The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (25 page)

As we travelled, the radio played recordings of traditional music and selected highlights from Mao’s greatest speeches. My companions, if I can call them that, were silent. I didn’t know how long the drive took, but by the time we came to a stop I could hear the first trillings of the dawn chorus. There were leaves rustling against each other in the damp morning breeze and thick mud underfoot as I was guided, still blindly, out of the car. A step up to a wooden porch, the
swish
of a door sliding sideways, and just on the inside of the porch the same polite voice of the man with the gun asking if I minded them removing my shoes. I did not. I was patted down briskly, professionally, and led through to another room by the arm. The room smelled ever so slightly of smoked fish, and as I was guided awkwardly into a low wooden chair, a source of warmth off to my right, another odour–green tea–was added to the medley.

The bag was removed, at last, from my head, and looking around I found myself in a square rush-floored room of eminently traditional design. There were no ornaments save for a low wooden
table and two chairs, one of which I sat in, but a great window looked out in front of me on to a small green pond, over whose surface the morning insects were beginning to flick with the approach of dawn. A woman came in, a pot of tea balanced expertly on a tray, and carefully laying out two china cups, she poured me some of the brew. The other cup was filled and set opposite me, though there was as yet no one to drink it. I smiled, thanked her and drank my cup down whole.

Waiting.

I waited, I estimate, fifteen minutes, alone with the pot of green tea and a cooling cup.

Then the sliding door at my back moved again, and another woman entered. She was young, barely more than fifteen years old, wearing flat sandals of woven reed, blue trousers, a quilted jacket and a single lilac flower in her hair. She folded herself neatly into the chair opposite me with the merest smile of acknowledgment, took her cup of green tea, rolled it beneath her nose once, to take in the by-now cold odour, then sipped it carefully.

She eyed me, I eyed her a while. At last she said, “I am Yoong, and I have been sent here to determine whether or not to kill you.” I raised my eyebrows and waited for the rest. She laid her cup carefully back down on the tray, fingers straightening as she adjusted the little vessel to place it in perfect alignment with the pot and my own empty cup. Then, folding her hands in her lap, she went on, “The Cronus Club has been attacked. Members have been kidnapped, their memories erased. Two have been terminated before they are born, and we are still mourning their departing. We have always lived discreetly, but now we feel that we are under threat. How do we know that you are not a threat to us?”

“How do I know that you are not a threat to me?” I replied. “I too have been attacked. I too was nearly destroyed. Whoever is behind this must have had access to and knowledge of the Club. This is an attack hundreds of years in the making, maybe thousands. My concerns are as valid as yours.”

“Be that as it may, you sought us. We did not look for you.”

“I came looking for the only Cronus Club which I know of as still being remotely intact. I came to pool resources, to determine if you had any information more than I currently possess which could help me track down the one behind all this.”

She was silent.

Irritation flared up in some pit of my soul. I had been patient–thirty-nine years of patience, no less–and was taking a considerable risk by even showing myself to these people. “I understand,” I went on, trying to keep the rising frustration out of my voice, “that you are suspicious of me, but the simple truth is, if I were your enemy, I would not be placing myself so absolutely in your power. I have gone to great lengths to hide my identity, it is true, but this is only to hide my point of origin and physical location from whoever is attempting to destroy us. I can give you some intelligence as to who our mutual enemy might be; I hope you believe it is in your interests to share any information you may have as well.”

She was silent a good long while, but by now my irritation was nearly on par with my self-control, and I felt that to say anything more would probably be to lose any restraint I had left. Abruptly she stood up, gave a little half bow and said, “If you would wait here, I will consider this matter further.”

“My cover is a Russian academic,” I replied. “If I am to be detained indefinitely, I hope you will supply means of extraction, should the need arise.”

“Of course,” she replied. “We would not wish to inconvenience you unnecessarily.”

So saying, she left as abruptly as she had arrived.

A few seconds later the smiling man with the gun came back into the room. “Did you enjoy the tea?” he asked, pulling the sack back over my head and guiding me to my feet. “It’s all in the simmering, you know!”

They deposited me back where they’d found me, outside Beihei Park. I had half an hour to get to a class, and ran wildly through the streets, making it two minutes late to the classroom. My
students, far from reproaching me for my tardiness, chuckled, and I gave a breathless lecture on agrarian collectivisation and the benefits of chemical fertilisers before dismissing them three minutes early and running even faster than I’d run from the park for the nearest toilet. No one ever considers the question of bladder when dealing with matters of subterfuge.

For four days I waited.

