Night Work (5 page)

He fetched himself another bottle of lemonade and drank, looking out over the city as it slid past.

He tried to access dozens more known and invented websites, checked to see what pages had been stored and tried them too. In vain.

Bottle in hand, Jonas unhurriedly explored every part of the café. In the children’s corner he came across some painting equipment. He had loved mucking around with paints as a child, but his parents had very soon confiscated all his brushes and crayons because he made a mess and ruined some of his mother’s needlework.

His eye lighted on a white tablecloth.

He counted the tables in the café. There were a dozen or more, plus the ones on the upper floor.

He proceeded to strip them all. The upper floor yielded fourteen tablecloths, and he found a few spares in a dresser. By the time he’d finished, thirty-three squares of cloth lay spread out in front of him.

He knotted the ends together to form an oblong made up of three times eleven tablecloths. He had to push the tables and chairs aside to create enough room to work in. It was half an hour before he went and fetched the tubes of paint. He decided on black.

His name? His phone number? Just
HELP
?

He hesitated for a moment before starting to paint, then completed the job in short order. It wasn’t easy because the tablecloths tended to wrinkle up. Besides, he had to gauge the letter-spacing and apply the paint thickly enough.

He used the remainder in the tubes to write his phone number on the walls, tables and floor.

The panoramic window couldn’t be opened, so he blew out two panes on either side of an upright with the shotgun. The two reports were followed moments later by the tinkle of glass raining down on the terrace below. Wind came surging into the café, sweeping menus off the bare tables and rattling the glasses behind the bar.

Jonas knocked out the remaining shards of glass with the butt of his gun. He felt queasy when he stationed himself at the window holding the ends of his improvised banner. He ought to have turned off the motor, he realised. The café’s rotation didn’t exactly help. The wind lashed his face, making his eyes water. He felt as if he might topple into space at any moment, but he managed to tie the ends of the three outermost tablecloths firmly to the window frame. The material was thin, after all, and he felt sure the frame would hold.

Bundling up the rest of his banner, he hefted it out of the window. It hung down limply for a moment. Then the
wind caught it, but the inscription was still not as clearly visible as he’d hoped.

He picked up the gun, cast a brief glance at the devastation he was leaving behind, and hurried to the control booth. Tools were readily available there because the in-house mechanics used it as their depot. A moment later he was standing beside the regulator with a hammer. Three blows sufficed to knock out the cotter pin. An alarm went off. The regulator offered little resistance as he turned it beyond the 26 mark.

A low, all-pervading hum filled the air. He couldn’t see what was happening because the control booth had no windows, but the sound told him all he needed to know.

He continued to turn the regulator until it would go no further, however much pressure he applied. Then he grabbed his gun and dashed to the lift.

He made for the car without glancing up. He didn’t look back until he’d driven a few hundred metres. The café was rotating with the banner fluttering from it. The inscription, legible from afar, read:

UMIROM.

Next morning he found a Polaroid photo tucked between the bread bin and the coffee grinder. It showed him asleep.

He couldn’t remember seeing it before. When and where had it been taken? He had no idea why it should be there. The likeliest answer was that Marie had left it there, intentionally or not.

Except that he’d never owned a Polaroid camera. Nor had Marie.

Jonas arrived at his parents’ old flat in Hollandstrasse armed with the biggest axe from the DIY store. He went round the rooms, picturing what he wanted. Dumping bulky refuse in the street outside the building wasn’t a good idea because he wanted to keep the access clear. He didn’t need the backyard, on the other hand, so he decided to use it as a rubbish dump.

Anything that wouldn’t go through the kitchen window had to be chopped up small. To make room, he began by pitching upright chairs and other manageable objects through the window into the yard. Then he set to work on the three-piece suite. Having removed the cushions and ripped off the upholstery with the aid of a carpet knife,
he began to dismember the frames. He hacked away so vigorously that the axe went through a chair leg and into the floor. He was rather more restrained after that.

It was the bookshelves’ turn after the three-piece suite. Then came a massive linen cupboard, a chaise longue, a display cabinet, and a chest of drawers. His T-shirt was clinging to him by the time he tossed the last bits of debris out of the window, and he was breathing heavily.

He sat down on the floor, which was littered with shavings and sawdust, and surveyed the living room. Bare though it was, it made a warmer impression than before.

Jonas had stopped worrying about red lights and one-way streets long ago. He drove down the wrong side of the ring road at high speed, turned off into Babenberger Strasse, and came out on Mariahilfer Strasse.

Vienna’s main shopping area had never appealed to him. He disliked hustle and bustle. When he pulled up outside a shopping centre, the only sound to be heard was the ticking under the bonnet. The only moving object in sight was a scrap of paper scudding across the asphalt at the next intersection, blown by the wind. It was hot. He made his way over to the entrance. The revolving door activated itself.

