Faust Among Equals (18 page)

‘Quark.'

‘No.'

The seagulls flapped their wings and lifted out of the window. George played the video through once more. Then he made a phone call.
How! This is a recorded spirit message. Kindly leave your name and a medium through whom you can be contacted and I'll get back to you as soon as I can
.

He shrugged and tried a different number. When it answered, his side of the conversation went like this:

‘Hello? Yes, could I have Mr Bosch, please, extension 3092? Yes, thanks, I'll hold.'

The hold facility on the switchboard played you the
Dies Irae
, as interpreted by a computer synthesizer. Eventually . . .

‘Bosch here.'

‘Ronnie,' said George, ‘how's tricks? The project coming together at last?'

‘Bloody hell, George . . .' The voice changed in pitch, though not in volume, until it became a rather heavy conspiratorial hiss. ‘You really have got to stop calling me at work like this. You have no idea how
embarrassing
—'

‘Yes, sorry. How's the Garden of Earthly Delights coming along, by the way?'

Bosch sighed. ‘Don't ask,' he said. ‘Even if we make it out of foam rubber instead of expanded polystyrene, the ninety-foot-high cracked eggshell just isn't going to stay up there, I just know it, and the sprinkler system's completely up a tree. I've got seventy-six thousand purple tubular carnivorous plants out there dying of dehydration, but do they listen?'

George tutted sympathetically. ‘Par for the course, it sounds to me. Look, can you do me a quick favour?'

Bosch growled darkly. ‘Depends,' he said. ‘I mean, there's favours and favours. I think opening wormholes in the fabric of virtual reality for you to hide your rope ladder in probably puts us all square, don't you?'

George laughed cheerfully. ‘Call those wormholes, Ron?' he said. ‘I'd have been better off stashing the gear under the bed only I didn't want to hurt your feelings. I would also remind you of that time back at Wittenberg when I let you borrow my red slashed fustian doublet three weeks running when you were chasing after that barmaid with the big—'

‘All right,' Bosch cut him short. ‘I was younger then. Dammit, I was
alive
then. What do you want this time?'

‘Just a note of where Lundqvist is right now.'

‘That's
all
?'

‘For now, Ron.'

 

Meanwhile, Lundqvist was negotiating with two seagulls.

‘We got the Revenue off your back like you said,' Larry croaked, ‘although we couldn't do anything about your 1986 expenses claim. I mean,' he added quickly, as Lundqvist's eyes smouldered, ‘putting five thousand cubic feet of cyanide gas down as entertaining potential clients
is
going a bit too far, you've got to—'

‘The hell with you,' Lundqvist snapped. ‘Those particular clients were pretty peculiar people. So what? You've got to be weird to need a transtemporal security consultant in the first place.'

‘Okay,' said Mike. ‘But do you really expect the tax guys to believe you got through thirty-seven dozen throwing knives in one fiscal quarter. Don't you
ever
re-use them?'

A shrewd thrust from a wingtip suggested to him that this was a subject best left alone. He cleared his throat, ruffled his feathers with his beak and changed tack.

‘Anyway,' he said, ‘they've unfrozen your bank accounts and the bailiffs have released your goods. We've kept our side of the bargain.'

‘Good,' Lundqvist replied icily. ‘Now we can start talking.'

The seagulls exchanged glances. ‘I thought we'd been—'

‘Preliminaries,' Lundqvist said. ‘Now we get to the good stuff. That is, unless your man wants to play it the hard way. Because if he does, the only thing the girl's gonna be launching from now on is oil rigs.'

Larry sighed. ‘Let's hear it, then,' he said.

‘Fine by me,' Lundqvist said. ‘I want George, I want him here, and no tricks. You got that?'

‘Quark.'

‘Right. Now piss off.'

The seagulls lifted their wings and flapped noisily out through the open window. Lundqvist grinned and drew the shutters.

‘Actually,' said a voice from the corner of the room, ‘would you mind awfully much leaving the window? It's a bit stuffy in here.'

Lundqvist snarled.

‘Please.'

‘Sure. You want me to leave the window. You think I was born yesterday?'

‘Not really,' Helen said, smiling. ‘If you had been, you'd be all pink and small and covered in fluffy down, and you'd need feeding all the time. Talking of which, I thought we'd have dinner around sevenish.'

Lundqvist scowled. ‘We'll eat when I say so,' he said. ‘If I say so. You got . . . ?'

Helen ignored him. With a dainty flick of her slim wrists, she wriggled free of the handcuffs and drew a liberated finger along the top of the table next to where she was tied up. It left a furrow in the dust. She didn't say anything, but she tutted.

‘I'll need some ingredients,' she went on. ‘Four pounds of potatoes, a large cabbage, two pounds of parsnips . . .'

‘We'll have corned beef and like it,' Lundqvist grunted.

‘I doubt that,' replied Helen. ‘Also some desiccated coconut, some ginger, sunflower oil - it's better for you, more polyunsaturates - and a pound of self-raising flour. You'll just have time to pop out before the shops shut.'

Lundqvist turned round slowly. Helen had slipped free of all her bonds by now. She was standing up and tying a pinny round her waist. There was a horrible look in her eye, and for a moment Lundqvist's heart stopped.

Far back, in the left luggage room of one of the most twisted psyches in the history of Creation, a woman's voice was calling; shrill, hard, cruel.

Kurt
, it shrieked,
You come here this instant, you hear me? You want that I tell your father?

Yes, Mom
. . .

