The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (28 page)

Mrs Evelina Cynthia-Wright was exactly what a grand dame of the Louisiana river should have been–extremely courteous, utterly welcoming and hard as the rusted nails which bound her great property together. Her research was clearly as up to date as her rather ineffective air-conditioning unit, for as I stood scanning the room, considering whether I had made enough of a necessary token appearance and wondering, not for the first time, if journalism was an appropriate response to the encroaching end of the world, she bore down on me like a melting glacier and cried out, “I say, Mr August!” I managed to suppress my flinch and crank up my smile, producing a half-bow to the hand offered to me by the wrist. Even fingers, it seemed, drooped in this weather. “Mr August, it’s so good of you to come. I’ve been such an avid follower of your work…”

“Thank you for the invitation, Mrs Wright…”

“Oh my, you’re British! Isn’t that charming? Darling!” A man three parts moustache to one part facial features responded to “Darling!” with the dutiful twitch of one who has chosen not to fight the inevitable. “Mr August is British, would you ever have guessed?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I’ve read so many of your articles, but then I imagine writing in the American way must just come naturally to you.”

Had it? Was I permitted to say so? Was this a gathering where all modesty was false, all boasting insufferable? Where, I wondered, did speedy social victory and hasty escape lie?

“You absolutely have to meet Simon. Simon is such a dear and has been dying to meet you. Oh Simon!”

I fixed my smile in the locked position and, upon reflection, that was probably what saved the situation.

The man called Simon turned. He too was sporting a moustache that rolled out from his top lip like a crashing brown wave, and a smaller goatee, which ever so slightly mis-directed the user’s eye to his left collarbone. He held an icy glass in one hand and a rolled-up copy of the magazine I worked for in the other, as if about to swat a fly with it, and there were plenty of candidates for
the honour. Seeing me, he opened his mouth in an expansive “O” of surprise, for this was a gathering where nothing short of expansive would do, tucked the magazine under his arm, wiped his hand off on his shirt, perhaps to remove the detritus of perished flying adversaries, and exclaimed, “Mr August! I’ve been waiting so long to meet you!”

His name was Simon.

His name was Vincent Rankis.

I was not without my allies.

Charity Hazelmere was not dead.

It had taken me a while to find her, and not until the middle of my fourteenth life did I stumble on her, almost by chance, in the Library of Congress while trawling through a report on developments in modern science. I looked up from a particularly boring passage which had nothing to do with my perpetual investigation into Vincent and his activities, and there was Charity, old–inside, as well as out, leaning on a walking stick for the first time I’d ever known–staring at me from across the other side of the table, not sure if I was enemy or friend.

I looked from her to the rest of the library and, seeing no direct threat, closed my book, returned it carefully to its tray, pointed at the
SILENCE PLEASE
sign, smiled and walked towards the door. I didn’t know if she’d follow or not. I don’t think she knew either. But follow she did.

“Hello, Harry.”

“Hello, Charity.”

A little grimace. Her ancient body was in pain, and I recognised the signs of more than just old age about her. The hair on her head
was thinning, but there was a slouch to the left side of her mouth and a weight to her left leg which spoke of more than simple generic decay. “So you remember,” she muttered. “Not many do, these days.”

“I remember,” I replied gently. “What are you doing here?”

“Same as you, I think. I don’t usually like to live this long, but even I can see that something’s gone wrong with time. All this…
change
…” The word dripped like acid from her lips. “All this…
development
. Can’t be having that at all.” Then, sharper, “I see you’ve become a journalist now. Read some of your articles. What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing, drawing attention to yourself like that? Don’t you know there’s a war on, them against us?”

“Them” had to be Vincent, “us” the Cronus Club. I felt a momentary flicker of shame that I was still included in the “us”. After all, I had spent more than a decade working with Vincent, and my collaboration and subsequent defection were arguably the trigger for the attacks on the Cronus Club. Whether anyone knew this, I doubted, and nor was I in a hurry to tell.

“If the enemy knows your name, they can pursue you! A low profile, Harry, is vital–unless, that is, you’re deliberately inviting trouble?”

To her surprise, and perhaps mine, I smiled. “Yes,” I replied softly. “In point of fact, that’s exactly what I’m doing. It will make things easier in the long run.”

Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What are you playing at, Harry August?”

I told her.

Everyone needs an ally.

Particularly one born before 1900.

Two things I learned during my career in espionage. The first is that a dull listener is, nine times out of ten, a vastly more effective spy than a charming conversationalist. The second is that the best way to approach a contact blind is not for you to directly engage with them, but to convince them that they want to engage with you.

“Mr August, such a pleasure.”

Vincent Rankis stood before me, smiling, offering me his hand, and all those years of preparation, all that planning, all the thought I had dedicated to what I would do if this moment ever came, and for a moment, just a moment, it was all I could do not to plunge the rim of my julep glass into the pulsing softness of his pink throat.

