by Claire North
With this in mind, I lived an endlessly changing series of lives. I stayed in no place for more than a few days, changed my clothes, my language, my voice, on a regular basis. I dyed my hair so often that it quickly became a brittle mousy mess, and grew such an apt forger of documents I was offered a commission in Frankfurt to do a job lot for a criminal mob. I left no traces of myself: no pictures, words, letters, names, documents; I kept my notes entirely in my mind, won only as much money as I absolutely needed from gambling and maintained no close friends. I never wrote to Hulne House, nor told, I think, a single honest truth about myself in all the time that I searched. I was going to be Vincent Rankis’s nemesis, and he was not going to see me coming.
Three months it took me, which felt like two months too long to search. The Cronus Club directors had been careful, burying all traces, but one, a Theodore Himmel, had left a note in his will stipulating that an iron box be buried at the foot of his grave. The note was tiny, a quirky proviso in the documents of a man dead for over thirty years, but it was enough. I sneaked into the cemetery in the dead of night and by the glow of a torch dug down to the coffin of Theodore Himmel, scraping away until I struck metal.
There was the iron box, black and dented, buried as had been promised in his final will and testament. It had been welded shut, and it took me three hours with a hacksaw to cut my way inside.
In the box was a stone, written on in three languages–German, English and French. The writing was tiny, crammed into every curve of the rock, and the message read
I, Theodore Himmel, who am of the kin known as ouroboran, the snake that swallows its own tail, leave this message for future descendants of my kind who may seek knowledge of my fate. As a child I was saved from the weariness of my life by the Cronus Club, who came to take me from poverty into riches, companionship and comfort. As an old man, I sought to do the same for the younger generations of my kind, a service I have performed for many lives before this one. Yet in this life it was not to be.
Up to the year of Our Lord 1894 the children of our kind had all been born as they should be. Yet from that fated year onwards more and more of our kin have been born with no memory of what they are, and there are some indeed who are not born at all. It would appear that in their previous life they were captured by a force unknown, and their minds, their souls, the repositories of a great knowledge and character accumulated over hundreds of years, destroyed. It is a sin against learning, a sin against men, a sin against all our kind, and I have seen my friends, my colleagues, my family, reduced to infants again. For them there is no Cronus Club, and I can only pity the journeys they must undertake in their next lives, as they go through the pain of rediscovery once again.
If you read this, know that I am dead, and that the Cronus Club in this life has been damaged beyond repair. Do not seek it, for it is a trap; do not enquire after others of your kin nor trust them. For so many to have forgotten so much, for some to have been destroyed absolutely before their birth, can only be treason.
I ask you to bury this stone again, for any others who may come to find it, and pray that the Cronus Club will rise again, as our future lives roll by.
I read it only once, by the light of my torch, and then, as requested, returned it to the bottom of the grave.
Chapter 62
I had to find Vincent Rankis.
Infuriatingly, I knew that doing so would not prove easy and, perhaps yet more infuriatingly, that to do so actively in this life would arguably expose me to far greater danger than if I were to do it in the next. If I were caught in this life, it would be proof sufficient that the Forgetting had not worked, and I had little doubt that next time Vincent would not be so sloppy as to let me take rat poison before he had finally extracted my point of origin. Likewise, if I were to pop up on the social radar as too prominent or powerful a figure, it could well lead to questions being asked by linears, as well as kalachakra, as to my origins, and that information was now the most precious I possessed.
With all this in mind, and for the first time in my lives, I became a professional criminal.
My intention, I hasten to add, was not to accumulate wealth as much as contacts. I needed to find those ouroborans who were still alive, still remembering–those who had survived Vincent’s purge–but I clearly could not use the Cronus Club to do so. Likewise, I could not use legal means and risk my enquiries being traced back to me, so I established for myself layers of security to prevent both police and anyone else who might be looking from stumbling on my true identity. I began as a money launderer, with the advantage that I both knew my way around major banking institutions and had foreknowledge of where would be wise and unwise to invest. The Second World War disrupted crime to a degree, in that it took a lot of the big business away from my clients and reduced whole economies to black market enterprises over which I had very little control, but the years which followed were ripe for exploitation. I was a little disappointed at how easily the techniques came to me, and how ruthless I quickly became. Clients who violated my advice, or who flaunted their riches in a way liable to bring attention to me, I dropped at once. Those who sought my identity too closely, I cut off. Those who listened and obeyed my strict precepts of business I rewarded with heavy returns on investment. Ironically, a lot of the time the front companies I passed the money through were so successful that they began making profits greater than the illicit activities which had funded them, at which point I was usually forced to close them down or disconnect them from the crime, to prevent too much scrutiny from the tax authorities of the countries where they were based. I never conducted my business face to face but sent plausible proxies, as I had done so many years ago when working for Waterbrooke & Smith. I even hired Cyril Handly, my in-pocket actor from a previous life, to conduct a few exchanges for me. He stuck to the script well this time, largely because I kept him away from the drink, until one day in 1949 when, in Marseilles, a gang of dealers suffering from revolutionary pretensions stormed the meeting he was attending, gunned down all who resisted and hanged the survivors from a crane, a warning to their rivals that they were moving on to this turf. The attacked crime syndicate retaliated with blood and fire, which got them nowhere. I lifted every centime of every franc from their bank accounts, grassed up every accountant and every front man who’d ever worked for them, exposed their shell companies to the force of the law and, when it seemed that this was only going to rouse them to greater stupidity, I poisoned their leader’s dog.