Armed with two suitcases taken from a boutique on the first floor, he rode the escalator up to a shop selling electrical goods. It was so stuffy he could hardly breathe. The sun had been beating down on the glass roof for days, and every window in the building was shut.

In the electrical shop he went behind the counter and opened his suitcases. Further along the aisle he found a digital video camera he knew how to operate. The cabinet contained eight boxed examples of the same model. Eight would be enough. He stowed them in one of the suitcases.

The tripods were harder to find. He could only lay hands on three. He put them in the second suitcase together with two small radio cassette recorders, an answerphone and some blank audio tapes and videotapes. Then he shut the suitcase and tested the weight. No problem.

In the radio section it took him some time to locate the most powerful short-wave receivers. He also helped himself to a Polaroid camera, plus another as a spare. He remembered the Polaroid films last of all.

The air was so stale he couldn’t wait to leave. He stretched. He had a stiff back from carrying the suitcases around and from the hard work in his parents’ former flat. It made him think of his masseuse, Frau Lindsay, who had a lisp and talked incessantly about her child.

He wolfed down his freezer fish and spooned some potato salad out of a jar. After cursorily rinsing the plate and the frying pan, he unpacked his cases. His flat didn’t have enough wall sockets for the cameras’ adapters, he saw. But he’d intended to take the tape recorders to the neighbouring flats in any case.

He forced his immediate neighbour’s rickety door with ease. Having often crossed swords with him over his habit of playing music late at night, he’d expected to find himself in a bachelor pad littered with pizza cartons and CD sleeves. To his surprise, the place was empty. A ladder stood propped against the wall in one of the rooms. Beside it was a bucket with a tattered floorcloth draped over the rim.

He felt uneasy as he went from room to room. He hadn’t noticed any sign of a move.

The longer he thought about it, the uneasier he became. Did this vacant flat possess some significance? Did it indicate that something crucial had escaped his attention?

He checked the other flats on his floor. Again to his surprise, few of the doors were locked. His neighbours had obviously been trusting souls. Only two doors resisted the crowbar. Behind all the others he found ordinary homes whose occupants might simply have been out shopping.

He returned to the empty flat, taking the adapters and batteries with him. There were seven wall sockets. He plugged adapters into six of them, reserving the seventh for one of the new tape recorders. The power had not been cut off; the displays came on.

He turned on the radio. With this model he should be able to pick up stations in places as distant as Turkey and Scandinavia. He selected a frequency and waited. Radioed a call for help, stated his location, spoke in German, English and French. He counted silently up to twenty, then changed frequencies and repeated his request to get in touch.

An hour of this convinced him that there was no radio traffic in Europe.

He turned on the short-wave receiver.

White noise from the BBC’s World Service. From Radio Oslo, from Central Europe, from the Middle East, from Germany, from Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. No reception, just white noise.

The sun was now so low that he had to switch on the light. He turned on the TV. Started the Love Parade video, pressing the mute button as usual. He adjusted the short-wave receiver to the Radio Vatican wavelength. White noise.

He awoke around midnight, having slid off the sofa and banged his knee. The TV screen was flickering, the radio hissing. It was hot inside the room.

With the shotgun in one hand and the tape recorder in the other, he went out into the passage. He listened.
Something was bothering him. Hurriedly, he turned on the landing light. He listened some more.

He padded barefoot over the cool stone floor and into the adjoining flat, shouldering the splintered door aside. He stared into the darkness ahead. Just then he thought he felt a draught.

‘Hello?’

A narrow strip of light from the passage was shining on the door between the hallway and the living room. The door seemed to be ajar.

Again he felt a draught, this time on the back of his neck.

He went back into his flat and put the tape recorder down. Before going out into the passage again he peered in both directions and listened. Having locked the door behind him, he stole down the stairs holding the gun.

The light went out just as he reached the third floor.

He froze. Engulfed in darkness, all he could hear was his own irregular breathing. Seconds or minutes later – he couldn’t have said which – he gradually shook off his inertia. With his back to the wall, he felt for the light switch. The bulb shed a dim glow. He remained where he was, straining his ears.

He found the street door closed. Although it could only be opened from outside with a key, he locked it. He looked out at the street through the glass panel. Not a sound. Absolute darkness.

Back on the sixth floor, he turned on all the lights in the flat next door without letting go of the gun.

He couldn’t remember leaving the door between the hallway and the living room ajar. However, he didn’t find anything suspicious. Everything seemed to be just as he’d left it. The windows were shut. He couldn’t explain where the draught had come from.

Perhaps he’d imagined them both, the draught and the position of the door.

He fetched the tape recorder and put in a blank tape. Making a note of the time, he pressed the record button. He tiptoed out of the flat.

The neighbours on his floor had their own tape decks, so he didn’t have to use the other tape recorder. He put tapes in the decks in seven other flats, started them off, and wrote down the times and flat numbers in a notebook. The tapes had a playing time of 120 minutes.

