The Twelfth Tablet

Chapter 4

On the phone’s screen, Ari stood on the deck of a motor cruiser holding a steering wheel. The wind blew his hair wild; his bare chest glistened with salt water, and the sun bathed him gold. He looked like a god — the ancient sort, before gods learned to be kind.

There was a number below the picture. Valerie pressed it and put the phone on speaker. Ari’s face stayed still as a statue — but suddenly his voice was there in the car.

‘Legyeteh.’

‘It’s me,’ said Valerie

‘Where are you?’

‘Safe. With Paul.’

‘Do you have…?’

He left the question unfinished. In case the call’s recorded, Paul realised. Nothing incriminating.

Anger surged inside him. He wanted to shout down the phone, to confront Ari with all the things he’d done. To drag him into the netherworld he’d condemned Paul to.

Valerie put a warning hand on his. Her finger stroked his wrist, the little hollow between the tendons where his pulse beat.

‘I’m going to make sure Paul’s safe,’ she said. ‘Then you’ll get it.’

A growl from the phone. ‘He can bring it to me himself. Now.’

‘He doesn’t trust you.’

Paul listened, more carefully than he’d ever listened to anything in his life — every breath, every pause, every rise or fall of tone that might betray him.

Ari said nothing.

‘Do you agree?’ said Valerie.

A long pause. Then: ‘OK.’

Valerie pressed a button on the phone. The screen went blank.

They left the car and hiked through the forest. A hundred yards away, Paul buried the rifle under a mound of pine needles and earth. Valerie gave Paul her cigarette lighter, a golden cylinder with her initials engraved on the barrel. It reminded him of the golden writing on the tablet.

He held the flame until the flint got so hot it burned him. After three goes, his thumb was so sore he gave up and let the darkness do its worst. He thought his eyes would adjust, but the trees were so thick that none of Zurich’s city glow penetrated. He walked with one arm always in front of his face: halting, hesitant steps which still didn’t protect him from the trips and bruises the forest sprung on him. The wind stirred the trees, and the trees stirred every fear men have had since they left the plains of Africa and penetrated the dark forests of the north.

He thought of Dante.

Dante had found solace in a guiding star, he remembered. But when he looked up, the trees closed so tight they locked out the sky.

And Dante had been going to Hell.

From out in the darkness, he heard a bell ringing. He shook his head to make it go away, but the sound persisted, got louder. Not far ahead, down the slope, a line of yellow lights drifted by — like an ocean liner in the night. He stumbled on, tripping down the hill. The trees thinned. Suddenly, the world became real again. There was a road, and rails, and a tram disappearing round the bend still dinging its bell.

Headlights swept up the road. He shrank back into the forest as a car passed.

‘What now?’

Valerie pointed. A hundred metres up the road was a station.

‘You take the next tram to the Hauptbahnhof. I’ll hire a car and pick you up.’

‘What if someone sees me?’

She shrugged. ‘Then it’s better if I’m not with you.’

The famous station clock was striking eight when Paul dismounted the tram at Bahnhofplatz. The cold air hit him like a bullet, though that wasn’t what made him tense. He’d spent the ride hidden behind a newspaper; now, there was nothing to protect him. He braced himself for shouts, alarms, rough hands grabbing him.

Nothing happened.

Zurich Hauptbahnhof was no longer simply a station: it was, the signs announced, ShopVille-RailCity Zurich. He’d always found it philistine, a hasty euthanizing of the last romance of rail travel by a world that always needed something to buy. Now, he was glad of the shops. He ducked into one and bought a scarf and hat, winding the scarf high and pulling the hat low. The assistant was telling her colleague a long story about her flatmate and barely noticed him.

The commuters had gone home, but the shops still drew plenty of customers to the station. In the cavernous concourse, the lights were dim: they’d put up a screen and were showing an old movie. Paul skirted round the audience, row after row all staring forward at the black-and-white images projected on the screen. He might as well not have existed.

He took an escalator down to the lower concourse. The bright lights and low ceiling pressed down on him. Penitential bars of black and white marble striped the walls. He felt a headache coming on. The rows of luggage lockers, efficient blue, blurred together. He had to read the number three times. 247.

He put his hand in his pocket and took out the cigarette case. The metal throbbed against his skin; he could feel the tablet inside like a beating heart.

There is one condition.

He thought of everything he’d suffered to get it. The life he’d lost. He thought of Ari. The injustice burned him, that Ari would win and he would flee into permanent exile.

Everything’s hypothetical until you do it.

He entered his combination, shut the locker and headed for the exit, head down, forcing himself not to run. He counted his steps. Ten. Twenty. Forty. Up the escalator, out of the concourse, into the bright shopping arcade. He must be almost there.

‘Paul?’

He should have ignored it, carried on walking and pretended he hadn’t heard, that it wasn’t him. But he was primed. The switch tripped; he stopped dead.

‘Paul?’ said the voice again.

He couldn’t pretend now. He turned, his face frozen. A tall, stooping man with brown floppy hair poking out from under a bobble hat was waiting for him.

‘Marcel?’

‘Trying to escape?’ His nose was too big and his mouth too wide: it made his smile vaguely grotesque.

Paul opened his own mouth, but no sound came out.

‘The late antiquity colloquium.’ Marcel tapped him too-familiarly on the shoulder. ‘Hey, me too — it’s my fucking supervisor giving the talk, right?

He doesn’t know, Paul thought. His legs turned to water.

‘Where are you going?’ was all he could manage to say.

