I answered, groggy and bewildered, which was precisely how he intended me to be.
“Mr August?”
His voice, instantly recognisable. Full wakefulness immediately; the blood raced so fast in my ears I wondered he couldn’t hear it as I pressed the phone against my body.
“Who is this?” I demanded, crawling across my bed for the light switch.
“It’s Simon Ransome,” he replied. “We met at Mrs Cynthia-Wright’s soirée?”
Was that what it had been? Perhaps. “Ransome… I’m sorry, I don’t quite—”
“Forgive me, you probably don’t recall. I’m an avid reader of your works…”
“Of course!” Was my jubilation at recognition a little too much, a little too forced? This was America, a land of big expressions, and the phone was not the medium for subtlety. “I’m sorry, Mr Ransome, of course I remember–it’s a touch early in the morning, is all…”
“Good God!” Was his regret a little too forced, a little too over the top? Perhaps, I mused, when this was done we could swap notes on the qualities of each other’s deceptions? I could think of no one whose opinion I would value more in this regard. “I’m so sorry. What time is it there?”
“Two in the morning.”
“Good God!” again, and really I was beginning to feel I should be taking points off Vincent’s otherwise flawless performance. I made a mental note to myself that empty banal sounds were far more apposite than grand exclamations of sentiment when it came to such matters. Then again, if his operating assumption was that I was a traumatised innocent stuck in my second life, perhaps he considered it only apt to treat me like an idiot? “Harry, I’m so sorry,” and again there it was, the slip of a familiar first name where no such terms should have yet existed. “I was going to invite you to join me for drinks next week, as I believe I’ll be in your neighbourhood. How thoughtless of me to forget the time! I’ll call back later–a thousand apologies!”
He hung up before I could begin to let him off the hook.
We met for drinks.
The bar was a haunt for lobbyists and journalists, and beneath the low-wattage bulbs and against the sound of slow jazz, a brief truce was declared and the soldiers were allowed to cross the lines to join strangers at their tables, discussing football, baseball and the latest twists and turns in the ongoing battles of the civil rights movement.
Vincent arrived ten minutes late, dressed in an outrageous white suit and braces. He was, he explained, a layabout with very little do with his life, but the world I inhabited fascinated him, and he hoped I didn’t mind his picking my brains. Not at all, I replied, and he insisted on buying the drinks.
I had eaten vast amounts of cheese in preparation for this moment, and drunk copious quantities of water. There is an art to getting drunk in the line of duty, and I was determined that he would catch me neither shirking in my efforts nor off guard as a consequence. The only downside was the regular need to nip to the toilet, but as prices went, I’ve paid worse.
As we talked, it became evident that Vincent’s notion of rich layabout was not necessarily the same as that held by his peers. “Father left me a lot,” he explained with a dismissive shrug, “including a degree I never use, a house I never live in and a factory I never visit, but really I can’t be bothered with all that.”
Sure you can’t, Vincent. Sure you can’t.
“Your father must have been a rich man.”
“So-so, so-so.”
The immortal words of the extremely wealthy, whose natural financial saturation point is so high they have been buoyed above the realms of ordinary mortals, and can perceive vast riches beyond the dreams of lesser fishes. Thus, “So-so, so-so”, a promise of wealth yet undiscovered.
The question of Vincent’s father dangled between us and, as the bait seemed so juicy and tender, I ignored it.
“So what’s a guy like you,” I wondered, “doing talking to a hack like me?”
“Didn’t I say? I’m an admirer of your work.”
“Is that it? I mean, you’re not… what, looking to start your own newspaper, or get a job in the trade or any of that?”
“Good God no! I wouldn’t know where to begin. Tell you what though…”
Here it came, the conspiratorial shuffle across the couch, the bowed head, furtive glances at his neighbours: “You wouldn’t have some insider dirt, would you?”
What kind of dirt, dear Liza, dear Liza?
