The Thief of Time

by John Boyne

  Below us there was a sea of red jackets and young and old men all holding their tickets in the air as they tried to offload anything they could; however, not a single share was being traded. And then from the left-hand side of the exchange a young man – he couldn’t have been more than about twenty-five – walked into the centre of the floor and raised his hand aloft. Over the din, which somehow seemed to lessen as his self-assurance grabbed people, he shouted out that he wanted to buy 25,000 shares of US Steel for $205 each. I looked at the board quickly.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ asked Denton, his hand clutching the rail in front of himself anxiously so that the knuckles became white with the pressure. ‘US Steel is down to $193.’

  I shook my head. I couldn’t quite grasp it myself. ‘I’m not sure ...’ I began as the young man shouted out his order again to one of the traders who immediately sold the shares to him greedily, with the look of a man who could not believe his luck.

  ‘He’s steadying the market,’ I said then, shaking my head in disbelief. ‘The most audacious .. .’ I found that I couldn’t complete my sentence, so impressed was I by the gesture which within minutes saw more tentative sales taking place on the floor and a slight rise in prices. Within about half an hour they had steadied completely and it appeared as if the panic was over.

  ‘That was incredible,’ said Denton afterwards. ‘I thought we were finished there for a moment.’

  I wasn’t so sure. I couldn’t quite see what was going to happen next but it seemed obvious that the worst was far from over. Over the next few days, the state of the stock market was on the tip of everybody’s tongue and Denton himself was under siege from his father with constant questions of what he was doing to help salvage the firm’s fortunes. However, as the consequences of Black Thursday began to settle in investors’ minds, most people attempted to recover their losses and the dramatic selling began again. On Tuesday 29 October, the day of the Wall Street Crash, more than 16 million shares were dumped in an afternoon of trading. On that one single day, as much money was lost on the New York stock exchange as had been spent in its entirety by the US government on fighting the First World War. It was a disaster.

  Annette phoned me from CartellCo. to tell me that Denton was acting crazy. His father had been phoning all day but Denton had refused to take any of the calls, finally locking himself in his office. The firm was bust – I knew that much already. Everything he owned was gone, as was most of his investors’ money. I was the fortunate man in a city of terrible tragedies that day. By the time I arrived at his offices and made my way to the top floor, where his own suite was located, Annette was in a terrible state; Denton wouldn’t open the door but we could hear him inside, breaking things. I could hear the sound of lamps crashing to the floor as he paced around, the incessant ringing of the phones his accompaniment as he moved.

  ‘That’ll be Magnus,’ said Annette, ripping the line from the wall and silencing it at last. ‘He thinks the whole fucking thing is Denton’s fault.’ I stared at her in surprise, having never heard her utter such a profanity before, but sure that it was called for at this point. ‘You have to break the door down, Matthieu,’ she said and I nodded.

  I stepped back and shoved against it but it was solid oak and by the time I felt I was starting to get anywhere I could feel the bruising coming out on my shoulder. Eventually, with one last push and a kick to the lock, it fell through and Annette and I ran inside, to find Denton standing by the open window, his face contorted with madness and disarray, his clothes torn, his eyes on fire.

  ‘Denton,’ screamed Annette, tears rolling down her face as she started to run towards him, but I prevented her by holding on to her arm for I could see him edge ever closer to the window as she approached him. ‘We can fix this,’ she said. ‘You don’t need to -’

  ‘Stay away!’ he roared, jumping up on the ledge now, and my heart skipped a beat because I knew from the look on his face that all was lost. He took a look outside, licked his lips and in a moment he was gone. Annette screamed and charged to the window, leaning out so far that I feared she might fall herself but we could only barely make out his broken body on the ground below.

  In time, the unfortunate Annette recovered from this tragedy although Magnus Irving suffered another stroke when he heard about what had happened to his son and he died shortly afterwards himself. I was lucky still to have my fortune pretty much intact and when I left for Hawaii for a couple of decades that Christmas I settled a decent amount on Annette and Tommy, who declined to join me but instead returned to Milwaukee where they lived out their days.

  Annette and I kept in touch but she never married again and after her son’s death in Pearl Harbor she moved in with her daughter-in-law and grandson, until they in turn moved back to England where that child also fathered a son, who was to become a well known television soap opera actor and singer. Eventually we lost touch but I received a letter from her neighbour after she died, telling me that it had been quite peaceful after a long illness. She forwarded on to me a letter of gratitude from Annette which she had left in her possession, thanking me for whatever I had done for her in New York in the twenties and also sent a photograph of the three of us, Denton, Annette and I, at the ball which announced their engagement a few months before the Crash. We all looked very happy in it, very optimistic about our futures.

  Chapter 18

  August-September 1999

  London, 12 August 1999

  Dear Mr Zéla,

  I have meant to call you several times since my father’s funeral to thank you for the heartfelt words you said in the church that day. I can tell you that it has been a great source of comfort to all of us to know that our father was so well respected and liked within the industry.

  I very much enjoyed our chat after the funeral and was only sorry that you seemed to disappear before we could finish it. You may recall we were having a discussion about my work – my writing – and you seemed keen to hear more about it. You also mentioned your nephew Tommy who you said would probably know more about the workings of the television industry than you did.

