Chameleon
His expression hardened. ‘Okay. If you have to know … yes.’
The change of heart was too abrupt. It left me more uncertain than before. I had the feeling his admission was a lie, designed to hurt me while he still could. Either way, I no longer cared. It was typical of Olivier not to see that.
‘Well,’ I said, unable to resist the cheap shot, ‘that would explain the drop-off in your sexual performance, I suppose. Recently, you’ve been dismal.’ Before he could respond, I went on. ‘The point is, you don’t feel anything for me and I no longer feel anything for you, so what’s the use?’
Outraged, he rose to his feet and jabbed a finger at me. ‘I can’t believe this! You … you’re …’
He frothed, spluttered and, eventually, found his insult. He called me frigid. A frigid Swiss bitch. It sounded so helpless and absurd – so castrated – that I should have felt a pinch of pity for him. But I didn’t. Instead, I laughed and Olivier, his anger now complete, threw a slap at me.
What happened next was automatic. I feinted to my left, ducking outside the arc cast by his arm. I intercepted his hand, crushed the fingers into a ball and twisted it. All in half a second. I heard his wrist crack, felt two fingers breaking. As he sank to his knees, I let go of him, took a step back, spun on one foot, lashed out with the other and broke three ribs.
The next thing I remember, I was standing over him. I was silent. The only sound in the room was Olivier’s breathing. He was gurgling like a baby. There was blood on his face, there were fragments of teeth on the floor.
In some ways, I think Olivier recovered quicker than I did. It certainly crushed my complacency. I had come to believe that I’d purged that part of my past. Now I know better and don’t take anything for granted. Violence is a part of me and probably always will be. I was manufactured to be that way.
After Olivier, there was Remy, a professor of economics from Toulouse who was taking a year-long sabbatical in order to write a book. That was nice. Older, wiser, more civilized, for a while the whole affair seemed more in keeping with my new frame of mind. But after three months, he started to talk about the future, about a life in Toulouse. The first hint of permanency was the beginning of the end.
Now, there is Laurent. I told him at the start not to expect any commitment.
‘I’ve only been divorced for three months,’ he replied. ‘The last thing I need right now is commitment. I just want an easy life. Some good times …’
Which is how it has been, so far. He’s bright, witty, kind. He’s wasted as a mechanic in Salernes. Then again, who am I to speak? After all that’s happened to me, I could live this way for years and not grow bored with it. I don’t know what the future holds and I don’t care. For the first time in my life, I’m happy with the present. Doing nothing and being nowhere seem perfect.
These days, when I think of 20 January 2000 and that tiny room on the second floor of that run-down hotel in Bilbao, I think to myself, was that really me?
She spent the afternoon at one end of the highest olive terrace, sketching the ruined shepherd’s hut at the farm’s edge. She made four drawings from two vantage points, ink and charcoal on paper. There was a constant hot breeze. By the time she returned to the house, she felt the sun and dust on her skin. She left the drawings on the slate worktop, drank a glass of water, refilled it and went upstairs.
The free-standing bath stood at the centre of the bathroom on heavy iron legs. The rusted taps coughed when turned. Stephanie pulled her linen dress over her head, dropped it onto the scrubbed wooden floor and lowered herself into the water. Through a circular window, she watched the vineyards turning blue in the evening light.
A steam shroud rose from the surface. She closed her eyes and the present made way for the past: an airless top floor flat in Valletta with a view of the fort; the crowded lobby of the Hotel Inter-Continental in Belgrade; Salman Rifat pouring olive oil onto her skin; a bout of dysentery contracted in Kinshasa; TV pictures of pieces of wreckage from flight NE027 floating on the North Atlantic; the message on the screen – I have work for you, if you’re interested; Bilbao.
Eighteen months ago, these memories would have provoked panic. Now, Stephanie felt calm in their company. She accepted they would never go away but the further she moved away from them, the easier it became. She was starting to feel disconnected from them. In time, she hoped she might almost believe that they belonged to someone else.
The door onto the street was open. Masson’s apartment was in a narrow side street off the main square in Entrecasteaux. A first floor with high ceilings, patches of damp and rotten shutters that opened onto a shallow balcony. The bedroom was at the back, overlooking an internal courtyard that reeked of damp in the winter. During the summer, it was a humid air-trap.
