The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(81)

Three months it took me, which felt like two months too long to search. The Cronus Club directors had been careful, burying all traces, but one, a Theodore Himmel, had left a note in his will stipulating that an iron box be buried at the foot of his grave. The note was tiny, a quirky proviso in the documents of a man dead for over thirty years, but it was enough. I sneaked into the cemetery in the dead of night and by the glow of a torch dug down to the coffin of Theodore Himmel, scraping away until I struck metal.

There was the iron box, black and dented, buried as had been promised in his final will and testament. It had been welded shut, and it took me three hours with a hacksaw to cut my way inside.

In the box was a stone, written on in three languages–German, English and French. The writing was tiny, crammed into every curve of the rock, and the message read


I, Theodore Himmel, who am of the kin known as ouroboran, the snake that swallows its own tail, leave this message for future descendants of my kind who may seek knowledge of my fate. As a child I was saved from the weariness of my life by the Cronus Club, who came to take me from poverty into riches, companionship and comfort. As an old man, I sought to do the same for the younger generations of my kind, a service I have performed for many lives before this one. Yet in this life it was not to be.

Up to the year of Our Lord 1894 the children of our kind had all been born as they should be. Yet from that fated year onwards more and more of our kin have been born with no memory of what they are, and there are some indeed who are not born at all. It would appear that in their previous life they were captured by a force unknown, and their minds, their souls, the repositories of a great knowledge and character accumulated over hundreds of years, destroyed. It is a sin against learning, a sin against men, a sin against all our kind, and I have seen my friends, my colleagues, my family, reduced to infants again. For them there is no Cronus Club, and I can only pity the journeys they must undertake in their next lives, as they go through the pain of rediscovery once again.

If you read this, know that I am dead, and that the Cronus Club in this life has been damaged beyond repair. Do not seek it, for it is a trap; do not enquire after others of your kin nor trust them. For so many to have forgotten so much, for some to have been destroyed absolutely before their birth, can only be treason.

I ask you to bury this stone again, for any others who may come to find it, and pray that the Cronus Club will rise again, as our future lives roll by.



I read it only once, by the light of my torch, and then, as requested, returned it to the bottom of the grave.





Chapter 62


I had to find Vincent Rankis.

Infuriatingly, I knew that doing so would not prove easy and, perhaps yet more infuriatingly, that to do so actively in this life would arguably expose me to far greater danger than if I were to do it in the next. If I were caught in this life, it would be proof sufficient that the Forgetting had not worked, and I had little doubt that next time Vincent would not be so sloppy as to let me take rat poison before he had finally extracted my point of origin. Likewise, if I were to pop up on the social radar as too prominent or powerful a figure, it could well lead to questions being asked by linears, as well as kalachakra, as to my origins, and that information was now the most precious I possessed.

With all this in mind, and for the first time in my lives, I became a professional criminal.

My intention, I hasten to add, was not to accumulate wealth as much as contacts. I needed to find those ouroborans who were still alive, still remembering–those who had survived Vincent’s purge–but I clearly could not use the Cronus Club to do so. Likewise, I could not use legal means and risk my enquiries being traced back to me, so I established for myself layers of security to prevent both police and anyone else who might be looking from stumbling on my true identity. I began as a money launderer, with the advantage that I both knew my way around major banking institutions and had foreknowledge of where would be wise and unwise to invest. The Second World War disrupted crime to a degree, in that it took a lot of the big business away from my clients and reduced whole economies to black market enterprises over which I had very little control, but the years which followed were ripe for exploitation. I was a little disappointed at how easily the techniques came to me, and how ruthless I quickly became. Clients who violated my advice, or who flaunted their riches in a way liable to bring attention to me, I dropped at once. Those who sought my identity too closely, I cut off. Those who listened and obeyed my strict precepts of business I rewarded with heavy returns on investment. Ironically, a lot of the time the front companies I passed the money through were so successful that they began making profits greater than the illicit activities which had funded them, at which point I was usually forced to close them down or disconnect them from the crime, to prevent too much scrutiny from the tax authorities of the countries where they were based. I never conducted my business face to face but sent plausible proxies, as I had done so many years ago when working for Waterbrooke & Smith. I even hired Cyril Handly, my in-pocket actor from a previous life, to conduct a few exchanges for me. He stuck to the script well this time, largely because I kept him away from the drink, until one day in 1949 when, in Marseilles, a gang of dealers suffering from revolutionary pretensions stormed the meeting he was attending, gunned down all who resisted and hanged the survivors from a crane, a warning to their rivals that they were moving on to this turf. The attacked crime syndicate retaliated with blood and fire, which got them nowhere. I lifted every centime of every franc from their bank accounts, grassed up every accountant and every front man who’d ever worked for them, exposed their shell companies to the force of the law and, when it seemed that this was only going to rouse them to greater stupidity, I poisoned their leader’s dog.