“My accountant chappy wants me to buy into a company doing something terribly technical with harmonic resonance, whatever that is. I usually just let him handle these sorts of things, but the investment is really quite high and I wasn’t sure if it was going to go anywhere. What do you think?”
I think, Vincent, that when you decided to deploy the notion of an “accountant chappy”, you pushed your hand a little too far.
I think it would be easy to kill you now.
I think that, despite everything, I am smiling.
Smiling at your act. At your charm. At your easy manner and little dirty jokes. Smiling because for ten years we smiled and worked together, and for only a few days did you attempt to destroy my life. Smiling because that’s the habit that has been set into my features in your presence, though I loathe you beyond all comprehension. Smiling because, despite the lies, despite knowing all I do about you, I like you, Vincent Rankis. I still like you.
“What’s the name of the company?” I asked. “Maybe I can check them out?”
“Would you? I don’t want you to think that was what this is about–I know that people use others all the time–but honestly, Harry–may I call you Harry–I have been such an admirer of your work I just wanted to meet you, this other business is really on the side…”
“It’s no problem, Mr Ransome–Simon? Simon, it’s no problem at all.”
“I really don’t want to inconvenience you.”
“No inconvenience. Just doing my job.”
“At least let me pay you for your time! Expenses? Expenses at the very least?”
I remembered how easy it was to bribe a good man. Was this Harry August, the Harry I was playing, a good man? I decided he was, he had to be, and like all good men in the presence of Vincent Rankis, he would have to take a fall.
“You buy the dinner,” I replied, “and we’ll call it even.”
In the end I also let him pay for travel too.
The company was everything I should have expected it to be. In the ordinary way of things, it should have been working on developing the next generation of TVs, refining the oscillations in the cathode-ray tube, studying interference and induction through electromagnetic effect. But it, like so many other institutions across the US, had received five pieces of yellow paper on which were laid out in careful detail specs, diagrams and figures relating to technologies some twenty years ahead of their time, and now the company was…
“Doing really exciting work, Mr August, really exciting, into single-particle beam resonance.”
And what did that mean? For my article, of course, for the readers to understand.
“Well, Mr August, if we take, say, a beam of light–a high-intensity beam of light, such as a laser…”
Of course, lasers in the 1960s, that well-known household tool.
“… and we fire it at an electron…”
Naturally, but naturally we spend the 1960s firing lasers at sole electrons–where had I been for the last eight hundred and eighty years?
“… we can see a transfer of energy occurring and–are you familiar with the notion of wave particle duality?”
Let’s imagine that I am.
“F… antastic! So you must know that what we consider light is now understood to be both a particle–photons–and a wave, and it is through harmonic resonance between these waves, which are also particles, that we can begin to see… Are you sure you understand this, Mr August? You look deeply concerned.”
Do I? Bad lunch. Let’s call it a bad lunch.
/> “I am so sorry, Mr August. I hadn’t realised! Would you like to sit down?”
Afterwards, I wrote my report for Vincent. I could see the application at once, and more importantly why Vincent would be looking to use the company in question, as its research could be more than useful for his dream device, the quantum mirror, which would look at a single particle and from that derive the answers to everything. Simple, Harry, so simple–if you have the courage to do it.
He was still building it, I knew, somewhere deep in the heart of America–that was the purpose of this whole exercise. I, however, could show no knowledge of the same so wrote up my analysis based largely on the personalities of the people I’d met and whether they seemed to have a viable financial plan, rather than on the science.
We met over dinner–he paid–and he hummed and ah’d and gasped like an expert as he flicked through my pages, finally throwing the whole thing on to the table with a clap of his hands and exclaiming, “This is perfect, Harry, just perfect! Waiter–more sake!”
It was 1969 and sushi was the new fashion in America. The polar ice caps were melting, the skies were turning orange-yellow with the smear of industry, the Soviet bloc was collapsing and there were rumours of a pill for black people fighting for civil rights in the US which would turn their skin baby-white. This, proclaimed Nixon, was the true path to equality. The only reason the world hadn’t been nuked, I concluded, was that no one could really see the point of trying.
