Overtime (11 page)

After a long and slightly uncomfortable silence, Giovanni sighed and said, ‘That's all very clever and impressive, but it doesn't really get us anywhere, does it?'

Blondel shrugged.

‘I take it,' Giovanni went on, ‘that your friend isn't actually a historian?'

‘Correct,' Blondel smiled. ‘Nor is he a top-notch marksman. At this range, however—'

‘Yes, all right, I think you've made that point,' Giovanni scowled. ‘Violence really isn't our way, you know,' he said. ‘The last resort of the incompetent, and all that.'

‘In which case, gentlemen,' Blondel replied, ‘I think you probably qualify. Good Lord, is that the time?'

‘All right,' Giovanni said, ‘point taken. We have an offer.'

‘I know all about your offers,' Blondel replied. ‘Please don't try and stop us. I'm very fond of that hat, and another hole in it will leave it fit only for the dustbin. Thanks for the drink.'

He stood up and took hold of the blanket. Giovanni shook his head.

‘We can help you find what you're looking for,' he said. ‘That is, provided you're prepared to help us.'

Blondel raised one eyebrow. Then he sat down again, the blanket across his knees. To a certain limited extent, he looked like Whistler's Mother.

‘The last time I listened to you gentlemen,' he said, ‘I ended up with my face all over thirty thousand imitation satin surcoats.' He frowned. ‘It's taken me eight hundred years to get over that,' he said.

Giovanni shrugged. ‘So maybe we overdid the merchandising,' he said. ‘You're an artist. Deep down, you need to perform. You need to communicate to vast audiences. You have a duty to your public.'

‘I haven't got a public,' Blondel replied. ‘And I am decidedly not an artist. Artists wear berets and smocks and cut their ears off. Messire Galeazzo, you are talking through your hat, and that is a very risky thing to do while Mr Goodlet's anywhere in the vicinity. Good day to you.'

Giovanni shrugged. ‘It's up to you,' he said. ‘But if you do actually want to find the King...'

Blondel closed his eyes for a moment and then sighed deeply.

‘All right, then,' he said. ‘Let's hear it.'

‘Well—'

Before Giovanni was able to say anything else, however, the side door of the pub flew open and three men burst in. They were wearing dark green anoraks and holding big wooden clubs. Having entered, they stopped still and looked around them. Nobody seemed particularly bothered by their presence.

‘Oh, how
tiresome,'
Blondel said. ‘You just wait there.'

He got up, pulled his sword out from under the blankets, rushed at the three men and cut their heads off. A head rolled across the floor, was deflected off the leg of a chair, and ended up with its nose against Guy's foot. He looked down, feeling sick, terrified and, above all, horribly conspicuous. He needn't have worried, however; nobody was looking at him, particularly.

Someone behind the bar started to scream. Blondel frowned.

‘Right,' he said, ‘I think we ought to be getting along.'

 

There is a wide dichotomy between actual truth and perceived truth; and if the actual truth about the history of the world is that it was just one of those things, that is not necessarily important or even relevant to the people responsible for making sure that it doesn't happen again. Of this latter group, a considerable number have offices at the Chastel des Larmes Chaudes; and one of them in particular, having just had a report from his senior operations manager, was not happy at all.

‘Idiot,' he said.

Mountjoy King of Arms was far too spiritual, in the widest sense of the term, to be upset by vulgar abuse. He flickered for an instant, like a table lamp in a thunderstorm, and carried on with what he'd been saying.

‘After that,' he said, ‘they gathered up the bits and came back.'

Julian II snarled and stabbed the arm of his chair with a pencil, snapping it.

‘Sack the lot of them,' he said. ‘I ask you, what is this world coming to? You send out your top men - supposedly your top men - and what do you get? Unseemly brawls in public houses. I want them all back in the filing department by this time tomorrow, do you hear?'

Mountjoy nodded. His Unholiness' outbursts of temper rarely lasted long, and he never remembered what he'd said afterwards.

‘And meanwhile?' he asked.

‘Good question.' Julian's face calmed down slightly - the act of thinking always had that effect on him - and he stroked his beard gently. Small flashes of blue fire crackled away into the air.

