The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (32 page)

There is a ritual I undertake in nearly every life. It is the assassination of Richard Lisle.

Every life since the first murder I have either dispatched him directly or sent others to do it for me, before he can begin his murdering of the women of Battersea, and every life Rosemary Dawsett and the rest of the girls live a little while longer, not even knowing that their would-be killer is dead. Except for one life, when I didn’t send a killer and couldn’t make the appointment myself, and Rosemary Dawsett died, her body sliced up in the bathtub. I am now so used to killing Richard Lisle it has acquired a rather ritualistic quality. I no longer bother with any fancy preparations, no words or hesitation. I merely go to his flat one day, settle down in a seat away from the window, wait for him to walk through the door and put two through his brain. I have never felt that anything more is required.

I wonder now if Vincent’s attitude towards me was not entirely dissimilar to my regard for Lisle. Posing no threat, there was no need for him to return to me, but yet return he did, like a fond owner checking up on his favourite pet. As I kept Lisle perpetually in my sights, so he seemed to want to keep me close across the
lives. Perhaps he considered my personality of such iron stuff that it might one day return to be a danger to him; perhaps he feared I could regain my memory; perhaps I was a victory prize, a trophy, proof of his success. Perhaps he simply wanted a friend whose very nature he could mould, life to life, to his needs. And how cooperative I had been, how helpful and malleable, from the very first to the very last. Perhaps it was all of these things, in ever-changing measure.

Whatever his motives, keep me close Vincent did. By 1943 he was a captain, and I was surprised to receive a transfer to his very specialist unit of what my major termed “boffins, bookworms and other oily chaps”. On arriving, I was less surprised to discover that Vincent Rankis had established himself as the go-to man for scientific know-how and expertise.

“Why me?” I asked as he sat me down in his office. “Why did you request I join your unit? I’m a lawyer; I don’t know anything about this science stuff.”

“Lieutenant,” he replied, for I was still a humble subaltern, “you do yourself a disservice. When I met you in Scotland, you seemed one of the most capable men I’ve ever met, and if this army needs anything, it needs capable men.”

Indeed, I was of some use to the unit, for all its great scientific minds were clearly far too great to be bothered with such trivial details as whether there were enough blankets in the barracks, supplies for the canteen and petrol coupons to get them to their meetings and back.

“See, Harry!” exclaimed Vincent in our once-monthly administrative round-up of business. “I told you you’d fit right in here!”

And so, while my old unit fought and died in the forests of France, I played secretary once again to Vincent Rankis and his rapidly growing private empire of brilliant minds. It was clear–politely yet obviously clear–that Vincent was already very rich, though the source of his wealth was not known among the men. However, as my role as administrative assistant grew, so did my access to information, including, eventually, the details of the
account into which Vincent’s pay was regularly deposited. Armed with this, and an immaculate forgery of Vincent’s signature, it was a simple enough matter to head down to the bank and request a complete history of Vincent’s transactions–for the tax men, you know how it is. I was lucky. In my last life my exhaustive research into Vincent’s finances had revealed only a tangled web of offshore accounts and intricate security procedures which had sent even the finest forensic accountants wheeling off around the world as they traced this piece of income to a sauna in Bangkok, or that to an Indian restaurant in Paris, or thought perhaps they’d found something in a line of credit which ended in the grocery department of Harrods.

This time, with Vincent barely nineteen years old (but doing a passable impression of twenty-five), he hadn’t had either the time or the opportunity to spread his finances far and wide, and a few bank details were enough for me to trace his finances back to the 1920s themselves. I had to fight to keep both my excitement and my activities secret. Living in such close proximity to Vincent, I knew I dared not keep any physical record of my activity in the base so spent my time on leave in a small bed and breakfast in Hastings, poring over every line by light turned down low against the blackout curtain, before burning every document I’d found and washing the ashes away. The pattern of his behaviour was in many ways predictable. Whenever he fell short, he gambled, and like all good kalachakra knew the victors of certain key races and bet heavily enough to ensure a good return but widely enough to raise no questions in any one particular location as to how this boy could do so well. However, one detail did catch my eye: during the earliest years in which I could trace his movements, they seemed focused around the south-west of London, and leaving aside the supplementary income provided by the races, he appeared to receive a regular income of sixteen pounds a month up to the start of the war. While there were plenty of innocent explanations for this, I could not help but suspect, could not but begin to believe, that what I was seeing was an allowance from a relative. Perhaps a very close relative indeed.

