Night Work

16

He didn’t know the painting he was looking at. It depicted two mendwarfed by some windmills in the background and holding a big dog on a leash. A colourful picture. He’d never seen it before. The radio alarm clock on the bedside table was as unfamiliar to him as the bedside table itself and the old-fashioned bedside light, which he mechanically turned off.

The TV wasn’t his, nor were the curtains and desk. Nor was the bed. It wasn’t his bedroom, his home. Nothing here belonged to him except for the shoes beside the bed. He had no idea where he was or how he had got there.

The room had no personal touches at all. The TV was small and shabby, the bedding stiff as cardboard, the wardrobe empty. Lying on the window sill was a bible. A hotel room?

Jonas slipped his shoes on, jumped up and looked out of the window. A stretch of woodland met his eyes.

He tried the door. It was locked. The key was attached to a metal tag. It clattered against the lock as he rattled the handle. He unlocked the door and opened it a crack, looked left. A musty-smelling passage. He hesitated before opening the door wider and peering round the doorpost to the right. At the end of the passage he made out some stairs.

His door had a ‘9’ on it. He’d guessed rightly. On the way to the stairs he passed some other rooms. He tried the door handles, but all the doors were locked.

He went down the stairs and walked along a passage to a door at the end. Beyond it lay another passage. The walls were decorated with children’s drawings. The inscription beneath a sun with ears read: Nadja Vuksits, aged 6, from Kofidisch. A piece of cheese with smiling faces instead of holes was by Günther Lipke from Dresden, a kind of vacuum cleaner by Marcel Neville from Stuttgart, a farmhand wielding a scythe by Albin Egger from Lienz. The last picture, which had been painted by Daniel from Vienna, Jonas identified with difficulty as a sausage firing a bullet.

He turned the corner and nearly bumped into a reception desk. The drawer beneath it was open. On the receptionist’s chair was an open folder containing postage stamps. Lying on the floor, lit by the greenish glow from some neon tubes on the ceiling, were two glossy postcards.

The automatic door whirred open. Hitching up his trousers by the belt, Jonas went outside. His hunch was confirmed: he was in Grossram. He’d woken up in a motel room in the motorway service area.

Either someone else was responsible for this, or he himself was. But that he simply couldn’t believe.

It was cold and windy. Jonas, who was in his shirtsleeves, shivered and rubbed his arms. He lifted the flap of the letterbox next to the entrance and peered inside, but it was too dark to see anything.

The Spider was in the car park. He took the keys from his trouser pocket and opened the boot. The shotgun wasn’t there, but he hadn’t expected it to be. He removed the crowbar.

The letterbox didn’t have many good leverage points. He began by trying to force the flap the postman opened with a key, but the tip of the crowbar kept slipping out of the crack. Eventually he lost patience and inserted it in the mouth of the letterbox itself. Bracing his chest against the crowbar, he leant on it with all his weight. There was a crack, the crowbar gave way beneath him, and he fell flat on his stomach.

He swore, rubbing his elbows, and looked up. The top of the letterbox had broken off.

He fished out envelope after envelope, postcard after postcard, careful not to cut himself on the jagged metal. He read most of the postcards. Letters he opened, skimmed their contents and tossed away. The wind blew them over to the filling station, behind whose windows lights were burning dimly.

6 July, Grossram service area.

He stared at the card in his hand. He had written these words not knowing what lay ahead of him. This G with a flourish, he’d written it without having any idea how things were in Freilassing, Villach or Domzale. Twenty-five days ago he’d posted this card in the hope that it would be collected. This letterbox had been spattered with rain and scorched by the sun, but no postman had come to clear it. What he’d written had been imprisoned in the dark for over three weeks. In solitude.

He tossed the crowbar into the boot and started the engine, but he didn’t drive off right away. His hands tightened on the steering wheel.

What had happened the last time he sat here?

When had he sat here last?

Who had sat here last?

Either someone else.

Or himself.

*

Although he noticed nothing unusual outside the block of flats on the Brigittenauer embankment, he was warier than normal. When the lift door opened he hid round the corner until he heard it close again. He only got in the second time. On the seventh floor he leapt out so as to catch any potential enemy off guard. He realised how stupid he was being, but it always helped him over the difficult moment of decision. The sense that he was being active, attacking, gave him some feeling of assurance.

The shotgun was leaning against the wardrobe. ‘Morning,’ he greeted it. He cocked it. The noise sounded good.