Back inside his own flat, he locked the door and rewound the video. He left the sound turned off. Then he got the remaining tape recorder ready and switched off the short-wave receiver, which was hissing and crackling to itself beside the window. After that, he stretched out on the sofa with his notebook and a glass of water. Apathetically, he watched the Berliners repeat their silent dance towards the Victory Column.

He glanced at the clock when his eyelids started to droop. Twelve thirty-one. He noted it down, then pressed the record button.

Another cloudless day.

Jonas loaded the video cameras and all their accessories into the Spider. He’d left the windows open overnight, so the interior wasn’t as unbearably hot as usual.

During the drive he tried to contact various people by phone. Marie in England, Martina at home and at the office, the police, Radio Austria, his father.

He pictured the phone ringing in his father’s flat. It stood on a small chest in the hallway, and above it hung a mirror that made you feel you were being watched while phoning. That dim hallway in which the phone was ringing, now, at this very moment, was usually a little cooler than the rest of the flat. Lying in that hallway were his
father’s worn-out shoes, and hanging in the cupboard was the old-fashioned Loden jacket whose elbows his mother had darned. It smelt of metal and plastic, that hallway. Now, at this moment.

But did the phone really ring when no one was there to hear it?

Jonas didn’t pull up outside Millennium City but drove straight in. He cruised at a walking pace past the boutiques, the bookshop, the jeweller’s, the drugstore, the cafés and restaurants. All were open, as if today were a normal working day. He refrained from sounding his horn.

Looking at the snack bars, he was struck by how spick and span they were. No stale bread lying around, no rotting fruit, everything clean and tidy. Most of the city’s cafés and restaurants looked the same.

He had to get out when he reached the Millennium Tower because there was no public access at ground level. Laden with his shotgun, the crowbar and the video camera plus accessories, he took the escalator. One of the lifts whisked him up to the twentieth floor, where he boarded another. The whole ascent took a minute.

The offices on the top floor were open. Jonas chose one whose picture window provided the best view of the city. He put his things down and locked the door.

When he went right up to the window, the view took his breath away. There was a drop of 200 metres. The parked cars looked minute, the litter bins and news-stands were almost unrecognisable as such.

He needn’t have lugged the tripod up there, a table shoved up against the window did just as well. He stacked some books on it. As soon as he considered this makeshift base to be stable enough, he loaded the camera with a
blank tape and placed it on top of the books. He adjusted it so that the lens was pointing at the city’s sun-bathed roofs, checking its position on the miniature screen. Then, after jotting down the location, date and time in his notebook, he pressed the record button.

The other camera required a tripod. He set it up at the entrance to St Stephen’s Cathedral facing the Haas Haus, where acrobats used to show off their tricks to tourists. Spectacles of that kind left Jonas cold – in fact he’d been so afraid of being accosted by one of these artistes that he’d always hurried past them with his head down.

When everything was ready and he was about to start filming, it occurred to him that he hadn’t yet been into the cathedral. St Stephen’s was one of the few important buildings in the city centre he still hadn’t checked, a careless oversight. It seemed logical that anyone left alive in the city would seek refuge in its biggest church.

He opened the heavy door a crack and slipped inside. The first thing he noticed was the smell of incense, which lay heavy on his chest.

‘Hello? Anyone here?’

His voice sounded feeble in the cathedral’s huge, vaulted nave. He cleared his throat. He called again. The sound went echoing round the walls. He stood still until silence descended once more.

No candles were burning. The church was harshly illuminated by some bulbs suspended at intervals from the roof. The numerous chandeliers were unlit, the high altar was almost invisible.

‘Is anyone here?’ he shouted.

The echo was so shrill, he decided not to call again. Instead, he walked around talking loudly to himself.

Having combed the cathedral and satisfied himself that no one else was there, he turned his attention to the altar of the Virgin Mary. It was she to whom those in need most often addressed their prayers. This was where there were most candle-ends, and where, in the old days, Jonas had seen dozens of mutual strangers praying side by side, fingering their rosaries, pressing their lips to sacred pictures and weeping. The sight had made him feel uneasy. He’d dreaded to think what personal disasters had brought the poor creatures there.

It was the young men in tears who upset him most. You sometimes saw women weeping in public, but he was appalled by the sight of men his own age giving way to their emotions in front of everyone. It pained him to be so close to them, and yet it was all he could do not to go up to them and stroke their bowed heads. Was one of their nearest and dearest sick? Had somebody left them? Had somebody died? Were they themselves terminally ill? There they knelt, those embodiments of mental anguish, with Japanese and Italian tourists taking flash pictures all around them. That’s how it had seemed to him.

He surveyed the empty pews before the unlit altar. He would have liked to sit down but felt as if he was being watched. Felt as if someone was only waiting for him to do so.