The Thief of Time (27 page)

‘Well?' I said eventually, nodding at him and looking towards the pistol which stood out in his jacket pocket. ‘Aren't you going to do it?'

He took out the gun and his face grew a little pale. He stared at the butt and licked his dry lips before looking at me. ‘Ever done this, have you? Ever had to kill a horse?' I shook my head and swallowed hard.

‘No,' I said. ‘And I don't want to now, if it's all the same to you.'

He snorted and stared at the gun again for a moment, and the horse, before thrusting it at me. ‘Don't be such a bloody coward,' he said quickly. ‘And do as you're told. Do ... what has to be done.' I took the gun and knew immediately that he had never done this himself either. ‘Just aim it directly at the beast's brains and pull the trigger,' he announced and I could feel the anger swelling within me. ‘Try and get a clean shot though, Zulu, for Christ's sake,' he continued. ‘We don't want to create too much of a mess.'

He turned around, lifting his boot and wiping at the toe of it with great concentration, waiting for me to take the fatal shot. I looked at the horse, whose movements were as shaky as ever and I knew that for her sake there was no more time to waste. I reached out my hand and settled it around the unfamiliar pistol – a shape I had never had to make before – and covered it with my left hand in order to stop it from shaking. Stepping closer to her head, I looked away and the second I could feel the gorge rise within me, I pulled the trigger and was immediately thrown back with the unfamiliar recoil. Neither of us said anything for a moment – I was stunned and the ringing in my ears took away all memory of the incident for a few seconds. I looked at my work and was pleased to see that the horse had stopped shaking. Through great fortune, I had achieved a clean shot and, with the exception of a smoking circle of red, whose colour leaked down into the horse's white-patched eye, there did not seem to be any great difference between the scene of a few moments earlier and the one that presented itself now.

‘Is it done?' asked Nat, who had not turned around. I looked at his back and said nothing for a moment. I could see his whole body shaking and, without knowing why exactly, my hand lifted again and I aimed the pistol at the back of his head. ‘Is it done, Zulu?' he asked.

‘It's Zéla,' I said, my voice calm and steady now. ‘My name is Matthieu Zéla. And yes, it's done.'

He turned around then but avoided looking at the body. ‘Well,' he said eventually as we went towards our own horses. ‘I suppose that's what you get for not doing what you're told.' I looked at him quizzically and he smiled. ‘Well, she wanted the horse to jump the fence,' he explained. ‘Miss Logan, that is. She wanted her to jump and she reared on her. And now look at her. That's what she gets. When we get back, you'd better tell Holby to organise someone to clear her off to the knacker's yard, yes?'

He didn't look at me or speak to me again as he mounted his horse and rode back in the direction of Cageley House. Suddenly I was forced to steady myself against a tree, where I felt my knees give way beneath me and my stomach turn over until its contents were on the ground at my feet. When I stood up again, my forehead was perspiring and the taste in my mouth was hideous. And, without quite knowing why, I started to cry. Small sobs at first, then great, dry heaving sounds, empty of noise for moments at a time, then filled with misery. I rolled myself up in a ball on the ground and lay there for what seemed like an eternity. My life, I thought. My only life.

It was dark when I returned home to the Ambertons' that night, and I went there only after Jack and I had disposed of the mare's body ourselves.

After the death of my eighth wife Constance in Hollywood in 1921, I decided to move as far away from California as possible, while yet remaining in the United States. Constance's death had left me depressed – she had died in a senseless car crash immediately following our wedding, an accident which had also seen off my nephew Tom, a teenage starlet and her own sister Amelia – and at the age of 178, I was left floundering, wondering where my life could possibly go from there. For the first, and perhaps only, time in my 256 years, I questioned my body's ability to continue its rigorous insistence upon being locked into a middle-aged appearance and vigour. I felt like giving up, removing myself from the tiresome existence which I seemed destined to be stuck within for ever, and it took a certain strength of will to prevent myself from going to the nearest doctor's office, explaining my situation, and seeing whether he could help me to age, or simply to end it all there and then.

However, this depression, such as it was, eventually passed. As I have said, I do not in general feel that my condition is a negative one; without it I would most likely have been dead by the beginning of the 1800s and never had as many experiences as I have been blessed with. Age can be a cruel thing but, as long as you still have your looks and a little financial security, there's always an awful lot to do.

I stayed in California until the end of the year as there seemed no point beginning a fresh life so close to the holiday season, but then moved to Washington DC in 1922 where I bought a small house in Georgetown and invested in a chain of restaurants. Their owner, Mitch Lendl, was a Czech immigrant who had come to America in the 1870s and, in traditional style, made his fortune and bastardised his first name, from Miklos to the more American moniker. He was looking to expand his chain around the capital but could not afford to do so. His credit rating with the banks was good but he didn't trust them not to recall any loan that they might give him and lay claim to his empire so he decided to look for an investor instead. I got to know him quite well from the simple fact that I enjoyed dining in his establishments and we hit it off; eventually I agreed to go in on the venture myself and it became profitable. Lendl's restaurants began to pop up around the state and through Miklos's knowledge of good chefs – I always called him Miklos, never Mitch – we established a fine reputation and a successful business.

