The Stolen (2 page)

 

It was starting again, the vision a leviathan rising from the depths of fear – inevitable, unstoppable, paralysing, and always the same. But before Liliane could wake herself she was pulled into the vortex, into the last minutes of her mother's life.

The staccato of the pine trees as they flashed past, the weight of the snow beneath the skis, the feel of the wind rushing by her – the stark silence of the vision as petrifying as the inevitability of her mother's death. One tree, two trees, three trees, she counted, the dread a huge lump in her chest; by tree six if Liliane could scream she would, but she couldn't – she was trapped in her mother's body, in a frozen memory that had lived on inside her own consciousness. Tree seven was now in sight, and in that moment it began, as it always began, a shockwave, from the left face of the mountain as if the very air were shuddering. Liliane, looking through her mother's eyes, turned towards the great bank of snow that had peeled away and was now descending the mountain, a slow, powdery ripple of horrifying beauty. The terror, both her mother's and her own, rushed through her before her mother's body was knocked into a suffocating blackness that grew heavier and heavier until she could breathe no longer —

Liliane woke bolt upright in her bed, the shadowy walls of the bedroom pulling into focus as she gasped for breath – her posters of The Clash, the pouting David Bowie, the side table with the pots of make-up and vinyl records scattered over it, the turntable, the electric guitar leaning up against the wall, prosaic in polished wood and metal struts: normal life, immediately anchoring in its banality. But as she finally relaxed back against the pillow something glinting on the carpet caught the moonlight. She looked over. Her mother's body lay twisted on the floor, her limbs broken and tangled with her skis. At the sight Liliane found herself screaming.

In seconds lamplight flooded the room. Matthias, a tall, angular man in his late thirties, stood blinking in the brightness, his large hands dangling awkwardly by his sides, Liliane's hair a veil as she rocked herself in the bed.

‘Liliane, it's me, Papa,' he ventured softly, hating the way these trances of hers transformed her into something alien, a creature he couldn't reach. He waited awkwardly for permission to comfort her, the hesitancy of a father confronted with his adolescent daughter's fragility. She looked so vulnerable, her narrow shoulders shaking, her eyes staring up at him, still unseeing. Then risking rejection, Matthias moved to the bed to pull her into an embrace. Her painfully thin body, initially resistant, folded against him.

‘Was it the same?' he whispered.

She nodded. She'd never been able to tell him the truth about what she experienced during these episodes – how, sitting in a playground in Zürich, she'd found herself swept into the mind of her mother dying on the mountain four years ago, and how those few petrifying minutes then came back again and again, woven into the visions she'd always had, even as a small child. Instead she shut down, nestling her face into his chest like she used to.

‘Imaginary phantoms, they can't hurt you.' He tried, and failed, to sound as if he believed it himself.

‘If they can't hurt me, why can't I control them?'

Uncertain of the answer, Matthias couldn't return her gaze. Hiding the shame he felt at his own inadequacy, he got up to switch off the lights.

‘Go back to sleep, it's not even five.'

He waited until she'd settled back down into the blankets then shut the door behind him. Overcome, he leaned against the corridor wall, face in his hands.

The year before, Liliane had been arrested for possession of a couple of grams of heroin. Because of the family's contacts she'd been released with a warning. She'd told her father drugs were the only way of blocking her ‘visions' and since then Matthias had been playing a dangerous guessing game about whether his fifteen-year-old daughter had started taking heroin again, helpless as she wrestled with the hallucinogenic episodes that would suddenly absent her completely from the world.

Where did I go wrong?
It has to be my fault
, Matthias's guilt pounded in his head. But guilty of what? Liliane had always been an odd child, marooned in her own imagination. However, since his wife's death she'd withdrawn even further. Matthias had buried his own sorrow in work and he couldn't help feeling he'd made a fatal mistake not trying harder to help Liliane with her own grieving. With a sigh he stepped away from the wall then re-entered his study to continue the letter he'd begun earlier.

Matthias glanced over ruefully at the flute resting on the music stand in the corner of the study. He daren't pick it up so early in the morning. Music was his way of sorting the chaos of a world he often didn't understand into pristine patterns that would fill the air and float about his head like iridescent butterflies. Once he played to his wife; now he played alone furtively. There was one refrain he liked to play over and over. A dozen notes melded together to make the beginning of a poignant melody. He couldn't even remember where he had heard it. It certainly didn't exist in any of his scored music, and yet he had the feeling he hadn't invented the tune, but that somehow it was embedded in his memory. It had haunted him as long as he could remember.

He glanced back down at the page.
Even in death his wife would not miss the progress of their only child growing up. The letters themselves were a conduit to an imaginary world in which Marie continued to live, and their lives spun on as before, untouched by tragedy. After finishing them, Matthias would burn each page as if reducing the paper to carbon was the alchemy of sending them into that invented afterlife. A pointless ritual, he knew, but he kept writing anyhow.

