The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

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.