The Map of Time (39 page)

No one said a word, for there was nothing more to say. Jeff gave the order, and his men slowly fanned out, like prizefighters sizing up their opponent. Since none of them took the initiative, Tom assumed they were giving him the chance to initiate the one-sided combat. “Who would he go for first?” he wondered, as his companions slowly circled him. He stepped towards Mike, fists raised, but at the last moment, made a feint and threw the punch at an unsuspecting Jeff. The blow hit him full in the face, knocking him to the floor. Out of the corner of his eye, Tom saw Bradley’s attack coming. He dodged the punch, and when Bradley was squarely in front of him, plunged his fist into the lad’s stomach, doubling him up in pain. He was not so lucky with Spurrell, whose hammer blow was deadly. The world went fuzzy, Tom’s mouth filled with blood, and he had to make a superhuman effort to stay on his feet. But the giant showed him no mercy. Before Tom had time to recover, Spurrell threw another punch, this time right on the chin. There was an ominous crack and Tom went spinning to the ground. Almost immediately, he felt the toe of a boot sink ruthlessly into his side, threatening to shatter his ribs, and Tom realized they had him. The fight was over. From the hail of blows raining down on him, he deduced that Bradley and Jeff had joined in the beating. On the floor beside him, through the dense fog of his pain, he could make out Wells’s book, which must have fallen out of his pocket during the brawl. Claire’s flower had escaped from its pages and lay incongruously on the filthy ground, a pale yellow brightness that looked as though it would be snuffed out at any moment, like his life.

33

When at last the beating stopped, Tom clenched his teeth and, ignoring the pain, reached out to try to grasp Claire’s flower, but was unable to because at that moment someone grabbed his hair and tried to pull him up.

“Nice try, Tom, nice try,” Jeff Wayne whispered in his ear, accompanying his words with what sounded like a snigger or perhaps a groan. “Unfortunately, your efforts were wasted. You’re going to die anyway.” He ordered Mike Spurrell to take hold of Tom’s feet, and he felt himself being borne aloft by his executioners to a place which, on the brink of losing consciousness, scarcely mattered to him.

After a few minutes of being bumped and jolted, his companions tossed him on the ground as if he were a bundle of rags. When Tom heard the sound of lapping water and boats knocking together, his worst fears were confirmed: they had brought him back to the docks, probably because they planned to throw him in the river. But for the moment no one did or said anything. Tom was trying to slip into oblivion, but the sensation of something soft, warm, and not unpleasant touching his swollen cheeks prevented him. It felt as if one of his companions had decided to prepare him for death by wiping the blood from his wounds with a cloth dipped in tar.

“Eternal, come here at once!” he heard someone shout.

The sensation stopped instantly, and then through the vibrations in the ground Tom could hear the heavy yet delicate tread of footsteps slowly approaching the scene.

“Stand him up,” the voice commanded.

His companions yanked him roughly to his feet, but Tom’s legs would not support him and gave way instantly, causing him to slump to his knees with the almost sensual limpness of a puppet whose strings have been cut. A hand grasped his collar to prevent him from keeling over completely. Once he had overcome his dizziness and was able to focus, Tom watched impassively from his kneeling position as Gilliam Murray made his way slowly towards him, his dog circling at his feet. He wore the slightly irritated expression of someone who has been dragged from his bed in the middle of the night for no good reason, as though it had escaped his memory that he was the one behind the ambush. He stopped a few yards in front of Tom and looked at him for a moment, smirking disdainfully, taking pleasure in his pathetic state.

“Tom, Tom, Tom,” he said at last, in the tone of someone scolding a child. “How has it come to this unpleasant situation? Was it really so difficult to follow my instructions?” Tom remained silent, not so much because the question was rhetorical, but because he doubted whether he could utter a word, with his swollen lips and mouth full of blood and pieces of broken tooth. Now that he could focus, he glanced around and saw that they were indeed at the docks, only a few yards from the quayside. Besides Gilliam, who was standing in front of him, and his companions waiting behind him for their orders, there seemed not to be another soul in sight. It would all take place in the strictest intimacy. That was how nobodies met their end, discreetly, without any fuss, like refuse tossed in the river in the middle of the night while the world is sleeping. And no one would notice his absence the next day. No one would say, Hold on, where’s Tom Blunt? No, the orchestra of life would carry on playing without him, because in reality his part had never been important to the score.

“Do you know what’s so amusing about this whole thing, Tom?” said Murray calmly, moving closer to the edge of the quay and gazing absentmindedly into the murky river. “It was your lover who gave you away.” Again, Tom said nothing. He simply stared at his boss, whose eyes were still contemplating the Thames, that bottomless coffer where he stored anything that posed a problem. A moment later, Murray smirked at him once more with a mixture of pity and amusement.

