The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (16 page)

I will never fully understand the notion of a suicide mission. For us it is relatively simple, entailing only the considerable boredom of youth as its primary consequence. Certainly I regretted how likely it seemed that I was going to have to blow a hole in my own skull to escape the situation I had so effectively talked myself into, but by far the more intimidating prospect would have been capture and questioning, and I considered a few years’ boredom to be infinitely preferable to that.

But I have seen men for whom death truly is the end walk towards their demise for reasons no greater than that it was what they were told to do. On the beaches of Normandy, where the bodies floated in the water beside the falling ramps of the landing craft, I saw men run into machine-gun fire who would say, “Hell, I never thought it would come to this, but now I’m here, what’s a guy to do?” With no going back, and no going forward, they went to their deaths with no better plan immediately to hand, having gambled that their choices would not narrow so far, and having been found to be wrong.

For my part, it seemed likely that I would die in this place for little more than a speculation. For a crystal in a radio which was
a few years ahead of its time; for the name of a man who saw the future; for a secret hidden by men with guns.

The commander was so good as to point all of this out to me. “You’re going to die here,” he explained as we sat in his office, waiting for Karpenko to come. “Make it easier for yourself.”

I grinned. “Make it easier for yourself” implied that death was my primary concern, as well as being a phrase I associated with New York policemen rather than Soviet commanders in a hidden base. My levity surprised him, his thin grey eyebrows twitching over his paper face. “You’re handling this very calmly,” I pointed out, “for a man on the wrong end of a gun.”

He shrugged. “I’ve had my time and lived it well. You, though–you are a young man. You will have things which tie you to this world. Are you married?”

“That’s a very pious question,” I answered. “Will it have the same emotional implication if I say that I enjoy living in sin?”

“What else do you enjoy? Perhaps you can enjoy them again.”

“That’s a really nice thought–” I sighed “–and I’m grateful for it, but there comes a point when one realises that gratification of the flesh is only so fulfilling. It’s fantastic while it lasts, but comes with so many questions of emotional baggage and doubt that frankly I begin to question whether the grief involved outweighs the satisfaction gained.”

To my surprise, he raised his eyebrows. “You clearly aren’t having the right sort of gratification.”

“A professional ear masseuse in Bangkok once said exactly those words to me.”

“You’re not Russian,” he suggested.

“Is there something wrong with my accent?”

“No Russian would do this.”

“That’s a terrible indictment of the Soviet spirit.”

“You misunderstand. You do not appear to be in a fragile enough state to have chosen this as your particular suicide, and yet neither do you seem to have an agenda which could further the cause of others. I see in you no clear explanation for what you do…”

“So why assume I’m foreign?”

He shrugged. “Call it instinct.” That was a little distressing. Instinct was one of the few factors which I had no great ability to alter or control. “Comrade,” he went on, “you seem too intelligent to be doing this for nothing. Is there really no other path open to you?”

“None which engages me so much,” I replied. A knock at the door cut short any further soul-searching. I gestured at the commander to be silent behind his desk and, tucking the gun into my coat, slipped on to the one stool besides his desk.

A nod, and the commander called,

“Enter!”

The door opened. The man who came in was already in the middle of a sentence, which had clearly begun for him some several seconds before actually receiving permission to come inside.

“… very busy right now and really can’t be—”

The sentence stopped.

The man looked from the commander to me, and his face broke into a smile. “Good God,” he said, each word dropping like a pebble in a pond. “Fancy seeing you here.”

Many lives ago, in that busy summer when Vincent Rankis and I first began to truly examine each other’s minds, and before that cold night when he learned of the Cronus Club and left me with some light bruises and some heavy doubts for my pains, we went punting down the river Cam.

I have never liked punting, always feeling that, as means of transport went, it was one of the least sensible available and, more to the point, as it appeared to be practised in Cambridge, a skill as much valued in the incompetence as the mastery. A good trip on the river would not be complete for both students and some of my peers unless it involved hitting a bridge, causing a pile-up, running aground on a muddy bank, dropping the pole in fast-flowing waters and, ideally, at least one person falling in. I have similar feelings about gondolas in Venice, where the skill of the pilot is almost entirely cancelled out by the size of the fee and the sense that you are, in your own naïve way, contributing to a cliché that will in later years serve more gondoliers to defraud more tourists of their cash.

“That’s your problem, Harry,” Vincent had explained. “You’ve never understood the concept of doing things by halves.”

I had grumbled my way to the riverbank, and grumbled my way on to the punt, and grumbled as we bumped our way between students, and grumbled as Vincent opened up his wicker basket, packed for the purpose, to produce flasks of gin with a dash of tonic, and perfectly cut cucumber sandwiches.

