recurrent childhood dream he could not quite remember, from which the only way to wake was to keep on going until he found the exit.
The elevator ride seemed to go on a long time. He wondered what might be waiting at the end of it. When at last it did halt, he put up his hands to protect himself. Jerkily the doors opened on to the sixth floor.
The landing was deserted. He was reluctant to step out on to it at first, but then the doors began to close and he had to thrust his leg out to save himself from being reimprisoned. The doors juddered back and he moved out cautiously on to the landing. It was darker than in the lobby. His eyes had to readjust. The walls were bare. There was the same stale, almost fetid smell of air that had been breathed a thousand times and never refreshed by an open door or window. It was hot. Two doors were opposite him; more led off the passages to either side. An amateurish sign composed of movable coloured plastic letters, of the kind sold in toyshops, indicated that Room 68 was to the right. The clank of the elevator motor restarting behind him made him jump. He listened to the car descend all the way to the bottom. When it shut off, there was silence.
He took a couple of paces to the right and peered slowly around the corner along the passage. Room 68 was at the far end, its door closed. From somewhere close by came a rhythmic noise of rasping metal, which at first he mistook for sawing but almost immediately realised was bedsprings. There was a thump. A man moaned as if in pain.
Hoffmann pulled out his mobile, intending to call the police. But, curiously for the centre of Geneva, there was no signal. He put it back in his pocket and walked warily to the end of the passage. His eyes were at exactly the same level as the bulging opaque glass of the spyhole. He listened. He couldn’t hear anything. He tapped on the door, then put his ear to the wood and listened again. Nothing: even the neighbour’s bedsprings had ceased to creak.
He tried the black plastic handle. The door wouldn’t open. But it was held by only a single Yale lock and he could see the door jamb was rotted: when he dug his fingernail into the spongy wood, he pulled away a wedge of crumbling orange flakes the size of matchsticks. He stepped back a pace, checked behind him, then barged against the door with his shoulder. It gave slightly. He moved back a couple of feet further and lunged at it again. This time there was a splintering sound and the door opened a couple of centimetres. He worked the fingers of both hands into the gap and pushed. There was a crack and the door opened.
It was dark inside, with just a faint line of grey daylight showing where the bottom of the window shutter had failed to close properly. He edged across the carpet, groped around and through the net curtain for the switch, pressed it, and noisily the shutter began to rise. The window looked out through a fire escape on to the back of a row of buildings about fifty metres away, separated from the hotel by a brick wall and adjacent yards full of waste bins, weeds and rubbish. By the thin light Hoffmann could see the room, such as it was: a single unmade bed on wheels with a greyish sheet hanging down over a red and black carpet, a small chest of drawers with a rucksack resting on top of it, a wooden chair with a scuffed brown leather seat. The radiator under the window was too hot to touch. There was a strong smell of stale cigarette smoke, masculine sweat and cheap soap. The wallpaper around the wall lights had been scorched brown by the bare bulbs. In the tiny bathroom were a small bathtub with a clear plastic shower curtain hung around it, a basin streaked greenish-black where the taps had dripped, and a WC with similar markings; on a wooden shelf was a glass mug with a toothbrush and a blue disposable plastic razor.
Hoffmann moved back into the bedroom. He carried the rucksack to the bed, upended it and emptied out the contents. It was mostly dirty clothes – a plaid shirt, T-shirts, underwear, socks – but buried among them was an old Zeiss camera with a powerful lens, and also a laptop computer which felt warm to the touch. It was in sleep mode.
He put the laptop down and returned to the open door. The frame had splintered outwards around the lock but had not broken, and he found he was able to press the housing of the lock back into place and gently close the door. It would fall open again if pressure was applied from the other side, but from a distance it would look untouched. Behind the door he noticed a pair of boots. He picked them up between thumb and forefinger and examined them. They were identical to the ones he had seen outside his house. He replaced them and went and sat on the edge of the bed and opened the laptop. Then, from the bowels of the building, came a clang. The elevator was moving again.
