He had to admit, grudgingly, that the food wasn’t bad. He was constantly plagued by nutritionists and well-meaning doctors wanting to get his cholesterol down, but within those parameters he actually ate quite well. He’d been quite plump when he first came here, but now his weight was down to a rangy sixty-five kilos and he couldn’t deny that it made getting about somewhat easier, even if the sight of his bony knees in the morning did annoy him out of all proportion.
There was a rack of communal pads by the entrance to the restaurant. He grabbed one as he went past and sat at his usual table, in a corner by one of the windows, far from the other early morning residents gumming their way through their cereal. One of the serving staff came to his table and he waved his phone so it could transmit his ID and dietary requirements.
When the waiter had departed, Johnny activated the pad and called up a menu of news sites. There were many things he hated about the modern world, but the internet was not among them. The communal pads had restrictions to stop the residents looking for porn, narcotics or firearms – all of which had caused problems in the past, some of the residents were pretty feisty – but the news wasn’t obviously censored. He was reading a piece about the Community’s delegation taking their seat at the United Nations when his breakfast arrived. Grapefruit, orange juice, a cup of coffee, rasher of grilled bacon, a grilled sausage, a small portion of scrambled eggs – obviously today was a day for lifting the foot off the anti-cholesterol pedal. The bacon wasn’t bad.
After breakfast, he returned to his apartment for his coat and scarf and went for a walk in the grounds of the hospital. It was a bright, chilly day, and his breath plumed in the cool air as he did a couple of circuits of the building. The grounds weren’t very large, and several other of the more ambulatory residents were also taking morning constitutionals in the hour or so before the wheelchair-bound started to emerge from the building and race each other awkwardly along the paths.
After his walk was an hour’s physio, which was... well, it passed the time, if nothing else.
He usually had a nap after physio. He found himself napping a lot, these days, which was irritating. He remembered a time when he could work all day and far into the night and wake up the next morning clear-headed and ready to start work again. These days he was lucky if he could make it to lunch without nodding off.
This morning, though, he had barely settled down when there was a knock on the door. When he answered it he found Ania standing outside with two men he had never seen before, and his heart thudded in his chest so hard that he thought for a moment that it was finally going to stop.
“You’ve got visitors, Johnny,” Ania told him. “From your lawyers.”
He looked at them. One was nondescript and had a cane; the other had prematurely-white hair and a hunted expression. They were both wearing expensive suits and carrying briefcases, but they were the least likely-looking lawyers he had ever seen.
“Sir,” the one with the cane said briskly in French, presumably hoping that Ania would not be able to follow, “my name is Smith, and this is my colleague, Mr Jones. We represent Leonidas & Parr of Tilbury, Essex. Please accept our identification.” And he took from his jacket pocket a small black and white photograph and held it out. Jean-Yves took it, and even now, after all these years, his eye first sought out not Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd-George and the other world leaders, but Roland’s face, in the background, stern and purposeful. He felt a great tiredness, like the shadow of a cloud.
“You’d better come in, then,” he said.
3.
THE FIRST THING he said, when Ania had gone and the two men were sitting on the sofa in his apartment, was, “You’re no more lawyers than I am.”
“No,” the one with the cane admitted. “No, we’re not. We’re not here to harm you, though, I assure you of that. My father was sole trustee of your fund.”
Jean-Yves tipped his head to one side and looked at the younger man’s face. “Yes,” he said. “I remember him. You look almost nothing like him, you know. I presume your presence here means he’s dead.”
“About eighteen months ago,” said Rudi. He paused, somewhat awkwardly. “There are some questions I must ask you, the first of which is, which one are you? Sarkisian, Tremblay, or Charpentier?”
Jean-Yves glowered at him. “You don’t know?”
Rudi shook his head. “There are just the details of payments. And they were not easy to come by.”
“I am Charpentier,” said Jean-Yves. “How did you find me?”
“My father left me some... items,” Rudi said. “They led me to a trust fund of some nine hundred and seventy million dollars. I can only assume my father intended me to take his place as trustee.”
“How did you find me?” Jean-Yves asked again. “No one was supposed to be able to find me.”
“Well, I had a head start, with the details of the trust fund,” Rudi said reasonably. “It wasn’t easy, if that’s any consolation; my father laid quite a paper trail.”
“Yes,” said Jean-Yves. “Yes, I remember. Evil little bastard. I always said we shouldn’t have trusted him.”
“To be fair, you may have been the only people in my father’s life who were justified in trusting him. In his very long life.”
Jean-Yves looked at the two men. “And what about you?” he asked the white-haired one.
“Me?” said Forsyth in surprise.
“Yes, you. Is your father mixed up in this catastrophe somehow?”
“This man is under my protection,” said Rudi. “And when did this become a catastrophe, precisely?”
“When you turned up at my front door,” Jean-Yves said angrily. “No one was supposed to visit me in person. Ever. I’m supposed to be dead, for Christ’s sake.”
“Yes, since 1978,” said Rudi. “I read your obituary. That was one of the questions I was going to ask you.”
