Touch (36 page)

My name is…

Irena.

No. Irena was France; I don’t feel like being an Irena again.

Marta. Marilyn. Greta. Sandra. Salome. Amelia. Lydia. Susie.

My handbag doesn’t contain any evidence either way. This body has no name that isn’t a descriptor. Whatever the story behind the pasty face that regards me from the mirror, the pills cut in half in my bag, I can’t see it. I try to guess, but nothing convincing comes to mind and I seem unable to hold on to the basic tenets of even the simplest stories. Perhaps I ran away…

was taken from my home…

a father that beat…

a father who loved.

Perhaps, in this face, I see a woman wrongly convicted of stealing another woman’s child, sent to prison, from which I emerged too scathed to live. Perhaps one time I tried drugs, and it went wrong, or I didn’t try drugs but had within my heart no conviction of my own worth, and having so little faith in myself only served to prove, again and again, how accurate my self-assessment was.

Perhaps I have a daughter, crying alone at home for her mother.

Perhaps I have a husband, sitting in his underpants watching the hockey, a can of beer in one hand, a cap pulled down low over his puffy black eyes.

Perhaps I have none of these things at all, and my life is only the half-sliced pills and the next job to pay for the same.

Then Coyle is behind me, standing in the bathroom door, and he says, “Ready?”

“Nearly. There’s somewhere I want to go first.”

Nathan Coyle was not a man built for the women’s department of any Sixth Avenue store. He sat on a small padded bench outside the changing cubicles, legs crossed and arms folded, and perhaps tried to imagine himself a doting husband waiting on his wife’s selections. Skin flaking beneath my underwear, I tried on smart shirts, smart shoes, smart trousers, smart jewels, until at last, satisfied that I now looked like at worst a tired newsreader, I stepped out before him, twirled and said, “What do you think?”

He looked me over top to bottom. “You look… like someone else.”

“It’s all in the cut. Which do you prefer?” I held out my hand, in which two bracelets, one of silver, one of gold, lay for his inspection.

“If I were buying? Silver.”

“I thought so too. But then the gold may fetch a few more dollars at the pawnbroker.”

Revelation dawned, and he now took in the silk and linen, expensive shoes and designer bag. “You’re giving her wealth in clothes?”

“I might also slip cash into her handbag.”

“You think that’ll make a difference?”

“You have a better idea?”

“No,” he conceded, “I don’t. Money… seems a crude compensation for the price you take.”

“She sleeps a dreamless sleep and, a few hours later, she wakes and is some other place, dressed some other way. I may not know much about my host, but I think I can guess that of the events in her life, this will not count as the worst.”

“When first we met, I slept and woke, and the journey was from one bad place to somewhere worse.”

“That was when I didn’t love you,” I replied, checking my reflection in the mirror. “Times change.”

“You love yourself. Not your host.”

I shrugged. “In relationships as intimate as mine I challenge you to find the difference.” I turned back, happy with my ensemble; wealth not beauty adorned my back. “There. Do you like what you see?”

We rode the Subway. Too many people to find a seat, but as I bumped, shoulder to shoulder, arm to arm with the strangers on the train, I felt no urge to jump. My hands, buried in their new coat pockets, felt warm, fingers gently curled, tendons relaxed into their natural position. A beautiful man with long black hair and skin like melted chocolate smiled at me, and I smiled back and thought how nice it would be to experience the touch of his lips from the outside, a stranger kissing a stranger rather than myself. A child with a violin on its back stared up at me, studying my rich clothes, my expensive jewels. A pickpocket eyed my handbag and it occurred to me that the only reason I’d be him and stick his head through the nearest pane of glass was to protect my host. I looked him in the eye and smiled, and let him know in my smile that he was known to me. He fled at the next stop, searching for easier pickings, and I patted my bag of money and pills, felt the stretch of the leather in my new shoes, on my new feet, and it was good.

Then we were at 86th Street, the tide marks of Hurricane Sandy still visible on its walls where the water had risen over white tiles and red mosaic. The flow of well-jacketed, camera-slung strangers heading towards Fifth Avenue was thick enough to follow through the one-way streets towards Central Park. At Madison Avenue a small truck was attempting a delivery, causing a tailback of traffic which honked and roared its fury all the way down to East 72nd Street. Two blue-coated cops stood by, drinking their coffees beside a kiosk, ready to spring into action just as soon as the caffeine had hit.

