Faust Among Equals (24 page)

Columbus sighed. Sixty-one days he'd been cooped up on this floating strawberry-punnet with these idiots. A lesser man, one without his inexhaustible patience, would have blown the ship up by now.

‘Albatross.'

‘No.'

‘Aurora borealis.'

‘No. Hey skip, you aren't even
trying
. . .'

‘Okay, okay.' Columbus thought hard. When dealing with morons, he'd learnt the hard way, the trick is to think like a moron. This is no mean accomplishment. ‘Arquebus,' he said. ‘Am I right?'

Hernan lifted his eyes and gazed for two seconds at the distant coastline, the one that quite definitely wasn't India, and said to himself, Look, why me, whoever says it first is going to get lynched, they'll know soon enough without me telling them. ‘You got it, skip,' he replied. ‘Oh, and by the way, land ahoy.'

‘What did you just say?'

‘Land, skip. Ahoy. Just over there on the left.'

‘What ahoy? Speak up, you're muttering.'

‘Land, skip. L for laundry, A for Amer . . . I mean arquebus, N for . . .'

As Columbus jerked like a shot deer and started capering hysterically up and down the deck, Hernan leant back in the crow's nest, shrugged and found the remains of his apple. He'd been nursing it along, one nibble per day, for a fortnight, saving it for a special occasion. He looked at it and chucked it over the side.

A freak gust of wind carried up to him scraps of the conversation buzzing away below - Roderigo was saying that as soon as they got in he was going to have a roghan ghosh with spicy dall and nan bread, Diego was saying no, make mine a chicken tikka with pilau rice and spoonfuls of mango chutney. The poor fools, Hernan thought. It was going to be bad enough when the crew found out, but that was likely to be nothing compared to the embarrassment that would ensue when the news was broken to their Most Catholic Majesties back in Madrid. Well, no, ma'am, not India
as such
, in fact more like a clump of hot, scrawny little islands populated by savages with no commercially useful exports of any kind; we were thinking of calling it San Salvador.

Maybe they could just sort of hush the whole thing up. Forget about it. Pretend they got to the edge of the world, turned round and came straight back.

Nah.

Hernan shook his head sadly. Some fool would be bound to let something slip, and then where would they all be?

Anyway. Hernan leant his elbows on the rail of the crow's nest and took a long, hard look. Okay, so it wasn't up to much, but it was a new country. A new continent, maybe. And here he was, the first man ever to set eyes on it. That was something. Not much perhaps, but something.

 

Wrong.

 

Because, at the precise moment when Columbus was ordering the lads to lower a rowing boat and feverishly trying to remember the exchange rate for moidores into rupees, a small, bedraggled man in a Brooks Brothers suit and waders was dragging a rubber dinghy behind some bushes on the seashore and opening a small suitcase.

The man was one Morrie Goldman, and the suitcase contained a portable fax machine with the special digital transtemporal wave shift function.

He looked at his watch. Mr Van Appin had been very insistent that he log in the precise moment of landfall. Having dictated a note into his pocket dictaphone, he switched on the fax and started typing out the message on his laptop word processor.

Not exactly an orthodox assignment, he reflected as he typed. Whizz back through time to the late fifteenth century, go to San Salvador, arriving at such and such a time, send a fax to the Land Registry stating time of arrival, and then clear off. Not perhaps the most complex matter he'd ever handled from a legal standpoint, but the travelling expenses were going to be just out of this world.

 

Message: Arrived 3.25 p.m. precisely. Please accept this communication as our indefeasible claim of title to the continent edged red on the plan annexed hereto and confirm registration by return of fax
.

He paused for a moment. If he was discovering this place, wherever in hell it was (geography wasn't his thing), he supposed he ought to give it a name, if only to enable it to be sufficiently identified.

 

Newly discovered territory to be known as Goldmannia
.

 

No. You couldn't call a country Goldmannia. It lacked that certain something.

He deleted Goldmannia and typed in Mauretania.

No. There was somewhere else called that. Try again.

He deleted Mauretania and . . .

Nice snappy name. Something that'd look good on the stamps. The United States of
something
. Life is all right in
something
.The business of
something
is business. The
something
dream. Bye bye, Miss
something
Pie.