The flashback faded, as swift and terrible as it had come, leaving Lundqvist standing with his mouth open. ‘You get back in the corner,' he said, ‘or I'll—'

‘Nonsense,' replied Helen briskly. From somewhere - God only knew where - she'd produced a feather duster and a can of furniture polish. ‘Off you go. Don't forget the sunflower oil.'

Lundqvist struggled to remember. He was Kurt Lundqvist, the biggest, meanest, most savage . . .

. . . Untidiest, scruffiest kid on the whole block.
No!
The most savage . . .

‘Sure,' he said weakly. ‘I go out and as soon as my back's turned you're outa here and . . .'

Helen smiled. ‘Don't be silly,' she said. ‘First, I'm going to give this place a really good clean. Then we'll be able to see what colour the curtains are.'

She fluttered her eyelashes cruelly.

‘I mean,' she said, ‘if we've got to be cooped up in this smelly old place, we might as well make it as comfortable as possible.'

 

Lessons Learned The Hard Way Number One: Don't Kidnap Helen of Troy.

The wooden horse was basically a face-saving exercise, something to make it all look slightly more convincing to the outside world.

Within three months of Helen's arrival in Troy after her abduction by Prince Paris, there wasn't a square inch of original carpeting in the whole city. The entire workforce had been transferred from sword-tempering and arrow-sharpening to curtain-making, and King Priam had mortgaged his empire and taken out a personal loan from the First Achaean Bank to pay for new three-piece suites in every room in his gigantic palace. It wasn't Achilles or the wrath of the gods or the curse of Dardanus that did for Troy of the Hundred Gates; it was the sheer bloody havoc wrought on the Trojan economy by a determined home-maker with a Liberty catalogue and a Gold AmEx card.

The reason that the siege of Troy took so long was simple. Once King Menelaus had got used to being able to wipe his hands on the towels and smoke in the living-room again, it took the concentrated moral pressure of three continents ten years to persuade him to take her back.

T
here is only one bar in Potters Creek (population 53) but the awareness of its own monopoly hasn't led its enterprising and forward-thinking management to grow complacent. Nothing is too good for the customers (especially the beer, which wouldn't be too good for an elephant, let alone a human being) and the proprietor is constantly striving to make such improvements as his means permit. Thus, last year, he put in chairs. This year, tables.

Around the smaller of the two tables, a film crew sat, staring into the suds at the bottom of their glasses, trying to shame each other into getting in the next round.

‘Reminds me of that time in Afghanistan,' said the sound recordist.

‘Yeah.'

‘Or that time last year in Ghana.'

‘That wasn't Ghana, that was Mozambique.'

‘Nah,' interrupted the assistant cameraman, ‘I'm not thinking of
that
time in Ghana, I'm thinking of that
other
time in Ghana.'

The sound recordist nodded. ‘Yeah,' he said. ‘I was reminded of that, too.'

There was a long silence, broken only by the distant commentary of the kookaburra, and the whisper of a slight breeze in the eucalyptus.

‘Let's give him till half-seven,' muttered the chief cameraman. ‘Then we bugger off, right?'

His companions nodded (except the continuity girl, who'd fallen asleep). Everyone fiddled with their glasses, suddenly noticing that they were empty.

‘Aidan,' said the chief cameraman at last to the junior electrician, ‘go and buy the beer.' The junior electrician, who was young, poor and saving up to buy a moped, slouched to the bar.

‘Sodding lousy country, this,' opined the chief cameraman. ‘Bit like Paris.'

The others nodded. ‘Except,' qualified the chief electrician, ‘the handles on the bogs are on the left. Anyone else notice that? I did.'

‘Sodding awful place, Paris,' continued the chief cameraman. ‘Full of holes.'

‘Yeah. Like Tangier.'

‘Or Laos. Laos is full of sodding holes. Can't get a tripod level anywhere.'

Under their hands, the table moved.

Well, you know how it is with tables in bars. There are strict international specifications about precisely how much shorter one leg should be than the others. The object is to make customers spill their drinks and buy more.

‘I remember we were in Cairo once,' said the chief electrician. ‘Holes
and
flies. Bloody horrible place.'

‘Like Valparaiso.'

‘Or Genoa.'

‘Venice,' said the assistant cameraman, ‘is a real bog-hole. Armpit of the universe, Venice. You want to film something, a building or something, you step back to get the bugger in the frame, splash. Here, who's jogging the bloody table?'

‘Not me.'

Simultaneously, the film crew lifted their elbows. The table continued to move.

‘Hey,' remarked the chief electrician, breaking a nervous silence, ‘this
is
like bloody Valparaiso.'

‘Yeah, or Archangel.'

The table was balancing on three of its legs. With the foot of the fourth, it was pecking tentatively at the ground, like a spider at its first tap-dancing lesson. The continuity girl woke up, blinked, and went back to sleep.

Help
.

‘Did someone just say something?' enquired the sound recordist.

‘Yeah.'

‘Ah. Right.'

‘The table just said Help!'

Listen, it's me. Danny Bennett.You've got to help me
.

The crew looked at each other. They were, after all, a film crew, and he was a producer. Had they thought of it, they might have quoted the line about the triumph of hope over experience.

I'm dead
.

The sound recordist cleared his throat.

‘Not a lot we can do about that, my son,' he said. ‘What you need is more like a priest or something.'

I was murdered. It was a cover-up
.

The chief cameraman checked the movement of his glass to his lips and frowned.

‘Jesus!' he said. ‘Danny! That really
is
you, isn't it?'