Night Work (2 page)

Jonas surveyed this panorama. It was the view from the flat that had prompted him to rent it two years ago. He used to stand there in the evenings and watch the sun go down behind the mountains, bathing him in its rays until the very last moment.

He checked that the front door was locked, then poured himself a whisky and returned to the window, glass in hand.

There weren’t many possible explanations. Some catastrophe was to blame. But if everyone had fled from the threat of an attack by nuclear missiles, why hadn’t those missiles landed? In any case, why should anyone take the trouble to waste such expensive technology on an old city that had lost its importance?

An asteroid strike. Jonas had seen films in which kilometre-high tsunamis came surging inland after such an event. Was that what the Viennese had fled from? Had they taken refuge in the Alps? If so, they would have left some trace behind. The authorities couldn’t have evacuated a million-and-a-half inhabitants overnight and forgotten about him alone. And all without his noticing.

Maybe he was dreaming. Maybe he’d gone mad.

Mechanically, he took another sip of whisky.

He looked up at the cloudless sky. He didn’t believe that extraterrestrials would have spent light years travelling
through space, simply to annihilate every Viennese except himself. He didn’t believe in any of that stuff.

He extracted his address book from under the phone and dialled every number listed. He called Werner again, likewise Marie’s relations in England. He dialled the police, the fire brigade, the emergency services. He tried 911, 160 604, 1503. No emergency services. No taxi. No speaking clock.

Jonas looked through his collection of videos for movies he hadn’t yet seen or hadn’t seen for a long time. He deposited a stack of comedies in front of the TV and lowered the blinds.

Jonas awoke with a sore throat. He felt his forehead. No temperature. He stared up at the ceiling.

After breakfast, having satisfied himself that the TV was still flickering and the street deserted, he sat down beside the phone. Marie didn’t answer – neither her mobile, nor her relatives’ phone. He couldn’t reach anyone else either.

He turned out half the medicine cabinet before he found an aspirin. Leaving it to dissolve, hissing, in a glass of water, he took a shower. He put on some casual clothes. He drained the glass in one gulp.

He looked in both directions as he left the building and came out into the sunlight. He took a few steps, turned his head swiftly. He stopped. Listened. Just the muted lapping of the Danube Canal. He craned his neck and scanned the windows for signs of movement.

Nothing.

Back inside again, he went downstairs to his storage space in the basement. He turned the contents of his toolbox upside down without finding anything suitable. Then he remembered the pipe wrench he’d left beside a stack of old tyres.

‘Anyone there?’

His voice sounded absurdly feeble in the Westbahnhof’s spacious concourse.

Shouldering the pipe wrench, he stomped up the steps to the departure hall. Bureau de change, newsagent, cafés – all were shut.

He went out onto the platforms. Several trains were standing there as if on the point of pulling out. Back to the departure hall, then out onto the platforms once more.

Back again.

Out again.

He jumped aboard the Intercity to Bregenz and searched it carriage by carriage, compartment by compartment. He called out as he entered each stuffy carriage in turn, gripping the pipe wrench tightly. Sometimes he coughed or cleared his throat with the ferocity of a man fifty pounds heavier. He made as much din as possible by banging the wrench against the partitions.

By midday he’d explored every last corner of the station. Every train, every ticket office. The lounge. The restaurant where he’d eaten a few lousy meals, which still reeked of stale fat. The supermarket. The tobacconist’s. The News & Books. He’d bashed in windows and glass doors with the pipe wrench, disconnected wailing security alarms and searched a whole series of back rooms. Bread two days old indicated the last time anyone had been there.

The big arrivals and departures board in the middle of the concourse was blank.

The clocks were working.

So were the cash dispensers.

At Schwechat Airport he didn’t bother to park in the multi-storey and walk all the way back. He left his car right
outside the main entrance, in the no-waiting area normally patrolled by policemen and security personnel.

The temperature out here was somewhat cooler than in the city. Flags were fluttering noisily in the breeze. Shading his eyes with one hand, he searched the sky for aircraft. He strained his ears, but all he could hear was the flap-flap of the flags.

With the pipe wrench on his shoulder he strode down some dimly lit passages to the departures level. Menus were stuck in their holders on the tables outside the café. The café was shut, like the restaurant and the pub. The lifts were working, the departure lounges accessible. No flights were listed. The electronic displays were blank.

He combed the entire area. An alarm went off when he passed through a security gate. Repeated blows with the wrench failed to silence it. He peered around uneasily. There was a box on the wall. He pressed several buttons and the wailing finally ceased.

