The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 70

Two things I learned during my career in espionage. The first is that a dull listener is, nine times out of ten, a vastly more effective spy than a charming conversationalist. The second is that the best way to approach a contact blind is not for you to directly engage with them, but to convince them that they want to engage with you.

“Mr August, such a pleasure.”

Vincent Rankis stood before me, smiling, offering me his hand, and all those years of preparation, all that planning, all the thought I had dedicated to what I would do if this moment ever came, and for a moment, just a moment, it was all I could do not to plunge the rim of my julep glass into the pulsing softness of his pink throat.

Vincent Rankis, smiling at me like a stranger, inviting my friendship.

He knew everything he had done to me, remembered it with the perfect detail of a mnemonic.

What he did not know–could not know–was that I remembered it all as well.

“A pleasure, Mr…?”

“Ransome,” he replied brightly, clasping my hand in his and shaking it warmly. His fingers were cold from where he’d held his drink, passing it from hand to hand, and damp with still-clinging condensation from the outside of the glass. “I’ve read so much of your work, followed your career, you might say.”

“That’s very considerate of you, Mr… Ransome?” I nearly stumbled on the enquiry, important to make it clear I didn’t know him, but push any lie too far and it begins to totter. “Are you in the trade?”

The trade, to any large profession on the planet, is always whatever craft the speaker happens to practise.

“Good God, no!” He chuckled. “I’m something of a layabout really, terrible thing, but I do admire you journalist chaps, striding about places, putting wrongs to right and that.”

Vincent Rankis and his bare, sweaty throat.

“I hardly do that, Mr Ransome. Just earn those dimes, as they say.”

“Not at all. Your commentary is engaging–some might even say incisive.”

Vincent Rankis sat by my bedside as the rat poison flooded through my veins.

Walking away as the torturer began to pull the nails out of my toes.

Riding a boat down the river Cam.

Hopping with excitement at another experiment. We can push the boundaries, Harry. We can find the answers, all things, everywhere. We can see with the eyes of God.

Not turning back at the sound of my screams.

Take him, he said, and they took me, a bullet to the brain, and here I am, and I will never forget.

He was looking.

God but he was looking, above that brilliant smile and behind those empty, charming lies, he was studying every feature of my face, looking for the lie in my eye, looking for recognition, revulsion, rebellion, some hint that I was still who I had been, that I knew what he had done. I smiled and turned back to our host, heart beating too fast, no longer confident I could stop my body from revealing what my mind would not.

“You clearly have excellent taste in both friends and reading material, ma’am,” I explained, “but I trust my invitation here wasn’t merely to discuss the incisiveness of my text?”

Mrs Evelina Cynthia-Wright, God bless her, God praise her, had an agenda to push, and in that moment of crisis, that moment when I might have turned and lost my control altogether, she exclaimed, “Mr August, you’ve got such a journalist’s mind! As a matter of fact, there are a few people I’d like you to meet…”

And she put an arm around my shoulder and I could have kissed that arm, could have wept into its clean white sleeve, as she led me away from Vincent Rankis and back into the crowd. And as Vincent had not looked back, neither did I.