It wasn’t much, but it was a place to start looking, quietly–so quietly.

When VE Day came, I, in my capacity as the only one in Vincent’s unit capable of organising a piss-up in a brewery, did exactly that, perhaps as a petty reminder to my peers that, for all they were brilliant, bright, intelligent and quite possibly the future of scientific development, they were nevertheless incapable of running their own day-to-day lives without having someone to organise it for them. Two weeks later Vincent stuck his head round the door of my office. “Harry,” he exclaimed, “I’m off out to meet a bird. Could you pop these in the post?”

A great fistful of envelopes was given to me. I glanced at the addresses briefly: MIT, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne. “No problem, sir.”

“For God’s sake, Harry, surely we can stop using ‘sir’ now?”

When he was gone, I steamed open one of the letters. Inside, written on thick yellow paper with no watermark, was a very detailed, very well drawn diagram illustrating the uses, functionality and specifications of a microwave magnetron.

I thought long and hard that night about what to do with these documents. They were dangerous, deadly and postal distribution was precisely the same method as Vincent had deployed in his last life for kick-starting technological growth across the globe, only this time–
this
time he wasn’t limiting himself to ideas from twenty or thirty years in the future; within those envelopes were ideas that wouldn’t be expounded for at least sixty years.

In the end, I went to Charity for advice.

We met in Sheringham, a small town on the north Norfolk coast, where the fish was always fresh and you half imagined the catch had been blasted in across the shingle by the sheer force of the waves which pounded its shore–a salt-sprayed thundering that chafed the lips, dried the eyes and crystallised every hair within a few minutes of exposure to its roar. She was getting old, my ally, and would soon be looking at death. I was on the verge of being discharged from the army, still stuck in my uniform for a few more
days, holding tightly on to my hat between my gloved fists as the wind howled in from a thick grey sky.

“Well?” she demanded, as we strode first one way, then the other, along the few yards of beach that weren’t foaming white. “What do you have for me now?”

“Letters,” I replied. “He’s sending out letters again, to all the universities and engineering institutions of the world. Not just America this time–Europe, Russia, China–anywhere with resources and good minds. There’s diagrams for Scud missiles, illustrations of wave-particle duality, analysis of heat-resistant orbital shields, analysis of weight-to-thrust ratios for orbital escape…”

She waved me to silence with one white-gloved hand. “I think I see the problem, Harry.”

“He’s told me to post them.”

“Are you going to?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I wanted to see you.”

“I’m flattered that you value my opinion so highly.” She was waiting for me to talk it through, work it out for myself, so I did.

“If I post these, history will change again. Faster than ever before. I can’t predict it, don’t know what will happen, but these letters will revolutionise science, cut out forty to fifty years of technological development. The Clubs of the future—”

“The Cronus Club is already in turmoil, Harry. Last time Vincent did this, history itself was changed. Do not delude yourself into thinking it will be turned back by a few lifetimes.”

“If I don’t post them, my cover with Vincent will be blown. He’ll realise that I can remember everything, and we’ll be no closer to his point of origin.”

“I still say we should just slice his ears off. It worked in the old days.”

“He won’t talk.”

“You seem so sure of that, Harry.”

“I didn’t, did I?”

She pursed her lips, turned her head away from another great blast of spray across the shore. “I cannot make this choice for you.
If you don’t post the letters, then we’ll have no choice but to pick Vincent up at once and attempt to interrogate the truth out of him. If you do post the letters, then, for this life at least, the world will once again dissolve into chaos. Order will crumble, the natural course of things will decline, and mankind will not be the same again. But…”

“But I will still have my position with Vincent, and still have a chance at tricking him into trusting me with his secrets.”

“Quite. I do not know this man. I have never met him, nor can I risk meeting him in case he knows who and what I am. I have no doubt that he’s already perfecting the technology for the Forgetting, just in case he should encounter more members of the Cronus Club. The choice is yours, Harry. Only you can judge the best way to end this.”