The thirty-eight-year-old physicist had woken an hour earlier wrestling with the atomic structure of another alloy. He'd lain there with a half-formed equation of elements dancing like cartoon characters on a music score, tantalisingly just out of reach. After a while he'd given up and come to the desk to write the letter. It had been four in the morning. Time does not flow evenly, he observed with a small ironic smile, but stutters forward, like life, like entropy. As if in answer, outside a lone bird started a thin, doubtful piping.
Perhaps he too is uncertain dawn will come,
Matthias thought to himself,
yawning.

Beyond the jagged sentinels of the fir trees, the lights of Küsnacht had begun to switch on, one pinprick of yellow after another. Matthias stretched his exhausted muscles, then glanced over at the clock. Five… The lonely hour, the chasing-mortality-away hour, his wife used to call it, her attempt to excuse her habit of waking and pushing her warm body into his – a prelude to making love whether he wanted to or not. Covering his eyes with his hand, he tried to press his spinning brain back into an equilibrium, away from memories. It didn't work; the void Marie had left was always there no matter how many times he tried to fold his mind over it. When she'd died so suddenly, the epiphany he'd experienced – that he had never been truly vulnerable with her – had been one of his greatest regrets. Her death had made him realise that it had always been a fear of loss that held him back. But he'd lost her anyway and now he was in real danger of losing his daughter.

 

 

Every clock behind the heavy plate glass read the same: five o'clock.
Gadjé
time. The non-gypsy world was divided up into digits and scribbles Yojo didn't understand, and didn't care to. In his world it was seasons, the moon and the rising and falling sun that marked the hours and the years. He looked across at the elegant brass plaque set discreetly to the side of the large oak door. It was simple: a square divided into triangles. To anybody else it was merely a company logo, a cleverly devised symbol that suggested antiquity and a trustworthy quality that was beyond price. To Yojo it suggested something else entirely. He glanced down the cobbled lane. He had chosen the ghost hour, when the Niederdorf would be empty, to come to the small, exclusive showroom. When he'd walked down Bahnhofstrasse, one of the most expensive shopping malls on the planet, it had been absolutely silent except for a single pealing church bell; even so, Yojo was nervous as he turned into the lanes of the medieval town.

The faint drone of a machine made him swing round; a mechanised street cleaner was slowly making its way down the In Gassen. The driver would be wondering what a gypsy was doing right outside one of the most exclusive watch companies in Switzerland. No, he wouldn't wonder – he would think him a thief. Yojo knew it. He'd lived his whole life trying to stay invisible; sometimes he'd succeeded, but not always. Instinctively, the Kalderash slipped an olive-skinned hand, hardened by decades working gold and copper, into a jacket pocket to touch the amulet his sister Keja had given him. It wasn't there. Blessed with second sight, she hadn't wanted him to go, but for once he knew he had to ignore her warnings. Without the amulet he felt particularly vulnerable.

Ever since he'd visited the records office two days before, he'd had the uncanny impression his shadow had another shadow skipping just behind, breathing behind his breath. He knew this fear. He knew it from the time of the
gadjé
war: the war that had pulled his people into her black mouth, seven hundred thousand of them – seven hundred thousand souls now without a voice.

‘If my time has come, I cannot fight it, it is written,' he whispered in Romanes. The sentence hung in the light of the setting moon then vanished with his courage. Easy to talk, hard to act – Yojo tried to stop his old heart from beating like that of a frightened stallion.
I am here for her
, he told himself;
she belongs to my people; my father was murdered protecting her
.

Yojo looked back down the street. The cleaning machine had come closer, the driver obscure behind a cloudy shield of plastic, the brushes whirling madly against the cobblestones.

He reached up to the panel beside the entrance and traced the logo with his fingers. He knew the clue to finding her lay somewhere inside this building, but where?
In the past, present and future.
The answer seemed to be spun from the very air itself, as if She, the Goddess, had answered him, as if Time itself had begun to collide with Memory.

A wise gypsy would run now, but he didn't want to be wise, he wanted to be brave. He'd waited too many years. But the heavy door with its many locks was impenetrable. He needed another way of getting in, a trickster's way. Just then he heard a slight sound and, before he had a chance to turn, the bullet went cleanly through the side of his head. He fell heavily, the yellow kerchief stained with blood, one arm stretching out, the tattooed number on the inside of his wrist clearly visible.

The cleaning machine came to a halt and the assassin disembarked casually, whistling as he strolled to the body. He knelt and carefully laced a raven's wing between the middle finger and the forefinger of the dead gypsy's left hand. After a few minutes the machine disappeared round a corner. The assassin didn't even bother to accelerate.