Touch

  Odds were, he’d be so shocked he’d bite, and it seemed unfair to leave Christina with a swollen tongue and the taste of vodka.

  Then his friend ran up, and she was fifteen, and she was crying, and she pulled at his arm and said, “They’re here!”

  “Babe!” he wailed. “Can’t you see I’m…?” A gesture attempted to take in the curves of my body, the shape of my dress, the look of murder in my eyes.

  “They’re here,” she hissed. “They want the money.”

  Her eyes darted across the dance floor, and his followed, red capillaries wiggling through the whites, body half-falling as he twisted to see the source of the disruption.

  Three men with the faces of those for whom a party was a source of profit, no more, were heading across the floor with the determination of a Roman road. Johannes whooped, stuck both his arms in the air, revealing a well-pierced midriff, and shrilled, “Hey! Motherfuckers! Come get it!”

  If they heard this statement, the three gentlemen were unimpressed.

  “You have to go. Please, run!” whimpered his companion, tugging at his arm.

  “Fuckers!” he roared, face open with delight, eyes staring at some fantastical outcome only he could see. “Come on then, come on!”

  I tapped the girl, tears still flowing down her face, politely on the shoulder. “Drugs?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer, and didn’t need to. Johannes whooped. A blade flicked open in the fist of one of the approaching men.

  “Right then,” I muttered, and put my hand on Johannes’ arm.

  Jumping into an inebriated body is an entirely unpleasant experience. It is my belief that the process of getting drunk is a cushion to the actual reality of being drunk. Bit by bit the mind grows accustomed to swaying room, burning skin, churning stomach, so though every aspect of your physiology screams, poison, poison, it is the gentle and pleasant acquisition of the state that prevents the experience from becoming a thoroughly vile event.

  Jumping straight from a reasonably sober body into one riding high on more noxious substances than I cared to guess at was like taking a standing jump from a trotting pony to a speeding train.

  My body jerked, fingers tightening on the bar as every part of me tried to rearrange itself in some other place. I tasted bile, felt mosquitoes feeding inside my head. “Jesus Christ,” I hissed, and as Christina swayed and opened her eyes beside me, I pressed my hands against my skull and turned, and did my very best to run.

  The skin of strangers as it touched mine was an electric shock that rippled through my arms, ran down to my stomach and made the sack full of puke I carried beneath my lungs swish like the ocean against a cliff. I heard the girl shriek and the boys run, staggered against a man with coffee skin and avocado eyes, beautiful in every way, and wanted to fall into him then and there, damn Johannes.

  The fire exit was shut, but not locked, the alarm long since disabled to let the smokers, sniffers and shaggers out into the alley at the back. I stumbled, forgetting that I wasn’t in a dress, wasn’t in Christina’s fancy shoes. I crawled up the stairs to street level, reached for the nearest dumpster, pressed my head against the cold stinking metal and was profoundly, and gratefully, sick.

  The fire door slammed shut behind me.

  A voice said, “You’re dead, Schwarb.”

  I lifted my head to see the fist, which collided with the hard bone beneath my eye. I fell, hands scraping along the tarmac, vision spinning, heard tinnitus break out loud in my right ear, coughed thin white bile.

  The three boys had an average age of nineteen, twenty at most. They wore knock-offs of sporty brands: baggy trousers and tight T-shirts which emphasised in clinging polyester just how few muscles they had to celebrate.

  They were going to kick the crap out of me, and with my head auditioning for soprano, I couldn’t precisely put my finger on why.

  I tried to get up, and one of them swung his fist again, slamming it into the side of my face. My head hit the ground and that was fine, that was completely fine, because at least with most of me on the floor, there was less of me to fall. The same thought seemed to occur to one of the boys, who grabbed me by the scruff of my shirt and began to haul me upright. I caught his wrists instinctively and, as his nostrils flared and his eyes widened, I dug my fingers into his skin and switched.

  Johannes in my hands, my heart in triple figures, Christ, my fingers wanted to strike, my muscles wanted to strike, every part of my body was buzzing with adrenaline and I thought – why the hell not?