They were four infuriating days during which I knew perfectly well that my alibi was being checked and every aspect of my cover story examined by the Beijing Cronus Club. I was confident that they would find nothing. I had put enough safeguards between Professor Sing-Song and myself to necessitate a lifetime of investigation. On the fifth day, as I was walking out of the university and heading for my hall, a voice said from the shadow of a door, “Professor?”

I turned.

The teenage girl I had met in the house by the pond stood there, wearing khaki and carrying a satchel over one shoulder. She looked even more a child than before, dressed in her baggy-panted uniform. “May I speak with you, Professor?” she enquired. I nodded, gesturing towards the street.

“Let me get my bicycle,” I said.

We walked together sedately back through the city streets, my foreign skin and undeniably quirky nose attracting all the usual stares, only enhanced by the presence of the girl by my side. “I have to congratulate you,” she murmured as we walked, “on the thoroughness of your preparations. Every document and contact indicates that you are who you claim to be, a great achievement considering that you are not.”

I shrugged, eyes scanning the street, looking for anyone who took too great an interest in our discussion. “I’ve had a while to get this sort of thing right.”

“Perhaps it was your skill with subterfuge which saved you from being targeted?” she mused. “Perhaps that was how you escaped the Forgetting?”

“I was dead by Watergate,” I replied. “I suspect that played a bigger part.”

“Indeed. There was no indication of anything amiss until 1965. That was the year Club members began to disappear. At first we thought they were simply being assassinated, their bodies buried in unmarked graves–such things have occurred before, when linear authorities take too much interest in us–and will occur again, I think. But our own deaths and returns to life showed a far more sinister trend. Those who were kidnapped and killed had their memories destroyed first, which is a form of death that the Club cannot tolerate or accept. Here in Beijing we have lost eleven members to the Forgetting, two to pre-birth death.”

“From what I’ve gathered from the other Clubs,” I replied softly, “that seems a fairly average pattern.”

“There are more patterns,” she added with a stiff nod. “No one killed pre-birth was prior to 1896. This implies that their murderer is too young to act before that time. Assuming consciousness and faculties are obtained between four and five years old—”

“That puts our murderer’s birth at approximately 1890, yes,” I murmured.

Another strict nod of agreement as we rounded a corner. Students bustled against us, scurrying by to classes. Several groups marched together, carrying giant banners proclaiming
STUDENTS UNITE FOR THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD!
and other such tokens of impending calamity.

“The pre-birth killings appear to be targeted against older members of the Club,” she went on. “It would appear the intention is to remove the most active members of our kind who might be in a position to interfere at the start of the twentieth century. Naturally their removal has an impact on the future generations of the century, who are more grievously affected by their loss than if, for example, you or I were removed.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” I joked, and she did not even flicker a smile.

“In 1931 there is a brief acceleration in the pre-birth murder rate. Where, before, the worldwide average for Club losses was six
a year, concentrated mainly in Europe and America, in 1931 there is a spike to ten losses a year, including three in Africa and two in Asia.”

“The murderer reaching maturity,” I suggested. “Growing more active?” Yet even as the words passed my lips, I discarded them for the more obvious, more simple possibility. “Another kalachakra, one born later, is joining the killings.” I sighed. And of course I knew who.

“This seems most likely,” she confirmed. “The year in which the killings spike suggests a birthday around 1925.”

Yes, I could well believe Vincent was born in that year. “What about the Forgettings?” I asked. “Is there any pattern there?”

“They began in 1953, starting with the Leningrad Cronus Club. At first we assumed the Club had suffered some great political damage through the actions of the linears, but in 1966 both Moscow and Kiev were hit, with 80 per cent of the members of those Clubs kidnapped, their memories erased, and the bodies destroyed.”

“Eighty per cent?” I couldn’t keep the astonishment out of my voice. “That high?”

“Clearly the perpetrator has been monitoring the Club’s activities for a long time, taking note of its members. By 1967 most Clubs in Europe had been hit, as well as five in America, seven in Asia and three in Africa. Those members who had evaded attack were sent underground and all Club houses ordered closed until 2070, by which date it was assumed our attacker would be deceased. Messages were left in stone for future generations warning them of the danger. So far we’ve received no whisper reply.”

As the girl talked, my mind raced. I had known the situation was bad, known that Vincent had spread himself far and wide, but this? This was on a scale I hadn’t even considered possible.

“By 1973 the attacks on our kind were slowing, thanks to the methods employed for our own protection, but those survivors who were not exemplary in their security still risked exposure and the Forgetting. In 1975 a final bulletin was issued from the Beijing
Cronus Club, urging all surviving members to take their own lives at once, to evade any pursuers in this life. Regrettably–” a twitch in the corner of her mouth that might have been sorrow “–we did not predict that after the mass Forgettings inflicted upon us our enemy would then seek to destroy so many pre-birth. We believed our attacker to be a linear agency, perhaps a government apprised of our existence. We did not realise that the perpetrator could be one of our own. The loss has been extraordinary. We tried to find out who was attacking us, who was bringing us down, but this… crime… was planned, organised and executed with a stark brutality that left us reeling. We had grown complacent, I believe. We had grown lazy. We will not be caught so off guard again.”

