Faust Among Equals (21 page)

‘The other, um portfolio, you mean?'

‘That's right.'

The Sales Director ruffled some papers, took off his glasses and laid them on the table beside him. ‘Yes indeed,' he said. ‘The other portfolio. Right, where to start?'

Spectral warriors, being entirely made up out of solidified paranoia and racial guilt, have no hearts, or toenails, or anything else. However, years of mixing with human mortals had given the Captain a pretty shrewd idea of what a heart is, and what it does under circumstances of extreme apprehension. Accordingly, when the Sales Director said the words
the other portfolio
, his notional or imaginary heart turned to water and tried to seep quietly out through his ear.

‘Pretty straightforward job,' the Sales Director went on. ‘Recognised punishment for swearing, blasphemy, slanderous gossip and saying nice things about one's employers with intent to procure advancement - up to the neck in a big vat full of, ah, thing. Ordure. The smelly stuff. We get it delivered, you know, fresh every day. Well, not
fresh
exactly. New. Anyway, there's the question of quality control . . .'

‘Ah.'

‘Vitally important, quality control,' broke in the Production Director. ‘There are rigid specifications laid down in the franchise, so we can't just go around giving the clients any old—'

‘As my colleague says. Well, to cut a long story short, the post is now vacant.'

The Captain swallowed hard. Vacancies simply do not occur in an immortal and ineffable workforce. In Hell, dead men's shoes means nothing more than the pairs of leather things left outside the doors of the more expensive suites for the hall-porter to clean before morning.

‘What,' he asked slowly, ‘happened to the previous . . . ?'

The Finance Director grinned very slightly. ‘Resigned,' he said. ‘Or rather, misplaced.'

‘Fell in the main vat,' the Production Director explained. ‘Leant over too far one morning, lost his balance, splosh. Presumably, ' he added carelessly, ‘the poor bugger's still in there somewhere; damn steep, slippery sides that vat's got, to stop the clients getting out, of course. Very dodgy indeed. For some reason or other, volunteers to dredge the vat to look for him were not forthcoming.'

‘Fourth in six months.'

‘Dirty job, but someone's got to . . .'

‘Still,' repeated the Captain quietly, ‘in there somewhere. With the clients. I see.'

The Production Director smiled affably. ‘Sooner or later,' he said, ‘the thing'll solve itself. There'll be enough of them down there - our people, I mean - to form a sort of human pyramid so they can climb out again. Some of them, anyway. Meanwhile . . .'

He left the sentence unfinished. For his part the Captain closed his eyes and thought about it for a moment. He was not a dramatically imaginative person - you can't be if you're a spectral warrior, without having severe personality problems - but he could vaguely sort of picture . . .

It wouldn't, he decided, be the shit that'd get to him in the end. It'd be the endless bloody squabbling with all the other poor bastards stuck down there as to whose turn it was to stand on whose shoulders.

He indicated with a gesture his willingness to join the Board of Directors instead.

 

What Sitting Bull did best was, of course, sitting. Otherwise he'd have been called Standing Bull or Bull Leaning Nonchalantly, or even Bull Getting His Head Down.

On this occasion he was sitting in the Polo Lounge of Attila's Palace, sipping a margarita before wandering into the Casino to play a few hands of blackjack and feed some coins into the slot machines. He had, after all, suddenly come into money.

‘How.'

He nearly jumped out of his skin. If that had been a question rather than a greeting, the truthful reply would, of course, have been, ‘By grassing up Lucky George to Kurt Lundqvist.' He turned his head, and his jaw dropped like a badly lowered drawbridge.

‘I,' said the taller of the two figures looming over him, ‘am Carpet Slippers, of the Cigar Store nation. This is Changes Light Bulbs, of the Hollywood nation. You must come with us.'

‘What, now?'

‘Now.'

‘How.'

‘No,
now
. With an N.'

‘You mean Hnow?'