Coyle walked a little ahead; I followed behind at an easy lollop, feeling warmer and more awake than I had felt for too many skins.

Then Coyle said, “Here.”

I looked at what here was and laughed.

“Something funny?”

“Sure. You don’t get the joke?”

“Humour was never my strong point. Come on.”

I followed him up the steps, into the museum.

The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Museum is too small a word. Museums are places you visit for a few hours – half a day at the most. A museum is somewhere to go on a Sunday afternoon when the weather is not so warm that you want to be in the park. A museum is a place to take that distant relative who you don’t really know but promised a tour round the city. A museum is a repository of stories you were half-told as a child and then forgot when more pressing matters of sex and money overwhelmed your preoccupations.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is not a museum, but rather a monument. It is a temple raised to peoples gone and stories lost, a haven of ancient beauties picked out by long-dead fingertips, an offering to the vanished craftsman and the mighty emperor. It is full of beautiful things that I want and cannot have for myself.

All of which said, the entrance fee, as I line up in the queue behind Coyle, would deflate anyone’s good mood.

Coyle climbs the great stone stairs that lead up through great stone halls. At one end of the museum is an Egyptian temple, and between there and us are breastplates of gold, silver scimitars, statues of ancient emperors serene in death, and the axe that severed the necks of greedy princelings. Here are the chests of lacquer and pearl in which the opium smugglers carried their goods into China, pipes of the dreamers who withered while inhaling the scent. There the muskets that were fired at the rebellion of Cairo, the Koran that was rescued from the ashes of the mosque, blood still visible on the hand-inscribed pages. Here the ballgown of a Russian aristocrat who danced her way to the revolution; there fine blue porcelain from which Victorian wives once drank their Indian tea. All these things were once beautiful, and time has made them sacred.

Coyle wants to hurry through.

I say, stop, wait, I want to look at this.

We look.

A gallery of faces, portraits of kings and queens, presidents and their wives, revolutionaries and martyrs to their cause. They fascinate me, watching me as I watch them. Coyle says, we’ll be late.

It’ll wait a few more minutes, I reply. It’ll wait.

“Kepler?”

I hum an answer, distracted, my eyes on the face of a woman who seems surprised that the painter has caught her there, face half-turned away from the canvas, eyes looking back over her shoulder as if a stranger had just that moment called her name when she had thought herself alone.

“Kepler.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry. For Josephine.”

The words are enough to make me look away. Coyle seems tiny beneath these faces, a little hunched-up thing of skin and flesh. Inhuman almost beneath the living canvas, his gaze turned down, words shrivelled in. “I’m sorry.”

He’s sorry for being wrong.

And again: I’m sorry.

Sorry for murder, which he called something else.

And one more time: I’m sorry.

Sorry for…

a list probably longer than the time we have available.

Then:

“If something goes wrong, if it’s a trap. Be me.”

“What?” My voice is a mumble. For a moment I cannot remember what shoes I wear, what gender I am; my body is some other place.

“If Pam has… If we’re betrayed, if this isn’t what it should be. The woman you are now, I think… she is beautiful. Now that I look. Now that I can see… her. As well as you. Both of you. I have done some things, and they were not… Anyway…”

He lets out a breath, draws in another. Where is that man who in a no-place in eastern Europe could calm his heart with a single thought, who looked up proud and knew himself to be right? I look for Nathan Coyle in his face and cannot see him. Someone else, the face of that man, vandalised, looks back.

“Anyway,” he says again, drawing himself up a little straighter. “If you have to choose – if there comes a moment where you have to decide – then I want you to be me. I think… it’s better that way.”

“All right,” I reply, and find that it is. “All right then.”

Then we reach a door, and a red rope has been drawn across it, barring us access, and a sign proclaims,
CLOSED
FOR
SPECIAL
OCCASION
,
and a single security guard, radio clipped to her belt, wears the look of one who long ago ceased to be impressed by anything.

“Kepler…” Coyle wants to say something more, hesitates. “You never told me your name.”

“No. You never told me yours. Does it matter?”

