Chapter 36
Blackmail is surprisingly difficult to pull off. The art lies in convincing the target that whatever harm they do themselves–for, by definition, you are compelling them rather than coaxing them into obedience–is less than the harm which will be caused by the revelation of the secrets in your power. More often than not the blackmailer overplays their hand, and nothing is achieved except grief. A light touch and, more importantly, an understanding of when to back away is vital to achieve success.
I've employed plenty of dirty tricks to achieve my goals; employing them against people I like is harder. Professor Gulakov was a man I liked. I liked him from the moment he answered his door with a polite smile of enquiry, a grizzle-chinned man in a thick brown jumper, to the moment he offered me thin boiled coffee in a china cup no thicker than a fingernail and invited me to sit down in a room laden with scrounged, begged and borrowed books. In another life I might have enjoyed his company, shared thoughts on science and its possibilities, hypothesised and debated with him. But I was here with a very precise purpose, and he was my means to achieve it.
"Professor," I said, "I am looking for a man by the name of Vitali Karpenko. Can you find him for me?"
"I don't know this man," he replied. "Why do you want to see him?"
"A relative of his died recently. I was instructed by his lawyer to find Karpenko. There is a matter of some money."
"Of course, I'd help you if I can…"
"I'm told Karpenko is a scientist."
"I don't know all the scientists in Russia!" He laughed, uneasily swirling the coffee around his cup.
"But you could find out."
"Well I… I could make some enquiries."
"Discreetly. As I said, there is a question of some money, and his relative did not die within Russia." Gulakov's face twitched–he was beginning to sense where this might lead. "I understand," I went on calmly, "that you have dealings with scientists outside the Soviet Union?"
His hand stopped still, but the coffee kept tumbling around inside his cup, whipping up the granules from the bottom. "No," he said at last. "I don't."
"A professor in MIT, do you not correspond with him?" My smile was fixed, but I couldn't quite meet Gulakov's gaze, my eyes transfixed by the coffee in his cup. "There's no harm in that," I added brightly, "no harm at all. Science should be beyond the boundaries of politics, should it not? I merely suggest that a man of your influence and ability should have no trouble–discreetly–finding this Vitali Karpenko, if you wanted to. The family would be very appreciative."
My work done, I shifted the subject at once and for another half an hour talked about Einstein and Bohr, and the question of the neutron bomb, though in truth Gulakov made little more than empty noises to my speech, and then I left him alone in silence to consider his next move.
Gulakov didn't call for three days.
On the fourth the phone rang in the Cronus Club, and he was there and frightened.
"Kostya Prekovsky?" he asked. "It's the professor. I may have something for you."
He was talking slowly–a little too slowly–and there was a clicking on the line like the amplified rattle of an insect's skin.
"Can you meet me in twenty minutes? At mine?"
"I can't get to yours in twenty," I lied. "Can you make it to Avtovo Metro?"
His silence–a little too long. Then, "Half an hour?"
"I'll see you there, Professor."
I was reaching for my coat even before the receiver was down. "Olga!" I sang out, voice echoing round the hard, empty corridors of the Cronus Club. "Do you keep a gun anywhere on the premises?"
I had never fully understood the hypocrisy of the Soviet metro systems, for it seemed that the world above and the world below ground were from different universes, let alone different times. The Leningrad Metro had been open less than a year, extensions already planned, and the stations on its one gleaming line were palaces of crystal decadence. Twisting columns and mosaics which, at their best, were triumphs of modern art and, at their worst, gaudy declarations of vanity and ego, lined the tiled platforms like palace viewing galleries. It was a system where the clock didn't count down to the next train, but up from the last, daring the passenger to believe that, in this perfect world, you would never have to wait more than three minutes for anything.
It was also, in terms of any pursuers who might be out there, something of an unknown factor. The system presented problems to local agents in that, in the few months since it had been open, it seemed unlikely they would have developed a method of operating in it, and crowds have always been a friend to anonymity. So, for that matter, has Russia's need for large warm hats and bulky clothes worn tight against the winter. Short of a society where religion obligated modesty, a Russian winter could do wonders for thwarting facial recognition.
