A Spy in Time

by Imraan Coovadia

  “I need to get used to it first.”

  João drained his glass and placed it on the table.

  “I suspect your beacon was useless long before you arrived in Rio de Janeiro. I suspect. I suspect.” He put his hands in the air. “But all I can do is suspect and never prove a thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe it means nothing. Maybe it means that you have a friend, or an enemy, that you don’t know anything about—and that friend, or that enemy, doesn’t want to see your face again. Maybe you will find there is no rendezvous in the end. Then again, I don’t want you to be lost in paranoia. It might be me they’re after. I haven’t been able to establish a good connection with the center for days. I also feel abandoned, feel as if there is something they are not telling me. Could it be the hidden enemy?”

  “My heart is pounding very fast.”

  “That’s the catuaba, man. It will subside. But, if you don’t mind, let’s rather go somewhere where we are certain we won’t be overheard in years to come.” He took a leather jacket from the hook and measured me against it. “What kinds of clothes did you come with?”

  “Pants. Some shirts. All taken.”

  “I can lend you something. I have a pair of leather trousers which go very well with this jacket.”

  The roads were filled with pedestrians and restaurant-goers, coconut-water sellers, taxis, and police cars. I didn’t mind their complexions.

  There was noise everywhere on the squares. Radio sets ran on every corner where makeshift tables groaned under the weight of limes and rock sugar, buckets of ice, and bottles of sharp-smelling cachaça. Drinks went from hand to hand without spilling. Young women in black-lace dresses accompanied men in suits into private clubs. The archways leading into them were hung with mother-of-pearl light bulbs, otherworldly as the lanterns of a dream. Couples were kissing along the walls, cocoons placed at regular intervals throughout old vanished Rio.

  For the first time, I saw that I was the ghost. I was the one without a reflection. These remembrances of human beings, these souvenirs of a disappeared continent, were all the more real and substantial compared to me. For I was indeed the ghost and, if things went any further in the direction they seemed to be going, I would never return to the future. I would be a ghost among ghosts, a shadow without the consolation of its own reflection.

  I felt even more out of place in my leather trousers, so tight in the seat of the pants. The jacket was even tighter, but to be honest nobody noticed me beside João in his pastel-blue linen suit and blue beret. João was at home on the streets of Rio, the model resident and, as I was soon to discover, the matchless observer of what there was to be observed.

  He led me though an unlit doorway into a lounge with long benches and a bar counter. A jazz quartet stood on a short stage, letting their instruments rest during the interval. A man stood smoking next to the electric piano. He had a red scarf tied around his neck. Around the room people were talking, drinking beer out of frosted glasses, waiting expectantly near the counter where iron trays of prawn pies were being pulled out of an oven.

  João found us a separate table at the back of the room. He sank into a chair, folded the collar of his jacket up, settled his sunglasses on his nose, and motioned to me to sit beside him.

  “We should be able to talk freely here, Mr. Eleven. But we will keep an eye on the door just in case. I believe that nobody will know to look for us in this place, in the present or in the days to come. Therefore, we have attained the only true form of safety available to us as members of the foreign service, the safety of the needle in the haystack. Isn’t that true?”

  “I’m not sure what you intend.”

  “I am a needle and you are a needle, my friend, and there is a common magnetism between us. It makes us point in the same direction, towards the same truths. Wouldn’t you say?”

  As I got used to João Twenty, I would also become accustomed to his ideas and his proverbs, spun in the years of his exile in Rio when he had nobody to share them with. In a matter of days, I would learn to receive the things he had to say as his own brand of poetry and philosophy.

  In that moment, however, I watched the door with an increasing sense of dread about the hidden enemy. I could picture our pursuers entering. They would find us exposed. It was unusually vivid. After all that had happened I was nothing but the coward who died a thousand deaths in his own imagination. I could hear the soft hissing sound of the bullet which they would put into me. I placed my hand on my stomach and felt a flower of black blood from the imaginary wound.