On the arrivals level he sat down at a computer terminal, trying to discover the last time an aircraft had taken off or landed. Either he didn’t have the expertise to tackle the problem, or the computer had a fault. No amount of messing around with mouse and keyboard would bring up anything on the screen but meaningless, flickering columns of figures.

He got lost several times before he found the stairs and walked out onto the tarmac.

Most of the aircraft attached to the telescopic walkways belonged to Austrian Airlines. There was a Lauda, a Lufthansa, a Yemeni machine, another from Belgium. Standing further away was an El-Al 727. This plane interested him most. Why was it so far out? Had it been about to take off?

When he reached the plane he crouched down. He looked up at it, breathing heavily, then back at the airport
buildings. He felt disappointed. It wasn’t anything like as far out as he’d thought. The runway’s dimensions had played a trick on him, nor was there any indication that the pilot had been on his way to the take-off point.

Jonas started to shout. He hurled the wrench at a window, first in the cockpit and then in the passenger cabin. When it landed on the tarmac for the eighth or ninth time it broke in half.

He combed every hall, every lounge, every area accessible to him. In the loading bay he made a discovery that galvanised him: dozens of bags and suitcases.

Excitedly, he opened one. Underclothes. Socks. Shirts. Swimming trunks.

Neither this bag nor any of the others contained any clue to what had happened to their owners. There weren’t enough to suggest that they belonged to an entire flight. It seemed more probable that they’d either been forgotten or were awaiting collection. They might have come from anywhere, any time. No help at all.

He got out at the intersection of Karolinengasse and Mommsengasse. Reaching in through the driver’s window, he sounded the horn and looked up at the front of the building as he did so. Not a window opened, not a curtain twitched, even though he hooted continuously.

He didn’t bother to press the intercom button. The front door, most of which was glass, yielded to a couple of blows with the remaining half of his wrench. He ducked through the jagged opening and went inside.

Werner’s flat was on the first floor. A photograph of a heavily laden yak was pinned to the door beneath the spyhole, and the doormat greeted visitors with a grimy Rolling Stones tongue. He couldn’t help remembering how
often he’d stood there, bottle of wine in hand, and listened to Werner’s approaching footsteps.

He hammered on the door with the remains of his wrench. He couldn’t open it – only a crowbar would have forced the lock. He felt in his pockets for something to write with, meaning to leave a message under the spyhole. All he found apart from a pencil was a dirty handkerchief. When he tried to scrawl a few words on the door itself, the lead broke off.

On reaching the Südbahnhof he noticed how hungry he was.

In the station concourse he trotted from ticket office to ticket office, shop to shop, smashing the windows with his wrench. He didn’t disconnect the security alarms this time. Having broken the window of the bureau de change, he waited to see if its alarm would go off, or if he would have to continue his orgy of destruction. Perhaps some still-surviving guardian of the law would think a heist was in progress and intervene.

To the ear-splitting accompaniment of the security alarms he rode the escalator up to the platforms. Taking his time, he began by exploring platforms 1 to 11 in the east section, where he’d seldom been before. Then he boarded the second escalator.

He also smashed the windows of the shops in the south section. They weren’t equipped with burglar alarms, which surprised him. He raided one for a bag of crisps and a can of lemonade, plus a packet of paper handkerchiefs for his runny nose. From the newsagent’s he grabbed a stack of newspapers two days old.

Without searching it from end to end, he got into the rear carriage of a train bound for Zagreb. The seat was
hot, the compartment stuffy. He yanked the window open and sat down, putting his feet on the seat opposite without removing his shoes.

While mechanically stuffing crisps into his mouth he looked through the newspapers. Not the smallest indication that some exceptional occurrence was imminent. Political squabbles at home, crises abroad, reports of horrors and banalities. The TV pages listed series, talk shows, magazine programmes.

His eyelids drooped.

The muffled, monotonous wail of the security alarms drifted into the compartment.

He swept the papers off his lap. He could afford a brief nap. Only a minute with his eyes closed and the muted strains of the sirens in his ears. Only a minute …

He jumped up and rubbed his face hard. He looked for a bolt on the door, then remembered that only sleepers were lockable.

He went out into the corridor.

‘Hello? Anyone there?’

He tested one of the curtains with his fingertips. It was so grimy and impregnated with nicotine, he wouldn’t have touched it normally. He tugged at it with all his might. There was a ripping sound and he fell over backwards with the length of material in his hand. Using what was left of the pipe wrench, he managed to tear it into several strips. These he used to lash the door handle to the grille of the luggage rack.

