Standing outside, I was nervous. But at least it was a feeling. I wasn’t used to them recently.
‘He will be testing you, even when he isn’t testing you. It is all a test.’ We climbed the stairs. ‘He can read people – faces, movements – better than anyone I have met. Hendrich has developed, over the years, a seemingly unnatural aptitude.’
‘An aptitude for what?’
Agnes shrugged. ‘He just calls it aptitude. It’s an aptitude for people. An understanding of people. Apparently, between the ages of five hundred and six hundred, your cerebral talents become heightened to a point beyond a normal human range. He has dealt with so many people, in so many different cultures, that he can read faces and body language with an astounding accuracy. He knows if he can trust people.’
We were there, in the French flat – we didn’t use the word ‘apartment’ in America back then – on the top floor of the Dakota building, with Central Park spread beneath us.
‘I try to pretend it’s my garden,’ said the tall lean bald sharp-suited man at the window. He held a cane, which he clutched tightly. As much for show as for his arthritis, which hadn’t yet taken him over.
‘It’s a very impressive view,’ I told him.
‘Yes. And these buildings grow by the day. Please, sit down.’
Elegant was the word. There was an elegant Steinway piano and beside it an elegant, expensive-looking leather sofa. Standing lamps, a mahogany desk, a chandelier. Agnes made herself comfortable on the sofa and gestured to a chair near the desk. Hendrich was on the other side of the desk, but still standing, staring out of that window. She gave me a firm nod, to indicate that I had better sit right away.
Meanwhile Hendrich stayed staring at Central Park.
‘How have you survived, Tom?’ He turned to face me. He was old, I realised. If he had been an ordinary human – a ‘mayfly’ as Agnes called them, straight-faced – you would have guessed his age as seventy. In our days, right now, adjusting for inflation, you’d go higher. Eighty plus. He looked older then than I have ever known him to look.
‘You have lived such a long time. And from what I hear you haven’t been doing so in the best circumstances. What stopped you from jumping off a bridge? What drives you?’
I looked at him. His cheeks sagged and his eyes had so many bags under them he reminded me of a melting candle.
I didn’t want to say the real reason. If Marion was alive I didn’t want Hendrich knowing about her. I didn’t trust anyone.
‘Come on, we are here to help you. You were born in a château. You were made for fine things, Tom. We will restore you to that life. And to your daughter.’
I felt things contract around me. ‘My daughter?’
‘I read Dr Hutchinson’s report. About Marion. Don’t worry, we will search for her. We will find her, I promise you. If she’s alive we will find her. We will find all of us. And as new generations emerge we will find them too.’
I was scared, but also, I confess, a little thrilled at the idea that I could get help in my search for Marion. I felt, suddenly, less alone.
There was a decanter of whisky on his desk. And three glasses. He poured a round of whisky without asking if we wanted one. As it happened, I did, to calm my nerves.
He read the label. ‘Look at this. “Wexford Old Irish Malt Whiskey Liquor. A Taste of the Past.” A taste of the past! When I was a young man, whisky didn’t even exist.’ His accent was hard to place. Not fully American. ‘But I’m a good deal older than you.’
He sighed wistfully and sat down behind the vast mahogany desk.
‘It’s strange, isn’t it? All the things that we have lived to see. In my case it’s quite a list: spectacles, the printing press, newspapers, rifles, compasses, the telescope . . . the pendulum clock . . . the piano . . . Impressionist paintings . . . photography . . . Napoleon . . . champagne . . . semi-colons . . . billboards . . . the hot dog . . .’
He must have seen the confused look on my face.
‘Of course, Agnes. The poor man has never had a hot dog before. We must take him to Coney Island. They have the best in the whole city.’
‘They sincerely do,’ said Agnes, who seemed to have lost a little of her sharpness around him.
‘Is it food?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’ He laughed, drily. ‘It’s a sausage. A special sausage. A Dachshund sausage. A special little frankfurter. It’s heaven in a bun. It’s what all of civilisation has been heading towards . . . If I’d have known, growing up in Flanders, that one day I would get to taste a hot dog. Well!’