It was on the tip of his tongue.

He typed in Lundqvistia, hit the Send button and made himself scarce.

 

Scroll fast forward through Time, until the monitor reads 1996, and hold. The place: the Polo Lounge, Valhalla. Christopher Columbus discovered, nursing a long, cool drink and smoking a big cigar.

Not, of course, that Valhalla's what it was. Gone are the deep leather armchairs, the inedible food, the self-effacing spectral waiters. Evening dress is no longer a prerequisite for the Carousing Hall, and people no longer glare at you if you refrain from shouting in the Fighting Room. Mead has been replaced by fiddly things in stemmed glasses in the Members Bar, and the iron-corseted Valkyrie barmaids have been quietly replaced by less statuesque, softer beings with names like Cindi, Nikki and Cheryl. Nevertheless, it still has a certain cachet, and visitors still steal the headed notepaper from the library.

‘Paging Mr Columbus. Visitor for you at the front desk. Thank you.'

Columbus got up and made his languid way to the lobby, his mind still lovingly turning over the thought of next month's ground rent payment. There were those, he knew, who referred to him behind his back as the biggest slum landlord in the universe, but that was just jealousy.

‘You said there was a message for me?'

‘Over there, Mr Columbus, by the fountain of milk and honey.'

‘Him in the mac?'

‘That's him, Mr Columbus.'

‘Right.'

He finished his drink, placed the empty glass on the desk and wandered over to the stranger . . .

Who served him with a Notice to Quit.

 

Mr Van Appin leant back in his chair and replaced the telephone.

‘That was Goldman,' he said. ‘Everything according to plan. Columbus should be getting the eviction papers any minute now.'

The muzzle of the .40 Glock lifted and disappeared inside Lundqvist's jacket. ‘Good,' he said. ‘Now then, how long'll it take to get vacant possession?'

Mr Van Appin shrugged. ‘Say three to four weeks. Unless they appeal, of course. They may have grounds, I couldn't say offhand. This is pretty much a grey area so far as the law is concerned.' Perfectly safe to say that, of course; as any lawyer will tell you, the law is full of the most amazingly large and expensive grey areas, so that seen from the air it resembles nothing so much as the Confederate army camped on a shale beach on a cloudy day.

‘Do it in three,' growled Lundqvist. ‘I want those bastards out of there as soon as possible, you got that?'

Mr Van Appin twitched slightly. ‘When you say bastards, Kurt, you mean . . .'

‘The Americans,' Lundqvist replied. ‘All of them.' He grinned. ‘Goddamn trespassers. Get the place cleared, okay? And make sure they leave it clean and tidy when they go, because I might just have another tenant lined up.'

‘Yeah?'

Lundqvist nodded. ‘I was thinking,' he said, ‘of going into the private prison business. Long term, violent offenders. New York. It's just a matter of putting a few extra bars on the odd window and cleaning the streets up a bit, and there we are, ready to start trading.'

Mr Van Appin made a soft, lawyerly clicking noise with his tongue. ‘I don't want to sound alarmist in any way,' he said, ‘but something tells me the bailiffs aren't going to find it that easy. Maybe you should just stick to raising the rent a bit. You know, gradually, a few cents per annum over say the next three hundred—'

‘Vacant possession, Van Appin. And if the bailiffs have any trouble,' Lundqvist said, smiling thoughtfully, ‘just let me know. I haven't done an eviction since Atlantis.'

Mr Van Appin swallowed. ‘That was an eviction, huh?'

‘We all have our different methods.'

‘I guess so, Kurt. Only . . .'

‘Just do it.'

‘Okay.'

Lundqvist rose. ‘A pleasure doing business with you, Van Appin,' he said, adding, ‘For me, anyhow,' and left. After he'd gone, Van Appin sat quite still for well over a minute, thinking Oh shit.

His special lawyer's sixth sense was telling him that there could possibly be a bit of comeback on this one. A pity, but there it was.

Lundqvistia, he said to himself. Jesus God, what an awful name for a continent.

Not a patch, he couldn't help thinking, on Van Appin's Land, or something like that.

‘George?'

‘Chris! Great to hear from you. How's things?'