Food has never been an abiding interest of mine; I like to dine well but then that is not a trait that singles me out from the masses. However, during this era, my one foray into the restaurant trade, I learned a little about food, particularly about the importing of fine delicacies and speciality foods from other countries, which was something in which we at Lendl's specialised. I became concerned about what we were actually serving in our restaurants and soon we made it a policy that nothing unhealthy would ever be served from our premises; indeed, it became something of a catchphrase for us. Through Miklos's talent and skills, we served the most tender vegetables, the choicest cuts of meat and the most delicious cakes known to man. Our tables were full every night.

In 1926 I was invited to join an executive committee of the Food Administration and it was while I was a member of that panel, analysing the dietary habits of Washingtonians and putting together a common policy which could help improve them, that I met Herb Hoover, who had been a member of the same committee some years earlier under President Wilson. Although now serving as Secretary of Commerce, Herb had maintained an interest in our work, as it had been one of his abiding passions throughout his career. We became friends and would dine together frequently, a difficult business when everyone in the restaurant wanted to speak to him on some personal matter every time they passed by.

‘They all think that I can help them out in some way,' he told me one evening as we sat at a secluded table in Lendl's, nursing our brandies after a large meal prepared to the very highest standards by Miklos himself. ‘They think that because I'm Secretary of Commerce I can give them some sort of tax break or something if they become my friends.'

Some chance. Herb was well known to be one of the straightest and most incorruptible men in the cabinet. How he had even ended up in such an important financial job was beyond me, considering his history of humanitarianism and, some might say, charity. When the Germans had overrun the Low Countries after the outbreak of the First World War, Herb had been in London and had been entrusted by the Allies with the task of getting food through to the Belgians, something he did with great success; the country might have starved without him. He had taken a great personal gamble a few7 years after that when, in 1921, he had seen to it that aid had been extended to Soviet Russia at the very height of their famine. When criticised for thus lending a helping hand to Bolshevism, he had roared back from the floor of the House, ‘Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!'

‘I don't know how I got it myself,' he acknowledged, referring to his current position. ‘But I seem to be doing it all right!' he added with a wide grin, his jowly, cheerful features extending across his face and crinkling his eyes at the corner. And he was right; the country was prosperous and his tenure in the cabinet seemed secure.

I enjoyed his company enormously, I must admit, and was excited when he was elected president in late 1928 for it had been some time since I had a close connection with someone in a position of power, and there had never been anyone quite like Herbert Hoover in the White House. I attended his inauguration in March 1929, the day before I was due to leave for New York, and listened as he praised the country for rebuilding itself after the Great War and admitted pride in his fellow citizens as they faced the peacetime years ahead. His speech, although a little long and heavy on the kind of detail that the American people did not necessarily need to hear, was optimistic and cheerful and boded well for the four years to come. I had very little time to speak to him afterwards, of course, but wished him well, believing that the respect which the American people held for him, his own humanitarian nature, and the peaceful, economically prosperous country that he was inheriting bode about as well for him as for any of his predecessors. I little thought that, by the end of the year, the country would be entering into a great depression and that his presidency would be destroyed before it had even got off the ground.

I expected even less the personal price that those close to me would pay because of it.

Denton Irving loved to take risks. His father, Magnus Irving, had been the head of a large New York investment firm, CartellCo., which he in turn had inherited from his late father-in-law, Joseph Cartell. At the age of sixty-one, Magnus suffered a stroke which incapacitated him and Denton, who had spent the best part of his thirty-six years on the planet working as an investment specialist and vice-president with the firm, took over. Herb, then President Hoover, had brought us together a couple of years earlier in Washington and we had become friends; I looked him up immediately after I descended upon New York, told him of my plans for the future and sought his advice.

Miklos and I had received a generous offer from a consortium of investors for our restaurant chain and we had decided to accept it, a decision which precipitated my departure from the capital. The offer was over and above what we could have ever expected to receive from a single buyer and far surpassed the kind of money that we could make together in a (regular) lifetime. Also, Miklos was not getting any younger and did not have any children who possessed quite as much instinct for the catering industry as he did and so it seemed like the right time to sell up. However, it meant that, in addition to my regular shares and accounts, I now had a large stockpile of money which I needed to invest. When the time came, Denton seemed to be the right man to talk to.

