The Redactor, Chapter 14

The first thing I did on the other side of Viennese customs was to stop at one of the airport’s currency exchange counters and convert a chunk of my hong kong dollars into Euros. The next was to locate one a free Internet terminal.

  I emailed Matt for the password to get back into Hiero’s blog, and looked up directions to the address I had for Annika Krieder, Chalky. With a shiver, I realized that Hiero was in this city, somewhere out there.

  The address wasn’t near a subway station, so too far to walk. Speed was of the essence, and anyway, a thick snowfall was blanketing the city. The sight of it made me spend precious minutes and precious Euros on the cheapest overcoat and hat that Hugo Boss stocked. I shrugged the coat on as I stepped outside, but the cold still took my breath away. I hailed a cab, a brown Mercedes, and gave the driver the address.

  The apartment was in a tenement row beyond the ring road, in the new city which looker older than the old. The kind of place where a couple had kept their daughter locked in a basement for years. I asked the driver to wait (was thinking more and more of accruing witnesses to my not murdering) ran up the short flight of steps and into a cool lobby. I found a buzzer for apartment 27 and pressed it.

  There was no reply, so I pressed it again.

  When I still got no reply, I ran a hand across the buzzers. Voices came through the speaker like scattershot, and the door clunked open.

  The building had no elevator, being only three floors high. I raced up the stairs, then along the corridor on the second floor till I came to apartment 27.

  I put my ear to the door and listened. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I heard the muted throb of a television. I knocked long and loud.

  At last, I heard a shuffling tread approach the door, and heaved a sigh of relief.

  The door opened to reveal a short woman with greying hair caught up in curlers and a vast bosom restrained by a faded floral nightgown.

  “Was?” she said through a frown. Behind her, German voices droned in the universal language of soap opera.

  “I wanted—do you speak English?” I said.

  The frown deepened. The door began to close.

  “Wait,” I said, and placed a palm firmly in its path. “I’m looking for Annika Krieder. It’s very urgent.”

  She stopped pushing the door, and the frown eased.

  “Annika?” she said.

  “Yes, yes.”

  The old lady disappeared, leaving the door ajar. She returned and thrust a slip of paper at me. I read it, and to my dismay realized it was a forwarding address.

  The cold on the street was bracing after the stuffy building. The taxi driver had the engine running to keep warm, and a plume of exhaust was boiling from the rear of the car.

  I slid onto the back seat and handed him the new address. He grunted, put away the paper he was reading, and drove.

  I watched the cab fee readout rise, all the while thinking of my dwindling cash, which had taken a hit already when I converted my Hong Kong dollars to Euros at the airport.

  The new address was within the old city, and frustratingly close to where we had passed not half an hour before. I again asked the driver to wait, and leapt onto the pavement and hurried to the door of a slim townhouse of five stories. Inside, I found the glass lobby door unlocked. I took the elevator to the fourth floor, muscles tense, and was soon rapping on the door of apartment 4c.

  The door swung inward under the blows of its own accord. I ran my fingers along the door jamb and felt the sharp pain of a splinter. Someone had forced the door.

  Without thinking, I shoved the door back onto its hinges and entered.

  Another quiet living room. Bars of muted winter light sheared the gloom in places, and revealed a clutter of tall, reserved leather couches and armchairs. Standing over them were pedestal lamps and dark bookcases, crammed together with barely enough space to maneuver. Beyond them was a kitchenette beneath a large, curtained window. Dark doorways gaped left and right—I thought of what I’d found in the bedroom in Hong Kong.

  But to get to either, I would first have to wade through the wreckage strewn over the floor. Every bookshelf had been emptied, its books flung down. Vases and picture frames from a mantel had been swept into a heap, and I saw at least three paintings or prints that had been torn from their hooks and smashed on the coffee table.

  I was looking at a thorough ransacking.

  Or something meant to look like one.

  I picked my way through the debris, hearing something crunch and tinkle under my feet more than once, and toward the left doorway. It led to a small bathroom. The mirrored door of the vanity cabinet hung at an angle from one hinge, and its contents had been smashed and spread across the tiles.

