And she had an instinct that someone was already in there.
She coughed so that whoever was there might signal it was engaged.
A magpie took off from a branch on the edge of the wood. Otherwise all was still.
She stepped up onto the flagstone. Grabbed the lump of wood that passed for a door handle. Pulled it. The black room gaped open.
She breathed out. There was a torch beside the toilet seat, but she didn't need to switch it on. She raised the seat lid before closing the door and fastening the door hook. Then she pulled up her nightie, pulled down her knickers and sat down. In the ensuing silence she thought she heard something. Something that was neither animal nor magpie nor insects shedding skin. Something that moved fast through the tall grass behind the toilet. Then the trickle started and the noise was obscured. But her heart had already started pounding.
When she had finished, she quickly pulled up her pants and sat in the dark listening. But all she could hear was a faint ripple in the tops of the trees and her blood throbbing in her ears. She waited for her pulse to slow down, then she unhooked the catch and opened the door. The dark figure filled almost the whole of the doorway. He must have been standing and waiting, silent, outside on the stone step. The next minute she was splayed over the toilet seat and he stood above her. He closed the door behind him.
'You?' she said.
'Me,' he said in an alien, tremulous, husky voice.
Then he was on top of her. His eyes glittered in the dark as he bit her lower lip until he drew blood and one hand found the way under her nightie and tore off her knickers. She lay there crippled with fear beneath the knife blade that stung the skin on her neck while he kept thrusting his groin into her before he had even got his trousers off, like some crazed copulating dog.
'One word from you and I'll cut you into pieces,' he whispered.
And not one word issued from her mouth. Because she was fourteen years old and sure that if she shut her eyes tight and concentrated she would be able to see the stars through the roof. God had the power to do things like that. If it was His wish.
2
Sunday, 14 December 2003. The Visit.
HE STUDIED HIS REFLECTED FEATURES IN THE TRAIN window. Tried to see what it was, where the secret lay. But he saw nothing in particular, apart from the red neckerchief, just an expressionless face and eyes and hair that, approaching the walls of the tunnels between Courcelles and Ternes, was as black as the eternal night of the métro. Le Monde lay in his lap, forecasting snow, but above him the streets of Paris were still cold and deserted beneath impenetrable, low-lying cloud cover. His nostrils flared and drew in the faint but distinct smell of damp cement, human perspiration, hot metal, eau de cologne, tobacco, sodden wool and bile, a smell they never managed to wash out of the train seats, or to ventilate.
The pressure created by an oncoming train made the windows vibrate, and the darkness was temporarily banished by the pale squares of light that flashed past. He pulled up the sleeve of his coat and checked his watch, a Seiko SQ50 which he had received in part payment from a client. There were already scratches on the glass, so he was not sure it was a genuine item. A quarter past seven. It was Sunday evening and the carriage was no more than half full. He looked around him. People slept on the métro; they always did. On weekdays in particular. Switched off, closed their eyes and let the daily journey become a dreamless interval of nothing between the red or the blue lines on the métro map, as a mute connecting line between work and freedom. He had read about a man who had sat like this for a whole day, eyes closed, to and fro, and it was only when they came to clean the carriage at the end of the day that they discovered he was dead. Perhaps he had descended into the catacombs for this very purpose, to draw a blue connecting line between life and the beyond in this pale yellow coffin, knowing he would be undisturbed.
As for himself, he was forming a connecting line in the other direction. Back to life. There was this job tonight and then the one in Oslo. The last job. Then he would be out of the catacombs for good.
A dissonant signal screamed before the doors closed in Ternes. They picked up speed again.
He closed his eyes, trying to imagine the other smell. The smell of urinal blocks and hot, fresh urine. The smell of freedom. But perhaps it was true what his mother, the teacher, had said. That the human brain can reproduce detailed images of everything you have seen or heard, but not even the most basic smell.
Smell. The images began to flash past on the inside of his eyelids. He had been fifteen years old, sitting in the corridor of the hospital in Vukovar, listening to his mother repeat the mumbled prayer to Thomas the Apostle, the patron saint of construction workers, to let God spare her husband. He had heard the rumble of the Serbian artillery firing from the river and the screams of those being operated on in the infants ward, where there were no longer any infants because the women of the town had stopped producing after the siege started. He had worked as an errand boy in the hospital and learned to shut out the noises, the screams and the artillery. But not the smells. And one smell above all others. Surgeons performing an amputation first had to cut through the flesh to the bone, and then, so that patients did not bleed to death, to use something that looked like a soldering iron to cauterise the blood vessels so that they were closed off. The smell of burnt flesh and blood was like nothing else.