  “Who do you think is following us, João? Is it Muller? Did someone tip him off? Is it a rogue faction at Agency? Is it Internal Section chasing its own tail?”

  “Somebody doesn’t have to follow us today, in the flesh, so to speak, to eavesdrop on our conversation. They could be following us in a thousand years” time, or ten thousand years, assuming they have the right coordinates. We don’t even know who they are. Who they could be. I mean, my friend, even who we could turn out to be is an unknown mystery. In the face of all that, not even the notorious Internal Section has an idea about how to protect our operations.’

  “You have some idea about Keswyn Muller from the case file. There’s nothing that suggests he has the ability to crack our codes if even a mathematical genius in our time can’t do it. How could he obtain an eight-hundred-digit prime? Do you agree that somebody on the inside could be collaborating?”

  “Could be. I don’t like to speculate. But you need to watch out in case he, she, or it makes sure you never go home again. And remember that you and I are both in possession of eight-hundred-digit primes. That is enough to give us power. We are not going like sheep to the slaughter.”

  I pushed down the desire to confess to João Twenty, to inform him what Akiko had told me about his future. I told myself that it was a secret which Internal Section must have wanted me to communicate. Otherwise they would never have permitted me to travel with the knowledge of João’s death. I kept silent. The guilt pierced my heart.

  The waiter came to take our orders. João waited to say anything more until he was gone. The band started to play again. People were dancing in front of the stage, dressed for the most part in black silk and satin, moving slowly in one another’s arms. Their bracelets and watches gleamed in the low light.

  João watched the women and men. I thought I could tell what he was thinking. What was so simple for them was impossible for most of us in the foreign service. In the lost city of Rio, devoted to the art of kissing, I could never truly hold a woman in my arms. I wanted to ask João if he had taken advantage of his freedom from the usual constraints, but I remembered Akiko and held my tongue.

  “Mr. Eleven, you really want to know what I think? You want to know what I think is behind the recent chaos at Agency?”

  “Very much.”

  “It’s just my homespun philosophy, mind you, but one advantage of being on station in the twentieth century is that I have time to philosophize and follow the concepts where they lead. Since you want to know, I think we are like a snake trying to catch its own tail.”

  “In a concrete sense, João, what does that mean?”

  “It means that, in my opinion, human beings can only stretch so far. Even the machines we build to help us can only do so much within the constraints of our evolutionary nature. Once we let go of causality, cause and effect, beginning and end, we weren’t prepared. As human beings, we need things to take place one after the other. Birth first, and death after. Love first, and then the possibility of marriage. The father first, and after him the son. The mother, and then the daughter. So. So. And so.” João put one hand over his temple as if he had a headache. “In the current mixed-up and back-to-front situation, our minds don’t work properly. Nothing works straight. Not even your friends in Internal Section can protect us from the ensuing chaos.”

/>   My attention drifted from João to the band and to the couples dancing around us who could never again be divided. I noticed the merry glow of the oven in the background, and the frosty pitchers of beer on every table. I thought that I had never been in a city that was so perfectly devoted to happiness. So many years, so many decades of suffering and destruction, so many underground persecutions, and such a sudden strike of radiation in the skies separated us from loving old Rio and its pursuits of happiness.

  I wasn’t the ideal audience for a conspiracy theorist like João Twenty who had been in Rio too long to maintain perspective. I wasn’t concerned with the meaning of time travel and what it did to the small heart of a human being. A pragmatist, I wanted to know what I was supposed to wake up and do the next morning, where I should go, whom I could trust and distrust. If somebody at Agency had sabotaged my beacon, I wanted to know whom it was and what they were up to. João must have guessed my state of mind.

  “You’re impatient, Mr. Eleven. Ah, I don’t blame you. I truly cannot blame you. Those of us who live on station, you understand, develop our own strange need to talk the moment we find a sympathetic ear. It probably detracts from our value as case officers, that we can wear our hearts on our sleeves like this. I am nauseated by myself.”

