Earth, Air, Fire & Custard Tom Holt

by Earth, Air, Fire

  In the corridor he stopped, caught his breath and tucked the contract carefully under his arm.

  Water dripped from Paul's trousers and puddled embarrassingly on the carpet. A fat drop trickled down his forehead and into his right eye. He looked at his watch, but of course it had stopped. Wearily, he squelched back the way he'd come, happily not meeting anybody on the way. They still hadn't got around to replacing the blown light bulb on the third floor stairs. The world, Paul decided, was a wretched, miserable place.

  'You are wet,' Theo Van Spee told him, as he shuffled through the door. 'There is a towel on your chair, and dry clothes in the Marks & Spencer bag on the floor to your right, next to the waste-paper basket. You will wish to get changed in the lavatory at the end of the corridor. Nobody else will want to use it today, and you may therefore hang up your wet clothes to dry. You will just be in time to catch Mr Shumway before he leaves for the Bank. I shall not need you any more today.'

  Benny seemed preoccupied, and didn't hang around to chat; Paul knew that even now he dreaded the daily banking run, and with good reason; so he dumped the contract on the desk and left, heading back to his office. When he got there, he found the new partner, Mr Laertides, sitting on the edge of his desk, eating an apple.

  'Your hair's all wet,' Mr Laertides said. 'Raining out, is it?'

  For all I know, Paul decided, it could very well be. 'Yes,' he said. 'Is there anything I can do for you?'

  Mr Laertides took another bite of his apple; he sank his teeth into it, then pulled his hand away, so that a chunk of apple-flesh was torn off. Then he dumped the core in Paul's bin. 'So tell me,' he said, 'what was it really like, fighting it out with Countess Judy? Scary, I bet.'

  Paul nodded. 'Would it be all right if I didn't talk about it?' he said.

  'Please yourself,' Mr Laertides said with his mouth full. 'Point is, you never actually finished your stint in Media and PR. I know you're working with Theo Van Spee right now, and after that you're booked for two months with Cas Suslowicz, castles in the air and so forth. Just thought, though, you might like to sandwich in a few weeks with me. Only, I'm building a rather juicy deal right now that'll be starting to get interesting about the time you're due to finish with Theo, and I thought you might like to be in on it. I saw in your personnel file, Judy reckoned you've got the knack. And say what you like about her, she was bloody good at the job. What do you say?'

  Difficult, Paul thought. The truth was, of course, that he'd rather scrub sewers with a toothbrush than have anything to do with magic of any sort; but, since he didn't have that option, one form of unspeakableness was pretty much the same as any other. On the other hand, Mr Suslowicz had struck him as the least offensive of the JWW gang; on Paul's first day in the job he'd sent him down a map of the building so that he could find his way about through the nightmare tangle of corridors and staircases. True, Mr Suslowicz's map had turned out to be no more than forty per cent accurate, and where it was wrong it was usually disastrously wrong - the first floor small interview room had proved to be a store for eight-foot-tall man-shaped wicker cages, and Mr Suslowicz had marked the blue door opposite the window on the second floor landing as a stationery cupboard, when in fact it was a ladies' toilet. In spite of that, Paul had been sort-of-looking-forward to two months in Civil Engineering, whereas Mr Laertides was very much an unknown quantity. Fortunately, inspiration struck; 'I'll ask Mr Tanner what he thinks,' Paul said. 'He's sort of in charge of that kind of arrangement, so-'

  'Fair enough.' Mr Laertides stood up. He moved jerkily, like bad animation. 'Well, see you at Rosie's later, for the rehearsal.' On his way to the door, he paused. 'One last thing,' he added, rather in the style of Lieutenant Columbo. 'Have you had a chance to brew up the medicine yet?'

  As far as Paul was concerned, his life over the last nine months had turned into the sort of experience you'd expect if Dante had designed the rides at Alton Towers. Mostly he seemed to be trapped in the one where you're swept along down a pitch-dark underground river in an open boat, and the branches of overhanging trees keep smacking you in the face. 'Medicine,' he repeated.