Having made a bed out of the six seats, he drained his can of lemonade and lay down.

He felt a bit more cheerful now. Lying there open-eyed with his head resting on his arm, he ran his fingers over the plush upholstery. They encountered a cigarette burn.

He couldn’t help thinking of the summer he and some friends had spent touring Europe by train. He’d travelled
many thousands of kilometres on a moving bed like this one. From one unfamiliar smell to another. From one happening to the next. From one exciting city to an even more alluring one. Fifteen years ago, it was.

The people he’d slept rough with in parks and railway stations – where were they at this moment?

Where were the people he’d been speaking to only two days ago?

Where was he? In a train. It was uncomfortable. It wasn’t going anywhere.

He might have slept for half an hour. Some saliva had trickled from the corner of his mouth. Instinctively, he wiped it off the seat with his sleeve. He looked at the door. His makeshift lock was intact. He shut his eyes and listened. No change. The security alarms were wailing exactly as before.

He blew his nose, which was stuffed up with cold and the dust from the compartment. Then he tried to untie the strips of curtain around the door handle. It turned out that he’d done his work too well. He picked at the knots with his fingers, but he was too clumsy and impatient. He tried brute force, but the door wouldn’t budge and the knots tightened still more. They were past untying now.

He had no choice but to free himself by violent means. He smashed the window with the wrench. Carefully, he climbed out into the corridor. He glanced back into the compartment, committing the scene to memory in case he should return for some reason.

Then he looted the supermarket.

He filled a wire-mesh basket with drinks and tins of soup, nibbles and bars of chocolate, apples and bananas. He also took meat and sausages. The perishable stuff
would soon go off. He didn’t dare think when he might get another fresh steak.

He circled his car before getting in, uncertain whether he had parked it at that particular spot.

He peered around. He walked a few steps, then went back to the car.

Jonas awoke fully dressed.

He thought he remembered putting on his pyjamas last night. Even if he hadn’t, he always wore something comfortable at home. He’d certainly got changed.

Or had he?

In the kitchen he found five empty beer cans. The beer he’d drunk – that he did remember.

After showering he threw some T-shirts and underpants into a bag before undertaking the depressing check of the window, TV and phone. He was hungry, but his appetite had deserted him. He decided to breakfast somewhere on the way. He blew his nose and smeared some ointment on the sore places beneath it. He did without a shave.

The look of the wardrobe puzzled him. Something had changed since yesterday. There seemed to be one jacket too many hanging there. That was impossible, though. Besides, he’d locked the front door. No one else had been here.

He was already standing on the doormat when something impelled him to go back inside. He stared at the hangers in the wardrobe but couldn’t put his finger on it.

The air was crystal-clear, the sky almost abnormally cloudless. Despite an occasional puff of wind, the dashboard in his car seemed to be melting. He lowered all the windows and half-heartedly pressed a few buttons on the radio. Nothing emerged but a hiss of static, sometimes louder, sometimes more subdued.

He found his father’s flat unchanged. The wall clock was ticking. The tumbler he’d drunk from was standing, half empty, on the table. The bedclothes were rumpled. When he looked out of the window he caught sight of the bicycle with the plastic cover on its saddle. The bottle was protruding from the dustbin. The motorbikes were in their places.

He was about to leave when he thought of the knife.

He didn’t have to search for long. His father kept his war souvenirs in the drawer beside the drinks cupboard. His Iron Crosses First and Second Class, his close-combat clasp, his wounded-in-action badge, his Eastern Campaign medal. Jonas knew them all. Often, as a child, he’d watched his father polishing them. An address book, his army paybook, some letters from comrades-in-arms. Three photos showing his father seated in some gloomy rooms with a group of fellow conscripts. The expression on his face was so unfamiliar Jonas couldn’t recall ever having seen him look like that. The knife was in there too. He took it.

His last visit to Schönbrunn Zoo had been a work outing – a cheerful occasion several years ago. He had a vague recollection of dirty cages and a café where they hadn’t been served.

Much had changed since then. The newspapers claimed that Schönbrunn was the finest zoo in Europe. It offered some new sensation every year. A pair of koalas, for example,
or other exotic beasts that obliged every Viennese with still-impressionable young children to make a pilgrimage to the zoo. It had never occurred to Jonas to spend his Sundays gazing at the big cats’ enclosure or the insectarium. Now, because he wanted to discover whether the animals had vanished as well, he pulled up beside the ticket office and the metal bollards that denied access to cars.

He didn’t get out until he’d sounded his horn for a couple of minutes. He stuck the knife in his belt. He also took the wrench with him.

