Night Work (3 page)

He went outside. The first flashes of lightning could be seen. The wind was getting up. Empty cigarette packets and other bits of rubbish went skittering across the street. He tilted his head back and massaged his shoulders, which were stiff after his drive. Black clouds were massing in the sky. A distant rumble. Another flash of lightning. And another.

He was about to go back inside when a crash rang out directly overhead. Without looking round he ran to the car and locked himself in. He withdrew the knife from its sheath. Waited for a few minutes. The windscreen misted over.

He lowered the driver’s window.

‘What do you want?’ he yelled.

Another crash, fainter than before, followed at once by yet another.

‘Come out of there!’

Heavy raindrops came pelting down on the bonnet, on the roadway. More rumbling.

He looked up as he ran back to the entrance through the rain, but his view was obstructed by trees. He dashed into the bar, opened the door to the stairs and pounded up them, knife in hand. On the first floor was a long, narrow passage almost devoid of light from outside. He failed to find the switch in his haste.

He came to a door. It wasn’t shut. The wind kept banging it against the jamb with monotonous regularity. He pushed it wide open with the knife held out in front of him.

The room was completely bare. There wasn’t even any furniture in it. The big casement window was flapping in the wind.

He turned on the spot a couple of times, knife at the ready, then walked to the window. He looked out, glanced back over his shoulder at the room, looked out again. The window was above the entrance and a little to one side.

Just as he withdrew his head a gust of wind blew into the room. The window banged against his arm. He shut it and went downstairs again, still with the knife in his hand.

In the bar he subsided onto a bench. It was a while before his rapid, shallow breathing steadied. He sat staring at the wooden panelling until he remembered the potatoes.

The thunderstorm ended just as he laid his knife and fork aside. He left the plate on the table and returned to his car, leaping over muddy puddles on the way.

He drove to the station.

The booking hall and the long, gloomy passage from which flights of steps led to the platforms were as deserted as the forecourt and the platforms themselves. He smashed the window of a kiosk and took a can of lemonade, which he drank at once, dropping the empty can in a litter bin.

He found a postbox on the forecourt.
Linz Station
,
6
July
, he wrote on a postcard. After a moment’s thought he addressed it to his father.

Although Jonas had passed a number of car showrooms, he had something better in mind than an Opel or a Ford. No good opportunity to exchange his rattletrap of a Toyota presented itself until he reached the outskirts of the city, where he at last spotted a dealer offering more than just family saloons.

Jonas was no petrolhead. He’d never gone in for fast cars, but it now seemed absurd to restrict his speed to 160 k.p.h. That meant saying goodbye to his old car. It had cost more than it was worth and held no sentimental associations.

To his surprise, his wrench made no impression on the showroom window behind which the cars awaited their purchasers. He’d never had to deal with safety glass before. He rammed it with the Toyota instead. There was a crash, and splinters came raining down on the bonnet. He backed out again. The hole in the glass was big enough.

He chose a red Alfa Spider. He found the keys on a hook behind the sales desk. It proved harder to locate the key to the only vehicular exit, a pair of big double doors, but he eventually found that too. He went back to the Toyota and cleared out all his belongings.

Before getting in he turned and waved his old car goodbye. He felt foolish a moment later.

A hundred metres from the car showroom he stopped at a service station. The petrol pump worked without any problem. He filled the tank.

On the way to Salzburg he tested the Spider’s potential. The acceleration pressed him back into his seat. He put out his hand, meaning to try the radio, but none had been installed. He reached instead for the throat pastilles on the passenger seat.

Lying beside the road beyond Wels, as though someone had thrown it away, was a guitar case.

Jonas backed up. He threw stones at the case from a few feet away. He hit it but nothing happened. He kicked it. Eventually he opened it. There was an electric guitar inside. Water had seeped into the case. It had evidently rained hard here too.

He walked around for a while. The grass soaked his trouser legs to the knee. He was near the motorway access road. This spot was probably frequented by hitchhikers, so he shouted and vigorously sounded his horn. He came
across discarded beer cans, cigarette ends, condoms. The sodden earth squelched beneath his shoes.

He leant against the passenger door.

Anything might or might not be significant. Perhaps that guitar case had fallen off the roof of a car. Perhaps it had belonged to some person who had vanished at this spot. However and whyever they’d vanished.

The sun was going down behind the castle as he passed Salzburg station. He drove across the station square, sounding his horn, then headed for his aunt’s flat in Parsch. It took him some time to find the way. He sounded his horn when he finally got to Apothekerhofstrasse. When there was no response he got in again. It was unlikely that he would find anything informative at his aunt’s place, so he saved himself the trouble of breaking down the door.