Vincent Rankis, smiling at me like a stranger, inviting my friendship.

He knew everything he had done to me, remembered it with the perfect detail of a mnemonic.

What he did not know–
could not know
–was that I remembered it all as well.

“A pleasure, Mr…?”

“Ransome,” he replied brightly, clasping my hand in his and shaking it warmly. His fingers were cold from where he’d held his drink, passing it from hand to hand, and damp with still-clinging condensation from the outside of the glass. “I’ve read so much of your work, followed your career, you might say.”

“That’s very considerate of you, Mr… Ransome?” I nearly stumbled on the enquiry, important to make it clear I didn’t know him, but push any lie too far and it begins to totter. “Are you in the trade?”

The trade, to any large profession on the planet, is always whatever craft the speaker happens to practise.

“Good God, no!” He chuckled. “I’m something of a layabout really, terrible thing, but I do admire you journalist chaps, striding about places, putting wrongs to right and that.”

Vincent Rankis and his bare, sweaty throat.

“I hardly do that, Mr Ransome. Just earn those dimes, as they say.”

“Not at all. Your commentary is engaging–some might even say incisive.”

Vincent Rankis sat by my bedside as the rat poison flooded through my veins.

Walking away as the torturer began to pull the nails out of my toes.

Riding a boat down the river Cam.

Hopping with excitement at another experiment. We can push the boundaries, Harry. We can find the answers, all things, everywhere. We can see with the eyes of God.

Not turning back at the sound of my screams.

Take him, he said, and they took me, a bullet to the brain, and here I am, and I will never forget.

He was looking.

God but he was looking, above that brilliant smile and behind those empty, charming lies, he was studying every feature of my face, looking for the lie in my eye, looking for recognition, revulsion, rebellion, some hint that I was still who I had been, that I knew what he had done. I smiled and turned back to our host,
heart beating too fast, no longer confident I could stop my body from revealing what my mind would not.

“You clearly have excellent taste in both friends and reading material, ma’am,” I explained, “but I trust my invitation here wasn’t merely to discuss the incisiveness of my text?”

Mrs Evelina Cynthia-Wright, God bless her, God praise her, had an agenda to push, and in that moment of crisis, that moment when I might have turned and lost my control altogether, she exclaimed, “Mr August, you’ve got such a journalist’s mind! As a matter of fact, there are a few people I’d like you to meet…”

And she put an arm around my shoulder and I could have kissed that arm, could have wept into its clean white sleeve, as she led me away from Vincent Rankis and back into the crowd. And as Vincent had not looked back, neither did I.

I had him.

I had him.

I had him.

And best of all, I had him without having to expose myself.

He had sought out me.

He had come to
me
.

And I had him.

I had him.

At last.

Utterly cool, as the Americans would say.

Time to play it utterly cool.

I listened to Mrs Cynthia-Wright’s friends discuss in earnest, occasionally frantic tones the threats of nuclear war, the dangers of ideological stand-off, the invasion of technology into conflict, and knew that Vincent was only a few paces from my back, and I didn’t look once. Not too cold, not arctic and distant: on my way out of the house I smiled at him and complimented him once more on his excellent literary taste, expressing the hope that he was a regular subscriber to the magazine. He was. What
a good man, what a fine bastion of learning in this ever-changing time.

Not too hot either.

I did not shake his hand on the way out, and as I walked back down the drive beneath the now star-studded sky, I did not turn my head to see if he stood in the door.

I had him.

I made it back to my hotel, a second-floor room that stank of the damp mould creeping into every corner of this soggy town, and locked the door, sat down on my bed and shook for nearly fifteen minutes. I couldn’t stop, and for a while, as I watched my hands tremble across my lap, wondered what kind of twisted conscious reaction of my mind this was, what manifestation of the many emotions I knew I should feel to see this man who I had hunted for over a century, this man who had come so close to destroying me. But if it was so, still I could not control it, and as I went mechanically through the motions of going to bed, my hands shook, and I smeared toothpaste down my chin.

Had I thought it would work, I would have called the Club at once. I would have summoned up mercenaries, I would have taken up arms myself, and we would have administered the Forgetting to Vincent, right then and there. No question, no trial, no fruitless interrogation for his point of origin, which information, I felt sure, he would not easily give. He was a mnemonic, and if my experiences were anything to judge by, such action could only result in failure, and every chance we had of stopping Vincent could be lost for good.

Having found him, this was a time now to walk away.

He knew where to find me, if that was his inclination.

Three months.

Worse than any torture.

