by Tom Holt
The host called Mr Wells a bastard. Mr Wells didn’t seem inclined to deny it. In fact, he smiled.
“Isn’t it Von Clausewitz who defines bastardry as the art of negotiation by other means?” he said, with a mild grin. “Now, about my client’s takeover bid for your client’s company.”
The audience was starting to get restless; he could hear voices, sounding worried. Someone laughed, but there was an edge to it. “Your client?” the host said.
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“Oh.” Pause. “Oh, so you’re—?”
“Yes. Always nice to put a face to the name, isn’t it?”
“But—”
“Fond of her, aren’t you?”
About a second of dead silence. “All right,” said the host. “What’ve I got to do?”
“Just sign here.” Mr Wells produced a sheet of paper from inside his gown. “You can borrow my pen if you like.”
After that, the host went back to his seat; he was as white as a sheet, and even from where he was, Paul could see he was shaking. Then Mr Wells came out from behind the screen and, with a graceful flourish, he slid the two halves of the coffin back together again and lifted the lid. The girl’s head moved, she groaned; and Mr Wells reached out his hand and helped her to her feet.
For a single heartbeat, there was total silence. Then the audience started to clap; the girl looked round, as if she hadn’t known they were there. Mr Wells bowed again, with a good deal of exaggerated business, swirling the hem of his gown. The girl tottered back to her place in the front row and sat down.
That seemed to be that.
Mr Wells nodded to Paul, and he guessed he was supposed to help with dismantling the gear. The audience was getting up, filing out of the tent. Even the children seemed subdued, as if they knew they’d seen something odd, but didn’t know what exactly. The girl left with the rest of the crowd; the host stayed on for a moment or so, staring up at Mr Wells as he folded up the coffin and turned it back into a suitcase. Then he left too.
“Time we were on our way, I think,” Mr Wells said, when the three of them were alone in the tent. “Best not to hang around when you’ve pulled off a good deal.” He seemed almost absurdly cheerful, like a favourite uncle at Christmas. “Right, is that the lot? Splendid. We didn’t leave anything in the other tent, did we?” He pulled his robes off and dumped them unfolded in the suitcase. “You two can change in the bus, to save time. Come on.”
A minute or so later they were back in the minibus, and the driver was starting up the engine. Mr Wells flopped into his comfy chair; Paul could see he’d been sweating. “What’s the time?” Mr Wells asked, and then answered his own question. “Quarter past twelve, splendid. We’ll stop for lunch on the way back, firm’s treat. Well, that all went very smoothly. I thought it would, but you can never be sure.”
They were driving out of the field. “Mr Wells,” Sophie said.
“Hm?” Already Mr Wells had a pile of papers on his lap, and a silver fountain pen in his right hand.
“If that man hadn’t signed your bit of paper,” Sophie said, “would you have let her die?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The woman in the box. Would you have let her die?” Mr Wells looked at her for a moment; a very cold, thoughtful look. Then he laughed and said, “Good lord, you don’t actually think—? It was just a conjuring trick, that’s all.”
Sophie’s expression didn’t change. “Oh,” she said. “Really?”
“Well, of course it was.” Mr Wells laughed again; it was studio-audience laughter. “You don’t for one moment believe I’d actually cut somebody in two? How ridiculous.”
“Fine,” said Sophie. “That’s all right, then.”
“Splendid,” said Mr Wells, and went back to reading his documents.
About half an hour later, the bus stopped. They were in the car park of a motorway service station. “Lunch,” Mr Wells explained.
He led them to the Burger King. Sophie said she wasn’t actually very hungry, but Mr Wells just smiled and ordered her a Vegeburger with large fries and a coffee, together with a bacon double cheeseburger for himself and (without asking) a Whopper, large fries and large vanilla shake for Paul. As it happened, it was just what he’d have chosen for himself.
They sat down at a table with their trays and styrofoam cups. Mr Wells ate like a tyrannosaurus, gripping the food with his teeth and then ripping a mouthful away. “In case you were wondering,” he said, with his mouth full, “we act for a major road-haulage contractor, and our host at the party back there’s the solicitor representing our client’s landlords. We were having some difficulty over the terms of a new lease for our client’s main distribution depot, but it’s all settled now. The party,” he added, “was for his son’s tenth birthday. Rather a stroke of luck, but part of the secret of this business is making the most of opportunities.”
They got back to St Mary’s Axe at half-past five precisely. When the bus stopped, Mr Wells bookmarked the chunky-looking document he’d been reading, dropped it into the suitcase, snapped it shut and hopped out. “Be in my office at ten past nine on Monday morning, please,” he called back over his shoulder. As soon as Paul and Sophie were out of the minibus, it roared away from the kerb, the back doors still open, and vanished up the road.
“Well,” Paul said.
“Yes,” Sophie replied. “I need a drink. Coming?”
“Actually—” Paul stopped. Why not? he thought. It wasn’t every day you saw a woman sawn in half, and he could do with a drink himself. “Yes,” he said.
They went to the pub where they’d met again after the interview, and sat at the same table. Paul tried not to think about that. Sophie wasn’t drinking Guinness this time; instead, she came back from the bar with what looked like a large brandy, which she gulped down as if it was medicine.
“He was lying,” she said. “I saw what he did.”
“So did I,” Paul replied. “Though there wasn’t any blood. But—”
“And when you were inside the box,” she said, “and he stuck those swords down through it. Did you feel anything?”
“No,” Paul said.
“If that man hadn’t agreed—you know, the solicitor or whatever he was—Wells’d just have walked away and let her die. I know he would.”