A hesitation, a half-shake of the head, and then, unexpected, beautiful, the smallest smile. “Good luck.”

Then the woman called Pam appears from the circle-shaped doorway behind the guard and simply says, “They’re with me.”

The guard leaves.

We follow Pam inside.

It was a Chinese tea garden.

Through a round door and then a square, a walkway covered with ceramic tiles ran around the edge of a courtyard, in which bamboo swayed, water dribbled into a pool of orange and white mottled carp, and twisted volcanic rocks like the trapped scream of a frozen monster writhed around the wall.

In the centre of it all a small wooden table had been laid, and on the table were a blue porcelain teapot, three porcelain cups and a silver stand of tiny cakes. A man sat, his back to the door, a grey scarf wound around his neck, black jacket and silver hair. He did not look up, did not cease his slow sipping as we approached, but rather Pam, her face still obscured by the grey veil she had worn when last we met, a gun tucked with no discretion at all in the pocket of her beige overcoat, stood between us and him, and even with her mouth and nose covered her eyes were grim.

“Stop,” she barked at Coyle. “Tell me something I want to know.”

“Elijah. My call sign is Elijah.”

Her gaze turned to me. “Is this her?”

“This is Kepler,” Coyle replied before I could speak.

She didn’t answer, but with the little finger of one hand gestured me away from the table, towards the whitewashed wall. “You come within three metres of me, or anyone in this room, and I’ll put you down,” she breathed. “So I shall.”

I raised my hands, let her guide me towards the nearest wall.

“Stop. Face the wall.”

Hands still raised, I faced the whiteness of the wall.

Feet behind me, keeping their distance, keeping safe.

Coyle: She’s not a threat.

Pam: That’s a dumb thing to say.

“She came here knowing the risks.”

“Then she’s dumb as well as ugly.” Pam’s voice, high and out of tune.

Then a third voice, older than the rest, tired – the voice of the silver-haired man with the grey scarf – said, “You didn’t ask me here to enjoy a lovers’ spat, did you?”

There was

familiarity

in that voice.

Staring at a whitewashed wall, a gun at my back, fat carp swimming by my side, several thousand dollars’ worth of jewels and clothes on my gently dying body.

I am Kepler, and I know who the sponsor is.

Then the voice spoke again. “Mr Coyle, may I offer you some tea?” The pouring of hot water into a white bone cup. “I understand you wanted to see me urgently. Normally I wouldn’t be amenable to these encounters – particularly with one who appears to be as compromised as yourself – but Pamela raised some interesting points that I would like to discuss. Please. Sit.”

A creaking of a chair, the tinkle of plate and cup.

“I am the sponsor,” the voice went on after a suitable pause for the sipping of tea. “You should understand that I have very little day-to-day interest in the running of your organisation. Its activities are entirely of its own deciding. I merely… afford it some resources. As, indeed, I do for this museum. My interests are eclectic.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“For what?”

“For… the tea.”

“You are most welcome.”

“And for seeing me.”

“There you are perhaps less welcome, especially considering the company you keep.”

“Kepler has been… helpful.”

“Mr Coyle, let me say right now that any statements you may make in support or sympathy towards the entity you have brought into this place will only serve to compromise you in my eyes. I would urge you to focus only on the single statement that aroused my and Pamela’s interest in this affair.”

“Galileo.”

I flinched as Coyle said the word and imagined that perhaps he winced too, though at what recollection I could only guess.

“Indeed,” murmured the sponsor. “Galileo. Pamela was kind enough to take me through the file last night. I had looked at it before, of course, though not with such a… critical eye. You allege that the entity Galileo has somehow entered your organisation?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“Because Kepler says so?”

“Yes, sir, and for other reasons.”

I stared at a white wall, my hands by my head, and wondered if this was how it felt to be a host. The world moves, and I am still, actions beyond my control turning, unseen, in the background. I am a woman who sells her body for medicines she cannot afford, and around me conspiracies were unravelled and tales told, and I stared at a wall and waited.

“Such as?”

“Frankfurt.”

“Yes, the medical trials. What of them?”

“They were designed to create a vaccine against ghosts. I think Galileo subverted them instead, to gather data not on the destruction but the creation of creatures like him.”

