The Violent Century Read online

  – Come on, Fogg.

  – Damn it, Oblivion!

  Oblivion doesn’t reply. Stands up. He’s tall, he almost has to stoop under the ceiling. But not quite. Pulls on his gloves. Says, Come on, Fogg. It’s just routine.

  Fogg says, Sommertag.

  The name, if that’s what it is, lights up the room. Fogg says, She was beautiful, wasn’t she, Oblivion?

  Oblivion says, Yes. She was.

  As though something has been decided. As though there never was a question about it.

  Fogg stands up. The silent men move their heads as one, watching him with their blank milky eyes. Oblivion picks up his cane. Twirls it, distracted.

  – Let’s go, Fogg says.

  Oblivion nods. Is Fogg resigned? Defeated? We don’t know. Something in his eyes. A light that shouldn’t be there. The Hole in the Wall is grey, smoke stands motionless in the air. The barman still cleans the same pint glass with the same dirty rag. An automaton, like the smoking men. Fogg and Oblivion, Oblivion and Fogg. They walk to the door together. Their feet make no sound on the hardwood floor.

  4. PALL MALL, LONDON the present

  Night. It seems to Fogg it is always night, these days. London is his city, a city of fog. Sunlight hidden behind clouds even at midday. They cross the bridge, the Thames down below, the water eddies cold, treacherous. A Rolls-Royce Phantom II. Remembers this car, from long ago. Oblivion driving. That, in itself, is inconceivable. Remembers the car’s driver. Samuel. Memory like a chalkboard, but you can never quite remove the images there, only smudge them. Sometimes beyond recognition.

  – Did you steal it? he says.

  Oblivion laughs. Not much humour. Inside the smell of old cigars and old polished leather. Fogg winds down the window. Looks down at the water. The Thames, brown murky water, fog gathering in clumps over the surface, as if the river is haunted by ghosts.

  Quiet. A plane overhead, coming low, following the contours of the river. Heading to Heathrow. Passengers aboard, like so many sardines in a rations tin. Packed tight. Peering out of lit windows on a city burning with lights.

  It’s a short drive to Pall Mall. The tall buildings are dark. They have wide stone façades. Gentlemen’s clubs. The Athenaeum. The Travellers. The Army and Navy Club.

  St James’s Palace. Fogg had met the King there, once, and the Simpson woman. Before the war. The Old Man had taken him to the palace. Secret meetings in secret rooms.

  There is a shadow on the roof opposite the Bureau. Or does he just imagine it? The car comes to a stop. Oblivion stills the engine. They just sit there, the two of them. Like old times. Old men no less old for looking young.

  – Have there been any new ones, Oblivion?

  – You know the answer to that.

  – Then no, Fogg says.

  – No.

  Just sitting there. Reluctant to get out. An old bond holding them together close as lovers.

  5. PALL MALL the present

  Fogg hadn’t imagined the shadow, though. It’s there, perched on the rooftop. Watching.

  A young woman with old eyes. Dark hair. Dark clothes. Watching the car. Watching the two men. Angry, now. Hawks up phlegm and spits.

  Not quite in the way we would.

  Normally a water-based gel. But this one’s tougher. Her body’s composition demands to be studied. Has been studied. Glycoproteins and water undergoing metamorphosis, becoming something hard and strong, like iron or lead. The globule of spit flies through the air, the shape elongating, hardening. Its speed reaches terminal velocity. It is aimed at the car. Like a bullet. Sometimes, everything is like a bullet.

  It hits the back window of the Rolls-Royce.

  Which shatters.

  An explosion of glass and spit.

  6. PALL MALL the present

  The two men drop low in their seats. Cold air bursts in through the broken window.

  Fogg: What the—

  Oblivion: Stay down!

  A second explosion. The passenger-seat window shatters inwards. Glass showers the two men. Oblivion kicks his door open. Slides out. Fogg follows. Crouching. Looking up, shadow on the rooftop. Something familiar about her. Fog starts to rise around the car. Tendrils of it. Obscuring.

  The woman spits a third time. Phlegm like a bullet going straight at Fogg. Oblivion raises his hand. Something invisible emanating from him. The spit loses definition. Hesitates. As if confused. Caught between two states. Loses momentum. By the time it reaches them it has no power left. Flops, wetly, on the pavement.

  – Spit.

  She looks down at them. We can’t read her face, from that distance. She raises her hand, a salute, a wave. Turns and disappears into the night.

  – Get up, Oblivion says. And get rid of the damned fog, will you?

  Fogg does as he’s told. Stands up. Stretches. The fog dissipates, slowly. He says, What the hell was that?

  – That was Spit, Oblivion says.

  Fogg says, What’s her damned problem?

  Oblivion twists his lips into something resembling a smile.

  – I suppose she doesn’t like you very much, he says.

  Looks sadly at the car. Air gusting in through broken windows.

  Turns away.

  – Come on, he says.

  Walks away, towards the building. Fogg follows. Nondescript building. Can’t really tell what, if anything, is inside. Could be a bank. Could be a warehouse. Could be anything.

  They go around to the side of the building. A narrow alleyway. A door set in the wall. No handle. They stop in front of it. Stare.

  – It’s a damn shame about the car, Oblivion says.

  Fogg, face suddenly animated: Too bad you can’t fix things, isn’t it, Oblivion. Only rub them away, like they never existed.

  Oblivion turns his head. Too bad you … he says, but doesn’t complete the sentence.

  The door swings open. An absence of sound. Darkness beyond. Oblivion expels air. Never mind, he says. Walks through the door instead. Swallowed by the dark. Fogg, after a moment’s hesitation, follows.

  7. THE BUREAU the present

  A dusty corridor. Bare. No windows. Never been cleaned, by all accounts. The door shuts noiselessly behind them. It’s dark inside. There’s a small wooden table in the entrance, with a potted plant sitting on top of it. The plant’s leaves are drooping. It seems half dead. Fogg touches it. Marvels at the feel of soft plant matter, the texture of the leaves. Says, Has no one watered this thing since the war?

  Oblivion oblivious. Walks down the corridor. Fogg abandons the plant to its half-life. Follows. Says, What about the car?

  – The car will be taken care of.

  Fogg remembers this corridor. Remembers that same plant, decades before. Like them, it is one of the changed. Who knows where the Old Man found it. Fogg feels a strange sort of kinship with it. None of us choose what we become. Notices no dust on the floor, scuffed by the passage of too many feet over too many years – a clue that this place is not as abandoned as it appears. At the end of the corridor, a lift. No buttons to press.

  – Hasn’t changed much around here, Fogg says.

  Oblivion says, The Old Man doesn’t like change.

  Which is ironic, Fogg thinks, but doesn’t say. Doesn’t plan on saying anything much at all. Plans on saying, in fact, as little as possible. Afraid, however, that they already know.

  The only real question, then, simply, is how much.

  The lift pings. The doors slide open. Nobody likes change, Oblivion says. They get in the lift. The doors close, sealing them inside.

  8. THE BUREAU the present

  Blinking lights. The first thing Fogg notices is that the technology has been updated. An open-plan space, deep under Pall Mall. Maybe below the level of the Thames, even. The Bureau. London has always been a warren underground, and Pall Mall is no exception: secret passageways, Tube tunnels, sewers, cellars, more of London under- than above-ground. The Bureau didn’t build this space, merely colonised it. Ants in a warr
en. Or mushrooms, sporing. Take your pick.

  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.