Louis scratched his stubble. ‘From this side of the gun, looks like you are the one whose life hangs in the breeze.’
Joe was frowning. ‘So what are you asking us, mister?’
A deep breath. ‘I’m just here with a proposition. Look, people here in Bisbee already have their suspicions about you. Word is leaking out. This is the age of photography now. Our past has evidence.’ As I was hearing myself, with fear slowly creeping into my voice, I realised how much I was simply parroting Hendrich. Everything I was saying was the kind of thing Hendrich said. There was something hollow to every word. ‘There’s a society, like a union, working for the collective good. We are trying to get every person with this condition, this condition they call anageria, to be part of the society. It helps people. It assists them, when they need to move on and begin being someone else. That help can be money, and it can be in the form of papers and documents.’
Joe and Louis exchanged thoughts with their eyes. Louis’ eyes were duller, less illuminated with intelligence. He looked dangerously stupid, but he was the more malleable one. The one most likely to be sold. Joe was the strong one, in body and mind. Joe was the one who held his Colt without a quiver.
‘How much money you talkin’?’ Louis asked as an insect buzzed around his head.
‘It depends on need. The society allocates budgets according to the requirements of each particular case.’ God, I really was starting to sound like Hendrich.
Joe shook his head. ‘Didn’t you hear the man, Louis? He’s tellin’ us to move out of Bisbee. And that just ain’t gonna work, see. We’ve got it good here. We have good relations with folk here. We done our roamin’, and I been all over this country since I got off the boat all those years ago. And I ain’t bein’ told to move.’
‘It will be best for you if you do. You see, the society says that after eight years—’
Joe sighed a sigh that was halfway to a growl. ‘The society says? The society says? We ain’t in no society and we ain’t ever gonna be in no society. You understand me?’
‘I’m sorry but—’
‘I wanna put a hole in that head of yours.’
‘Listen, the society have contacted the law officials. They know I am here. If you shoot me, you will be caught.’
They both laughed at this.
‘You hear that, Louis?’
‘I heard ’im all right.’
‘Best we explain to Mr Peter Whicheverhisnameis why the joke is funny.’
‘You can call me Tom. See, I’m like you. I’ve had many names.’
Joe ignored me completely and carried on with his train of thought. ‘It’s all right. I’ll do it. See, the joke is funny cos there ain’t no law that touches us ’round here. This here ain’t an ordinary town. We’ve been helping Sheriff Downey and old P.D. out for some time now.’
P.D. Phelps Dodge. I’d been given enough information about Bisbee to know that Phelps Dodge was the major mining company in the area.
‘In actual fact,’ Joe went on, ‘we helped them instigate the Bisbee deportation. You know about that, right?’
I knew something about it. I knew that, in 1919, hundreds of striking miners had been roughly kidnapped and deported out of town.
‘So comin’ here and talkin’ about propositions and your little union ain’t gonna sway us too much. The last union men we dealt with we kicked all the way to New Mexico, and we did it with the sheriff’s seal of approval . . . Now, you really do look hot and bothered. Let’s go for a little walk and cool your blood a little . . .’
It was dark now. Desert-dark.
The air was turning chill, but I was sweating and sore and aching and my whisky-sour mouth was as dry as the grave I had been digging for over an hour.
Bullets weren’t infections. They weren’t the plague or one of the other hundred or so illnesses albas were able to resist. As with ultimate old age, there was no immunity from a bullet. And I didn’t want to die. I had to stay alive for Marion. Hendrich had convinced me we were getting closer to finding her.
At least one of them had had their revolver fixed on me the whole time I’d been digging. This situation didn’t change as they beckoned me out of the hole. And all the time their two dark Saddlebred horses stayed nibbling and whispering at each other.
‘Now,’ said Joe, as I hauled myself out, making sure I kept hold of the shovel as I did so. I leaned on it, as a kind of resting aid. ‘We ain’t buryin’ your money with ya. Empty those pockets and place all you have on the ground.’
I knew this was the moment. The only one I would get. I gave a curious glance towards the horses, causing the men to do the same. By the time Joe’s cold hard eyes were back upon me, the shovel was swinging fast towards his face. He fell back, semi-conscious, losing his hold of the gun, which landed with a thud in the dust.
‘Kill ’im,’ slurred Joe.
Louis, the one I’d gambled on being a little more cowardly, a little slower on the trigger, fired a shot as I was scrambling for Joe’s gun. The noise echoed around the desert as I felt the pain in my back, near my right shoulder. But I had Joe’s gun and one good arm, and I turned and shot Louis in the neck and he fired again but only hit the night that time. Then I shot Joe a couple of times too and there was blood slick black in the dark, and somehow inside my pain I managed to kick and roll them into the grave I had dug and put the earth back on them. I slapped the rump of one of the horses, causing it to gallop away, before I hauled myself on the other one.
The pain was beyond anything I had known, but somehow I made it away and I kept going and I kept going and I kept going across the desert and over dry hills and mountains and past a large quarry that seemed to my delirious mind like the blackness of death itself calling me towards it like the River Styx. I resisted and the horse kept walking through that night until I reached Tucson as the morning sun slowly bled its light into the sky and I found the Arizona Inn where Agnes poured alcohol on my wound and I bit into a wet towel to mask my screams as she tweezered the bullet out of my flesh.
