Splinter

23

It’s easy to spot a mistake after the event. But as long as you haven’t reached the eye of the storm and are still on the edge of the vortex of insanity, you’re subject to its irresistible attraction. While the set pieces of your own life are whirling about your ears, you lose your perspective and make one wrong decision after another. Marc guessed he was making a mistake the moment he got into Emma’s car. He also guessed that he would be making an even bigger one by following her into the cheap commercial travellers’ hotel near the airport.

If he’d been watching a biopic of his own life, he would doubtless have been able to ply the wretched hero on the screen with sensible pieces of advice. Call the police. Go to Constantin’s hospital. Enlist some impartial assistance. But don’t go anywhere with this woman, least of all to a seedy hotel in Tegel!

He wasn’t relaxing in a comfortable cinema seat, however, but sitting on the edge of a worn-out hotel mattress. Nor was his brain functioning normally, in a way that would have enabled him to come to a rational decision. Within the space of a few hours Marc had lost everything he’d believed in up to then: the authenticity of his memories and his own existence.

During the drive Emma had silently handed him a sheet of paper that looked as if it had been ripped out of a binder by someone in a rage. Out of a CV, to be precise, because closer inspection by the car’s dim courtesy light revealed it to be the first page of a three-page résumé. It seemed even less consistent with Emma’s outward appearance than his initial assumption that she begged for a living.

Apparently born in Dresden, she had fled to France with her parents before the reunification of Germany and studied at the Sorbonne. Medicine to begin with, then German, Spanish and French. Thereafter she had worked as a simultaneous interpreter at trade conferences, mainly for the pharmaceutical industry, for which her discontinued medical studies particularly fitted her.

Marc made another attempt to breach the wall of silence. ‘Well, what did you want to show me that’s so important?’ Since reaching the hotel she had confined her conversation to bare essentials. She signalled to him to wait a moment.

Having so far limited himself to watching her get out a holdall and extract several batches of old newspapers, he made a leisurely survey of her hotel room. Its neglected, gloomy appearance matched that of the night porter who had handed them the key at the reception desk. It was also probable that the stale, overheated air smelt like his armpits. Emma had presumably left the ‘Please Don’t Disturb’ sign on her door for days. She had spent the interval transforming her quarters into a cross between a box room and a second-hand bookshop.

Half of the double bed was strewn with press cuttings, sheets of paper written on both sides and medical textbooks, more of which could be seen on the small desk beside the TV cabinet. Emma had taken off her boots and her white hooded jacket, which was lying in a heap on the threadbare carpet. All she now wore was a baggy woollen dress that reached to her ankles.

While Marc was debating how much longer to give her before he finally cut and run, Emma sat down on a precariously creaking upright chair with her left leg draped over her massive right thigh, massaging the ball of her foot.

He got up and went over to the window.

‘Don’t. They might see you.’

‘Who?’ He lowered the blind.

‘Bleibtreu’s people.’

She fiddled nervously with her glasses, then took them off and chewed the end of one arm.

‘Bleibtreu?’ said Marc.

‘Yes.’

‘So the clinic really exists?’

Great. You’re seeking reassurance from a nutter.

He opened the window without raising the blind.

‘Of course.’

Emma had to speak up to make herself heard above the patter of the raindrops, which were hitting the pane like bullets. The wind blew an occasional ricochet into the room. ‘Of course the clinic exists. I was there myself.’

She pushed the glasses up over her forehead like an Alice band, nervously licking her lips again. All at once, as if something had occurred to her, she rose with a jerk and stomped over to the wardrobe.

‘So where, tell me, has the building gone?’ Marc demanded.

Emma keyed a six-digit code into a safe the size of a shoebox secured to one corner of the wardrobe.

‘It hasn’t gone anywhere, Marc. You just didn’t see it.’

His sarcastic laugh was rather shriller than he’d intended. ‘Look, I’ve had one hell of a tiring day. My powers of comprehension are roughly equal to those of someone emerging from a general anaesthetic. Just for once, could you possibly say something that doesn’t raise more questions than it answers?’

Emma took out a slim folder folded in half to enable it to fit into the safe. It trembled in her clumsy-looking hands.

‘It’s all part of their plan. They want to rattle us, confuse us, traumatize us.’

Studying her face closely for signs of the insanity he suspected in himself, Marc could detect nothing but the residue of long-vanished good looks. He guessed that Emma must once have been extremely attractive – until something happened to throw her out of kilter, first mentally, then physically. Today, only the regularity of her features recalled a time preceding the medication that had left such visible traces behind, or so he surmised. Cortisone, for example, which often resulted in a moon face like hers. Psychiatric drugs, perhaps, or worse.

Drugs?

‘All right,’ he said, ‘let me try a different approach.’ He resumed his place on the edge of the bed. ‘This morning, a little old man in a very expensive car offered to delete all my unpleasant memories for ever.’

‘MME. The amnesia experiment.’

‘You took part in it yourself?’

‘Till I broke it off a week ago.’

‘Really?’ Marc frowned. ‘Okay, be that as it may. My problem is – well, how can I put it? – at the moment I’m undergoing experiences that would knock any mystic sideways but which can’t have any connection with the Bleibtreu Clinic.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because those people wanted to blot out my memories, but they’re all still in here.’ Marc tapped his head. ‘Unaltered. It’s just that they don’t add up any more. To be quite honest, the professor and his associates may be a bunch of lunatics, but I’ve no idea how they could have completely brainwashed me in such a short time without my noticing.’

Emma stared at him in bewilderment. ‘A short time?’

‘I was only there five or six hours. I swallowed no pills, wasn’t given any injections and drank a couple of glasses of water.’

‘You’re wrong.’

‘Are you disputing what I remember?’

‘No. All I meant was, today wasn’t your first day as part of the trial.’

‘Huh?’

‘That’s why I wanted you to come with me. To show you this.’

She opened the folder and took out a sheet of paper printed on both sides. Marc had seen it once before. A few hours ago. At the clinic.

‘See this?’

She held out the form and tapped the handwritten box in the top-right corner.

‘This is…’

…impossible.

Marc took the sheet from her.

Quite impossible.

‘Now do you see why it’s so important for us to have a talk?’

He nodded without taking his eyes off the application form, which had been completed and bore his signature. What startled him most of all was the date.

October 1st. The date of the accident.

Four weeks before he answered the Bleibtreu Clinic’s advertisement.