Masson was barefoot, his hair still wet from his shower. He wore faded jeans and a green cotton shirt, untucked and badly creased. Like his apartment, he was a mess. It suited him.
They ate chicken and salad, followed by locally produced apricots. The sweet juice stained Stephanie’s fingers. Later, they went to the bar on the square. Small, stuffy, starkly lit, it lacked charm, but Masson was friendly with the patron and Stephanie had grown to know the people who went there. There was a TV on a wall bracket in one corner, a European football tie on the screen, a partisan group gathered in front of it. Behind the bar, there were faded photographs of a dozen Olympique Marseille teams, all taken in the Stade Vélodrome. Children scuttled in and out of the bar, some dressed in the white and sky-blue football shirts of l’OM. It was quarter to midnight by the time Stephanie and Masson returned to his apartment. A little tired, a little drunk, they made clumsy love.
In the morning, Stephanie woke first and went out to collect fresh bread. When she returned, Masson was making coffee, smoking his first cigarette of the day.
‘Are you busy tonight?’
‘Yes.’
He turned to look at her. ‘Really?’
‘You seem surprised.’
He looked back at the ground coffee in the pot. ‘Not really. It’s just …’
‘Just what?’
‘I don’t know …’
‘It’s okay, Laurent. I’m not busy.’
Uncertainty made way for a lopsided grin. ‘No?’
‘I just don’t want you to take me for granted.’
‘How could I? I don’t even know you. You tell me that you have a temper but I’ve never seen it.’ Stephanie grinned too. Masson let it drop, as she knew he would. ‘You want to come here again?’
‘Why don’t you come out to me?’
‘Okay. I’ll be finished in the garage at about six thirty, seven.’
When Masson went to work, Stephanie climbed into her second-hand Peugeot 106 and drove back to the farmhouse. She parked beneath a tree and left the windows rolled down. Despite the cool dawn, it was already a hot morning, a firm wind among the leaves and branches. The lavender bushes were clouds of bright purple that whispered to her as she climbed up the stone steps to the rough gravel beside the terrace.
It wasn’t anything she saw or heard that made her stop. It was a feeling, a tightness in the chest. Just like her reaction to Olivier’s slap, it was an instinct she couldn’t rinse from her system. She stood still, held her breath and felt her pulse accelerate. There was no apparent reason for it; no door forced, no window broken, nothing out of place. She waited. Still nothing. She told herself she’d imagined it. But as she took a step forward, she heard a noise. A soft scrape, perhaps. One hard surface against another. The sound was barely audible over the wind. It could have been the gentle clatter of a branch on the clay tiles of the barn, or the creak of a rotten shutter on a rusty hinge.
The memory triggered the response. The mind functioned like a computer. Gathering information, analysing it, forming strategy, assessing risk. She felt herself begin to move, directed by a will that didn’t seem to be her own.
She hummed a tune to herself as she strolled round the farmhouse to the back. To look at, a girl without a care in the world. Behind the house, she shed her shoes and clutched the drainpipe which rose to the roof gutter. When she’d moved in, it had been loose. During her first week, she’d bolted it to the stone wall herself.
She began the climb, the surface abrasive against the soles of her feet, the paint flaking against her palms. She was out of practice, testing tissue that had softened or tightened, but her technique remained intact. She pulled back the shutter – always closed, never fastened – and made the swing to the window, grasping the wooden frame, hauling herself up and through, and into a tiny room that the leasing company had fraudulently described as a third bedroom.
She paused on the landing to check for sound but heard nothing. In the second bedroom, which overlooked the courtyard at the rear of the house, she opened the only cupboard in the room, emptied the floor-space of shoes, pulled out the patch of mat beneath and lifted the central floorboard. Attached to a nail, there was a piece of washing line. At the end of it, there was a sealed plastic pouch, coated in dust and cobwebs.
For all the serenity of the life she’d made for herself, it had never occurred to Stephanie to dispense with her insurance. She took it out of the pouch. A gleaming 9mm SIG-Sauer P226. In the past, her gun of choice. She checked the weapon, then left the bedroom.
