On display in the middle of the room is a large design object with steel cables and several chromed tubes. A piece of fitness equipment. I can’t think of any other purpose. Two serious men look down on the device disapprovingly from their dark portraits on the wainscoting.
I mustn’t fall asleep. Despite everything, I feel as if I could fall asleep effortlessly, with a brief, blissful awareness of it happening, me disappearing into myself. I scratch my beard, stick a finger in one ear and jiggle it as quickly as I can. The pleasure spreads over my skull, opening my mouth and refreshing me. After the noise has left my head and I can hear the silence again, I press in the safety catch and strip the Flock: slide, barrel with chamber, recoil spring guide. I keep my eyes on the dark-swathed ceiling. Twice I overcome the resistance of the trigger: two clear clicks of the hammer and firing pin. For a few seconds, the parts are spread out on my stomach. Nobody notices it. Nobody seizes the opportunity. Then I click and slide everything back into place and it is as if the pistol, which I haven’t really cleaned, is brand new again and extremely reliable.
148
Perhaps I’m leaving a trail. When it gets light, my trail will be as visible as the slime of a snail that has been dragging itself around all night. Although I am certain it’s the same apartment, I don’t encounter anything that fits in with last night’s journey with Harry. The swing doors are unfindable, but the kitchen isn’t necessarily close to the swing doors; nothing here can be taken for granted. Everything looks the same, but I don’t recognize anything. I might as well be equipped with a faulty compass and surrounded by a swarm of mosquitoes in the barren landscape of the far North. I wouldn’t feel any more lost than here between the tapestries, candelabras and carved chests, faint with hunger.
149
A step. I feel another one higher up. I light the way with my watch. I’m far from any windows, in the heart of the apartment, somewhere in a small room. Narrow, wooden steps like the kind that lead up to a mezzanine or an attic. It’s close to morning, maybe the other rooms are already getting lighter. I haven’t heard a thing all night. The resident isn’t on this floor. He’s either dead or alive. If he’s alive, he must have fled out of fear, upward perhaps, to a higher floor. He expected the danger to come from below, merciless, like water rising in a flood. I creep up. The staircase is short, two or three meters, that’s all. I expect an intermediate level, a workroom, studio or loft, but my hand doesn’t feel the oak floorboards I’m used to. I feel the chill of stone. I enter a room that amplifies every noise I make. It reminds me of the landings Harry and I crossed earlier. Some distance farther along a new staircase begins, made of stone like the stairs between floors. Have I found my way back into the stairwell near the swing doors? Or is there more than one set of stairs? Are the apartments not only larger than a thousand square meters, but with layouts and dimensions that vary completely from one to the next?
150
Slinking is ridiculous and pointless. Except for the white marble columns, a double row of three, the imposing hall is virtually bare: every corner is exposed. I am alone. I stand up. I stand on two feet like a man. Is this a mosque? I see a vision of gray prayer rooms hidden behind faded warehouse gates, with cables and pipes visible on the walls, with low, false ceilings. But this makes me think of Mohammedan temples on the banks of the Euphrates. Every square centimeter is covered with tiles, together representing garlands of flowers, olive branches and symmetrical vines, blue, yellow, reddish brown, green, in numbers and patterns that make my head spin. I can hardly bear it. So much profusion is overwhelming. I concentrate on the low benches against the walls: they’re continuous, they pass under the keyhole-shaped windows and trace the perimeter of the hall like overgrown skirting boards. On the very far side there is a small interior balcony. But no carpets, not even a doormat. In the middle, the floor is a kaleidoscopic compass rose, a mosaic of the most colorful kinds of stone beneath a gold-leaf-covered chandelier as big as a treetop.
There, in the center, I also see myself. I see my uniform, stained and sagging. My cheap black shoes, my ruffian’s face. I feel like a desecrator. I’m still wearing my cap on my head.
151
I sweep the aluminum plate with the dim light of my watch. Two threes. I’m on the thirty-third floor. I repeat the sentence in my head, as if putting a seal on a certificate. With my back against the wall, I slide down onto the floor.
The stairs connecting the floors to each other are meant for domestic staff only. They share a single employer, after all. The residents have purchased the service, but that doesn’t make them their bosses. That’s why the staff can disappear into trompe l’oeils like Regency period servants and slip down secret corridors on their way to another floor, climbing wooden attic stairs to get there if necessary.
I stare at the red light in the frame for so long that the −1 becomes meaningless and it takes me a while to realize that it’s suddenly gone off. I keep looking at exactly the same spot. When I blink, I see it appear again as a vague glow. The after-image is displaced by a new light. It’s the same red, at most a little brighter, and now shaped like a zero.
For a short period I am convinced that I am controlling the light with my brain, through my gaze. I think of 1, I think of 2, and, look, the numbers light up before my eyes. It’s only at 4 that I hear something, a weak, subterranean rumbling, and only at 5, a handful of seconds after the disappearance of −1, that it hits me like a bucket of ice water: the service elevator is moving.
Breathlessly I follow the numbers, trying to avert them. 20 is a turning point. The moment I see that I haven’t succeeded in stopping it at 20, I realize in the darkness preceding 21 that the elevator is headed for this floor, 33, and me.
152
I’m sitting in front of the elevator with both hands clamped around the grip of the Flock. My relaxed arms are resting on my raised knees. I’d hit the bull’s-eye at fifty meters.
I concentrate on the sliding doors, no longer looking at the red numbers.
A sucking sound as it brakes, starting high and getting lower.
The familiar signal.
After a moment’s hesitation, the doors slide swiftly open.
I see the table in a sea of light.
It is as if the elevator is presenting me with the table.
The hatch through which Harry and I climbed up onto the roof of the cabin is still open.
The door stays open longer than usual.
I start to get a nasty feeling that something is expected of me. The elevator has come to visit me of its own accord to present me with the table. It’s my turn.
Again I check the corners of the cabin. The table can’t hide anyone, therefore there is no one in the elevator. Just the table.
Then I catch sight of the control panel. Because I’m sitting on the ground, I notice a slightly larger button at the bottom, separate from the long row like the dot of an exclamation mark. There is a picture of a red telephone on it. Next to it, thin vertical stripes indicate a built-in speaker.