Night Work (14 page)

He lowered the gun. His musical box came to mind.

Although he carried no more than five boxed video cameras at any one time, shuffling along like an old man, he broke out in a sweat on the way from the car to the lift. He pressed the button with his free little finger. When the door
slid open, he added the boxes to the others already inside. The lift was too small to take them all at the same time, so he had to make two journeys.

He sprawled on the sofa, breathing hoarsely through his mouth. As soon as he’d recovered he squeezed some menthol gel up his nose, straight from the tube. It stung, but he could breathe freely soon afterwards.

He unpacked. Twenty cameras and twenty-six tripods had to be removed from their bubble wrap, twenty battery packs inserted in the charger and connected to the mains. He was also conscientious enough to recharge the old batteries he’d obtained from the shopping centre, including those in the cameras in front of the bed and next to the TV.

Should he watch the tape of the night before his departure for the Mondsee? He still had no idea why he’d woken up in the living room that morning. Perhaps the tape would enlighten him. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure it was something he was looking forward to. He removed the tape from the bedroom camera and put it on one side.

He spread some liver pâté on a slice of pumpernickel. He didn’t like it, but he could sense how short of energy he was. He made himself another slice and followed it up with an apple and a few drops of echinacea washed down with some vitamin-enriched fruit juice.

He looked at the musical box, which he’d put beside the phone. He could remember the tune it played, but not the one-eyed, one-eared bear itself.

He pulled the string and the tune played. It was as if he were touching something that no longer existed. As if he were seeing some long-extinguished heavenly body whose light was reaching him only now.

He spent several hours playing a computer game, breaking off just long enough to hang up the washing. By evening he was feeling tired but better than he had that morning. He blew his nose, gargled with camomile tea and took an aspirin.

The batteries were fully charged. He collected them together and put them on the sofa with the rest of his equipment. He pushed a battery into its holder and put a tape in the deck, then screwed the camera to a tripod. When he’d got two cameras ready, he took them into the empty flat next door. He unfolded the tripods and set them up side by side.

When he was finished he surveyed the semicircle of cameras confronting him in the spacious living room. Most of their lenses were trained on him. There were so many of them it seemed unreal. He felt they were crowding around him like extraterrestrial dwarfs at feeding time.

The Sleeper was tossing and turning as usual. An occasional snore could be heard.

Jonas wondered how to stay awake. It was almost midnight. He put the thermometer under his armpit.

How should he spend tomorrow? He was still too weak to load the furniture into the truck. He would look for suitable flats in which to set up the cameras, restricting himself to buildings with lifts.

The Sleeper threw off the duvet.

Jonas leant forwards. Without taking his eyes off the screen, he felt for his teacup. The thermometer beeped but he took no notice. He couldn’t understand what he was seeing.

The Sleeper was wearing a hood.

Jonas hadn’t looked as closely before. Now he noticed
that the Sleeper’s head was enveloped in a black hood pierced with little holes for the eyes, nose and mouth.

The Sleeper was sitting upright on the edge of the bed. Motionless, supporting himself on his hands. He seemed to be staring at the camera. The lighting wasn’t strong enough to reveal the eyes in the midst of the black material.

He just sat there. Unmoving.

In some sinister, unspoken manner, his rigid pose conveyed scorn and defiance. It was a silent challenge.

Jonas couldn’t look at that black mask for long. He felt he was staring into a void. Unable to endure its emptiness, he averted his gaze.

Then he looked back at that black head, that hole of a face.

He went into the bathroom and cleaned his teeth. Paced up and down, humming to himself. Returned to the TV.

Black head, motionless body.

The Sleeper was sitting there like a dead man.

Little by little, as if in slow motion, he raised his right arm. Extended his forefinger. Pointed at the camera.

Froze.

Was there really no chance of getting to England?

That was the first thought that occurred to him when he woke up. Would it be possible to get from the Continent to the British Isles?

Images took shape in his mind’s eye. Motorboats. Sailing ships. Yachts. Helicopters. With him on board.

