The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (24 page)

The Vienna Cronus Club stood–or rather, had stood–overlooking the Danube on the edge of town, where the waters flood out fat and rolling, their tossing surfaces hinting at the great currents dragging beneath. The city was, by the time I arrived, little more than a pleasure palace for the gently declining aristocracy of what had once been the Austro-Hungarian empire, who would, in very few years, be ruled by Hitler and his proxies, then Stalin and his. But for now they danced and made music, and tried not to consider these things yet to come.

I had come to Vienna for the very simple reason that it was the only Club I had heard of, in all my enquiries, where it seemed an older generation had willingly dissolved the society. In London all trace of the Cronus Club had been wiped away, and I had received no answers as to my enquiries in other cities, but here, in Vienna, there was some hope that, in dissolving the Club, the directors had left a clue in the stones. Something that Vincent may have missed.

I dressed myself as a student of Austrian history and spoke German with a slight Magyar accent, which entertained my hosts no end. I paid my way through a mixture of deception, theft and, that oldest trick for the oldest kalachakra, remarkably accurate
predictions as to what would win at the races. And as I worked, scouring the grounds of the former Club, tearing through the local civic records, I asked myself why had the Forgetting not worked on me?

I could think of only one simple answer–I was a mnemonic like Vincent. But then… did Vincent know as much? The destruction wrought on my kind was a clear indication of how much Vincent knew and how far he was prepared to go with his ambitions, but in my case how much did he truly know? He had a rough idea of my age and possibly my geographical origins, but he couldn’t be sure that my name was my own, nor could he know with any certainty that I remembered a thing. This latter could be a great advantage to me as long as I remained undiscovered. Being caught digging up dirt on the Cronus Club would be highly incriminating and reveal that the Forgetting had failed entirely. While my identity remained hidden, however, I could be the unknown thorn in Vincent’s side.

With this in mind, I lived an endlessly changing series of lives. I stayed in no place for more than a few days, changed my clothes, my language, my voice, on a regular basis. I dyed my hair so often that it quickly became a brittle mousy mess, and grew such an apt forger of documents I was offered a commission in Frankfurt to do a job lot for a criminal mob. I left no traces of myself: no pictures, words, letters, names, documents; I kept my notes entirely in my mind, won only as much money as I absolutely needed from gambling and maintained no close friends. I never wrote to Hulne House, nor told, I think, a single honest truth about myself in all the time that I searched. I was going to be Vincent Rankis’s nemesis, and he was not going to see me coming.

Three months it took me, which felt like two months too long to search. The Cronus Club directors had been careful, burying all traces, but one, a Theodore Himmel, had left a note in his will stipulating that an iron box be buried at the foot of his grave. The note was tiny, a quirky proviso in the documents of a man dead for over thirty years, but it was enough. I sneaked into the cemetery in the dead of night and by the glow of a torch dug down to the
coffin of Theodore Himmel, scraping away until I struck metal.

There was the iron box, black and dented, buried as had been promised in his final will and testament. It had been welded shut, and it took me three hours with a hacksaw to cut my way inside.

In the box was a stone, written on in three languages–German, English and French. The writing was tiny, crammed into every curve of the rock, and the message read

I read it only once, by the light of my torch, and then, as requested, returned it to the bottom of the grave.

I had to find Vincent Rankis.

Infuriatingly, I knew that doing so would not prove easy and, perhaps yet more infuriatingly, that to do so actively in this life would arguably expose me to far greater danger than if I were to do it in the next. If I were caught in this life, it would be proof sufficient that the Forgetting had not worked, and I had little doubt that next time Vincent would not be so sloppy as to let me take rat poison before he had finally extracted my point of origin. Likewise, if I were to pop up on the social radar as too prominent or powerful a figure, it could well lead to questions being asked by linears, as well as kalachakra, as to my origins, and that information was now the most precious I possessed.

With all this in mind, and for the first time in my lives, I became a professional criminal.