  I returned to the living room, and tiptoed to the other doorway. It led to the bedroom, which had also been turned upside down, but was mercifully empty of dead bodies.

  Back in the living room I swept a pile of magazines from the couch and sat. Unconsciously I sucked on the finger that ached dully at the splinter site.

  The taxi was waiting. The fare rising by the minute, but I needed to sit and clear my head.

  “What are the chances this break-in is a coincidence?” I said into the thin air.

  And was surprised when I voice like my own answered.

  “Possible, but you’d be a fool to believe it.”

  It was my voice.

  No, it was my daughter’s voice. It was Tracey’s.

  It was both. My voice in the still air of that wrecked apartment; and hers in the vault of my mind.

  It seemed my novel wanted out in any way it could. If that meant hijacking real life, then so be it.

  It had taken Jean and Tracey to leave my life for me to realize how much I talked to myself. My next thought was that perhaps I was finally going mad. The concoction of drugs I’d tried over the years to heal my idio-pathetic heart had finally congealed into a mutant mess and was eating me away from the inside.

  Then I remembered that a young girl’s life was hanging by a thread.

  I decided to play along.

  “This has to be Hiero’s doing,” I replied.

  “But why?” said Tracey with my voice. “He didn’t trash Li Min’s apartment. He just...”

  I looked the room over, still rooted to the spot. It was every person’s nightmare, wasn’t it? To return home to find that strange men had been in your house, in your space—the space where you lived so much of your life. Had touched your things with their fingers. Leered at your photos. Tracked mud over your memories.

  Break-ins. Police statistics listed them in the category Crime Against Property. They should be listed under Crime Against Person, Grievous Bodily Harm.

  “He wanted to scare Annika,” I said.

  An image of Tracey leapt from my mind and into that room. She turned her green eyes toward me. She had freckles again. (Why did I give her childhood freckles?)

  She shook her head. “It’s wrong,” she said. “Hiero doesn’t scare. He charms.”

  “Then maybe there is something here he wanted.”

  I carefully retraced my steps through the wreckage, while in my mind’s eye, Tracey probed among the wreckage. Strangely, I felt glad for the company.

  I lingered, looking for a pattern, something at odds with the chaos of destruction.

  But nothing jarred. If it had hung, it had been torn down; if it could be moved, it had been flung. The only exceptions were the largest breakables, vases, a mirror, a porcelain lion. They had not been smashed.

  I touched a large vase of modern design.

  “Why isn’t this on the floor in pieces?”

  “Noise?” suggested Tracey.

  I glanced at the bookshelf where a sleek silver stereo had also avoided destruction.

  Its speakers were putting out a faint hum and I turned the volume a notch down to prompt an electronic readout. It was set very high.

  I winked at Tracey. “Clever girl,” I said, and wondered if that was a kind of arrogance.

  Annika Krieder was home fresh from university. It was reasonable to guess she hadn’t found a job yet and slipped into a daytime routine. Had Hiero expected to find her here, and flown into a rage when he found the apartment empty?

  No. The destruction was too controlled.

  On the wall a great, glass-fronted clock chimed the hour—ten chimes then fell silent. But the second hand kept winding around. Tick, tick... all the way to the heat death of the Universe, and the end of all clocks.

  How many murders before we got there? ... one less if I got my backside into gear.

  I traced the telephone by its wire to where it lay smothered in books.

  “You sure you want to do that?” said Tracey. Her heart-shaped face held a wry grin. I decided I would handle it alone from here. She disappeared and I was alone.

  I shook my head a moment, then scooped the phone from the floor and tapped the hook till I got a dial tone. Then I called international, to Australia, and the directory by heart. I asked for Price, suburb of Subiaco. The female voice said she had found the number, and would I like to be put through.

  I said yes, and waited.

  It was the middle of the night in Perth, Australia. Matt had probably only just made it to bed. Too bad for him.

  While I waited I thought about the long shot I was trying. It had taken Hiero less than a day to write up the murder of Li Min, judging by the timestamp in his blog entry. What if he was even now blogging his actions? If I could find Hiero before he got to Annika, and forestall him, I wouldn’t even need to find her.

