“Honestly,” I replied, shuffling my papers out of the way of her heeled shoes, “I don’t see the point.”

“You don’t see the point of being Marilyn fucking Monroe?” she squeaked.

“No. Is it wealth you want? There’s richer people out there. The body? There are prettier bodies. You want fame? You want to feel adored, adulated for a night? They’re not adoring you, it’s not you they’ll praise. You want to experience that high, find the body of a dresser or a stage manager, and as the actor goes on for their final bow, grab them by the wrist and walk out to the roaring of the crowd. Or learn to do it for yourself. Find a pretty body–an anonymous pretty body–and I’ll jump into producers and casting directors in any studio in LA and tick that box by your name right up to the moment when you turn to the camera and smile your cosmetic moonlit smile.”

Aurangzeb had rolled her eyes when my words began, and now she rolled them again as I finished. “You want me to work? I could be Clark Gable like that.” She snapped her long manicured fingers. “I could walk Laurence Olivier naked round London; I could be fucking Marlon Brando–I could be Marlon Brando fucking–and you wanna tell me to sit back and take, what, five years out of my life, maybe ten, to get what I could get in a day? What the hell is wrong with you?” She leaned forward, legs swinging down, eyes bright. “I heard things about you. I thought you were the kinda guy who lived.”

“What kind of things did you hear?” I asked softly.

“That you were a guy who tried things out. That you’d been the fat soprano, the airline pilot; you’d shaken hands right into the Oval Office. I heard you did stuff too, like, back in the war. I heard that there were more forgetful soldiers staggering around central Europe in 1943 than there were fucking V1s dropped on London.”

“I had no idea Janus gossiped so much. And what did you do in the war?”

“Moved about. America. Canada. I thought it’d be cool to hitch a ride with a GI on a ship to Europe, once the U-boats were going down, but in the end I tagged along with a co-pilot and faked food poisoning over the Atlantic. Way easier. I saw the liberation of Paris.”

“And what was that like?”

“It was shit,” she replied. “Guys marching up and down and people waving and bands playing, and I thought, where were you last week, where were you yesterday, when you didn’t know if you were gonna wave the fucking tricolour or the swastika? Then I found out that the guy I was wearing was a collaborator and that dampened my mood.” She slammed her hands down into her thighs and exclaimed, “The war was so fucking lame!” and it occurred to me that, for all her curving clothes and pampered hair, in every way, in every flail of her arms and the way she sat with knees apart, Aurangzeb was through-and-through an American male.

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “OK,” I breathed. “We need to get you walking in some higher heels.”

Chapter 40

A direct train runs from Vienna to Berlin. It is a white monster decked out with the square red letters DB–Deutsche Bahn. With its origami white cabins and stainless-steel sinks, the slick Berlin sleeper was a triumphant two fingers raised against the Balkans Express.

I had a two-bed berth to myself. With the mattresses folded into the wall, it was a bright white triumph of spatial engineering. Unfolded, you had to squeeze between bunk and wall like an eel through a cracked sluice.

Outside, the full romantic cliché of the German night became apparent, criss-crossed only by the light of the yellow-skimmed autobahn as we raced it north. Low moonlit mist clung to the fields; towns flared, puddles of whiteness; great rivers wound between black hills, little villas of white concrete and clean glass peeking out between the trees, where the stressed families of München and Augsburg went to relax. When the train began to curve east, it did so in a great sweep, luxurious as the painter’s brush drawing the final curve of a woman’s breast.

I watched the landscape go by, my bed made but untouched. Every body grows used to its own smell, but even I could tell that I stank. The water from my sink ran either too hot, or too cold, with no middle ground.

At 1 a.m. I heard the shuffle of the stewardess as she made her rounds down the slumbering train. I snapped a bracelet of my handcuffs on to my left wrist, leaned out of my door and whispered, “Madam?” Even at that hour, her smile had been engineered to dazzling perfection. “Madam,” I murmured above the heartbeat of the track beneath us, “could you help me?”

Of course, sir. It’d be a pleasure.

I gestured her into the cabin. She followed, eyes curious, smile open. With one person the cabin might have been called cosy; with two it became suffocating.

“May I…” she asked,

and I reached out, caught her wrist, jumped.

Nathan Coyle. He was getting better at recognising his own symptoms: as he swayed, dizzy at the release, he tried to lash out, flailing wildly, his hand striking the compartment wall with a thump that made him wince. I caught his hand and snapped the handcuffs to the rail on the higher bunk, waited for the dizziness to pass.

Pass it did. He felt the restraint on his left wrist, saw the handcuff, groaned and slouched back against the wall. “Right,” he grunted. “Where now?”

“Train to Berlin.”

He raised one drooping eyebrow to examine me. “What are you supposed to be? I thought you only went in for whores and garbage men.”

I smoothed down my uniform. “I think I look rather smart. You missed the joy that was Kapikule, or the Balkans Express, or Slovakian buses, so you probably lack the appreciation for a smiling face as it stamps your ticket that I have. Thankfully, you and I will both benefit from Deutsche Bahn’s breakfast tray with marmalade.”

“I hate marmalade.”

“I like it,” I retorted. “I could eat pots of the stuff.”

He straightened a little, turned to fully examine me. “Are you… threatening me with breakfast condiments?”

I tucked a loose strand of hair behind a delicate ear, and said, “I have an address for Alice Mair.”

His fists tightened. “She’ll be ready for you,” he breathed.

“I know. By now your friends will be scouring Europe for you–or rather me, or let’s say us. That they haven’t found us is something we can perhaps both be grateful for. I’ve been through the Kepler file and I can’t work out what deed I directly performed that could induce such personal hatred in you. Professional dislike and business animosity I can comprehend. In the last ten years I have worn prostitutes, beggars, criminals, liars, killers, thieves. I haven’t always been… I was not always what I am now, but surely you can see, I have tried my best.” I shivered, suddenly cold in my uniform shirt. “Your file is a lie. Perhaps you assume I’ve killed, that I’ve… worn a body for a night, ridden high on the sex and heroin, and left it to die of the overdose, alone on the hospital floor. I have lived longer than you know, and I have carved… turmoil through my past. You talked to my hosts. Were they unhappy? Were they left naked and alone? As samples of my species go, you must be able to see, you must know… I am a bad choice of target.”

He didn’t speak, didn’t move. I hissed in frustration, my thin arms wrapped tight across my bony chest. “You presume the high ground. Most murderers do. But it was me you should have killed, not Josephine.”

Was that hesitation in his face? A quiver of a thought more than hate? It was hard to tell. I had spent too much time in his features, not looking at them.

“Who is Galileo?” I asked and saw his weight shift, one foot to the other, then back again.