The staircase was the worst part, a narrow trap. She eased the safety off the SIG and descended, her naked feet silent on the smooth stone. On the ground floor, she moved like a ghost; the sitting room, the cloakroom, the study.
The intruder was in the kitchen. She felt his presence at the foot of the stairs but only spied him when she peered through a crack in the kitchen door, which was half open. She saw a patch of cream jacket, some back, a little shoulder, half an arm, an elbow. She tiptoed inside. He was facing the terrace entrance, his back to her. He was standing, as if expecting her. Perhaps he’d heard the Peugeot park; he couldn’t have seen her approach from the steps, not from any of the kitchen windows, and yet he seemed to know that she most often entered the farmhouse via the terrace.
Stephanie managed to place the cold metal tip of the SIG’s barrel against the nape of his neck before he stirred. When he did, it was nothing more than a gentle flinch. He made no attempt to turn around or to cry out with surprise. That was when she recognized the clipped, snow-white hair.
‘Hello, Miss Schneider.’ And the clipped Scottish accent. ‘Or should I say, Miss Patrick?’
2
You tell yourself it can’t be true. For once, you’re honest with yourself but your first reaction is denial. It has to be a mistake. Your mistake, somebody else’s, it doesn’t really matter. Any excuse will do when you can’t face the truth about yourself.
Everybody has a talent. This is what the cliché tells us. I think it depends on what you regard as a talent. When the lowest common denominator determines the threshold for that talent, almost anything can count; having a nice smile, being a good liar, not succumbing to obesity. Personally, though, I reject the idea that everybody has a gift. It’s rather like saying ‘art is for the people’. It isn’t. It’s for those who can appreciate it and understand it. It’s elitist. Just like talent.
Most people have no particular ability. Mediocrity is the only quality they have in abundance. I should know. For a long time, I was one of them. But that was before I discovered that there was an alternative me, that there was another world where I could rise above the rest and excel.
It’s one thing to discover you’re exceptional. It’s quite another to recognize that what makes you exceptional is unacceptable. What do you do when you finally see who you really are – what you really are – and it’s everything society rejects? You tell yourself it can’t be true. That’s what you do, that’s the first thing. And maybe it’s what you continue to do. But not me. I’d already lied to myself for long enough. When the moment came, I stopped pretending I was someone else and chose to be the real me instead. I chose to be honest.
Brutally honest.
‘How are you, Stephanie?’
Slowly, he turned round, his face emerging from her memory; ruddy skin stretched tightly across prominent bones, aquamarine eyes, that white hair. He was wearing a cream suit, a dark blue shirt open at the throat, a pair of polished black slip-ons.
‘I heard the rumours, of course. That Petra Reuter was back. Naturally, I didn’t believe them. But when it turned out that there was some substance to them, I assumed that someone had hijacked her identity in order to protect their own identity. Just as you once did.’ He squinted at her, perplexed, offended. ‘It never occurred to me that it might actually be you, the real Petra Reuter.’
Alexander was a man who believed mistakes were made by other people. That was why he was staring at her so intensely. He was looking for an answer.
‘I was sure that once you vanished, I would never hear of you again, let alone see you. But for more than two years, you were Petra. The question is, why?’
Stephanie said nothing.
‘And then you stopped. About eighteen months ago, wasn’t it? No reason, no warning. Again, the question is, why?’
Alexander. A man with no first name. A man she’d spent four years trying to forget.
‘What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?’ He took a packet of Rothmans out of his jacket pocket. ‘How unlike you.’
Stephanie couldn’t help herself. ‘Fuck off.’
She’d wanted to stay silent. Now, Alexander had his reaction. ‘That’s more like it.’
She jabbed the gun against the bridge of his nose. ‘Get out.’
‘Are you familiar with the phrase “act in haste, repent at leisure”?’
‘Are you familiar with the phrase “I’m going to count to three”?’
He didn’t even blink.
‘You rented this property through the Braun-Stahl agency in Munich. You bought your Peugeot from Yves Monteanu, a dental technician from St Raphael. Did you know that his father was a Romanian dissident? He used to publish an underground pamphlet in Bucharest each month. All through the seventies and into the eighties. A brave but foolish –’
‘One.’
