The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(37)

I prepared carefully. I bought a boat under an assumed name for cash in hand, a crabby tin thing with a lower deck that stank of the slick white fungus which infested its walls. I bought petrol and food, hydrochloric acid and a hacksaw, careful to spread my purchases over as wide an area as possible. I bought gloves and rubber overalls, examined the tides on the Thames and observed the traffic in the night. I acquired several ccs of benzodiazepine and rented a room opposite the pub where I had first acquired Richard Lisle’s fingerprints. I waited until one night–a Tuesday, the smog thick green over the streets–when he came to have a drink, and went in. I joined him, remembering our old acquaintance and asking how he had been. He was gleeful, happy, a gleam of sweat about his face and a loudness in his speech that at once set alarm bells ringing in my mind. What had he done to induce such delight? I examined him, every part, for a sign of something amiss, and smelled the fresh soap in his hair, saw how scrubbed his nails were, how fresh and clean his clothes were despite the settling lateness of the hour, and knew with that irrational part of the mind that rationality always denies that I had come to him a few hours too late. Rage flared up inside me and briefly my plan was forgotten, my efficient, organised scheme. I still smiled, and smiled, and we staggered out together into the coal-hung air at closing time, hanging off each other, best of friends, our skin smeared black by the air we breathed. But as we staggered away up the street, one of those lingering terraced streets of tiny houses that still hid beneath the craters of the East End, he looked up at the sky and laughed, and I punched him and punched him again, and when he fell I straddled him, grabbing him by the throat and screamed, “Where is she? Who was it this time?” and punched him again.

In the rush of adrenaline, in my rage, smothered by the smog and hidden by the dark, all my plans, my careful, reasoned plans were forgotten. I barely felt the shock against my knuckles as I drove my fists into his skull. Nor did I register the flick knife that he drove up through my abdomen and into the bottom of my left lung until, drawing breath for another strike, I realised I had no breath to draw. His face was jelly but I was dead. He pushed me off him and and I fell like soggy pudding into the gutter, the dirty water flecking my face. He crawled over to me, his breath wheezing, blood popping and bubbling out of the end of his shattered nose. Awareness of the knife in his hand gave me an awareness of what he did with it, so I felt the next three strokes as he drove it into my chest. Then I felt nothing at all.





Chapter 31


Many, many lives later, I sat down opposite Virginia in the lounge of the Cronus Club and said, “His name is Vincent.”

“Darling, that’s hardly much to go by.”

“He’s one of us. Ouroboran. I asked him about the Cronus Club, and he attacked me and walked away.”

“How immature of him.”

“He has ambitions.”

Virginia was more than capable of being uninterested when she wanted to be. She wanted to be now. She stared at the ceiling as if it was the most fascinating thing in the world and waited for the rest.

“The message keeps coming down to us from the future generations–the world is ending, the world is ending. Nothing changes about the established course of linear events–nothing–except us.”

“You suggest this… Vincent… may be the ‘who’ which leads to the ‘what’?”

“I… no. I don’t know. I’m suggesting that one of his character, someone who is one of us but not one of us, is someone seeking an answer… mindless of the consequences… that’s what I suggest.”

“And Harry,” she murmured, “you appear to have an idea of what you desire to do next.”

“We look for anomalies,” I explained firmly. “The Cronus Club looks for events which should not be happening in their time periods, changes to the normal course of things. I think I’ve found one.”

“Where?”

“Russia.”

She sucked in her teeth thoughtfully. “Have you spoken to the Club? To Moscow, St Petersburg–Leningrad, I suppose we must call it, ghastly though it is?”

“I sent them a message via Helsinki. I’m going to Finland tomorrow morning.”

“If you’re already pursuing this, why do you tell me?”

I hesitated, then, “Should something unfortunate happen, I’d ask that you pass my suspicions on to others. But…”

“You’re concerned that if one of our kind is altering established events, they may have informants within the Club.” She sighed. I wondered how long she’d held on to this thought, and how many of our peers considered it too. Were we, all of us, so used to apathy and deceit that not one had bothered to raise the question of it? Did we all take betrayal so much for granted? Then, what good could be achieved, other than to spread suspicion without a cure? “But,” she went on, brightening a little, “you, dear boy, clearly trust me enough to inform me of your concerns. But not Moscow or St Petersburg. Oh, Harry, your time as an intelligence agent has done nothing for your socialite reputation.”

“I wasn’t aware I had a socialite reputation.”

“Quite. Harry.” A note of what, I imagined, passed for genuine concern slipped into her voice. “I understand how exciting it must be to be informed that the world is ending, what a marvellous adventure this must present for you. Repetition is dull; stimulation is vital to stave off the decline of faculties and will. But the simple, mathematical truth is that, between us and the events unfolding of the future, there is an almost infinite range of possibilities and permutations, and to think that we can, in any meaningful way, affect this, now, is not merely ludicrous, it’s really rather childish. I have no objection to you doing whatever it is you wish to do, Harry–it is, after all, your life, and I know that you won’t cause any especial embarrassment for the Club while doing it–but I just don’t want to see you get too emotionally involved.”