Flashback

Chapter Fifteen

In the Zoologischer Garten underground station, Jem stopped as she noticed two uniformed police officers twenty feet away from her. They were eating curried sausages near an information desk. She hid behind a postcard carousel, thinking, Don’t be so obvious… don’t be so… so fucking Clouseau. She felt the strain of predation, but its pressure could be transferred: it was potential energy, like that of a coiled spring, and when released she would launch and lose them all. Her eyes hurried over the options as they were served on the departure board. Three hours to Hamburg, door to the North Sea. Four hours to Cologne, the Rhineland city she had visited with her school as a teenager. Four hours to Frankfurt—a blank space on her internal map. Munich, six hours. But why limit herself to Germany? There were night trains to Scandinavia. In short hours, she might part the curtains in her sleeper compartment to view the sea beyond the Danish peninsula. What was that called? The Baltic? Scapa Flow?

‘Scarper,’ she said, testing the word.

She gave a euro to the woman who tended the ladies’ toilet. Inside, she found a disabled stall. Jem put her plastic bag on the cistern and dealt her tools across the seat: hair clips, plastic gloves, towels, and a hand mirror. She re-checked the chemical names on the reverse of the hair dye and asked Ego to reassure her that Wasserstoffperoxid was hydrogen peroxide and Ammoniaklösung ammonia. She smiled as she thought back to the girls in that crappy little hairdresser’s in Exeter.

Twenty minutes later—hair witchy black—she passed the cleaner and dropped a second euro on the plate. It would not cover the damage she had done to the sink. She put her prepaid mobile phone into a bin and bought a second, including a Bluetooth earpiece. She loaded the earpiece with a battery and slipped it over her ear, careful not to touch her hair.

‘Ego?’

‘Jem,’ said a voice in the earpiece, ‘I have booked your flight.’

‘I don’t want to fly.’

‘That is your best option. Other forms of transport are less safe.’

‘Less safe? From Cory?’

Ego paused. ‘I’m afraid he is certain to find you. He is focused on locating the information that he believes Saskia possessed. If he can’t have Saskia, he will have you.’

The coldness came. Jem tried to picture a life on the run from Cory. She could not.

‘There’s still the computer in her apartment.’

‘According to the German AP, an apartment on Dublinerstrasse was destroyed by fire in the early hours of this morning. I’m certain it was Saskia’s.’

‘Did Cory do it?’

‘Or incendiary countermeasures triggered by his attempts to access the computer.’

‘What will I do when he finds me?’

‘Imply that Saskia was carrying copies of her important documents on her person when the plane went down. That will give him something to go on—something to leave you for.’

‘If he thinks that I believe that, then I should be travelling to Saskia myself when he finds me. I’ll tell him I want her gambling system.’

‘Is that a lie or the truth?’

‘Up yours.’

‘It might be important, given that Cory might have enhanced sensory capabilities.’

‘He’ll be able to tell when I’m lying?’

‘Just so. Now, I will book you on five trains over the next two days. This should cause confusion. Begin by collecting your ticket from the information desk on your right.’

‘I have to get my gear first. I stashed it here this morning.’

She located the bank of lockers near the first platform and took the key from her pocket. The rucksack was still there.

‘Your train will leave from Gleis 4 in half an hour,’ said Ego. ‘Please collect your ticket.’

‘I’ll pretend to be French. You know, just in case they’re looking for an English woman.’

‘Pouvez-vous parler comme une personne native de France?’

‘Que?’

‘Try Lithuanian.’

‘Get bent, K9.’ She hefted the rucksack. ‘What about Danny?’

‘There is some chatter on the police network concerning Danny and Inspector Duczyński. Danny cannot be located and the Berlin police have instructions to detain him for questioning. However, their physical description is inaccurate. This is due to some nuisance phone calls on my part.’

‘Is the inspector hurt?’

‘It appears that Inspector Duczyński is not severely injured. He received a concussion and a flesh wound. He will be discharged from the UKB hospital later today. He has, however, been suspended pending disciplinary action for involving Wolfgang and losing Cory.’

‘Who, let me guess, is nowhere to be found.’

‘Correct.’

The crowd flowed around her stopped body and cold air touched the last of the water on her neck. She thought of Cory watching the flames in Saskia’s apartment.

Pyrene. ‘They make fire extinguishers. Ironically.’