  I dropped Johannes and turned, putting my entire body into the blow, knees and hips, shoulders and arms, twisting and rising to deliver a punch under the chin of my nearest companion. His jaw cracked, a tooth snapping as mandible hit cranium, and as he fell back I leaped on top of him, my knees into his chest, my face against his face, and pushed him down, screaming with a voice only freshly broken. I hit him, and hit him again, and felt blood on my knuckles though I wasn’t sure where it had come from until the third boy grabbed me by the throat, yelling a name which I guessed had to be mine. As he pulled me off the bleeding mess beneath my knees, I grabbed his arm where it lay across my neck

  I had an arm across the boy’s neck, but I made it better, putting my left forearm across my right to pull tighter as the boy, bewildered and confused, writhed and wheezed and wiggled in my grasp. I kicked his left knee, and as he dropped, I held on tighter, suspending him by skull alone until his eyes began to roll and his fighting grew less, at which point and at last

  I let him go.

  And turned, breathless, to Johannes.

  He sat, blood running from a wide cut across his face, palms dirty and scratched, staring at me with mouth open, eyes wide. I looked at the two boys on the ground, and saw that they weren’t going anywhere any time soon. I looked back at Johannes. His lips were twitching from side to side, unsure of which torrent of thought they should express. When he finally found something, it was not the sentiment I had expected. “Oh my God!” he whispered. “That was incredible!”

  Chapter 18

  That was then.

  Belgrade, the body of a man who might or might not have been Nathan Coyle.

  I bought an hour of internet time in a café behind the dark-domed cathedral of St Sava, opened a packet of biscuits and a sweet fruity drink, and went online.

  I needed a hacker.

  Though when Johannes Schwarb went online, he did so in an altogether different guise.

  Christina 636 – Hi, JS.

  Spunkmaster13 – OMG! How are you?

  Christina 636 – I need a favour.

  Chapter 19

  More photos in the Kepler file.

  Faces and memories. Places seen, people travelled.

  I pulled one from the folder.

  Horst Gubler, US citizen. First contact with entity Kepler, 14 November 2009.

  Current residence – Dominico Hospice, Slovakia.

  Good on the Slovakians.

  No one else would have taken him in.

  It takes twelve hours to travel by train from Belgrade to Bratislava.

  By plane the journey is barely worth the taxi down the runway.

  Get stuck on a plane, however, and your options are far fewer than they are on a train of several hundred diverse weary travellers. As for getting a gun through an airport – a train seemed the easier option.

  I caught the 6.48 from Belgrade to Bratislava.

  Notes on the train from Belgrade:

  It is a mish-mash of carriages and compartments, some Serbian, some Slovakian, some Hungarian, most Czech. A surprisingly high number of seats are designed for disabled passengers, though none are to be seen. An entire carriage is assigned for passengers who have children under the age of ten on the wise assumption that twelve hours with a mewling infant in close proximity is enough to drive anyone to a criminal act. The restaurant car sells variations on a theme of sandwich, soup, tea, coffee, biscuit, cauliflower and cabbage, all carefully reheated in the microwave t
o your exacting desires. The train crosses three international borders, though passports are checked only once, and were it not for a slight variation in the spelling of “toilet” as you pull in and out of long platforms, you might not notice the transition at all.

  I turned my

  this body’s

  mobile phone on as we crossed from Serbia to Hungary. There was one new message. It read: Aeolus.

  Still no number.

  I turned the phone off again, pulled out the battery, pushed it back to the bottom of the bag.

  “Seven hundred euros,” said the traveller at the bar. “Seven hundred euros, that was my bill last time I went travelling. I thought the EU was supposed to sort that shit out. I thought they were changing things – you make a call in Europe, it’s like you make a call to home, you know? How do they let the phone companies do that? How do they let them rob you like that and pretend it’s OK? You know the worst part?”

  No, what was the worst part?