‘So where are they headed now, do you think?'

‘We don't know,' Mountjoy replied. ‘However, we have at last got some information on the men who were with him.'

Julian lifted his head and nodded approvingly. ‘That's rather more like it,' he said. ‘What have you got?'

Mountjoy took out his notebook. ‘One of them,' he said, ‘is a British citizen by the name of Guy Goodlet.'

‘Yes?'

‘From the mid-twentieth century,' Mountjoy went on. ‘Some sort of professional warrior. His family held land in Norfolk at the time of the Domesday Book, but they've always been what you might call small to middling yeomen. No particular antecedents.'

‘That doesn't sound very promising.'

‘No indeed. The other three men are in fact the Beaumont Street Syndicate.'

Julian looked up. ‘Are they indeed?'

Mountjoy nodded. He had decided that there was no point in trying to cover it up. After all, he really had nothing to hide. When he'd invested his small savings in the Beaumont Street Renaissance Income Fund, he'd had no idea that they were mixed up in anything untoward.

‘The Beaumont Street Syndicate,' Julian repeated. ‘Well, well. How deeply do you think they're involved?'

‘Too early to say,' Mountjoy replied. ‘It might be,' he added cautiously, ‘that their involvement is entirely innocent.'

‘Well quite,' Julian replied, nodding. ‘In fact, I expect we'll find that that's it, entirely. I mean, everybody's got to have a financial adviser, even Jean de Nesle. No law against it.'

‘No indeed.'

‘Just common sense, really.'

‘Quite so.'

‘Well, there you are, then,' Julian said. ‘Nevertheless,' he added, ‘we'd better keep an eye on them. Discreetly, of course. Wouldn't want to start a scare on the Exchanges, would we?' He laughed brightly. ‘Right, you get that in hand straight away. Put Pursuivant on to it, why don't you? He's got more brains than the others. I've even known him switch on a light without blowing all the fuses. Oh, and Mountjoy ...'

‘Yes?'

‘I wonder if you'd mind just sending a fax for me. To my broker, you know,' Julian said. ‘Just a little bit of personal business.'

 

‘Blondel.'

‘Testing, testing, one, two, three,' said Blondel. ‘Yes?'

Guy frowned. He didn't want to appear fainthearted or anything like that, but he felt he had a right to know. ‘Those people,' he said. ‘You know, in that pub?'

Blondel thought for a moment. ‘Oh,' he said, ‘you mean in that pub in the Elephant and Castle?'

‘That's right,' Guy said. ‘After we'd been sorting things out with the Lombards; the men who came in and ...'

‘Got you, yes,' Blondel said. He peered at the microphone and blew into it, giving rise to a sound like God coughing. ‘What about them?'

‘It's nothing, really,' Guy replied. ‘It's just ... well, does that sort of thing happen very often? Because first there was the fight we had with the man when we followed the stag, and then that business in the Houses of Parliament, and now this ...'

‘The Houses of Parliament thing was different,' Blondel said. He adjusted the microphone stand slightly and tightened up the little clips. ‘They were just ordinary guards. Must be an awful job, I always think, being a guard. Complete strangers forever hitting you and so forth.'

‘But the other ones,' Guy persisted. ‘What about them?'

Blondel shrugged. ‘I don't really know all that much about them myself. They just keep turning up and trying to attack me. They're not very good at it, as you'll have seen for yourself. Their arms and legs don't seem to ... well, to work properly, if you know what I mean. They've been doing it for as long as I can remember.'

‘How can you tell?' Guy asked. ‘That it's the same lot, I mean.'

‘Easy,' Blondel replied. ‘It's always the same people. They never seem to get a day older, you know. Been jumping out on me for years, some of them have.'

‘Have you tried finding out who they are?'

‘What, from them, you mean? No point.'

‘Why not?' Guy asked. ‘Do they refuse to talk, or something?'

Blondel scratched his ear. ‘It's not that,' he said, ‘far from it. It's just that when you try questioning them, they go all to pieces.'

‘Perhaps if you tried, I don't know, being a bit less intimidating ...'