He drove across the border to Freilassing.

No one there.

No one.

Almost unable to believe it, Jonas drove round the village for an hour. He had secretly assumed that he would come across some human activity on German soil. He’d expected to see soldiers. Possibly tents and refugees – even, perhaps, tanks or people in protective clothing. Civilisation, anyway.

He turned off the engine. Staring at the sign that indicated the route to the motorway for Munich, he drummed on the steering wheel with his fingertips.

How far should he drive?

Using his mobile, he dialled the number of a furniture manufacturer based near Cologne. The phone rang three times, four, five. An answerphone cut in.

It was dark by the time he parked in front of Salzburg’s Marriott Hotel. He tossed the wrench into his bag and stuck the knife in his belt. Locking the car, he peered in all directions and listened. Not a sound. There had to be some flowering shrubs nearby. He could smell their scent but didn’t recognise it.

He stumbled through the revolving door and into the lobby. It was so dark inside he caught his foot in the thick carpet and knocked over an ashtray on a stand.

A shaded lamp was burning on the reception desk. He put his bag down, drew the knife and peered round the gloomy lobby. Without looking, he groped for the main light switch with his free hand.

He blinked.

Once his eyes got used to the light he noticed the stereo system housed in a cabinet beside a wide-screen TV. An empty CD sleeve was lying on the deck. Mozart, of course. He pressed play. It was a while before the first notes rang out.

He took a closer look at the stereo. It was a more expensive system than he himself could ever have afforded, complete with every conceivable extra. The CDs were automatically cleaned. There was also a repeat button. He pressed it and turned up the volume until it made him wince.

He wrote on a slip of paper:
Someone’s here. 6 July
. He secured it in a conspicuous position beside the entrance, then wedged the side door open with an armchair so the music could be heard in the street.

He took a random assortment of keys from behind the reception desk, feeling as if the loudspeakers’ output would flatten him at any moment. He had never heard anything like it from an ordinary home stereo rig. His heart thudded as if he’d been running, and he felt slightly sick. He was glad when a dozen keys and their tags were jingling in his pocket and he could escape the din.

Using the stairs because he didn’t trust the lift, he found a place to sleep on the top floor. It was a suite of three interconnecting rooms and a spacious tiled bathroom with underfloor heating. The music from the lobby was inaudible with the door shut. If he opened it, however, he could tell when the various sections of the orchestra came in.

He locked himself in and ran a bath.

While waiting for the bathtub to fill he turned on the TV. He dialled Marie’s mobile again and again, and tried her sister’s number for the hundredth time.

He toured the suite, his feet sinking into its oriental carpets. The floorboards beneath them creaked faintly. Once, he probably wouldn’t have noticed this, but the unnatural silence of recent days had honed his hearing to such an extent that the slightest sound made him jump.

A bottle of champagne was chilling in the minibar. Although it didn’t seem appropriate, he stretched out in the tub with a glass in his hand. He took a sip and shut his eyes. There was a smell of bath salts and essential oils. Foam hissed and crackled around him.

Next morning he found his shoes not only one on top of the other but face to face. It reminded him of the way Marie sometimes arranged their mobiles: as if exchanging an armless embrace.

Jonas felt pretty sure he hadn’t left his shoes like that.

He checked the door. Securely locked.

He regretted not having taken some bread or rolls from the deep-freeze in the hotel kitchen the night before. He found a couple of kiwi fruits. He scooped out their flesh and ate it as he stood by the fruit shelf in the kitchen.

The stereo system was still blasting out through the entire building. Wincing, he hurried to reception. He scribbled his name and mobile number on a slip of paper, together with a request that anyone who found it should call him. This he stuck to the reception desk. Before leaving the hotel he stocked up with paper and sticky tape.

Salzburg, Marriott, 7 July
, he wrote on the postcard he dropped in the letterbox outside.

At midday he drove through deserted Villach, at half past he sounded his horn in front of Klagenfurt’s celebrated Dragon Statue. In both places he wrote postcards and left slips of paper bearing his phone number. He didn’t stop to search any buildings.

Several times he pulled up in the middle of large squares where he could get out and stretch his legs in safety, without having to watch his back. He called out. Listened. Stared at the ground.

Thanks to his powerful car and the fact that he didn’t have to worry about oncoming traffic, he crossed the Loibl Pass and reached the frontier within a few minutes. The frontier post was deserted, the barrier raised.