Los Angeles, 1926
My bullet wound was healing, but there was still pain in my shoulder. I was at the Garden Court Apartments and Hotel, on Hollywood Boulevard, in the restaurant they had there. All marble and columns and grandeur. A mesmerising-looking woman with dark painted lips and a ghostly pale face sat at a table not too far away, talking to two fawning men in business suits. It was Lillian Gish, the movie star. I recognised her from Orphans of the Storm, a film set during the French Revolution.
For a moment or two, I was entranced.
I had come to love the cinema during my time in Albuquerque, where I had been stationed for the last eight years. The way you could just sit on your own in the dark and forget who you were, just let yourself feel what the film was telling you to feel for an hour or so.
‘They have them all in here,’ Hendrich was explaining discreetly as he set about his halibut in shrimp sauce. ‘Gloria Swanson, Fairbanks, Fatty Arbuckle, Valentino. Just last week Chaplin was at this very table. In your seat. He just had the soup. That was his entire meal. Just soup.’
Hendrich grinned. I had never hated that grin until now. ‘What’s the matter, Tom? Is it the beef? It can be a little overdone.’
‘The beef is fine.’
‘Oh, so it’s about what happened in Arizona?’
I almost laughed at this. ‘What else would it be about? I had to kill two men.’
‘Quiet now. I doubt Miss Gish wants to hear such things. Discretion, Tom, please.’
‘Well, I don’t see why we had to do this in the restaurant. I thought you had an apartment upstairs.’
He looked confused. ‘I like the restaurant. It’s always good to be around people. Don’t you enjoy being around people, Tom?’
‘I will tell you what I don’t enjoy . . .’
He glided his hand through the air, as if inviting me through a door. ‘Please do,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you don’t enjoy. If that makes you happy.’
>
I leaned forward to whisper. ‘I don’t enjoy fleeing a murder scene on a horse with a bullet lodged in my shoulder. A bullet. And . . . and . . .’ I was losing my flow. ‘I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to kill them.’
He sighed philosophically. ‘What was it Dr Johnson said? He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. Do you know what I think? I think you are finding yourself. You were lost. You didn’t even know who or what you were. You had no purpose. You were living in poverty. You were moping around, burning yourself to feel something. Now look. You have a purpose.’ He waited a beat or two. ‘This shrimp sauce is really divine.’
The waiter came over and poured some more wine. We concentrated on our food until he disappeared again. A piano started to play. Some of the diners leaned over the backs of their seats to have a look at the pianist for a moment or two.
‘I’m just saying I didn’t like it. Those men were never going to join the society. You should have known that. I should have been told that, Hendrich.’
‘Please, try to call me Cecil. They know me as Cecil here. My story is that I made my money in San Francisco. Property development. I helped rebuild the city. After the quake. Don’t I look like a Cecil? Call me Cecil. They’ll think I’m Cecil B. DeMille, I can make them a star. It might get me some action . . .’
He drifted off into more thought. ‘I love this town. They are all coming here now. All these young farm girls from South Dakota or Oklahoma or Europe. This city has always been the same apparently. In the Ice Age animals used to come and get stuck in the tar pits that looked like shimmering lakes and the smell of the meat would bring other animals there to be trapped in that thick black tar. Anyway, I’m a safe kind of predator. They think I’m past it at seventy-eight. Seventy-eight! Imagine that. At seventy-eight I was fucking my way around Flanders. I was incorrigible. The amount of marriage proposals I made. I was the Valentino of the Lowlands . . .’
I took a big gulp of wine. ‘I can’t do this, Hendrich, I can’t do it.’
‘Cecil, please.’
‘I am sorry I went to Dr Hutchinson. Seriously, I am. But I want my old life back. I just want to be me again.’
‘I am afraid that is, as they say, impossible. Time moves forwards. We have the luxury of time but we still can’t reverse it. We can’t stop it. We are one-way traffic, just the same as all these mayflies. You can’t simply cut away from the society any more than you can be unborn. You do understand that, don’t you, Tom? And what about your daughter, Tom? We are going to find her. We will.’
‘But you haven’t.’
‘Yet, Tom, we haven’t yet. I sense she is out there, Tom. I know she is out there. She is there, Tom.’
I said nothing. I was angry, yes, but as was so often the case with anger, it was really just fear projecting outwards. The society was nothing – it had no physical presence in the real world, there was no stone plaque outside a grand building announcing its existence. It was just Hendrich and the people who had faith in him. And yet . . . Hendrich was enough. His aptitude. Indeed, maybe it was that aptitude that caused him to reel me in again with just the right words. Maybe it wasn’t just words, either. Maybe he actually could sense she was out there.
But then a thought. ‘If your aptitude is so good, then why didn’t you know? Why didn’t you know they could have killed me?’