“The cucumber sandwiches,” he’d explained, “are vital if we are to fulfil our roles.”

“What are our roles?” I sulked.

“We are the living proof of the notion that rationality and intellectual vigour are slaves to social pressure and pleasant sunlight. For you and I may know, Harry,” he exclaimed, sloshing the pole through the water with pointed enthusiasm, “that this is a truly ridiculous pastime for any self-respecting scholar of the universe to indulge in, and yet, for no rational reason that I can possibly devise, this is what
must
be done.”

Our companions giggled.

I wasn’t at all convinced by Vincent’s choice of associates for this trip. I’d only met them at the riverbank, and their presence had further added to my sense of impending doom. She was Leticia, and she was Frances, but which was which I still couldn’t quite put my finger on. They were dressed very properly in high-buttoned summer dresses and with their hair immaculately curled by their ears, but alas, from their propriety also came their frivolity, for they knew–of course they knew!–that taking a punt ride with two young bachelors in the summer sun was very much something Mother Would Not Approve Of, and any other thoughts they might have had on the course of our journey were rather subsumed by this all-encompassing revelation.

“Leticia’s father is something in biochemistry,” Vincent whispered in my ear, “and Frances has been claimed, apparently, by Hugh, who’s a thoroughly repugnant creature but is playing tennis today down on the lawns. When we get there, Harry, I’m afraid it’s either your or my ghastly duty to ensure that one of us kisses Frances on the lips, for Hugh to see; better not get the timing wrong, else we’ll have to go through the entire procedure again until he notices.”

I begged tutor’s privilege, announcing it was bad enough to be seen to be on the river with students, let alone kissing one. Vincent sighed profoundly, and when we got to the lawns he did, indeed, as promised, contrive to drop the pole into the river and insist that myself and Leticia paddle against the current to collect it while he engaged in the loud and important business of temporarily seducing Frances. The calamity of our situation drew everyone’s attention; the sight of the small, slightly round figure of Vincent entering into a sensual embrace with the spry Frances held it, and his work was done.

To my surprise, as I dried my freezing hands on my trousers and returned the pole to the safety of the punt, I realised I was laughing. Quite when the absurdity of the situation had begun to outweigh my resentment at its circumstances, I couldn’t say, but no matter how hard I tried, I found it almost impossible to maintain a foul mood. Even the cucumber sandwiches, thin, tasteless and forlorn, entertained me for all of the above qualities. I had a worry that Leticia, feeling left out, expected me to do something sensual with her too, and my polite refusals to do so led to a rumour within the campus that I was, in fact, gay and enjoyed Vincent for his body, not his mind.

“Damn me, it’s nice that someone does,” said Vincent when the rumour reached his ears. “It’s a lot of hard work, falling back on intellectual brilliance and emotional intelligence to seduce girls these days.”

Should I have seen the clues?

Should I have spotted what Vincent was?

He was a novelty. He was unusual, ridiculous, brilliant, sombre and absurd. He was innovation in a stodgy town. When the day was done, and our companions had been returned to the stony embraces of their families, unsullied if not uncorrupted, we sat in my rooms, drinking the last of the gin–a nearly empty bottle being far sadder, in Vincent’s mind, than a finished one–and discussed once again the perpetual subject of Vincent’s final-year thesis.

“I don’t know, Harry. None of it seems really… important enough.”

Not important enough? The turning of the stars in the heavens, the breaking of the atoms of existence, the bending of light in our sky, the rolling of electromagnetic waves through our very bodies…

“Yes yes yes.” He flapped his hands. “That’s all important! But ten thousand words of thesis is… well, it’s nothing, is it? And then there’s this assumption that I should focus on one thing alone, as if it’s possible to comprehend the structure of the sun without truly understanding the nature of atomic behaviour!”

Here it was again, the familiar rant.

“We talk about a theory of everything,” he spat, “as if it were a thing which will just be discovered overnight. As if a second Einstein will one day sit up in his bed and exclaim, ‘Mein Gott! Ich habe es gesehen!’ and that’s it, the universe comprehended. I find it offensive, genuinely offensive, to think that the solution is going to be found in numbers, or in atoms, or in great galactic forces–as if our petty academia could truly comprehend on a single side of A4 the structure of the universe. X = Y, we seem to say; one day there will be a theory of everything and then we can stop. We’ll have won–all things will be known. Codswallop.”

“Codswallop?”

“Codswallop and barney,” he agreed firmly, “to paraphrase Dr Johnson.”

Perhaps, I suggested, the fate of the universe could briefly take second place to the thorny issue of graduating with honours?