I arrived early, and so did they. They were easy to recognise, men in dark coats who didn't board the train when it came. They were uncomfortable, shifty spots of gloom beneath the brilliant bright walls, aware that when it came to discretion they weren't handling themselves particularly well. One was trying to read a copy of Pravda, the other stared at the one-line Metro map with the intensity of a snake trying to work out if it could swallow a goat. On my second pass through the station I also detected the woman, who was doing far better. She'd brought a baby in a pram, a prop the merits of which I was divided on, and her air of dedication towards the infant put the distracted quality of the other two watchers to shame. I caught the train out of Avtovo, rode it a couple of stops, then caught the opposite direction back. I repeated this pattern twice, overshooting Avtovo the first time, looking for the professor. When he turned up, he was the most nervous of them all. Standing awkwardly by a wall, shifting from one foot to the other, he looked as if he wanted to pace but wasn't sure if pacing was appropriate. He held a book under one arm, cover out. It was The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory by W. Heisenberg. Thinking about it retrospectively, I can't help but wonder if the book was an attempt by the professor to warn me that he was being observed. It was certainly a curious choice of reading matter being so prominently displayed, and perhaps he hoped the incongruity, as much as anything else, would alert me to something being amiss. Whatever the case, the fact remained that the professor was under observation but probably had the knowledge I needed. As I rode through Avtovo and beyond, I considered my next move. Attempting to acquire information from him now would be dangerous to say the least; but then, if I failed to make the meeting, there was every possibility that he would be whisked away and my best chance at finding Karpenko gone. It isn't always easy for ouroborans to make bold decisions, spoilt as we are by the luxury of time, but this seemed too good an opportunity to miss, and the consequence of not acting on it too dangerous. I headed back to Avtovo station, and as the train began to pull into the platform, pulled my hat down over my eyes and shouted, "Stop, thief!"
There was no thief to stop, but speed in a crowd can often compensate for this particular problem. I barrelled through the shoulders of the people on the train, elbowing them aside with no regard for age or disposition, until, as the train slowed to a halt and the people turned to stare, I raised my head and shouted, "He's got a gun!" To make my point, I drew my own and fired it once into the wall of the carriage. The doors opened, and the stampede began.
There were certain disadvantages to my technique, not least being that the point of origin of the surge of people was a clear indicator of where I was. However, this was to a degree countered by the chaos that reigned on the platform and by the herd mentality of the people around as they perceived the carriage emptying, heard the cry of "A gun, a gun!" and made their own, potentially unwise, decisions. I like to think I contributed in my own way to the chaos, stumbling into the crowd with my head down and giving an occasional cry of "Oh God, help us" or words to that effect. The finer details of what I said were hardly inspiring, but in that heightened state no one really cared. I was pushed, shoved and stumbled upon, my fellow travellers knocking me aside as thoughtlessly as I had ruined their day, and I went with them, the surge of the crowd sweeping me past the bewildered-looking professor, who pressed himself into the wall for refuge, only to give a surprised whimper as, stumbling through the crowd, I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him after me.
All stations have bottlenecks, and while the crowd wished to run, there wasn't the space to do it, so as we pressed and piled for the exit I pushed my body close to Gulakov, pushed my gun into his belly and hissed, "I know they're here. Tell me where I can find Karpenko."
"I'm sorry," he whimpered. "I'm sorry!"
"Karpenko!"
"Pietrok-112! He's in Pietrok-112!"
I let go of his arm and plunged back into the flow of people. There didn't seem much point saying anything more. The three watchers on the platform were shouting, moving among us, pulling hats from faces, hollering at commuters to stop, to stay calm. I could see the woman had now a gun in her hand, the pram abandoned, and was shouting at everyone to stand still and present their papers. At the top of the stairs to the outside world more voices were being raised, police, some in uniform, some not, pouring down towards the human weight that wished to go up. However good their security services, the transport system hadn't yet got the message. I heard the rattle of wheels on metal and as the first watcher came near me, a long-faced man in a fur-lined coat, I turned, face an open picture of panic, wailed, "He's got a gun! Oh my God!" and nutted him as hard as I could in the nose, grabbing the gun in his hand and twisting his wrist hard towards the ceiling. I heard a shot, felt the bite of the metal moving beneath my fingers, and someone next to me screamed, a woman, clutching her leg, before I twisted the pistol free and kicked the watcher squarely between the legs. He fell inelegantly to the floor, and as the crowd parted around us like a flower I turned towards the approaching train, slipped the gun into my pocket and ran for the opening doors.