The Frenchman rubbed his eyes. “You have no idea what you’ve done, coming here like this.” He stood up. “You have to get me out of here. Right now.”
“Now wait a moment,” said Rudi.
“No.” Jean-Yves stomped over and poked Rudi in the chest. “I’ve spent decades hiding from them. And you just come waltzing in here with Christ only knows who following you. This is your responsibility.”
This was not going quite the way Rudi had envisaged it. He said. “I can relocate you, certainly, but not on the hoof. It’ll take time.”
“I don’t have any time. We have to go now.”
Rudi looked at Forsyth, who was following the conversation with a baffled expression. He said to the Frenchman, “But how can you trust us? I could have come into possession of these bona fides by any number of routes.”
Jean-Yves stomped across the room to the coat rack and grabbed his jacket. “Because if you have control of the money you wouldn’t be here asking me questions; you’d have killed me on the spot. Now let’s go.”
FORSYTH DROVE. RUDI told him to head in the direction of Radom, and then busied himself with his phone for an hour or so while the Frenchman sat beside him in the back of the car, fuming gently and occasionally shaking his head and uttering swear words in four different European languages.
“How old are you?” Rudi asked at one point, between flurries of texts and emails.
“I’m ninety-two years old this year, fuck you,” Jean-Yves said.
“Your obituary says you were born in 1895. You were photographed at the Treaty of Versailles. You are not ninety-two years old. Look at me, please.” He took a photograph of the Frenchman with his phone. “Thank you.”
Jean-Yves snorted and crossed his arms and stared pointedly out of the window at the passing scenery while Rudi went back to sending and receiving messages.
It took them an hour and a half to reach Radom, and when they got there Rudi told Forsyth to turn west towards Cz¸estochowa.
“How much do you know?”Jean-Yves asked.
“I know the Sarkisian Collective was a group of mathe
maticians and topologists and cartographers, which in certain circles is very significant,” Rudi told him. “I know you’re a lot older than you look, and that makes me suspect that you and your colleagues spent a long time in the Community. I know you have a lot of money, and I know you employed my father to look after it. I know you’re afraid of someone.”
The Frenchman sighed. “Did you find the others?”
“I found details of two other sets of disbursements, both of them discontinued.”
“So they’re both dead.”
“I don’t know. One of the disbursements was to a bank in Cannes, the other to a firm of attorneys in Montreal.”
“Roland,” said Jean-Yves. “Roland always said he wanted to visit Canada.”
“What I don’t know, Professor, is what you’ve done,” Rudi said.
“I don’t have to tell you that.”
“You do if you don’t want us to stop the car and leave you at the side of the road,” Rudi told him. “I have control of your money, Professor. What are you going to do without that?”
Jean-Yves rubbed his face. “I was born in Avignon,” he said. “My father was a pâtissier, my mother a seamstress. My mother was also a genius; if she’d been given the chance she would have been one of the most naturally talented mathematicians in Europe. I think she wanted to live the career she never had through me; she would have beaten me black and blue if I had wound up as a small-town pastry chef.”
“There are worse things,” Rudi opined resuming thumb-typing on his phone. “It takes a rare kind of patience to be a pâtissier. Or at least to be any good at it.”
The Frenchman looked at him. Then he shrugged. “Whatever,” he said. “My father was adequate. It was my mother who introduced me to mathematics, who taught me things I wasn’t being taught at school, who prepared me for university.”
“Your mother,” Rudi said, “wasn’t English, by any chance, was she?”
Jean-Yves chuckled. “No. But I see where your mind’s going. His mother was English. Sarkisian.”
“Le Parapluie.”
“Roland,” said Jean-Yves. “At university everyone called him Le Parapluie because he always carried an umbrella. We all started doing it; it was our trademark.”
“The Sarkisian Collective.”
Jean-Yves waved the name away.
“How did you meet?”
“In Paris, at university. Although we weren’t there long, because of the War. We met again afterward.”
Rudi glanced at the old Frenchman and wondered what lay in the gap between ‘... because of the War’ and ‘We met again afterward.’
“I was in Caen by then,” Jean-Yves went on. “He wrote to me. I have no idea how he found me; my parents were dead by then, no one from university knew where I was. Roland said he wanted me to join a group of friends – mathematicians and cartographers – who were studying a particularly interesting question of topology. There was a patron who would fund our work. He told me to meet him at Versailles.”
“His mother’s maiden name was Whitton-Whyte, wasn’t it.”
“White. He said her name was White. He had some papers she’d left him, things she’d inherited from some distant relative. Maps and things.”
Rudi paused, just momentarily, in his texting.
“There was a... treatise,” Jean-Yves went on. “Among the papers. It was really very strange work; I hadn’t seen anything like it before.” He paused. “You already know what it was, don’t you.”
“The holy grail. The creation myth.”
Jean-Yves nodded. “Just so. It wasn’t the work of one person. It was a bundle of papers, oh, so thick.” He indicated by holding his thumb and forefinger about three centimetres apart. “It was written in perhaps a dozen different hands, in different inks. Some of it was very old. There were many annotations and crossings-out. It was actually quite a mess. Roland wanted us to work on it, refine it, try to understand it.”