  I chose to ignore half this outburst. “I thought you would say more about our mutual friend.”

  “We could sit here all night and I would listen to whatever you have to tell me about Akiko, any detail of her existence. But it’s not good for me to fill my imagination with thoughts of her. So, for the moment, let it rest. Let me pay and we can go. Tomorrow we have an early start. We meet the enemy.”

  On the way back, João was subdued. The clubs and restaurants were brighter than ever, their windows blazing yellow in the velvet evening, although there were fewer people in the street. I felt there was some strange perfume blowing through the streets of Rio, a wind of flowers and rotting plant matter, that before long was going to sweep us away. I had seen the blank space on the map and the oceans which closed over the top of Sugarloaf in three hundred years’ time and I felt the mortality of the enormous city press on my heart. I felt the fragility of the millions of black and white and brown people in the buildings, and the ever-briefer life span of their kisses and embraces, their loves foretold and foredoomed.

  Maybe João wasn’t wrong about the limits of the human heart. They say that members of the foreign service see too much in a single career to remain fully human.

  The next morning, we began surveillance on Muller. João woke me up early, when the sun was still a blur across a flat ocean. He produced espresso from a cabinet-sized machine, drained cup after cup with a tablespoon of sugar in each one.

  I declined and went to shower in a cramped bathtub, alternately scalded and frozen by the sporadic bursts of water. I chose a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of linen trousers from the cupboard, on João’s invitation, and returned to find him changing from his silk dressing gown into camouflage trousers and an army jacket.

  Near João’s place we caught the bus to Santa Teresa. The neighborhood was set in a commanding situation, overlooking the center of Rio, connected by a single winding road. We went round and round the mountain, a hot wind flowing in through the open windows of the bus, until the road came out in a flat business district.

  The bus let us out on a square, the Largo dos Guimarães. People stood around or sat at tables, playing cards, coffee and pastries at their elbows, black and white with no distinction, pardos and pretos. We waited on the square in case anybody had followed us. If so, if we were indeed under surveillance by parties unknown, there was no sign of it that I could detect.

  The tram arrived and sat in the middle of the square for a moment before rattling back down the hill. From the bus stop, you saw a cheerless gray sky set over the breadth of the immense city, apartment buildings in great rows, tin-roofed favelas lining the green curves of the jungle and mountain. In the distance, the ocean was still as flat and gray as the sky. Oil tankers lined up short of the horizon, their masts like crossed matchsticks.

  “Is it too early for catuaba?”

  “You are learning to be a carioca, Mr. Eleven, faster than I anticipated. But perhaps it is best if we have clear heads. For today at least.”

  On the other side of the square were a few three- and four-story buildings. One housed a secondhand record store, at ground level, where there were rock ’n’ roll posters plastered on every wall. Young men were leafing through the drawers of stock or listening unhappily to music in soundproofed cubicles, their faces sober as a priest’s. I longed to listen with them but we continued. The built-up section ended abruptly. There were no more cars going in our direction, only the coming-and-going chatter of a helicopter heading inland.

  We climbed a deserted road lined with towering trees and bushes. Birds sang indignantly to one another as the noise of traffic receded. The road made a number of turns. At one bend João opened two strands of barbed wire to allow me to get through.

  We moved through the bushes, careful not to break any branches, and made ourselves a place. From there, lying on a narrow slope covered with rough grass, we could observe the residence of the most wanted man in the history of time.

  João had two pairs of binoculars. He gave me one and showed me how to focus it. Then he put down a diagram of the house, printed on an embossed page.

  “The official building plans of the structure you see in front of you. I have a contact in the office of the prefeito.”

  “Useful to have.”

  “He told me there’s been building work in recent months. You can see the double garage on the right there. It used to be a stable. You should also take note of the fence around the whole of the property. It’s electrified, and to a level far beyond the need to keep out stray animals.”

