‘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.