I had never been a fugitive in Russia before.
The feeling was exhilarating at first, until the discomfort of the settling night and the damp cold eating through my boots reminded me that exhilaration held nothing over reliable hygiene and warm sheets. My Kostya Prekovsky papers were now an even greater liability to me than no papers at all–no papers would at least cause bureaucratic delay, whereas the Prekovsky name was instant, guaranteed incarceration or death. I threw them into the slow black waters of the canal, bought a new hat and coat, and in a second-hand bookshop beneath the glowing lights of a doctor's surgery flicked through an atlas of the Soviet Union, looking for Pietrok-112. I couldn't see it. I considered going to the Cronus Club, but the grief that I would bring upon Olga and her ilk seemed uncivilised in light of her hospitality, and I wasn't entirely sure whether it was the professor's enquiries alone which had led to the appearance of security forces at Avtovo. Instead, I found Pietrok-111 and Pietrok-113 in the atlas, two tiny markers on an empty stretch of nowhere in the north of the country, and considering this as likely a place to start as anywhere, waited until the last tram had slipped into silence, and headed to Finland Station to recover my escape papers. I had left two sets of documents in an empty signal box by the railway tracks, where a man, hopefully in a fur hat, had once spent his days switching points, and where now mice hid from the worst of the winter's cold. The first document declared that I was one Mikhail Kamin, party member and industrial adviser, a position high enough to accord me respect without necessarily inviting security checks. The second was a Finnish passport, stamped already with an entry visa, which I attached to the back of my calf with surgical tape and rubber bands. I then spent a chilly night in the signal box, listening to the mice scurrying below, around and, in one particularly adventurous case, over me, and waiting for sunrise and the journey north.
Chapter 37
I have spoken before of my rather feeble attempt to kill Richard Lisle, some five lives before I took the train from Leningrad towards a situation which, even then, I felt could only end in blood. Lisle had killed Rosemary Dawsett and he had killed me. I suspected, though of course my death had prevented me from pursuing the investigation, that after my demise he had killed many more and never been caught.
He had killed me in my eighth life, and in my ninth I pursued him. Not the hot pursuit of a righteous avenger, nor the sly chase of a spy waiting to be caught. I had just over thirty years in which to consider my attitude towards him, thirty years in which hatred could cool to practical, business-like assassination.
"I understand why, but I'm not sure I can condone."
Akinleye. Born some time in the mid-1920s, at her oldest she had lived to see planes fly into the World Trade Center. "I remember thinking," she would say, "how frustrating it was that I wouldn't live long enough to see what happened next." But she interrogated the kalachakra of the Club, the younger members, those born in the 1980s and 1990s, who shook their heads sadly and said, "You're not missing anything." Akinleye's father was a Nigerian teacher, her mother a Ghanaian secretary "who ran the hospital she worked at and everyone knew it, but she was a woman in the 1920s so they called her a secretary anyway". Unlike most of our kin, she didn't require rescuing from her childhood. "My parents give me an unconditional love which I have yet to meet from any adult," she explained. We were lovers whenever our paths crossed, except once when she was giving homosexuality a go, "To see if it's me?" and once when she was married. Her husband was Sudanese–tall, thin, he towered over the room without ever dominating it and was linear and mortal and wildly in love.
"I'm thinking of telling him the truth," she confided one day. I told her about Jenny, the woman I'd loved, and how that had ended, and she tutted and said, "Maybe not then."
From what I heard later, their relationship was long, happy and deceitful until the day he died.
"This man you want to kill," she said, "has he murdered?"
"Yes," I replied firmly. "Not in this life, but in the last."
"But within the course of his living memory, not yours–has he murdered?"
"No," I admitted. "Not as far as I know."