“You’ve been a great help,” I grumbled.

She shrugged. “This is your crusade, Harry, not mine. Do what you think fit. The Cronus Club… we can no longer judge. We have had our chance.”

The following morning I posted the letters and caught the first train out of town before I had a chance to change my mind.

After the war Vincent once again established himself as an all-purpose “investor”. He didn’t have any particular company to front for this, but trotted around the globe as an extremely wealthy enthusiast, picking up bits here and there of whatever it was that seemed to interest him. And I was his personal private secretary.

“I want to keep you close, Harry,” he explained. “You’re just so good for me.”

As his secretary, I had access to information far beyond anything I’d possessed in my last life. Documents he didn’t even know existed were continually fed to me from banks, universities, CEOs, charities looking for investment, governments and brokers, and Vincent, in an omission which I can only class as a fatal mistake, didn’t even bother to check on them. He was used to me: I was his pet, utterly reliable, utterly dependent, utterly harmless. I was subservient, grateful that he was paying me so much to do so little, excited by the people I met, and, if asked my job title, would reply proudly that I was not a secretary at all, but rather a corporate executive working for Mr Rankis, a fix-it man travelling across the globe with him, living the high life, following in his voluminous coat tails. He treated me very well, both as an employee and as a
friend, once again buying my affection through the usual pattern of free dinners–holidays–golf–and gods how I loathed golf–and the regular trips he paid for us to take to his favourite club in the Caribbean. These were all part of my corruption, and so I went along with it to show willing. I like to tell myself I could have been a good golfer, if only I’d given a damn, but perhaps the simple truth is that there are some skills which experience cannot buy.

We shared stories of the war, friends, acquaintances, drinks; slept in the same compartment on overnight trains; sat side by side on the planes across the Atlantic; swapped seats as we drove from meeting to meeting up and down first the east, then the west coast of America. We stood together above Niagara Falls, one of the few sights on this planet which, no matter how perfectly I recall it, never fails to take my breath away, and when working together on business trips, our hotel rooms were adjoining, a connecting door between so we could share a midnight drink when inspiration struck. Many people assumed we were lovers, and I considered what I would do if Vincent proposed the same. Having been through so much, the prospect of sleeping with him was nothing to me at all, and I would have done it without a second thought. The question that remained over the matter was whether I could justify it based on the persona I was currently wearing of Harry August, nice boy from Leeds, raised in an age when homosexuality wasn’t merely illegal, it was entirely taboo. If the matter came up, I resolved to have a good, public, old-fashioned crisis of religious faith about it, and if the question still remained, I would succumb only after a great deal of guilt and quite possibly an unhappy love affair. There was no point making things too easy for him. Thankfully, the issue never arose, though everyone, including myself, seemed to be waiting for the moment. Vincent’s attitude to love, it appeared, was, as he himself had stated, strictly therapeutic. Destructive passion was foolish; irrational desire was a waste of time, and his mind was always on higher things.

The first whiff of the higher things his mind was on came in 1948 when, as was so often the way, Vincent walked into the small
room that served as my London office, slumped down into the chair on the other side of the desk, stuck his feet on the tabletop between my heavy in-tray and my impressive collection of coloured inks, and said, “I’m going to inspect something the boffins are working on tomorrow–want to come?”

I laid down the document I’d been working on and steepled my fingers carefully. Usually, business trips with Vincent ended in a severe hangover, a large cheque and an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, but this time the vagueness and lightness with which he described his intentions intrigued me. “Where is this project?”

“Switzerland.”

“You’re going to Switzerland tomorrow?”

“This afternoon, actually,” he replied. “I’m sure I sent you a memo.”

“You haven’t sent me a memo for two years,” I pointed out mildly. “You just do things and wait for me to catch up.”

“And hasn’t it worked brilliantly?” he demanded. “Isn’t it marvellous?”

“What’s in Switzerland?”

“Oh, something they’re working on with heavy water and particles and that stuff. You know I don’t bother with these kinds of things.”