My intention, I hasten to add, was not to accumulate wealth as much as contacts. I needed to find those ouroborans who were still alive, still remembering–those who had survived Vincent’s purge–but I clearly could not use the Cronus Club to do so. Likewise, I could not use legal means and risk my enquiries being traced back to me, so I established for myself layers of security to
prevent both police and anyone else who might be looking from stumbling on my true identity. I began as a money launderer, with the advantage that I both knew my way around major banking institutions and had foreknowledge of where would be wise and unwise to invest. The Second World War disrupted crime to a degree, in that it took a lot of the big business away from my clients and reduced whole economies to black market enterprises over which I had very little control, but the years which followed were ripe for exploitation. I was a little disappointed at how easily the techniques came to me, and how ruthless I quickly became. Clients who violated my advice, or who flaunted their riches in a way liable to bring attention to me, I dropped at once. Those who sought my identity too closely, I cut off. Those who listened and obeyed my strict precepts of business I rewarded with heavy returns on investment. Ironically, a lot of the time the front companies I passed the money through were so successful that they began making profits greater than the illicit activities which had funded them, at which point I was usually forced to close them down or disconnect them from the crime, to prevent too much scrutiny from the tax authorities of the countries where they were based. I never conducted my business face to face but sent plausible proxies, as I had done so many years ago when working for Waterbrooke & Smith. I even hired Cyril Handly, my in-pocket actor from a previous life, to conduct a few exchanges for me. He stuck to the script well this time, largely because I kept him away from the drink, until one day in 1949 when, in Marseilles, a gang of dealers suffering from revolutionary pretensions stormed the meeting he was attending, gunned down all who resisted and hanged the survivors from a crane, a warning to their rivals that they were moving on to this turf. The attacked crime syndicate retaliated with blood and fire, which got them nowhere. I lifted every centime of every franc from their bank accounts, grassed up every accountant and every front man who’d ever worked for them, exposed their shell companies to the force of the law and, when it seemed that this was only going to rouse them to greater stupidity, I poisoned their leader’s dog.

A note left around the dog’s neck proclaimed, “
I can reach you in any place, at any time. Tomorrow it will be your daughter, and the day after, your wife
.”

He left the city the next day but posted a tactlessly high bounty on my head before he did, which he could not afford to pay. No assassin ever claimed it. No assassin ever knew where to look.

By 1953 I had informants and contacts across the surface of the globe. I also had a wife–Mei–who I had met in Thailand during one of my flying visits and who wanted a visa to the USA. I gave her this visa and set her up in comfortable middle-class gentility in the suburbs of New Jersey, where she learned English, attended society gatherings, meddled in charities and kept a very polite young lover called Tony, who she loved deeply but would, out of good manners to me, always shoo out of the house before my return. For my few expenditures I received regular meals of an extraordinarily high quality, companionship when required and a philanthropic reputation. Indeed, I had a problem with what to do with the excess money I was receiving, and relied heavily on anonymous donations to charity to remove the compromising wealth from my possession. Mei excelled in this task, visiting the offices of every potential recipient and examining, in the finest detail, records of their words, deeds and actions before permitting the dump. Sometimes the glut of income was so embarrassingly large and Mei’s scrutiny so thoroughly fine that I had to go behind her back and give an anonymous donation to a charity she didn’t approve of, simply to save time. We were never in love, nor ever needed to be. We had what we desired and that was all, and to the day she died she was loyal to both Tony and me, believed my name was Jacob and I was from Pennsylvania. Or if she doubted, she never questioned.

All of this was fine and well, but its ultimate purpose was still hidden even from my wife. As my criminal contacts grew, so my ability to tap into sources of knowledge expanded, and by the 1950s I had policemen, politicians, civil servants, governors and generals either under my thumb or within my grasp. Considering that the information I wanted from them was so minimal, so
simple, they must have been grateful that I was the one doing the pushing. My enquiries came through in the form of data on this or that building, or this or that name, ferreting out in my own side-winding way the fates of the Cronus Clubs across the world and of their members, who had lived, or died, or Forgotten. Sometimes I struck lucky: in 1954 I stumbled quite by chance on Phillip Hopper, the son of the Devon farmer, who in this life had inherited his father’s business and was now, to my mild delight, producing clotted cream in vast quantities from his herd of fat, overbred cows. The fact he was working on his father’s land did not bode well for his memory, as I had never, in all my years, seen Phillip do a stroke of work, but in a spirit of adventure I packed Mei on to a flight to England, bought her a straw hat, took her to see the Tower of London and finally jumped on a train with her to the south-west, where we spent a very pleasant holiday walking the cliffs, looking for fossils and growing really rather tubby on fruit scones. Only on the penultimate day, as if by chance, did Mei and I wander past Phillip Hopper’s farm, climbing over the fence and down to the cottage door to see if we could buy some of his famous clotted cream.