“Yes, if she hadn’t come to my office the day after the expedition asking for the address of one of Captain Shackleton’s descendants, I would never have found out about your affair.” He paused again to give Tom time to digest what he had just told him. Evidently, as Murray had suspected, the girl had never mentioned this to him. And why should she? From Tom’s point of view, it was unimportant, of course. For Gilliam it had been a fortuitous blunder.

“I had no idea what the girl’s game was,” he said, walking back over to Tom with mincing, almost ballet dancer’s, steps. “I gave her an evasive reply and sent her packing, but I was curious, so I had one of my men follow her just to be on the safe side—you know how much I dislike people poking their noses in my affairs.

But Miss Haggerty didn’t seem interested in snooping, quite the contrary, isn’t that so? I confess to being astonished when my informant told me she had arranged to meet you at a tearoom, and afterwards … Well, I don’t need to tell you what happened afterwards at the Pickard boardinghouse.” Tom lowered his head, in a gesture that could equally have been embarrassment or vertigo.

“My suspicions were justified,” Gilliam went on, amused by Tom’s awkwardness, “but not in the way I had imagined. I thought of killing you there and then, despite my admiration for the way you had used the situation to your advantage. But then you did something completely unexpected: you visited Wells’s house, and that aroused my curiosity even more. I wondered what you were up to. If you intended telling the writer it was all a hoax, you had gone to the wrong person. As you immediately discovered, Wells is the only person in the whole of London who is aware of the truth. But no, you had a far nobler purpose.” As Gilliam spoke, he paced back and forth in front of Tom, hands behind his back. His movement made the boards on the quayside squeak unpleasantly. Eternal sat a few feet away, fixing him with a vaguely curious look.

“After leaving Wells’s house, you went to Harrow-on-the-Hill.

There you hid a letter under a stone, which my spy brought to me immediately. And when I read it I understood everything.” He gazed at Tom with mock compassion. “I have to confess I was most amused by your letters, which my informant took from underneath the stone and put back before whoever was to collect them that day arrived. Except for the last one, of course, which you whisked away so fast I had to steal it off Wells while he was out on that ludicrous machine known as a bicycle he likes to ride around on.” He stopped pacing and studied the river again.

“Herbert George Wells … ,” he whispered, scarcely able to contain his contempt. “The poor fool. I can’t deny I was tempted to tear up all his letters and rewrite them myself. I only refrained from doing so because Wells would never have found out, which would have been the same as if I had done nothing. But let’s not talk about that anymore,” he declared, suddenly brightening up and turning once more to face his victim. “You couldn’t care less about petty rivalries between writers, could you, Tom? Yes, I greatly enjoyed reading your letters, one passage in particular, as I’m sure you can imagine. I believe it was very instructive to us all. However, now that the final installment has been written, the little old ladies will shed bitter tears over the lovers” tragic fate, and I am free to kill you.” He crouched down before Tom, and, lifting his chin, raised his head with almost maternal tenderness. The blood streaming from Tom’s split lip soiled his fingers and he pulled out a handkerchief and cleaned it off absentmindedly, still gazing intently at Tom.

“Do you know something, Tom?” he said. “In the end, I’m deeply grateful for all your efforts not to reveal my hoax. I realize you are partially blameless. But only partially. True, this foolish girl started everything. Yet you could have let it go, and you didn’t, did you? I sympathize, believe me: I’m sure the girl was worth taking all those risks for. However, you see why I can’t let you go on living. We each have our role to play in this tale. And sadly for you, mine consists of killing you. And how could I resist the perfect irony of giving the job to your faithful soldiers of the future.” With these words, he gave a twisted smile at the men looming behind Tom. He studied Tom again for a long time, as though giving one last thought to what he was about to do, perhaps mulling over another possible course of action.

“I have no choice, Tom,” he said finally, shrugging his shoulders.

“If I don’t kill you, sooner or later you’ll look for her again. I know you will. You’ll look for her because you’re in love with her.” On hearing this, Tom could not help gazing at Murray in surprise. Was it true? Was he really in love with Claire? This was a question to which he had never given much thought, because, whether or not he loved her or she had just been a passing fancy, an opportunity he was loathe to pass up, he still had to keep away from her. However, now he had to admit that if Gilliam were to let him live, the first thing he would do would be to look for her, and that could only mean his boss was right: he was in love with her. Yes, he realized with astonishment, he loved her, he loved Claire Haggerty. He had loved her from the moment he saw her.