We had met in 1948 in Cuba. She was just blooming into her twenties and spending this life, whatever number it was, doing what she had done for every life I'd ever known her–travelling, shopping, wining, dining and having emotionally fraught liaisons with unsuitable men. She had a yacht, and the locals stared as this young Nigerian woman with her flawless English and her perfect Spanish drifted down the quay towards a white beast of a thing, a shark padded in leather and plated with chrome, which she pushed towards any tropical storms with a merry cry of "Give me rain!" I had agreed to stay with her on the open seas for a couple of nights, on the understanding that this was not yet the hurricane season and I had things to do.
"What things?" she demanded petulantly.
"I'm joining the British secret service," I replied, ticking the points off on my fingers; "I want to meet Elvis before he dies; and I need to kill a man called Richard Lisle."
"Why are you joining the spies?"
"Curiosity. I wish to see if there are any truths behind the conspiracy theories I keep reading about during my old age."
Not many women can drink rum disapprovingly, but Akinleye could. "I don't understand you, Harry," she said at last. "I don't understand what drives you. You have wealth, time and the world at your feet, but all you do is push, push and keep on pushing at things which really don't bother you. So what if Lisle killed a few people? He dies, doesn't he? He always dies and never remembers. Why is it your business? Is it revenge?"
"No. Not really."
"You can't expect me to believe you'd go to all this trouble for a few linear prostitutes?"
"I think I can," I replied carefully. "I'm afraid I must."
"But prostitutes are murdered all the time! Report Ted Bundy, track down Manson, find the Zodiac–why do you have to waste your time on this one man? Jesus, Harry, is this your idea of making a difference?"
"I can't make a difference, can I?" I sighed. "There's no tampering with major established events. Ted Bundy will kill; the Zodiac will terrorise California. These things have been and, by the creed of the Cronus Club, must be again."
"Then why get involved? For Christ's sake, just sit back and enjoy yourself."
I craned my head back further to see the light of the stars coming out overhead. "In a little over twenty years man will walk on the moon. Hundreds of thousands will die in Vietnam for no apparently sensible reason, dissidents will be shot, men will be tortured, women will weep and children will die. We know all of this and we do… nothing. I'm not suggesting we change the world. I'm not suggesting we know how. What will the future be if these things do not come to pass? But we must do… something."
She tutted.
I found the gesture strangely annoying, an absent little sound on a peaceful night. I turned away, craning my head back further to see deeper into the sky, picking out the constellations. In truth, my own words rang hollow in my ears. I spoke fine sentiments about participation in the world around us, and yet what was my participation to be? The murder of a man who had not, yet, in his life committed murder.
"Linears only have one life," she said at last, "and they don't bother to change anything. It's just not convenient. Some do. Some… 'great' men, or angry men, or men that have been beaten so low that all they have left to do is fight back and change the world. But, Harry, if there is one feature most common to 'great' men, it's that they're nearly always alone."
"It's all right," I said. "I'm not a great man."
"No," she replied. "I guess that just makes you a murderer."
Afterwards I walked along the waterfront alone, as the sea rolled against black rocks and white sand, and Akinleye sailed on to the next party, the next drink, the next adventure.
"Only one thing surprises me any more," she explained, "and that's the things people admit when they're pissed."
I'd almost sighed. The things people confessed, the deepest secrets of their souls, had long since ceased to amaze me.
This I knew for certain: Richard Lisle would kill.
Was I going to wait for the event?