Phillip himself answered the door, and there was no doubt, none at all, even in that first second, that he had lost his memory. It wasn’t simply his circumstances, his accented farmer’s voice or the look of blank ignorance when he saw me, and the flicker of contempt when he heard my fake American accent; it was a deeper absence. A loss of time, experience, knowledge–a loss of all the things that had made this man who he had been. Phillip Hopper, like so many ouroborans, had at some point in his last life been captured by forces unknown and the very essence of who he was wiped from his memory.

He sold us the clotted cream, and I am ashamed to say we had eaten all of it by the time our train got back into London the following morning.

There would be, I concluded, chaos in my next life.

Lying next to Mei in our polite suburban home, paid for by drug smugglers and fraudsters, I would stare at the shadows of leaves swaying across the ceiling and consider questions hundreds of years apart.

Those kalachakra whose memories had been wiped would wake with the same confusion and madness that I myself had experienced in my early lives. Usually, after a Forgetting, Cronus Club members would appear in the second life to shield the terrified child from the worst traumas of that experience and to guide them through that most difficult of times. But to do so now, with Vincent clearly aware of the identities of so many kalachakra, risked an exposure for those of us–however many there were–still with our memories intact. And yet what if we did not? Future generations of the Cronus Club, for hundreds of years, were relying on the twentieth-century members to protect them, to assist them. What would they do without the groundwork we laid?

They would find their way, I concluded, as they had no choice in the matter. The more pressing question lay in the here and
now–what would
I
do, one of the privileged few who still recalled the nature of my own being, when in the next life the asylums of this world began to fill with men and women whose minds had been ripped apart by Vincent?

I needed to find a Cronus Club which had not been touched by Vincent Rankis’s purge, even one would be enough, whose members still knew who they were.

By 1958 it was apparent that the only Club I was likely to find which would fit this description was in Beijing.

It was not a good year to visit Beijing. The Hundred Flowers Campaign had been briskly and effectively terminated when the communist government of China realised that granting cultural freedom was not the same as winning cultural praise; now the Great Leap Forward was commencing, in which the people of the nation would be fired up to advance China, sacrificing tools and metal, time and energy, lives and strength for the good of the nation. Anywhere between eighteen and thirty million people would die of the starvation which ensued. Getting in as a Westerner was almost impossible, but I had enough criminal contacts in Russia to acquire a cover as a Soviet academic sent to Beijing to share knowledge of industrial techniques and expand my knowledge of Mandarin.

Speaking Mandarin with a Russian accent is extremely difficult. Of all the languages I have learned, Mandarin took me the longest, and having to replicate the suitable tones while simultaneously presenting myself as a rather bumbling Soviet scholar was an exercise that caused me considerable distress. In the end I chose to emphasise my Russian accent over any great accuracy in language, producing endless sly smiles from my hosts and the nickname of Professor Sing-Song, which fairly quickly became the name by which all knew me anyway.

Even though I was, technically, an ally from a friendly nation, my movements in Beijing were heavily restricted. It was a city going through tumultuous change but, with the state of the country being what it was, that change was hideously piecemeal.
Whole districts of old Qing housing had been knocked down in a go, though no resources existed to replace the lost abodes. Great skyscrapers had been begun but then could not be completed, so a roof was slotted on some four floors up as if to say “This was our plan all along.” Posters were everywhere, and the propaganda was some of the most colourful and, to my sensibilities at least, the most naïve I had ever seen. Ranging from the traditional staples of communist rule–images of happy families striving together against a red sky in a well-tended field–through to more unusual campaigns, such as suggestions that keeping potted plants would encourage clean living, or exhortations to mind your personal hygiene for the good of the nation, they reminded me of a sort of school art project plastered across the city. Nevertheless, the fervour behind much of the propaganda could not be denied, at least among our louder hosts, who spouted the rhetoric of the time with the passion of priests and who would, in a few years yet to come, probably believe the Cultural Revolution to be the greatest time of their lives. It was a reminder of the old truth that for tyranny to flourish all it required was the complicity of good men. In China at that time how many millions of good men, I wondered, were silently watching while this louder, snappier minority of believers marched and sang their way towards famine and destruction?

