Touch (4 page)

My first switch.

I was thirty-three years old.

He was probably only in his twenties, but his body felt a lot older. His skin flaked in little white clouds as he scratched, a great rasping of dry flesh beneath cracked yellow nails. His hair was turning smudged grey, his beard grew in erratic patches from a once-scarred chin, and when he beat me to death, he only did it for the money to fill his belly, and his belly was so empty

my belly was so empty

as I discovered, when I switched.

I didn’t want to touch him, since he had just killed me. But I didn’t want to die alone so, as my vision flooded like wine in a cup, I reached out and grabbed his shoulder as he pulled my purse from round my waist, and in that moment I became him, just in time to see myself die.

Awake at 3 a.m. in a hotel room.

The light still on.

Nothing on TV.

This body needs sleep.

I need sleep.

Sleep does not come.

A mind that will not stop, thoughts that will not cease.

At 9.40 a.m. a woman called Josephine Cebula left a hotel room in Istanbul, heading to the waterfront. Three days ago she’d met two new friends, who’d said please join us, we’ll teach you how to fish off the Galata bridge.

I’m too beautiful to fish, the mind that wore the body of Josephine Cebula had thought. Are you sure you don’t want me to change into someone more appropriate?

Fishing would be delightful, my fresh red lips proclaimed. I’ve always meant to learn how to fish.

By midday I’d seen someone in the corner of my eye, and by 12.20 p.m. I was running, grateful that my shoes had flat soles, for the crowds of Taksim, for the easy way out, my bare fingers flicking from skin to skin as I searched for a suitable exit route, and then, as I stumbled against the body of a woman with swollen ankles and the taste of coconut in her mouth, the gunman at my back had fired, and I had felt the shot tear through my leg, felt flesh burst outwards and arteries snap, seen my own blood sprinkled on the concrete in front of me, and as I closed my eyes against the pain and opened my mouth to scream, my fingers had tangled against those of a stranger, and I had run and left Josephine Cebula to die.

And then

inexplicably

he’d killed Josephine.

She was fallen and I was gone, but he put two bullets in her chest and she died, even though he was coming for me.

Why would anyone do that?

In a hotel room, 3 a.m., and my left leg ached, though there was no sign of scarring or apparent cause for pain.

A Manila folder from Nathan Coyle’s lethal travelling bag.

I’d glimpsed it when I stole his car, and now, as the night crawled towards dawn, I spread its contents across the bed and looked again, and saw the faces of my life stretched out before me. A single name was written across the front of the file: Kepler.

It seemed as good a name as any.

I checked out of the Edirne hotel at 7 a.m. Breakfast was from a bakery around the corner, which served hot croissants, cherry jam and the best coffee I’d had in this body so far. With my bags on my back and hat pulled down low, I went looking for the first bus to Kapikule, and out of this country. In a murderer’s body I couldn’t think of any good reason to linger.

How unusual it felt for me to be the innocent in any crime but my flesh to be the hunted.

The thought made me smile all the way to the ticket booth.

There were eleven people on the short bus ride to Kapikule, which seemed apt, as the bus was no more than a converted minivan with a paper sign in the front which read,
KAPIKULE
.
LEV
OR
LIRA
ACCEPTED
,
NO
CHANGE
GIVEN
.

An ageing man and his aged mother were sitting in the twin seats behind me, bickering.

She said, “I don’t want to.”

He said, “Mother…”

She said, “I don’t want to and that’s that.”

He said, “Well, you’ve got to, Mother, you’ve got to, and we’ve had this conversation and this is your future as well as mine so we’re going and you’ve got to and that’s it.”

She said, her voice rising almost to the point of tears, “But I don’t want to!”

Their conversation continued in this vein all the way to the station, and doubtless beyond.

Kapikule was a non-place on the edge of not-anywhere-really. Not so long ago I would have avoided it and picked up the train I wanted directly from Edirne’s central station. But these were difficult times, lines suspended for lack of pay, terminals withering as the flow of people dried up with the work.

The station was a two-storey building of no discernible merit whatsoever, lit in fluorescent white. In another country it might have been a grim commercial development filled with little shops doomed to fail, or a well-intentioned residential undertaking whose purpose had been corrupted by dubious landowners looking to sell on to MegaMart International. As it was, it was neither of these things.