I went about my job, and this time I was scrupulous, I was rigorous, I played the part of a journalist to the full and took no action that could be even considered as remotely researching Vincent. Further, I stepped up other activities that might be
considered symptomatic of a ouroboran only two lives on from a Forgetting. I attended churches of various denominations; made and then broke various appointments with counsellors, maintained firm isolation from my peers, and in every way, shape and form lived the life of Harry August, innocent kalachakra slogging through a confusing world. I even took private classes in Spanish, which language I spoke fluently, masking my easy progress by paying my downstairs neighbour’s child to do my homework, and that badly, and embarking on a brief and fairly enjoyable affair with my teacher, before guilt at her betrayal of a very absent Mexican boyfriend caused her to break off both relationship and lessons.

Whether I needed to have gone to the lengths I did to maintain this illusion, I do not know. If Vincent was investigating my present conditions closely, he hid it brilliantly. For certain he was investigating my past, looking no doubt for my point of origin. But my allies were in place, Charity and Akinleye, and every document left in the system proclaimed that I, Harry August, had come into the understanding of the British as an orphan abandoned in Leeds, and there remained until my adoption by a local couple by the name of Mr and Mrs August. I knew Vincent would investigate these facts and indeed find a Mr and Mrs August of Leeds who had adopted a boy of roughly suitable age, whose life I had always quietly marked as being a useful alibi for mine and who died in a car crash in 1938, in time for me to claim his paperwork as my own. His accidental death was, in many ways, a great fortune to me as, if it had not occurred, I may well have been forced to kill him in order to safely maintain my disguise.

Whatever the course of Vincent’s investigations into these carefully woven lies, he did not approach me for another three months, and I did not seek him out. Then, when he finally did reappear, he did so at two in the morning, on a land line to my apartment in Washington DC.

I answered, groggy and bewildered, which was precisely how he intended me to be.

“Mr August?”

His voice, instantly recognisable. Full wakefulness immediately; the blood raced so fast in my ears I wondered he couldn’t hear it as I pressed the phone against my body.

“Who is this?” I demanded, crawling across my bed for the light switch.

“It’s Simon Ransome,” he replied. “We met at Mrs Cynthia-Wright’s soirée?”

Was that what it had been? Perhaps. “Ransome… I’m sorry, I don’t quite—”

“Forgive me, you probably don’t recall. I’m an avid reader of your works…”

“Of course!” Was my jubilation at recognition a little too much, a little too forced? This was America, a land of big expressions, and the phone was not the medium for subtlety. “I’m sorry, Mr Ransome, of course I remember–it’s a touch early in the morning, is all…”

“Good God!” Was his regret a little too forced, a little too over the top? Perhaps, I mused, when this was done we could swap notes on the qualities of each other’s deceptions? I could think of no one whose opinion I would value more in this regard. “I’m so sorry. What time is it there?”

“Two in the morning.”

“Good
God
!” again, and really I was beginning to feel I should be taking points off Vincent’s otherwise flawless performance. I made a mental note to myself that empty banal sounds were far more apposite than grand exclamations of sentiment when it came to such matters. Then again, if his operating assumption was that I was a traumatised innocent stuck in my second life, perhaps he considered it only apt to treat me like an idiot? “Harry, I’m so sorry,” and again there it was, the slip of a familiar first name where no such terms should have yet existed. “I was going to invite you to join me for drinks next week, as I believe I’ll be in your neighbourhood. How thoughtless of me to forget the time! I’ll call back later–a thousand apologies!”

He hung up before I could begin to let him off the hook.

We met for drinks.

The bar was a haunt for lobbyists and journalists, and beneath the low-wattage bulbs and against the sound of slow jazz, a brief truce was declared and the soldiers were allowed to cross the lines to join strangers at their tables, discussing football, baseball and the latest twists and turns in the ongoing battles of the civil rights movement.

Vincent arrived ten minutes late, dressed in an outrageous white suit and braces. He was, he explained, a layabout with very little do with his life, but the world I inhabited fascinated him, and he hoped I didn’t mind his picking my brains. Not at all, I replied, and he insisted on buying the drinks.

I had eaten vast amounts of cheese in preparation for this moment, and drunk copious quantities of water. There is an art to getting drunk in the line of duty, and I was determined that he would catch me neither shirking in my efforts nor off guard as a consequence. The only downside was the regular need to nip to the toilet, but as prices went, I’ve paid worse.

As we talked, it became evident that Vincent’s notion of rich layabout was not necessarily the same as that held by his peers. “Father left me a lot,” he explained with a dismissive shrug, “including a degree I never use, a house I never live in and a factory I never visit, but really I can’t be bothered with all that.”

Sure you can’t, Vincent. Sure you can’t.

“Your father must have been a rich man.”

“So-so, so-so.”

The immortal words of the extremely wealthy, whose natural financial saturation point is so high they have been buoyed above the realms of ordinary mortals, and can perceive vast riches beyond the dreams of lesser fishes. Thus, “So-so, so-so”, a promise of wealth yet undiscovered.

The question of Vincent’s father dangled between us and, as the bait seemed so juicy and tender, I ignored it.