By day I taught classes of hard-faced earnest young technocrats everything I could remember about Russian industrial dogma of the time. I even drew up entirely fictitious graphs and charts, discussed non-existent steelworks and ways of motivating the workers, and took questions at the end of every session such as,

“Professor Sing-Song, sir, is it not encouraging ideological weakness to offer rewards to supervisors for increasing factory output? Should not the supervisor always remain equal to all his workers?”

To which the answer was, “The supervisor is a servant of his workers, for they are the producers and he is not. However, there must be a clear leadership figure in every organisation, otherwise
we have no means of gathering information on its success or failure, nor can we rely on universal policies being implemented at the lowest level. In the matter of rewarding the supervisor for success, we find that if you do not, the motivation of the supervisor and the workers declines, and they may not struggle as hard in the following year.”

“But sir! Would not a campaign of indoctrination in correct thinking be the appropriate response to this?”

I smiled and nodded and spoke utter, empty, vapid lies.

I had, very specifically, requested that my time in Beijing be limited to three months. I did not think I could sustain my deception any longer than that and wished to have an effective extraction route available should my cover ever be blown. I had also established links with the triads in Hong Kong, and, at my request and to their great trepidation, they had sent a team of five men north, ready to assist me at any given moment. Neither the men nor the triad appreciated that it would be I myself in Beijing using their resources, but rather assumed, as always, that I was operating through a proxy. The first time I met them, I was alarmed to see how poorly their clothes blended with their surroundings, for they still carried hints of Hong Kong bling about them–new shoes and clean trousers, soft skin, and, to my horror, one even smelled of expensive aftershave. I berated them in a mixture of Russian and Mandarin, and was slightly comforted to discover that their Mandarin was excellent, albeit with strong Hunan accents. As I worked, they went in search of the Cronus Club, spreading out through the criminal underworld of Beijing one cautious whisper at a time, for the government was nothing if not savage to criminals it caught.

The Beijing Cronus Club.

I had been reluctant to try it even at the beginning of my mission, for in the twentieth century it had a rather dubious reputation among the Clubs of the world. For so much of its existence Beijing is a stable, pleasant, reliable Club–something of a tourist destination, indeed, for if you can make the journey to its
door it offers a degree of stability and luxury unrivalled by most other Clubs until well into the 1890s. However, from 1910 the Club increasingly shuts down, becoming much as the Leningrad Club was in 1950–a shadow Club, a place to support its youth but little more. By the 1960s the Beijing Club is a bare whisper on the air, and several times, despite the best precautions of its members, it has fallen victim to the Cultural Revolution. In Soviet Russia, that kind of attack on luxury and intellectualism may be bribed or blackmailed into submission, but during the madness of those months not even the kalachakra can accurately predict the outcome of events.

The Club has also suffered other problems in the twentieth century, a large number of which are ideological. Its members have always been very proud of China, of their nation, and for several lives most will fight on this or that side during the prolonged civil war. However, eventually the more pragmatic members will come to realise that nothing they do will alter the course of events, and several leave, bitter and disappointed at the fate that awaits their country. Those who stay, and there are many indeed, are often caught up in a battle between national pride, an awareness of the bigger picture which many of their linear contemporaries lack, and the same ideological fervour which has so often destroyed the Club itself. When all you can see day in and day out are banners proclaiming the glory of communism, and your whole intellectual world is defined by this great rallying cry, against which you have no tool or defence, then, like a prisoner in a jail cell, those walls become your life. So it can be with the Beijing Cronus Club, and its members–fiery, passionate, angry, bitter, incensed, committed, rejected–carry a dubious reputation in the twentieth century. I am told that in the twenty-first the Club’s nature changes again, and it becomes more of a place for luxury and security, as it had been before, but I have never known those days.

Finding the Beijing Club at the best of times is tricky.