  'You know,' said Mr Laertides, with a hint of impatience, 'the jollop. The stuff that'll stop you falling in love every two minutes. Theo told me you went ferreting about in his old books one time when you thought he wasn't looking. Then you nicked a load of his special patent wonder-crystals from the jar in his desk drawer, so Theo guessed you were planning on making the stuff. Bloody good idea, he thought, it'll help you keep your mind on your work, instead of drooping round the place like a weasel with malaria. Well? Only if you haven't done it yet, maybe you'd like a hand. It's not exactly rocket science, chucking a few ingredients in a saucepan, but it's not exactly defrosting an Asda cannelloni, either.' Mr Laertides frowned; his whole face seemed to clench inwards, as if an invisible hand was squeezing it. 'You want my help or don't you? Up to you, of course, but I do happen to have a master's degree in supernatural chemistry, whereas you can just about boil an egg without blowing up most of north-west London.'

  The last part was true enough. 'Excuse me,' Paul said cautiously, 'but why would you, a partner and all, want to spend valuable fee-earning time helping me do something that's nothing to do with work?'

  Mr Laertides's face went blank for a moment; then he laughed. 'Suspicious soul, aren't you? No bad thing, either, in this trade, and after the Countess Judy business and all I don't blame you. Always wise to have a gander at a gift horse's teeth, just in case they're about to meet in your neck.' He reached out hand - it was almost as though he had a telescopic arm that extended from the elbow - and dealt Paul a staggering blow on the shoulder. 'But it's okay,' he said, 'you don't need to worry about me. Fact is, we're going to be working together from now on, and I don't hold with all that stuffy them-and-us crap, it's completely counter-productive in my experience. If we're going to be on the same team, I'd like us to be mates, and mates help each other, right? Or would you rather stick with the unappeasable-hatred school of industrial relations?'

  'Well, no,' Paul said, when the silence got too much for him. 'No, obviously. I just didn't want to, um, trespass on your good nature or anything.'

  'Bollocks,' said Mr Laertides, and his face dissolved and reformed into a jovial scowl. 'You're thinking, this bloke's up to something, and he's a partner, so he's got to be a right bastard. Which is fine,' he added, 'but it's not getting your medicine brewed, and you don't even know where to buy crème frâiche. Whereas I just happen to have a spare half-hour and a pot of the stuff upstairs in the staffroom fridge. So, you up for it or not?'

  You can lead a horse to water, and even though you can't necessarily make it drink, you can stick a hosepipe up its nose and turn on the tap. 'Yes,' Paul said. 'I mean, thanks, that'd be really great. So long as you're sure it's no bother.'

  'No trouble at all.' Mr Laertides immediately became a smile on legs. 'You scratch my back, I scratch yours, that's what makes the world go round.' From the top pocket of his suit jacket, he pulled a piece of paper, a photocopy of a page from a book. 'Now then, apart from the crystals and the crème frâiche, we need anchovies, floor wax, trichloroethylene, fresh cucumber, turpentine, paracetamol, mutton fat, charcoal, chalk dust, black lead, extra-virgin olive oil, salt, sulphur, cornflour, starch, Epsom salts, butter, eggs, flour, monosodium glutamate and permitted colourants and flavourings.' He was ticking items off the list with a stub of pencil that had materialised behind his ear as soon as he reached up for it. 'No problems there, we've got all of that in the stores. Equipment; let's see, we'll want a Groeninger crucible - well, that's easy enough, just cut the neck off a plastic milk bottle - an ethane burner rated to 3,000,000 BTU, triple-action refractory chamber, yes, got that, all just standard lab kit really, and a tin-opener, of course. No,' he concluded, folding the paper up and vanishing it into the palm of his hand, 'no difficulties there. You've got the crystals, we'll stop off at the staffroom and then press on to the lab on the fourth floor. Piece of cake, real
ly.'

  As Paul followed Mr Laertides up the stairs it occurred to him, when he could spare a moment or two from trying to catch his breath, that 70 St Mary Axe didn't have a fourth floor. He kept quiet, however, and that proved to be just as well, because he'd only have shown his ignorance. Mr Laertides led the way past Professor Van Spee's office, down a corridor that Paul had never explored to a small door painted an improbable shade of primrose yellow. It opened onto a narrow circular staircase, the sort of thing you'd expect to find in a church steeple or a castle tower; at the top was another yellow door, on which someone had painted

  DEFENSE D'ENTRER

  in huge green letters. It opened a split second before Mr Laertides gave it a shove, and beyond it lay a long, bright, sparse room, lined with melamine-topped workbenches cluttered with retorts, Bunsen burners, fume cupboards, old-fashioned brass microscopes and all manner of scientific junk the likes of which Paul hadn't seen since his last school chemistry lesson. On hooks on the butter-coloured wall hung a row of several dozen brown lab coats. Mr Laertides grabbed two as he swept past, tossed one over his shoulder to Paul and wriggled into the other without breaking stride.