A note left around the dog’s neck proclaimed, “I can reach you in any place, at any time. Tomorrow it will be your daughter, and the day after, your wife.”
He left the city the next day but posted a tactlessly high bounty on my head before he did, which he could not afford to pay. No assassin ever claimed it. No assassin ever knew where to look.
By 1953 I had informants and contacts across the surface of the globe. I also had a wife–Mei–who I had met in Thailand during one of my flying visits and who wanted a visa to the USA. I gave her this visa and set her up in comfortable middle-class gentility in the suburbs of New Jersey, where she learned English, attended society gatherings, meddled in charities and kept a very polite young lover called Tony, who she loved deeply but would, out of good manners to me, always shoo out of the house before my return. For my few expenditures I received regular meals of an extraordinarily high quality, companionship when required and a philanthropic reputation. Indeed, I had a problem with what to do with the excess money I was receiving, and relied heavily on anonymous donations to charity to remove the compromising wealth from my possession. Mei excelled in this task, visiting the offices of every potential recipient and examining, in the finest detail, records of their words, deeds and actions before permitting the dump. Sometimes the glut of income was so embarrassingly large and Mei’s scrutiny so thoroughly fine that I had to go behind her back and give an anonymous donation to a charity she didn’t approve of, simply to save time. We were never in love, nor ever
needed to be. We had what we desired and that was all, and to the day she died she was loyal to both Tony and me, believed my name was Jacob and I was from Pennsylvania. Or if she doubted, she never questioned.
All of this was fine and well, but its ultimate purpose was still hidden even from my wife. As my criminal contacts grew, so my ability to tap into sources of knowledge expanded, and by the 1950s I had policemen, politicians, civil servants, governors and generals either under my thumb or within my grasp. Considering that the information I wanted from them was so minimal, so simple, they must have been grateful that I was the one doing the pushing. My enquiries came through in the form of data on this or that building, or this or that name, ferreting out in my own side-winding way the fates of the Cronus Clubs across the world and of their members, who had lived, or died, or Forgotten. Sometimes I struck lucky: in 1954 I stumbled quite by chance on Phillip Hopper, the son of the Devon farmer, who in this life had inherited his father’s business and was now, to my mild delight, producing clotted cream in vast quantities from his herd of fat, overbred cows. The fact he was working on his father’s land did not bode well for his memory, as I had never, in all my years, seen Phillip do a stroke of work, but in a spirit of adventure I packed Mei on to a flight to England, bought her a straw hat, took her to see the Tower of London and finally jumped on a train with her to the south-west, where we spent a very pleasant holiday walking the cliffs, looking for fossils and growing really rather tubby on fruit scones. Only on the penultimate day, as if by chance, did Mei and I wander past Phillip Hopper’s farm, climbing over the fence and down to the cottage door to see if we could buy some of his famous clotted cream.
Phillip himself answered the door, and there was no doubt, none at all, even in that first second, that he had lost his memory. It wasn’t simply his circumstances, his accented farmer’s voice or the look of blank ignorance when he saw me, and the flicker of contempt when he heard my fake American accent; it was a deeper absence. A loss of time, experience, knowledge–a loss of all the things that had made this man who he had been. Phillip Hopper, like so many ouroborans, had at some point in his last life been captured by forces unknown and the very essence of who he was wiped from his memory.
He sold us the clotted cream, and I am ashamed to say we had eaten all of it by the time our train got back into London the following morning.
Chapter 63
There would be, I concluded, chaos in my next life.
Lying next to Mei in our polite suburban home, paid for by drug smugglers and fraudsters, I would stare at the shadows of leaves swaying across the ceiling and consider questions hundreds of years apart.
Those kalachakra whose memories had been wiped would wake with the same confusion and madness that I myself had experienced in my early lives. Usually, after a Forgetting, Cronus Club members would appear in the second life to shield the terrified child from the worst traumas of that experience and to guide them through that most difficult of times. But to do so now, with Vincent clearly aware of the identities of so many kalachakra, risked an exposure for those of us–however many there were–still with our memories intact. And yet what if we did not? Future generations of the Cronus Club, for hundreds of years, were relying on the twentieth-century members to protect them, to assist them. What would they do without the groundwork we laid?
They would find their way, I concluded, as they had no choice in the matter. The more pressing question lay in the here and now–what would I do, one of the privileged few who still recalled the nature of my own being, when in the next life the asylums of this world began to fill with men and women whose minds had been ripped apart by Vincent?
I needed to find a Cronus Club which had not been touched by Vincent Rankis’s purge, even one would be enough, whose members still knew who they were.
By 1958 it was apparent that the only Club I was likely to find which would fit this description was in Beijing.
