The Violent Century (3 page)

Computer screens, office chairs on squeaking wheels. Desks with no personal mementos. Pens, note pads, yellow Post-it notes. In- and out-trays. Blinking server lights, fluorescent bars on the ceiling, dividing the world into neat black and white. A row of listening equipment. The listeners, mostly women, wear oversized earphones, like mufflers in winter. The sound of keyboards, a constant patter of typing, like rain on a corrugated iron roof. They go past the open-plan office, into another corridor. Lights flicker overhead. The same utilitarian design, walls sheathed in cheap durable plastic, hiding stone or earth or other Londons. Lights flicker, on and off, reminding him of the light in an interrogation room. Bad wiring, Fogg thinks. The corridor is quiet. They walk past a closed door. Fogg recognises it with a start. A sign on the door.
The Cipher Room
. Voices from behind it. Fogg stops, listens. Oblivion turns to him, half exasperated. Says nothing, though.

Voices crackly on a radio receiver. Faint. Broken by the hiss of static. Like echoes from the past. Pebbles on the beach. Like Fogg doesn’t want to listen, but can’t help himself. The voice rolls like a wave.

– Vomacht … North Sea installation … extraction team … aborted … snow storm.

Each ellipsis a burst of static. Can’t tell who’s speaking. Fogg tenses at the last phrase. Says, Snow Storm?

Says it like a name.

– Some operation in the North Sea, gone bad, Oblivion says. Shakes his head. Nothing that concerns you. Gives the door a tap. Like a warning. The sound dies abruptly.

– Come on.

Leads Fogg on. Fogg doesn’t want to follow, but has no choice. Their feet the only sound in that corridor now. Reach the last door. No plaque. But Fogg knows it well, nonetheless. Takes a deep breath. Oblivion’s sculpted face, turning. All right? he says.

Fogg nods. Let’s get this over with, he says, futilely.

Oblivion opens the door and they go inside.

9.
THE OLD MAN’S OFFICE
the present

Fogg remembers a night in Paris. The room hot, stuffy, despite the cold outside. A fog knocking against the windows. Hiding them inside. A womb. A shelter. The room smelled of their sex. The bedsheets humid. A radio downstairs, playing marching band. He could mask the outside but he couldn’t mask the music. It penetrated. War music, a truce inside the room.

Entwined. Did not escape into that other place. Stayed in the now. Her body hot, like an oven, the smell of freshly baked bread. Pressed against her. Excited again. People died, everywhere. They made love. The fog masked their sounds.

She was an innocent. He was convinced of that, then and after. The only one of them who could claim to be, despite everything, but he never understood her, in the way you never do, the ones you love. Maybe it was just the way he saw her, through a haze, a fog; perhaps, he thinks, he never saw her clearly.

Fogg comes back to himself with a start. Trying to avoid this room, its solitary occupier. The room is illuminated only sparsely. Bookshelves. A desk, a man behind it. Vintage posters on the walls. One shows a soldier speaking, his words spiral out of his mouth like a metal tongue, on the end of it are impaled three tortured figures, hands raised to their faces in agony.
Your Talk May Kill Your Comrades
, the poster advises. Another shows Uncle Sam pointing an accusing finger. Dressed in his customary cape and tights, a big fuck-off S etched on his chest.
Do You Have What It Takes? Uncle Sam Needs You
. Beside it, an old German propaganda poster. Rocket men soaring into the skies, right hands extended upwards, reaching for the heavens in a Nazi salute. A map of Europe below them, its borders marked, the long shadows of the rocket men falling on it. Underneath, a legend in English:
Every German is an Übermensch – Adolf Hitler
. Fogg remembers them dropping down from the skies in great paper clouds over London, during the Blitz.

Brings back memories. Paris. Leningrad. Berlin. Doesn’t want to think about that.

A photo on the wall. A rare photo. The Old Man and a young Winston Churchill, shaking hands. Both smiling. Churchill with one of his trademark cigars. Long overcoats. Winter. Books on the shelf. Fogg knows them well
. Le Dictionnaire Biographique des Surhommes
, by Stanley Lieber. A default reference text. French edition. Banned for years in Britain. Even included some Bureau personnel within its pages. Stands right next to
The Super Man: His Myth, his Iconography
, by Siegel and Shuster.