He glanced into the toilet and the bathroom. Went into the kitchen and looked round. All was as it had been. The glasses on the sofa table, the dishwasher open, the video camera beside the TV. The smell, too, hadn’t changed.

The change in the bedroom he spotted immediately.

A knife was sticking into the wall.

Protruding from the wall at the spot the Sleeper had thrown his weight against it in that recording was the hilt of a knife that looked familiar. Jonas examined it. It was his father’s knife. He tugged at it. It refused to give. He wiggled it. The knife didn’t move a single millimetre.

Jonas looked more closely. The blade was embedded, up to the hilt, in the concrete wall.

He took hold of the handle and tugged with both hands. They slid off. He dried them on his shirt, wiped the handle and tried again. No effect whatever.

How could anyone drive a knife so deep into a concrete wall that it couldn’t be pulled out?

He looked at the camera.

*

Jonas boiled some water. Leaving the herbal tea to brew, he cleaned his teeth in the living room. Doing it at the basin in the bathroom would have meant turning his back on the door.

He looked out of the window while the electric toothbrush was humming against his teeth. The clouds had moved on. It might be a good day to set up the cameras.

In the bedroom he leant against the doorpost and eyed the knife embedded in the wall. Perhaps it was a message. An order to go into buildings and search them thoroughly, to get to the bottom of things. The Sleeper wasn’t evil, he was just a well-meaning prankster.

He emptied his trouser pockets but found nothing that hadn’t been in them the day before.

Opening the freezer drawer, he took out the goose he’d got from the supermarket, which he planned to cook for dinner. He put it in a big bowl to thaw and made sure the casserole was clean.

He carried his herbal tea over to the sofa table, then went to get some sheets of cardboard, a pair of scissors and a pencil. He cut the cardboard into rectangles the size of visiting cards. Without giving any thought to the wording, which he promptly forgot, he wrote on them in quick succession. After a while he counted them. There were thirty. He put them in his pocket.

*

The tripods clattered together behind him as he pulled up. After a reassuring glance at his notebook he got out, taking two cameras with him.

The flat smelt bad. He held his breath until he was standing on the balcony, then set up the cameras as planned. One was looking down at the embankment road, the other in the direction of the Heiligenstädter Brücke. He’d left his watch at home, so he took out his mobile. It was midday. He checked the times on the camera displays. They tallied. Having estimated how long he would take to set up twenty-six cameras, he programmed these two to start recording at 3 p.m.

He made faster progress than he’d expected. By half past twelve he was setting everything up at Rossau Barracks, at a quarter to one he was driving back over the Danube Canal, and shortly before half past one he was outside his block of flats. He had over an hour to spare, and he was hungry. He wondered what to do. His goose wouldn’t be ready till late that evening.

*

The canteen of the Brigittenauer swimming baths smelt of rancid fat and stale tobacco smoke. Jonas looked in vain for a window overlooking the street, so that he could air the place. He put the contents of two tins in the microwave.

While eating he leafed through a 3 July edition of the Kronen Zeitung. Stale breadcrumbs crackled between the pages, many of which were spotted with gravy. The crossword puzzle was half completed, the five mistakes in the picture puzzle had been marked with a cross. In other respects this edition didn’t differ from the ones he’d come across in other places. An article on the Pope on the foreign news page, rumours of a cabinet reshuffle in the home news section. The TV pages carried a profile of a popular presenter. He had read all these pieces dozens of times without discovering any allusion to unusual events.

As he read the article on the Pope he couldn’t help remembering a prophecy that had appeared in various magazines and programmes since the end of the 1970s, sometimes seriously, mostly ironically: that the present Pope would be the last but one. This prediction had scared Jonas even as a boy. He had tried to work out what it meant. Would the world come to an end? Would a nuclear war break out? Later on, as an adult, he’d speculated that the Catholic Church might undergo a fundamental reform and dispense with an elected leader. He had to try and remember if the prediction had come true.

It hadn’t.

He was convinced that St Peter’s Square in Rome looked no different from the Heldenplatz in Vienna or the Bahnhofsplatz in Salzburg or the main square in Domzale.

Jonas pushed the empty plate away and drained his glass of water. He looked down through the window at the indoor pool. The muffled, regular lapping of water reached his ears. The last time he’d been here was with Marie. That was where they’d swum together, down there.

He wiped his lips on a paper napkin, then wrote Jonas, 31 July on the menu board.

