Then the guard, all his previous fear and empty sounds turned to the dead silence of the competently self-aware, reaches down and plucks the cigarette lighter from the fallen man’s hands. He steps back to the edge of the pool, and as the filmmaker shakes himself, blinks in bleary confusion, opens his eyes and looks up to see–as though for the very first time–his situation, the guard flicks back the cap from the lighter, looks direct to camera and breathes,
“Do you like what you see?”
Saturated in a pool of petrol, Johannes Schwarb, his face bewildered and mouth open, begins to get out a scream before the falling flame hits the ground.
The security guard waits for the body to stop burning before he reaches down, picks up the still-filming mobile phone and turns it off.
Janus watches in silence.
There is revulsion there, but not surprise.
When it is done, she says, “Who is it for?”
“What?”
“He said this one’s for you. Who is it for?”
“Oh,” I reply, briefly bewildered. “Me. Obviously. It’s for me.”
Chapter 68
The body of Sebastian Puis did not sleep that night.
I have surfed from host to host, night by night, never sleeping, and though my skin may be fresh as a spring flower, yet I remain tired. The only conclusion I can reach is that the mind–whatever loose concept of the same may be applied to myself–needs sleep as much as every muscle fibre, nerve and hormone-crunching cell.
Descending for breakfast out of the dumb sense that it was dawn and breakfast was what you did, I was only slightly surprised to find Janus not there. No one answered my knock on her bedroom door, and at the reception desk the clerk mumbled, “Yes, she went out this morning and left you this.”
A yellow piece of hotel paper, a hand–child-like in its scrawled hugeness–proclaiming on it, Popped out. Dinner, Saint-Guillaume, 53 rue de la Garde, 5 p.m.? xx
Dinner and a kiss.
“Where is Saint-Guillaume?” I asked wearily.
The receptionist looked it up on a map. “Do you have a car?”
“No,” I sighed. “But I’m sure I can find a lift.”
Abandoning a body is dangerous.
If you cannot find the moment of the switch itself, then look for the next best thing. Find the patient who walked into the hospital, amnesiac and frightened, and ask them–what was the last thing you remember? And who was the last person you touched?
In those circumstances where a body must be abandoned without triggering the usual panoply of symptoms that may arouse attention, I recommend massive doses of mind-altering drugs.
Say what you will for the French; they know how to stock a pharmacy.
I took a gentle walk around the city, stopping on the way to pick up a drug here, a painkiller there, until my bag was sagging with the weight of questionable medication. I visited the cathedral, read a little more of my book and managed to restrain myself from editing the contents of Sebastian’s iPod. I bought a map of the surrounding area and a bottle of water, tucked both into a brown paper bag and settled down on a bench opposite the emergency ward of the university hospital.
As it began to rain, sideways off the sea, I reached into my bag, pulled out a hefty handful of pills and downed them in a gulp of sugar-coated delirium. I waited ten minutes, stood up, leaving my map behind beneath the bench, and, surprised at how reluctant my own legs were to move and how tempting it was to laugh, swung my way towards the emergency room.
The receptionist at the entrance desk had a face designed to discourage sickness. Better a lingering disease, the furrows of her eye seemed to proclaim, than the customer care skills about to be revealed. I beamed, slouching across the desk, and let my packets of pills tumble from their bag. “Hi,” I said. “I’m really, really high. Can I shake you by the hand?”
Jumping from a sober body to a drunk one is unpleasant.
Jumping from a stoned body to a sober one is, arguably, an even harsher return.
Needs must.
Fifteen minutes later–ten spent in the ladies’ toilet reminding myself that my nausea was a psychological rather than physiological response–I was a male nurse with a straight back, short trousers and a set of car keys in my pocket. Five minutes walking round the car park with the electronic tag, looking for a flash of indicator lights, located my car. I paused long enough to turn my mobile phone off, and collect my map from beneath the bench, before settling into a car that smelt perfectly of me and heading north towards Saint-Guillaume.
Chapter 69
Once, in Milan, I was a woman with a handsome face and thick eyebrows that seemed always to rebuke the foolishness of what they beheld. I owned a little yellow Mini but, slipping into the driver’s seat for the first time, I was shocked to discover how high the headrest, how close the brakes, my knees bumping up against the wheel. The back of the seat was pushed forward, crunching me down like a rally driver, and not two minutes into the drive I was forced to stop, readjust every part, tweak every mirror. Comfort and security thus restored, I spent four glorious days attending the most fashionable gatherings of the town, until at last a beautiful man in a suit approached me and said hello, and only after I’d started hitting on him did it become apparent that this unknown gentleman was my brother and he was perturbed by my behaviour.
Somewhat embarrassed, I moved swiftly on, and my host, it seemed, continued about her daily life as if oblivious to the time I had stolen from her. Until, that was, she tried to drive her car, which she crashed almost immediately into the side of a police truck, and was taken shrieking first to hospital, later to court.
Remarkable, the habits people will justify as normal.
I drive north as the rain thickens until it is a shimmering sheet sloshed across my windscreen, until the road is a grey fuzz of rebounding water, until the skies are black and the mountains vanish beneath the frozen skies, and I think of Galileo.
Chapter 70
Saint-Guillaume.
I had never been there before; doubt I’ll go again.
The lights in their iron brackets along the steeply climbing streets were bubbles of pink hanging in the pouring air.
A single shop was open at the bottom of the hill, its back balcony overhanging a rocky river in full roar. The streets were empty save for the occasional outline of a smoker framed in an open door. Parking was difficult, finding my way through the downpour up the tight-spun stairways and byways near impossible. I cowered beneath the arch of a church and peered into the gloom for rue de la Garde. Eventually an old woman, her umbrella abandoned as useless against the slicing deluge, pointed me back down the hill and round the side of a bakery, its shutters barred and delivery van tucked up on the pavement for the night. I slipped and scrambled, my coat over my head, looking for number 53, warm lights behind the open shutters and closed window panes; hammered on the door, waited to be let in.
“It’s open!”
A man’s voice, calling from inside. Tried the handle and the door scraped open, heavy wood scratching along the granite floor. A log fire burned within, the ceiling was low, the smell of onion heavy on the air. I looked for a restaurant sign and saw none; rather, a dining-room table neatly laid, lace tablecloth starched white, candle burning in an empty bottle in the middle. An open door, twisted trapezoid in its crooked frame, led to the smell of cooking and wine, and from within that hot glow came the man’s voice again: “That you?”