“Tell me about yourself, Harry. You’re British, right?” Here we are, the point-of-origin question, slipped in so subtly, so gently between courses that I almost didn’t notice it appear. “You got much family?”
“No,” I replied, honestly enough. “My parents are both dead, a few years back now. I never had any brothers or sisters.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. They must have been very proud of you, though?”
“I think so. I hope so. They were good people, but with me working over here, and them living over there… You know how it is.”
“Can’t say I do, Harry, but I guess I can understand. You from London?”
A good, American question. If in doubt, assume the Brit is a Londoner. “No, further north. Leeds.”
“Can’t say I know it.”
God, but he lied beautifully; it was a masterclass. If I hadn’t been concentrating so hard on my own deceit, I would have stood up and applauded. I shrugged, the half-shrug of the restrained Englishman in no great hurry to talk about difficult things, and he recognised the signal and had the good sense to move swiftly on.
I worked several more jobs for Vincent, on the side.
Trips to odd companies, interviews with potential “investors”. The pattern was clear to see, and with each new venture I allowed myself to sink just a little deeper into his pocket. In many ways the techniques he used to corrupt me were the mirrors of techniques I had used in my previous life to corrupt others: a dinner became a weekend away, a weekend away became a regular meeting at his local health club. We dressed in not-quite-matching white shorts and T-shirts and played squash like the rapidly middle-ageing men society expected us to be, and had coffee with other members of the club after, and talked about news, and politics, and whether cold fusion would be the way forward. The day a group of Lebanese radicals finally unleashed a chemical bomb on Beirut, I sat with Vincent in the recreation room of the health club and watched journalists in gas masks hiding behind their armoured trucks as the living and the dying crawled out of the smoke-stained killing ground of the city, and I knew we had done this, we had unleashed this technology on the world, and felt the cold hand of inevitability on my back. In 1975 I bought my first mobile phone, and by 1977 was writing articles on telephone scams, computer hacking, fraudulent emails and the corruption of the modern media. The world was moving forward too fast. My time with Vincent offered an idyllic retreat from it all, as he invited me to attend parties at his grand mansion in the heart of Maine, away from the chaos and the rapidly rising body count. He never mentioned his research, his work, and I never enquired.
His father, the mysterious source of his wealth, turned out to be a real individual who had died in 1942, a hero in the Pacific war. His grave was conveniently unmarked and untraceable, but I had little doubt, as I trawled quietly through Vincent’s records, that even if there was a body to examine, it would show about as much genetic connection to Vincent as my DNA did to the mysterious Mr and Mrs August of Leeds. It would take more–much more–to spin Vincent’s point of origin out of him.
In 1978, the year the Berlin Wall fell and the first attempt at the Channel Tunnel caused a cave-in beneath the sea which killed twelve men and briefly stalled European attempts at economic recovery following the bursting of the dot.com bubble, I was invited, as I had now grown accustomed to being, to another party at Vincent’s mansion. The invitation, trimmed with gold, was clearly to a large social affair, but large social affairs served my purposes, for the repetition and volume of the lies Vincent was forced to tell at such gatherings only made it easier to detect the anomalies in his reporting. Nothing was said as to the occasion, but a handwritten note at the bottom of my card told me to “Hang on to your pyjamas!”
He enjoyed toying with me, and, in my way, I enjoyed being toyed with. The years had led him to relax a little in my presence, perhaps to believe that I was as harmless as I claimed–Harry August, limited memory, dubious reputation–and hell, but he knew how to hold a party.