A shadow stirs behind the desk. The figure leans forward. A deep, rough voice. Hello, Fogg, it says.

Fogg turns to face him, reluctantly. As though he could keep delaying, forever if he had to. As if he had the talent to stop time. But doesn’t. Looks at him. An old man, still. Been old a long time. Unshaven. Powerful hands. Blue eyes, deep-set. Prominent forehead. Hair somewhere between black and white. Unruly. Sticks out somewhat. Fogg nods, cautiously.

– Old Man, he says.

– Sit down.

Gruffly. How long has it been?

But time no longer matters. Not in this room, this room without windows, and only one way out. Oblivion shuts the door with a note of finality.

Two chairs facing the desk and its occupier. Oblivion sits, on the right. The desk is strewn with papers. This room halts entropy. Exists like a pocket universe. Sealed, and Fogg is sealed in with it.

– I said sit down!

Fogg shrugs. Sits down, on the left, close to the wall. The Old Man sighs, leans back in his chair. I should have known you were going to be trouble when I first recruited you, he says.

TWO:

SHADOW MEN

KINGSTON–CAMBRIDGE
1926–1936

10.
KINGSTON UPON THAMES
1926

Cambridge. But not yet. Before Cambridge. London boy. Well, that’s a lie. Kingston, Surrey. Father a greengrocer in the market square. Burly men come in carts from the countryside, fruit and veg. Offloading. Fogg, helping. Puny muscles straining against the weight. His father a mixture of tobacco and parsley. You’ll never amount to nothing if you don’t … Shakes his head, says, Look at you. That disappointment. His son’s weakness. Fogg Père lifting weights – at the Harvest Fair played the strongman. Once Fogg overheard two men in the market square. Terror of the town, one said. I still remember. Scared of him. I remember, the other one says. Talking about his father, he realised. Short where Fogg sprouts up. Wide where Fogg is not. Like the twin reflections in a funhouse mirror. Fogg Père would go into pubs and start fights when he was younger. Fogg’s mother always working on the house, accumulating things, painting, the brick walls of the house each a different colour gave her sleepless nights. Three dogs, collies. Walks in Bushy Park. Henry, she’d say. Henry.

He hid in books. He was a quiet kid. Didn’t talk much. No one wanted to hear.
Around the World in Eighty Days
.
The Coral Island
.
King Solomon’s Mines
. Once came across one of his mother’s secret books.
The Sorrows of Satan
. Marie Corelli. Didn’t like it. His dad’s shelf, a row of penny dreadfuls.
The Blue Dwarf
, Part Seven, gave him nightmares, the cover a hideous monster lurking beside a sleeping woman’s bed.

Hid in books. Doors into other worlds. Had a secret place by the railway tracks, his own secret garden, would come back smelling of the rosemary that grew there.

But everything blurred, pre-Vomacht. He had one sister, Agnes. She died in seventy-three. So he was told. The world sharply divided, before and after. Even when it happened, at first he didn’t know.

11.
KINGSTON UPON THAMES
1932

Standing by the train tracks. He had cut a hole through the fence to get in. A bit old for it now but still, he likes to watch the trains go past. To Hampton Court, to London. Fog clinging to their metal hides. At dawn their lights shine like yellow eyes. Standing there. Rain falling, but lightly. The ground is not yet mud. A London summer. The ground rumbling underneath him. A train, approaching. Steam rising into the air. Beautiful things, trains. Something coming.

A bubble of silence rushing outwards, expanding. A distortion that has no name. Time slows, for just a moment. Henry reaches out, the fog clinging to his hand, that bubble of silence rushes in slow motion, envelops him, holds him, then pops.

Rushes onwards. Disappears.

And everything changes.

Just like that. The train passed him by. Faces in the windows. Each in their own bubble of silence. Each changed, in their way, but for most it is an undetectable thing, like a single spot of colour on a butterfly’s wing.

Not so for Henry. Not with the fog around him suddenly alive. Suddenly … responsive.

Scaring him. Scaring him a lot.

When it changed.

12.
CAMBRIDGE
1936

A blue sky stretches across the horizon. A yellow spring sun hovers in the sky. The black Rolls-Royce Phantom absorbs the light. Seems to shine. Brand new: and the leather’s as crisp as a British morning.