‘Not so hot, George. In fact, I've got a bit of a problem.' Lucky George frowned and reached for the scratch-pad that lived beside the phone. ‘Fire away, Chris, tell me all about it.'

On the other end of the line, Christopher Columbus took a deep breath, said, ‘Well, it's like this,' and told him. After he'd finished, George sat for a while, chewing the end of his pencil.

‘You still there, George?'

‘Still here, Chris. Bit awkward, isn't it?'

‘Yes.'

‘And the bailiffs are going in - when, did you say?'

‘A week's time, George. Backed up by four million spectral warriors from the Court Office.'

‘Suitcases on the pavement time, huh?'

‘You could say that.'

George doodled a few wavy lines, coloured in the ‘O's in
While You Were Out
and chewed his lip for a moment. Then he smiled.

‘Don't worry about a thing, Chris,' he said at last. ‘I think I can see what we're going to have to do, and it shouldn't be much of a problem.' He paused. ‘At least, it won't be if we can get the right help.'

‘Anyone I know?'

‘Old friend of ours, Chris. Leave it with me, all right? It's really just a question of hydraulics.'

‘
Hydraulics?
'

George nodded. ‘Hydraulics, Chris. Be seeing you.'

E
urobosch, the theme park to end all theme parks, was on its way. Five hundred thousand spectral construction workers laboured night and day to bring into being the most sensational leisure facility in the history of Time and Space. And all because one man dared to dream the impossible nightmare.

The man in question sat in the window of the site office, looking out over the muddy shambles and trying to discern any resemblance, however slight, to the vision of unalloyed nastiness he could see in his mind's eye. It wasn't easy.

Take, for example, the helter-skelter. This took the form of a seventy-foot-high hourglass, on which was seated a stomach-churning bird-headed demon, its feet improbably thrust into two wine-jars, meditatively nibbling on the leg of a woman taken in adultery. On paper, it had looked fine. Translated into three dimensions, it was quite another sort of nightmare.

The basic structure hadn't been a problem; you've got your reinforced steel joists, your basic chipboard panels, your sixty-by-thirty sheets of galvanised. You bung those in with a few girders braced crosswise for rigidity, everything fine so far. Next you put in your actual helter-skelter track, starting under the demon's armpit and exiting rather ingeniously through the raised rump of a sinner being hideously mauled by a nine-foot-high animated tree; no problem, the builders' merchants just happen to have a continuous spiral sheet of anodised aluminium long enough to do the job and going cheap owing to a cancelled order. It's then that the fun starts.

Bird-headed demons are, to put it bluntly, a pain. You can go for your injection-moulded propylene, but you can bet your life that the two halves won't fit flush, and for the price of just one moulding you could afford to panel the Crab Nebula in French walnut. On the other hand, you can opt for good old expanded polystyrene, just so long as you're prepared to put up with bits crumbling off in wet weather and the whole bloody thing threatening to take off in a high wind. Fibreglass would be too brittle because of the length of the adulteress's leg, and anything else is out because of the weight factor and/or the aggravation of getting the sonofabitch thing installed without all the pointy bits getting broken off. Finally you persuade the money men to lash out on the injection mouldings, only to find that the pattern makers are booked solid for the next three months and when they eventually can get around to doing it, they've quarrelled irrevocably with the moulding contractors and refuse to lift so much as a Stanley knife without fifty per cent of the contract price up front. Just when you've ironed all that out and sorted out the building inspectors and the fire inspectors and the little arsehole from the planning department who's always wittering on about not exceeding the overall permitted height, the quantity surveyor (who plays golf with the company accountant who wants to see the whole project called off) tells the board that there's a firm down the road he knows who'd do the whole job for forty per cent less, including road haulage and wiring up the psychedelic lights. The moulding contractors are by now threatening to sue for breach of contract, and quite possibly the aluminium strip (which hasn't had its three coats of primer because the painters are waiting until the sound system's wired in) has turned all grey and flaky and needs to be replaced from scratch. Finally, the Finance Director drops by on his monthly tour of inspection and says, yes, love the basic concept, but really don't you think we need it a bit more, well,
yukky
, how about a couple of skull-headed snakes slithering up and down the main uprights?