“Because?”

“I think Galileo murdered the researchers in Frankfurt.”

“In itself not proof of anything.”

“Kepler was blamed and her host too. I was ordered to kill them both. Why was I ordered to kill the host?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re the sponsor.”

“And as I’ve said, my interests are varied, my tastes eclectic, and I do not make operational decisions. But now you work with the very entity that you sought to kill. Why?”

“Galileo.”

A sigh, a shifting of weight. Perhaps now a cake was consumed; perhaps sugar was added to some gently cooling tea. I imagined delicate fingertips holding a French fancy by the edges, unwilling to damage the icing. The thought made me smile.

“Galileo.” The sponsor’s sigh, deep and old. “We always seem to come back to Galileo.”

The fountain dribbled, the carp swam. Beyond the moon door a thousand people ebbed and flowed, their eyes turned to the wonders of the past.

Then the sponsor said, “Kepler.”

I lifted my head at my name, didn’t turn from the wall. Bodies moved in chairs behind me. “Kepler, look at me.”

I turned, keeping my hands raised, looked into the eyes of the silver-haired man. His face was grey, stained with yellow spots beneath the sagging hollows of his eyes. His neck hung with skin like the soft fins of a seal; his eyes were deep dark and looked on me without hatred, without recognition, and I knew his name.

He cleared his throat and, one hand scratching irritably at the vest underneath his ironed white shirt, said, “Why are you here?”

“I share Coyle’s interest in Galileo.”

“Why?”

“It seems… right. Maybe that’s not even it. We’ve… shared hosts. I wore her flesh; he wore mine. At first you could say we were competitors. Then it was retribution. I betrayed Galileo, and Galileo took revenge.”

“What kind of revenge?”

“He wore someone I loved, and I killed him. He was… beautiful. I didn’t have the heart to put a bullet in his brain. That was in Miami. And then in Berlin… I went to a friend for help, and Galileo burned him alive. He did it so that I might see. He said, ‘Do you like what you see?’ We always like what we see, people like us. We always see how something else could be better than what we have. Perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps this face, perhaps these hands, perhaps… perhaps I will be better. Perhaps no one will care for the things I did when last I was someone else. Perhaps someone will love me. Perhaps they will love
me.
Perhaps if I love them enough, they’ll have no choice but to love me in return. Do you like what you see? we ask, and the answer is yes, of course. I love it. I love it. If I am it, will you love me?

“That Galileo is a monstrosity is an evident truth. That he has penetrated your organisation, torn it to pieces, is again obvious. Galileo has ripped you apart. That Galileo is perhaps attempting, through research and violence, to create more of himself, to create children, if you will, a something, someone that will last – well, that is debatable. I doubt Galileo himself would be able to give you a fair assessment either way.”

Again the sponsor scratched at his vest, rubbing across his chest, and I wondered what manner of surgical scars might lurk beneath, digging their way through the body of this stooped old man.

“You are the first —” He stopped and smiled at a joke only he could know. “You are nearly the first,” he corrected, “creature of your kind I have spoken to. You do a better impression of human than I expected. I congratulate you. That Galileo may have… compromised us in ways we do not know, well, the matter is rather too repugnant to speak of, yet we must speak of it. You… suggest that orders have been given, and operatives have acted on them?”

“Yes.”

“Orders given by Galileo?”

“By Galileo, through another’s voice.”

“We have protocols in place, of course, to prevent this.”

“Your protocols are only as good as the people who created them. Galileo has been around for a long time. Perhaps when you agreed a code word with a friend, you agreed it with someone else entirely?”

“I find that difficult to believe.”

“People always find difficult truths harder than easy lies.”

His breath caught in his throat, as his hand scratched scratched scratched at his shirt. “And we should believe you: a murderer, a slaver, a —”

“Sir!” Coyle was on his feet.

“Whatever Coyle may say,” his voice rose, cutting Coyle off, “do not think that your pretence of humanity begins to redeem the harm you have done!”

Pam was stepping clear of the table, out of Coyle’s reach, and now the gun was in her hands.