“Which you did, in the end.”
“Ah,” Jean-Yves looked sad. “I’m not sure we ever understood it. But we learned how to use it, eventually, which was sufficient for the purposes of our patrons.”
“Your patrons being...?”
Jean-Yves ignored the question. “We worked for years. This was no simple problem, it was...” he searched for the words. “It was all-consuming. Even with the treatise, we were working in completely unknown territory. Our patrons looked after us, took care of our every need.” He paused and looked out of the window again. “We were prisoners, of course. But we became so absorbed in our work that it didn’t matter. Only the work mattered. We were like monks.” He glanced at Rudi. “I suppose you find that absurd.”
Still typing, Rudi shook his head.
“We moved, from time to time,” Jean-Yves went on. “Were moved, I should say. We’d stay in country houses, old hotels, abandoned farms. After a few years, representatives of our patrons would come and we would be told to pack up our work and our belongings and we would be taken somewhere else. We wound up near Auxerre, in a big old house with a vineyard. This was, oh, late 1937, early 1938. Roland saw the way the wind was blowing – we all did, we’d lived through one German invasion – and he said we had to leave in order to protect our work. So we left Auxerre and he led us into the Promised Land.”
“The Community.”
“No. That was later.”
Rudi didn’t say anything. He turned his head and looked out of the window.
“It was very isolated,” Jean-Yves said. “A house by the sea. We were free to walk anywhere we wanted, but there was nowhere to go. No other habitation, no other people. It was as if we were the only people in the world. And we stayed there while Europe burned and millions died.” He sighed.
“Did you see no one else at all?”
“There was a small staff at the house. Half a dozen men and women. They looked after us.” He shrugged. “There was a man who used to visit us when we were in France. To visit Roland, really. A quiet man, unassuming, almost apologetic. We called him ‘Gaston’, but he wasn’t French. I got the impression he was Russian. He came and went from the house by the sea. I think he represented our patrons, and he took our work away with him for others to look at.”
“How long were you there for?” asked Rudi.
Jean-Yves looked at him. “How familiar are you with the Community?”
“I know there’s a time dilation effect, if that’s what you mean,” Rudi said. “Time passes more slowly in the Community. Nobody knows why.”
The Frenchman looked smug. “I know why.”
There was a silence in the car for almost a minute. Then Rudi said, “I presume you’re not going to tell us.”
Jean-Yves shook his head. “Not even if I thought you stood a chance of understanding it. Which I don’t.”
Rudi sighed and looked at his phone, thumbed up a text, read it, swiped it away.
“We went to the house by the sea in January 1939,” said Jean-Yves. “We stayed there for three years, as far as I could judge. When we came back to Europe it was April 1979.”
Rudi stared.
“It was a bit of a shock,” Jean-Yves added.
“I can imagine.”
“Can you?”
Rudi thought about it. “No,” he said finally. “No, I can’t. Sorry.”
“Most of us wanted to go straight back to the house,” Jean-Yves said.
Time passes more slowly in the Community. But not that slowly. Rudi tried to think.
“What did you do?” he asked.
“Our lives had ceased to be normal when we went to the house by the sea. We knew we were investigating something... extraordinary, but until we came back we didn’t realise just how extraordinary it was. We were men out of time. Our patrons had placed fake obituaries in the papers. We were dead. Some of the group wanted to try to find their families; they went away and I never saw them again. I don’t know what happened to them.
“One night Roland gathered the
rest of us together and told us he believed our patrons would have us killed as soon as they realised that our work was complete. He’d kept the truth from them for some time, but he said they were close to understanding that they didn’t need us any more. So he had done a bad thing. At some point, he had come into contact with quite a large amount of our patrons’ money, and he had... sequestered it somewhere. He said he’d been in contact with the Community and that they were prepared to grant us asylum. They’d sent him the coordinates of a border crossing in Estonia and were waiting to welcome us with open arms.”
Rudi’s shoulders sagged. He dropped the phone into his lap and sat back. “And that’s when you met my father.”
“Your father and another man. They’d been sent to guide us across the border. I didn’t find out until later that Roland had also engaged him to take care of the money, and by that time it was too late to do anything about it.”
Rudi closed his eyes and swore under his breath. With an effort, he said, “What happened next?”
“Roland was very clever in his negotiations with the Community. He hadn’t told them everything we knew, everything we had done. They believed we were mathematicians who had stumbled independently across topologies which would allow us to open their borders from the European side. The world had just passed through two terrible wars; they were terrified that Europe would find a way to invade. It would have been just as easy to have us killed, but instead they put us to work making their borders secure.”
Rudi thought about it. Apart from a very brief period in the late nineteenth century, the Presiding Authority had been staunchly isolationist for its entire history, aware of but entirely uninterested in Europe. Only a select few had been allowed to cross the border, in either direction. It would have suited them to seal the place off entirely, but they had already begun to meddle quietly in European affairs and either they had too much time and effort invested in it, or were simply enjoying themselves too much, to stop.
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