“So what’s a guy like you,” I wondered, “doing talking to a hack like me?”

“Didn’t I say? I’m an admirer of your work.”

“Is that it? I mean, you’re not… what, looking to start your own newspaper, or get a job in the trade or any of that?”

“Good God no! I wouldn’t know where to begin. Tell you what though…”

Here it came, the conspiratorial shuffle across the couch, the bowed head, furtive glances at his neighbours: “You wouldn’t have some insider dirt, would you?”

What kind of dirt, dear Liza, dear Liza?

“My accountant chappy wants me to buy into a company doing something terribly technical with harmonic resonance, whatever that is. I usually just let him handle these sorts of things, but the investment is really quite high and I wasn’t sure if it was going to go anywhere. What do you think?”

I think, Vincent, that when you decided to deploy the notion of an “accountant chappy”, you pushed your hand a little too far.

I think it would be easy to kill you now.

I think that, despite everything, I am smiling.

Smiling at your act. At your charm. At your easy manner and little dirty jokes. Smiling because for ten years we smiled and worked together, and for only a few days did you attempt to destroy my life. Smiling because that’s the habit that has been set into my features in your presence, though I loathe you beyond all comprehension. Smiling because, despite the lies, despite knowing all I do about you, I like you, Vincent Rankis. I still like you.

“What’s the name of the company?” I asked. “Maybe I can check them out?”

“Would you? I don’t want you to think that was what this is about–I know that people use others all the time–but honestly, Harry–may I call you Harry–I have been such an admirer of your work I just wanted to meet you, this other business is really on the side…”

“It’s no problem, Mr Ransome–Simon? Simon, it’s no problem at all.”

“I really don’t want to inconvenience you.”

“No inconvenience. Just doing my job.”

“At least let me pay you for your time! Expenses? Expenses at the very least?”

I remembered how easy it was to bribe a good man. Was this Harry August, the Harry I was playing, a good man? I decided he was, he had to be, and like all good men in the presence of Vincent Rankis, he would have to take a fall.

“You buy the dinner,” I replied, “and we’ll call it even.”

In the end I also let him pay for travel too.

The company was everything I should have expected it to be. In the ordinary way of things, it should have been working on developing the next generation of TVs, refining the oscillations in the cathode-ray tube, studying interference and induction through electromagnetic effect. But it, like so many other institutions across the US, had received five pieces of yellow paper on which were laid out in careful detail specs, diagrams and figures relating to technologies some twenty years ahead of their time, and now the company was…

“Doing really exciting work, Mr August, really exciting, into single-particle beam resonance.”

And what did that mean? For my article, of course, for the readers to understand.

“Well, Mr August, if we take, say, a beam of light–a high-intensity beam of light, such as a laser…”

Of course, lasers in the 1960s, that well-known household tool.

“… and we fire it at an electron…”

Naturally, but naturally we spend the 1960s firing lasers at sole electrons–where had I been for the last eight hundred and eighty years?

“… we can see a transfer of energy occurring and–are you familiar with the notion of wave particle duality?”

Let’s imagine that I am.

“F… antastic! So you must know that what we consider light is now understood to be both a particle–photons–
and
a wave, and it is through harmonic resonance between these waves, which
are also particles, that we can begin to see… Are you sure you understand this, Mr August? You look deeply concerned.”

Do I? Bad lunch. Let’s call it a bad lunch.

“I am so sorry, Mr August. I hadn’t realised! Would you like to sit down?”

Afterwards, I wrote my report for Vincent. I could see the application at once, and more importantly why Vincent would be looking to use the company in question, as its research could be more than useful for his dream device, the quantum mirror, which would look at a single particle and from that derive the answers to everything. Simple, Harry, so simple–if you have the courage to do it.

He was still building it, I knew, somewhere deep in the heart of America–that was the purpose of this whole exercise. I, however, could show no knowledge of the same so wrote up my analysis based largely on the personalities of the people I’d met and whether they seemed to have a viable financial plan, rather than on the science.

We met over dinner–he paid–and he hummed and ah’d and gasped like an expert as he flicked through my pages, finally throwing the whole thing on to the table with a clap of his hands and exclaiming, “This is perfect, Harry, just perfect! Waiter–more sake!”

It was 1969 and sushi was the new fashion in America. The polar ice caps were melting, the skies were turning orange-yellow with the smear of industry, the Soviet bloc was collapsing and there were rumours of a pill for black people fighting for civil rights in the US which would turn their skin baby-white. This, proclaimed Nixon, was the true path to equality. The only reason the world hadn’t been nuked, I concluded, was that no one could really see the point of trying.

“Tell me about yourself, Harry. You’re British, right?” Here we are, the point-of-origin question, slipped in so subtly, so gently between courses that I almost didn’t notice it appear. “You got much family?”