  A voice came on the line, male. I began to speak, then realized it was not Matt’s voice. It was his father’s. And this was an answering machine.

  I waited for the beep, and said, “Matt, it’s me, Jack. I need you to get me the password to that blog again. The one you gave me stopped working. Please hurry. This is urgent.” I paused. “Deadly urgent.”

  I hung up and, with a last glance at the wrecked apartment, left.

  I emerged from the townhouse into the heart of Vienna to discover the taxi was gone, lured away by a better fare.

  It was cold, Sunlight glittered on the snow swept off the sidewalk. I jammed my hands in my pockets and hunched my shoulders and walked just to be moving. I passed shops, which vented warm air as customers came or went. Each burst full of the aromas of perfume, or pastries, or frying meat. I turned a corner, and then another, and a great plaza opened out in front of me. At its center, standing massive and solid, was a building looking like an oversized fairytale keep. It was in fact a church, the Cathedral of Saint Stephen, which had stood on that spot for 900 years—battered by the passions of war, and the steady gnawing of the elements, but erect still. Knots of tourists were scattered across the plaza, taking photos, or craning necks to take in the cathedral’s vast roof.

  But from the corner of my eye, I spied an internet cafe. I hurried toward it, with the rueful acknowledgement that the internet was fast becoming my chief vice. But I had been surrounded by strangers now for 72 hours straight (barring hallucinations) and was hankering for friends. Hell, acquaintances would do.

  Inside the warm cafe, I had begun drafting an email to Jean—an argument really, for my sanity—when a message arrived in my inbox.

  It was from Matt Price.

  I stuck the message for Jean into the drafts folder and brought up Matt’s.

  Had he got my voice message already?

  He made no mention of it. It appeared we had crossed wires. He said,

 

  Jack.

  You’re right, the password has been changed.

  I checked back on the server to see if there was any evidence my own hack had been spotted. That looks okay, but I realize that the password I gave you would have expired an hour at most after I gave it to you. Whoever set up that server is some tight ass. He’s set it up so the passwords are randomly cycled every hour and SMS’d to a phone number. It would be a great system, IF he’d locked the server down properly. >-)

  I’ve set up my own silent service to copy the password to your email account, so you can login to the blog any time. Hope that’s okay.

  Later, Matt.

 

  No sooner had I closed Matt’s message, than another appeared. I opened it and read a single alphanumeric word. The latest password p3QUod4u.

  I called up Hiero’s blog and entered the password, hunt and peck on the keyboard.

  The screen filled with the latest entry. I was in.

  More than that. My long shot had hit.

  Then I read the title properly and my heart sank, suddenly a deadweight in my chest.

  The topmost entry was titled: The human body, such a fragile organism.

  Cathartic. That’s the word. It was tremendously cathartic to rip Chalky’s apartment to shreds. To grasp every item—no matter the item—and hurl it down. She was such a prissy person. Perhaps I should have let her live long enough to see the mess. She might have died at the sight of it.

  Ah well, can’t unwind the past. The person formally known as Annika Krieder is now just a piece of meat. An amazing transformation, from life and warmth and voice, to inertness, a cluster of organs, food for microbes. And the alchemy that turns this gold of life into the lead of death? A simple shove.

  But it has to be the right shove at the right time.

  And how had I, the magician, learned the secret of invoking this correct shove? From the train timetables I found in Chalky’s apartment.

 

  Train timetables? I thought. Of course. Hiero had broken into Annika’s apartment to learn everything he could about her movements. He’d ransacked the place to cover his purpose. Heavy with foreboding, I read on.

 

  Yes, Chalky is prissy. And very orderly, bordering on Obsessive Compulsive. I found her stash of timetables, and no doubt she carried another copy with her. The ones I found were neatly marked with her travel plans, colour-coded. From them I learned which train line and station she would be using today.

  However, I don’t think she intended to catch the train in the manner she actually did. Her flight through the air was reminiscent of Piggy’s in Lord of the Flies. Even to the shattered spectacles. So too was the way her body crumpled on impact.

 

  And here, suddenly, I read something that confused me.