‘No, I don’t suppose you did,’ Alexander concluded. ‘But that would be because you didn’t do as much research as we did. You know what we’re like, though, how thorough we are. For instance, I know that you rarely stray further than Entrecasteaux or Salernes. I know you have a checking account with Crédit Lyonnais that receives fifty thousand francs a month. Which seems a lot, considering the life you’re leading. Each month, it’s from a different source that vanishes as soon as the transaction’s complete. A neat trick – one day, you’ll have to explain it to me. I also know that you’re having a relationship with Laurent Masson, a car mechanic from Marseille. I assume you know that Masson has an ex-wife …’
‘Two.’
‘… but I wonder whether he’s told you about his criminal record.’ Stephanie was betrayed by her expression. ‘I didn’t think so.’ Alexander took his time, making a play out of plucking a cigarette from the packet. He tapped it on the lid. ‘He’s a car thief. Three convictions to his name. Last time out, he got four months inside. That was when his wife decided she’d had enough. She moved out. Took everything with her; furniture, carpets, curtains, the lot. You can imagine his surprise on the day of his release when he got back home. Mind you, it must have made it easier just to walk away … there being nothing to walk away from.’
Stephanie increased the pressure of metal on skin.
Alexander met her stare fully. ‘Three?’
There was a moment where she could have done it. In her mind, there was nothing but static. It was fifty-fifty. She felt that Alexander sensed it too, yet he hadn’t backed down.
She eased the safety on. ‘What are you doing here?’
When she pulled the gun away, it left a pale, circular indentation over the bridge of his nose.
‘I guess Masson thought he’d come to a quiet little town like Salernes – or Entrecasteaux, for that matter – where nobody’d bother him. Where he could start to build a new life for himself. Just like you. Right?’
There was a briefcase on the kitchen table. He opened it and produced an A4-sized manila envelope, which he handed to her.
‘Take a look.’
Inside, there were about twenty photographs, half of them in black-and-white. The first was of a school playground, five girls in uniform, aged seven or eight. They were playing, laughing. From the grain of the print, Stephanie could tell that the photographer had used a zoom lens. For a few moments, the significance of the shot wasn’t apparent. But then she saw.
It was the hair that fooled her. Brown and thick, it was almost waist-length. Four years ago, it had been cropped short. She was tall, too, taller than the girls around her. As a four-year-old, she’d been small for her age. Now, she’d caught up with her school friends and surged ahead. The facial features began to chime; Christopher’s nose, Jane’s eyes. The girl at the centre of the photograph was Polly, her niece.
‘I don’t believe you’ve ever seen Philip, have you? The last time you saw your sister-in-law she was pregnant with him. We were standing on the road overlooking Falstone Cemetery. Your family were burying you after your fatal car crash. Remember?’
Stephanie ignored the barb. There were five photographs taken on a beach. Bamburgh, perhaps, or maybe Seahouses. Those were the beaches Stephanie’s parents had taken them to as children. They’d remained popular with Christopher and Jane and their children. She saw James and Polly running through ankle-deep surf, Christopher with his trousers rolled up to the knee, Philip on his shoulders, tiny hands in his hair. It looked like a windy day. As she remembered them, they always were. There was a golden retriever in two of the shots. She wanted to know if it was theirs but knew she couldn’t ask. The final photographs were taken at their home, overlooking Falstone; Christopher rounding up sheep in the field below the paddock, Jane captured in the bathroom window, unfastening her bra, unaware. Stephanie recognized an implied threat when she saw it.
She put the prints on the table. ‘I imagine there’s a point to this.’
‘Been to Paris recently?’
She said nothing.
‘What do you know about James Marshall?’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘How about Oleg Rogachev?’
‘No.’
Alexander finally lit his cigarette. ‘Ever heard of a man named Koba?’
‘No.’
‘Another Russian.’
‘I would never have guessed.’
‘Not even when you were Petra?’
‘No.’
‘I have a proposition for you …’
‘Not a chance.’
