The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(45)
I had never been a fugitive in Russia before.
The feeling was exhilarating at first, until the discomfort of the settling night and the damp cold eating through my boots reminded me that exhilaration held nothing over reliable hygiene and warm sheets. My Kostya Prekovsky papers were now an even greater liability to me than no papers at all–no papers would at least cause bureaucratic delay, whereas the Prekovsky name was instant, guaranteed incarceration or death. I threw them into the slow black waters of the canal, bought a new hat and coat, and in a second-hand bookshop beneath the glowing lights of a doctor’s surgery flicked through an atlas of the Soviet Union, looking for Pietrok-112. I couldn’t see it. I considered going to the Cronus Club, but the grief that I would bring upon Olga and her ilk seemed uncivilised in light of her hospitality, and I wasn’t entirely sure whether it was the professor’s enquiries alone which had led to the appearance of security forces at Avtovo. Instead, I found Pietrok-111 and Pietrok-113 in the atlas, two tiny markers on an empty stretch of nowhere in the north of the country, and considering this as likely a place to start as anywhere, waited until the last tram had slipped into silence, and headed to Finland Station to recover my escape papers. I had left two sets of documents in an empty signal box by the railway tracks, where a man, hopefully in a fur hat, had once spent his days switching points, and where now mice hid from the worst of the winter’s cold. The first document declared that I was one Mikhail Kamin, party member and industrial adviser, a position high enough to accord me respect without necessarily inviting security checks. The second was a Finnish passport, stamped already with an entry visa, which I attached to the back of my calf with surgical tape and rubber bands. I then spent a chilly night in the signal box, listening to the mice scurrying below, around and, in one particularly adventurous case, over me, and waiting for sunrise and the journey north.
Chapter 37
I have spoken before of my rather feeble attempt to kill Richard Lisle, some five lives before I took the train from Leningrad towards a situation which, even then, I felt could only end in blood. Lisle had killed Rosemary Dawsett and he had killed me. I suspected, though of course my death had prevented me from pursuing the investigation, that after my demise he had killed many more and never been caught.
He had killed me in my eighth life, and in my ninth I pursued him. Not the hot pursuit of a righteous avenger, nor the sly chase of a spy waiting to be caught. I had just over thirty years in which to consider my attitude towards him, thirty years in which hatred could cool to practical, business-like assassination.
“I understand why, but I’m not sure I can condone.”
Akinleye. Born some time in the mid-1920s, at her oldest she had lived to see planes fly into the World Trade Center. “I remember thinking,” she would say, “how frustrating it was that I wouldn’t live long enough to see what happened next.” But she interrogated the kalachakra of the Club, the younger members, those born in the 1980s and 1990s, who shook their heads sadly and said, “You’re not missing anything.” Akinleye’s father was a Nigerian teacher, her mother a Ghanaian secretary “who ran the hospital she worked at and everyone knew it, but she was a woman in the 1920s so they called her a secretary anyway”. Unlike most of our kin, she didn’t require rescuing from her childhood. “My parents give me an unconditional love which I have yet to meet from any adult,” she explained. We were lovers whenever our paths crossed, except once when she was giving homosexuality a go, “To see if it’s me?” and once when she was married. Her husband was Sudanese–tall, thin, he towered over the room without ever dominating it and was linear and mortal and wildly in love.
“I’m thinking of telling him the truth,” she confided one day. I told her about Jenny, the woman I’d loved, and how that had ended, and she tutted and said, “Maybe not then.”
From what I heard later, their relationship was long, happy and deceitful until the day he died.
“This man you want to kill,” she said, “has he murdered?”
“Yes,” I replied firmly. “Not in this life, but in the last.”
“But within the course of his living memory, not yours–has he murdered?”
“No,” I admitted. “Not as far as I know.”
We had met in 1948 in Cuba. She was just blooming into her twenties and spending this life, whatever number it was, doing what she had done for every life I’d ever known her–travelling, shopping, wining, dining and having emotionally fraught liaisons with unsuitable men. She had a yacht, and the locals stared as this young Nigerian woman with her flawless English and her perfect Spanish drifted down the quay towards a white beast of a thing, a shark padded in leather and plated with chrome, which she pushed towards any tropical storms with a merry cry of “Give me rain!” I had agreed to stay with her on the open seas for a couple of nights, on the understanding that this was not yet the hurricane season and I had things to do.
“What things?” she demanded petulantly.
“I’m joining the British secret service,” I replied, ticking the points off on my fingers; “I want to meet Elvis before he dies; and I need to kill a man called Richard Lisle.”
“Why are you joining the spies?”
“Curiosity. I wish to see if there are any truths behind the conspiracy theories I keep reading about during my old age.”