  Hiero had just described how he murdered Annika.

  The very next line, he did it again. Only it was a different murder.

 

  She paused to survey the platform below, which was thick with moiling passengers. Her train had already arrived, and she hurried toward the stair, her handbag jouncing against her hip.

  I’m a helpful guy, so I gave her a hand reaching the platform. Straight over the edge of the railing, and thirty death-dealing feet to the concrete. Her flight through the air was reminiscent of Piggy’s...[PASTE]

 

  But when understanding came, my heart flared with hope.

  I sat back and frantically tried to corral my thoughts. Hiero’s latest blog entry described him murdering Annika—twice. First by shoving her in front of a train. And then again by pushing her over the edge of a concourse. Both “blunt-force trauma.”

  Two murders. But only one could be true.

  Or neither.

  If Hiero’s blog was describing two ways Hiero might murder Annika, two contingencies, it would mean she still lived. For the moment.

  I gathered my things and leapt out of my chair. I’d only used a fraction of my credit.

  On the street I collared an elderly man in a long coat.

  “Vienna Hauptbahnhof. Do you know it?”

  “But, of course,” he said and pointed at his feet.

  I doubted very much I was standing on the rail hub of a major European city, and my skepticism must have shown.

  “Fifty meters down,” he said, “and then five minutes by U-Bahn.”

  I tore off in the direction indicated. If I had to pitch a tent and stake out the station for the rest of the week, I would. I only hoped I wouldn’t arrive to find an ambulance, and police, and chalk...

The Redactor, Chapter 15

My first miscalculation was that Vienna Hauptbahnhof was impossibly huge.

  I knew it would be big, but when I asked my mind for an image of a railway station it handed me something I was familiar with, which was one of Perth’s provincial patches of concrete. Not the sprawling, multi-level hub of a European city.

  This would be haystacks and needles unless I could narrow it down. Then I remembered Hiero’s blog passage. He hadn’t just said Vienna Hauptbahnhof, he had said the line. I found a digital information board and looked up the line. Platform 5.

  A map of the station indicated the location of platform 5 and I wove through the crowd attempting to think calm thoughts. Calm thoughts. I would find Annika. She would be surprised to see me. Then I would tell her how close death had come. And she would believe me. It seemed to me that it wasn’t just her life I was racing to preserve. But my own too.

  But on reaching the platform, there was no sign of her. Or him. There was no train at the platform, so I went back and forth along the lip of the platform scanning the waiting commuters, until the weight of curious stares forced me to stop.

  Escalators connected every platform to the level above, which had to be a thirty foot drop. Far enough to kill barring a miracle. A drunk might fall that far and live. Something to do with relaxed muscles. I prayed that Annika was plastered.

  Further down the platform, an elevator was working in a transparently walled shaft. There was a third contingency Hiero didn’t seem to have covered. If Annika took the elevator to reach the platform with the train already idling, then he wouldn’t have the opportunity to push her in front of it or off the gallery. In that case, she and I could board the train together, where she would be a captive audience, and would have no choice but to hear me out.

  But then again, what were the chances she would take the elevator if the train was already at the platform? Half of not much. She would choose the stairs.

  And Hiero would give her that helping hand.

  I swore, and began pacing again.

  There was an ache reaching up through my calves and into my lower back when I heard the scream.

  The scream that was suddenly drowned by a metallic screeching that made the concrete rumble. My head twisted round in the direction of the noise. It had not come from this platform.

  Another scream tore the air. It wailed on, until the screeching sound died away, and went on alone for what seemed an eternity.

  I ran, dodging through the crowd that suddenly seemed magnetized and drawn to that sound.

  I reached the platform and took in the scene at a glance.

  A train was pulled up, two-thirds the way along the platform. Through its windows I could see passengers sprawled over each other, their faces wearing embarrassed smiles, or simple wide-eyed shock. In front of me, the platform was thick with people. A grey-haired woman in a heavy coat had fainted. One man simply stood with his index finger pointed at something below the lip of the platform. A young man raised a cellphone and its flash burst over the front of the train, reflecting. Another man turned and slapped the phone from his hand.