*

At 2.55 p.m. he parked the Spider in the middle of the Stifter-strasse— Brigittenauer embankment intersection. He wanted to be on the move by the time he came into shot. So as not to be filmed as he set off, he had programmed the camera at this intersection to start recording at two minutes past three. A window of two minutes would be enough.

He ambled round the car with his hands in his pockets, kicked the tyres, leant against the bonnet. A strong wind was blowing. Above his head, an unsecured window hit the wall beside it with a crash. He looked up at the sky. Clouds had gathered once more, but they were far enough away, hopefully, for him to collect the cameras in good time. As long as the wind didn’t blow them over.

2.57 p.m. He got into the car and dialled his home number.

The answerphone cut in.

2.58 p.m. He dialled Marie’s mobile number.

Nothing.

2.59 p.m. He dialled a twenty-digit made-up number.

Number unobtainable.

3 p.m. He floored the accelerator.

Between Döblinger Steg and the Heiligenstädter Brücke he reached a speed of over 120 k.p.h. He had to brake hard to make it round the bend leading to the bridge. Tyres screaming, he raced down to the Heiligenstädter embankment. He accelerated, changed gear, accelerated, changed gear, accelerated, changed gear. Although he had to concentrate on the road, he caught a glimpse of the camera as he roared beneath it a split-second later.

The speedometer was reading 170 as he passed the Friedensbrücke and 200 just before Rossau Barracks. The buildings beside the road were just blurred shapes. They loomed up and were there, but he’d left them behind before he could take them in.

On the Schottenring he had to slow down to avoid skidding off the bend and ending up in the Danube Canal. He headed for Schwedenplatz at 140, braked at the last moment and raced across the bridge. His heart was pumping the blood so furiously through his body he started to suffer from a stabbing pain behind the eyes. His stomach tied itself in knots, his arms twitched. Sweat was streaming down his face, and he only breathed by fits and starts.

More bends here, so ease off, was the message sent him by the rational part of his subconscious.

He trod on the accelerator and changed up.

Twice he nearly lost control of the car. He felt he was seeing everything in slow motion. Yet he felt nothing. It wasn’t until he got the car back on track that something inside him seemed to snap. Desperately, he put his foot down even harder. He was perfectly aware that he’d crossed a line, but he was powerless. He could only watch, eager to see what he would do next.

He had thoroughly familiarised himself with the place where the embankment road and Obere Donaustrasse diverged. If he wanted to avoid crashing at the Gaussplatz roundabout, he shouldn’t be doing more than 100 k.p.h. at the intersection before it. He glanced at the speedometer as he passed the traffic lights. 120.

For a second he kept his foot hard down. Then he stamped on the brake pedal with all his might. According to the driving course he’d completed during his national service, the pedal had to be pumped, in other words, depressed and released alternately. Centrifugal force and muscular cramp prevented him from bending his leg. The Spider grazed a parked car and skidded. Jonas wrenched at the wheel. He felt a violent impact and heard a crash. The car went into a spin.

*

He mopped his face.

Looked left and right.

Coughed. Put on the handbrake. Released his seat belt. Pressed the central locking button. He tried to get out, but the door was jammed.

Leaning forwards, he found he’d come to rest on the roundabout’s tramlines. The clock on the dashboard was showing twelve minutes past three.

His fingers trembled as he scratched a dried gravy stain off his trousers. He put his seat belt on again and drove down Klosterneuburger Strasse.

As he passed the Brigittenauer swimming baths he decided to do the whole circuit again. He accelerated away, but he failed to reach the speeds he’d managed on his first tour. It wasn’t the car’s fault. His testosterone level had dropped and he was feeling dazed. Going too fast had lost its charm for him. He found 100 k.p.h. enough.

After rounding the Danube Canal between Heiligen-stadt and the city centre for a second time, driving at a more moderate speed, he set about collecting the cameras, which he’d numbered so he wouldn’t get the tapes mixed up later on. When he got out on the Brigittenauer embankment in order to collect the two cameras from the balcony of the flat, he stumbled. But for a rubbish skip, which he clung to in the nick of time, he would have fallen over.

He circled the Spider. The nearside tail light was smashed and the offside rear bodywork dented. The front of the car had suffered the worst damage. Part of the bonnet had been torn off and the headlights were shattered.

He dragged himself to the entrance on legs like cotton wool and took the lift up. He didn’t bother to inspect the cameras, just pressed the stop button and turned them off.