  'Lots to do,' he called out without looking round; he was pulling open a huge store cupboard at the back of the room, hauling out jars and packets and bottles without needing to look at the labels. 'Light up a Bunsen, would you, and fill a couple of those five-litre beakers with clean water.'

  After a long and frustrating search, Paul found a matchbox containing precisely one match, and lit the gas. By now, the pile of ingredients was so tall that he could only just see the top of Mr Laertides's head. He drew the water from the tap in the middle of the centre bench. The room, he noticed, had a frosted-glass roof but no windows, and no electric light. No electric points, either, or electrical equipment of any kind; odd, surely, for a modern laboratory. Mr Laertides was humming as he worked, but he was a lousy hummer, and the tune sounded like nothing on Earth.

  Filling the beakers turned out to be the last chore assigned to him. Mr Laertides did everything else himself, shuffling and scuttling up and down the workbenches like a huge long-legged crab. Pretty soon he had no less than half a dozen Bunsens roaring away, each one warming a big glass vessel on a tripod stand. Fiddly arrangements of rubber and glass tube linked each vessel to its neighbours; there were filters, like yuppie coffee-makers, and things gripped in steel claws on clamps, and vents where waste gas was burned off. It all looked like a cross between a black-and-white Frankenstein's workshop and the old Mousetrap game that Paul had played with as a kid. Presumably there was a point to it all.

  'Coming along, coming along,' Mr Laertides chirrupped. 'Fuck, where did I just put the litmus paper? Tell me if the stuff in that end flask goes purple, if it does we'll have seven seconds to get out before the whole lot blows and they start flying in emergency cartographers from the Continent to redraw all the maps. Oh, that's good, that's excellent.' Here, Mr Laertides paused to admire the bubbles rising from a pool of clear liquid in the bottom of a beaker. 'Told you there was nothing to it really.'

  Paul cleared his throat. 'Mr Laertides.'

  'Frank. Just call me Frank.'

  'Sorry to bother you,' Paul said. 'But I don't remember any of this from when I copied the recipe out of the book.'

  Mr Laertides grinned. 'Just as well I stepped in, then, isn't it? See, that formula was written for the trade, it's assumed you know how to use it, all the different basic techniques. Like it says, clarify two ounces of mutton fat dissolved in turpentine. Sounds like you don't know how to clarify. Well, do you? Thought not. I didn't spend twenty years learning all this stuff just for something to do, you know.'

  Paul could take a hint, especially one which landed with the terminal velocity of a large meteorite. He stood back, stayed out of the way while Mr Laertides worked and tried to keep himself amused by reading the labels of the bottles in the store cupboard. There was aqua regia and aqua fortis, sweet spirits of nitre and salt of wormwood, lunar caustic and oil of Mars and peach ash and pearl ash and calomel, butter and bloom and glance of antimony, bitter salts and blue vitriol, killed spirits, tincture of steel, liver of sulphur and corrosive sublimate, and not a single newt's eye or frog's toe to be found anywhere. At the very back of the cupboard, among the wreaths of cobweb and moraines of dust, he found a tiny bottle whose label read Van Spee's crystals, but it was empty.

  'All done,' sang out Mr Laertides. 'Complete, finito, come and get it while it's hot.' He was holding out a clear plastic pot, marginally bigger than an upturned thimble. 'I'd knock it back in one if I were you,' he went on. 'Probably doesn't taste too wonderful, I don't know. I haven't actually tried it, for obvious reasons.'

  Paul looked at it with a certain degree of horror, then did as he was told. It was only slightly warm, and had no perceptible taste whatever.

  'Is that it?' he said.

  'Yes,' Mr Laertides confirmed. He was red in the face and sweating a little. He'd taken off his jacket at some point and rolled up his sleeves, revealing long, thin white forearms, completely hairless. 'My guess is, it'll be about half an hour before it takes effect, and you may feel a bit drowsy, so don't drive or operate heavy machinery. Aside from that, though, that should be you seen to for at least six months before you need topping up.' He was putting things away, wiping the desktop, stoppering bottles and jars, dismantling glass and rubber tubing. 'And the good part is, we'll be testing it straight away, because there's bound to be one or two cute chicks at the rehearsal this evening. But now you'll be able to look 'em in the eye and walk straight past, and that's one less set of hideous complications in your life.'