  “All the calls I made, I made for work. On my personal mobile because my work phone was broken. And the fuckers wouldn’t pay the bill. ‘Your fault,’ they said. ‘Your fault for not paying attention to the fine print; you can’t ask us to foot the bill for your mistake.’ Like fuck. Fuck, I say fuck. What do you call the recession? What do you call government? All we ever do is pay for other people’s greed and vanity, that’s all we’re good for, men like you and me.”

  So what did you do?

  “I quit my fucking job, didn’t I?!”

  And how’s that going?

  “Shit. Like shit. I’m going home to live with my mother. She’s eighty-seven and still thinks she’s married, stupid hag. But what’s a man to do?”

  I bought another bottle of water and a packet of crisps from the restaurant-bar, wobbled my way back to my seat, and slumbered through the long Hungarian countryside as we tracked north, chasing the Danube to Slovakia.

  Chapter 20

  I was going to visit Horst Gubler.

  Not because I liked the man, but because at some point whoever wrote the file on Kepler had also visited. If I was lucky, I might even be wearing the right face for the trip.

  This is how I met Horst Gubler:

  She said, “I want him to pay.”

  Her hands were clamped around the whisky glass, her face tight, shoulders stiff. She sat on the terrace of her white-wood house as the sun set over the weeping willows and said in a thick Alabama drawl, “I want him to suffer.”

  I ran my finger round the rim of my glass and said not a word. The evening was settling in pink stripes across the horizon, layers of cloud and sun, cloud and sun, stretching away towards the river. The next house along flew an American flag; two doors down from that, a couple stood with a baby in a pram, talking to their neighbour about neighbourly things. Obama was president and the economy was burning, but in this tiny corner of the USA it seemed that no one wanted to care.

  Except her.

  “He raped her,” she said. “He raped her and he’s done it to others, and I don’t give a fuck what the law says, because he did it and he’s got away with it before and he’ll get away with it again. I want Gubler to pay.”

  “Dead?” I asked.

  She shook her head, thick black curls catching on her shirt. “Death is a sin, Bible clearly says so. But Bible don’t say nothing about draining his accounts, shutting down his house, turning away his friends and marching him to the ends of the fucking earth in nothing but ashes and sackcloth. They tell me you can do that. They tell me you were an estate agent once.”

  I took a sip of whisky. It was bad American stuff, distilled on estates bigger than the average English county, advertised as wholesome goodness for men who believed that the wearing of a flat cap equated to an understanding of universal truths. Sitting opposite me, in a white shirt and vanilla skirt, was Maria Anna Celeste Jones, whose ancestors had been stolen from Sierra Leone, and whose home was Mississippi, and whose vengeance was absolute.

  “How did you come to hear of me?” I asked.

  “I was worn.” Her voice was flat, to the point. “As a skin. That’s what you call it, right? I was seventeen and in the gutter. This guy comes up to me. ‘You’ve got beautiful eyes,’ he says, and he touches me, and I go to sleep, and when I wake it’s six months later and a girl sits by me on the bed and says, ‘Thanks for the ride.’ There’s fifteen thousand US dollars under the bed and a letter from NYU, saying hey, well done – you got in.”

  “Did you go?”

  “I burned the letter. Then two weeks later I wrote to them to say that the letter had got lost in the post, would they send me another, and they did, and I went and learned the law. And I learned other things too. Like how folk who move from body to body sometimes keep the same email address. The one who wore me – he went by the name of Kuanyin, and left his internet account details on the hotel computer when he cleared out of my skin.”

  “I know Kuanyin,” I murmured. “She – she’s a she, last I checked – is sloppy. Many are. Did she…” I toyed with my words, trying to find the right combination “… leave you as she found you?”

  Maria Anna Celeste Jones looked me in the eye, and her stare was iron, her will unbreakable. “He – she – fucked people with my body. Ate, drank, stole six months of my life, got a manicure, cut my hair, dumped me in some city I’d never seen. Kuanyin gave me more money than I’d had in my life and got me enrolled at a college, and I never looked back since. So no. She didn’t leave me as she found me. Dumb question, don’t you think?”

