officials boarded the train, while the grimy-eyed crew of the previous night disembarked, wheeling their little cases to the opposite platform and the journey home. The new officials wore smart peaked hats and scuffed blue coats. As we pulled away from the station, they knocked on every compartment door, calling out, “Tickets, passports!”
Tickets and passports were taken away for inspection. I handed over my Turkish identity, the name newly learned, and lay back in the bunk, wishing we could open more of the window as the Bulgarian countryside flashed by. I had no great fear of detection this side of the border. No matter how good the Turkish police, international arrest warrants take time.
As my details were inspected and my tickets stamped, I flicked through the file marked Kepler.
Nearly a hundred photos and names, faces, glimpses of old CCTV pictures, arrest warrants, family photos. Records of interviews and documents logged, emails sent and phones hacked. Some of the faces in the file I barely remembered; others had been part of me for years at a time. There the beggar I had met in Chicago whose face, when shaved, turned out to be barely a boy’s, and whose body I enrolled, as my very last act in it, on a catering course in St Louis, reasoning there were worse places to begin again. Here the woman from St Petersburg whose companions had loved her and left her, and who I’d found wandering the streets without the money to get home, and who hissed, “Vengeance against all false friends…” There the district attorney in New Orleans who, sitting beside me in the bar, had said, “If he testifies, I can blow this case wide open, but he’s too goddamn scared to come to court.” And I’d replied, “What if I could get him there?”
Here, over ten years of my life, laid out in neat chronological order, every jump, every switch, every skin, tracked and documented and filed for future reference, right up to the very last page, and Josephine.
Someone had spent years tracing me, monitoring my every move through records of amnesia, the testimonies of men and women who had lost an hour here, a day there, a few months at a time. It was a masterpiece of investigation, a triumph of forensic detection, right up to the point where, without explanation, it took it upon itself to lie shamelessly and brand both me and my host murderers.
I pulled a few pictures from the file.
A woman, sitting in the window of a café in Vienna, her cake untouched, her coffee growing cold.
A man in a hospital gown, a tawny beard spreading across his round sagging belly, staring out of the window at nothing much in particular.
A teenage boy, his hair stuck up in ozone-destroying spikes, giving two fingers to the camera as he waggled his pink pierced tongue. Definitely not my type but perhaps, given the circumstances, his presence in my file was fortuitous after all.
Chapter 16
As the train slowed into Belgrade, I checked my belongings.
Passports, money, weapons, mobile phone.
I put the battery back in the phone and thumbed it on.
It took a while to work out its location and then grudgingly conceded that yes, it was in Serbia, and sent me a text message to inform me of the same and ask me to enjoy my stay. I waited. Two new messages. The first was a missed call, no message, number unknown. The second was a text message. It read:
SOS Circe
.
Nothing more.
I thought about it a moment, then turned the phone back off, removed the battery and put them away at the bottom of the bag.
What may be said of Belgrade?
It is a bad city in which to be old or cantankerous.
It is a fantastic place to party.
The station is a monument to triumphant 1800s ambition, a palace of fine lines and handsome stones that put Kapikule to shame. Step outside and taxis honk, cars scrunch head to tail, trams and trolley carts compete for space beneath the spider’s web of overhead power lines feeding the transport system, and a couple of tower blocks
Tickets and passports were taken away for inspection. I handed over my Turkish identity, the name newly learned, and lay back in the bunk, wishing we could open more of the window as the Bulgarian countryside flashed by. I had no great fear of detection this side of the border. No matter how good the Turkish police, international arrest warrants take time.
As my details were inspected and my tickets stamped, I flicked through the file marked Kepler.
Nearly a hundred photos and names, faces, glimpses of old CCTV pictures, arrest warrants, family photos. Records of interviews and documents logged, emails sent and phones hacked. Some of the faces in the file I barely remembered; others had been part of me for years at a time. There the beggar I had met in Chicago whose face, when shaved, turned out to be barely a boy’s, and whose body I enrolled, as my very last act in it, on a catering course in St Louis, reasoning there were worse places to begin again. Here the woman from St Petersburg whose companions had loved her and left her, and who I’d found wandering the streets without the money to get home, and who hissed, “Vengeance against all false friends…” There the district attorney in New Orleans who, sitting beside me in the bar, had said, “If he testifies, I can blow this case wide open, but he’s too goddamn scared to come to court.” And I’d replied, “What if I could get him there?”
Here, over ten years of my life, laid out in neat chronological order, every jump, every switch, every skin, tracked and documented and filed for future reference, right up to the very last page, and Josephine.
Someone had spent years tracing me, monitoring my every move through records of amnesia, the testimonies of men and women who had lost an hour here, a day there, a few months at a time. It was a masterpiece of investigation, a triumph of forensic detection, right up to the point where, without explanation, it took it upon itself to lie shamelessly and brand both me and my host murderers.
I pulled a few pictures from the file.
A woman, sitting in the window of a café in Vienna, her cake untouched, her coffee growing cold.
A man in a hospital gown, a tawny beard spreading across his round sagging belly, staring out of the window at nothing much in particular.
A teenage boy, his hair stuck up in ozone-destroying spikes, giving two fingers to the camera as he waggled his pink pierced tongue. Definitely not my type but perhaps, given the circumstances, his presence in my file was fortuitous after all.
Chapter 16
As the train slowed into Belgrade, I checked my belongings.
Passports, money, weapons, mobile phone.
I put the battery back in the phone and thumbed it on.
It took a while to work out its location and then grudgingly conceded that yes, it was in Serbia, and sent me a text message to inform me of the same and ask me to enjoy my stay. I waited. Two new messages. The first was a missed call, no message, number unknown. The second was a text message. It read:
SOS Circe
.
Nothing more.
I thought about it a moment, then turned the phone back off, removed the battery and put them away at the bottom of the bag.
What may be said of Belgrade?
It is a bad city in which to be old or cantankerous.
It is a fantastic place to party.
The station is a monument to triumphant 1800s ambition, a palace of fine lines and handsome stones that put Kapikule to shame. Step outside and taxis honk, cars scrunch head to tail, trams and trolley carts compete for space beneath the spider’s web of overhead power lines feeding the transport system, and a couple of tower blocks
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