These were quite possibly the worst of all times to even consider looking, but to look I had no choice.

It took two months, and I was already beginning to struggle under the pressure of colleagues at the university whispering that Professor Sing-Song was not doctrinally correct. The doctrine I spouted was, in fact, absolutely correct for the times we lived in, but I had underestimated how quickly the times changed and, vitally, how much more important the interpretations of rivals were than the truth of what you said. I calculated I only had a few weeks until I was deported, and deportation would be the soft option.

When the message came through, it wasn’t a moment too late. It took the form of a small folded slip of paper under my door, written in Russian. It read, “
Have met a friend. Drop by for tea, 6 p.m. beneath the lantern?
”

“Beneath the lantern” was established code for a small teahouse, one of the very few teahouses still left in Beijing, which had been kept open largely for the benefit of the party elite and visiting scholars such as myself, to enjoy the service of attentive young women who could be extra-attentive for only a little more incentive. The madam of the teahouse wore a plain white robe at all times, but her hair was done up in a great crown of metal sticks and jewels, and I had never seen the smile falter, even for a second, on her wide round face. To show the teahouse’s commitment to the Great Leap Forward, all the low metal chairs on which guests had previously been sat had been contributed to industry, and now guests sat on red pillows on the floor. The move had been met with great praise from the party secretaries who drank there, and eventually a gift of twenty lacquered wooden seats from one secretary in particular, who found his knees could no longer handle sitting cross-legged.

I met my informant, one of the triad boys, on the corner of the tight alley where the teahouse resided. It was raining, the hard northern rain that blows in from Manchuria and makes the tiles of the curving roofs clatter with every heavy drop. He began to walk as I approached, and I fell in some fifty yards behind him, checking the streets as we moved through them for informers, eavesdroppers, surveillance. After ten minutes of this he slowed his
pace for me to catch up, and we walked while talking beneath his umbrella, as the streets of the city bounced and sparkled with rushing water.

“I’ve found a soldier who’ll take you to the Cronus Club,” he whispered. “He says it must be only you.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I checked him out. He’s not with the PLA, even though he wears the uniform. He says to tell you that this is his seventh life. He said you would know what that means.”

I nodded. “Where do I meet him?”

“Tonight, Beihei, 2 a.m.”

“If I don’t contact you in twelve hours,” I replied, “you’re to pull out of the city.”

He nodded briskly. “Good luck,” he hissed and, with a single shake of my hand, slipped back into the darkness.

Beihei Park. In spring you can barely move for the throngs of people come to enjoy the fresh flowers and leaves on the trees. In summer the surface of the lake thickens with water lilies, and in winter the white stupa is disguised behind the frost in the trees.

At 2 a.m. in 1958 it is a good place to get into trouble.

I waited by the westernmost entrance to the park and monitored the progress of the rain as it seeped through my socks. I regretted that I had not seen Beihei in happier times and resolved that, should I live to the early 1990s, I would come back here as a tourist and do the things that tourists do, perhaps choosing an affably harmless passport to travel on, such as Norwegian or Danish. Surely even the most vehement of ideologues couldn’t find anything wrong with Norway?

A car came up the empty street towards me, and of course the car was for me. There were few enough cars on the streets of Beijing, and I felt no great surprise when it came to a stop directly in front of me, the door was pushed open, and a voice called out in clear, crisp Russian, “Please get in.”

I got in.

The interior of the car stank of cheap cigarettes. There was a
driver in front, and another man in the passenger seat, a military cap pulled down across his forehead. I turned to the third man, who’d pushed open the rear door for me to get in. He was small, silver-haired, dressed in a neat grey tunic and trousers. He had a gun in one hand, and a sack, also smelling of cigarette smoke, in the other. “Please forgive this,” he said as he pulled the sack over my head.

An uncomfortable journey.

The roads weren’t much to speak of, and the car’s suspension had been welded in by a stonemason resentful of his change in career. Whenever we neared a crowded area, I was politely asked to put my head down beneath the front seats, an action which required considerable shuffling of knees as the front seats were a bare breath away to begin with. I sensed the move into countryside by the swelling of the engine as we reached open roads, and was politely informed I could sit up and relax but, please, not to remove the bag from my head.