Ian Hocking - Flashback

However, he looked forward to the meeting. He had a growing sense that the people he met, even little Lisandro, were dancing to a tune that only he could hear. Cory, the vagabundeo , was wandering through a monument to the past perfect: past completed. These people had already lived and died. He convinced himself that these thoughts were intellectual musings in the style of a reductio ad absurdum . He would not voice them to Jennifer when he met her at the prearranged time. The notion sounded too much like Jackson, Cory’s predecessor, who had cracked under the strain of time travel. For Jackson, the zombies were too much. Not Cory. He would cope.

Cory reached the art deco apartment block ten minutes early. Following a reconnoitre, he waited outside a hotel. Some builders were observing the midday ritual of a street-side barbecue. Cory declined the offered meat and moved along to an intersection. Being an intersection, it was thronging with people. Two men argued about Peron and five-year plans; their discussion was punctuated by the sudden intuition and non sequitur of enthusiastic but inexpert debaters. Behind them, three ladies managing fans declared them stupid. A young woman in light, black petticoats offered Cory a flower from her stall, but he shook his head, smiling. Then he looked at his watch. It was time.

He approached the gated hallway of the apartments. Two elderly porteros porteños were sweeping the floor beyond the gate. They looked up at Cory but did not let him in. He pressed the buzzer for the second of the apartments. A minute passed. The taller of the porteños , who was looking at Cory, stopped sweeping and wiped his mouth with the edge of his neck cloth. When the gate unlocked itself, Cory stepped back. It was the first electric entry system he had seen in Buenos Aires. He passed through, whistling, and raised his hat to the sweepers. They frowned and moved into the shadows on either side of the hallway. Cory’s expensive shoes and cane reflected in the polished wooden floor.

He found Jennifer on a bench in the centre of the courtyard. There was a jacaranda tree between the bench and the white wall. Beneath the black branches and purple-blue corollas, Jennifer sat like an arachnid, shaded and still. Her outfit was black. She wore a wide-brimmed hat, a black top—anachronistically tight—with blooming cuffs. Her skirt was ankle-length. A veil darkened and blurred her face. It was, however, the bracelet on her right wrist that drew most of Cory’s attention. With that device Jennifer could conjure a wormhole on demand. It permitted her a direct connection with the future. This connection was denied to Cory, who had no rank for such a privilege. His communications were limited to cryptic announcements in the classified advertisements of newspapers; to be read, if at all, by automated agents that Jennifer had assured him would scour the archives.

As Cory approached the bench, he offered his hand. She ignored it.

‘I think–’ he began.

‘You’re the monkey,’ the woman replied, ‘and I’m the organ grinder. So stop thinking. Sit down and code in.’

Cory sat. The bench was wet from the recent rain.

It was 1st August, 1947. That meant he had to code in with a fragment of poetry.

Where is Echo, beheld of no man, only heard on river and mere? he thought.

The answer came as a second thought, not his: But where are the snows of yesteryear?

‘So,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Do you understand the seriousness of what you did, Cory?’ she said. Only her lips moved. ‘The calculations require a precise mass. Precise . You almost destroyed the bridge. Dumb luck kept your atoms together.’

Cory shook his head. What the hell was she talking about? He had wanted to tell her that she was the first real person he had met in months. He had wanted conversation.

‘Never mind that it weighs next to nothing,’ she said, half to herself. ‘The further back you go, the more sensitive the insertion becomes to initial conditions. It took a whole bloody day to reset.’

‘You’ve gotten it wrong,’ Cory said, smiling crookedly. He still hoped the conversation could be salvaged. He needed, he supposed, her humanity. ‘I’m meant to act British, you’re meant to act American.’

‘Don’t question my patriotism,’ she said. ‘Hand it over.’

‘What?’

She snapped her fingers. ‘The ring .’

Cory stared at her until the moment grew long enough for her head to turn, cold and slow, towards him. Until those eyes were fully on his, he had not believed that she could be serious.

‘Can’t I keep it? The thing’s travelled with me already. It represents my promise.’

‘Sweetheart, don’t try to be profound. Not in that hat.’

He sighed and gave her the ring. She placed it in her small handbag and relaxed somewhat, letting her back curve against the slats of the bench. She took a long breath and looked at him as though this action—the handing over of the ring—represented a second beginning. She even smiled. Cory did not smile back.

‘Cory, my Cory. So young and yet so serious.’

He looked at the handbag. ‘We should be less candid with proper names.’

‘Ever played that child’s game with the paper cups and string? That’s the game they play in 1947, only they call it the telephone. Don’t let the sunshine fool you. This is the fucking dark ages.’ She lifted her head and, as the hat’s penumbra moved up, Cory saw the paleness there in her face and the unfamiliar deltas that had formed at the corners of her eyes and, lower, sour grooves drooping from her lips.

‘When are you from?’ he asked.

‘It’s been a few days since you crossed the bridge. Why, do I look older?’

By years .

‘No.’

‘Liar,’ she said, but her flippancy betrayed a certain self-consciousness. ‘Now, how about a report? Speak, don’t think.’

Cory looked around the courtyard. Its walls were conspicuously pink in homage to the palace where Peron conducted the orchestra of government. The colour fused the warring red and white of Argentina’s past, a blend as silly as raspberry ripple ice-cream, as incongruous as the woman on the bench: fifty-five kilogrammes of matter that did not belong to this time any more than Cory himself.

‘Eventually,’ he said, packing unspoken adventures into that word, ‘I traced the item.’

‘How?’

‘In Durban, I picked up the Portuguese link from the daughter of Rodenbach.’ Cory removed his hat and placed it on his lap. ‘I flew into Lisbon a week later but the offices were closed. Turns out two men—matching the descriptions of the target and the underwriter—had hired a local airman to fly them to London via Paris two hours before I showed. I hired the airman’s partner to take me to London in their spare plane. Two days later, I discovered that the target had flown to Buenos Aires. He used his own name.’

‘Harkes?’

Patrick Harkes. Cory wondered what it meant to Jennifer when she spoke the name of the man who had killed—who would kill—her father. There was no change in her expression.

‘Why would Harkes travel to London when his business is here? Why not fly direct to Buenos Aires?’

‘Perhaps his first instinct was to escape me, London being the most convenient route.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Have the archivists unearthed anything?’ he asked.

‘The evidence trail stops in South Africa, as you thought.’ She glanced at him. ‘Don’t flatter yourself with a sense of accomplishment. If Harkes used his own name, he must be confident in his escape plan. You can’t let the Cullinan vanish with him. Is that clear?’

‘I was briefed, ma’am.’