  A dog kennel had been added to the back of the house. The facade was blank. White stone walls and blinds drawn over the windows.

  I said, “You can’t see anything of what’s going on inside.”

  “That’s the general idea, Mr. Eleven. I’ve been out here, three afternoons of the past five, preparing for your arrival, and I have seen neither hide nor hair of Muller since I met him once outside the gate and shook his hand. But we know he’s in there right now. He gets deliveries and the occasional visitor.”

  “I should march straight up to the door and take him back to Agency.”

  “If he kills himself?”

  „We’d be rid of him, at least. We would have achieved vengeance. Isn’t that a virtue in the old world?”

  “You cowboys sometimes don’t accept the need for running a patient investigation which is the daily bread of a resident. Do we need another body on our hands? Muller is our lead. We cannot afford to alarm him before the moment to strike has arrived.”

  “And who decides that? Who decides when it is the right moment to strike?”

  “I believe that it may be you, Mr. Eleven. Young as you are, they have sent you back here for a reason. That is when a cowboy becomes necessary. And just don’t ask me to give you confidence. I have little enough of it for myself at the present time.”

  João produced a flask from his backpack, poured strong black coffee into the lid. I drank two cups. The jolt only made clearer my sense of separation from the ordinary world. They had warned us about disorientation in training. It was built into the nature of the profession. One day I was at my father’s nursing home, watching him program the robots to play backgammon. The next, I was a mile underground, not far from the mines which had saved the blessed remainder of humanity. I was spying on a criminal mastermind on Santa Teresa in a country of black and white, octoroon, mestizo, red rib, and yellow bone. Meanwhile, I was keeping to myself knowledge of the fate of the man lying beside me. I could hardly breathe for the guilt.

  “And who is in charge of me, João Twenty? Who will say if I m
ake the right decision or the wrong decision out here? Will it be you?”

  “I can’t answer your question but it will not be me. As the resident, I am simply here to be your eyes and ears. You can think of me as a facilitator for those who want to observe and interrupt.”

  “So who is above me?”

  “From what you say, Internal Section. But they are centuries away. You will have to make up your mind.”

  I shook my head. There was nothing more to say on the subject. João folded his arms, turned on his side, and seemed to fall asleep. An hour went by, another and another while I watched the unwavering walls.

  The sun arrived and began to push the accumulations of hot cloud to the horizon. Clouds of insects rose around us. I got on my knees to brush them off. João pushed me down. I looked back to the house. The garage door was opening. A blue Mercedes eased onto the driveway, its long bonnet sparkling. The door closed behind it.

  I examined the car through the binoculars. The driver was alone. I watched her until the car passed through the automatic gate and disappeared. She was wearing a light-gray coat over her shoulders. Her hair was shorter. Otherwise, so far as I could tell, she hadn’t changed. Soledad.

  “You recognize her?”

  “Soledad. I met her in the Green Dolphin with Muller, several years ago.”

  “Ah, this woman, I believe, this woman is the entire reason you were sent to Rio, Mr. Eleven. The fact that you know this woman is the key. That is the theory I am developing.”

  The Agency hadn’t given João any additional information about Soledad. He didn’t ask me and I didn’t tell him. That was the new way. In any case, she didn’t come back to Santa Teresa that night. At around two in the morning, João let me keep watch and went to sleep on his back, the stars shining strangely above both of us.

  I listened to João purring through his long mustache, his hands twitching at his sides. I wondered how he could be so trusting of the universe to lie asleep in the midst of it. I drank more coffee and tried to concentrate on Muller’s castle. I decided that the masonry in the walls was unusually bright in the starlight and then I was also asleep. My sister entered my dreams, her hands also trembling at her sides as if she had a terrible message to deliver. She touched my face with her hands and I wanted to put my head on her bosom, fall down at her feet and beg her forgiveness.