  Following your advice, I finished my script and sent it along to your nephew, care of the BBC, and I’m sorry to tell you that he returned it to me, unread, with a rather terse note attached. Perhaps you forgot to mention to him that the script was on the way?

  I never got a chance to talk to him or you about it, so in the best tradition of the Hollywood money-makers, I thought I’d ‘pitch’ it to you in one quick paragraph! So here goes:

  A couple of middle-aged friends are out drinking one night and on the way home they pick up some teenage tart to take back with them. When they get there they start dabbling around in drugs, which they’re not used to, and one of them ends up dead. One of the friends goes to pieces, but the other one keeps his head and phones up a young guy who owes him a few favours and asks for help. Together, they take the body elsewhere and when the guy is discovered, everyone thinks it was an accident and he was the only one involved and so no one gets dragged into the scandal. What they don’t know is that in the middle of the commotion that night, the dead man’s son woke up – they didn’t even know he was in the house – and hears their plans and sees what they do. He thinks about calling the police to report them all but decides against it in the end because he knows that these two guys can help him out. They see the sense in it and life goes on as normal for everyone involved. No one ever finds out a thing.

  That’s it, Mr Zéla! You like? Well, as you can see I’ve sent you a copy of the full script and I’ve sent it to your nephew again with a better note of explanation. I’m sure you’ll be able to help in raising the finance to make it and I look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience.

  With best wishes,

  Lee Hocknell

  I invited Martin downstairs to my apartment for a drink, feeling that the warm, familiar surroundings of my home would be a better place to break the bad news to him about the cancellat
ion of his show than the relatively sterile atmosphere of the station’s offices. I considered his situation and how he would take it; a late middle-aged man, used to the spotlight, accustomed to people hanging on his every word, however ridiculous those words might actually be, suddenly unemployed and left to his own devices. He’d go crazy. And it wasn’t the money because we didn’t pay him all that much and he was already quite comfortable. He’d made enough as a politician to keep him for the rest of his life; he owned his house and had filled it with good paintings and ohjets d’art which hadn’t come cheap. He had the kind of lifestyle that he liked to ridicule in others but enjoy for himself. I hoped he’d take the news well but, somehow, I doubted it.

  I hadn’t counted on Polly, his wife, coming downstairs with him and it rather threw out my prepared speech. Polly is Martin’s second wife and they’ve been married for seven years. Needless to say, she’s quite a bit younger than him – he’s aged sixty-one, she’s only thirty-four. His first wife, Angela, whom I have never met, was with him through most of his parliamentary career but they broke up shortly after he became a private citizen again. Not needing to pursue the public necessity for a happy marriage, he divorced her and chased after the next generation, managing to find Polly without very much difficulty, for celebrity inspires attraction. I know little about her background except to note that she has a very good eye for art – she used to work in a gallery in Florence whose construction I helped to finance in the 1870s – and an ear for music in which ladies of her generation are often lacking. She married him for his money, of course, but he’s gained something out of it too. He clearly enjoys being seen as the ageing squire of a young, beautiful woman and, assuming that she allows him anywhere near her, I dare say there’s still a thing or two that she can teach him.

  ‘Martin,’ I said, opening the door cheerfully, and ‘Polly’, I muttered then, my smile freezing slightly as I tried to weigh up how this might affect the meeting. ‘I’m so glad you two could make it.’

  ‘Delighted to,’ he replied, stepping inside and shooting his head in every direction quickly in order to see whether there was anyone else present or anything new which he could examine. He has a habit of picking up my belongings and giving them the once over, and then informing me either how he has a better one himself or how he could have got me the same thing for only half the price. It’s one of his less endearing traits.

  I led them both to the living room and offered them drinks. Martin took a whisky as ever but Polly absurdly asked for a mint julep.

  ‘A what?’ I asked in surprise for I had never intended upon this becoming a cocktail party or a scene out of The Great Gatsby.

  ‘A mint julep,’ she repeated. ‘It’s bourbon, mint leaves, caster -’

  ‘I know what’s in it,’ I replied quickly. ‘I’m just surprised to hear you ask for one, that’s all.’ It occurred to me that I hadn’t had a mint julep since the twenties. ‘And I doubt if I have any mint, to be honest with you.’

  ‘Have you got bourbon?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’ll have a glass of that then. Straight.’ From a cocktail to a straight shot; odd. I went into the kitchen and fixed the drinks. When I returned, Martin was standing in the corner with a wrought iron candleholder in his hands; it was inverted and he was examining it carefully, holding the three candles in place carefully even as small shavings of hardened wax drizzled effortlessly on to the carpet. I put the tray down noisily, hoping he would replace it as well.

  ‘Where did you get this then?’ he asked me, returning it right side up but scratching at the iron to see whether anything would come off. ‘I’ve got one just like it but the colour comes off when you scratch at it.’