The dialectic confusion was resolved by Changes Light Bulbs taking hold of Sitting Bull and lifting him out of his chair, an operation that Changes Light Bulbs was able to perform with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.

‘Disciplinary tribunal,' he explained.

 

The tribunal met in a small, rather musty teepee at the edge of one of the back lots of the Happy Hunting Grounds. When the tribunal was not sitting, the teepee was used as a combined charnel-house and offal depository. It had ambience.

‘Hear ye, hear ye, disciplinary tribunal of the Combined Amerindian Nations, His Honour Judge Five Ovenproof Dishes presiding, all stand.'

‘Sitting Bull, alias Consorts With Lawyers, you are charged with breach of trust, betraying a friend of the Combined Nations to the common enemy and behaviour likely to bring the Combined Nations into disrepute, how . . .'

‘How.'

‘. . . do you plead, guilty or not guilty?'

‘Hey, not guilty. Who are you guys, anyway?'

Five Ovenproof Dishes rapped his desk with a miniature tomahawk and frowned. The prisoner at the bar wilted slightly.

Couper Ses Gorges of the Paris Apaches, for the prosecution, presented his case quickly and succinctly, whereupon the judge turned and called upon the defence.

‘Your Honour.' Carpet Slippers rose to his feet and frowned. ‘I am of the Cigar Store nation. My nation do not tell lies. The scumbag is as guilty as a wigwamful of rapists.'

‘Hey!'

The entire court turned and gave Sitting Bull an unpleasant stare. He sat down again.

‘The sentence of this court,' said Five Ovenproof Dishes, breathing heavily, ‘is that you be expelled from your nation until the wind ceases to blow and the eagle lies down with the wolf. I have spoken.'

‘Ah come
on
,' shouted Sitting Bull incredulously. ‘This whole thing is getting hopelessly jejune. I demand to know by what right . . .'

Counsel for the Defence nutted him with an obsidian club and he resumed his seat. The judge scowled.

‘For calling the court jejune,' he growled, ‘the mandatory penalty is burial upright in an anthill. Perhaps you would care to rephrase . . . ?'

‘Okay, not jejune.' Sitting Bull looked around, selected a big, thick legal tome (
Giggles Incessantly on Criminal Procedure
), held it over his head umbrella-fashion and rose to a wary crouch. ‘Forget jejune, sorry. But really, you guys are making one big mistake here. I'm a medium, goddammit, people ask me questions, I tell 'em. It's my job. I had no choice, okay?'

There was a pause. Counsel for both parties approached the bench, and whispering ensued.

‘Prisoner states that he is a medium,' intoned the judge. ‘Correct?'

Sitting Bull nodded.

‘Fine. Call Marshall Macluhan.'

Witness testified that, in his expert opinion, the medium was the message. The message found to be inherently unlawful. Appeal disallowed. All stand.

Twenty minutes later, Sitting Bull's suitcases were put outside the front entrance, followed shortly and at great speed by their owner. After a pause, Sitting Bull got up, dusted himself off, shooed various members of the spectral buffalo herd away from his suit covers and slouched off into the Upper Air.

As he slouched, he considered.

It was fortunate, he said to himself, that he was a fully westernised, regenerate member of the indigenous American community, free from the absurd superstitions of his ancestors; because otherwise, he'd be firmly convinced that being slung out of the Hunting Grounds would inevitably result in his being chased six times round the Sun by the Great Wolf Spirit, bitten in half and eaten. ‘Absolutely just as well,' he muttered aloud. ‘Crazy bunch of goddamn savages . . .'

He hesitated. He could feel hot breath on the back of his neck, soft fur rubbing his ankles, a nose as cold as Death nuzzling his ear.

‘Woof.'

He turned round. Behind him, two piercing red eyes, a pair of gnarled ears laid back against a long, thin, cruel skull, jaws like scrap car compressors holding between them a yellow and blue rubber ball.

S
lowly, with infinite pains and an almost superhuman patience, Kurt Lundqvist made his way across the main room - sorry, we must now call it the drawing-room - of the hideout, towards the corner with the loose floorboard.