‘They didn’t kill you. If they had killed you then, yes, I would have made a terrible mistake. But the fact is that you are a survivor, and I knew that, and it has been proven. Obviously, we are all survivors. But you . . . I don’t know. There is something special about you. You have a desire to live. Most people who get to your age feel like everything is behind them. But when I look at you I see a thirst for the future, a yearning for it. For your daughter, yes, but for something else too. The great unknown.’
‘But what kind of life is it? Having to change who you are every eight years?’
‘You had to change who you were before. What is the difference?’
‘The difference is that I could decide. It was my life.’
He shook his head, and smiled solemnly. ‘No. You were in retreat. You were hiding from life. You were hiding, if I dare say, from yourself.’
‘But that’s what the society is for, isn’t it? To hide?’
‘No, Tom, no. You misunderstand everything. Look at us. In the centre of the most famous restaurant in a sunlit city everyone wants to visit. We are not hiding. We are not tucked away in St Albans pulling metal out of a forge. The aim of the society is to provide a structure, a system, which enables us to enhance our lives. You do the occasional favour, a spot of recruitment, and you get to live a good life. And this is how you thank me.’
‘I have just spent eight years on a farm in Albuquerque with nothing but three cows and some cacti for company. It seems the society works better for some than it does for others.’
Hendrich shook his head. ‘I have a letter for you, from Reginald Fisher. You remember? The man you recruited in Chicago?’
He handed me the letter and I read it. It was a long letter. The one line that stood out was this one, near the end. I would have betrayed God to finish myself if you had never come and seen me, but I feel so happy now, knowing I am not a freakish specimen of humanity, but part of a family.
‘All right, Arizona was a mistake. But not everything has been. Lives are lost in wars but it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t ever be fought. You had a piano, Tom. Did you play it?’
‘Five hours a day.’
‘So how many instruments can you play now?’
‘Around thirty.’
‘That’s impressive.’
‘Not really. Most of them no one wants to hear any more. It’s hard to play Gershwin on a lute.’
‘Yes.’ Hendrich ate the last of his fish. Then he stared at me earnestly. ‘You are a murderer, Tom. Without the society’s protection you would be in a very vulnerable place right now. You need us. But I don’t want you to stay out of sheer necessity, Tom . . . I hear you, I hear you. I do. And I will never forget the people whose lives you have saved by bringing them into the society. So, from now on I am going to be a little more considerate of your needs. I am going to allocate a few more resources to finding Marion. We’ve got some new people. Someone in London. Someone in New York. One in Scotland. Another in Vienna. I’ll get them working on it. And, of course, I will fund those needs. I am going to listen. I am going to help you as much as I can. I want you to thrive, Tom. I want you to find not just Marion but the future you are waiting for . . .’
A group of four men entered the room and were escorted to a table. One of them had the most recognisable face on the planet. It was Charlie Chaplin. He spotted Lillian Gish and went over and spoke to her, his calm expression punctuated by the occasional quick nervous smile. She laughed gracefully. I had breathed the same air as Shakespeare, and now I was breathing the same air as Chaplin. How could I be ungrateful?
‘We are the invisible threads of history,’ Hendrich told me, as if reading my mind. Chaplin saw us looking and tipped an invisible bowler hat in our direction.
‘See. Told you. He loves this place. Must be the soup. Now, what do you want to do with your life?’
I considered the attention Chaplin was getting, and couldn’t think of a greater nightmare. Then, as I continued to contemplate the question I stared at the pianist, in his white dinner jacket, closing his eyes and drifting away, note by note, bar by bar, unnoticed except by me.
‘That,’ I said, nodding in the pianist’s direction. ‘That is what I want to do.’
London, now
‘But why couldn’t the League of Nations stop Mussolini from entering Abyssinia?’
Aamina is in the front row. Serious, frowning, alert, holding a pencil, she is wearing a T-shirt that says ‘Proud Snowflake’.
I am giving a lesson on the causes of the Second World War, trying to go back from 1939 through the 1930s, talking about Italy taking over
Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, in 1935, as well as Hitler’s rise in 1933, the Spanish Civil War and the Great Depression.
‘Well, they tried, but in a really half-hearted way. Economic sanctions, but nothing that was majorly enforced. But the thing is, at the time, a lot of people didn’t realise what they were dealing with. You see, when you look at events in history there is a two-way perspective. Forwards and back. But at the time everything is one way. No one knew where fascism was heading.’
The lesson is going okay and my headache isn’t too bad – I think having made peace with Camille helped – but maybe because of this I slip into a kind of autopilot. I am not really thinking about what I am saying.
‘The news about Abyssinia felt like a real turning point, though. It made people realise something was happening. Not just with Germany but Italy too. With the world order. I remember reading a newspaper on the day Mussolini declared victory and I . . .’
Fuck.
I stop.
Realise what I have said.
Aamina, sharp as her pencil, also notices. ‘You said that as if you were there,’ she says.
A couple of other pupils nod in agreement.
‘No. I wasn’t there, but I felt I was. That’s the thing with history. You inhabit it. It’s another present . . .’
Aamina makes an amused face.
I continue. I cover my tracks, I think. It is a pretty minor mistake to make and yet it is the kind of mistake I never used to make.