A Spy in Time

by Imraan Coovadia

  “You live with Dr. Keswyn Muller, don’t you?”

  “To know this you don’t need to travel through time.”

  I didn’t know what more to risk telling Soledad, how much she was shamming and playing ignorant. She had known something about the death of Shanumi. I had heard Muller relate the facts to her. But conversion experiences were expensive. To take a person from the past and let them into the secret of traveling, to reveal that their world was nothing but a shadow and the people in it no more than shadow players, to spawn rumors of immortals and flying saucers—none of that came cheap in energetic terms. It was the last thing you wanted to do, but it was something I had to do because I didn’t want to let João die at her hand. I had to confess to Soledad as much as I dared.

  “Look again. My face is familiar to you. I met the two of you in the Green Dolphin in Marrakesh, in 1955, on the night the pilgrims came into town.”

  Her voice was suddenly soft, a surprise to my ears. “You were there in Marrakesh?”

  “Just for an evening, as it happened. You were wearing long earrings, a piece of jade in the center. And a blouse with roses on it.”

  “I still have that blouse. So you are speaking a part of the truth.”

  In the long house behind the consulate a light came on, showing a figure through a gauze curtain. Who was watching us while we were watching? I thought that nobody, especially not a traveller, knew that his life was his own property. Nothing was private.

  “You think we could drive?”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Wherever you feel safe. But the longer we stay in one place, the greater the chance that somebody, in years to come, will be listening to our conversation.”

  I wanted to be closer to João in case we had to kidnap Soledad or put further questions to her under the action of a truth serum. Safer, in any case, from a counterintelligence perspective, to move rather than stay still. Safer to be amongst many people. Safer to be where we went on Copacabana, on the margin of the stale ocean. Safer to speak under the cloak of the noise. Men with their shirts open to the navel tended their radios. Cars played music in the parking lots. In the small bars on the seaside waiters took drinks to the tables. Behind them were beachfront towers and, on the perpendicular streets, the massive stone buildings housing Rio’s private gyms.

  Soledad was careful. She looked along the beach, up and down, as if expecting to see somebody. We went closer to the water until the sand was firm. The moon had floated in over the ocean, perfect as a pearl.

  “From what you say, assuming I choose to believe you, you have been tracking us since Marrakesh. That is a substantial amount of time. At the very least, I suppose, you are patient before you decide to make contact.”

  “On your timeline, as you have experienced your life, many years have elapsed. And you’re right, Soledad. I work for a patient organization. We can afford to be—to wait before we make our moves, and to think before we make our moves. After all, we have the whole past of mankind to preserve from foreign influences.”

  “Foreign influences?”

  “That’s what we call them, Soledad. Anything that can interfere with the integrity of the past and interfere with the preservation of mankind or the action of the Agency.”

  “And you do not count as a foreign influence?” She sounded weary. “Traveling from place to place, on the instruction of your Board, with the freedom to attack and destroy anybody you don’t approve of?”

  “You’re not the first person to come up with that paradox about the meaning of protection. If you are in this line of work, you quickly realize there is nothing so useless as a paradox.” I looked at the ocean, shrouded in fog, and despaired of my ability to convince anyone, least of all myself. “Soledad, you don’t have to believe me but, in my opinion, from what I’ve been taught, nothing in history has caused as much confusion as the dread of paradoxes. A paradox is only a loop carried to infinity. In fact, you could say we belong to the Agency precisely to protect humanity from the infinite. We despise the loop. We have only benevolent intentions, I assure you. Above and beyond that, we are governed by an iron triangle of machines, a doctrine, and the relevant clauses of the Constitution.”

  Two men in sleeveless shirts came running out of the dusk, pounding on the beach. They were laughing, shorts thin on their big thighs, as they ran. In half a minute, they had disappeared again. I could see the swimming pool on the balcony of an adjacent apartment building, lit from inside, where a man was doing laps methodically.

  I went on. “I need to ask you and Keswyn Muller some questions. They have been prepared by our experts. If you are willing to answer them, I see no reason why we can’t allow you to be on your way.”

  Soledad turned to me. I wanted to put my hand to her cheek.

  “If you want to meet Keswyn, come tomorrow night. He will answer any questions you might have.”

  “Just like that? I let you go now?”

  “We are not going to run, you fool. We have been waiting for your arrival for centuries. The arrival of the prophet and the final mover in his proper time. In any case, where would we fly to?”

  I had no reason to take Soledad at her word. I had every reason not to. I wasn’t in love with her, although João imagined it. There was no evidence on her side of the ledger. I didn’t believe that a secret society had handed down the report of my arrival in Rio in 1967. I knew enough to dismiss the significance of prophecy and revelation when it came to the activities of the Agency. They were most often the result of carelessness on the part of a case officer or a long-term resident. I wouldn’t be the first member of a foreign delegation to start a cult, which could happen by a mere slip of the tongue.

  Soledad vanished up the beach before I decided whether to believe her or not. I could have run after her. I could have gone directly to Santa Teresa and apprehended Muller and his apparatus.