Peacetime. Jack Payne and the BBC Orchestra. ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’. The Old Man in the back seat. A folder in his lap. He uses folders the way others use guns. Awake eyes, the blue deep and startling. Fields go past. The road from London. Cambridge in the spring. Not many automobiles on the road. The Old Man looks at the folder. The photo of a young man stares back at him. In black ink, a name.
Henry Fogg
. The Old Man shuts the folder. We never learn his own name. He’s buried it deep. Records can’t be trusted, not any more. We only know him as the Old Man.

Samuel is driving.

Trinity College, Cambridge. The Rolls comes to a stop. A sea of grass. Students in groups, sitting in the sun. Samuel comes around and opens the passenger door. The Old Man climbs out. Stretches. Sun on his face. Opens a small metal box, extracts a cigar and lights it. Samuel closes the door of the automobile, softly. Students walking past, books under their arms. Laughing. The Old Man smiles. Then drops it. Like his face is not used to the expression. Turns his head this way and that. Searching for something. Hunting.

– Sir?

– Stay put, Samuel, the Old Man says. Walks towards the college entrance, a grand stone building rising like an ancient castle. The Old Man smiles again, to himself, and sees a fellow come hurrying towards him.

Youngish man. Good-looking in a Jewish sort of way. Tweed jacket. Glasses. A head of dark hair. Hurries towards the Old Man. Stops. Reaches out to shake hands – the Old Man ignores the offer.

– Deutsch, the man says. Arnold Deutsch. Not proudly. Just giving out information. I’ve been expecting you.

Holds his hand out a moment longer. Then lets it drop. We study him, covertly. Deutsch. We know the name. A brilliant man. An Austrian. A Jew. A communist, too, but we don’t find that out, not then. Not for a long time.

13.
TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
1936

The Old Man says, Where is the boy?

– He’s waiting, Deutsch says.

– Then let’s pick up the pace, shall we? We don’t want to keep the young master waiting.

Deutsch nods. Calm, but can sense the hostility from the Old Man and, perhaps, not sure how to take it. Says, Of course not. Left unsaid:
sir
.

The Old Man blows out a cloud of smoke. Drops the cigar to the ground and grinds it with his foot. Come on, then, he says.

He starts walking. Long steps. Deutsch has no choice but to hurry after him.

14.
TRINITY COLLEGE
1936

In a classroom abandoned by its occupants, a young man sits alone. There are no photos of this moment. Had there been, one might be amused by the formal suit, the bad haircut. That sense of fidgety motion even in a frozen image. But there are no photos. They have been destroyed. Windows blink in the light. The smell of cut grass. The sound of laughter. Sunlight coming in through the glass. One window is half open. Warm air wafts through. The boy – the man – fidgets.

The door opens.

The boy raises his head. Recognises the one man, but not the other.

– This is the boy, Deutsch says. Henry Fogg.

The name –
his
name – hangs in the air. Exposed.

Father had a stroke two years before. Mother took over the fruit and vegetables stand. Did better than her man, truth be told. Henry helped, but she said no. Her aunt died, or not an aunt, not exactly. A distant relative, with blood, and money. Left some of it to Henry’s old mum, for the boy, she said. You married beneath you, don’t let the boy suffer the same fate. Not much, Henry’s mother says. Not much but enough. Blood and money will get you into Cambridge – blood more than money, for this is England.

You did well at school, Henry. You should go, she says, urgently, one night. Father in his armchair, staring. Lips moving. No sound. Drools from one corner of his mouth. His left. Henry’s right. Father looks at him funny. Like he
knows
.

It’s all arranged, Mother says. Shoves a piece of folded paper into his hands. He opens it, smooths it. It’s a train ticket. Fierce pride, worry in her voice. Henry’s sister’s out, at a dance. He thinks. His memory of that period is hazy. It rains outside, banishing the fog.

They’d fenced the train tracks. On the Thames, swans mating, he watches the rowers going past, mud on the riverbank, blackberries ripe and black like eyes to be plucked. Just go, Mother says. So he went. Hushed enormous library rooms, books like an army of spirits raised from the dead. A shelter, he thought. An escape.

Until now.

Deutsch: Stand up, Henry!

He stands up. Reluctantly. Outside the windows, the weather begins to change. The sun fades, slowly. The man beside Deutsch glances at the windows, as if confirming something. Looks back. Deutsch gestures at him. Deutsch’s Adam’s apple moving up and down.