*

It occurred to him, as he lifted the dripping goose out of the bowl and put it down on the work surface, that his airbag hadn’t inflated after the crash. He wasn’t sure he remembered all the details correctly, but the state of the car said it all. The impact must have been considerable. The airbag should have inflated.

Product recall campaign, he thought. He couldn’t help laughing.

He got out some salt, pepper, tarragon and other herbs, chopped some vegetables, rinsed the casserole dish and preheated the oven. Then he dismembered the goose with poultry shears. It hadn’t thawed out completely, so he had to use a lot of force. He slit open the stomach and cut off the wings. Jonas wasn’t a very skilful cook, and before long the work surface was a scene of devastation.

He stared at the drumsticks. The wings. The parson’s nose.

He stared into the maw.

He surveyed the carcass in front of him.

Dashed to the toilet and vomited.

After cleaning his teeth and washing his face, he took a big shopping bag from the hall cupboard. Without looking too closely, he swept the bits of goose off the work surface and into the bag, which he tossed into a neighbouring flat.

He switched off the oven. The chopped vegetables caught his eye. He took a carrot and put it in his mouth. He felt tired. As if he hadn’t slept for days.

He sank onto the sofa. He would have liked to check the door. He tried to remember. He was pretty sure he’d locked it.

So limp. So tired.

*

He surfaced abruptly from a welter of confused, unpleasant images. It was after 7 p.m. He sprang to his feet. He mustn’t sleep, he had things to do.

While packing he floated around the flat like a sleepwalker. If he needed two things that were lying side by side he would pick up one and leave the other. He went back as soon as he noticed his oversight, only to think of something else and leave it lying there again.

Even so, he was ready in half an hour. His needs were few, after all. T-shirts, underpants, fruit juice, fruit and vegetables, blank tapes, cables and leads. He went into the deserted flat next door, where he’d dumped the cameras after his drive. He selected five of them and removed the tapes, which he marked with the numbers of their respective cameras.

While driving to Hollandstrasse he remembered the dream he’d had that afternoon. It had had no plot. Again and again half a head or a mouth had appeared. An open mouth, its most notable feature being that it was toothless, with cigarette butts embedded in the gums where teeth should have been. That gaping mouth, with its uniform rows of cigarette butts, had appeared to him again and again. Nothing was said. There had been a cool, empty feeling about things.

The truck was standing outside. Jonas pulled up a few metres beyond it, where the Spider wouldn’t get in his way. He put two cameras in his bag and slung it over his shoulder.

It was stuffy inside his parents’ former flat. His footsteps echoed as he walked across the old parquet floor to the windows and opened each in turn.

Fresh, warm evening air flooded into the room. He perched on the window sill and looked out. The truck was blocking his view of the street. It didn’t bother him. He was filled with a feeling of familiarity. This was where he had stood as a small child, a box under his feet so he could look out at the street. That hole in the window flashing, that drain in the gutter, the colour of the roadway — all were familiar to him.

He got to his feet again. No time to lose.

In the hallway he laid some planks down on the short staircase that led to the ground-floor flats, making a ramp for the trolley. Having wheeled the two halves of the bedstead up it, he leant them against the wall.

He wouldn’t be able to put the bed up again without technical aids of some kind. He could try to glue them together again, it was true, but they probably wouldn’t support his weight. So he went and fetched some blocks of wood from the truck, blocks he’d obtained from a building site specifically for the purpose. Outside in the street he glanced anxiously at the sky. It would soon be getting dark.

He arranged the blocks on the floor. They were of different heights. He went outside again and returned with a box of books. The first three volumes he took out were valuable, he even remembered their former position in the mahogany bookcase. The next half dozen were Second World War tomes his father had collected after his mother’s death. They were dispensable.

He balanced two of them on the smallest block and distributed the rest, then checked the height. He switched two around, checked again, picked out a slender volume he didn’t need and added it to one of the supports. Now they were equal in height.

He wheeled in the first half of the bed, his mother’s side. Carefully, he tipped the bulky frame over and lowered it until the edge came to rest plumb in the centre of the supports. He did the same with the other half of the bedstead. That done, he fetched the mattresses and laid them down on top.

Gingerly at first, then more confidently, he rested his weight on the bed. When it didn’t collapse as he’d expected, he pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the mattresses.

Job done. Night could fall. He wouldn’t be faced with a choice between braving the darkness on the drive home to his flat on the Brigittenauer embankment and sleeping on the floor here.

