Flashback

Chapter Thirteen

August, 1947, Buenos Aires

As Cory crossed the city, he thought about the message he had found in the mausoleum. It had confirmed a rendezvous. His twenty-day wait was over. He could avoid the traffic-choked streets by taking el subte, the underground, but he wanted time to think, and the narrow, crowded pavements answered wonderfully in this regard. They forced him to drift, to slow. In truth, the underground held a certain anxiety for him. It was crowded and airless. The last time he had used the service, there had been a blind man moving through the cramped tranvía subterráneo selling shirt stiffeners. The passengers had jostled him, complaining in that Buenos Airean manner about their rights and the many things they had to talk about without interruption from this man. So Cory walked the streets and sometimes thought about the man, and his own father, just as he now thought about the message in the mausoleum. The streets were wet with the recent rain and smelled of tar and petrol.

He asked himself why Jennifer would take the risk of a rendezvous. There were surer methods of communication. She could send him a coded telegram or letter. The energy and risk of injecting a human through more than one hundred years of time were considerable.

However, he looked forward to the meeting. He had a growing sense that the people he met, even little Lisandro, were dancing to a tune that only he could hear. Cory, the vagabundeo, was wandering through a monument to the past perfect: past completed. These people had already lived and died. He convinced himself that these thoughts were intellectual musings in the style of a reductio ad absurdum. He would not voice them to Jennifer when he met her at the prearranged time. The notion sounded too much like Jackson, Cory’s predecessor, who had cracked under the strain of time travel. For Jackson, the zombies were too much. Not Cory. He would cope.

Cory reached the art deco apartment block ten minutes early. Following a reconnoitre, he waited outside a hotel. Some builders were observing the midday ritual of a street-side barbecue. Cory declined the offered meat and moved along to an intersection. Being an intersection, it was thronging with people. Two men argued about Peron and five-year plans; their discussion was punctuated by the sudden intuition and non sequitur of enthusiastic but inexpert debaters. Behind them, three ladies managing fans declared them stupid. A young woman in light, black petticoats offered Cory a flower from her stall, but he shook his head, smiling. Then he looked at his watch. It was time.

He approached the gated hallway of the apartments. Two elderly porteros porteños were sweeping the floor beyond the gate. They looked up at Cory but did not let him in. He pressed the buzzer for the second of the apartments. A minute passed. The taller of the porteños, who was looking at Cory, stopped sweeping and wiped his mouth with the edge of his neck cloth. When the gate unlocked itself, Cory stepped back. It was the first electric entry system he had seen in Buenos Aires. He passed through, whistling, and raised his hat to the sweepers. They frowned and moved into the shadows on either side of the hallway. Cory’s expensive shoes and cane reflected in the polished wooden floor.

He found Jennifer on a bench in the centre of the courtyard. There was a jacaranda tree between the bench and the white wall. Beneath the black branches and purple-blue corollas, Jennifer sat like an arachnid, shaded and still. Her outfit was black. She wore a wide-brimmed hat, a black top—anachronistically tight—with blooming cuffs. Her skirt was ankle-length. A veil darkened and blurred her face. It was, however, the bracelet on her right wrist that drew most of Cory’s attention. With that device Jennifer could conjure a wormhole on demand. It permitted her a direct connection with the future. This connection was denied to Cory, who had no rank for such a privilege. His communications were limited to cryptic announcements in the classified advertisements of newspapers; to be read, if at all, by automated agents that Jennifer had assured him would scour the archives.

As Cory approached the bench, he offered his hand. She ignored it.

‘I think–’ he began.

‘You’re the monkey,’ the woman replied, ‘and I’m the organ grinder. So stop thinking. Sit down and code in.’

Cory sat. The bench was wet from the recent rain.

It was 1st August, 1947. That meant he had to code in with a fragment of poetry.

Where is Echo, beheld of no man, only heard on river and mere? he thought.

The answer came as a second thought, not his: But where are the snows of yesteryear?

‘So,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Do you understand the seriousness of what you did, Cory?’ she said. Only her lips moved. ‘The calculations require a precise mass. Precise. You almost destroyed the bridge. Dumb luck kept your atoms together.’

