The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 37

I have spoken before of my rather feeble attempt to kill Richard Lisle, some five lives before I took the train from Leningrad towards a situation which, even then, I felt could only end in blood. Lisle had killed Rosemary Dawsett and he had killed me. I suspected, though of course my death had prevented me from pursuing the investigation, that after my demise he had killed many more and never been caught.

He had killed me in my eighth life, and in my ninth I pursued him. Not the hot pursuit of a righteous avenger, nor the sly chase of a spy waiting to be caught. I had just over thirty years in which to consider my attitude towards him, thirty years in which hatred could cool to practical, business-like assassination.

“I understand why, but I’m not sure I can condone.”

Akinleye. Born some time in the mid-1920s, at her oldest she had lived to see planes fly into the World Trade Center. “I remember thinking,” she would say, “how frustrating it was that I wouldn’t live long enough to see what happened next.” But she interrogated the kalachakra of the Club, the younger members, those born in the 1980s and 1990s, who shook their heads sadly and said, “You’re not missing anything.” Akinleye’s father was a Nigerian teacher, her mother a Ghanaian secretary “who ran the hospital she worked at and everyone knew it, but she was a woman in the 1920s so they called her a secretary anyway”. Unlike most of our kin, she didn’t require rescuing from her childhood. “My parents give me an unconditional love which I have yet to meet from any adult,” she explained. We were lovers whenever our paths crossed, except once when she was giving homosexuality a go, “To see if it’s me?” and once when she was married. Her husband was Sudanese–tall, thin, he towered over the room without ever dominating it and was linear and mortal and wildly in love.

“I’m thinking of telling him the truth,” she confided one day. I told her about Jenny, the woman I’d loved, and how that had ended, and she tutted and said, “Maybe not then.”

From what I heard later, their relationship was long, happy and deceitful until the day he died.

“This man you want to kill,” she said, “has he murdered?”

“Yes,” I replied firmly. “Not in this life, but in the last.”

“But within the course of his living memory, not yours–has he murdered?”

“No,” I admitted. “Not as far as I know.”

We had met in 1948 in Cuba. She was just blooming into her twenties and spending this life, whatever number it was, doing what she had done for every life I’d ever known her–travelling, shopping, wining, dining and having emotionally fraught liaisons with unsuitable men. She had a yacht, and the locals stared as this young Nigerian woman with her flawless English and her perfect Spanish drifted down the quay towards a white beast of a thing, a shark padded in leather and plated with chrome, which she pushed towards any tropical storms with a merry cry of “Give me rain!” I had agreed to stay with her on the open seas for a couple of nights, on the understanding that this was not yet the hurricane season and I had things to do.

“What things?” she demanded petulantly.

“I’m joining the British secret service,” I replied, ticking the points off on my fingers; “I want to meet Elvis before he dies; and I need to kill a man called Richard Lisle.”

“Why are you joining the spies?”

“Curiosity. I wish to see if there are any truths behind the conspiracy theories I keep reading about during my old age.”

Not many women can drink rum disapprovingly, but Akinleye could. “I don’t understand you, Harry,” she said at last. “I don’t understand what drives you. You have wealth, time and the world at your feet, but all you do is push, push and keep on pushing at things which really don’t bother you. So what if Lisle killed a few people? He dies, doesn’t he? He always dies and never remembers. Why is it your business? Is it revenge?”

“No. Not really.”

“You can’t expect me to believe you’d go to all this trouble for a few linear prostitutes?”

“I think I can,” I replied carefully. “I’m afraid I must.”

“But prostitutes are murdered all the time! Report Ted Bundy, track down Manson, find the Zodiac–why do you have to waste your time on this one man? Jesus, Harry, is this your idea of making a difference?”

“I can’t make a difference, can I?” I sighed. “There’s no tampering with major established events. Ted Bundy will kill; the Zodiac will terrorise California. These things have been and, by the creed of the Cronus Club, must be again.”

“Then why get involved? For Christ’s sake, just sit back and enjoy yourself.”

