By 1953 I had informants and contacts across the surface of the globe. I also had a wife–Mei–who I had met in Thailand during one of my flying visits and who wanted a visa to the USA. I gave her this visa and set her up in comfortable middle-class gentility in the suburbs of New Jersey, where she learned English, attended society gatherings, meddled in charities and kept a very polite young lover called Tony, who she loved deeply but would, out of good manners to me, always shoo out of the house before my return. For my few expenditures I received regular meals of an extraordinarily high quality, companionship when required and a philanthropic reputation. Indeed, I had a problem with what to do with the excess money I was receiving, and relied heavily on anonymous donations to charity to remove the compromising wealth from my possession. Mei excelled in this task, visiting the offices of every potential recipient and examining, in the finest detail, records of their words, deeds and actions before permitting the dump. Sometimes the glut of income was so embarrassingly large and Mei’s scrutiny so thoroughly fine that I had to go behind her back and give an anonymous donation to a charity she didn’t approve of, simply to save time. We were never in love, nor ever needed to be. We had what we desired and that was all, and to the day she died she was loyal to both Tony and me, believed my name was Jacob and I was from Pennsylvania. Or if she doubted, she never questioned.
All of this was fine and well, but its ultimate purpose was still hidden even from my wife. As my criminal contacts grew, so my ability to tap into sources of knowledge expanded, and by the 1950s I had policemen, politicians, civil servants, governors and generals either under my thumb or within my grasp. Considering that the information I wanted from them was so minimal, so simple, they must have been grateful that I was the one doing the pushing. My enquiries came through in the form of data on this or that building, or this or that name, ferreting out in my own side-winding way the fates of the Cronus Clubs across the world and of their members, who had lived, or died, or Forgotten. Sometimes I struck lucky: in 1954 I stumbled quite by chance on Phillip Hopper, the son of the Devon farmer, who in this life had inherited his father’s business and was now, to my mild delight, producing clotted cream in vast quantities from his herd of fat, overbred cows. The fact he was working on his father’s land did not bode well for his memory, as I had never, in all my years, seen Phillip do a stroke of work, but in a spirit of adventure I packed Mei on to a flight to England, bought her a straw hat, took her to see the Tower of London and finally jumped on a train with her to the south-west, where we spent a very pleasant holiday walking the cliffs, looking for fossils and growing really rather tubby on fruit scones. Only on the penultimate day, as if by chance, did Mei and I wander past Phillip Hopper’s farm, climbing over the fence and down to the cottage door to see if we could buy some of his famous clotted cream.
Phillip himself answered the door, and there was no doubt, none at all, even in that first second, that he had lost his memory. It wasn’t simply his circumstances, his accented farmer’s voice or the look of blank ignorance when he saw me, and the flicker of contempt when he heard my fake American accent; it was a deeper absence. A loss of time, experience, knowledge–a loss of all the things that had made this man who he had been. Phillip Hopper, like so many ouroborans, had at some point in his last life been captured by forces unknown and the very essence of who he was wiped from his memory.
He sold us the clotted cream, and I am ashamed to say we had eaten all of it by the time our train got back into London the following morning.
Chapter 63
There would be, I concluded, chaos in my next life.
Lying next to Mei in our polite suburban home, paid for by drug smugglers and fraudsters, I would stare at the shadows of leaves swaying across the ceiling and consider questions hundreds of years apart.
Those kalachakra whose memories had been wiped would wake with the same confusion and madness that I myself had experienced in my early lives. Usually, after a Forgetting, Cronus Club members would appear in the second life to shield the terrified child from the worst traumas of that experience and to guide them through that most difficult of times. But to do so now, with Vincent clearly aware of the identities of so many kalachakra, risked an exposure for those of us–however many there were–still with our memories intact. And yet what if we did not? Future generations of the Cronus Club, for hundreds of years, were relying on the twentieth-century members to protect them, to assist them. What would they do without the groundwork we laid?
They would find their way, I concluded, as they had no choice in the matter. The more pressing question lay in the here and now–what would I do, one of the privileged few who still recalled the nature of my own being, when in the next life the asylums of this world began to fill with men and women whose minds had been ripped apart by Vincent?
I needed to find a Cronus Club which had not been touched by Vincent Rankis’s purge, even one would be enough, whose members still knew who they were.
By 1958 it was apparent that the only Club I was likely to find which would fit this description was in Beijing.