‘Beckenried. My girlfriend got a free pass. Ten centimetres of powder, this late in the year, it’s a crime to miss it, right?

Paul forced a smile. ‘Right.’

‘What’s your excuse?’

Another moment where time seemed to stutter. He tried to see a departure board, but there were none in sight. All he could think of was the last train he’d taken.

‘I’m going to Paris.’

From the corner of his eye, he saw two policemen slowly circuiting the station, submachine guns cradled in their arms. Sweat soaked his scarf; he edged around so that Marcel was between him and them.

Marcel had said something he hadn’t heard. He was frowning. Is there a problem?

‘Sorry?’

‘Didn’t you go there like a month ago?’

‘Where?’

‘Paris.’ Marcel’s eyes twitched, trying to follow Paul’s gaze over his shoulder. Paul forced himself to concentrate on Marcel.

‘The museum asked me to go back.’ Inspiration. ‘They want me to do a piece comparing our new Aphrodite with the Venus de Milo.’ He checked his watch. ‘In fact, I really ought to get on the train.’

‘For sure. Give my love to Venus, OK?’

‘Enjoy the skiing.’

Ten paces on, Paul looked back. Every fibre in his body warned him he’d see Marcel staring at a TV in a shop window, or getting the news on his phone, accosting a policeman and pointing him after Paul.

But he was gone.

The pressure release when he got in the car was so much he almost threw up in the footwell. He slumped down in the seat, head barely above the window.

‘Someone recognised me.’ He told her about Marcel. ‘The moment he sees the news, he’ll report me.’

‘He’ll tell them you’re going to Paris.’ Valerie crossed the river and piloted the car down a canyon of long, high buildings. She drove awkwardly, moving the gear stick with abrupt jerks, turning the wheel in short, angular motions. Paul guessed she was used to being driven.

‘Where are we going, anyway?’ she asked.

‘Frankfurt.’

She turned into a tunnel. ‘You have a friend there?’

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘I did an exchange there, so I know the city. And I speak German.’ That was all true. Also true: it’s connected with the whole of Europe. An easy place to leave. He didn’t say that. Now they were leaving Zurich, his terror was boiling away. What it left behind was hard, dry realism, no trace of sentiment. You must open your mind. Was this what she’d meant?

‘Are you excited?’

‘What kind of question…?’

‘About the future, I mean. Becoming someone else.’

‘Exciting’s not quite the word.’

‘You’re getting what everyone longs for, deep down. New life. Forgetting who you were.’

He remembered the way she’d caressed the statue in the museum, her ear pressed against the cold bronze. The sound of immortality, she’d said.

And maybe she was right. If he picked up the life he’d shed and examined it, was there anything there he’d miss? Work? Family? Colleagues? Not really — it was just an empty husk. Yesterday, that thought would have prompted hours of loathing self-analysis. Now it didn’t matter.

‘It’s not me who has to forget the truth. It’s everyone else.’

Valerie shook her head. ‘The truth is only what people remember. They will forget you. So, all that is necessary, the one remaining spark of evidence, is for you to forget yourself.’

‘OK.’

The tunnel ended and spat them out onto a dual carriageway heading east. He found a wheel that reclined the seat and dialled himself back.

‘You seem to know Zurich pretty well, considering you just arrived yesterday.’

‘I was here for finishing school.’

He laughed — and after a moment’s thought, she laughed with him. It was the first time he’d heard it, rich and solemn, like the lower register of a harp.

‘Don’t you think I’m the finished article?’ she teased.

‘You seem more like a work in progress.’

She liked that. He sat up a little straighter. The moment of intimacy only made him realise how little — nothing at all — he knew about the woman he’d trusted his life to.

‘Where are you from?’

She flicked her head. ‘I had a cosmopolitan childhood.’

‘Anywhere in particular?’

‘All over.’

Her tone said he wasn’t going to get anything more geographical. He tried a different angle.

‘If you were in my situation — if you had to choose one person to save your life — who would you choose?’

‘My sister.’ No hesitation.

‘Where’s she.’

‘I don’t know.’ Paul started to laugh; Valerie cut him short. ‘I’d find her. Or she’d find me. She’s very intuitive.’

‘OK.’

‘Anyway, you still haven’t answered that question yourself.’

‘I’d choose you.’ He’d rushed it, almost swallowing the words with a sudden fit of anxiety. So many things, and you’re nervous about this? marvelled the voice inside. He glanced across at her, wondering how she’d taken it.

She slowed the car and eased into a layby. ‘You’d better get in the back. We’re nearly at the border.’

The boot was small and cramped, though not nearly tight enough to contain his fears. Crossing from Switzerland to Germany was almost like going from England to Scotland: he’d done it half a dozen times and never even had to show his passport. But none of those times had he been wanted for theft and murder.

The car slowed. He listened to the tyres beneath him, praying they wouldn’t stop. Slower and slower, rolling towards a standstill. He thought he could count every rotation of the wheels. He screwed his eyes almost shut, waiting for the onslaught of light and sound when the guards opened the boot. He thought of all the things he could say in his defence, and realised there was nothing.

The full weight of his guilt bore down on him. Just in front of his nose, a triangular plastic tag glowed in the darkness. An emergency release handle. He wriggled in the dark, trying to free his arm to reach it. Better to go now, to surrender before they caught him. Anything to be free of the guilt.

The car picked up speed. Through the seats, he heard Valerie’s muffled voice from the front.

‘That was easy.’