He searched the offices and dialled some numbers stored in their phones. Nobody answered. He left a message there too and did the same at the Slovenian frontier post a few hundred metres further on. He filled his tank, stocked up with mineral water and sausage, swallowed an aspirin.

It took him less than half an hour to cover the eighty kilometres to Ljubljana. The place was deserted. So were Domzale, Celje, Slovenska Bistrica and Maribor.

He left messages in English and German everywhere. Posted cards with Slovenian stamps on them. Dialled stored numbers at service stations. Tried the internal communications network at toll gates. Set off alarms and waited a minute or two. Left business cards behind because he’d run out of notepaper from the Marriott.

Just short of the Slovenian–Hungarian border he passed an overturned truck. He braked so sharply he almost lost control of the car. The cab of the truck had come to rest on its side. He had to clamber on top to open the driver’s door. The cab was empty.

He examined the nearby area. Skid marks could be seen. The crash barrier was damaged and part of the load – building materials – was lying in the ditch. Everything pointed to a normal accident.

Jonas didn’t find a soul in Hungary either.

He drove to Zalaegerszeg. From there he took the expressway to Austria and crossed the frontier at Heiligenkreuz. Absurdly, he felt he was back home.

The night before he’d left a matchbox propped against the front door the way he’d seen people do it in films. It was still there when he checked in the morning. In exactly the same spot.

Except that the side with the eagle was facing upwards, not the one with the flag.

The door was locked. It was a deadlock. No one could have got in without a duplicate key. Besides, the matchbox was still propped against the door. No one had been there. No one. It was impossible.

But how to account for the matchbox?

When he made himself some coffee the milk curdled. He hurled the cup at the wall. It smashed, leaving brown splashes on the wallpaper.

Cautiously, he put the milk bottle to his nose. He winced and pulled a face, then dumped it in the waste bin and poured himself another cup.

He stormed downstairs with the cup in his hand, spilling half its contents. He put it down on the grimy pavement outside the supermarket and kicked the automatic door a couple of times. When it refused to open he picked
up a bicycle and flung it at the glass. A few scratches, nothing more.

He used the Spider as a battering ram. There was a crash, and the door disintegrated into a shower of glass. Shelves toppled over like dominoes as he drove to the back of the shop. Coming to a halt in a mound of overturned tins, he went to fetch his cup and took it to the dairy section.

He unscrewed a bottle of milk and sniffed. It smelt iffy, so he tossed it aside. He opened another bottle and flung it after the first. The third smelt passable. He poured some into his cup. No clots.

He leant against a humming freezer cabinet and sipped his coffee with relish.

He wondered how many more such coffees he would drink. Made not with powdered or long-life milk, but with milk yielded by a cow only days ago.

How much more fresh meat? How much more freshly squeezed orange juice?

He took the bottle back upstairs with him. He left the car where it was.

After his third cup he tried Marie again. Nothing to be heard but the English ringing tone. He slammed the receiver down.

He hurried downstairs again and checked the postbox. Empty.

He ran himself a bubble bath.

He pulled the dirty dressing off his finger. The cut was healing pretty well – it wouldn’t leave much of a scar. He crooked his finger. It didn’t hurt.

He got into the bath. His toes protruded from the foam. He fiddled with them, had a shave and cut his nails. Now
and then he darted out of the bathroom, leaving wet footprints on the floor, because he thought he’d heard a noise.

At midday he took the scratched and dented Spider on a tour of the city. He met no one. He sounded his horn at every intersection, but more for form’s sake than anything else.

He doubted if he would find a crowbar in a normal DIY store, but that didn’t deter him from demolishing the glass doors of several such establishments with the Spider. He didn’t get out to look for a crowbar. It was an odd sensation, driving a car along aisles normally frequented by taciturn men with big hands pushing trolleys and putting on their reading glasses to squint at price tickets.

I need something more robust, he told himself, having inspected the front of the Spider after his fourth foray.

He eventually struck lucky in a musty old hardware store near the Volkstheater. He couldn’t help recalling that Marie had lived near there years ago, when they’d first met. Engrossed in his memories, he stowed the crowbar in the car. Just as he slammed the passenger door he heard a noise behind him. It sounded like two bits of wood knocking together.

He froze, unable to turn round.

He had the feeling that someone was there. He knew there wasn’t, but the sensation tormented him.

He waited, hunching his shoulders.

Then he swung round. No one there.