‘You haven’t heard it yet.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I’m not interested.’
‘You will be. So why don’t you sit down and listen?’
She remained standing.
Alexander looked bored. ‘I’m not leaving until you hear me out.’
‘Then get on with it.’
‘You have no right to expect any leniency from me, you know. You belonged to Magenta House. You still do. The last four years count for nothing. You should bear that in mind when you consider my proposition, which is this: one job in two or three parts –’
‘No.’
Alexander continued as though he hadn’t heard her. ‘Afterwards … well, you’ll be free. You won’t have to see me again. A pleasure for both of us, I’m sure.’
‘No.’
‘Stephanie …’
‘You don’t understand. I can’t work for you again.’
‘You mean, you won’t.’
‘I mean, I can’t. I’ve changed.’
‘We’ve all changed. Some of us more than others. But no one changes quite like you. Changing is what you do best, Stephanie. And once you’ve changed into Petra Reuter and taken care of business, you’ll be free to change back into who you are now. Or anyone else you might want to be.’
‘Didn’t you hear what I said? I’ll never work for you again. I’d sooner be dead.’
Alexander took a long, theatrical drag, then exhaled slowly, smoke spilling from his nostrils. ‘I don’t expect you to agree. Not here, not now. You have your pride. But when you manage to put that to one side, you’ll see that this is a good offer.’ He picked up the photographs from the table. ‘It’s Monday afternoon now. I’ll expect you at Magenta House by the end of the week.’
‘You must be out of your mind.’
His shrug was dismissive. ‘You seem to have made a good life for yourself here. Why ruin it? Why go back on the run? Which is what you’ll have to do. Think about it. You can set yourself free.’ He was about to put the photographs back into his briefcase but changed his mind. ‘I’ll leave these with you.’
‘You don’t really think you’ll see me again, do you?’
‘Were you really going to shoot me?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you didn’t.’ He headed for the terrace, then paused. On the slate worktop, next to the sink, were the drawings she’d made of the shepherd’s hut the previous afternoon. He picked one up and examined it. ‘Yours?’
‘Get out.’
He dropped the sketch back onto the pile with casual contempt. ‘You should stick to killing people, Stephanie. That’s where your real talent lies.’
‘I’m retired.’
Alexander smiled. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen him do that. He said, ‘You’re twenty-seven. You’re too young to retire.’
Stephanie watched Alexander walk down the track towards the road. She hadn’t noticed a car on her return from Entrecasteaux. Perhaps he had a driver nearby. She didn’t wait for him to fade from view.
You can make a home for yourself, you can make a life for yourself, but don’t make anything for yourself that you can’t walk away from in a second.
There was no need to think. The procedure was self-activating.
She collected a paring knife from a kitchen drawer and went upstairs to her bedroom. Beneath her bed, there was an old leather suitcase with brass locks. She opened it and slit the stained fabric lining near the bottom, so that the contents would not be damaged. A German passport in the name of Franka Müller and two thousand Deutschmarks. That was enough to get her to Helsinki. There, in a safe-deposit box at the 1572 Senaatintori branch of the Merita-Nordbanken on Aleksanterinkatu, the ingredients of Franka Müller’s life awaited collection; keys to a rented bed-sit in Berlin that was paid for monthly by direct debit to a management agency, a birth certificate, a valid American Express card, a German driving licence, personal bank records. A dormant but complete identity.
She opened the cupboard to the right of the bed and stood on a chair so that she could reach the back of the top shelf. Behind an old shoe-box, there was a small black rucksack. Everything was already packed; some underwear, socks, a pair of trainers, a pair of black jeans (now probably too tight), a couple of T-shirts, a sweatshirt, a thin grey anorak with a hood. Also, a wash-bag containing a few toiletries and a medical pack that included sutures, disinfectant and painkillers.
Stephanie looked at her watch. It was only ten thirty. Traffic permitting, she’d be at Nice airport by twelve thirty. From there, one way or another, she’d make sure she was in Helsinki before the end of the day. Tomorrow, once she’d gathered the rest of Franka Müller, she would have the whole world in which to lose herself. Tomorrow, there would be no trace of Stephanie Schneider left on the planet.