The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(72)

He grimaced as a pigeon’s dropping landed on the effigy’s head. Having indulged his desire to go and see the sculpture, he had no wish to linger and witness firsthand the humiliations it would suffer before someone finally ordered its removal: the slow but steady erosion by time and the elements, the desecration and acts of vandalism, the relentless shelling by countless generations of those delightful pigeons. Yes, that indignity was enough of a taste of things to come. Murray gave the statue a complicit smile and set off slowly toward Greek Street, greeting any passersby with a friendly nod. He grinned complacently when he realized that no one recognized him, despite his being immortalized only a few blocks away. Although in truth he was not unduly worried, for given the susceptibility of the English to spiritualism, anyone recognizing him would undoubtedly take him for Gilliam Murray’s ghost, an explanation that was more easily acceptable than someone successfully staging his own death.

When he reached Greek Street, he came to a halt in front of his former business premises, for which he had sacrificed his life. It was a disused theater, which Murray himself had remodeled, adorning its fa?ade with a variety of ornamentation alluding to time, such as a frieze of carved hourglasses and an entablature depicting Chronos spinning the wheel of the zodiac, a sinister expression on his face. Between the carving of the god of time and the lintel, in flamboyant sculpted pink marble letters were the words MURRAY’S TIME TRAVEL. Murray ascended the steps and gazed wistfully at the poster beside the entrance inviting passersby to visit the year 2000. Murray waited until the street was clear before taking the key from his pocket and stealing into the building. The inside reeked of the past, of neglect, of faded memories. Murray paused in the vast foyer and listened to the silence—the only sound emanating now from the legions of clocks, which two years before had disrupted the place with their incessant ticking. The sculpture that took up the central area, and symbolized the passing of time with its gigantic hourglass turned over by a pair of jointed arms, had also ground to a halt and was shrouded in cobwebs. The same dust that jammed its mechanism had settled on the levers and cogs of the display of antique timepieces along one side of the vestibule and on the casings of the innumerable clocks lining its walls. Murray walked straight past the stairs leading up to his former office and made his way to the vast warehouse, where the Cronotilus stood like a tired old beast shivering from neglect. The vehicle had been adapted for venturing into dangerous territories, which was what had happened, for the Cronotilus had traveled to the future through the fourth dimension, where Murray had met his end.

Murray had made millions from becoming the Master of Time. And when he decided he had amassed enough of a fortune, he could think of no other way to close down Murray’s Time Travel than by staging his own death. In fact, he had had no choice; no one would have accepted him closing down his business without good reason, thus denying the public the chance to travel in time, and it was impossible for him to sell it as one might a china shop or a tavern. His demise provided a horribly simple solution, and his legacy would retain a wonderfully tragic quality. And die was precisely what Murray had done: he had invented a grisly but perfect end for himself that had shaken the whole of society, which in his honor had erected a bronze statue of him in the middle of a square. Yes, Gilliam Murray had died as only heroes do, on a grand scale, and he had taken the secret of time travel with him to his grave. And while everyone resigned themselves to being once more hopelessly trapped in the present, Murray had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, his pockets lined with money, to begin a new life in the modern city of New York, under the name Montgomery Gilmore.

His arrival had caused a small tidal wave in the otherwise tranquil sea of stuffy New York society. He soon realized he had fled to a place no less ambiguous and elusive than the one he had just left. For even as life appeared to flow like a serene river over its immaculate surface, kept from bursting its banks by a set of archaic rules, beneath there lay a world of passion and human frailty, meticulously documented by the spokespeople of that strange realm of appearances. Murray observed all that inherent hypocrisy from the outside. The way in which at every dinner someone would bring to the table a fresh snippet of gossip, an illicit affair, or the union through marriage of two well-to-do families. Disgusted by it all, and once the novelty of his presence had worn off, Murray showed his face little in society. Indeed, he would only attend very important business lunches, and his discreet, almost monastic existence ended up protecting him from those rumormongers, who soon grew tired of rummaging for scandal in what they must have considered his tedious life, beyond all earthly temptation. Murray finally blended into the wealthy New York landscape as a mysterious misanthropic magnate who posed no threat to the delicate fabric of its traditions.

And yet the life he led, which he was the first to consider pathetic, was not so much voluntary as inescapable. Even if he had wanted to live in a different way, it would have been impossible: the city’s plethora of shows and exhibitions bored him, and rather than help refine his mind, that flurry of aesthetic emotions simply highlighted his unfortunate awkwardness in society, as did the dinners and dances and sundry entertainments he agreed to attend. Unable to enjoy the pleasures his wealth could afford, and not knowing what to do with his life after he had achieved his main goal, which had been the creation of his time travel company, Murray the millionaire cast a sorrowful eye over his vast dominion and felt that being forced to live was a harsh punishment. What was there in life that could excite him, fascinate him, free him from the deadly solitude that assailed him, and which even the monthly parcel of books from England failed to alleviate? He seemed to derive no pleasure or comfort from life, and so the simplest thing was to accept it, to face the facts, and to do absolutely nothing. Indeed, his only important task was to preserve his wealth, which he achieved every day without the slightest effort, but also without the slightest enthusiasm, meeting with businessmen, investing in this and that, for if Murray had one good quality it was his enviable sixth sense for discovering successful investments in mining, shipping, hotels, and even the fledgling subway system. In order that his wealthy neighbors should not suspect he was a dreamer, he even collected antiques, which his representatives acquired at auction houses and junk shops throughout Europe, and with which he crammed every room in his house, much to the despair of Elmer, who had a natural antipathy toward dust traps. Yet however many ruses he invented to pull the wool over others’ eyes, the truth was that Murray’s life was tedious, unproductive, and depressing.