It was not a good year to visit Beijing. The Hundred Flowers Campaign had been briskly and effectively terminated when the communist government of China realised that granting cultural freedom was not the same as winning cultural praise; now the Great Leap Forward was commencing, in which the people of the nation would be fired up to advance China, sacrificing tools and metal, time and energy, lives and strength for the good of the nation. Anywhere between eighteen and thirty million people would die of the starvation which ensued. Getting in as a Westerner was almost impossible, but I had enough criminal contacts in Russia to acquire a cover as a Soviet academic sent to Beijing to share knowledge of industrial techniques and expand my knowledge of Mandarin.
Speaking Mandarin with a Russian accent is extremely difficult. Of all the languages I have learned, Mandarin took me the longest, and having to replicate the suitable tones while simultaneously presenting myself as a rather bumbling Soviet scholar was an exercise that caused me considerable distress. In the end I chose to emphasise my Russian accent over any great accuracy in language, producing endless sly smiles from my hosts and the nickname of Professor Sing-Song, which fairly quickly became the name by which all knew me anyway.
Even though I was, technically, an ally from a friendly nation, my movements in Beijing were heavily restricted. It was a city going through tumultuous change but, with the state of the country being what it was, that change was hideously piecemeal. Whole districts of old Qing housing had been knocked down in a go, though no resources existed to replace the lost abodes. Great skyscrapers had been begun but then could not be completed, so a roof was slotted on some four floors up as if to say “This was our plan all along.” Posters were everywhere, and the propaganda was some of the most colourful and, to my sensibilities at least, the most naïve I had ever seen. Ranging from the traditional staples of communist rule–images of happy families striving together against a red sky in a well-tended field–through to more unusual campaigns, such as suggestions that keeping potted plants would encourage clean living, or exhortations to mind your personal hygiene for the good of the nation, they reminded me of a sort of school art project plastered across the city. Nevertheless, the fervour behind much of the propaganda could not be denied, at least among our louder hosts, who spouted the rhetoric of the time with the passion of priests and who would, in a few years yet to come, probably believe the Cultural Revolution to be the greatest time of their lives. It was a reminder of the old truth that for tyranny to flourish all it required was the complicity of good men. In China at that time how many millions of good men, I wondered, were silently watching while this louder, snappier minority of believers marched and sang their way towards famine and destruction?
By day I taught classes of hard-faced earnest young technocrats everything I could remember about Russian industrial dogma of the time. I even drew up entirely fictitious graphs and charts, discussed non-existent steelworks and ways of motivating the workers, and took questions at the end of every session such as,
“Professor Sing-Song, sir, is it not encouraging ideological weakness to offer rewards to supervisors for increasing factory output? Should not the supervisor always remain equal to all his workers?”
To which the answer was, “The supervisor is a servant of his workers, for they are the producers and he is not. However, there must be a clear leadership figure in every organisation, otherwise we have no means of gathering information on its success or failure, nor can we rely on universal policies being implemented at the lowest level. In the matter of rewarding the supervisor for success, we find that if you do not, the motivation of the supervisor and the workers declines, and they may not struggle as hard in the following year.”
“But sir! Would not a campaign of indoctrination in correct thinking be the appropriate response to this?”
I smiled and nodded and spoke utter, empty, vapid lies.
I had, very specifically, requested that my time in Beijing be limited to three months. I did not think I could sustain my deception any longer than that and wished to have an
effective extraction route available should my cover ever be blown. I had also established links with the triads in Hong Kong, and, at my request and to their great trepidation, they had sent a team of five men north, ready to assist me at any given moment. Neither the men nor the triad appreciated that it would be I myself in Beijing using their resources, but rather assumed, as always, that I was operating through a proxy. The first time I met them, I was alarmed to see how poorly their clothes blended with their surroundings, for they still carried hints of Hong Kong bling about them–new shoes and clean trousers, soft skin, and, to my horror, one even smelled of expensive aftershave. I berated them in a mixture of Russian and Mandarin, and was slightly comforted to discover that their Mandarin was excellent, albeit with strong Hunan accents. As I worked, they went in search of the Cronus Club, spreading out through the criminal underworld of Beijing one cautious whisper at a time, for the government was nothing if not savage to criminals it caught.
The Beijing Cronus Club.
I had been reluctant to try it even at the beginning of my mission, for in the twentieth century it had a rather dubious reputation among the Clubs of the world. For so much of its existence Beijing is a stable, pleasant, reliable Club–something of a tourist destination, indeed, for if you can make the journey to its door it offers a degree of stability and luxury unrivalled by most other Clubs until well into the 1890s. However, from 1910 the Club increasingly shuts down, becoming much as the Leningrad Club was in 1950–a shadow Club, a place to support its youth but little more. By the 1960s the Beijing Club is a bare whisper on the air, and several times, despite the best precautions of its members, it has fallen victim to the Cultural Revolution. In Soviet Russia, that kind of attack on luxury and intellectualism may be bribed or blackmailed into submission, but during the madness of those months not even the kalachakra can accurately predict the outcome of events.
