Faust Among Equals (10 page)

‘That's wonderful, Larry. Mike there too?'

‘Sure,' Mr Loredano replied. ‘I'll tell him to come too. Where are you?'

As George explained, Mr Loredano made notes on his order pad. After a few more cordial exchanges he replaced the phone, removed his apron and called his wife.

‘Honey,' he said, ‘me and Mike, we gotta go out for a while. Business.'

Mrs Loredano expressed herself, stating her opinion of this suggestion. Her husband stopped her.

‘I know,' he said. ‘Sure. That was George on the line.' The penny dropped.

‘We'll be back as soon as we can,' Mr Loredano assured her.

‘Don't give any credit while we're away.'

He then found his business partner and explained, whereupon both men retired to the back office and changed for the journey.

‘You ready, Mike?'

‘Ready as I'll ever be.'

‘Window open?'

‘Yeah.'

‘See you there, then.'

The two proprietors of La Veneziana then spread their wings, squawked a few times, and flitted out of the window. Ten minutes later they were midway across the Atlantic, slowed down by a strong headwind and driving rain from the south-east. Not bad going, nevertheless, for a pair of superficially ordinary herring gulls, particularly when you bear in mind that they'd been out of practice for four hundred years.

Mrs Loredano, meanwhile, was explaining to Mrs Steno why their respective husbands had abandoned the restaurant at the height of the mid-day rush. She knew all about it, having been let in on the secret some years ago; and besides, she believed that a good marriage is built on mutual trust. Mrs Steno, who believed that a good marriage is built on unilateral terrorism, hadn't been favoured with her husband's confidence in this regard.

Mrs Loredano explained that many years ago, before they went into the restaurant business, Larry and Mike had worked for this guy back in the old country. What as? Well, as familiars. No, not that, that's a valet, familiars are those guys who help out sorcerers and magicians. Yeah, hand them the top hat and get sawn in half, that sort of thing. And other things, too, of course. Yeah, usually it's some bimbo with no clothes on, but sometimes it's men as well. And sometimes - here Mrs Loredano took a deep breath - it's seagulls.

Seagulls? You mean like performing animals?

Yeah, only more than that, sometimes.

She explained further.

It took Mrs Steno some time to recover.

You mean, she said, Mike and Larry are
seagulls
? Yes, well,
were
seagulls, but when the guy they were working for, (pause for thought), when he
retired
, he turned them into human beings, regular guys. Even set them up in the restaurant business. A very thoughtful man, by all accounts, the guy really knew how to look after his employees.

Catholic seagulls, Rosa, I absolutely guarantee that. Almost the first thing they did after getting their human bodies, they went out and got baptised. You've got absolutely nothing to worry about on that score.

Anyway, part of the deal was that if ever this Mr Buonaventura needed them again for anything, anything in the familiaring line, then of course they'd be only too pleased. A matter of honour. You've got to have respect in this life, or what have you got?

Yes, but seagulls . . .

At which, Mrs Loredano became slightly affronted. No offence intended, but she hoped Mrs Steno wasn't prejudiced in any way, because that wasn't a very nice thing to be. After all, everybody's something, if you go back far enough: Italian, Jewish, Irish, German, Chinese, seagull, Greek, whatever. Bring us your huddled masses. Had Mrs Steno taken a look at the Statue of Liberty lately, by the way?

There was a long silence.

‘Sorry, Maria,' said Mrs Steno.

‘That's okay, Rosa,' replied Mrs Loredano. ‘Just forget it, okay?'

They went and tossed the salad.

A
fortuitous tail wind and a lift hitched from a passing anticyclone helped Larry and Mike make up time, and they swooped down on the Oosterdok just on two and a half hours after leaving Brooklyn.

They were only just in time.

Not that they were to know that, of course. They circled for a while, making kawk-kawk noises and generally getting used to being seagulls again. Oddly enough, what both of them found strangest was being without their watches.

‘It's like riding a bicycle,' Larry observed.

‘Bloody uncomfortable, yeah.'

‘No, I meant—'

‘And cold. And very, very tiring.'

Mike tilted his wingtips and dropped down a hundred feet or so. ‘Right,' he said, ‘we'd better report in, I guess. Where's the map?'

Larry looked at him. ‘What map?'

‘The street map.'

‘I thought you had it.'

‘Don't be dumb. How can I carry a goddamn street map in a seagull outfit? You think I've got pockets in the wings or something?'

Larry made no reply. He'd been putting up with Mike's logic for approximately twice as long as America had been an independent nation, and although it still occasionally had the power to make him want to scream, he had built up a sort of immunity to it; apparently, you can do the same thing with arsenic, if you take a microscopic amount each day. ‘What was the address again?' he asked.

‘Intersection of Keisergracht and Hartenstraat,' Mike replied. ‘I guess we just fly around until we see the street names, or . . .'

He broke off and craned his head down under his wing.

‘Hey,' he remarked. ‘Maybe we won't have to, at that. Look.'

 

‘That's him all right,' said Lucky George. ‘I'd know him anywhere. Come on, time we weren't here.'

From their window they could see a man in mirror sunglasses and a green jacket strolling along the canal bank, with a long brown paper parcel under his arm. At a respectful distance of maybe five yards, there followed a troop of assorted demons, all unexpected heads, misplaced organs and unfashionable colours, wheeling handcarts. The carts were piled high with some very impressive-looking machinery, the specific uses of which you couldn't hope to guess if you didn't actually know (although you'd have no trouble coming up with the general idea). For the record, they were a set of the latest state-of-the-art magical effect suppressors, together with generators, transformers and other ancillary hardware, capable of neutralising supernatural forces up to thirty kilograils within a six-hundred-yard radius.