They train you for this sort of thing at Ninja School, of course; crossing a dark and unfamiliar room full of hideously lethal booby-traps without waking the guards. The orthodox technique is to use the scabbard of your sword as a sort of blind man's white stick. Untold generations of Japanese silent killers have succeeded with it; or if they failed, they never came to report back. And anyway, the Japanese are a conservative people.

Lundqvist believed in progress and he had no scabbard, so he used the snapped-off aerial of the clock radio he'd received as a free gift for spending more than A$15,000 on soft furnishings with a leading Melbourne furniture warehouse. It was tricky going, and his hand was starting to shake.

Goddammit, the place was an absolute fucking
minefield
.

Because when you buy furniture, you buy surfaces, and every major league homemaker worth her velour crowds each surface with enough breakable ornaments to fill a ceramics museum. One false move and the air would be full of needle-sharp porcelain splinters, higher velocity and more deadly than the latest generation of anti-personnel fragmentation mines (and, of course, unlocatable with a metal detector).

Ting. The tip of the aerial tapped against something cold, hard and musical. Probably the big blue pot-pourri bowl. Lundqvist froze, then reached forward with the aerial, glacier-slow and gentle as the softest breeze. Ting. Yes. Right. At least he knew where the bugger
was
. He'd been worrying about that ever since he'd millimetred his way round the standard lamp.

Thunk. The sound of metal on walnut. Bookshelves. The end wall. He flicked gingerly and tapped against the spines of big, glossy coffee-table books (
Modern Interior Design
,
This House A Home
,
Three Thousand Lounges In Full Colour
and other similar titles). He was nearly there, and nothing dislodged or smashed. Ninjas; fuck Ninjas. By this time, even the best of those black-pyjamad loons would have fallen over the footstool and be picking Wedgewood shrapnel out of his windpipe.

Delicate probing with the aerial and the fingertips located the corner of the wall, which meant that the rest would be sheer dead reckoning. The loose floorboard, under which he'd stashed the shortband radio and the spare Glock about thirty seconds before the carpet squad had turned the place into a deep-pile killing zone, was at the point of a right angle seventy centimetres out from the corner.

Lundqvist opened his big Gerber TAC II lockknife, paused and listened. He had no reason to believe that Helen wasn't still sleeping soundly, but in this game you don't last long if you confine yourself to mere existential evidence. You have to reach out and feel for the mind of the assailant, the guard, the sentry; you have to taste sleep in the air. He recognised it - the less-than-absolute stillness which means that the other person in this house isn't standing motionless behind you with a whacking great knife - and started to cut the carpet.

The Gerber is state of the art, the nearest thing to Luke Skywalker's lightsabre ever made, but there are some materials that even Death's scythe snags on, and really expensive carpeting is one of them. As he sawed, Lundqvist could feel the exquisitely honed edge of the blade being wiped away, like spilt coffee on Formica.

His hand found the floorboard, tilted it, and burrowed, until the tip of his index finger made contact with cold, smooth plastic. Gently, quietly, he drew the package out, slit it open, and felt the radio.

‘Links,' he hissed. ‘Links, can you hear me? For Chrissakes, Links, this is no time for goddamn screwing around - oh, God, sorry Mrs Jotapian, is Links there, please? Links. Your
son
. Yes, sorry,
Jerome
. Thank you.'

‘Hi,' crackled a voice, sounding like a PA system in an echo chamber in the quiet of the drawing-room. ‘Links Jotapian here, who's this?'

‘It's Lundqvist, you bastard, and keep your voice down.'

Lucky George isn't the only one who has friends, you see. Admittedly, since Crazy Mean Bernard was dragged out of a blazing chopper somewhere in Nicaragua and vanished from the face of the earth Lundqvist only has one friend, who happens to be sixteen years old and short-sighted, but it evens the score a little bit. Like, say, a single hair cast on to the balance.