Fire: Did it roll up the cabin of the aircraft as it dived? Burned jeans and cowgirl boots. And in the jeans: the pink sheets of an unbeatable gambling system, edges charred.

‘Where might Cory be?’

‘I have no idea.’

Jem remembered the sensation that had overwhelmed her the previous night, just after she had returned to Saskia’s apartment, when Cory walked into the kitchen: the silence had been so complete that she had questioned her perceptions of the man. Was Cory even there? Had she imagined him?

‘Jem,’ said Ego. ‘We must go to the library on Fasanenstrasse to locate a book called Resources and Parsing.’

‘Why?’

‘It is one of the few books in that library that has never been borrowed. It will make an effective hiding place.’

Jem walked to the end of the platform, where the long train began to curl. She entered the tenth couchette and found an empty compartment. Its four beds had been folded out. The mattress on each was hard. The pillows, at least, were English in size and shape. Thick curtains covered the window and the door to the corridor. The compartment smelled of feet. Jem finished her baguette, screwed up the paper bag, and put her bottle of water on the small table beneath the window. There was a ladder against the bunk. She put an elbow on a rung.

As the train pulled away, she was watching her expression in the mirror of a washroom. The configuration of her eyes and mouth—the triangle one might draw between them—seemed different. Perhaps this was due to her hair. It was now black, not blue, and the loss of the gas-flame colour was like misplacing an enjoyable book half-read.

She returned to her compartment. No late-boarding passengers had joined her. This part of the couchette was empty, though she could hear a group of Dutch students at the far end playing a drinking game. She twisted the door lock and pressed the switch that toggled between the ceiling light and the lights in each berth. She fell across her mattress and climbed, fully clothed apart from her skirt, beneath the thin sheet. It was stitched along one side to make a bag. She lay there, thinking. Raindrops made slick diagonals on the window. There was a cord to pull the curtains but she wanted to keep the night close. Outskirts of Berlin. Factories. Endless flatness. Did Regensburg mean ‘city of rain’? She had no-one to ask. She tugged the string and the curtains shut.

She dreamed of a castle whose walls moved at night. Saskia was there. She knew its secret passages. Her eyes were swollen and her hair long—the hair of the dead grew—and her lips were like meat on a barbecue, part-cooked and split.

When she awoke, it was still night, but the train had stopped. She plumped her sweaty pillow and waited for the beat of the wheels to resume. After some minutes, they did, and she let the movement wash her to the edge of sleep. But she had a headache where the plates of her skull met, at her crown, and the pain in her abdomen refused to let her move from doziness to true sleep. Her eyes wandered over the sooty shapes in her room and she named them, in order, as the overhead luggage basket, the laminated fire safety poster, and the door. A glimmer winked from the lock. The other beds, the bottle of water, the ladder. Her eyes returned to that glimmering lock. Something was wrong.

Like the sudden falling away of the sea before a tsunami.

Like everything was about to go wrong.

The tab was vertical. Unlocked.

She heard a sound from her nightstand. In the pile of coins she had scooped from the pocket of her duffle coat and placed there, an unnoticed bead the size of a breath freshener rolled—impossibly—over the raised edge and bounced twice on the carriage floor. She heard it cross to the door.

Blood hissed in her ears. Her muscles reeled tight. She could not move anything but her eyes. She found a shape in the darkness. Incidental light shifted in the tell-tale pattern of another person, reaching down to pick up the white bead.

Her struggle resolved to a thought. It condensed on her lips.

‘Cory?’

Suddenly, the cabin was filled with light.

Cory was wearing a black overcoat. There was a dash of white at his neck. She stared at it, conscious of the absurdity but not sure why, until she released that he was disguised as a priest. His hair was wet and his eyes had lost the depth of their blue. White stubble dusted his cheeks. He looked like a man in the last days of an illness. His finger remained on the light switch. As she looked from his hand to his face, Cory nodded slowly. It was the nod of a boxer before a round.

Jem recoiled from this propriety. She repeated the line she had rehearsed with Ego.

‘I thought you were dead.’

Cory moved forward. Jem recalled the moment she had first seen her brother at the TV tower. He had seemed to swoop upon her, like a bird of prey to her arm. Cory’s eyes, this close, were bloodshot. He gripped her head by the ears. This was at odds with the elegance of the man in Saskia’s apartment. She gasped and put her hands over his.

‘Jem, do you understand the danger you’re in?’

He won’t kill me, she thought. Ego had been certain. She had information. She might be able to cooperate. But there was a blankness in his eyes that suggested the professionalism of an executioner.

