Touch by Claire North Read Free Book Online

stand still, grey and empty where once – not so long ago – NATO cruise missiles fell. A proper heart-of-city station, the smell of the rivers pushes back against exhaust and cigarette smoke as the Sava and the Danube collide, determined to prove that whatever meagre definition of ‘river’ you’ve been working on up to now, you ain’t seen nothing yet. It is easy to believe, when you stand on the shores of the Danube, that the world is an island after all.
    By night the barges that hug the waterfront turn up the music and the disco lights, and the young come out to party. By day the pedestrianised streets of central Belgrade are swamped with the fashionable come to buy fashionable things, to sustain their sense of fashionability, while on the edge of the city the old folk sit, men with drooping cigarettes and time-sunken eyes, who stare at the swaggering world and are not impressed.
    Cross the waters of the Sava, and long shadows are thrown by the tower blocks and industrial slabs of communist dreams with such catchy names as Blok 34, Blok 8, Blok whatever. It is a place perhaps more real than the dream of exclusive boutiques that line Prince Mihailo, where life is not glamorous, and fashion serves no purpose apart from provoking envy and contempt.
    I checked in at a hotel that was one of a thousand hotels run by ten companies the world over. I used the German passport and the woman exclaimed in poorly accented
Deutsch
, “Ah! Welcome you here very much!”
    My room, unlike in Edirne, had the space, uniformity and whitewashed luxury expected by any bug-eyed European traveller who is now too tired to want to think about where the kettle is or watch anything other than CNN sports reports or repeats of
CSI
. I locked my case away, put a few hundred euros in my pocket, tucked the Kepler folder under my arm and went in search of an internet café.
     
    On page 14 of the Kepler file there was a photo of a man.
    His hair was dyed black, his nose, chin, ears, jaw burst with pieces of metal, he wore a T-shirt with a white skull on it and, if it hadn’t been for the prescription-strength glasses on his nose and the textbook on
Prüfungs Gemacht Physik
in the background, I would happily have dismissed him then and there as your average happy punk.
    The note in the file read: “Berlin, 2007. Johannes Schwarb. Short-term inhabitation, long-term association?”
    Looking at the leering expression on the studded face, I shuddered to think that I had ever even considered habitation of that flesh, brief though it had been.

Chapter 17
     
    He was sixteen, I was twenty-seven, and he was hitting on me in a Berlin nightclub.
    “No,” I said.
    “Come on…”
    “No.”
    “Come on, babe…”
    “Absolutely not.”
    “Come on…”
    The bar was loud, the music was good, I was Christina and had a taste for mojitos, he was Johannes Schwarb and he was high.
    He waggled his tongue at me like a flailing fish, revealing the stud protruding from its flapping pink surface. “Young man,” I said, “you are all of thirty seconds away from self-harm.”
    My statement, true as it was, didn’t seem to be comprehended by Johannes, who kept on writhing whichever parts of his body he still had some sort of control over up and down against the stool by my side. He hadn’t mustered the courage to writhe against anything living, so the furniture would have to do. For a brief moment I contemplated doing the unthinkable, grabbing his face and putting my tongue down his throat, just to see what happened.
    Odds were, he’d be so shocked he’d bite, and it seemed unfair to leave Christina with a swollen tongue and the taste of vodka.
    Then his friend ran up, and she was fifteen, and she was crying, and she pulled at his arm and said, “They’re here!”
    “Babe!” he wailed. “Can’t you see I’m…?” A gesture attempted to take in the curves of my body, the shape of my dress, the look of murder in my eyes.
    “They’re here,” she