I scampered through the rain as it tap-danced on the sloping roofs and thundered down from the straining metal gullies. The solemn statues on the churches dripped from the ends of their chins and noses, angel wings shed waterfalls across the wooden doors of medieval monuments. The cables on the trolley buses snapped great white stars as they swung through the running streets, while the four-towered castle upon its hill vanished into a yellow rectangle of light hanging over the distorted darkness of the city.

I ran, my trousers soaking, my stomach empty, a bag of someone else’s secrets bumping on my back, past the half-shadowed faces of men with coats pulled across their heads, fighting for a cab; women with umbrellas turned inside-out, hair clinging to their pale, cold faces; teenage girls whose shoes were now too impractical for walking in, holding them by their heels as they waded through the riverine streets. And for a moment my fingers itched and my face was heavy with cold and I glanced at

a woman with beautiful black hair down to the nape of her spine, her shoulders bare, icy in the cold, the jacket that should have adorned it slung over one arm as she struggled unexpectedly into thicker clothes, a man at her back, the taste of chocolate on her lips, and she looked beautiful, and her life looked serene. Tonight, perhaps, she dines with the man she loves, and he loves her, and when the rain stops they will stand together on a balcony

– for certain she has a balcony –

and look down on the river in the cold night air and have no need for words.

She turned away, and I scuttled on, for everyone’s life is greener on the other side.

My hotel was a hotel for tourists, right on the river. A bar protruded out over the water’s edge, purple LEDs framing the balustrade, and the sound of glass chinked against its neighbour. The lobby was lined with pictures of old Bratislava, dead princes and noble kings; the receptionist spoke five languages, all fluently, all with a smile, and when I slid the key card into the lock to my room, the door slid open without a sound, into warmth that was a little too hot and an interior that smelt of fabric softener.

I had a bath.

As I sank deep into the tub I ran my fingers over the markings of a life lived. Round white scar on the left upper arm where, a long time ago, I’d had the BCG jab. I remembered a time when bodies carried smallpox scars; now they were marked by vaccinations. Another faded scar ran straight through the webbing between thumb and forefinger on my right hand, and there, below my ribcage, the prize-winner – a great pinkish slice, the zigzag of brisk stitching done by a busy hand still apparent around the grinning flesh. I traced the mark, felt the thickness beneath the skin, and guessed a knife, rammed in from the side and then slid across the stomach. The wound had long since healed, and I had to applaud Nathan Coyle for the density of functional muscle he’d built up in the intermediate time, but the scar remained, like a slag heap above an exhausted mine.

Horst Gubler had recognised Coyle, and that was good. My borrowed face had some utility after all.

More importantly, he’d given me a name, a partner, someone else to look for. I was in no great hurry to backtrack through the faces of my life, but if in doing so I could also trace the men who had ordered my death

ordered Josephine’s death

then I would do so.

And if this body, hot water running off its arm and seeping into the places between its toes, died in the attempt?

That didn’t bother me at all.

Memories of ghosts.

Anna Maria Celeste Jones, sitting with her back straight and her eyes front.

I was worn, she said. As a skin.

Beauty is a hard attribute to measure. I have been a long-necked model with golden hair, my lips fresh, my eyes wide, my skin silk. And in this guise I found it hard to walk in my tight red heels, and bewailed how quickly my skin lost its sheen when not pampered with a regime more time-consuming than sense. The volume of my hair was lost after a single wash, the fullness of my lips cracked within a day. No more than a week was I this model of fine proportions before irritation at the maintenance drove me on to simpler pastures.

It is not beauty, in an eye, a hand, a curl of hair. I have seen old men, their backs bent and shirts white, whose eyes look up at the passers-by and in whose little knowing smiles there is more beauty, more radiance of soul, than any pampered flesh. I have seen a beggar, back straight and beard down to his chest, in whose green eyes and greying hair was such handsomeness that I yearned to have some fraction of him to call my own, to dress in rags and sweep imperious through city streets. The tiny woman, four foot eight of purple and pearl; the chubby mother, her bum heaving against denim jeans, her voice a whip-snap between supermarket aisles. I have been them all, and all of them, as I regarded myself in their mirrors, were beautiful.

In 1798, sitting upon the shores of the Red Sea, I first discovered this simple truth: that as one of us who move from flesh to flesh, life to life, I was not, in fact, alone.

My name was Abdul al-Mu’allim al-Ninowy, and I had chosen the wrong side; or perhaps, fairer to say, the wrong side had chosen me.

I came to Cairo in 1792, as the Ottoman administration collapsed and Egypt fell to whichever Mameluke strongman could muster the sharpest sword. Abdul al-Mu’allim al-Ninowy was such a man, who lived away from the stink of the city in a white mansion with a courtyard of trickling fountains and kept three wives, one of whom I loved. Her name was Ayesha bint Kamal, and she had a fondness for song, wine, poetry, dogs and astronomy, and had been married off cheap and young by her father, who understood wine and dogs and disapproved of the rest.

I met her in the bathhouse, where I was a respected widow young enough to be physically comfortable, old enough to escape excessive pursuit for my wealth. In the steamy confines of the women’s room, away from the ears of men, she and I had laughed and talked. When I asked what her position was, a frown had played across her plucked eyebrows and she replied, “I am the junior wife of Abdul al-Mu’allim al-Ninowy, who sells wheat to the Turks and cotton to the Greeks and slaves to everybody. He is a great and a powerful man. I would be nothing, if I were not his.”