He sat up in bed and looked round hurriedly. The camera was in its place and had clearly been recording. The room had undergone no noticeable changes. He went over to the mirror and pulled up his T-shirt, turning this way and that. He nearly dislocated his shoulder in an attempt to look at his back. He also checked the soles of his feet. He stuck out his chin and his tongue.

Before making breakfast he explored the whole flat in search of the unexpected. Nothing suspicious came to light.

He was feeling fresher than he had the previous day. His nose wasn’t blocked up any more, his throat wasn’t sore and he’d almost stopped coughing. This swift recovery surprised him. His immune system seemed to be functioning well.

During breakfast scenes from last night’s dream came back to him in quick succession. He reached for a notepad and pencil so as to record them, at least in rough outline.

He had entered a cavern suffused with a dark red glow. Visibility was restricted to a few metres. There were people around him, but they didn’t see him and he couldn’t communicate with them. The cavern led past a cube-shaped rock thirty metres high. The passage around the cube was two metres wide.

He climbed a rope ladder to the plateau overhead. The roof of the cavern was some seven metres above him. Fixed to it were the spotlights that gave off the dull red glow.

He saw three bodies lying on the plateau. A young couple on one side, a young man on the other. He recognised all three. He’d gone to school with them. They must have been dead for years, because they looked awful. Although they were skeletons, they had faces. Contorted faces and twisted limbs. Their mouths were open. Their eyes bulging. But they were skeletons.

The man lying by himself was Marc, whom he had sat beside in school for four years. The face wasn’t his, though. Jonas knew the face but couldn’t remember whose it was.

The policemen and paramedics he passed still didn’t speak to him, nor was he able to address a word to them. In some mysterious, non-verbal manner he learnt that the trio had died from rat poison, possibly self-administered. The strychnine had brought about dreadful convulsions and an agonising death.

It was warm on top of this rocky cube imprisoned in a cavern. Warm and still. All that occasionally broke the silence was a sound like wind ruffling a sheet of plastic.

And there were the corpses.

The faces of the dead were suddenly right in front of him. The next moment, he couldn’t see them any more.

All this had some bearing on himself, Jonas realised. It held some hidden significance.
Rat poison
, cavern, he jotted down.
Laura, Robert, Marc dead. Not Marc’s face.
Convulsions, decay. Silence. Red glow. A tower. Suspect a
wolf walled up in the rock face. Behind it the ultimate
horror
.

At the far end of the block he found a fifth-floor flat he thought would be suitable. The view from the balcony was absolutely ideal; he could even set up two cameras there. He wrote down the address and marked the spot on his street map.

He allocated another two cameras to the Heiligenstädter Brücke. One would film the Brigittenauer embankment while the other, on the other side, would take in the bridge itself and the exit road to the Heiligenstädter embankment. If he set up one camera on the Döblinger Steg, filming the bridge, and another pointing in the opposite direction, he would not only cover the entire area but get some attractive shots, and up to this spot he would have to make use of only one stranger’s flat.

Spittelauer embankment, Rossauer embankment, Franz-Josefs-Kai, Schwedenplatz. Parking the car on the tramlines, he marked the thirteenth camera on his plan. That meant it was time to turn his attention to the other side of the canal.

He spun round at lightning speed.

The leaves of the trees beside the hot-dog stands were rustling in the breeze.

The square, a motionless expanse. The windows of the chemist’s, unlit. The ice-cream parlour. The steps leading down to the underground station. Rotenturmstrasse.

He turned on the spot. Not a movement anywhere. He could have sworn he’d heard a sound he couldn’t identify. A sound of human origin.

He pretended to scribble something on his notepad. Head down, eyes swivelling in both directions until they
ached, he watched and waited to see if the sound was repeated. Again he spun round.

Nothing.

He drove across the Danube Canal. Camera No. 14 he reserved for the Schwedenbrücke and Obere Donaustrasse intersection. At the corner of Untere Augartenstrasse he explored a building in search of another elevated camera position. He found two unlocked flats and chose the upper one. It was almost bare of furniture, and the sound of his footsteps on the old parquet floors echoed around the rooms.