Absolutely I knew he didn’t bother with these kinds of things–he’d gone to great lengths to make it clear how little he bothered with these kinds of things, but now I was utterly fascinated for, as the person who planned nearly every aspect of Vincent’s life from morning to night, Switzerland presented a tantalising glimpse of that Holy Grail–a secret that had been kept from me. I’d spotted holes in Vincent’s schedules, many weeks set aside as “holiday” or “family business” or “wedding”–and how many weddings there’d been–but as I was never required to make travel arrangements for these events I had never known the full details. Now, I wondered, was it Switzerland, with its heavy water and particles and that stuff? Was this the black hole into which so much of Vincent’s money had been quietly diverted when he thought I wasn’t looking?

“I don’t think I want to go to Switzerland this afternoon.”

I was so good at lying I barely even had to hear the words I spoke out loud. So good at deceiving and being deceived, I knew already what Vincent’s reply would be.

“Come on, Harry. I know you’re not doing anything.”

“I may have plans with a beautiful young lady interested in my tales of high finance and dirty bars.”

“Philosophically speaking, you may. You may have all sorts of options, you may have herpes, but the fact of the matter is, Harry, in simple empirical terms, you don’t, so stop pissing around and get your hat.”

I stopped pissing around and got my hat and hoped he saw how irritated I was at having to do any of these things.

Switzerland. I find Switzerland most appealing between the ages of fifty-two and seventy-one. Much younger than that, and the clean air, healthy living, reserved manners and somewhat bland cooking puts me off. Any older and all of the above become a depressing contrast to my decaying body and imminent demise. However, between the ages of fifty-two and seventy-one, especially if I’m feeling hearty for my age, Switzerland is indeed a very pleasant place to retire to, complete with bracing breezes, clear pools and occasionally stunning scenery to walk beneath or between and very, very rarely, over.

Vincent had a car waiting for us at the airport.

“You hired this yourself?”

“Harry, I’m not
entirely
dependent on you to look after things, you know.”

“I know,” I replied. “Philosophically speaking, that is.”

He scowled and smiled all at once, and got into the driving seat.

We drove up, and round, and then up a little further, and then round a little further, and then, to my incredible irritation, down a lot and up again. Navigation on the tight hairpin roads that wind through mountains has always frustrated me. Eventually we began climbing higher than we’d climbed before, until the trees turned
to sharp-needled pines, and frost began to glimmer in the sweep of the headlights. I looked down sheer drops into valleys sprinkled with lights, and then up at a sky bursting with stars, and blurted, “Bloody hell, where are we going? I’m not dressed for skiing.”

“You’ll see! Good grief, if I’d known you’d complain this much, I’d have left you back at the airport.”

It was nearly one in the morning when we reached our destination, a chalet with a slanting wooden roof and lights already on behind the wide glass windows. There wasn’t snow on the ground, but it crackled with frost as I got out of the car, and my breath puffed in the air. A woman waved from the top balcony of the chalet as Vincent slammed the car door shut, then vanished inside to greet us. Vincent scurried with a familiar step down the narrow cobbled path to a side door, which was unlocked, and gestured me in.

The air inside was wonderfully warm, tinted with woodsmoke from an open fire. The woman appeared at the top of some stairs, apparently bursting with joy.

“Mr Rankis! It’s so good to see you again!”

She hugged him, he hugged her, and I briefly wondered if there was something more to their relationship than just affection. Then, “You must be Harry, such a pleasure, such a pleasure.” Her accent was German Swiss, her age perhaps thirty. She hurried us into the living room, where indeed a fat fire roared in the grate, and sat us down to a meal of cold meats, hot potato and warm wine. I was too tired and hungry to interrogate my hosts, and when Vincent finally declared with a slap on his knees, “Right! Busy day tomorrow!” I only put in a token grumble and went straight to bed.

I woke the following morning with a start.

He was standing, fully dressed for the cold, at the end of my bed, just staring at me.

I didn’t know how long he’d been there, watching me. He had a pair of gloves dangling down from his sleeves, sewn on with a long piece of string, like a mother might sew her child’s gloves together, but there was no sign of dampness on his trousers or
boots, no indication he’d been outside. For a long while he just looked at me, until, shuffling upright, I stammered, “Vincent? W-what is it?”