It seemed strange. Had I been sent across the ocean – leaving a man dead behind me – to indulge in a conversation about sausages?
‘Pleasure. That is the aim, isn’t it? To enjoy good things . . . fine things. Food. Liquor. Art. Poetry. Music. Cigars.’
He took a cigar from his desk, along with a chrome lighter.
‘Would you like a cigar?’
‘I don’t enjoy tobacco.’
He looked disappointed. Handed one to Agnes instead. ‘It’s good for the chest.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said, sipping my whisky.
He lit their cigars and said, ‘The finer things. The sensual pleasures. There is no other meaning than that, I’ve discovered. There is nothing else.’
‘Love?’ I said.
‘What about that?’
Hendrich smiled at Agnes. When the smile returned to me there was a menace to it. He moved the topic on. ‘I have no idea why you took it upon yourself to visit a doctor about your condition. Maybe you thought, now superstitions like witchcraft aren’t so prevalent, that it was a safe time to do so?’
‘I thought it would help people. People like us. To have a medical explanation.’
‘I am sure Agnes has already indicated why this was naïve.’
‘A little, yes.’
‘The truth is this: there is more danger now than there has ever been. The advances being made in science and medicine are not advances to be welcomed: germ theory and microbiology and immunology. Last year they found the vaccine for typhoid. What you won’t know is that in pursuit of their research the inventors of the vaccine capitalised on the work of the Institute for Experimental Research in Berlin.’
‘Surely a typhoid vaccination is a good thing?’
‘Not when the research was conducted at the expense of us.’ He clenched his jaw slightly, trying to keep his anger out of view. Agnes’ stiff silence made me worry even more. Maybe there was a gun in his desk. Maybe this had been a kind of test and I had failed and now he was going to put a bullet in my head.
‘Scientists’ – he said the word as if it tasted of sulphur – ‘are the new witchfinders. You know about witchfinders, don’t you? I know you do.’
‘He knows about witchfinders,’ assured Agnes, blowing a thin stream of smoke towards the standing lamp.
‘But what you don’t know is that the witch trials never ended. It just goes by a different name. We are their dead frogs. The institute knows of us.’ He leaned over the desk, dropping ash onto a fresh copy of the New York Tribune, his stare burning like the butt of his cigar. ‘Do you understand? There are members of the scientific community who do know about us.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘Not many. But a few. In Berlin. They have no interest in us as human beings. Indeed, they don’t even see us as human beings. They imprisoned two of us. Tortured them in the laboratory where they kept their guinea pigs. A man and a woman. The woman escaped. She is part of the society now. She still lives in Germany, in a village in the Bavarian countryside, but we got her a new life and name. She helps us when we need her. And we help her.’
‘I didn’t know this.’
‘You’re not meant to.’
I noticed that the park was cluttered with fallen trees.
A bird landed on the windowsill.
I didn’t recognise it. Birds were different here. A small robust yellow creature with dull grey wings, it jerked its head towards the window. Then th
e other way. I never tired of the way birds moved when they weren’t in flight. It was a series of tableaux rather than continuous movement. Staccato. Stuck moments.
‘Your daughter could be in danger. We all could. We need to work together, you understand?’
‘I do.’
‘There is one last question I need to ask you,’ Hendrich said, after a sip of whisky.
‘Please do.’
‘Do you want to survive? I mean, really? Do you want to stay alive?’
I had long asked myself this question. The answer was usually yes, because I didn’t want to die while I still had a daughter, possibly still alive, and yet it was very difficult to say I wanted to survive. Ever since Rose, it had been a pendulum between the two possibilities. To be or not to be. But in that lavish apartment, with that yellow bird still on the ledge, the answer seemed clearer. From this height, with the hard blue sky and bold new city in front of me, I felt closer to Marion. America made you think in the future tense. ‘Yes. Yes, I do want to survive.’
‘Well, to survive we must work together.’
The bird flew away.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Right. Work together.’