It took him a while to find a gun shop, but the one in Lerchenfelder Strasse left nothing to be desired. Rifles of all
kinds stood in racks against the walls, and revolvers and automatics were displayed in glass cases. There were throwing knives, even Ninja throwing stars. Tear-gas sprays for the lady’s handbag stood on the counter, and hunting bows and crossbows were hanging in cabinets at the back of the shop. Also on sale were camouflage jackets and protective clothing, gas masks, radio sets and other equipment.

Jonas was familiar with guns. During his national service he’d been offered a choice between doing a normal stint in the army and signing up for fifteen months. In the latter case he could choose which unit to be assigned to after basic training. He hadn’t hesitated for an instant. He didn’t enjoy marching and would have done anything to avoid the infantry, so he became a driver and later joined an explosives team. He’d spent two months blasting avalanches in the Tyrolean mountains.

He toured the shop. He disliked guns on principle and abhorred loud noises of any kind. In recent years he’d seen in the New Year in a mountain hut with Marie and Werner and Werner’s girlfriend Simone. However, there were situations in which the possession of a gun had its advantages. Not just any old gun. The best firearm in the world, at least psychologically, was a pump-action shotgun. Nobody who had heard one being reloaded ever forgot the sound.

A bollard-free side street enabled him to drive out across the Prater. The first turning he took brought him to a hotdog stand. He lit the gas under the hotplate and brushed the surface with oil. When the temperature was right he laid out a row of sausages on it.

With the scent of frying sausages in his nostrils he looked up at the towering, motionless shape of the Big
Wheel nearby. He’d been on it often. The first time as a boy accompanied by his father, who may have been quite as intimidated by the unaccustomed altitude as his son, because it would have been difficult to tell whose hand had squeezed the other’s harder. He’d had many rides since then. Sometimes with girlfriends, mostly with colleagues at the exuberant conclusion of a work outing.

The sausages sizzled and smoked as he turned them on the hotplate. He opened a can of beer and drank it with his head tilted back, gazing at the Big Wheel.

On the day Marie landed a job as a flight attendant with Austrian Airlines, Jonas had overcome his reluctance to splash out: he’d rented a gondola for three hours, just for the two of them. Overly romantic gestures weren’t his thing. He detested sentimentality, but he felt sure Marie would be thrilled.

A dinner table awaited them, complete with a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket and a long-stemmed red rose in a cut-glass vase. They took their seats, the waiter brought the hors d’oeuvres, bowed and withdrew. An almost imperceptible lurch, and the wheel got under way.

One revolution took twenty minutes. From high above they had a panoramic view of the city, whose traffic lights, street lights and floodlights punctuated the dusk. They drew each other’s attention to long-familiar sights, now given fresh appeal by the unaccustomed viewpoint. Jonas topped up their glasses. By the time they reached ground level and the next course was served, Marie’s cheeks were glowing.

During a conversation a year later, she made some faintly ironical reference to his romantic streak. Taken aback, he asked what she meant, and she reminded him of their evening on the Big Wheel. That was when he discovered that Marie had as little time as he did for candlelit dinners high above Vienna. She had enthused about the
atmosphere to please him, whereas what she’d really longed for was a glass of beer on a bar stool in some pub or other.

He took a bite of sausage. It tasted of nothing. He looked around for some ketchup and mustard.

He was surprised to find how relatively easy it was to operate the fairground attractions.

He smashed the window of the ticket office with the butt of his gun, took a handful of chips and seated himself in a go-cart. Nothing happened when he depressed the accelerator. He inserted a chip in the slot. Now it worked. With the shotgun on his lap, his free hand on the steering wheel and his foot down hard, he raced round the track several times, doing his best not to graze the barriers on the bends.

He broke into the ticket office of the old scenic railway. All he had to do then was press a button, and the wooden cars came gliding into position alongside the boarding platform. The trip passed off without incident. He might have been an ordinary customer on an ordinary day.

He hurled spears at balloons, threw rings over statuettes, fired arrows at a target. He spent a short time in the slot-machine arcade, but winning money was no fun.

He surveyed the rows of empty seats on the Flying Carpet. An idea occurred to him. He stripped off his shirt and tied it to one of the seats in the huge swingboat. In the ticket office he found the lever that controlled the motor. He turned it to automatic. The Flying Carpet swung into action. No girlish screams rent the air, as they usually did, and no one but Jonas stood watching.