I craned my head back further to see the light of the stars coming out overhead. “In a little over twenty years man will walk on the moon. Hundreds of thousands will die in Vietnam for no apparently sensible reason, dissidents will be shot, men will be tortured, women will weep and children will die. We know all of this and we do… nothing. I’m not suggesting we change the world. I’m not suggesting we know how. What will the future be if these things do not come to pass? But we must do… something.”

She tutted.

I found the gesture strangely annoying, an absent little sound on a peaceful night. I turned away, craning my head back further to see deeper into the sky, picking out the constellations. In truth, my own words rang hollow in my ears. I spoke fine sentiments about participation in the world around us, and yet what was my participation to be? The murder of a man who had not, yet, in his life committed murder.

“Linears only have one life,” she said at last, “and they don’t bother to change anything. It’s just not convenient. Some do. Some… ‘great’ men, or angry men, or men that have been beaten so low that all they have left to do is fight back and change the world. But, Harry, if there is one feature most common to ‘great’ men, it’s that they’re nearly always alone.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m not a great man.”

“No,” she replied. “I guess that just makes you a murderer.”

Afterwards I walked along the waterfront alone, as the sea rolled against black rocks and white sand, and Akinleye sailed on to the next party, the next drink, the next adventure.

“Only one thing surprises me any more,” she explained, “and that’s the things people admit when they’re pissed.”

I’d almost sighed. The things people confessed, the deepest secrets of their souls, had long since ceased to amaze me.

This I knew for certain: Richard Lisle would kill.

Was I going to wait for the event?

I went to London. Rosemary Dawsett had operated in Battersea, and so to Battersea I went, back into the old smoke-filled haunts hemmed in by smoke-drenched streets. My joining the secret service was as much about their training and the intellectual challenge as any real desire to learn their tales. I put their skills to use now, learned to be grey, a non-event at the back of the room. I observed Rosemary picking up her clients with the delicacy of a torpedo in an oil tanker and felt an odd pull in the pit of my stomach, remembering what had been between us before. Money, I knew, had been between us before, but in loneliness it can become easy to romanticise these things. I hunted out Richard Lisle and watched him watching. He was still several years away from his first murder, a young man with, perhaps, an uncomfortable manner about him, but nothing which suggested to the casual eye what he would become. He was even vaguely pleasant. He slept with the prostitutes and paid them reliably, had a reputation as a decent lad albeit a slightly odd one. His work colleagues were friendly acquaintances without being friends, and on breaking into his flat in Clapham and examining its contents, I found no black pictures of death, instruments of pain, signs of torture or organic remains. The most unpleasant thing about his flat was the lingering after-smell of corned beef and onion. His radio was tuned to the BBC Home Service, and what few magazines and books he had seemed largely themed around the joys of country living. I could easily picture him, a retired man of sixty-something, walking through gentle countryside in sensible boots, a dog bounding along merrily at his side, before calling in at the local pub, where everyone could call him Rich or Dick or Dicky, and the landlord would always be sure to pour him a proper pint. I see this so easily, almost as easily as I could see the knife in his hand cut through the smog before it sliced into my body.

Yet he had not done this yet.

Could even Richard Lisle be saved?

The voice of Vincent, my sometime student, as we sat together in my study in Cambridge, drinking whisky.

“The question you must ask yourself is this: will the good you do the other man by helping him overcome his problem–whatever that may be–gout, let’s say–will the help you do to the other man in overcoming his gout exceed the harm, exhaustion and general sense of distaste that you incur to yourself in helping him? I know it doesn’t sound very noble, Harry, but then neither does damaging yourself for the sakes of others, as you will then require fixing, and others will be damaged in the attempt, and so it goes on and on and on, and frankly everyone ends up a worse mess than they were to begin with.” A pause while he considered his own world view, before adding, “Besides, gout? Are you really going to help someone get through gout?”

Two weeks later I followed Richard Lisle to the home of Rosemary Dawsett. He stayed for an hour and emerged somewhat less groomed and rather content. She stood in the door and smiled at him as he departed into the dark, and the next day I bought a gun.