This was in March 1929 and within a week he had put together a reasonably solid investment portfolio for me, dividing my money between perennial bloomers such as US Steel and General Motors, fresh growers such as Eastman Kodak and a few new and innovative companies as well, which we believed could take off and turn a profit for a man willing to take a chance or two. Denton was an intelligent man but I found that he had no patience and, on that point, we were quite different from each other. From the moment he knew that I wanted to invest a substantial amount of money, he was calling all his contacts, trying to find the best options for me, the wisest ventures, as if he himself was going to be the beneficiary of whatever profits I eventually made. His enthusiasm entertained me, and gave me great confidence in his abilities, and I found that I enjoyed his company enormously.

At the same time, a young woman whom I had never met before entered my life. Her name was Annette Weathers and she was a thirty-three-year-old post office clerk from Milwaukee. She arrived at my apartment near Central Park on a wet April evening with two bags and an eight-year-old boy by her side. I opened my door to find her standing there, a soaking rag who was doing all she could to keep herself from crying as she held the hand of her small son tightly. I looked at her in surprise, wondering who on earth she could possibly be and what she wanted from me, but I only had to take one look at the boy to figure it out.

‘Mr Zéla,' she said, putting a bag down and extending me her hand. ‘I'm sorry to bother you but I wrote to you in California and I never heard back from you.'

‘I haven't lived there in some years,' I explained, still standing in the doorway. ‘I moved to -'

‘Washington, I know,' she replied firmly. ‘I'm sorry to come all this way but I didn't know what else to do. It's just that we're ... we're ...' She never made it to the end of her sentence as her battle to keep control of her tears was lost and she collapsed in a heap at my feet. The boy stared at me suspiciously as if I had been the one who had caused his mother to cry and I wasn't quite sure what to do. My last experience with a child his age had been about a century and a half before, when my own brother Tomas was a lad; in general I had steered clear of children ever since. I opened the door and ushered them inside, leading her towards a bathroom where she might regain her composure with a little dignity and seated the boy in a large armchair where he continued to stare at me with a mixture of awe and disgust.

An hour or so later, relaxing in front of the fire, freshly washed and wearing a thick, woollen dressing gown, Annette explained both her visit and her existence in the most apologetic of terms, even though I already knew exactly who she was.

‘You contacted me after your wedding, you remember,' she began, ‘when your poor wife died.'

‘I remember,' I said, a vision of Constance rearing up in my head; it occurred to me suddenly how long it had been since I had spared her a thought and I despised myself for it.

‘My poor Tom died that day too. It's not been easy without him, you know.'

‘No, I can imagine. I'm sorry I haven't been of more help.' Annette was Tom's widow; I had hardly known the boy but he had attended my marriage to Constance and lost his life because of it. I remembered him well from the day itself; even now I can see him working the room, introducing himself to Charlie and Doug and Mary, people he had seen on the big screen and in the newspapers and movie magazines. He had attempted to ingratiate himself with some teenage girl who had appeared in a few Sennett shorts and had been unfortunate enough to be standing in the spot where Constance and Amelia's car had landed after their accident. It was his own name that had appeared in the papers the following day. Annette had not been present; she had been pregnant at the time and hadn't wanted to travel from Milwaukee to California, although I suspected from what Tom had said that he had refused her permission to accompany him. From his behaviour on that one single day, I suspected that their marriage was not a strong one.

She was a fresh looking girl, with short, frizzy blonde hair and pale cheeks, the kind of girl who usually got tied to the train tracks by evil old men in the movies. Her eyes were wide with small pupils and her features were gentle and unaccentuated, with the most unblemished skin I had seen in a century. I felt instantly protective of her, not just for her son's or her husband's sake, but for her own. She had struggled for eight years without coming to me, even though she knew that I had money, and I guessed that for her to arrive now was not an act of greed on her part, but a simple act of necessity or desperation.

‘I feel terrible,' I admitted, raising my palms in the air in a desperate gesture. ‘I should have got in touch with you myself, if for no other reason than that this boy here is my nephew. How are you, Thomas, anyway?'

‘We call him Tommy. But how did you know his name?' she asked me, no doubt running through our conversation in her mind to recall whether she had mentioned it. I shrugged and smiled at her.

‘Lucky guess,' I said. The boy said nothing. ‘Doesn't say much, does he?' I asked.

‘He's just tired,' she replied. ‘Perhaps he could take a rest for a while. If there was a spare bed at all?'

I jumped up immediately. ‘Of course he can,' I said. ‘And there is.

Just follow me.' He leaned over towards his mother in fright and I looked at her, unsure what to do for the best.

‘I'll take him in if that's all right,' she said, standing up and lifting the child from the floor with an easy movement, even though he was an average sized eight-year-old and didn't need picking up or carrying around by anyone. ‘He gets nervous around strangers.' I didn't mind, and showed her the room and she stayed with him for fifteen minutes or so until he fell asleep. When she reappeared I gave her a brandy and told her that they must stay the night.