  Instead, I went to João’s building and travelled in the rickety elevator to the top floor. I wanted to hear what the Twenty thought in his capacity as resident. According to Akiko’s calendar, there was only one day remaining in his life. I had lost one collaborator in pursuit of Keswyn Muller. I might be able to save a different one. I imagined I could balance the one loss against the other, a dangerous form of addition and subtraction.

  João was doing his chores, the kind of chores you end up doing if you are several hundred years from home and you want your reports to find their way to the hands of sympathetic administrators. He had made himself comfortable on the balcony, looking out on the beachfront of old Rio. A glass pot of chamomile tea was suspended over a burner to keep warm, the stub of the candle covered in tiny insects. From time to time he would pour tea into two lacquered cups and offer me one.

  He continued to work on his summary while I told him about Soledad, Admiral Coriolis, and the Naval Club of the Republic. Steam shimmered over the head of the teapot.

  When it came to Soledad’s revelation, João made no immediate comment. He rolled up each page of his document, then tightened it with his hands, smoothed wax from the candle along the sides, and stored it in a gold-sided box of cigarillos. It would be placed in a bank vault so that scholars in subsequent centuries could retrieve his detailed chronology and enter his observations into the record. They could arrange for the message to be returned in the event that his standing orders needed to be updated.

  When the job was done, he sealed the box and went to put it away in the safe in his bedroom. He came out, closed the sliding door again, poured the remains of the tea, and put his hand over mine.

  “I am a mere resident. I don’t have the famous intuition you people are supposed to develop in your side of the profession. But for me, at any rate, alarm bells are ringing. The two of them build a castle in Rio and they request you to come in the front door? No, in my humble opinion, this is not a likely scenario.”

  �
��She asked. He hasn’t seen me this time, as far as I know.”

  “It’s a standard procedure, Mr. Eleven. We can assume they are not amateurs, since they have gotten this far. We have seen how seriously they take the security of the operation. I believe they agreed on a certain protocol before you arrived on the scene. They planned to flatter you with the talk of prophecy and the final move. Now they are putting the routine into action.”

  “Maybe so. I don’t deny it. I am not a proud person in any case.”

  João left me and put the candle out between his fingers. His back was to me for a minute. I could hear a record player in the apartment below us. It was only a vibraphone and a silky woman’s voice over a castanet, the soapy jazz of old Rio, but it touched me like a funeral march.

  “There is a contradiction, my friend, that I cannot work out. Your Soledad should have shot you on the spot and they should both be on the run, trying to avoid the long arm of the Agency. What do they have to gain by further interaction? They are exposing themselves to risk. They don’t know what methods we might employ. So what do they have to gain? You will answer this question for me please.”

  I didn’t have a satisfactory answer for João. I wasn’t sure what they were up to in the fortress at Santa Teresa. My crystal ball was dark. I couldn’t see into Soledad’s connection to Muller, or into Muller’s purposes, or into what they conceivably wanted from me. I couldn’t see into the near future, although my companion looked into the bottom of his cup, as if the stray tea leaves were going to tell him something. I hoped they didn’t bear the same tidings to João that had reached my ears through the vessel of Akiko Thirteen. I prayed that, for once, the predictions of the brassheads would turn out to be as hollow as the ravings of forgotten saints and prophets, medicine men and bone throwers. Everybody wanted to know the future but it made us miserable when we did.

  “Should I go tomorrow?”

  “You should go and hear what they want to tell you, because that in itself is an important piece of intelligence. But you should take protection. I don’t mean a gun, although I am going to give you one. I mean you need protection from people’s reasons. Isn’t that it? After all, this is the most dangerous game for a member of the foreign service to participate in—even more dangerous than to fall in love. They are inviting you there to win an argument, after all.”

  It wasn’t until midnight that João came into my bedroom to have the final word and bring me candles in case the electricity went out. Wearing his silk dressing gown, he sat at the end of the bed for a minute in silence. I saw that his thick brown legs were almost entirely hairless. João had the manner of an elder brother, I realized, and I was swept away by the greatest feeling of regret. I don’t think he noticed.

  “You really want to know my opinion? My philosophy as a resident?”

  “I’d be grateful.”

  “In that case, I will tell you, my friend. Because I run this station, I see agents come and go. They do their investigations, fill in the required paperwork, return to their comfortable berths five hundred years from now where it is not like Brazil under the military government. Nobody has to drive his own car, nobody has to die of a preventable disease, nobody can be murdered outside of the Constitution. That is their reality and it is a different one. That is your reality also. Whereas I know that on 31 December 1969, or thereabouts, that will mark the end of my present tour and the beginning of my new one. I finish and then I start again in 1967.” He must have seen my reaction and clapped his hands to hold my attention. “In any case, I have a different perspective which may be valuable to you. I believe that we cannot measure the changes in history because, at each turn of the screw, we ourselves have changed. There is simply no measuring rod outside of space and time. We ourselves are the measuring rods. So in that sense, yes, I am a relativist.”

  João was at the door when something struck me. I sat up and called him back.

  “As the resident you really go in a loop?”

  “Not a loop, mind you, but an honest spiral, perfectly permissible on doctrinal grounds. Every two years, approximately, back to January of this year, assuming the protocol continues in the same way after Muller. That is what I was trying to explain.”