‘Don’t look so worried. We are not a religious sect. Our aim is to stay alive, yes, but only so we can enjoy life. We have no gods here, save maybe Aphrodite. And Dionysus.’ He looked wistful for a moment. ‘Agnes, are you heading up to Harlem?’
‘Yes. I’m going to see an old friend, and then sedate myself and sleep for a week.’
Light gleamed like a jewel on the decanter. The sight made Hendrich happy. ‘Look! The sun is out. Shall we take a walk in the park?’
An uprooted maple tree was in our path.
‘Hurricane,’ Hendrich explained. ‘Killed some people a few weeks ago, sailors mainly. The park keepers have been a bit slow to do the clear-up.’
I stared at the roots, spreading like tentacles. ‘Must have been ferocious.’
Hendrich smiled at me. ‘It was quite a show.’
He stared down at the scattered earth and leaves on the path.
‘The immigrant experience. Right there. The wind comes and suddenly you’re not in the ground any more. And your roots are out on show and looking strange and unfamiliar. But you’ve been uprooted before, right? You’ve uprooted yourself. You’ve had to, surely.’
I nodded. ‘Many times.’
‘It shows.’
I was trying to take this as a compliment. It was difficult. ‘The trick is to stay upright. You know how to move and stay upright?’
‘How?’
‘You have to match the hurricane. You have to be your own storm. You have to . . .’
He stopped. His metaphor was running out of steam. I noticed how shiny his shoes were. I had never seen shoes like them.
‘We are different, Tom,’ he said eventually. ‘We are not other people. We carry the past with us. We see it everywhere. And sometimes that can be dangerous, and we need to help each other.’ His hand was now on my shoulder, as if he was telling me something of the deepest importance. ‘The past is never gone. It just hides.’
We walked slowly around the maple tree.
Manhattan rose out of the ground, ahead of us, like a new type of storm-proof forest.
‘We have to be above them. Do you understand? For our future survival, we have to be selfish.’
We passed a couple wrapped up in overcoats, laughing at some secret joke. ‘Your life is changing. The world is changing. It is ours. We just have to make sure most of the mayflies never know about us.’
I thought of a body floating along the Thames.
‘But to kill Dr Hutchinson . . .’
‘This is a war, Tom. It is an unseen war, but it is a war. We have to protect ourselves.’
He lowered his voice as two smart-suited men with identical moustaches rode by us on black bicycles. The bicycles had equal-sized wheels, which seemed a very modern development to me.
‘Who is this Omai?’ Hendrich whispered. His eyebrows raised like sparrow wings.
‘Sorry?’
‘Dr Hutchinson wrote about him. From the South Pacific. Who is he?’
I laughed nervously. It was strange having someone know your biggest secrets. ‘He was an old friend. I knew him back in the last century. He came to London for a while, but he doesn’t want to be found. I haven’t seen him for over a hundred years.’
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Fine.’
Then Hendrich opened his jacket and pulled out two beige tickets from the inside pocket. He handed me one.
‘Tchaikovsky. Tonight. The Chamber Music Hall. Hottest ticket in town. You need to see the bigger picture, Tom. All this time alive and you still can’t see it. But you will, you will. For the sake of your daughter. For the sake of yourself. Trust me, you will . . .’ He leaned in and grinned. ‘And if not, well, you might find yourself out of time altogether.’
We sat in the plush red seats, and when the woman with the extravagant claret-red dress – puff-sleeved, high-necked, bell-skirted, ornately embroidered décolletage – next to Hendrich stood up and left for the restroom, he tilted his head towards me and surreptitiously pointed out a celebrity in attendance.
‘Man on balcony . . . leaning over . . . next to the lady in the green dress. The one everyone is looking at while pretending they aren’t.’ I saw a genial rosy-skinned man with a round owlish face and a neatly trimmed white beard. ‘Andrew Carnegie. Titan of industry. Richer than Rockefeller. More generous too . . . But, look, he’s an old man. What’s he got left? Another decade? Maybe a bit more? Yet every single piece of Carnegie steel in every railroad across this country will be there long after him. This hall, built with spare change, will be standing when he is six feet under the earth. That’s why he built it. So his name will live long into the future. This is what the rich do. Once they know they can survive comfortably and their children can survive comfortably they set about working on their legacy. Such a sadness to that word, don’t you think? Legacy. What a meaningless thing. All that work for a future in which they don’t appear. And what is legacy, Mr Hazard? What is legacy but the most empty and mediocre substitute for what we have. Steel and money and fancy concert halls don’t give you immortality.’