Nobody seemed to be taking the slightest bit of notice, probably because the entire procession was theoretically invisible; a wonderful new effect produced by photoelectric mimesis. Put simply, the process works by making the subject closely resemble the viewer's most boring relative or acquaintance. The viewer is then so preoccupied with getting past without being noticed himself that he doesn't stop to look twice at the subject. The only living person in the cosmos who can't be taken in by theoretical invisibility is, of course, Lucky George; all of whose relatives have been dead for centuries, and none of whose friends are boring.

‘Where?' Helen asked, hopping towards the window with one leg in and one leg out of a pair of Ann Klein slacks. ‘I can't see . . .' She froze. ‘Hey, that's not possible.'

George grinned. ‘I know. Personally, I can see my aunt Hilda, my cousin Norman, my cousin Norman's second wife's brothers and what looks like seven enormous cappuccino machines. You make a break for it down the back stairs while I try and hold them off with a few . . .'

He stopped in mid-sentence, his face a picture of absolute bewilderment. Then he swore.

‘Suppressors,' he muttered. ‘Nuts. All right, we'll just have to run for it. Come on.'

(Meanwhile, the magical effect which he'd launched by way of a ranging shot and which had ricocheted off the suppressor field sang away into the upper air, bounced off a TV satellite and was broadcast into millions of homes worldwide in the form of a seven-hour-long subtitled Japanese art movie about a day in the life of a portable typewriter.)

Lundqvist looked up sharply and raised his hand.

‘In there,' he snapped.

As posses went, he reckoned, they were no worse than being trapped in a lift with an independent financial adviser; second-rate press-ganged local evil spirits, reluctant to get involved and anxiously awaiting any pretext for slipping quietly away to a bar somewhere. He could handle them.

‘You,' he said to the tallest demon present, ‘rig up the kit and give me maximum power. The rest of you, fan out, don't let anyone or anything leave the building. And,' he added, ‘remember, I've got all your serial numbers, and anyone who's not here when I get back is going to find himself in an oil lamp granting wishes so fast his hooves won't touch.'

He hitched up his trousers, unwrapped the flame-thrower, and strode towards the house.

His hand was on the doorknob when something white, wet and smelly hit him smack in the eye.

 

‘Shot!'

Larry shrugged modestly. ‘It's a gift,' he said. ‘Either you got it or you haven't. Your turn.'

By this time, Lundqvist had wiped his eye carefully with his handkerchief, turned round and stared long and hard at a goat-headed electrician who'd sniggered, and put on his hat. Bugger the doorknob, he was thinking. In fact, bugger the door. He turned the dial on the back of the fuel tank to one-quarter power, pressed the pilot light switch, and . . .

And a passing seagull swooped down, gave him a nasty nip on the left index finger, and rocketed off into the sky. Lundqvist swore, dropped the flame-gun and sucked the wound.

While he was thus occupied, a second passing seagull flapped up behind him, caught the fuel throttle awkwardly in its beak and twisted it on to maximum.

The flame-gun at his feet at once erupted, making Lundqvist jump about three feet in the air and dislodge his sunglasses. By some quirk of gravity, they reached the pavement before he did (although they had quite some way further to go), just in time to be under his feet when he landed. There was a crunch, like a lorry crossing gravel.

Two seagulls met in mid-air.

‘That'd better do for now,' said Larry. ‘Otherwise he might start to suspect . . .'

He didn't finish what he was saying, his attention having been distracted by a fifty-foot jet of fire passing within twenty centimetres of his tail. With more speed than dignity, the seagulls withdrew.

 

Outside the back gate, meanwhile, a demon stood guard.

He had the head of a dog, the nose of a gryphon, broad bat-like red wings, a pitchfork, four feet of tail and a stammer. He was the diabolical equivalent of sixteen and a half years old, and this was the first time he'd ever done anything like this. The reason why he'd been assigned this spot was because he was too junior to be able to refuse.

‘Excuse me.'

He looked up. Despite his poor eyesight (he was short-sighted, glasses made him feel self-conscious and, although he had contact-lenses, such was his biochemistry that they melted as soon as he put them in) he could see that the back door had opened and a female head had appeared round it. He swallowed hard, and tried to remember his lines.

‘Huhalt,' he said, in a high, quavering voice. ‘Whogugugu-goesthere, friendorfufufufufufoe?'

‘Sorry, what was the choice again?'

‘Fufufuf . . .'

‘Friend.'

‘That's all right then.' He lowered the pitchfork and stepped forward, and five seconds later was lying on his beak wondering how come the house had fallen on him. Helen of Troy, for her part, was looking at a slightly bent silver candlestick and sighing.

‘Okay?'

She nodded. ‘George,' she said, as he came out of the house and locked the door, ‘we are friends, aren't we? I mean, you and me.'

‘I guess so,' he replied. ‘Why?'

Helen stepped over the demon. ‘I'd hate to think I'd told a lie, that's all. Which way now?'

George shrugged. ‘Doesn't really matter, so long as it's generally north-east. All I really need is a phone box. Ah, there they are. About time too,' he said, as two seagulls flopped down on to his outstretched wrist. ‘What kept you?'

‘We came as fast as we could,' replied Larry, wounded.

‘Like hell you did,' George replied. ‘What were you doing, waiting for the exchange rate to swing in your favour? Follow me.'

By dint of reckless trespassing in the gardens of perfect strangers, they came out by the Westerkirk, where George flung himself into a telephone booth, grabbed the receiver and rattled his pockets for change. Helen sat on a bench and took out her powder compact. The seagulls ate a discarded ice-cream cone.