Although he was feeling faint with hunger and the light was steadily fading, he worked on. One piece of furniture after another was wheeled in and placed in position. He wasn’t as careful as he’d been when loading up. Rattles and bangs filled the air, the walls shed flakes of plaster, black streaks disfigured the wallpaper. He didn’t care as long as nothing got broken. Even professional removal men scratched things.

The last load of the evening consisted of two pictures, three cameras and the TV. Jonas turned on the TV. He fancied something, he didn’t know what. He untangled some leads and connected a camera to the TV. He had to press several buttons on the remote before the screen went blue, indicating it was ready.

It was dark now, but the street lights hadn’t come on as he’d hoped. Hands on hips, he looked through the window at the truck. All that could be heard behind him was the faint hum of the camera, which was on stand-by.

Chocolate.

He was ravenously hungry, but what tormented him most of all was a craving for chocolate. Milk chocolate, chocolate with nuts, chocolate creams, anything, even cooking chocolate, would have done. As long as it was chocolate.

The hallway was in darkness. Shotgun in hand, he groped his way to the light switch. When the dim bulb in the ceiling came on, he cleared his throat and let out a hoarse laugh. He tried the door of the flat opposite. Locked. He tried the next one. Just as he turned the handle he realised that it was Frau Bender’s former home.

‘Hello?’

Jonas turned the light on. His throat tightened. He gulped. He slid along the walls like a shadow. The flat was unrecognisable. Its occupants appeared to have been young people. Photos of film stars hung on the walls. The video collection filled two cupboards. TV magazines were lying around. In one corner stood an empty terrarium.

Everything looked unfamiliar. All he remembered was the handsome parquet floor and the moulded ceilings.

He was astonished to note that Frau Bender’s flat had been almost three times the size of his parents’.

He found no chocolate, only some biscuits of a kind he disliked. Then he remembered the grocer’s two streets away. Jonas had often shopped at Herr Weber’s as a boy. He’d even been allowed to buy things on account. The old man with the bushy eyebrows had eventually given up the business. If he remembered correctly, the shop had been acquired by an Egyptian who sold oriental specialities. Still, perhaps he’d stocked chocolate as well.

Out in the street it was a mild, windless night. Jonas peered left and right. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck as he set off through the gloom. He felt tempted to turn back, but he summoned up all his willpower and walked on.

The shop wasn’t locked. There was chocolate. In addition to tinned goods and powdered soups, the establishment had sold milk, bread and sausage — all of it spoilt now, of course. The owner had dealt in almost all the basic necessities. Alcohol was the only thing Jonas couldn’t find.

He put several bars of chocolate in a rusty shopping basket and added a few tins of bean soup, some peanuts and a bottle of mineral water. He also raided the shelves for a random assortment of sweets and biscuits.

The shopping basket proved a nuisance on the return trip. It was impossible to carry the thing and hold his gun at the ready at the same time. He walked slowly. Here and there a lighted window illuminated a stretch of pavement.

He couldn’t shake off the notion that someone was lying in wait behind the parked cars. He paused to listen. All he heard was his own tremulous breathing.

In his imagination a woman was lurking behind that van parked on the corner. She was wearing a kind of nun’s wimple, and she had no face. There she crouched, waiting for him as if she’d never moved before. As if she’d always been there. And she wasn’t waiting for just anyone. She was waiting for him.

He had an urge to laugh, to yell, but he didn’t utter a sound. He tried to run, but his legs refused to obey him. He approached the building steadily, not daring to breathe.

In the hallway he turned on the light, walked up the ramp and along the passage to the flat. He didn’t look back. He went in, put the basket down and pushed the door shut with his behind. Only then did he turn round and lock it.

‘Hahaha! Now we’ll feast! Now we’ll guzzle! Hahaha!’

He looked round the kitchen. The units and all the equipment had belonged to the Kästner family. He put a large saucepan on the stove and emptied the contents of two tins into it. His tension gradually eased as the scent of bean soup rose into the air.

After eating he took the shopping basket into the living room, where he was greeted by the hum of the camera. The bed didn’t collapse this time either, when he tested its stability with his foot. He went to get a blanket and a pillow and lay down. Tearing the wrapper off a bar of milk chocolate, he thrust a couple of squares into his mouth.

He surveyed the room. Although the furniture was still far from complete, the pieces he’d so far brought in were back in their original places. The brown bookcase and the yellow one. The ancient standard lamp. The rather greasy armchair. The rocking chair with the worn arms, in which he’d sometimes felt queasy as a child. And, on the wall opposite the bed, ‘Johanna’, the picture of an unknown woman that had always hung there: a beautiful, dark-haired woman leaning against a stylised tree trunk and gazing into the beholder’s eyes. His parents had jokingly christened her Johanna, although no one knew who had painted the picture or whom it represented. Or even where it had come from.