“No, sir…”

“Michael Peter Morgan!” My voice, high and hot, sliced through the air, knocked the sponsor back on his seat, a shudder running through his cold withered hands. “How old are you now? Your body must be far advanced into its declining years, but you – twenties, thirties? At least thirty years younger than the flesh you are prisoner to. Tell me, when they killed Janus did you know that it was yourself you ordered dead? It was you they gunned down in that house in Saint-Guillaume; it was the hand that held your wife, the heart that loved your children, flesh of your flesh but soul of his soul. You lost so much time: you lost your youth; you blinked and it was gone, a brief nap, and when you wake you are this. A man of eclectic tastes, and who are you? I don’t think you even know.”

The old man, cramped and curled around his own pain, one hand hugging the edge of the table, the other pressed against his chest, raised gummy eyes to my face and hissed, “How do you know me?”

“I knew Janus. I knew the person you were in your real life.” He opened his mouth to speak, but the corners curled in; no sound emerged. “Mr Morgan,” I said, “have you been losing time?”

Silence.

Not-silence.

This is the silence of air moving through our lips.

This is the silence of muscles tight, blood running, hearts racing.

This is the silence of a whole world turning outside the door.

This is the roaring not-silence of minds that dare not think out loud.

“Mr Morgan,” I breathed, “you studied economics at Harvard. You did tae kwon do, had terrible taste in clothes. Both parents dead by the time you were twenty-five, you were still a virgin when Janus took your flesh. You blinked, and when you opened your eyes your wife was crying by your side, and your daughters, Elsa and Amber, they didn’t understand what had happened to their father. They thought he’d died. Death of the mind, not the body. I know this because I knew you, Mr Morgan. I shared a drink with you in the junior common room in Princeton in 1961, when I was… someone else. Just doing my job. And since then you’ve hunted us for all you’re worth with all the wealth that Janus left behind, but you’re old now and all alone, and so I have to ask – have you been losing time?”

Silence.

The sponsor, breathing fast, ragged breath, head down, hands tight across his chest.

“Nathan,” I murmured “step away from him.”

Slowly he stepped back.

I advanced. Pam was moving now, watching me, her back to the wall, gun levelled at my chest, keeping her distance from everyone else in the room. I knelt down in front of him, seeing ancient liver-spotted hands that had been so young the last time they’d been his. I reached up slowly, palms open, fingers flexed, whispered, “I need to touch you, Mr Morgan. I need to know that you are who you say you are.”

His head shaking, tears in his eyes, he couldn’t speak, didn’t stop me, could barely breathe. Coyle whispered, “Kepler…” A question, a warning, but he wasn’t going to stop me, not now, and before anyone could change their mind I grabbed Morgan’s hands, held them tight, squeezed his fingers between my own and felt

nothing.

Only skin.

Just skin.

I let go, Morgan shaking now, the tears running through canyons on his face. He was young; he was so very young.

“Kepler?” Nathan’s voice, high and urgent.

“He’s not Galileo.” I eased myself up, backing away from Morgan, giving myself a little space, room to breathe. My gaze swept the room: the ancient man not yet grown up, the injured killer, the woman in grey. “Nathan, when we came in here, you said ‘Elijah’. What was Pamela’s part of the recognition code?”

He opened his mouth to answer, then closed it again, turning to look into her eyes.

She giggled, pressing three fingers to her lower lip behind the veil. “Whoops,” she said and fired.

Who she intended to fire at, clearly she couldn’t decide, for there was a second in which her gun swung between Coyle and myself, before finally, almost with a shrug, she settled on me and pulled the trigger. By then I was already moving, which was why the bullet shattered my left arm, splitting bone in two with a
crack
I could feel in the hollows of my ears, but Coyle caught her by both wrists, and as she pulled the gun round he pushed her down, slamming his knee into her face, blood blooming across her scarf. I landed on the floor in a screaming haze of bewildered pain and blood, even as Pam

not-Pam

she-who-was-not-herself

she-who-was-Galileo

twisted round and drove her elbow into Coyle’s throat. I heard two shots, the glass shattering in the ceiling overhead, a rainfall of shards, then three more shots that sang over my head and slammed into the wall, then the
click-click-click
of the pin on nothing at all, and Galileo, the scarf pulled back from her head to reveal golden hair and a soft blood-smeared face twisted with effort, slammed her open palm against Coyle’s throat,