The Breath of Suspension (38 page)

Tarkin tried to get up to Louisa’s window, but the fire was already licking the wall from base to roof, and he too was forced back. He called her name up at the blazing window. Then, “the bastard,” he yelled, no longer at Louisa’s window, but at the world in general. “The bastard! Why?”

This was how it started. Solomon walked down to the street. The fire, Louisa’s death, Tarkin’s apparently unmotivated and savage hatred: these had all helped make him the man he was, the hard, cold, duty-bound Full Historian of Time Center. But all of these things were the results of acts that he himself had committed precisely
because
he was the man he was. He felt drained, meaningless, a rolling hoop. Tarkin had every reason to hate him, but Tarkin would take that hatred out on an innocent man, thus turning him into a man who would someday be worthy of hatred. Before the night was out, Tarkin would try to kill the young Hugh Solomon and, failing, vanish into Time. Tarkin would keep trying to kill Solomon until that time when Solomon, old and bitter, would return to even the score. The old Full Historian walked, slowly, down pitch-black Wilmot and out onto Harrison, brighter, since it had gaslights.

Solomon froze. In the bright light in front of Masterson’s General Store was a two-wheeled trap, with a sway-backed gray horse hitched to the front. Sitting in it, a straw hat tied to her head and a heavy valise at her feet, was Louisa.

Solomon neither rubbed his eyes nor pinched himself. He knew instantly that he was indeed seeing what was before him, and that it was the punch line to the shaggy-dog story that his life was revealed to be. A young man emerged from the store with a package. He was Steven Eichorn, who lived a few blocks away and was studying at the University of Chicago to be a lawyer. He was “Louisa’s young man,” Solomon supposed, and his belatedly revealed existence explained a lot about Louisa’s behavior in the few months preceding the fire. Eichorn leaped into the trap with excessive energy, took the reins, and drove it away down the street.

Solomon felt the sharp edge of a knife blade at his ribs. “I thought I’d
never
get to you,” Tarkin said. He turned Solomon around.

This was a stoop-shouldered Tarkin, as old as the man Solomon had sent to a Soviet prison camp.

“Was it worth using yourself up?” Solomon said. “Tying your entire life into a knot?”

“It was,” Tarkin said. “I wanted to love her. But you can’t recover love, even if you can recover exactly the person who made you love in the first place. Time travel is funny that way, Hugh. It makes you think that you can finally recover the past, but it’s just memory made solid, so that it can hurt you even more. But I tried. I came back here after the last time I tried to kill you, aboard the
Dagmar
, and finally found out that Louisa hadn’t died in that fire. If you’d looked just now you would have seen me, standing on the other side of Masterson’s, looking just as stupid as you. That was when I decided to stay here, always. She fell in love with young Eichorn—”

“He was older than we were, Andy.”

Tarkin smiled. “One forgets these things. Wasn’t it amazing, to watch us there, on that porch?”

“We were happy. And that moment always exists.”

“Cold comfort.” Urged by Tarkin’s knife, which remained at Solomon’s ribs despite the ease of their conversation, they walked down the street, two old friends leaning on each other for support. “But I did what I could. I arranged for Eichorn to get that trap. I encouraged them to elope. And this evening, about ten years ago for me, I think, I hauled a sheep carcass into Louisa’s room. When the ashes had cooled they carried the remains of Louisa’s body out of the fire. She left the ring I gave her on her nightstand, and I found it in the ruins of the house.

“You went to the funeral. Forensic medicine leaves a lot to be desired in 1902, the coroner was drunk, the fire took place in a less than respectable neighborhood, and he gave the matter about ten minutes of his time. Louisa Mulvaney burned to death in an accidental fire. That was the verdict, Hugh. And you, you stupid son of a bitch, believed him, just like I did. You thought you were killing the woman you had once loved, but you were just cooking a rack of lamb.”

They walked slowly along, Solomon staring forward blankly, the immediacy of the past overwhelming him, until the sounds and smells around him told him that they were once again in the Levee, which never slept.

