On February 11 you will kill a man called Arthur Grimm in the Prater. With good reason. And of your own free will.
On February 11, of all days…
Norah went over to the window, thinking hard, and looked down onto the street. On the other side of the road, someone was trying to squeeze a black station wagon into a ridiculously small parking space. Norah heard the muted laughter of a passing couple through the double-glazed windows.
Given what the woman had said, it seemed only sensible to conclude that she was mentally ill. Norah didn’t know anyone called Arthur Grimm. And she certainly wasn’t intending to do anyone in. But the date. That fucking date. It had to be a coincidence.
Norah decided it was the discrepancy between the woman’s appearance and her words that was troubling her. She hadn’t seemed mentally ill, she’d seemed lucid and controlled. Norah had never come across anyone quite like her before; her interest was piqued. There might be something exciting behind it. She resolved to go in search of the strange fortune teller the next day—to find out who she was and what her story was. Norah was good at that kind of thing; it was her metier. In the meantime she could google the name the woman had mentioned.
Arthur Grimm. Norah screwed up her eyes, trying to think. No, she didn’t know anyone by that name. And yet it rang a bell. Or was she imagining things?
A fraction of a second later, the search engine spat out images of a face so handsome and yet so unnerving that Norah gasped.
5
Norah had dreamt she was alone in an empty world where there was no sign of life—only the occasional bird flying past, far away, out of reach.
Then the birds fell down.
Norah woke on her back in the dank cold of her flat. She was breathing heavily and when she opened her eyes, she had the impression that the ceiling had dropped to no more than a couple of feet above her face. It had rained in the night, staining the road dark and covering the city in a grey haze. Everything looked blurred at the edges, as if the cold and wet had attacked the very substance of things, watering them down to produce grubby pen and ink washes. Inside, Norah felt the same.
Somehow or other she managed to get up and make her way, shivering, into the shower, where she washed off the uneasy feeling with hot water.
Out on the stairs, she was met once more by the smell of mouldy carpet. At the letterboxes, she bumped into the ground-floor neighbour, a small, thin man with suspicious eyes and a crumpled face. She said good morning, but got no reply.
By the time she entered the corner bistro to fortify herself with a cappuccino, she was beginning to feel better.
Three elderly ladies were sitting at the window table over the first coffee and cigarettes of the day. There was a blonde, a redhead and a brunette, like in a bad joke, and they had worn heels, mangy fur coats and broad Viennese accents. Norah sipped her cappuccino, licking the froth from her lips, and stared out at the street, listening to the women’s scathing remarks as they bemoaned the state of the world, the decline of moral standards, the appalling dress taste of passers-by, and the smoking ban—not that they seemed to heed it. Norah was about to ask for the bill when her eye was caught by a young woman walking past the bistro. She was staring at the ground, as if she thought she might just get through life unscathed if she didn’t look at anything or anyone. Her dark blonde hair was tied in a ponytail and she was wearing tight jeans and a pink puffer jacket that accentuated her enormous girth. She looked oddly beautiful and heartrendingly sad, and if Norah had been any good at painting, she’d have liked to paint her portrait—oils on canvas, something classic.
‘It’s Marie!’ one of the old ladies cried. ‘Haven’t seen her for a long time!’ The other two nodded silently.
The couple at the table behind Norah had also noticed the young woman.
‘It’s a wonder she can still fit through her front door!’ the man said, and his girlfriend giggled. Norah glared at them, but they took no notice. Norah’s friend Coco popped into her head. Not that Coco looked anything like the young woman, but she, too, made people turn and look. Thinking of Coco made Norah think of Berlin and the disaster, and soon her good mood had evaporated.
When she left the bistro, it had begun to rain again. The houses seemed to be bracing themselves against the wind and weather, and the street, with its shuttered shops, closed grilles and darkly clad figures carrying umbrellas, looked almost hostile. Norah stopped, fished her phone out of her bag and opened Instagram. She took a photo, tagged it #winter-in vienna and #melancholia, and posted it. She’d been so caught up in events these last months that she’d neglected her social media channels and her blog. No wonder no one had replied last night. She’d better start posting more regularly; this beautiful, lonely city certainly offered enough material.
The underground station smelt of sadness and cement. Norah heard snatches of a melancholy eastern European air, the fruity cough of a homeless man, the ghostly echo of heels. She got on a train and stood wedged between strangers—headphones, lowered gazes, steamed-up windows, the dull noise of a throat being cleared. People’s bodies were pressed up close to hers, but the distance between them was unbridgeable. Berlin had been the same—cold and bleak and unwelcoming, though in a different way. The train stopped, the doors opened and people poured out, carrying Norah with them.
The old fortune teller she had come in search of was nowhere to be seen. In fact, the cold, damp weather seemed to have driven the beggars from the streets altogether. Maybe Norah would have better luck later in the day. She was determined to talk to the old woman again. The date was probably pure coincidence. Norah was probably just imagining that the name Arthur Grimm rang a bell. But probably had never been enough for her.
In the magazine offices Norah felt like a ghost, almost entirely ignored. Although her job didn’t officially start for two weeks, she’d already moved into one of the shared offices overlooking Kärntner Strasse. Berger had shown her around and introduced her to everyone, and she had found her new colleagues polite but aloof. That was fine by her; she’d always tended to keep her social life separate from work, and apart from Werner, she had no journalist friends. Norah knew Werner from her Hamburg days. He was an excellent reporter, but he and Norah had something else in common, too; there had been a time when he’d taken even more drugs than she had. Hard to believe that they’d both been clean for ten years; it was as if they’d been given a second chance. Norah certainly had no intention of straying from the straight and narrow again.
She shared her Vienna office with Aylin, a taciturn, wiry woman in her mid-forties who had positive slogans and photos of palm beaches pinned above her desk and took herself off to yoga in her lunch breaks. She was the anti-Werner.
Norah desperately needed caffeine, or nicotine, or both. She had persuaded Berger to let her write a series of features on Vienna’s homeless scene, and was wondering what tack to take. As usual, she decided to follow her gut instinct and focus on her own interests—though without stretching the remit of the magazine. Thanks to an old press contact in Berlin, she had another job lined up, too: in a few days she would be interviewing a film star. Berger had been thrilled—little sold as well as a real live Hollywood star—and Norah herself was looking forward to the interview, though she knew she would have to be well prepared; the actor had a reputation as a tough nut. Norah was an excellent interviewer. She had a sixth sense for knowing how to make people open up to her—whether to provoke or flatter or take the offensive. Most importantly, though, she had understood very early in her career that an interview, like everything in life, was based on reciprocity. If she wanted to get something out of her interviewees, she knew she had first to offer them something, and so she never interviewed anyone without revealing some small secret about herself. She had amused an American pop star in the Kempinski Hotel by showing him the unsuccessful tattoo on her hip. She had softened a neurotic French film director by telling him about one of her recurring nightmares. And she knew exactly how she would get this actor to identify with her and trust her. She was smiling to herself as she entered the office kitchen.