He loved the way she looked at him, the touch of her skin, the way she had of loving him. It felt so good to let himself be enveloped by the protective mantle of that immense unconditional love, that magic cape shielding him from life’s coldness, the icy indifference of every day that made his soul tremble, the incessant wind filtering through the shutters and seeping into his innermost depths. And he realized that he wanted nothing more than to be able to love her with the same intensity, to feel he was fulfilling man’s highest, most noble achievement, the one he had been born for, the one that satisfied him and made him happy: to love, to love truly, to love for no other reason than the joy of being able to do so. This was what drove him on, this was his reason for living, because although he might be unable to leave his mark on the world, he could make someone else happy, and that was the most important thing, the most important thing was to leave his mark on another person’s heart. Yes, Gilliam was right; he would look for her because he wanted her to be with him, because he needed her by his side in order to become someone else, to escape from who he was. Yes, he would look for her, whether to delight in the joys of spring together or to plunge into the abyss.

He would look for her because he loved her. And somehow this lessened the lie Claire was living. For, in the end, the girl’s love was reciprocated, and Tom’s love, like Shackleton’s, was also unattainable, lost in the ether, unable to find its way to her. What did it matter if they lived in the same time or even in the same city, that festering turn-of-the-century London, if they were to remain as far apart as if they were separated by an ocean of time.

“But why drag things out?” he heard Murray say, oblivious to his thoughts. “It would make for a worse, far less exciting ending to the story, don’t you think? It’s best if you disappear, Tom, for the story to end the way it’s supposed to. The girl will be far happier in any case.” Gilliam Murray lifted his huge body to its full height and gazed down at Tom once more with scientific interest, as though he were something floating in a bottle of formaldehyde.

“Don’t harm her,” Tom stammered.

Gilliam shook his head, pretending to be shocked.

“Of course, I won’t, Tom! Don’t you see? With you out of the way, the girl is no threat to me. And, believe it or not, I have my scruples. I don’t go round murdering people just for the fun of it, Tom.” “My name is Shackleton,” said Tom between gritted teeth, “Captain Derek Shackleton.” Murray burst out laughing.

“Then you needn’t be afraid, for I guarantee you will rise from the dead.” With these words, he gave Tom one last smile and gestured to his companions.

“All right, gentlemen. Let’s get this over with and go to bed.” Following Murray’s command, Jeff and Bradley scooped Tom up off the ground, while Mike Spurrell brought over a huge block of stone with a piece of rope tied round it which they fastened to Tom’s feet. Then they bound his hands behind his back. Gilliam watched the proceedings with a satisfied smile.

“Ready, boys,” said Jeff, after making sure the knots were secure. “Let’s do it.” Once more, Jeff and Bradley carried Tom shoulder high over to the edge of the quay, while Mike held onto the stone that would anchor him to the riverbed. Tom gazed blankly at the murky water. He was filled with the strange calm of someone who knows his life is no longer in his own hands. Gilliam walked over to him and squeezed his shoulder hard.

“Good-bye, Tom. You were the best Shackleton I could hope to find, but such is life,” he said. “Give my regards to Perkins.” Tom’s companions swung his body and at the count of three tossed both him and the stone into the Thames. Tom had time to fill his lungs with air before hitting the surface of the water. The ice-cold water came as a shock, dispelling the lethargy pervading his body. He was struck by fate’s final irony: what good was it to feel so awake now that he was about to drown? He sank in a horizontal position to begin with, but the weight of the stone soon pulled him upright, and he plummeted with astonishing speed to the bottom of the Thames. He blinked several times, trying to glimpse something through the greeny-brown water, but there was not much to see, besides the bottoms of the boats floating above and a flickering halo of light cast by the quay’s only streetlamp. The stone quickly hit the riverbed and Tom remained floating above it, suspended by ten inches of rope, like a child’s kite, buffeted by the current. “How long could he go without breathing?” he wondered. What did it matter? Was it not absurd to struggle against the inevitable? Even though he knew it would only postpone death, he pressed his lips tightly together. Again that painful instinct to survive, but now he had understood this sudden will to live: he had discovered that the worst thing about dying was not being able to change what he had been, that when he died, others would only see the repulsive tableau into which his life was going to solidify. He remained hanging upright for what felt like an excruciating eternity, lungs burning, temples throbbing deafeningly, until the urgent need to breathe compelled him against his will to open his mouth. Water began filling his throat, streaming merrily into his lungs, and everything around him became even fuzzier. Then Tom realized this was it: in a few seconds he would lose consciousness.