The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(67)
Return I did.
Fleeing Russia would have been problematic, and I had every confidence that, as it had been all those years ago, the simplest escape would be death. Why alert anyone to my contemplating this by attempting a crude physical escape? Escape from what? To what purpose? There were questions I needed answered, and if they were to end in my demise, it would be a death of my choosing, once I had as full a picture as I could find. Planning and questions, they were my food for the journey back to Pietrok-112.
“Harry!” He was waiting for me as I stepped through the goods door, blushing with enthusiasm. “Good holiday, well rested, yes? Excellent! I really need your brains on this one. It’s going to be beautiful when we solve it, simply beautiful!”
Vincent Rankis, did he ever sleep? “God for a pocket calculator,” he added, sweeping me down the halls. “Do you think it would be a waste of time developing a pocket calculator? I suspect that the time saved in having one to hand would vastly exceed the time wasted in bringing the technologies up to necessary scratch, but one never can tell with these productivity calculations, can one? How many decades do we have until they invent the management consultant? How many decades after that, I wonder, until they abolish it?”
“Vincent—”
“No, no time to take off your coat. I absolutely insist, we’re at a critical moment.”
“Afterwards,” I interjected firmly, “we need to talk.”
Strange how the approach of “afterwards” can weigh on a mind. I knew every number in front of me and every outcome of the equation on the board yet could barely concentrate or say a word. The others joked that my holiday had made me soft, that my mind was addled with pretty girls and too much drink. I nodded and smiled, and after a while, seeing just how distracted I was, they stopped joking and just got on with their work without me.
Afterwards should have been dinner, but Vincent, bursting with energy, was far too preoccupied.
Then it was the evening and he was wondering if we should try working through the night.
By the time I’d convinced him this was a poor idea, we’d already begun, and it wasn’t until two in the morning that I grabbed him by the sleeve, dragged him away from the blackboard and exclaimed, “Vincent!”
It was a rare breach of protocol to use his English name in front of others. His eyes flashed quickly round the room to see if anyone had noticed, but if they had, they ignored it. “Yes,” he murmured distantly, attention flowing back to me in little parts. “We were going to talk, weren’t we? Come into my office.”
Vincent’s office was his bedroom, and his bedroom was a cell like any other, small, windowless, humming with the sound of pipes and vents passing overhead. A small round table, a little too low to comfortably get your knees under, and two wooden chairs were the only furniture besides the wall-set single bed. He gestured me to a chair and, as I sat, pulled out a bottle of malt whisky and two shot glasses from beneath the bed, and laid them on the table.
“I had it imported through Finland,” he said, “for special occasions. Your health.” He toasted me, and I chinked glasses back, barely letting the drink wet my lips before setting it back down on the tabletop.
“I apologise for my insistence in there,” I began at once, for it’s always easier with Vincent just to get on with things. “But, as I said, we need to talk.”
“Harry,” he sounded almost concerned as he settled down opposite me, “are you all right? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so urgent.”
I pushed the glass a little further into the centre of the table and attempted to arrange my thoughts in some sort of order. My desire to speak to Vincent had somewhat undermined the focused list of matters I needed to discuss; now I struggled to reassemble the cold plan of my train ride beneath the furnace of the moment.
Finally, “You destroyed the Leningrad Cronus Club.”
He hesitated, looked briefly surprised, then turned his face away. It was an oddly animal movement, eyes focusing down into the depths of his whisky as he considered the accusation. “Yes,” he said at last. “I did. I’m sorry, Harry. I’m somewhat playing catch-up–the reports from your watchers indicated you went nowhere near the property.” A sudden flash of a smile. “I suppose I should expect that they would be reluctant to admit to their own incompetence in keeping you away, however. Did you like Sophia, by the by?”
“She seemed perfectly pleasant.”
“I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but sometimes, I feel, a man just needs to unwind. Yes, I destroyed the Leningrad Cronus Club. Was there anything else you wished to say?”
“Are you going to inform me that it was for my sake? To prevent my colleagues tracking me down, to hide the betrayal?”
“Of course it was, and don’t you feel that ‘betrayal’ is rather a pejorative term? The Cronus Club are interested only in the endlessly repetitive present; you and I are working for much, much more. You believe that as much as I, yes?” He topped up my whisky glass as he talked, even though I’d hardly drunk a drop, and sipped his. If his hope was that I would follow his example, he was disappointed. “Surely this doesn’t trouble you? It was merely to cloud the trail. And if you insist on using ‘betrayal’, I must remind you, purely in the interest of academic precision, that I was never of the Cronus Club. You are. The betrayal that you refer to was entirely yours, your choice, made freely and in full conscience. If you had any doubt about what we are doing here, and how wrong the Club is in its policy, you could have blown your brains out ten years ago. You could have blown them out today.”