  “Couldn’t you run into yourself, João?”

  “I could. Certainly I could. I would, if I didn’t keep careful records about where I am each day. But, as you know, paradoxes are very expensive to pay for in energistic terms, even comparatively minor paradoxes and contradictions. There would have to be a corresponding input of energy from your side to make it up. Plus, they make the brassheads very nervous because their calculations cannot be finalized in the ordinary way. This is truly a job for the meticulous.”

  “You never considered passing a message to a former self?”

  He shrugged and tightened the belt of his dressing gown.

  “What would I tell myself? What would we have to talk about? To me, in fact, the João Twenty of two years ago is just as much of a ghost as the men and women we see in the streets of old Rio. I believe I have caught sight of him, from time to time, the João of former times, but each time I was nauseated. Completely nauseated.”

  Under most circumstances I didn’t share my host’s taste for speculation. I had never been the type to chase mysteries and unravel conundrums. Many people loved to travel from century to century because they had found something in history or philosophy, in psychology or the history of art, that could only be experienced in the past. But I liked the idea of solving problems.

  Rio was a new experience in many ways, a new turn in my life. I had time to think. I had time to worry about my new friend who, as far as I knew, was enjoying the last days of his life. The Agency hadn’t minded saddling me with the foreknowledge of João’s fate. His words, his theory of the case, struck me as bearing the truth of the man standing on the brink of the grave. According to João, we had lost control of the fine threads of causality. There may have been some truth to his view of it. Our hearts were not designed to cope with chronological disorder. We were built to advance step by step, one day after the next, climbing from the past through the present into the future. Any greater degree of freedom meant exposing the soul to the pressure of the infinite which it could not withstand.

  In the meantime, I needed to write my initial report to Section, outlining my interactions with Soledad, which I did on the balcony, looking out on the beach and the streets populated by blacks and whites, browns and blacks. João brought out the almanac on which he kept track of his former incarnations and explained his method of avoiding himself when moving around Rio. We drank coffee, enjoying the salt air, and then I gave my report to João to put in his safe.

  In short, my host was restored to a good frame of mind. I looked at the date on the calendar, remembered what I knew from Akiko and hadn’t told him, and didn’t meet his eyes.

  “You’re ready for this evening, my friend? You’re ready to find out the secret of Muller?”

  “I hope so.”

  “You are ready to understand the mystery of Soledad?”

  “Yes, but I want to know more of the background beforehand, in case they don’t come clean. I want to have an independent idea of what they’re doing here in Brazil. For one thing, I would like to know something about Admiral Coriolis.”

  “Soledad’s lover?”

  “Who is installing communications equipment for the Brazilian Navy. Maybe he is her lover, maybe not.”

  To research Coriolis, I had to find my way to Cinelândia Square, not far from the Praça de República, where the grand old building of the Biblioteca Nacional stood in seclusion. The guards in white gloves allowed me to enter the reading room, a stuffy hall which was deserted apart from the stuffed animals on the high shelves: jaguars, parrots, sloths, and giant anacondas under glass domes.

  On the far end of the room was a desk with a bell. I rang and waited, ran
g again. I was rewarded by the appearance of a librarian, a man with very sleepy eyes—as sleepy, I thought, as the anacondas. He came out stooped over a trolley filled with documents and cloth-covered books, their titles stenciled on the spine. He thought about my request, as if I had offended him, but then went into the catalog for a few minutes, his fingers climbing rapidly through the punch cards as I looked along the lower shelves lining the big hall.

  The librarian disappeared up the staircase with a list and returned twenty minutes later with another trolley loaded with binders, copies of Navy News, and various bulletins on the prospects of the Brazilian fleet, covered in dust. I thanked him and piled them on the table.

  For hours, I sat in the Biblioteca and read, while the parrots and jaguars glared out of their glass eyes and the librarian dozed with his feet on the desk. I assembled the broader picture as I went along. Admiral Coriolis was close to the generals who ruled the country from Brasilia and controlled the big procurement budgets. Under the dictatorship, spending was concealed from the public. It was the perfect environment for a secret project, even a hidden enemy in the classic sense. If Dr. Muller helped Coriolis install communications equipment on his ships and diesel submarines, he would be creating a network of transmitters, moving across the oceans, between ports on different continents, wherever Brazil’s sailors happened to go. If Muller’s coding was good, the operators would have no idea that a back door had been put into the system. You could only run a conspiracy when you had a way to talk to each other and nobody else could listen in.

  From an Agency perspective—from the point of view of historical protection and purification as put down by S Natanson—there could be worse to come. The laws of nature were our ultimate line of defense. Nothing came from nothing. It required an expenditure of energy to send a man or woman into the past, more energy for every additional year, energy for every minute spent there, and for every physical action, be it ever so small. A single mission could absorb the output of a modern solar plant. Only a collaboration between governments had the resources to maneuver through the centuries. If Muller and his associates had figured out how to use the Brazilian state to provide nuclear energy, we were facing an entirely different environment—something closer to what fear and rumor over the ages had made of the hidden enemy. I remembered my father’s warning and my skin tingled.