‘We aren’t immortal.’
He smiled. ‘Look at me, Tom. I look the same age as him. But in reality I am younger than a baby. I’ll still be here in the year two thousand.’
I risked offending him. ‘But how do you feel inside? The thing that has always worried me is the idea of spending several lifetimes as an old man.’
And for a moment I thought I had offended him. I thought I had overstepped an invisible line. And maybe I had, but he just smiled at me and said, ‘Life is life. So long as I can hear music and so long as I can still enjoy oysters and champagne . . .’
‘So you aren’t in pain?’
‘I have some bone trouble, yes. It keeps me awake at night from time to time. And I am no longer entirely immune to colds and fevers. You will notice this as you get older. All those physical benefits of being an alba begin to fade. You catch things. You become more like them. The biological shield drops. But I am good with pain. Small price to pay for being alive.
‘Life is the ultimate privilege, so I am among the most privileged people on the planet. You should be grateful too. You will still be here deep into the next millennium. Beyond me. Beyond Agnes. You are a god, Tom. A walking god. We are gods and they are mayflies. You need to learn how to enjoy your deific existence.’
A frail-looking man with an intense expression and thinning hair walked towards the centre of the stage. He stood in front of the crowd and gave the semblance of a smile. The whole hall erupted in applause. He stayed there, silent, just staring out at us for a while. And then he – Tchaikovsky – turned towards the little lectern that was on the stage, picked up his baton and held it in the air. He paused a moment. It was like watching an old wizard with a wand, summoning the energy needed to cast the spell. r />
The hall fell silent. I had never heard a silence like it. The whole hall seemed to be holding its breath. It felt civilised and modern. It felt refined and tantalising all at once, like a polite collective pre-orgasm.
Time slowed, inside that moment.
Then the music began.
I hadn’t enjoyed music for years. So I sat in my seat waiting, as always, for nothing at all.
After a blast of trumpets the violins and cellos were left on their own for a while, creating a noise that started small and tender, and rose to create a kind of symphonic storm.
And, yes, it did nothing at first. But then, somehow, it got in.
No. Not got in. That’s the wrong way of putting it. Music doesn’t get in. Music is already in. Music simply uncovers what is there, makes you feel emotions that you didn’t necessarily know you had inside you, and runs around waking them all up. A rebirth of sorts.
There was such a yearning and energy to it. I closed my eyes. I could not describe here on the page how I felt. The very reason such music exists is because it is a language that couldn’t be communicated in any other way. But all I can say is that I felt suddenly alive again.
As the trumpets and French horns and bass drum thundered in, it had such power my heart quickened and my mind felt dizzy. When I opened my eyes I saw Tchaikovsky with his baton, seemingly pulling the music right out of the air, as if music was something already in the atmosphere that you just had to locate.
Then, when it was all over, the composer seemed to deflate again. Even as the whole hall got to its feet and showered him with wave after wave of applause, and the odd roar of ‘Bravo!’, he gave the smallest of smiles and the smallest of bows.
‘He pisses over Brahms from a mountain, don’t you think?’ Hendrich whispered to me at one point.
I had no idea. I just knew it was good to be back inside the world of feeling.
I realised, even at the time, that the visit to the Chamber Music Hall was all part of the sales technique. Hendrich’s way of getting me inside. Not only would he find my daughter, I would have a good life in the process. I didn’t yet understand what I was really being sold, but by the time that became clear I had already bought in. I had been sold, in reality, since he first mentioned Marion. But now I was starting to believe Hendrich’s hype. That the Albatross Society was a way not just to find my daughter, but also myself.