Hoffmann put aside the computer and listened to the whine of its long ascent. At last it stopped, and then came the rattle of its doors opening close by. He crossed the room quickly and put his eye to the spyhole just as the man came round the corner. He was carrying a white plastic bag in one hand and with the other he was fishing in his pocket. He reached the door and pulled out his key. The distorting lens of the peephole made his looming face seem even more skull-like than before, and Hoffmann felt the hairs rise on his scalp.
He stepped back and looked around quickly, then withdrew into the bathroom. An instant later he heard the key inserted into the keyhole, followed by a grunt of surprise as the door swung open without needing to be unlocked. In the semi-darkness, through the crack between the bathroom door and the door jamb, Hoffmann had a clear view of the centre of the bedroom. He held his breath. For a while nothing happened. He prayed the man might have turned around and gone down to reception to report a break-in. But then his shadow passed briefly across Hoffmann’s line of view, heading towards the window. Hoffmann was on the point of trying to make a run for it when, with shocking speed, the man doubled back and abruptly kicked open the bathroom door.
There was something scorpion-like in the way he crouched, legs apart, with a long blade held at head height. He was bigger than Hoffmann remembered, bulked out by his leather coat. There was no way past him. Long seconds elapsed as they stared at one another, and then the man said, in a surprisingly calm and educated voice, ‘ Zuruck. In die Badewanne.’ He gestured with the knife at the bath and Hoffmann shook his head, not understanding. ‘ In die Badewanne,’ repeated the man encouragingly, pointing the knife first at Hoffmann and then at the tub. After another endless pause, Hoffmann found his limbs doing as they were bidden. His hand pulled back the shower curtain and his legs stepped shakily over the edge into the bath, his desert boots clumping heavily on the cheap plastic. The man came a little further into the tiny room. It was so cramped he took up almost all the floor space. He pulled the light cord. Above the sink a neon strip stuttered into life. He closed the door and said, ‘ Ausziehen,’ and this time helpfully added a translation: ‘Take off your clothes.’ In his long leather coat he looked like a butcher.
‘ Nein,’ said Hoffmann, shaking his head and holding his palms up in a gesture of reasonableness. ‘No. No way.’ The man spat out some swear word he didn’t understand and slashed at him with the knife, the blade passing so close that even though Hoffmann pressed himself back into the corner under the shower nozzle, the front of his raincoat was slashed and the lower part of it flapped down to his knees. For a ghastly moment he thought it was his flesh and he said quickly, ‘ Ja, ja, okay. I’ll do it.’ The whole situation was so bizarre it seemed to be playing out at one remove from reality, to be happening to someone else. He quickly shrugged the coat off his left shoulder and then his right. There was hardly enough room for him to get his arms out of the sleeves and for a time it was stuck across his back and he had to struggle with it as if escaping from a straitjacket.
He tried to think of something to say, to establish contact with his attacker, to shift this encounter on to a different and less lethal plane. He said, ‘You are German?’ and when the man didn’t respond, he struggled to remember what little of the language he had picked up at CERN: ‘ Sie sind Deutscher? ’ There was no answer.
At last he had the ruined coat off. He let it drop around his feet. He slipped off his jacket and held it out to his captor, who gestured with his knife that he should throw it on to the bathroom floor. He started to unbutton his shirt. He would carry on removing his clothes until he was naked if necessary, but if the man tried to tie him up he resolved that he would fight – yes, then he would put up a struggle. He would rather die than be rendered completely helpless.
‘Why are you doing this?’ he asked.
The man frowned at him as if he were a slightly baffling child and replied in English: ‘Because you invited me.’
Hoffmann stared at him, aghast. ‘I didn’t invite you to do this.’
The knife was flourished again. ‘Continue, please.’
‘Listen, this is not right…’
Hoffmann finished unbuttoning his shirt and let it fall on top of his jacket. He was thinking hard now, evaluating risks and chances. He grasped the bottom of his T-shirt and pulled it up over his head, and when his face emerged and he saw his attacker’s hungry eyes he felt his flesh crawl. But here was weakness, he recognised: here was opportunity. Somehow he forced himself to make a ball of the white cotton and to offer it to him. ‘Here,’ he
