The young man picked out the faces one by one.
“Bobby Kennedy, JFK and someone beside them, a third man, who you must admit bears a striking resemblance to you.”
“There’s certainly a resemblance,” Roux said. “But I hate to disappoint you. I never had the privilege of meeting either of the Kennedys.”
He looked the journalist straight in the eye and lied, daring him to call him on it.
“That’s a shame. But maybe this one is a little more familiar?”
Another picture.
This one was slightly out of focus, but Roux remembered the night well.
He’d forgotten a lot of the others in the photograph, but knew the man on the right—Paul Reynaud, the president of France. It had been taken a few months before the outbreak of World War II. Roux stood behind Reynaud’s shoulder. He had been less cautious then, less concerned about being seen in public because the proliferation of cameras was nothing like it was today, and the chances of being caught and remembered from one image to the next were almost nil.
Only now Roux had been remembered, and the journalist had followed a trail of photographs into his past and found him impossibly unchanged despite the seventy years between the first and last picture.
“It could be the same man.” Roux offered a noncommittal shrug. He needed something to throw the young journalist off the trail, a conclusive spanner in the works that would destroy his faith that it was Roux in the photograph.
“I’m absolutely sure it is, Mr. Roux. It’s you, after all.” He produced another picture, a sepia-tinged photograph of the Russian royal family. Roux was there again. “Do I really need to show you more? I have them. Plenty of them. Enough, I’m sure, to convince you.”
“I’m not sure what you’re trying to say,” Roux told him. “You can’t possibly think these are all of me? They date back nearly a hundred years. That’s impossible.”
“And yet that’s you in each of those pictures, unable to resist the allure of power, rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous. As you say, there’s more than a hundred years between some of these photographs and yet there you are in all of them. And, most interestingly, you haven’t changed a bit. I would ask you what the secret of your young skin is, but I’m assuming it’s not some moisturizer.” His smile was more of a wince.
“A good story, but for one fatal flaw. That’s not me in those pictures, no matter how similar the men are. With the billions of people in the world, it’s hardly surprising that some of us wear recycled faces, is it? How could it be me?”
“You’re denying it?” the journalist asked, gathering the pictures.
“I’m simply pointing out that you are mistaken.”
“And that’s your final word?”
Roux rubbed a hand over his face, a gesture that could easily have been interpreted as having something to hide rather than simple exhaustion. “I really don’t think there’s anything else to say.” He pushed himself to his feet, indicating their meeting was over. He wasn’t about to sit and debate the impossibility of longevity, never mind immortality, with the young man when the only thing he risked was betraying himself with some careless word that would only strengthen his case.
“Then you’ll have no objection to me running the story, then?”
“What story?” That brought him up sharply. He’d reacted just a little too quickly to the threat. An innocent man wouldn’t have barked out those two words quite as fiercely. He forced himself to sound amused. “There is no story.”
“Perhaps, perhaps not. We’ll let the members of the public make up their own minds, shall we? Isn’t that the joy of a free press?”
“I’m not sure I’d call making up some fanciful story anything more than irresponsible, Mr. Moerlen. It certainly isn’t journalism.”
The reporter inclined his head slightly, as though conceding the point. “I’m going to be in Paris for a couple of days. Think about it. I’ll leave these copies of the photographs with you so you can go through them at your leisure. I do hope you will decide that you’d like to talk to me about this miracle, Mr. Roux. You have my number.”
The man got to his feet and held out his hand.
Reluctantly, Roux shook it.
The more he made of the situation, the harder it would be to brush it aside as some bizarre flight of fancy. People didn’t live forever. It was impossible. But then, so much about his life was impossible. He needed time to think about this. It would be easy to pull a few strings and make sure that the story was squashed before there was any danger of it being printed. No one made it to Roux’s age without collecting an awful lot of favors owed in the checks and balances of life. It helped that the story sounded utterly preposterous.
He stood at the front door and watched as the young man drove away in the small Fiat, white crystals of fog gathering in the night. He could taste snow on the breeze. Maybe not tonight, or tomorrow, but soon, Roux thought. He usually liked this time of year because it was all about the end of things, something he’d experienced so much without having faced it himself.
As the fog folded around the journalist’s car, Roux made his way to his study and started to make the calls.
“You absolute bastard!”
Roux had ignored Moerlen’s calls and, when they finally appeared to stop, assumed he’d gotten the message: there wasn’t a serious magazine or newspaper in the world that would touch the story. A few of the editors had humored Moerlen and admitted that yes, it was curious, wasn’t it? But curious or not, it wasn’t for them. A few that Roux knew personally had laughed in the young man’s face.
Roux said nothing.
Instead, he allowed the journalist to vent his frustration over the phone. He was doing the man a favor, even if he didn’t appreciate it. By letting him get it out of his system it minimized the chances of him doing something stupid. Sooner or later Moerlen would find some small circulation magazine that liked the unexplained and unexplainable, which would buy the story and might even run it, but no one took that kind of nonsense seriously.
“It’s not going to work. You can’t gag me, no matter who you know. I’ll find someone who will publish this story. The truth will come out.”
“Look,” Roux said patiently. “I don’t know what you think you know, but believe me, you don’t. There is no story to sell. Let it go. Get on with your life. Don’t make an enemy of me, son,” Roux said, deliberately patronizing the man on the other end of the line.
“You think you are so clever, don’t you? You think that you have it all worked out. What you don’t get is that the whole world will want to know your story. How can someone live for so long without aging? I’m not naive enough to think you signed some kind of pact with the devil, but something is going on. That is you in those photographs. I know it is. I’ll prove it.”
“I’m sorry that you’ve wasted time on this,” Roux said, signaling an end to the conversation, but the man refused to go.
“Fine. I’ll begin my story by telling everyone how I’ve been muzzled. That makes for a compelling beginning. How someone—you—didn’t want this story out in the public domain. That just makes it more interesting, doesn’t it? Think about it. The fact that the truth is being suppressed is more interesting than the truth itself. Why would you want this kept secret unless you had something to hide? You can try to ridicule me and make me look like a fool, but I won’t be silenced. There are other ways to tell this story. This is the modern world now. Information