‘How did you find me?’

Cory blinked. Wrong answer, the movement said. He lifted her head and dashed it against the metal rim of the window. Jem heard the sound as though it came from outside the train. She almost laughed. Cory had wanted to hurt her, but she was fine. He had underestimated the toughness of her nut.

‘I know exactly how much energy your head can take before the skin splits, or the bone cracks, or your brain is damaged. Do you understand?’

‘Yes–’ A sudden dizziness made her head feel hollow. There was a little blood in her eye. ‘Yes, you cunt.’

‘Where is the Ego unit?’

‘Where do you think? I posted it to my Aunt Mavis in Scunthorpe.’

Jem thought once more of the debonair spook who had told her the story of the Star Dust in Saskia’s apartment. She tried to count the distance between that image and the man before her, as one might count the seconds between lightning and thunder.

‘I’m going to ask you a question. Think carefully before you answer. Now, where is the Cullinan Zero?’

‘Wait. I…’

‘What?’

‘Saskia survived the crash. She knows, doesn’t she? About…’ She struggled to remember the word Cory had used. ‘The Coolinan?’

All movement ceased in Cory’s expression. He leaned forward, as if he was going to bite.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’

He put his lips on hers. Jem frowned but did not recoil. Well, she thought, if that will… and her consciousness flatlined like a leaf pressed beneath the iron wheels of the train.

August, 1947, Buenos Aires

It was the evening after Cory had met Jennifer. Cory and Lisandro were alone in an alley alongside the restaurant where, not minutes ago, he had treated the boy to a farewell treat of ice-cream. Now he had Lisandro in his arms, crushed too tightly to draw breath—a snake’s trick—and the white knife pierced the boy’s chest.

He remembered Jennifer’s advice. ‘Cory, the boy has always been dead. He was dead before he was born and he was dead after he died. His life is just a blip on a line: a two-dimensional irregularity on the forever one-dimensional. Here’s the secret: That blip gets smaller when you zoom out.’ The last two words looped in Cory’s mind. Zoom out. Zoom out. Now he spoke them aloud.

‘Zoom out. Zoom out.’

‘Ah,’ said Lisandro. He might have been grasping a mathematical principle at last.

Zoom out.

Cory would never be the same. He knew this.

He watched blood well over his shaking knuckles as the factor probed the heart through those ribs, those little fishbone ribs dressed in cast-off clothes. The boy’s heart valves were fluttering. Cory could feel them. He levered the blade again. A tremor shook Cory’s neck and he felt tears run from each eye. Entrada. Lisandro: held too hard to shout. Abrazo. Ice-cream bubbling on his lips. Cory crouched and let the dead Lisandro come to rest in the puddles and feathers of the alley. Volcada. The boy had passed into the forever one-dimensional.

‘You shouldn’t have followed me,’ Cory whispered. He coughed to recover his voice. ‘But you were already dead. I could have read that newspaper at any time. It was archived long before I was your age. You were always dead.’

Cory checked the alleyway. With his augmentations, the rats were clear shapes among the rubbish. He saw no people. There was a blue pinstripe suit in his gunny sack, and he changed into it.

‘Forgive me, Lisandro. Le llegó la hora.’

He squatted and took the one-hundred peso note from the boy’s bloodied trouser band.

Where the alley opened onto the street, he paused. Martín, the overweight owner of the restaurant next door, was standing on its porch. He described a shape with his cigar to a group of men who were dressed for an expensive dinner, which ruled them out as customers of Martín. Cory turned and put footsteps between him and Martín and Lisandro. His suit’s blue pinstripes complemented the rich colours of this night, though his shoes were bone-white beacons.

Cory remembered the bloodied one-hundred peso note. He changed direction and passed into the crowd. The trinket sellers jostled him and he barked gruff idioms drawn from Lunfardo slang. The throngs multiplied, and he avoided the improvised clearings where dancers moved foot-against-foot, belly-to-belly. Abrazo, the embrace. Entrada, the entrance. Volcada, the capsizement: the dancer tilts his partner, then, at the last moment, catches her.

To judge by the light in the door’s frosted glass, Lisandro’s mother was awake. Cory did not knock. He pushed the bloodied one-hundred peso note under the door. Turning away, making zeros in the dirt, subtracting himself, he heard laughter behind the door, and it might have been Jennifer laughing at the sentimentality of a fool.