  I strained onto my tiptoes to see to the platform’s edge as cries of Hilfe! and Ambulanz! rose. A minute ticked by, and another, and I could neither get to the platform edge, nor see Hiero.

  It was then, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a still figure. Maybe I noticed him because he was the only person not running or standing. He was leaning on a railing, thirty feet above the platform.

  By the time I focused on him, he had turned his back and was walking calmly away. He wore a long coat with the collar pulled up and a shapeless felt hat. He walked with the loping ease of an athlete or an egotist.

  And then I was after him, my shoes slapping on the concrete. I bounded up the escalator, two and three steps at a time.

  It was only as I reached the escalator’s head and bounded after him that I heard the angry cries rise from below, now calling for the police. I turned my head once and looked back, just enough to see a sea of faces looking back up at me. I saw the same index finger that had been thrust at something in the dark below the platform’s edge pointed at me.

  A thick foreboding suddenly crystallized. The figure fleeing even now was wearing the same bland winter gear as me. The cheap coat and hat I had purchased at the airport that had seemed to offer a veil of anonymity now marked me a potential murderer.

  I pounded after the escaping figure, along a walkway, up another escalator, and out onto a mall, but I couldn’t close the gap between us. We had barely gone a hundred meters before my Medline began beeping angrily at me.

  For a moment I drove myself harder. I would catch him, and if my heart exploded in the process, too bad. I would pin him to the ground with my corpse.

  But he was gone. I turned a corner, and scanned the street hunched over, hands on knees, but saw no sign of him. He had escaped.

  I hailed a taxi, and slumped onto its back seat. I was gulping air, and it took me a moment to recover my breath enough to speak. I gave the driver the only address I could think of at the time—Annika’s address, the first one—and only later feigned a change of mind, and asked the driver to take me to a hotel out of the way.

  When I had checked into my hotel, I used the internet terminal in the lounge to log onto Hiero’s blog. Sure enough, he had already updated the latest entry. The murder now read:

 

  However, I don’t think she intended to catch the train in the manner she actually did. We had a surprise meeting. We chatted. I convinced her to ditch her plans and come with me to the Tiergarten. (I love German!) I walked her to the platform lip as “our” train approached, and whispered in her ear that I was going to show her something most people never see.

  I shoved her in the small of the back with one arm, and feigned to save her with the other. Her flight through the air was reminiscent of Piggy’s in Lord of the Flies. Even to the shattered spectacles. So too was the way her body crumpled on impact. The look on her face at the end as she corkscrewed right way up was priceless. Delicious.

 

  I spent the rest of the night mentally drafting my surrender. Put down the dice.

  Hiero was not just evil. He was insane. Had to be. And I needed to short circuit his game any way I could.

The Redactor, Chapter 16

I woke the next morning to the smell of whiskey and a head packed with sawdust.

  “You really slipped in the shit this time,” said Tracey from the gloom, seated in the room’s only chair. Except she would never have said ‘shit’—I berated myself for the off-character dialog.

  I opened the curtains a crack, rode a wave of nausea, and counted the minibar bottles scattered through the room. Apparently it was all of them.

  When I opened my wallet with clumsy hands, I counted the cash and realized I would barely have enough to pay for the bar, let alone the room.

  A bottle of bourbon had a stain of liquor at its base, so I tipped the bottle above my mouth and let the dregs dribble into my throat. I was my own physician, and I had prescribed a dose of hair of the dog.

  At last I tried my voice, which came out in a croak: “How was I to know he would switch train lines?”

  I took hold of my head and spilled some angry tears. Tracey watched in silence.

  When I had sniffed up the last tear, and raked my scalp, forgetting it was bald, she said, “He’s making up the rules as he goes along, Dad,” and for a moment I felt like the child. “Edit, cut, paste. Whatever fits his fancy.”

  In a sudden pique I said, “I’ll kill him.”

  Tracey’s smile was mixed with pity. “No you won’t.”

  Pity from my own daughter. I wasn’t going to take that. I gripped the hallucination in my mind and extinguished it.

  I made my way to the bathroom. It wasn’t much bigger than a closet. I dashed water on my face and rubbed my cheeks. They were rough with stubble, but shaving was the second last thing I wanted to do right then.