Cory shook his head. What the hell was she talking about? He had wanted to tell her that she was the first real person he had met in months. He had wanted conversation.

‘Never mind that it weighs next to nothing,’ she said, half to herself. ‘The further back you go, the more sensitive the insertion becomes to initial conditions. It took a whole bloody day to reset.’

‘You’ve gotten it wrong,’ Cory said, smiling crookedly. He still hoped the conversation could be salvaged. He needed, he supposed, her humanity. ‘I’m meant to act British, you’re meant to act American.’

‘Don’t question my patriotism,’ she said. ‘Hand it over.’

‘What?’

She snapped her fingers. ‘The ring.’

Cory stared at her until the moment grew long enough for her head to turn, cold and slow, towards him. Until those eyes were fully on his, he had not believed that she could be serious.

‘Can’t I keep it? The thing’s travelled with me already. It represents my promise.’

‘Sweetheart, don’t try to be profound. Not in that hat.’

He sighed and gave her the ring. She placed it in her small handbag and relaxed somewhat, letting her back curve against the slats of the bench. She took a long breath and looked at him as though this action—the handing over of the ring—represented a second beginning. She even smiled. Cory did not smile back.

‘Cory, my Cory. So young and yet so serious.’

He looked at the handbag. ‘We should be less candid with proper names.’

‘Ever played that child’s game with the paper cups and string? That’s the game they play in 1947, only they call it the telephone. Don’t let the sunshine fool you. This is the fucking dark ages.’ She lifted her head and, as the hat’s penumbra moved up, Cory saw the paleness there in her face and the unfamiliar deltas that had formed at the corners of her eyes and, lower, sour grooves drooping from her lips.

‘When are you from?’ he asked.

‘It’s been a few days since you crossed the bridge. Why, do I look older?’

By years.

‘No.’

‘Liar,’ she said, but her flippancy betrayed a certain self-consciousness. ‘Now, how about a report? Speak, don’t think.’

Cory looked around the courtyard. Its walls were conspicuously pink in homage to the palace where Peron conducted the orchestra of government. The colour fused the warring red and white of Argentina’s past, a blend as silly as raspberry ripple ice-cream, as incongruous as the woman on the bench: fifty-five kilogrammes of matter that did not belong to this time any more than Cory himself.

‘Eventually,’ he said, packing unspoken adventures into that word, ‘I traced the item.’

‘How?’

‘In Durban, I picked up the Portuguese link from the daughter of Rodenbach.’ Cory removed his hat and placed it on his lap. ‘I flew into Lisbon a week later but the offices were closed. Turns out two men—matching the descriptions of the target and the underwriter—had hired a local airman to fly them to London via Paris two hours before I showed. I hired the airman’s partner to take me to London in their spare plane. Two days later, I discovered that the target had flown to Buenos Aires. He used his own name.’

‘Harkes?’

Patrick Harkes. Cory wondered what it meant to Jennifer when she spoke the name of the man who had killed—who would kill—her father. There was no change in her expression.

‘Why would Harkes travel to London when his business is here? Why not fly direct to Buenos Aires?’

‘Perhaps his first instinct was to escape me, London being the most convenient route.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Have the archivists unearthed anything?’ he asked.

‘The evidence trail stops in South Africa, as you thought.’ She glanced at him. ‘Don’t flatter yourself with a sense of accomplishment. If Harkes used his own name, he must be confident in his escape plan. You can’t let the Cullinan vanish with him. Is that clear?’

‘I was briefed, ma’am.’

‘Not well enough.’

‘Expatiate.’

‘You let the boy follow you to the cemetery. He compromised the dead-drop.’

Cory did not know what to say. There was embarrassment, yes, at this failure of tradecraft. But he had contained the situation. He wanted Jennifer to know that he had exercised his professional judgement. He closed his mouth and tried to relax. He was, he realised, crushing his hat. He relaxed his grip and smoothed the rim.

‘If you gave me more information about this time,’ he said, ‘I’d be in a better position to operate effectively. I need day-to-day intelligence on organised crime, developing black market routes, safe houses, and full access to the news media archive.’

