Alex Archer - The Mortality Principle

She waited at the window, listening, but heard neither so assumed the scrap had been fists not firearms.

The bedside clock flashed a few minutes shy of 3:00 a.m. Sleep still seemed a long way off. Annja turned on the radio, keeping the volume so low the half-whispered voice of the late-night DJ was so quiet it was impossible to tell what language he was speaking between the ripple of easy listening.

It was enough to lull her to sleep.

Annja woke to the sound of movement in the corridor outside her room.

The radio still provided its thin layer of background noise, but against the sounds of the waking hotel it was little more than a sibilant hiss. Her dreams had been filled with violence and fear. She knew logically there was nothing she could have done about the fighting in the street—it had been over before she was even aware of it—but that didn’t stop her subconscious mind from tormenting her with a guilt-tripped sleep.

She had no appetite for breakfast.

Annja showered, standing in the steaming hot spray long enough to turn her body a dark shade of pink, then wrapped a towel around herself and made a particularly foul cup of coffee from the selection of instant blends on offer. The heat alone was enough to make her feel more alive.

It was barely seven-thirty. If anything was going to revive her, it was the crisp morning air, which would only be clean and crisp for maybe another thirty minutes or so before the city filled with traffic.

Five minutes later she was stretching on the pavement, her hair pulled back in a still-damp ponytail.

She started to run, moving lightly on her feet, weaving a path through the narrow alleyways around the hotel, up beyond the corner that would have taken her over the Charles Bridge toward the palace on the hill, toward Wenceslas Square. Her muscles were tight, but as the blood started to flow they loosened up. Her breathing came in little wispy puffs of steam that corkscrewed up in front of her face.

In the distance Annja heard the sound of a siren approaching.

Without realizing it she was running toward the source of the previous night’s fight. Within the few minutes she’d been out, the streets had already begun to show increasing signs of life with café owners setting up the tables outside their windows. A newspaper vendor on the street corner beside the subway entrance was doing a brisk trade as people passed by in a rush to get to work. It was the kind of thing she saw in every street in every city. Every time she skirted that hubbub of life it reminded her how lucky she was not to be caught up in it. She couldn’t imagine drifting through life. Annja harbored no illusions just how lucky she was to live the life she did. That was just another reason why this live-broadcast Twitter-chasing plan made her so uncomfortable. She had secrets, just like everyone else. The idea of turning the world into citizen archaeologists and sending them out to chase monsters had the power to turn her life upside down.

She slowed as she reached the far end of the street. People had begun to gather, blocking the way.

One man stepped away from the group.

He pulled out his cell phone.

She was too far away to hear what the man said as he spoke into his phone, but his body language spoke volumes. He was calling the police.

At the sound of the approaching siren a few people peeled away from the crowd. They disappeared into the side streets and wider spaces beyond, happy not to be involved once the police arrived.

Annja stepped into a gap that had been created as a middle-aged woman stepped away. The woman’s rigid expression gave plenty warning of what she was about to see. A shiver raced up Annja’s spine as she peered through the cluster of bodies: a man in a blue suit crouched over someone lying on the ground in an alleyway that ran between two buildings. Annja saw the dark, damp patch staining the cobbles at his feet as she worked her way closer. The man was fighting for a life that wasn’t there to be saved. He stood and shook his head to no one in particular. There was nothing he could do. Nothing anyone could do. As he moved away to the fresher air of the street, Annja saw the body properly.

The victim had been dead for some time.

Four and a half hours, Annja thought, looking at the ragged clothes the body wore, and at the stains that had turned them the same dark color as the ground around the corpse.

Judging by the state of his clothes, there was every chance this usually quiet alleyway was where the dead man made his bed for the night. Could his death be the consequence of a fight over something as tragic as the meager shelter that the alleyway offered? If it was, then it was a poor way to end a life that had surely seen more than its fair share of troubles. Annja rubbed a hand through her damp hair. The body that lay in the narrow space was no longer a man; now it was evidence to be picked over in the mortuary.

It didn’t need a pathologist to read the crime scene. This wasn’t death by natural causes. There was nothing accidental about it. She’d been right the previous night; there had been violence in the air. She couldn’t have stopped it. She couldn’t even let herself think that way. The world wasn’t her responsibility. She couldn’t police every street and save every victim.

When the police car came to a halt only a few feet away from the crowd, the press of bodies miraculously thinned, gawkers suddenly remembering they had somewhere else to be. The man in the suit spoke to a policeman, no doubt explaining that he had found the dead man. Annja couldn’t understand the few words she caught. One policeman made a note in his small black book, presumably of the man’s name and address while the other worked his way through the remaining gawkers to the corpse. A few seconds later, after the briefest of glances at the dead vagrant, he began to usher everyone back.

The forlorn siren song of an approaching ambulance was wholly out of place and much too late, unless it was bringing a priest. By the look of the dead man, every last ounce of hope had been torn from him, shredded, before he had finally slumped to the ground and spilled what little was left of his bodily fluids out across the cobbles.

Annja was still wrapped up in her thoughts when she realized that the policeman was talking to her. She shook her head.

“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t speak Czech.”

“Ah, did you see anything?” he asked, switching to English easily, though his voice carried a heavy accent. There was no way anyone would mistake him for a native speaker. Annja shook her head, so he moved on to the next person, no doubt sure this was a crime that didn’t warrant investigating given who the victim was.

“I might have heard something, though,” Annja said to his back. “Last night.”

He made no effort to disguise his world-weary sigh as he turned back to her. His pen was still poised over his pad. “What did you hear?”

Annja chose her words carefully. She didn’t want to risk any misunderstanding. “I heard a fight,” she began.

“A fight?”

She nodded. “Two men,” she said, though even as the words left her lips she couldn’t actually be sure that it was the truth. She’d heard so little, even with the window open. In truth, she had no reason to believe the dead man had anything to do with the struggle she had heard in the night.

“Can you describe them?” the policeman asked. “Anything at all?”

Annja held out her hands, shaking her head slightly. “I’m sorry, no. I only heard them. I can’t even be sure what I heard. It just sounded like fighting, but it was over very quickly, then I heard footsteps running away. It could have been anything, really. I just thought you should know.”

“When was this?”