He blew loudly between his lips, a liquid sound of contempt. “That,” he exclaimed, “is precisely what’s wrong with academics.”

“Good God,” he said. “Fancy seeing you here.”

He was only a few years older since I’d seen him last, those centuries ago, still a fresh-faced young man barely clipping his early thirties. Somehow he’d managed to find a pair of grey suit trousers and well-kept brown leather shoes, polished up bright to wear. An oversized greenish tunic was more in keeping with his Soviet style, and a thin beard of fragile curls was an attempt to enhance his age, and he was Karpenko, and he was Vincent Rankis. He was followed almost immediately by two armed guards, rifles raised. They at once shouted at me to get down, to put my hands above my head, but he silenced them with a gesture.

“It’s all right,” said the man known as Karpenko. “Let me handle this.”

Vincent Rankis, sometime student, as British as they came, his Russian flawless, his eyes full of recollection. The night he’d attacked me in Cambridge, he’d also vanished from his rooms. I’d used every resource in my power to track him down, but every name had led to an empty nothing, every enquiry ended in a failure. Vincent Rankis, I’d been forced to conclude, had, legally speaking, never existed. But then neither had I.

For a moment I couldn’t speak, all the tactics and questions I’d had in mind briefly suspended at the sight of him. He took the opportunity to flash me a brilliant smile, before glancing at the commander and saying, “Comrade, may I have the room?”

The commander looked to me, and through lips turned to sand I mumbled, “Fine by me.”

The commander rose carefully, walked to Vincent and paused, turning his head by the young man’s side to murmur, quietly but audibly, “He has a gun.”

“That’s fine,” replied Vincent. “I’ll handle it.”

With a nod, he dismissed the other soldiers and, moving around the commander’s desk, settled himself down in the large chair with an easy confidence, folding his fingers together in front of his chin, elbow resting on his crossed-over knee.

“Hello, Harry,” he said at last.

“Hello, Vincent.”

“You here about our Daniel van Thiel, I assume?”

“He pointed the way.”

“Self-important little man,” said Vincent. “Had this incredibly annoying habit of telling everyone how brilliant they were, which was of course nothing more than a demand to be informed how brilliant he was himself. I’d hoped he’d help resolve some of the monitoring issues we’ve been having, but in the end I had to let him go. Little wart was bright enough to remember a few technical specifications, though. Should have killed him months ago. And your journey here–via Professor Gulakov? Did you like him?”

“Yes, very much.”

“I’m afraid he’s been sent away for re-education.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. But then this is a very gun-heavy operation you seem to be running. Had to kill many to preserve it?”

He puffed impatiently. “You know how it is, Harry. Can’t risk introducing too much new technology into the course of the linear timeline without being able to control the consequences. Risks drawing attention, rocking the boat–you’re Cronus Club, you must know all about that. Speaking of which…”
he flicked a fingernail casually against the ridge of its neighbour, making a soft
thwap-thwap
noise “… should I be expecting the combined forces of the world’s Clubs to descend on me any second now?”

“The Clubs know my suspicions, if that’s what you’re wondering, and are under orders to pursue the matter if I vanish.”

He groaned, throwing his eyes up to heaven in exasperation. “That’s incredibly tedious, Harry, actually. What people never realise about the Soviet Union is how much bureaucracy there is at the middling level. It’s all very well if you’re the general secretary–people know better than to take notes then–but for anyone further down than Politburo there’s a huge amount of documentation that has to be accounted for whenever shutting down or moving these projects.”

“Doesn’t sound very secure,” I admitted.

“Politics,” he spat. “Everyone is always looking for material to use against everybody else–my point being, Harry, I could really do without the frustration of having to move bases again. Do you think the Club will find you, if you vanish?”

“Maybe,” I replied with a shrug. “Is that the situation we’re looking at here? Am I going to vanish?”

“I don’t know, Harry,” he murmured thoughtfully. “What do you think?”

For the first time our gazes locked, and there was no student there, no young man wanting to go punting on the Cam with a girl called Frances to embarrass a rival, but an old, old man in a young man’s body, staring out from those still-round eyes. I pulled the gun from my coat, laid it quietly in my lap, finger inside the trigger guard. The movement caused his eyes briefly to flicker, before settling back on me.

“Not for me, I trust?”

“Just in case reporting back becomes difficult.”

“Of course–a bullet for your brain. How determined of you. Although…” he shifted gently in his seat, shoulders twitching in what might have been a shrug “… what do you really have to report?”

I sighed. “I don’t suppose it would be too much for you to tell me what’s going on here?”

“Not at all, Harry. Indeed, it is my hope that, once you are aware, you may even join us.” He stood, gesturing courteously towards the door. “Shall we?”