“This is a good place,” Tarkin said as they entered the Lone Star Saloon and Palm Garden. “I believe you know it.” The place was the same, the lights were the same, the teeth were the same, the faces were the same.

“Hey, Mickey!” Tarkin shouted at the bartender. “Give us one of your Specials! And I’ll have a gin.”

In a minute, a large glass of murky liquid was placed in front of Solomon, who stared at it dully.

“Drink up,” Tarkin said. “It will make you feel better.”

Solomon looked at him. “You tried to kill me, the young man I was. Why, Andy? I hadn’t done anything.”

“Shut up and drink.”

Solomon shrugged, and with somewhat the air of Socrates drinking the cup of hemlock, drained it. He made a face.

Tarkin leaned back and looked at the sign that was just visible behind the bar. “Try the Mickey Finn Special,” it said. Not yet proverbial, the mickey was, in Chicago of 1902, a new innovation in the art of rolling customers, chloral hydrate and alcohol.

Solomon’s eyes rolled up in his head, and he toppled from his chair with a loud groan. “Why did I pursue the young Hugh Solomon? Because I knew that eventually it would bring me to the man who
was
guilty,” Tarkin said. “I have you now, you son of a bitch.”

Solomon’s body suddenly vanished. Staring, Tarkin sat heavily back in his chair. He shivered and took a gulp of his gin. “I can’t start all over again,” he said to himself. “I can’t.”

He was still sitting that way, slumped forward over his drink, when he felt the sharp blow of an elbow on the left side of his head, and the cold slide of a hypodermic needle into his buttock.

Solomon stumbled along the street in Aleppo. He wore a heavy wool cloak, which he had bought to throw over his light gray gabardine suit, the height of fashion in early twentieth-century Chicago. He regretted having sold his suit of merchant’s clothes to the clothing dealer. He stopped by a stall and, with his last coins, bought a short, curved sword, not stopping to haggle with the proprietor.

There was yet a chance of stopping everything, he thought to himself. He was dizzy and sick. Visions of flames and abandoned cathedrals flashed before his eyes, and the long tiled hallways of Time Center. The mickey and his Tempedrine overdoses had caused him to slide through Time like a wet bar of soap on a shower floor. His palm was sweaty on the pommel of the sword.

Finally he saw him standing in front of the shop of al-Bukhari, tall and lean, talking to the short, stocky jeweler. Hatred overwhelmed him. He raised his sword and, screaming, attacked.

The earlier Solomon parried the attack skillfully. Despairing and weakened by the drugs in the Mickey Finn, the later Solomon was no match for him, and the penetration of the other’s blade was a release from pain. He fell to the dusty street. The other Solomon fled.

Al-Bukhari approached the figure sprawled in front of his shop. Was it indeed an Ifrit? Ifrits were tormentors and tricksters, but the guilts and sins of men were not normally their concern, for their essential substance was fire, not earth. And they certainly did not bleed, blood pooling at its belly as it curled around its moital wound. He pulled the cloth away from the face and stared into Solomon’s eyes.

“Zaynab!” he called over his shoulder. “Some water. Quickly!” He knelt down and rested the man’s head on his lap. Zaynab ran out of the shop and paused, eyes wide, when she saw the bleeding man. She handed the cup to al-Bukhari, and he put it to the other’s lips. “You are not his brother. Nor are you a djinni in his image, as first I thought. You are he himself.”

Solomon choked. “I am. He will now commit great... sins. I wanted to stop him. But it is impossible. Everything was fixed in its place, and I could do nothing.”

“Your sins are your own,” al-Bukhari said. “Did you not choose whether to commit them?” He closed his eyes and saw a ship full of dead men blow ashore in sand dunes on the shores of a cold gray sea. A house burned and a horse screamed. Men frozen to death in a box in the snow. They were tied together in a knot, like that in the elaborate calligraphy on the dome of a mosque. And the name of the knot was Guilt.

“I had to... history... what happened had to happen or else....”