The gravel path crunched beneath his feet. It was a little cooler here than in the city centre. Wind was ruffling the trees that surrounded the zoo, but nothing was stirring inside the fence which, according to a noticeboard, enclosed the giraffe paddock.

His legs refused to carry him beyond a point from which he could still see his car. He couldn’t bring himself to turn off down one of the lateral paths. The car was his home, his insurance.

He swung round, gripping the wrench tightly, and stood there with his head down, listening.

Just wind.

The animals had gone.

He sprinted back to the car. No sooner was he behind the wheel than he locked the doors. Only then did he put the wrench and the knife on the passenger seat. He left the windows shut in spite of the heat.

He had often driven along the A1. An aunt of his lived in Salzburg, and he’d regularly visited Linz to inspect new ranges of furniture for the firm. The A1 was the motorway he liked least. He preferred the A2 because it led south, towards the sea. The traffic was lighter too.

Without taking his foot off the accelerator, he opened the glove compartment and emptied the contents onto the passenger seat. His sore throat had developed into an increasingly troublesome cold. His forehead was filmed with sweat and the glands in his neck were swollen. His nose was so blocked up he was breathing almost entirely through his mouth. Marie seldom went anywhere without some remedies for minor ailments, but she hadn’t left anything in the glove compartment.

The further he got from Vienna, the more often he turned on the radio. Once every frequency had been scanned, he’d turn it off again.

At Grossram service station his hopes were raised by the sight of several parked cars. He sounded his horn. Then he got out, carefully locking the car behind him, and went over to the restaurant entrance. The automatic door hummed open.

‘Hello?’

He hesitated. The restaurant stood in the shade of a clump of fir trees. Although the sun was shining, it might have been early evening in the dim interior.

‘Anyone there?’

The door closed. He jumped back so as not to be squashed and it opened again.

He fetched the knife from the car. He peered in all directions but could detect nothing unusual. It was just an ordinary motorway service area with cars parked in front of the restaurant and alongside the petrol pumps. People were the only missing feature. People and sounds.

The automatic door glided open again. Its hum, heard a thousand times, seemed suddenly like a message to his subconscious. He walked past the turnstile that separated the shop and cashier’s desk from the restaurant and stood among the tables with the knife clutched in his fist.

‘What’s going on here?’ he called, louder than was necessary.

The tables, rows of them covered with white tablecloths, were laid. The self-service counter, which would normally have held soups and sauces, baskets filled with rolls, small bowls of croutons and big bowls of salad, was completely bare.

He discovered the remains of a loaf in the kitchen dresser. It was stale but still edible. He improvised a snack with some sandwich spread from the fridge and ate on his feet, staring at the tiled floor. Back in the restaurant he brewed himself some coffee at the espresso machine. The first cup tasted bitter. The second tasted no better, and it wasn’t until he’d made a fourth that he placed the cup on the saucer.

He sat down on the terrace. It was scorching hot. He put up a parasol. The tables were just as unremarkable as those inside. Each had an ashtray, a list of ice creams, a menu card, salt and pepper shakers, toothpicks. They would have looked just the same had he come this way a few days ago.

He looked around him. Not a soul in sight.

After he had spent a while staring at the grey ribbon of the motorway it occurred to him that he’d sat here once before. With Marie. At the very same table, in fact. He recognised it from its position, which gave him a view of a small, secluded vegetable garden. They’d been on their way to their holiday resort in France. They’d breakfasted here.

He jumped up. Perhaps there was something wrong with the phones in Vienna. Perhaps he could call someone from here.

He found a phone at the cash desk. By now he knew the number of Marie’s sister in England by heart. The same unfamiliar ringing tone.

No one in Vienna answered either. Not Werner, not the office, not his father.

He took a dozen postcards from a stand. He found some stamps in a folder in a drawer beneath the cash register. He wrote his own address on a card.

The message ran:
Grossram service area, 6 July
.

He stuck a stamp on. There was a postbox beside the entrance. A little notice stated that it was emptied at 3 p.m. No mention of the days of the week, but he posted the card anyway. He took the rest of the cards and the stamps with him.

He was about to unlock his car when he noticed a sports car parked nearby. He went over to it. No ignition key, of course.

Jonas left the motorway at the next exit and pulled up outside the first house in the first village he came to. He rang the bell and knocked.

‘Hello? Hello!’

The door wasn’t locked.

‘Anyone there? Hey? Hello!’

He checked all the rooms. Not a living soul. No dog, no canary, not even a fly.