His shirt was fluttering in the front row. He followed its progress through the air, shading his eyes with his hand.
After three minutes the swingboat came to rest and the safety bars snapped open automatically.

Jonas retrieved his shirt. He wondered if you could speak of a view if there was no one there to admire it. Was a shirt enough to make a view a view?

He opened another can of beer and took it with him into the House of Adventure. A children’s attraction. It was quite hard to squeeze between sandbags and cross swaying wooden bridges with the shotgun on his back. He trod on stairs that gave way with a crash, teetered across sloping rooms, blundered along unlit passages. When he hadn’t activated some mechanism or other, all was quiet. Now and then a beam would creak beneath his weight.

On reaching the third floor, he stationed himself beside the balustrade overlooking the forecourt.

Nothing was stirring down below.

He drank his beer.

Then he went lurching down a rope walkway in the shape of a spiral staircase.

At the shooting gallery he couldn’t resist the air rifle lying on the counter. He took his time aiming. He fired and reloaded. He took aim, fired and reloaded again. Six times the gun spat air, and six times came the almost simultaneous smack of the slug striking home. He examined the target. The result was not unsatisfactory.

He hung up another target and slowly crooked his finger.

He had always fancied that you could die of slowness by prolonging some everyday action indefinitely – to infinity, or, rather, to finality – because you would depart this world while still engaged in that process. A step, a gesture, a wave of the arm, a turn of the head – if you
slowed that movement more and more, everything would come to an end, more or less of its own accord.

His finger curled around the trigger. With surprising clarity, he realised that he must long ago have reached, yet failed to reach, the point of release.

Unslinging the shotgun, he cocked it and fired. A gratifyingly loud report rang out. Simultaneously, he felt the weapon kick him in the shoulder.

The target displayed a gaping hole big enough to take a man’s fist. Sunlight was twinkling through some other, smaller holes around it.

He went for a trip round the Prater on the miniature railway, whose diesel locomotive was simple to operate. The engine puttered, the air smelt of greenery. It was much cooler in the shade of the trees than among the booths in the amusement park. He pulled on his shirt, which he’d tied round his waist after its ride on the Flying Carpet.

At the Heustadlwasser he climbed unsteadily into one of the boats moored there. Tossing the painter onto the landing stage, he pushed off and rowed vigorously until the boatman’s hut was out of sight. Then he shipped his oars.

He lay down on his back and drifted. Sunlight flickered through the trees overhead.

He awoke with a start.

Blinking in the gloom, he gradually made out the furniture’s familiar outlines and realised that he was at home in bed. He wiped his sweaty face on his forearm, threw back the thin linen sheet he slept beneath in summer and
went into the bathroom. His nose was blocked up, his throat sore. He drank a glass of water.

Sitting on the edge of the bath, he groped his way back into the nightmare.

He had dreamt of his family. The strange thing was, they were all his own age. He’d spoken to his grandmother, who was seventy when he was born and had died at eighty-eight. In his dream she was thirty-five. Although Jonas had never seen her at that age, he knew it was her. He’d marvelled at her smooth complexion and dark, luxuriant hair.

His grandfather, likewise thirty-five, had also appeared. His mother, his father, his uncle, his aunts – all were his own age.

David, his cousin Stephanie’s son, who had celebrated his eleventh birthday last February, sported a moustache and had chill blue eyes.

Paula, another cousin’s seventeen-year-old daughter, whom he had bumped into by chance in Mariahilfer Strasse not long ago, glanced at him over her shoulder and said: ‘Well?’ Her face was older, more expressive and a little careworn. She, too, was thirty-five beyond a doubt. Standing beside her was the baby she’d given birth to last autumn, an aloof-looking thirty-five-year-old man wearing brown gloves.

There was something else as well, some disquieting feature he couldn’t put his finger on.

They’d all yammered at him in a language of which he understood only snatches. His dead young grandmother had patted his cheek and muttered ‘UMIROM, UMIROM, UMIROM’ – at least, that was what it had sounded like to him. Thereafter she merely moved her lips. His father, who resembled his wartime photos, had been jogging along behind her on a treadmill. He hadn’t looked at Jonas.

But there was something else.

He sluiced his face in cold water and looked up at the
ceiling. A damp patch had appeared there some months ago, but it hadn’t grown any bigger of late.

Going straight back to bed was out of the question. He turned on every light in the flat. And the TV, whose flickering screen he now accepted as normal. He put in a video but killed the sound. It was the highlights of the Berlin Love Parade of 1999, which he’d inadvertently tossed into his trolley at the supermarket.