His route took him from Obere Donaustrasse to Gaussplatz and from there into Klosterneuburger Strasse, which came out on the Brigittenauer embankment. The last camera but one would film the intersection of Klosterneuburger Strasse and Adalbert-Stifter-Strasse from the north. The last was also camera No. 1. He would set it up on the Brigittenauer embankment, fifty metres past his front door in the direction of Heiligenstädter Brücke.

Jonas shut his notepad. He was hungry. He took a few steps towards the entrance. Turned once more.

Something was making him feel uneasy.

He got into the car and locked the doors.

While driving along he noticed that a door was open. He backed up. It was the entrance to the Gasthaus Haas in Margaretenstrasse.

‘Come outside!’

He waited for a minute. Meanwhile, he memorised the layout of the street.

He went inside and searched the premises cautiously. He remembered having eaten there once with Marie. Years ago. The restaurant was jam-packed and the food nothing
special. Their meal had been spoilt by the people at the next table. A bunch of drunken racegoers with lots of gold around their necks and wrists, they had loudly debated the chances of various horses and tried to outdo each other in name-dropping.

A friend who was interested in canine science had once explained to Jonas why so many small dogs will attack far more powerful members of the same species despite the risks involved. It was all down to breeding. Having once belonged to a far bigger breed, they hadn’t yet got it into their heads that they no longer measured ninety centimetres from shoulder to paw. In a sense, small dogs believed themselves to be the same size as their opponents and flew at their throats regardless.

Jonas hadn’t gathered whether this theory was based on scientific research or just a leg-pull on his friend’s part, but one thing he
had
grasped: Austrians were exactly like those dogs.

As he walked through the half-cleared flat he had an urge to start work again. He was feeling better, so there was no reason why not.

He fetched the trolley from the truck and began with some lighter pieces. A linen chest, a standard lamp, the last remaining bookcase. He made rapid progress. Although sweating, he wasn’t breathing much faster than usual. Clothes horse, TV, sofa table, bedside table all disappeared into the truck one by one. All that remained in the end were the bed and the wardrobe.

Jonas eyed the wardrobe, leaning against the wall with his arms folded. It held a lot of associations for him. He knew how the left-hand door creaked when it was opened, a whining sound that went through the whole scale,
from high to low. He knew how it smelt inside. Of leather and clean linen. Of his parents, his father. For years he had lain on the sofa beside this wardrobe when ill because his mother didn’t want to go into the bedroom to bring him tea and rusks. Traces of that period must surely be visible.

There was an energy-saving bulb in the ceiling light. It was too dim to reveal much. Jonas fetched the torch and shone it on the side of the wardrobe. He could clearly make out some numbers and letters scratched on the pale wood with the tip of a penknife.

8.4.1977. Tummy-ache. Mummy’s new hat. Yellow.
22.11.1978. 23.11.1978. 4.3.1979. Flu. Tea. Given a
model of Fittipaldi’s car. 12.6.1979. 13.6.1979. 15.6.1979.
21.2.1980. Ski jumping
.

There were a dozen more dates, some with comments, many unexplained. He was surprised his father hadn’t got rid of these inscriptions. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed them or hadn’t wanted the expense of restoration. His father had never liked spending money.

Jonas tried to think himself into the skin of the boy he’d been then.

He was lying there. Feeling bored. He wasn’t allowed to read because reading strained your eyes. He wasn’t allowed to watch TV because the set emitted rays to which a sick child should not be exposed. He was lying there with his Lego set and his marbles and his pocket knife and other things to be concealed from his mother’s gaze. He had to occupy himself, so he often played rafts, a game that came to his rescue even on rainy afternoons when he was well. The raft was an upturned table. Or, if he was lying beside the wardrobe with a temperature, the sofa itself.