The ticket clerk sat with his chin resting on the palm of his hand as I approached. His cap was pulled down over his eyes, but when he looked up at the arrival of money on the steel counter before him I was excited to see that here was the last man left in the world who thought that a Hitler-Chaplin moustache was the pinnacle of stylish facial hair.

I pushed cash and my Turkish passport towards him. He regarded both as a doctor observes a severed leg, waiting to see if there may yet be a body attached.

“What?” he asked.

“Belgrade,” I said.

His sigh as he took my money – and ignored my passport – was the profound heave of a man aware that, strictly speaking, you have him. You have him and really he has to oblige, but, damn it, a kinder man would have walked away, let him rest, rather than trouble him with this ticket-selling business.

“Train is this evening,” he grumbled, pushing the meagre papers towards me. “You’ll have to hang around.”

“Is there anything to see in Kapikule?”

His look could have cowed a cobra. I smiled my most charming smile, slipped the tickets into my passport and said, “I’ll find somewhere to nap.”

“Don’t nap here,” he barked. “Station property.”

“Of course it is. How silly of me.”

I was reluctant to wait anywhere too public.

By now the police may have found my body’s fingerprints, a hair fallen from my fleeing head or some other symptom of a cock-up which I knew not of, and begun to trace its movements. Perhaps they – the great unknown “they” – have followed CCTV footage from the moment Josephine Cebula fell down the stairs of Taksim station, all the way back to a hire car pulling into a car park beneath a hotel, and, if they are especially skilled at their job, an alert could have been issued for my hire car, now sitting in the shade of a cypress tree opposite a fountain where metal sunflowers grow.

Or perhaps not.

Perhaps the police were baffled.

Who was I to say?

I took shelter in a tiny pink-stone chapel by the banks of the river. I was in Turkey, but the neatly ordered dusty fields beyond the water, their crops uprooted for the harvest, the soil already turned for next year’s seeding, were in Greece. A spit and I could be there, and for a moment I considered it – quick knife to the wrists and then away I’d go in the body of a Greek farmer, breath smelling of garlic, shoes scrubbed with sand.

A priest with a great black beard approached me as I sat in the furthest pew, legs crossed upon a stone bench. He addressed me first in Greek, a language where I have never been strong, and hearing my accent raised his eyebrows in surprise, and switched to Turkish.

“This church was founded by Constantius I. He was travelling through the empire and came to this place, where he drank the waters of the river. That night, as he lay sleeping, the Virgin Mary came to him and bathed his feet and hands, and daubed his lips with the water from this stream. When he woke, he was so taken with the vision that he ordered a monastery built here. It was a thriving place: pilgrims came to wash their feet and dream of the Madonna. Then the Ottomans knocked down all but this little chapel you see now, but Sultan Selim the Grim came to this place while hunting, and lay down to rest by its banks and dreamed the same dream that his predecessor, Constantius, had dreamed. When he woke, he washed his hands and feet in the waters and proclaimed the river blessed, and said it was a crime to do any further harm against the walls of this place. He left this.” His hand swept the wall, brushing over the faded remains of a great golden scrawl of near-vanished paint, running across three feet of the wall nearest the altar. “The sultan’s
tigra
, stamp of his authority, so that should any man ever threaten these walls again, we could take him inside and show him the word of his master. He saved this chapel, though the pilgrims did not come again.”

I nodded the slow nod of the theologically well-meaning, eyes running from the signature of the sultan to the sad smile of the Virgin Mary above it, and asked, may I go down to the river and see if it washes my sins away?

The priest’s eyes widened in horror.

Of course you can’t, he exclaimed. The river is blessed!

The body of Nathan Coyle.

Upon reflection, he’s not really my type. The muscles under my arms and across my back are a little too gym-built, maintained by the lifting and dropping of weights for no apparent purpose. Years of running have strengthened my cardiovascular system, but my left knee aches after too long motionless, and the pain grows steadily until relieved by stretching. I am a little long-sighted – undoubtedly excellent vision at a distance, but close to I find myself inclined to squint. I can find no sign of contact lenses or glasses in my bag. Perhaps he’d been meaning to go to the optician. More likely he simply hadn’t realised that squinting was not the norm, having no experience save his own.

A file labelled “Kepler” sat on my lap.

The bench on the Kapikule platform was cold, hard, metal. The wind was from the east, the smell of rain on the air, the Belgrade train running twenty minutes late.

