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!
Chapter 13
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.