  ‘Then you shouldn’t scratch at it,’ I said with a slight smile, sitting down as Polly twisted around in her seat to observe her husband more closely. ‘It’s like the old story of the man who goes to the doctor and says it hurts when I do this with my arm.’ I watched as he put it back on the side table and came over to join us, and remembered that the candleholder had been a wedding present from my sometime mother-in-law Margerita Fleming, whose psychotic daughter Evangeline I had been foolish enough to marry some time in the early nineteenth century. It was one of my few mementoes from that miserable Swiss marriage, which had ended with Evangeline throwing herself from the roof of the sanatorium to which she had been confined. I had placed her there myself, of course, after she had tried to kill me – foolish girl -believing me to be in league with Napoleon, of all people, with whom I never had any dealings whatsoever. After her death, I rid myself of most of our joint possessions, not wishing to remember that sour, psychotic dervish, but held on to the candlestick for it was a particularly fine piece and one which always brought comment from visitors.

  ‘It was a wedding present’, I replied when he asked me again where I had come across it, ‘from my former mother-in-law, may she rest in peace.’ They both nodded in sorrow, looking at the ground for a moment out of respect to both the dead parties, even though they’d been gone for almost two hundred years. They presumably thought that it was my most recent wife to whom I was referring. It was like a moment of silence in their joint memories and I made sure to interrupt it for they deserved no such marks of respect. ‘It seems like ages since we’ve all got together,’ I said cheerfully, recalling our many entertaining dinners upstairs. ‘And who knows how long it’s been since I’ve invited you down here.’

  ‘Are you still seeing Tara Morrison?’ asked Polly, leaning forward and something made me glance at her hands to see whether she was holding a dictaphone or not.

  ‘Oh no,’ I said, laughing. ‘We haven’t been together in quite some time now. I’m afraid that really wasn’t destined to be.’

  ‘What a shame,’ she replied; I suspected that she was something of a fan of the ‘Tara Says:’ column. I imagined she followed Tara’s rules for living with something close to an obsessive-compulsive disorder. She had barely been able to keep her eyes off the celebrity the last time we had dined with them and had cornered her afterwards, looking for marital advice from a woman who had never held down a steady relationship in her life. ‘I thought you seemed like the perfect couple,’ she added generously.

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ I said and it amazed me how my mind was suddenly drifting on to Tara now with an emotion akin to regret. It occurred to me how often I thought of her, how much she had both delighted and infuriated me in equal measures, and how pleased I was by the prospect of winning her back to our television station. I shivered quickly. ‘We both lead very busy lives,’ I said, ‘especially Tara. She has so many commitments that it was difficult to find time together. And she spends so much of her time trying to think up her next opinion; it can’t be easy for her. Also, there was the age difference.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense,’ said Polly furiously, and I quickly realised my faux pas as I looked at the mismatched couple before me. ‘Age has nothing to do with it. And it’s not like you were that much older than her. She has to be in her mid-thirties if she’s a day. And I bet you weren’t even around during the war.’

  I opened my mouth and thought about it. ‘I was born in ‘forty-three,’ I said honestly.

  ‘Well, then. What’s that after all? Fifty-six?’

  ‘Fifty-six,’ confirmed her husband, nodding his head like a human calculator.

  ‘Well, then,’ she repeated, unwilling to let this one pass without hammering her objections into the ground. ‘You see? That’s not so much of a difference.’ I shrugged and decided to change the subject. I could see that Martin was feeling uncomfortable with it as it stood, age being a subject which has always bothered him. He confided in me once how from the age of about nineteen he had gone into a state of depression every time he saw another year pass him by. Birthdays destroy him; he looks back now, of course, from the age of sixty-one at occasions ten, twenty, thirty years before and realises just how young he was then but it doesn’t show him that it’s all rela
tive. He should imagine how it feels to be looking forward to entering a fourth century; then he really would feel old.

  Perhaps one of the things which made the age question most difficult for Martin was the business of Polly’s fidelity to him. Over a late night of drinks a few months earlier, he had mentioned to me that he thought Polly was having an affair with a runner from his own television show. The lad in question – and I sought him out a few days later – was no more than about nineteen years old, and he was tall and handsome, with an air of smug arrogance which apparently charmed those with whom he worked. Martin wanted me to fire Daniel, for that was his name, but I had refused and it had tested our friendship for a little while. I felt that I could not fire him if he was doing a good job, and from what I heard from his supervisor he was doing an excellent job, particularly when the allegations against him were completely without evidence or proof. I subsequently learned from a source at the station that Polly and Daniel, while not actually having an affair, had enjoyed an ‘incident’ but I never brought the subject up with Martin again, who seemed keen to pretend that it had never happened. Either way, I could tell that youth – Youth by its very nature – irritated the hell out of him.

  ‘I wanted to talk about the show,’ I began, after all this small talk had been got out of the way, ‘where you see it developing. Where you see the format going from here.’ I heard the words come out of my mouth and found them startling as I had prepared a perfectly adequate opener and instead said something which implied that I saw his programme as a going concern.

  ‘About time too,’ said Martin, always keen to discuss his career. ‘I don’t know about you, Matthieu, but I think we’ve done about all we can with the show the way it stands. I have to be perfectly honest with you on that.’