For a while we walked in silence. I was still too stunned to speak. How much had I missed, courtesy of my early death? And to what extent, I wondered, had Vincent’s all-out attack on the Cronus Clubs been a consequence of my actions, of my refusing to cooperate and threatening to expose him once and for all? Clearly the attack had been planned for a long while, but was I not partially responsible for bringing it to a head?

“The pre-birth murders,” I said at last. “If they’ve been going on since 1896 of this life, that gives you over fifty years to investigate them. Do you have any leads?”

“It’s been difficult,” she conceded, “our resources limited. Those who died–we did not know their points of origin and can only conclude that they have been murdered by the simple fact that they have not been born. However, we have made some progress and narrowed our list of suspects down. In its way–” a wry smile now, as humourless as a tomb “–the loss of life among our people makes it easier to predict who might be our villain. By focusing on a specific time, a specific place, there are only so many candidates for this deed.”

“Do you have names?” I asked.

“We do, but before I tell you all, I must ask you, Professor, what it is you intend to offer me.”

For a moment I nearly told her all.

Vincent Rankis, the quantum mirror, all our research together.

But no. Too much danger, for where could knowledge of this have come if not from me?

“How about a vast organised criminal network that spans the globe,” I said, “capable of finding anyone, anywhere, and buying anything, at any price. Will that do?”

She considered.

It would do.

She gave me a name.

I met Akinleye several times after her Forgetting. Once, in the life that immediately followed, I went to the school where she was studying, shook her hand and asked her how she was doing. She was a bright teenage girl, full of prospects. She was going to move to the city, she said, and become a secretary. It was the greatest ambition a young girl could have, a towering pinnacle of hope, and I wished her luck with it.

In the life after that I visited her again, this time when she was a child of seven. She’d come to the attention of the Accra Cronus Club–who in any case were keeping an eye out in that general area–as a child her parents called mad. They’d tried everything, from the shrieks of witch doctors to the chanting of imams, and still, they cried, Akinleye, their beautiful daughter, was mad. Already, the Accra Club proclaimed, Akinleye was a suicide threat.

I went to visit her before that could happen and found she had been given over to the care of a doctor who kept his patients shackled to their beds. Epileptics, schizophrenics, mothers who’d seen their children die, men with limbs hacked off, driven mad by infection and sadness, children in the last throes of cerebral malaria, their bodies twitching, were all kept together in the same ward, to
be treated with one spoonful of syrup and one spoonful of lemon juice every half-hour. My fury at the doctor was so great that, on leaving the place, I requested the Accra Club to have it torn down.

“It’s like this all over the country, Harry,” they complained. “It’s just the times!”

I wouldn’t take no for an answer, and so, reluctantly, and to get rid of me, they had the building knocked down and a neat, square hospital put up in its place, where one fully trained psychiatrist cared for thirty patients, whose numbers swelled to nearly four hundred in the first three months.

Akinleye, undersized and underfed, stared at me wildly when I came to visit.

“Help me,” she sobbed. “God help me, I am possessed by a demon!”

A seven-year-old girl, rocking in despair, possessed by a demon.

“You’re not, Akinleye,” I replied. “You are whole; you are yourself.”

I took her with me back to Accra that very night, to the Cronus Club, whose members greeted her as the old friend she was and gave her the greatest meal of her lives so far, and showed her luxury, and told her she was sane and well, and welcome among them.

Many years later I met Akinleye in a clinic in Sierra Leone. She was tall and beautiful, trained as a doctor and wearing a bright purple headscarf in her hair. She recognised me from our meeting in Accra and asked me to join her on the terrace for lemonade and memories.

“They tell me that I chose to forget my life before,” she explained as we sat and watched the sun set over the shrieking forest. “They tell me that I had grown tired of who I was. It is odd knowing all these people have known me for hundreds of years, yet they are still strangers. But I tell myself it is not me they have known–it is the last me, the old me, the me that I have forgotten. Did you know that me, Harry?”

“Yes,” I replied. “I did.”

“Were we… close?”

I thought about it. “No,” I replied at last. “Not really.”

“But… from your perspective, knowing me as you did, do you think I–she–made the right decision? Was she right to choose to forget?”

I looked over at her, young and bright and full of hope, and recalled the old Akinleye dying alone, laughing as a maid danced out into the waters off the bay of Hong Kong. “Yes,” I said at last. “I think you were.”