‘The immigrant experience. Right there. The wind comes and suddenly you’re not in the ground any more. And your roots are out on show and looking strange and unfamiliar. But you’ve been uprooted before, right? You’ve uprooted yourself. You’ve had to, surely.’
I nodded. ‘Many times.’
‘It shows.’
I was trying to take this as a compliment. It was difficult. ‘The trick is to stay upright. You know how to move and stay upright?’
‘How?’
‘You have to match the hurricane. You have to be your own storm. You have to . . .’
He stopped. His metaphor was running out of steam. I noticed how shiny his shoes were. I had never seen shoes like them.
‘We are different, Tom,’ he said eventually. ‘We are not other people. We carry the past with us. We see it everywhere. And sometimes that can be dangerous, and we need to help each other.’ His hand was now on my shoulder, as if he was telling me something of the deepest importance. ‘The past is never gone. It just hides.’
We walked slowly around the maple tree.
Manhattan rose out of the ground, ahead of us, like a new type of storm-proof forest.
‘We have to be above them. Do you understand? For our future survival, we have to be selfish.’
We passed a couple wrapped up in overcoats, laughing at some secret joke. ‘Your life is changing. The world is changing. It is ours. We just have to make sure most of the mayflies never know about us.’
I thought of a body floating along the Thames.
‘But to kill Dr Hutchinson . . .’
‘This is a war, Tom. It is an unseen war, but it is a war. We have to protect ourselves.’
He lowered his voice as two smart-suited men with identical moustaches rode by us on black bicycles. The bicycles had equal-sized wheels, which seemed a very modern development to me.
‘Who is this Omai?’ Hendrich whispered. His eyebrows raised like sparrow wings.
‘Sorry?’
‘Dr Hutchinson wrote about him. From the South Pacific. Who is he?’
I laughed nervously. It was strange having someone know your biggest secrets. ‘He was an old friend. I knew him back in the last century. He came to London for a while, but he doesn’t want to be found. I haven’t seen him for over a hundred years.’
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Fine.’
Then Hendrich opened his jacket and pulled out two beige tickets from the inside pocket. He handed me one.
‘Tchaikovsky. Tonight. The Chamber Music Hall. Hottest ticket in town. You need to see the bigger picture, Tom. All this time alive and you still can’t see it. But you will, you will. For the sake of your daughter. For the sake of yourself. Trust me, you will . . .’ He leaned in and grinned. ‘And if not, well, you might find yourself out of time altogether.’
We sat in the plush red seats, and when the woman with the extravagant claret-red dress – puff-sleeved, high-necked, bell-skirted, ornately embroidered décolletage – next to Hendrich stood up and left for the restroom, he tilted his head towards me and surreptitiously pointed out a celebrity in attendance.
‘Man on balcony . . . leaning over . . . next to the lady in the green dress. The one everyone is looking at while pretending they aren’t.’ I saw a genial rosy-skinned man with a round owlish face and a neatly trimmed white beard. ‘Andrew Carnegie. Titan of industry. Richer than Rockefeller. More generous too . . . But, look, he’s an old man. What’s he got left? Another decade? Maybe a bitmore? Yet every single piece of Carnegie steel in every railroad across this country will be there long after him. This hall, built with spare change, will be standing when he is six feet under the earth. That’s why he built it. So his name will live long into the future. This is what the rich do. Once they know they can survive comfortably and their children can survive comfortably they set about working on their legacy. Such a sadness to that word, don’t you think? Legacy. What a meaningless thing. All that work for a future in which they don’t appear. And what is legacy, Mr Hazard? What is legacy but the most empty and mediocre substitute for what we have. Steel and money and fancy concert halls don’t give you immortality.’
‘We aren’t immortal.’
He smiled. ‘Look at me, Tom. I look the same age as him. But in reality I am younger than a baby. I’ll still be here in the year two thousand.’
I risked offending him. ‘But how do you feel inside? The thing that has always worried me is the idea of spending several lifetimes as an old man.’
And for a moment I thought Ihadoffended him. I thought I had overstepped an invisible line. And maybe I had, but he just smiled at me and said, ‘Life is life. So long as I can hear music and so long as I can still enjoy oysters and champagne . . .’
‘So you aren’t in pain?’