For a second I thought he was going to say something else.

Then, with a half-shake of his head and a little shuffle to the door, he replied, not looking at me, “Time to get up, Harry. Busy, busy day.”

I got up and didn’t bother with a shower.

The world outside was blue-grey with a gentle frost. The air bit hard, promising snow. The woman waved from the balcony as we climbed back into Vincent’s little car, and then we drove up again, through thinning pine trees and jutting rock, the heater in the car on at full blast, neither of us saying a word.

We didn’t go far. It can’t have been more than ten minutes out before Vincent made a sharp right and turned into what I first assumed was the entrance to a mine. A short tunnel led to a concrete car park, surrounded by sheer rock walls on all sides, some parts of which had been covered with chain fencing against crumbling. A single small sign declared in French, German and English,
PRIVATE PROPERTY, NO RAMBLERS PLEASE
. A single security guard, dressed in a fur-lined blue coat, the bulge of his pistol well hidden beneath its shapeless bulk, greeted us with a polite nod of recognition as we parked among the very few cars and very few spaces. A grey door in a grey cliff wall was opened as we approached, a security camera many, many decades ahead of its time peering down at us as we passed.

I had questions but didn’t feel that I could ask them. We descended a corridor of stone cut from the walls of the mountain itself, lined with sluggish burning lanterns. Our breath steamed on the air, but as we went further down, rather than grow colder, a warm moisture began to tingle against my skin. I heard voices, rising from below, echoing against the hard, round walls, and as we descended one way, three men, pushing an empty sled, came up the other way. They were talking loudly, but as Vincent approached they fell silent, and remained so until we were deeper into the mountain out of earshot. By now I could hear the gentle
hiss of air vents, the rattling of pipes, and the heat was taking on an unnatural mechanical quality, a little too high and damp to have been designed for simple human comfort. The number of people was increasing, men and women of all ages, who all seemed to recognise Vincent and then look away. There were quiet traces of security too, more men in thick coats, guns under their arms and batons on their hips.

“What is this place?” I asked at last, when the sound of voices was enough to muffle the breakage of quiet that my words entailed.

“Do you understand quantum physics?” he asked briskly as we rounded a corner and paused by a blast door for it to be opened.

“Don’t be ridiculous; you know I don’t.”

He gave a patient sigh and ducked beneath the rising door into an even warmer cave. “Well then, I shall keep it simple. Let us say that you observe a waterfall and ask yourself how it came into being. The water flowed downwards and eroded the rock, you conclude. On the higher side of the waterfall, the rock was hard and did not crumble, but on the downward slope, the rock was soft and collapsed beneath the river rushing over it. Having made this deductive leap, you further conclude that water must always flow downhill, and it must erode, and that friction changes energy, and energy changes matter and so on and so forth, are you with me?”

“I think so.”

Did he miss me then? Did he miss the Harry August he had argued with in Cambridge and who had cried “claptrap” to his daft ideas? I think, perhaps, he did.

Your fault, Vincent, for killing me.

Twice.

“Well then, let us take it another step. Let us say that you take an atom in the universe, and you observe it closely. This atom, you say, is made of protons, neutrons and electrons, and from this you begin to deduce that a proton must have a positive charge and an electron a negative, and these two attract, and you say that a neutron binds itself to a proton and a force must be exerted to prevent
the attractive pull between all these from causing the atom to collapse in on itself, and from that you can deduce…” He paused, searching for a word.

“Yes?”

“Everything,” said so softly, eyes fixed on some other place. “You can deduce… everything. From a single atom, a single point in time and space, one can examine the fundamental stuff of the universe and conclude, by sheer mathematical process, everything that was, everything that is, everything that must be. Everything.”

Another door opened: a room even hotter than the others, fans working desperately to keep it cool, and there it was, nearly seven storeys high, scaffolding running up to its topmost level, men and women–hundreds of them–swarming over its every detail. The air tasted of electricity, smelled of electricity, the noise was almost deafening. He handed me a radioactivity badge, more advanced than anything I’d worn in Pietrok-112, nearly twenty years from now, nearly two hundred years ago, and over the roar shouted, “This is the quantum mirror!”