“From the Club, are you?” he grumbled, his voice surprisingly heavy for a man so close to the end. “Tell ’em if it’s a cure, I don’t bloody want it. Laudanum, thanking you kindly, that’d be what I need.”
I flicked through the chart at the end of his bed. The drips fed into his body were mostly saline, a half-hearted attempt at liquid sustenance after his digestive system had packed up. The bottles were glass drums, heavy, a leak in one where the rubber had cracked around the nipple of the jar. “Oh God,” he groaned, seeing me read. “You’ve trained as a doctor, haven’t you? Can’t stand bloody doctors, especially when they’re five years old.”
“Six,” I corrected. “And don’t worry; you’ll be dead within a week.”
“A week! I can’t be sitting around here for a bloody week! You know those bastards won’t even give me something good to read? ‘Mustn’t get excited, Mr Shotbolt,’ they say. ‘Now, Mr Shotbolt, can you make it to the potty?’ The potty! Do you know that’s what they actually call it? I’ve never been so humiliated in all my life.”
The way he spoke implied that here was a man for whom once-in-a-lifetime outrages had been a fairly common occurrence in times past, and would probably be again. I chose not to debate the point and, satisfied that for all his medication Shotbolt still had some semblance of coherence, I sat down on the edge of his bed and said, “I’ve got a message.”
“It had better not be a question about Queen bloody Victoria,” he growled. “Can’t stand all these academics wanting to know about her stocking size.”
“It’s not a question,” I repeated patiently. “More of a warning. It’s been passed down from generation to generation, trickled down from the future.”
“What’ve we done this time?” he grunted. “Too much ice and not enough fire?”
“Something like that. Apparently–and I feel a little embarrassed telling you this–but apparently the world is ending. Which is, in and of itself, no great surprise. But the end of the world is getting faster. And that’s something of a stumper.”
Shotbolt considered this a while, fingers still tight around the edge of his sheets. Then, “At last,” he exclaimed. “Something new to talk about!”
Almost exactly thirty years later I boarded a flight from Heathrow Airport to Berlin Templehof, changing passports on my way through customs, heading east in search of something new.
Chapter 32
There are certain rules to a successful deception, of which my personal favourite is–stick with what you know. That is not to say that truth should ever be incorporated into your lies, but rather that good research is the key to a consistent lie. It was in 1956 by no means impossible for a citizen of the West to enter the East–far easier, in fact, than for a citizen of the East to head to the West–but to declare yourself as such was to invite immediate attention and scrutiny, and this was, I felt, something I could not necessarily afford.
I had, in my twelfth life, after receiving Christa’s message, embarked on what I believe would come to be known, in the 1990s, as a portfolio existence. I travelled extensively under the flimsy cover of “executive businessman” and dabbled with whichever intelligence services I felt might be of most use to me in order to keep as broad an eye as possible on global events. In 1929, aged eleven, I bought up stocks as the markets collapsed, and by 1933 I was the sole shareholder in one of the fastest-growing investment brokerages in the northern hemisphere. An actor by the name of Cyril Handly was paid a very reasonable wage to impersonate me, it being unwise for a fifteen-year-old boy to be caught as CEO of a large investment company. He was precisely what a chairman should have been–dignified, well built, with a carefully cultivated accent, refined tastes and a reasonable but not unhealthy belly on him, and his combination of judicious silence and fiery retribution worked well in the office until in 1936 his enjoyment of the role became a little too much to tolerate when he began sacking reliable members of staff during board meetings. I relocated the company to Switzerland, paid Cyril off with a retirement home in Bali, and employed a rather younger actor to impersonate my son, newly risen to become head of the company, buying his complicity with a mixture of reasonable fees and, in a twist that surprised me more than anyone else, regular lessons in economics, finance and accountancy which led to, by 1938, my having complete confidence in his ability to run the company with the barest interference from me.