  I sipped whisky, let the moment settle, linger, cleared my throat. “But you didn’t want revenge.”

  “No. Not on her. Not any more.” Her fingers tightened round the glass. “Gubler. Kuanyin recommended you. Said you were good at this. Said you were an estate agent.”

  The edge of the glass hummed as I ran my finger round it. I couldn’t meet Maria Anna’s eyes. “Did she explain what that meant?”

  “Told me enough. Gubler, he’s rich, successful, and he’s gonna run for Congress and he’s gonna get in, because what he can’t buy with cash he’ll sell with lying. He’s lining up the fund-raisers, and he rapes poor black girls because he knows he can get away with it, and because we let him get away with it. Us. The law. Because we gotta protect everyone equally, but some people – some we protect more equally than others. And if I’m doing one thing with my life, now that it’s mine, I want it to be this. Take Gubler down. Do it for money, do it for reward, do it because you’ll find it fun and need a new fucking body – I don’t care why you do it. Just get it done.”

  Her voice didn’t rise, her gaze didn’t flinch. Her words were recorded messages played at the morgue, a testimony from beyond the grave, the gentleness buried beneath thick wet earth a long time ago.

  I drained the last of the whisky down, laid my glass on the table between us, and said, “OK.”

  Four days later she wore a blue ball gown cut to highlight the tightness of her waist, the roundness of her buttocks, the softness of her legs, and I wore a man with no chin and a new suit, who sold bad cars to gullible people and had tried the same with me. We stood on the steps of a museum dedicated to a great battle of the Civil War, where men who believed and men who were merely there because circumstances had collaborated against them had clashed on a field and fought no less hard for the reasons that brought them. From within came the sound of harmless music played by an inoffensive quartet, the bubble of well-heeled voices in high-heeled shoes, the chink of glass upon glass, the busy bustle of money flowing out of people’s mouths, into people’s ears, as deals were struck and pledges made for plans not yet written down.

  Maria Anna held a silver-edged invitation. I held out my hand, a partner inviting her to the dance and said, “May I?”

  Her face was locked as she held out her hand to me, but the fingers, when they brushed mine, trembled.

  I squeezed her palm reassuringly, and saw her flinch.

  I jumped.
br />   The car salesman staggered, groaning in confusion, but I was already sweeping up the steps in a wave of taffeta and rose-hip perfume, my hair pinned too tight to my head, my heart racing so fast in my chest I felt briefly dizzy and knew it was not my presence which made it beat, merely the thought that I might be present, which a moment ago had been all that filled Maria Anna’s mind.

  And yet she had taken my hand.

  I handed over my invitation with barely a glance at the boy who took it, and the boy who took it waved me through with more than a glance at the body I wore. Maria Anna, tall and graceful, her long neck accentuated by the single pearl she wore in the hollow of her throat, hands sticky – physiological reaction to stress a little over-contained. As I swept into the main gallery of the museum, the guests in tuxedos and gowns swirled and swept around black-iron cannon, monuments to the dead, glass cases containing the pistol of a general, the uniform of a colonel fallen in a charge, the banner of a regiment wiped out upon some gunpowder-blasted hill. Through all this, the crowd chatted and bantered, the past set out to be picked over like last night’s TV.

  I caught a glass of champagne from a waiter as he passed, and drifted towards a display of regimental photos, grainy and beige, sipping my drink and waiting for the rushing in my blood to slow down, pass. The hypertension eased a little at a time, muscles so tight it seemed the nerves themselves couldn’t process their presence. I let my gaze sweep the crowd, seeking out Horst Gubler from among his adoring fans.

  He didn’t take much seeking. The noise around him was a swell in the turning sea and, unlike his more meagre guests, he didn’t have to move to find the party, but rather the party twisted to come and find him. I eased my way through, smiling a dazzling smile at all I passed, until I stood close and a little to one side, listening as he regaled the gathered masses with the story of a time when he had caught a fish, and met a minister, and watched the sun set on a Saudi oil field. When the audience laughed, I did not, and my silence caused his gaze to turn and light on me.