I have no interest in going to Belgrade per se. My aim is to get out of Turkey, away from the police hunting my face. But Coyle’s passports are North American, north European, and there is a text on my phone which reads
Circe
, and a murder kit in my bag, and though it would be simple to kill this body and move on, I remember the feel of the bullet as it went through my leg, and though I ran and Josephine died

yet it was me he aimed to kill.

The file on my lap was laid out chronologically, photos and documents. An introduction lamented that no further information on entity Kepler was available than these thin pages of lives stolen, time lost. Not a footnote, appendix or watermark suggested who the author was.

I turned through sheaves of notes, stiff glossy photos, faces and names I barely remembered, until I reached the most recent photo – my photo. Josephine Cebula.

A copy of her Polish passport, found in the hands of her Frankfurt pimp. Her face, devoid of make-up and joy, was plain and grim, but no less than the face which had greeted me in the morning mirror.

A photo, snapped on a street corner, her face half-turned away as the photographer swept by, a moment captured, frozen, discarded.

The police record for the first time she was arrested, released nine hours later. She wore a short leather jacket that exposed her belly button, a skirt that barely covered her behind, and a bruise beneath her right eye as she glared at the camera.

The boarding pass I’d used when I caught the plane from Frankfurt to Kiev, ready for a languorous trip down the Crimea. I’d travelled business class, dressed in new, bright clothes, and as the stewardess poured me whisky I’d felt an itching and realised that Josephine was a smoker whose needs I had failed to indulge. Landing in Kiev and cursing all the way, I’d bought a box of nicotine patches and sworn that, by the time I gave her body back, she’d be clean, physiologically, if not mentally.

A picture of me, leaving the hotel in Pera, the sun on my face and phone in my hand, for I was young and rich and beautiful, and if these qualities lend themselves to one thing, it is the making of quick and easy friends. I remembered that day, that sunshine, that dress. It had been three days before I was gunned down on the steps of Taksim station, shot by a stranger. For three days they’d watched me leading my life, until they were ready to make the kill.

My nails dug into the palm of my hand, and I let them dig. A little blood, right now, wouldn’t go entirely amiss.

I flipped through to the report on Josephine. A violent mother who swore she loved her daughter and wept on Josephine’s shoulder every time she was released from jail. A boyfriend who’d told her that it was OK if she slept with his friends; in fact, he needed the money to pay for all the pretty things he’d bought her. A flight to Frankfurt, a flight from everything, thirty-two euros in her pocket and the author had no doubt she’d intended a better life, a good life for herself, but it seemed that Josephine’s situation was untenable until the entity known as Kepler arrived and offered her money for murder.

I stopped.

A list of the dead. Dr Tortsen Ulk, drowned in his own toilet. Magda Müller, stabbed to death in her kitchen by a stranger, her daughters asleep upstairs. James Richter and Elsbet Horn, found in each other’s arms, their eyes ripped out and insides spread across the floor of the cabin of the little boat they were sailing up the Rhine. Though the police had never linked the killings, lamented the author, we have done so, for these victims were part of us, and it was by Josephine’s hand, and at Kepler’s command, that they all died.

I read the words once and, not sure I had understood, read again.

They were no different on the second look, and no less lies.

The Belgrade train shrieked like a metal mother-in-law, white sparks bursting from its wheels as it crawled to a halt in Kapikule. A few lights were still on behind the blinds of the couchettes. Doors opened here or there, thick orange panels swinging out, metal stairs dropping down. The train had once been orange and blue, Bulgarian Railways’ finest. That colour was long since lost, obscured beneath layers of spray paint, the pride of the line overwritten by the pride of the kids who haunted the terminals at either end of the line. I smelt urine from the toilet that guarded the door, heard the illicit pressure pump of a passenger committing that ultimate offence – flushing while in the station – and turned to find my cubicle.

A cabin for six, four of the beds already taken. A husband, wife, teenage son occupied three; in the other was an old man who chewed something herbal with the circular grinding of a camel’s jaw and lay on his back to read articles about ancient cars and journeys through the east. The family had a makeshift feast, which they passed up and down the three-bunk tier they inhabited. Hard-boiled eggs, slices of ham, pieces of goats’ cheese, crumbling bread that shook golden shards across the floor. With every crunch of the knife through the loaf, the old man with the car magazine flinched, as if the blade were cutting bone.

I climbed into the top bunk as the train jerked into motion, put my bag of clothes beneath my head, my bag of weapons beneath my feet, and lay back to think. Metal bunk below, plastic ceiling above, the space between barely wide enough for a tomb.

No one came to check the passports.