He was adrift on the high seas. It was warm and sunny. He was bound for exciting places where he would have adventures and make friends with great, heroic figures. But he
needed provisions for the voyage. So he found excuses for creeping around the flat, pinched chewing gum, caramels and biscuits from the sweets drawer, begged slices of bread, filched bottles of lemonade from under his mother’s nose. Laden with this haul, he returned to the raft and put to sea again.

It was still as warm and sunny, but the raft was tossing around on the waves. He had to clutch his possessions to him to prevent them from becoming soaked with spray.

America was a long way off, however, and his stores were still insufficient, so he landed once more. He needed books and comics, plus some paper and a pencil to write and draw with. He needed more clothes. He needed various useful things to be found in his father’s drawers. A compass. A pair of binoculars. A pack of cards with which to win money from villainous opponents. A knife with which to defend himself. He must also take a gift for Sandokan, the Tiger of Malaysia, to seal their friendship. He could barter his mother’s string of pearls with the natives.

He needed all kinds of things, and he wasn’t satisfied with his equipment until there was barely room for himself on the sofa and he was hemmed in on all sides by blankets and ladles and clothes pegs. It thrilled him through and through to think that he’d accumulated all he needed in order to survive. He needed no outside help. He had everything.

Then his mother appeared to see how he was getting on. She was astonished that he’d managed to get together so many forbidden items in such a short time. Some of them, after much argument, he was allowed to keep. Then the raft put to sea again, lightened of one or two treasures by Blackbeard.

Jonas gave the wardrobe a shake. It scarcely moved. Manhandling it outside would be quite a business. He would have to turn the thing over because it stood on feet
and couldn’t be loaded onto the trolley in an upright position.

8.04.1977. Tummy-ache
.

On 8 April nearly thirty years ago he’d lain beside this wardrobe suffering from a stomach-ache. He had no recollection of that day or his discomfort. But these clumsy letters and numerals were his handiwork. He’d been feeling ill even at the moment when he was scratching that T, that U, that M. He, Jonas. That had been him. And he’d had no inkling of what was to come. No inkling of the exams he would sit later on, of his first girlfriend, of his moped, of leaving school and starting to earn a living. Or of Marie. He had changed, grown up, become an entirely different person. But this writing was still here. When he looked at these marks he was looking at frozen time.

On 4 March 1979 he’d had flu and been made to drink lots of tea, which he disliked in those days. Tito was still alive in Yugoslavia, Carter was president of the United States, Brezhnev ruled Russia, and he was lying beside this wardrobe with flu, not knowing what it signified that Carter was in office or that Tito would soon be dead. He had been preoccupied with his new model car, a black one with the number 1 on the side, and Brezhnev didn’t exist for him.

When he’d carved these letters the doomed crew of
Challenger
were still alive, the Pope was new in his job and had no idea that Ali Agca would shoot him, and the Falklands War hadn’t started. When he’d written this he hadn’t known what was to come. Nor had anyone else.

The rattle of the trolley wheels on the stone floor echoed round the building. He paused to listen. He recalled the feeling he’d had on the Brigittenauer embankment. The feeling that something was wrong. And the sensation
of being watched outside the Gasthaus Haas. Leaving the trolley and wardrobe where they were, he went out into the street.

‘Hello?’

He sounded the truck’s horn in short, sharp bursts. Peered in all directions. Looked up at the windows.

‘Come outside! At once!’

He waited for a few minutes. Pretended to be lost in thought, sauntered around with his hands in his pockets, whistling softly to himself. Every now and then he turned and stood stock-still, looking and listening.

Then he went back to work. He trundled the trolley outside, and soon afterwards the wardrobe was on board the truck. That only left the bed, but he’d done enough for today.

Something about the narrow cellar passage puzzled him. He stopped and looked around. Nothing caught his eye. He gave himself time to collect his thoughts, but he couldn’t think what it was.

He went to his father’s compartment, cleared his throat in a deep voice and wrenched the door open so roughly it crashed back against the wall. He gave a harsh laugh, looked over his shoulder and shook his fist.