‘Oh, no particulars, Cory,’ she said. Her voice had assumed a didactic tone. This annoyed Cory. She had no right to consider herself the equal of his instructor, Blake. ‘You only need generalities. Drifts. Particulars give you information log-jam. You know what happened to your predecessor.’

‘I can handle it. Jackson had psychological problems.’

‘And you are immune? No stirrings of madness yet, Cory?’

‘When I stop asking to come home to my wife, you’ll know I’m mad.’

‘No. It’ll prove you’re sane, trying to act mad to escape an insane situation.’

‘Catch-22?’

Jennifer tipped her head to one side. ‘Let me tell you something. Heller wanted to call the book Catch-18, but another author was about to release a war novel called Mila 18. So he changed it to Catch-22.’

‘I didn’t know you read novels.’

‘Why would I? Dad told me.’

‘What’s the moral?’

‘Catch-22 means something, Catch-18 means nothing. All because of an accident. Things start random, then they… congeal.’

‘In that case,’ said Cory, ‘things cannot be random to start with—that randomness is only the solidified product of the apparent randomness before.’

‘Result?’

‘It’s randomness all the way down.’

The smile again: tutorish, distant.

‘You scared yet, Cory?’

‘Always.’

‘So you’re sane for now.’

‘Jackson was the first time traveller,’ Cory said, ‘and we learned from his mistakes.’

‘You’re wrong. Jackson wasn’t the first.’

Cory raised his eyebrows. There was a brotherly grin on his lips. It told her that he wasn’t about to fall for the joke. But Jennifer nodded slowly.

‘Jackson was the third,’ she said. ‘The first didn’t survive the trip. The second did more than survive.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The second washed up in 2003. Marooned. But she has a part to play yet. We have evidence that she’ll be alive in the year 2023, aged forty or so.’

Cory knew that he resented the bump from second place to fourth. He had gone from being a Buzz Aldrin to… whoever was fourth on the moon. ‘At least she has a telecommunications network to interact with. What have I got? Paper cups and strings.’ Cory waited for his angry thoughts, like winds, to blow themselves out. Still waiting, he changed the subject to Lisandro. ‘Forget the boy. He’s nothing to do with us. I took him back to his mother’s apartment.’

‘You always were an idiot.’

‘What now?’

‘Don’t come the southern farm-boy with me.’ She opened her handbag and produced a rolled newspaper. It was the Buenos Aires Herald. ‘This is tomorrow’s newspaper. Let me show you what the Lady Saint Maria has in store for Lisandro. Here.’ She passed it to him. ‘Read it out loud.’

Cory looked at the newspaper and gasped. He pictured himself astride a horse—a trick inherited from Blake at Base Albany—and reined his heart to a trot. He became stony and controlled.

STREET BOY BUTCHERED, ENGLISHMAN SUSPECTED

‘I have to kill him?’

‘That dead drop has other functions. If Lisandro tells anyone about it, several operations will be compromised. He has to go.’

‘This changes things. They’ll be looking for me. I need a new identity.’

‘Of course you will. Ready?’

In their mental connection was a touch of the numinous. It rendered quaint the narrowband contact of fingers, or his lips on hers, or the first slide of intercourse. Cory knew the mundanities: a wireless handshake between his ichor and that of Jennifer; a wide-band burst of procedural and episodic memory; a fake personality violating the closed universe of his mind. It hurt.

Slowly, she eased out of him.

The new identity was that of a German flying ace who, Cory was amused to learn, had never existed beyond the sensational pamphlets of a junior clerk at the State Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. The Nazi phantom was known as Wittenbacher, der Vitvenmacher. Wittenbacher the widow-maker. Cory felt the man like a corpse laid out in the parlour of his mind.

She turned his chin with a fingertip. Her eyes, at last, were soft. ‘Cory, the boy has always been dead. He was dead before he was born and he was dead after he died. His life is just a blip on a line: a two-dimensional irregularity on the forever one-dimensional. Here’s the secret: That blip gets smaller when you zoom out.’

‘You want me to think like that?’

‘I want you to face the fact that you’re going to kill him.’

‘You sound like Jackson.’

Quietly, she said, ‘My poor, dumb Charlie. Your body made the small step, but your mind couldn’t make the giant leap.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘What’s new, soldier?’