  The last thing I wanted to do was get on the telephone. But I might as well charge the call to the room. In for a dime, in for a dollar.

  I looked up the numbers I needed for an international call, put the phone on speaker, and dialed.

  I sat on the edge of the bed with my head in my hands and listened to the phone’s faint hiss and the ping-pong of my call racing through the network.

  A call tone, finally. Four pulses, then someone picked up.

  “Hello?” said a voice.

  “Matt,” (At last) I said. “You need to give the police the passwords—”

  “Mr Griffin?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Did you hear me? You need—”

  “I got your message,” he said.

  “Well, never mind that. You got there ahead of me. The passwords are working, but I need you to give them to the police so they can look at the blog too.”

  Silence.

  “Mr Griffin...”

  There it was again. Mr Griffin? What the hell was wrong with the kid.

  “I got your message, but I have no idea what you’re talking about. And—”

  “What do you mean—”

  “—the police have been here.”

  “Wait. Wait. Back up. What do you mean you have no idea what I’m talking about? The passwords for Hiero’s blog. Remember? They cycle. You cracked his server.”

  “Mr Griffin,”—Arg!—”those things you said I did, I didn’t do. I haven’t spoken to you since... it must be last holidays.”

  I felt heat flush my cheeks, but my gut was growing cold.

  “I know we haven’t spoken,” I said, voice rising. “I tried to call you. We Skyped, text chat, last week.”

  “No, we didn’t. I was on leave last week. At beach camp. Digital detox. I haven’t Skyped anyone in weeks.”

  “Shit...” I breathed the word, long, like a sigh.

  I must’ve been silent a long time, because Matt said, “Mr Griffin? Are you there? What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I’d just stepped in shit, but it seems I’ve been flushed down the toilet.” I lowered the receiver, then raised it once more. “Whatever they say about me, Matt. It’s not true. Don’t believe it.”

  And with those sage words I hung up.

  I sat there in silence and tried to make the world stop spinning. The hardarse in my head reeled off the score.

  I was (mostly) alone in a hotel room on the other side of the world, in an unfamiliar city filled with people speaking an unfamiliar language. I was broke, and suspected of at least one, possibly two, murders. I was doomed with the foreknowledge of another murder about to happen, and my one ace in the hole, my one window into the mind of the killer, which had seemed too good to be true, was in fact too good to be true.

  The blog was a honeypot and I was Winnie-the-Pooh.

  Hiero had somehow intercepted my attempt to communicate with Matt. Had impersonated him and set me up to read his blog.

  But why?

  I suddenly understood those guys you see on street corners and train stations who hit themselves on the head.

  Quickly I packed my meager belongings and descended to the lobby. I stashed Li Min’s journal next to Hiero’s notes into my coat pockets in an attempt to not look like I was skipping out on my bill.

  Before I left I checked the blog again. I read the latest entry with that same car-crash-can’t-look-away feeling:

 

  On to the next adventure. By train, this time, I think. The 08:52 from the Hauptbahnhof on through a cavalcade of German cities, the names of which put me in mind of a dozen B-Grade World War 2 movies, and finally, Gare de L’Est, Gay Paree!

  Not the Orient Express, but the same romantic sense of that old European passage. Wintering trees and cigarettes and cocktails in the dining cart.

 

  And there it was. Hiero’s rampage rolled on again like that train. And now it was almost certain he knew I was reading his account of his exploits.

  Well, I was getting on that train.

  From a boutique telecoms store I bought a prepaid phone, and loaded every last cent onto it, for voice and data.

  I called the Murdoch police station from memory and asked for Thomas. My call was dispatched and seconds later a very alert Thomas spoke. “Tell me you’re on your way home, Griffin.”

  “No, I’m on my way to do your job. He’s killed again, you know. Vienna. Hauptbahnhof station. Yesterday, right in front of me. I’m not going to let him do it again.”

  “What you nee—”

  I hung up.

  Barely thirty seconds later the phone buzzed. No caller id, but it had to be Thomas. I turned the phone off. Let him stew.