Behind me a confused man with a battered briefcase thought about asking me where he was, how he came to be there, but who asks doddery old ladies anything these days?
Alice Mair lived on the third floor.
I took the lift and left my trolley on the landing.
I buzzed a brass bell once, twice. No reply. I considered knocking, but my knuckles felt hollow and my arm no stronger than a roll of paper soaked in rain.
I buzzed again.
A voice called out in German, “Coming.”
The door opened an inch, on the chain. I fixed my face to a foolish, denture-filled smile and said, “Have you seen my keys?”
A single eye, sky blue, peeked through the gap in the door. “Your… keys?”
“I had them,” I explained. “But I lost them.”
The eye considered.
Everyone knows that ghosts are vain; why would we be anything else? I am told that the old do not notice that age has come upon them until they are in the full throes of pain, in much the same way as an asthmatic assumes that the breath they struggle to draw is the same struggle fought by all men. No ghost ever chooses to be old.
“A moment,” said the voice.
I heard the rattling of the chain, and the door swung wide. A woman, five foot five, with blonde hair cut short and a hint of freckle across her flushed cheek, stood in jogger’s T-shirt and Lycra shorts, and as she opened her mouth to offer some charit able advice to the ageing neighbour who stood on her doorstep, I smiled my most sublime of smiles and caught her by the hand.
I don’t think she even had time to be afraid.
“Ma’am,” I said as the old woman blinked before me, “do you need help getting your shopping into your flat?”
Chapter 45
Impressions of the body of the woman called Alice Mair.
Good teeth, chemically whitened; nice hair; unplucked softly curving eyebrows. A twinge in my shins that might be the result of too much running in cold weather. Eyes seem good and she’s wearing sensible shoes. Itchy nose. A relief to be young again.
I lock the door behind me and inspect my apartment.
Walls painted a shade of not-quite-white which designers probably dubbed “pearl”. Flat-pack furniture, cream curtains hanging down before the windows. A flat-screen TV, a couple of magazines about women’s boxing and the plight of the polar bear. On the wall a collection of semi-Impressionist paintings bought three for two at a clearance sale of inoffensive art. Alice’s bed was freshly made, with matching duvet and pillow covers, but her laptop in the kitchen by a gently cooling cup of coffee was passcode protected. I patted my hips and felt no pockets, then spotted the phone on top of the microwave. It too was passcode locked.
I opened drawers, rummaged through books and pieces of old paper, checked the trash, the recycling bag beneath the sink. No pictures of friends, address books, handy lists of Christmas presents bought for helpfully notated colleagues. No files, no folders, no holiday snaps–nothing in this apartment to indicate even the slightest kind of external existence, save, of course, for the nine-millimetre pistol in her bedside cabinet. Alice was not about to win any awards for hospitality.
I sat on a soft padded sofa in a cream padded room, drinking the remains of Alice’s coffee, and tried to think.
Of all the paths available to me–and they weren’t a highway of choices–only one seemed to have any particular merit in it. Even so, that merit was questionable.
Walk away?
No reason for Alice Mair to have more than a glimmer of a doubt about my occupancy of her body. I could knock on the old lady’s door right now, pick up the conversation where we left off, get out, get away. Someone would find Coyle eventually. I could be a long way away before anyone even bothered to look.
And somewhere in Istanbul Josephine Cebula would be buried in an unmarked grave, and the man who seemed to have nothing to say but Galileo, Galileo, Galileo would walk away unscathed.
(A little girl in St Petersburg–touch him and I’ll rip your eyes out and feed them to my pussy cat.)
I picked up Alice’s phone, pulled out the battery, grabbed her laptop and, on further reflection, a warm jumper, wallet, U-Bahn pass and gun, and headed out into the cold light of day.
Ghosts are vain.
We are also largely ignorant.
Want to be a rocket scientist? Hijack one for a few days, and if anyone asks you anything at all, say it “needs further investigation”.
Want to be President of the USA? He shakes a lot of hands on his way out of convention centres; if you are a particularly cute little girl in a pink flowery dress, your odds of receiving the blessed touch increase hugely. The same can be said of popes, though the language skills required for a popish possession exceed those for the White House.
Want to go to university? Freshers’ week–my God, but freshers’ week! What a glorious opportunity to acquire clean skins–a great mass of strangers far from home, grab yourself a handy history student and be spared the indignity of actually having to take A levels to get there.
Which is not to say that we don’t occasionally try. I have several bachelor’s degrees from reputable institutions and nearly half a medical degree. Any guilt I experience at having deprived my hosts of their university experience is offset by the thought that the first-class degrees I acquired in their name were a perfectly good academic outcome, better than the STDs and 2.2s they may have obtained without my intervention.
Though self-improvement is a ludicrous notion to those of us who switch bodies like a new pair of shoes, who leave behind every purchase and every obtainment on the instant we jump, yet I am not wholly ignorant.
Although I know my limits.
I am not, for example, a computer hacker.
Christina 636–OK. I need your help again.
Spunkmaster13–Waaay! Lets paaarrtyyy!
Chapter 46
Johannes Schwarb.
Encountering him face to face brought back the uncomfortable recollection of those few minutes I spent in his skin–of alcohol, drugs and fists in a dark corner of the night.
We met in the McDonald’s on Adenauerplatz, where the almost-Mediterreanean cafés, Teutonic bars and ubiquitous clothing outlets of Kurfürstendamm met the sharp offices of well-to-do solicitors and the grand apartments of big-time bankers, and where the taxis were never for hire.
The burgers were bad, the McCroissant unmentionable.
When Schwarb–Spunkmaster to his friends–walked in, I barely recognised him. Dressed in a black suit with grey pinstripes, his thin hair gelled back against his skull, his chin was neatly shaved and even the tiny diamond stud in his right earlobe seemed like a sad attempt at being radical by a man who had long since sold his revolution for guaranteed investment bonds. The fact that he ordered a double burger with extra fries, extra mayonnaise, extra everything, yeah! seemed a little more in character, and when I slipped into the booth beside him, he exclaimed, “Oh my God, you’re hot again! You’re… you’re so… you’re…” He gestured furiously up and down, and failing to find anything else, concluded, “You’re sexy!”
“How have you been?”
“Me? I’m immense. I’m ruling the world, you know?”
“I thought you were a financial adviser.”
“An independent financial adviser,” he corrected. “An immense independent financial adviser.”
“I had the impression that was a position of respectability, responsibility, of nine to five…”