He drove through the village, sounding his horn until he could stand the din no longer. Then he searched the local pub. Nothing.

All the villages he passed in the next couple of hours were off the beaten track. The few houses they consisted of were so dilapidated he wondered if anyone had been living there at all. No chemist’s anywhere, let alone a car showroom. He regretted not having left the motorway near some sizeable town. He was lost, from the look of it.

He pulled up on the right, out of habit. It was a while before he found his position on the map. He’d strayed off into the Dunkelstein Forest. It was over twenty minutes’
drive to the next motorway access road. He itched to get to it and put on speed again, but he was too tired now.

In the next village, which at least had a grocery store, he made for the most expensive-looking house. It was locked, but the remaining half of his wrench came in useful once more. He smashed a window and climbed in.

In the kitchen he found a packet of aspirin. While one of them was noisily dissolving in a glass of water, he combed the house. It was well furnished in dark wood. Some of the pieces he recognised. They belonged to the Swedish 99 Series, with which he himself had done good business for an entire season. Antlers hung on the walls. The floor was covered in the kind of thick carpets known at the office as ‘bug rugs’. None of the decor was cheap, but none of it was tasteful either. Children’s toys were lying around.

He returned to the kitchen and downed his aspirin.

Back in the living room he shut his eyes and listened. From the kitchen came the muffled ticking of a clock. Soot dislodged from cracks by the wind came rattling down the chimney. There was a smell of dust, timber and damp cloth.

The stairs creaked underfoot. The bedrooms were on the first floor. The first was obviously a child’s. Behind the second door he found a double bed.

He hesitated, but his eyelids were drooping with fatigue. On a sudden impulse, he undressed completely. He drew the dark, heavy curtains and turned on the bedside light, which cast a faint glow. Having satisfied himself that the door was locked, he lay down on the bed. The sheet was soft, the duvet cover of exceptionally fine cotton. Under other circumstances he would have felt good.

He turned out the light.

An alarm clock was ticking almost inaudibly on the bedside table. The pillow smelt of a person Jonas had
never met. Wind whistled in the roof space overhead. The sound of the alarm clock was strangely homely.

Darkness engulfed him.

He was feeling less muzzy than before. Sitting up, he caught sight of some gilt-framed photos on the chest of drawers. With a handkerchief clamped to his streaming nose, he tottered over to them like a sleepwalker.

One showed a woman of about forty. Although she wasn’t smiling, there was a hint of gaiety in her eyes. She didn’t look the kind of person who lived in a house like this one.

He wondered what she did for a living. Was she a secretary, or did she own a boutique in one of the larger towns nearby?

The next photo was of a man. Her husband? A bit older, with a greying moustache and dark, piercing eyes. He looked like someone who spent all day driving around on business in a 4WD.

Two fair-haired children. One eight or nine, the other only a few months old. Neither looked particularly bright.

The woman’s image stayed with him all the way to the motorway. Sporadic thoughts about the house recurred even while he was twiddling the knobs of the radio shortly before Linz. Then he forced himself to concentrate so he didn’t overshoot the exit.

He made out the huge factory chimneys from far away. No smoke was rising from them.

He drove into the city without observing the speed limit. He hoped a policeman would stop him, but he
quickly realised that something was wrong here too.

There were no pedestrians.

The shops flanking the street were deserted.

Traffic lights turned red, but he waited in vain for other cars to cross his route.

He sounded his horn, gunned the engine and slammed on the brakes. His tyres screamed, sending up a stench of burning rubber. He sounded his horn again: three short, three long, three short. He drove along the same stretch several times. Not a door opened, not a car came his way. The air smelt less unpleasant than it had on his last visit, but it was thundery.

When he pulled up at a chemist’s and got out, he wondered why it felt so exceptionally cold. Having suffered from the heat for weeks, he was now shivering. However, this probably owed more to his cold than to the gathering storm.

He smashed the plate glass door of the chemist’s and took a packet of aspirin and some throat pastilles from one of the shelves. On the way out he noticed some echinacea and pocketed a small bottle.

It didn’t take him long to find a pub whose door was unlocked. He called. There was no response, but he hadn’t expected one.

He noticed nothing out of the ordinary in the bar, which reeked of stale tobacco smoke and rancid fat.

He called again.

In the kitchen he put a saucepan of water on the stove and tossed a handful of potatoes into it. He killed time in the bar with a newspaper dated 3 July. People had still been here that day: gravy stains and breadcrumbs on the pages showed that. The newspaper itself was just as unremarkable as those he’d read at the station the day before. Nothing pointed to an event of exceptional magnitude.