‘No, you don't understand,' Blondel said. ‘When I say they go all to pieces, I mean all to pieces. If you don't duck pretty sharpish, bits of them hit you. Legs, kidneys, that sort of thing.'

Guy stared. ‘You mean they ...?'

‘Blow up, yes. Now, where does this wire go?' He traced the course of the wire to the back of a huge amplifier and pulled it out. ‘There,' he said, ‘that's better. Never could be doing with all this gadgetry.' He picked up the microphone and tapped it. Silence. ‘I always reckon that if you can't make them hear you at the back of the hall then you shouldn't call yourself a singer. Why they blow up, of course, I haven't the faintest idea, but they do. The odd thing is that it can't do them much harm, because a month or so later they come bouncing back, club in hand ...'

‘You're telling me,' Guy said, ‘that the same men who blow up ...'

‘That's right,' Blondel said. ‘Anyway, that's all I know about them. Except, of course, that they're something to do with the Chastel des Larmes Chaudes. They've got the Chastel livery, you see.'

‘Fine,' Guy said. ‘So what's the ...?'

But Blondel had gone off to disconnect the boom mikes, and Guy thought it was best to leave it at that. The hell with La Beale Isoud, he had decided. If there was any way he could get back to his own time, he'd do it. If not, well, he'd have to settle down here (wherever here was) and get a job. But no more of this being jumped on by strange exploding assassins. Not his cup of tea at all.

‘Now where's he gone?' said a voice behind him. It was Giovanni, the senior partner.

‘He went off to look at something,' Guy replied. ‘Something technical, after my time. Look, can I ask you something?'

Giovanni raised an eyebrow. ‘What can I do for you?' he asked.

‘It's like this,' Guy said. ‘Have you known Blondel long?'

Giovanni grinned. ‘Yes,' he said.

Guy nodded. ‘All this stuff, about time travel and the civil service and Richard the Lion-Heart. It's not for real, is it?'

‘I'm sorry?'

‘I mean,' Guy said, ‘it's not actually true, is it? None of this is actually happening, or about to happen or whatever; it's all just ...'

Giovanni had both eyebrows raised. ‘Of course it's
true,'
he said. ‘What a very peculiar thing to suggest. After all, here you are experiencing it; it must be true, don't you think?'

‘I ...' Guy rallied his thoughts. ‘I just find it hard to accept,' he said, looking out over the auditorium, ‘that I'm here with the court poet of Richard the First, who's about to give a concert in a specially built auditorium somewhere in the middle of the Hundred Years War. With a public address system,' he added, ‘which makes the sort of thing we have back in my own century look like two cocoa tins and a length of string. I mean, you'll understand my being a bit confused.'

‘Indeed I do,' Giovanni said. ‘And I think I can help.'

‘You can?'

Giovanni smiled. ‘I believe so,' he said. ‘What you're really saying is that you're worried.'

‘Extremely worried.'

‘Perfectly understandable,' Giovanni said. ‘After all, you can't be expected to know what's going to happen next. You've absolutely no way of knowing, from one moment to the next, what the future, immediate or long-term, has in store for you.'

‘Exactly,' Guy said. ‘So perhaps ...'

‘What you need,' Giovanni said, ‘is your own personal pension scheme. Now it so happens ...'

 

It had taken a long time.

Well, it would, wouldn't it, if all you had to dig with was the handle of a broken spoon, and the wall was thirteen feet thick and made of a particularly hard sort of toughened silicon.

And then there was the problem of disposing of the dust and the rubble; you can't just leave it there, or the guards will notice and get suspicious. You have to stash it somewhere out of sight. The prisoner had eventually hit on the idea of stuffing it into bags and hanging them from the roof, where it was so dark that nobody could see them. But the only materials he had for making bags from was spiders' webs - it takes literally hundreds of miles of spiders' web to weave three inches of reasonably strong thread - and the skins of rats. He had, over many years, found out that his cell produced only enough food for one spider and one rat to live on at any one time. But one thing that the prisoner had plenty of was time; and while he was waiting for the spiders to spin another few inches of gossamer and for the rats to die of old age, he could always get on with the digging.