Her words were level as the stones on which we sat, and the next day I was the fourteen-year-old serving boy who bought al-Mu’allim his bread who no one noticed or cared for. Five days after that, having gathered sufficient information to fulfil the role, I was al-Mu’allim himself, slightly paunchy in my early forties, with a magnificent beard that needed constant attention, lips that tingled just before rain and overly long nails that I trimmed on my first day.

Naturally, upon habitation I set about reordering the household. Some slaves I sold; some servants I traded away. Friends who came to the door whose faces I did not know were politely rejected and informed that I had a fever, and sure enough fear of plague kept even my most loyal associates from knocking on my door, save for one cousin who hoped – who prayed, no doubt – that this was the fever that took his uncle from the world, and his cash from the vault.

Of my two senior wives, one was an absolute harpy. On learning that she had a sister in Medina, I recommended – for her health, both physical and spiritual – a pilgrimage, for which, naturally, I would pay. The middle wife was far more pleasant company, but it took her a few scant days to suspect that I was not myself, and so, to avoid the whispering of my household, I again suggested a pilgrimage – far, far away, preferably by camel with a lame foot.

They both loathed the idea, nearly as much as they loathed each other, but I was the grand man of the household and it was their duty to obey. The night before they were to depart my senior wife came into my room and screamed at me. She tore at my clothes, and when I was unmoved, she tore at her own, dragged her nails down her face, pulled clumps of her hair in thick fistfuls from her head, and screamed, “Monster! Monster! You swore you loved me, you made me think you loved me but you have always been a monster!”

My dear one, I replied, if this is so, would you not be happier away?

At this she pulled her robes wide, revealing a body well kept for its age, nourished but not to excess, loose as a pillow, pale as summer cloud.

“Am I not beautiful?” she cried. “Am I not what you desire?”

She did not look at me in the morning as I bade her farewell.

The majority of my affairs so settled, I moved what remained of my household to a mansion by the waterfront, and invited Ayesha to dine with me. Alas, for the first few weeks I could find nothing of the gentle woman I had met at the bathhouse, and wondered if I had not made a terrible mistake in leaving my wealthy widow. Ayesha would not meet my eye, nor answer in anything other than short affirmations, demonstrating such coldness in her manner that it dampened her veiled beauty too. I wooed gently, as a fresh lover might, and thought I saw no change until one evening, as we picked over fresh dates and cold leaves, she said, “You are very much changed, my husband.”

“Do you like the change?”

She was silent a while, and then replied, “I loved the man I married, and honour him, and pray daily for his soul. But I confess, I love the man who I see before me more, and am glad of his company, for as long as it may last.”

“Why did you marry me, if not for who I was?”

“For money,” she replied simply. “I had a good dowry, but that is not an income. You have income. You have prestige. You have a name. Even if you had not the first part, two together beget the third. My family lacks for any of these. By my union with you, I secure their advancement.”

“I see,” I murmured, unsure of what al-Mu’allim would have said to all this, and choosing, therefore, to say as little as possible.

At my reticence, Ayesha, rather than draw back, smiled. For the first time she raised her eyes to my face, and at that my heart ran fast. Then – a gesture almost unheard of at the dinner table – she reached over to touch my hand. “You do not recall,” she breathed, and there was no accusation in it, merely a statement of understanding, of discovery, “very well.”

For a moment, panic. But she simply sat, her fingers resting in my palm, and when the sun was down we stood together by the water’s edge and I said, “There is something I must tell you. Something you may not understand.”

“Don’t tell me,” she replied, sharp enough to make me flinch. Sensing my withdrawal, she repeated, softer, “Don’t tell me.”

“Why don’t you want to know?”

“I am sworn to you. I am tasked to honour and obey. While I do this in duty, and sincerity, my soul is clean. Only in these last months, however, have I found joy in my duty. Only with… only these last few months. Do not speak the words that might tarnish the joy we have. Do not wipe away this moment.”

So I said nothing. She was my wife, and I was her husband, and that was all that we needed to know.

It lasted six years, in which my wife lived with me in wealth – wheat, cotton and boys being profitable markets at nearly any time, and there the matter may have rested, until the French came to Cairo. When the rage of the Egyptians against their remarkably moderate oppressors grew too great, conspirators came to my door, asking for arms, influence, money – all of which I politely refused.

“Your city is held by the infidel!” they exclaimed. “How long until a Frenchman violates your wife?”

“I really couldn’t say,” I replied. “How long did it take until they violated yours?”

They left, muttering against my impiety, but their comings and their goings were already being watched, and when the revolt began and the cannon fired and the heavens cracked and Napoleon himself gave the order to blast down the walls of the Great Mosque and massacre every man, woman and child who had taken refuge inside, my name was called in the round-up of the living dead amid the thunder-blasted carnage of the Cairo streets.

The teenage boy, now grown to a man, whose body I had first inhabited when I came to inspect the household of al-Mu’allim came running to me. “Master,” he exclaimed, “the French are coming for you!”

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.