I went to London. Rosemary Dawsett had operated in Battersea, and so to Battersea I went, back into the old smoke-filled haunts hemmed in by smoke-drenched streets. My joining the secret service was as much about their training and the intellectual challenge as any real desire to learn their tales. I put their skills to use now, learned to be grey, a non-event at the back of the room. I observed Rosemary picking up her clients with the delicacy of a torpedo in an oil tanker and felt an odd pull in the pit of my stomach, remembering what had been between us before. Money, I knew, had been between us before, but in loneliness it can become easy to romanticise these things. I hunted out Richard Lisle and watched him watching. He was still several years away from his first murder, a young man with, perhaps, an uncomfortable manner about him, but nothing which suggested to the casual eye what he would become. He was even vaguely pleasant. He slept with the prostitutes and paid them reliably, had a reputation as a decent lad albeit a slightly odd one. His work colleagues were friendly acquaintances without being friends, and on breaking into his flat in Clapham and examining its contents, I found no black pictures of death, instruments of pain, signs of torture or organic remains. The most unpleasant thing about his flat was the lingering after-smell of corned beef and onion. His radio was tuned to the BBC Home Service, and what few magazines and books he had seemed largely themed around the joys of country living. I could easily picture him, a retired man of sixty-something, walking through gentle countryside in sensible boots, a dog bounding along merrily at his side, before calling in at the local pub, where everyone could call him Rich or Dick or Dicky, and the landlord would always be sure to pour him a proper pint. I see this so easily, almost as easily as I could see the knife in his hand cut through the smog before it sliced into my body.
Yet he had not done this yet.
Could even Richard Lisle be saved?
The voice of Vincent, my sometime student, as we sat together in my study in Cambridge, drinking whisky.
"The question you must ask yourself is this: will the good you do the other man by helping him overcome his problem–whatever that may be–gout, let's say–will the help you do to the other man in overcoming his gout exceed the harm, exhaustion and general sense of distaste that you incur to yourself in helping him? I know it doesn't sound very noble, Harry, but then neither does damaging yourself for the sakes of others, as you will then require fixing, and others will be damaged in the attempt, and so it goes on and on and on, and frankly everyone ends up a worse mess than they were to begin with." A pause while he considered his own world view, before adding, "Besides, gout? Are you really going to help someone get through gout?"
Two weeks later I followed Richard Lisle to the home of Rosemary Dawsett. He stayed for an hour and emerged somewhat less groomed and rather content. She stood in the door and smiled at him as he departed into the dark, and the next day I bought a gun.
Chapter 38
I'd never killed in cold blood before.
Sitting in Richard Lisle's apartment on a winter's night in 1948 when the ice was beginning to scratch its teeth across the inside of the window, waiting for him to come home, I knew that I would be perfectly capable of pulling the trigger. My anxiety, therefore, was not so much as to whether I could commit the deed, but as to how confident I was of this fact. It is not so far from such a state of mind to absolute sociopath, I reflected. Would it be appropriate to wail? To sob? To bite my lip, to acquire perhaps a nervous twitch? I hoped that my body, if not my mind, would at least have the good grace to demonstrate some psychosomatic disorder, some unconscious manifestation of guilt at the deed I was about to commit. I spent the long waiting hours sitting in the silence and the dark, reproaching myself for my lack of self-reproach. A self-defeating exercise, but even when the logical absurdity of my own thought processes became apparent to me, I was rather annoyed that even this slim manifestation of conscience was so intellectual. I would have far preferred crying into my pillow at night over this calm analysis of my own moral degeneration.
I broke into Richard Lisle's apartment at 9.12 p.m.
He did not come home until 1.17 a.m.
This wasn't particularly uncharacteristic, but nine o'clock had been the optimum time between neighbours settling down and my entry causing an unnecessary disturbance. I kept the light off to avoid questions and waited, gun in my lap, silently in the chair in the living room, which was also the bedroom and, partitioned by a low work surface only, the kitchen too.
He was tipsy without being drunk when he came in.
The sight of me, black leather gloves and small silenced pistol, brought an instant return of struggling sobriety. Rationality, if not intellect, can still overwhelm alcohol when death is on the line.
I should have shot him right then, but the sight of him standing in the door, keys still dangling from their ring, which was threaded over his index finger, a brown woollen vest pulled over his green woollen jumper and face smeared grey from the smog, froze me as well as him. I had no desire to speak to him–nothing I could possibly say–but as I reached for the trigger he blurted, "I don't have much for you to take, but anything you want is yours."
I hesitated, then raised the gun.
"You don't want to do this." His voice was a bare whisper, his words really rather banal as I was already resolved that this was precisely what I wanted to do, and even if I did not, this was now something that needed to be done. "Please." He dropped to his knees, the tears already flowing down his face. "I never done nothing wrong."
I thought about it.
Then pulled the trigger.