I arrived in the evening down the familiar gravel drive to the familiar old grand red-brick mansion which he called his “April–May, August–October” home, finding these the seasons when Maine was at its most pleasing. Where he spent November–March and June–July was anyone’s guess, but I couldn’t help but wonder if he wore a radiation badge while there. If a Geiger-Müller counter could have done anything more than confirm my suspicions, I would have packed one beneath my dinner jacket, but as it was I needed nothing more than my own awareness of the same to let me conclude that Vincent was still working on the quantum mirror. I wondered how far ahead he’d come.
Five lives, Harry. Five more lives and I think we’ll have it!
Those words had been spoken to me two lives since. Was he still on schedule?
“Harry!” He greeted me at the door, embracing me with a Frenchman’s charm and a Yankee’s enthusiasm. “You’re in the pink room–you are staying, aren’t you?”
“Your invite said to hang on to my pyjamas, which I could only assume was an invitation for the weekend.”
“Marvellous! Come inside, the other guests are already beginning to arrive. I apologise if I have to talk to them, you know how it is–contacts contacts contacts.”
The pink room in question was a small room in a tower projecting from one side of the building designed by an architect who’d decided that medieval was modern. It had its own tiny toilet and shower, and a picture on one wall showing a much younger Vincent proudly holding aloft the largest hunting rifle I’d ever seen, one foot on the carcass of a tiger. It had taken me a solid twenty minutes of analysis to determine that the image was in fact a fake, like so many images of Vincent sprawled around the house.
The chatter was indeed rising from downstairs, and as the sun settled below the horizon, the lawn beneath my room was striped with bright beams of tungsten light spilling out of the windows of every room of the house. A band struck up country tunes of a kind designed to rouse the soul, without necessarily inducing embarrassing deviations towards a “Yee-hah!” in a dignified environment. I donned my suit and headed downstairs.
There were some familiar faces in the crowd, men and women I’d been gradually introduced to over the years of my acquaintance with Vincent–Simon Ransome to all and sundry assembled. There were cordial handshakes and enquiries about mutual contacts, friends, family and, as increasingly began to happen at this time of life, health.
“God, I’ve taken to measuring my blood pressure at home–I go to the doctor and it just
soars through the roof!”
“I’ve been told to watch my sugar.”
“I’ve been warned to watch the fat!”
“Cholesterol, cholesterol, how I dream of a little more cholesterol in my life.”
A few more years, I reflected, and my body would begin its usual course of shutting down from the bone marrow out. A few more years, and if I wasn’t any closer to learning the secrets of Vincent Rankis, would this life count as a waste?
A sudden tinkling of silver on glass and a burst of polite applause, and there was Vincent, standing by the now-silent band, drink raised and face smiling proudly upon all assembled.
“Ladies and gentlemen–” the beginning of a speech, God how I hated speeches “–thank you all for coming here today. I’m sure you’re wondering why…”
In my time I’ve attended eighty-seven weddings, seventy-nine funerals, twenty-nine bar mitzvahs, eleven bat mitzvahs, twenty-three confirmations, thirty-two baptisms, eight divorce tribunals as a witness for one side or another, thirteen divorce tribunals as a mutual friend to cry on, seven hundred and eighty-four birthday parties of which one hundred and eleven had involved a stripper, twelve of them involving, in fact, the same stripper, one hundred and three anniversary parties and seven remarriages after relationship difficulties, and of these I could think of maybe only fourteen speeches that were even remotely, even passably…
“… and so, ladies and gentlemen, I give you, the bride to be.”
I applauded because everyone else did, on automatic, and looked up to behold the linear mortal who Vincent had decided to occupy himself with this time. Would she be a Frances, chosen to make an unseen Hugh jealous while playing tennis on the lawn? Or Leticia, perhaps, pretty but vacant; perhaps a Mei, adding that air of respectability as he went about his nefarious deeds, or a Lizzy, a companion in dark hours, a figure who was nine parts being there to only one part chemistry. She stepped to the front of the room, a woman with a hint of grey streaking the edge of her hair, dressed in a mermaid dress the colour of clotted cream, and she was