doctors did not agree on it, as none of the prescriptions matched, and nor did Axel, who had not been taking any of them. He left Adelaide peering at labels, mouthing their formulas to herself.
In the next room there was a broken clock on the wall. He stood looking at it, trying to decide why anyone would keep a broken clock. He checked his own watch. They still had over half an hour. If he listened, he could hear the watch ticking.
He found himself straining for noise. The twins’ reputation might have been wild, but the penthouse was not somewhere he could imagine holding a raucous party. It was easier to imagine his own friends here than it was Adelaide’s Haze. He wondered what Nils would say about it. Shake his head and laugh, Vikram decided, then remind Vikram that the penthouse’s owner was, after all, related to “that celebrity bitch.” Laughter was Nils’s reaction to most things: defusing agent and first line of defence. When Vikram finally told him about the deal he’d cut, Nils’s laugh was there. He’d had a warning, too. Watch out for her, he’d said. Don’t worry, Vikram had responded. I’ve not lost my head yet.
A laugh would sound strange in here.
The weirdness of being in a dead man’s home was steadily seeping into his consciousness. When people died, they were found and somebody mourned them and then their living space was recycled. What came with loss, unacknowledged and unspoken, but still there, was continuity. The penthouse held nothing of renewal, only endings. Death of the body. Worse than that, he thought. Death of the mind.
Adelaide strolled out of the bathroom with the sound of rushing water. She was doing up the buttons of her trousers.
“What?” she said. “I needed a piss.”
Vikram had a feeling the vulgarity was for his benefit.
Then she saw the clock. Her hands stilled at her waistband. He was going to ask its significance, but he saw her face, just for a second, succumb to something like fear.
She began her examination of the rest of the room. Her methods were erratic. She pressed her hands flat against the walls. She listened, with the shell of her ear close to the wallpaper, her face expectant. There was a white strip of skin between her glove and the sleeve of her shirt. She didn’t wear a watch. The foolishness of relying on one timepiece struck Vikram at the same time as he noticed how thin her wrists were.
When she twisted her head to look at him he thought of all the images in those paper magazines. A few strands of hair had escaped the confines of her hat and stuck to her face. He smiled to see the plastic sheaths over her feet, her long legs cut off so abruptly by the blue bags. Now he had to laugh.
“What’s funny?” demanded Adelaide.
He pointed. Adelaide frowned, then gave a reluctant smile. She raised her knee and extended her leg sideways in a slow motion kick. He imagined her muscles flexing beneath the loose black trousers.
“Sexy, aren’t they,” she said. She balanced for a moment, at once athletic and comic, before dropping her foot. For the first time he saw the charm of the girl. But he wasn’t going to tell her that.
“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s get going.”
They came to the last room. The lock was broken, presumably the key was with Axel. Adelaide turned the handle and stopped. Vikram peered over her shoulder.
The room smelled, not damp exactly, but chill, like old ice. It had been papered. Every inch of wall, floor and ceiling was covered in hot air balloons. Even the window-wall had been claimed. Repeated over and over again was the upturned pear shape, the coloured segments of the balloon envelope. There were prints, photographs, technical drawings, mathematical formulas. Here and there were swatches of yellow and red material. They were glued, taped, nailed or tacked, but they fluttered from their moorings as if stirred by an invisible breath. Vikram looked at the ragged edges of the cuttings. Axel’s handiwork was evident in illegible scrawls. He imagined the frenzied tearing, the hammering in the night. He felt cold.
He tapped Adelaide’s shoulder. She jumped.
“Do you want to go in?”
She shook her head and motioned to the floor. A minefield of nails stuck out of the dust.
“Looks like your brother was planning to skip town.”
“What kind of person thinks about making a hot air balloon?”
Vikram did not reply at once. He was thinking of an old western story, a legend about a balloon.
“Maybe the sort of person who thinks there’s something worth finding,” he said slowly. They were speaking in whispers. Vikram forced himself to raise his voice.
“We should go,” he said. “The hour’s almost up.”
All the same they stayed. Vikram could not dispel a niggling sense of premonition. By stepping into this man’s apartment he had crossed another border with it, one of obligations and no returns. He glanced at Adelaide. There was no doubt about it this time, she looked scared. Her hand bumped against his. She did not immediately move her arm away.
Noise startled both of them. First an erratic, then a regular drumming. Adelaide’s head snapped up. Vikram turned silently. Then he realized it was just the rain, rain breaking on windows covered in paper trails.
He looked at his watch.
“Shit, we’ve got three minutes, come on!”
Adelaide didn’t move.
“Come on!” he repeated. He took her arm but she thrust him off. He ran back through the penthouse. He thought she was right behind him but when he turned she was dawdling, opening a drawer, a cupboard door. They had two and a half minutes.
“Adelaide! Get out!”
The porthole loomed once more. He saw the skadi banging on his door in the middle of the night.
“Adelaide!” he yelled.
Still she lingered. He saw her touch a broken rivet on the wall.
“Fuck!”
Tiny but ominous on her finger, Vikram saw a bead of blood. His eyes snapped to the broken glass, which now carried the indelible mark of Adelaide’s DNA.
“Wipe it off! Use your sleeve, clean it!”
She obeyed. He hauled her forcibly through the domino rooms of the penthouse, past the broken clock, the cabinets, past the plants and the stacks of shoeboxes, out the front door into the hall. Adelaide slammed the door shut. He checked his watch. Sixty seconds.
“Lock up!” hissed Adelaide. “You have to lock up. Otherwise they’ll know!”
A string of expletives exploded in Vikram’s throat. He ripped the picks from his back pocket and with fumbling fingers shoved the first into the lower lock. He couldn’t see it. He could only see the porthole. His hand shook. Adelaide ran. He heard her footsteps clatter down the first ten steps and knew she was safe. At that moment he hated her.
Forty seconds. The corridor was shrinking again. He closed his eyes and listened to the lock. Tiny movements. Forget the porthole. Forget Adelaide. Forget everything but the way the metal works.
Listen. Just listen.
The lock clicked. He whipped the swipe card through the yellow bar and threw himself into the stairwell. Out of camera range. Six seconds. He counted, slowly, as the slender hand completed its circuit. When it reached the twelve he looked up at the buried mole of the camera in the ceiling. A red light blinked, just once, as if the tiny machine was waking up.
Adelaide crouched further down the stairs, her face electric. Their eyes connected. The tension between them was like the trembling space between polar magnets.
She ran.
That’s right. Run. Because if I get my hands on you now The thought prompted his body to move. It was only in motion that he realized the full extent of his rage. He hurtled down the stairs, chasing after her. In their efforts to make no noise they moved in contortionist shapes, half flying, half falling. Above his own straining lungs he heard the intake of her breath, the faint squeak as she grabbed the banister rail and vaulted a corner. Her blue overshoes landed with a crackle of plastic.
Thirty-one floors down she skidded to a halt.
“I thought we weren’t going to make it,” she said. Her face was pink with exertion.