  Paul thought about that. 'Thanks,' he said. 'Thanks very much Mr La- Sorry, Frank. You've got no idea how much this'll mean to me. And you're sure it'll work?' he couldn't help adding.

  'You bet.' Mr Laertides nodded his head four times in rapid succession. 'Fact is, though I've never made this one before, it's quite like all your basic love-philtre recipes - stands to reason if you think about it - and I've been making them for thirty years.' He'd just put something in his pocket, absent-mindedly and without thinking. Now he paused, frowned, took it out again. 'Silly me,' he said and opened his hand, revealing the aspirin bottle still nearly full of yellow crystals. 'I expect you'll want to hang on to these,' he continued. 'I sort of got the impression that Theo wasn't expecting to get them back, and you never know when they might come in handy.'

  Paul didn't make any attempt to take them. 'Aren't they, well, sort of valuable?' he asked.

  'What? Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, a bit. I suppose this lot'd be worth a bob or two on the black market. But if you sell them, what'll you do in six months time, when you've got to make the next batch? Up to you, of course, but-'

  'That's all right,' Paul said firmly, taking the bottle. 'I'll make sure I keep them very safe. You, um, you think the professor didn't mind me helping myself like that?'

  Mr Laertides grinned. 'The fact that you're standing there would tend to suggest that,' he said. 'If Theo was upset with you, by now you'd be nothing but a memory and a faint smell of burning. Don't worry, though, he makes the stuff, so there's plenty more where that came from, far as he's concerned. What's the time, by the way? It's just struck me, I'd better go and get changed if I'm going to this rehearsal thing. Can't show up at Rosie's shindig looking like this, can I?'

  Mr Laertides was wearing a plain blue suit. So was Paul. 'Can't you? I mean, ought I to change as well? She didn't say anything-'

  'Don't worry about it,' Mr Laertides said. 'What you're wearing will be the least of your problems.' He held the door open so Paul could go through. 'You carry on,' he said. 'I'll just make sure everything's shipshape, then lock up.'

  Half an hour, he'd said. Paul went slowly down the stairs and made for his office. The brewing process had taken a bit longer than Mr Laertides had predicted, an hour rather than thirty minutes. That left half an hour till going-home time; just long enough for the medicin
e to work. He sat down at his desk, which was noteless and memo-free, and rested his elbows on top.

  If it works, he thought. If it worked, if only, then it'd be goodbye to a whacking great chunk of the pain of being Paul Carpenter, and wouldn't that be good? No more falling in love, no more wild, hopeless crushes, no more drifting around bumping into things and absent-mindedly walking through shop windows. No more drooping, sighing, yearning, making an utter and unmitigated prat of himself. He'd be able to walk down the street without needing to look down or away every time a girl came into view. He grinned, as a picture formed in his mind of his arch-persecutor Cupid, who'd hounded him all these years like a chubby pink Captain Ahab, howling at him in baffled fury from his white fluffy cloud. Safe, for the first time since he was eleven. Assuming it worked, of course.

  But if it worked, what a wonderful world this would be. They could do what they liked; girls of every shape, size, height and weight, they could hunt him in packs for all he cared but it wouldn't do them any good. Just imagine, a world without fear. Only an hour or two ago, he'd been ambushed by Vicky the mermaid, been lucky to get out of that one with nothing worse than a plunge into deep water. Before that there'd been the fake Demelza Horrocks, a hateful trap set for him by Countess Judy into which he'd blundered like a honey-starved heffalump; and before that - before that, there'd been Sophie, and look where that had led. Thank you, he thought; thank you, nice Mr Laertides, even if you are as weird as nine pink ferrets in a blender. If I can be spared another sleigh-ride down the plumbing like that, I can't ever thank you enough. If it worked, it'd almost be enough to reconcile him to all this magic stuff for ever.

  Almost.

  The door swung open and Paul looked up. For once, Mr Tanner's mum hadn't bothered to disguise herself; she stood in the doorway in her goblin face and skin, all long, curved teeth, round red eyes and short bristles. He knew she wasn't really supposed to walk around like that before the office closed for the evening, and somehow he knew that it was meant as a friendly gesture, like a white flag denoting a brief ceasefire, a short interval during which they could share cups of tea in no man's land and sing 'Silent Night' together until the howitzers started up again. Of course, it was only because he was doing her a favour, coming to her stupid rehearsal.