“What happened happened because you made it so,” al-Bukhari said, in a moment of total mental transparency. He scarcely knew what he was saying. “Only then was it inevitable. Your fate, friend, lay in your character, not in Time.”

“Fate. Here is a piece of fate for you, al-Bukhari. Do with it what you will. In less than six years, the Byzantine Emperor, Nicephoras Phocas, will invade Syria, and sack and burn this city of Aleppo. You miss Bukhara, that beautiful land. Let that be your guide. And perhaps it will go a short way toward absolving me. But now... take this, take this ring.” He pulled it from his finger. It was in the shape of a snake biting its own tail, and had eyes that were chips of emerald. And so, with a final sigh, Solomon died.

The images faded from al-Bukhari’s mind, and there was just a market street with a dead man in the middle of it, and he had blood on his shirt. Others came and took the body away.

The old man stood behind the barn, bent wearily against the picket fence that marked the end of the lot, looking up at the lights of the Mulvaney house. The night lake breeze was cool but nowhere near as cold as it had just been in the railway car on the siding in Siberia. He shivered. Tarkin, near death, had time-traveled without an injection of Tempedrine, to return here, to the heart of events. It was just before midnight.

In a few minutes Solomon would come around the house to set the barn on fire, so that history would take its proper course. Tarkin slowly worked his way through the sycamore saplings that grew between the barn and the fence. He supported himself on each as he passed, feeling the bark of the young trees smooth in his hand. Last year’s grass rustled beneath his feet.

A small flame flickered in front of him. He stopped and squinted. Two boys, about ten years old, crouched at the corner of the barn trying to light a pipe. It was not a corncob but a heavy meerschaum, probably stolen from a father’s study. They muttered to each other, intent on their business, and did not see Tarkin. One of the boys burned his finger, swore, and dropped the match in the dry grass. It flared up instantly. The boys yelped and fled.

The grass caught quickly, and the fire soon started to lick up near the barn wall. Tarkin looked at it for several moments, mesmerized by the flames, then walked over and stomped it out.

He looked around the corner of the barn. A tall figure in a gabardine suit walked stiffly from the Mulvaney house to the back barn window. A bell tolled the twelve strokes of midnight.

“That’s it then, Hugh,” Tarkin whispered. He ground out the last hot ashes of the fire with his heel. “We made our choices, and they made us.” Solomon opened the barn window and climbed in. Tarkin vanished into the cool night air.

Al-Bukhari squatted and looked at the ring in the palm of his hand, wondering. A shadow loomed over him.

“Are you the jeweler al-Bukhari?” said a young man, very pale, with wild reddish hair. A northerner, a Russian perhaps. His eyes glowed. In love, probably, al-Bukhari thought to himself. When the dead have been cleaned away, there is still time to love.

“I am.” He stood. There would be time to think about the flames that would consume Aleppo. He did miss Bukhara dreadfully....

“I came here to have you make a ring for someone important.” The young Tarkin pointed at the ring al-Bukhari held in his hand. “I have heard of your skill, and know that you can do it. I would like a ring, if possible, very much like that one.”

By the time
I got to Bert, the sound of the shelling was sharp and clear in my ears. Someone was having an artillery duel down in the direction of Montauban. There were still some French units there, and it was close to the Somme, where trenches were damp and tempers short. I had heard it start when I was back in Amiens, lying in a bed at Madame Berthier’s, but there it hadn’t seemed to matter, coming as it did through a set of lace curtains.

The light of the declining sun shined the wrong way through the windows of the roofless houses. Before the War, people had lived in the town, then called Albert, but no one remembered those days. There was no one here now but the soldiers, and to them the place was called Bert, with a hard English
t.
Everyone knew Bert. French poilus shivering in the ruins of Fort Douaumont, at Verdun, pressed their crosses to their lips and thought of it. Russian conscripts drowning in shell holes at Aubers died whispering its name. German regulars on garrison duty along the Piave sang songs about it. For it was from this spot that the Golden Virgin tormented us.