The undersheet was soft. It still gave off a familiar odour.

Jonas turned on his side and reached for another piece of chocolate. Tired and relaxed, he stared at the window that overlooked the street. A double window, it was so ill-fitting that old blankets had been laid on the sill between the inner and outer casements to prevent draughts in winter.

This was where he’d handed over his letter addressed to the Christkind just before Christmas.

His mother used to remind him to make out a wish list for the Christkind at the beginning of December. She never forgot to mention that he must be modest in his requests because the Christkind was too poor to be able to afford more than a thin garment. So Jonas would sit at the table with his feet dangling clear of the floor, chewing his pencil and dreaming. Would a remote-controlled jeep be too expensive for the Christkind? How about a toy racetrack? Or an electric motorboat? The most wonderful presents occurred to him, but his mother said his requests would put the Christkind in an awkward position because they couldn’t all be granted.

As a result, Jonas’s wish list eventually consisted of just a few small items. A new fountain pen. A packet of transfers. A rubber ball. His letter ended up on the threadbare blanket between the windows, ready to be collected by an angel on one of the following nights and delivered to the Christkind.

How would the angel manage to open the outer window?

That was the question Jonas pondered before going to sleep. He didn’t want to shut his eyes and yearned to stay awake. Would the angel come tonight? Would he hear him?

His first thought on waking: I fell asleep after all. But when, when?

He ran to the window. If the envelope had disappeared, as it usually did on the second or third day, seldom on the first because angels were so busy, Jonas experienced a feeling of happiness far greater than anything he felt weeks later on Christmas Eve itself. He was delighted with his presents, and with the thought that the Christkind had been near enough in person to leave the parcels beneath the Christmas tree while he was sitting in the kitchen. His parents used to invite Uncle Reinhard and Aunt Lena, Uncle Richard and Aunt Olga to dinner. The tree was lit up with candles. Jonas would lie on the floor half-listening to the grown-ups’ conversation, which had become a steady murmur by the time it reached him. He felt enveloped by the sound as he leafed through a book or examined a toy train. This was all very lovely and mysterious, but nothing compared to the miracle that had occurred a week or two earlier, when an angel had come to collect his letter during the night.

Jonas sighed and turned over. Only a few squares of chocolate were left. He put them in his mouth and crumpled up the wrapper.

Aware that he wouldn’t be able to remain awake much longer, he overcame his inertia and got to his feet.

He stationed three cameras side by side, facing the bed. He looked through the lenses, adjusted their angle, put a tape in each. When everything was ready he turned his attention to the TV and the camera connected to it. Last night’s tape was in his trouser pocket. He inserted it and pressed ‘Play’.

*

The camera wasn’t pointing at the bed, nor was it located in the bedroom. The screen displayed the shower cubicle in the bathroom. The bathroom of this flat. In Hollandstrasse.

Someone seemed to have been taking quite a long shower, a hot one. The glass sides of the cubicle were misted up and steam was rising above them, but the swoosh of the water couldn’t be heard. The scene appeared to have been shot without sound.

After ten minutes Jonas began to wonder if this waste of water would go on for much longer.

Twenty minutes. He was so sleepy, he had to switch to fast-forward. Thirty minutes, forty. An hour. The bathroom door was shut, the room became more and more steamed up. The door of the shower cubicle was barely visible.

After two hours, all that could be seen on the screen was a dense grey mass.

Another fifteen minutes, and visibility rapidly improved. The bathroom door reappeared. It was open now. So was the door of the shower cubicle.

The cubicle itself was empty.

The tape ended without his having seen anyone.

Jonas turned off the TV. Warily, as if there were a direct connection between what he’d seen on the tape and what was happening at this moment, he peered into the bathroom. He looked at the rubber mat. The shower head. The soap dish projecting from the tiles. Nothing had changed.

That was impossible, though. Something had to be different. Something.

This was where what he’d seen on the tape had occurred, so it belonged to the place. But the place had sloughed it off — no vestige of the past clung to it. Just a shower cubicle. No steamed-up glass. No condensation. Just a memory. A void.

It was shortly after eleven. He programmed one camera to come on at 2.05 a.m. and another at 5.05. Then he turned on the third, undressed and got into bed.