Paul didn’t really want to dwell on that, but he decided to be polite and not make an issue out of it. “I agree. You’re right, I mean. But—”
“Well?”
“I don’t suppose that there was any real danger the man wouldn’t agree,” he said awkwardly. “So I suppose, in practice, there wasn’t any real harm done. I mean, when she got up and walked off the stage, she seemed all right to me.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Nothing, really,” Paul mumbled. “You’re right, it was a horrible thing to do, and he just didn’t care.” What am I supposed to do about it? he didn’t add.
“That man’s evil,” Sophie went on. “Total bastard. And when it was the solicitor bloke’s kid’s birthday, too. What sort of evil bastard would do something like that?”
There didn’t seem to be anything Paul could add to that; nor, he guessed, was any input required on his part. He nodded, and sipped his lemonade shandy. “I wonder what he’s got lined up for us on Monday,” he said.
“Whatever it is, I’m not doing it.” She looked at him, and they both knew she hadn’t meant it, because they had absolutely no choice whatsoever in the matter. For a brief moment, though, Paul was sorely tempted to tell her about the portable door; just in case she could think of some way of making use of it to get them out of the terrible mess they were both in. But he didn’t; instead, he said: “Doing anything this evening?”
He hadn’t meant it like that; he’d meant to ask if she had something pleasant lined up, something that might help to take the taste of blood away. She obviously took it the other way. “No,” she said. “I was supposed to be going to hel
p Shaz set up for a gig at a pub in Penge, but he called last night and said the gig was off and he was going to stay in and do something or other to his kiln, or something like that. So, no, I’m not doing anything.”
“Oh.” Paul wasn’t sure what to do next. He was confused; he wasn’t sure whether he was still supposed to be shoring up the Sophie⁄Shaz relationship, as part of his duty to heal the wounds he’d caused in the timeline by his escapade with the portable door, or whether he was now at liberty to sabotage it for all he was worth. And now, apparently, he’d somehow contrived to ask Sophie out on a date, and she’d accepted.
(But he didn’t want to go out on a date, not even with the girl he loved, not even if it meant there was an outside chance of prising the performance potter off her and winning her for himself. All he wanted to do was go home, have a bath, go to bed and try very hard not to dream about severed limbs and the effects of a cross-cut saw on living tissue. Still; as Mr Wells had said, part of the secret of this business was making the most of opportunities. Somehow, he didn’t really want to accept advice on this particular subject from Mr Wells, even if it did appear to be singularly appropriate.)
“Great,” he heard himself say. “Do you fancy going to the pictures?”
She frowned, as though he’d just asked her to do a complex piece of mental arithmetic. “I don’t know,” she said. “What did you want to see?”
Paul realised that he couldn’t think of the name of a single film currently on general release. “Nothing in particular,” he said. “Is there anything you’d like to see?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
And then she looked at him in a slightly different way, and said, “Let’s just stay here and have another drink or something.”; and for a brief moment, Paul felt as though he was stuck halfway up a sheer cliff, and suddenly it had shrugged its shoulders and levelled itself out into a gentle downhill slope. “That’d be nice,” he heard himself say. It wasn’t the reply he’d have chosen to make, but apparently it had got the job done, because she nodded very slightly and said she’d like a half of Guinness.
After that, they talked about several things. Sophie had quite a lot to say about Mr Wells; then she expanded the scope of her remarks to include Mr Tanner. She didn’t like either of them very much. However, she conceded, there wasn’t a lot she or Paul could do about it. She didn’t sound happy about that.
Paul made the point that he wasn’t exactly thrilled with the way matters stood, either. It had been more or less bearable, he said, when all they were doing was sorting through the Mortensen printouts—before they knew what they were, of course, because, somehow, knowing made it worse rather than better. Now, though, it looked like they were going to have to get involved, and he really didn’t want to do that. Then, for some reason that seemed to make sense at the time, he told Sophie about Mr Tanner’s mum. He had to do some serious editing, to leave out any reference to the portable door; so he shifted the scene of the encounter in Ankara to the Starbucks in Camden Town. He left out the not-chocolate-coated beans, too.
While he was telling the story, he wasn’t at all sure how it’d be received. It worried him that it might sound like macho locker-room talk, an unregenerate male bragging about his conquests. But Sophie didn’t appear to take it that way; in fact, she pulled a face and muttered ‘Yuck’, which was how Paul had hoped she’d react. She spoiled it rather by adding something to the effect that Mr Tanner’s mum must be really weird and, as he’d said himself, desperate, but he didn’t mind that really.
“And all those different receptionists are all just goblins in disguise,” she added. “That’s so sick. I mean, the clothes they wear, I guess I should have known there was something wrong with them. Talk about obvious. You’re so lucky you managed to get away from her.”
Paul felt like pointing out that luck hadn’t had much to do with it, but he didn’t. Instead, he changed the subject slightly. Had she thought of asking for help or advice from anybody? Her parents, for instance. Weren’t they curious about how she was getting on at work?
“Not really,” she replied, with a sigh. “They’ve got it into their heads that I’ve got this really good job with this really important company, and in a year or so I’ll be a junior partner because I’m so clever and talented, and everything’s going to be fine. If I tried to tell them what’s really going on, they’d simply shut their ears and not take it in. That’s just what they’re like, you see. They get an idea of how they want things to be, and if it doesn’t turn out that way, they just ignore it. They probably think that sooner or later Shaz’ll stop all this ceramics nonsense and get a proper job in a building society, and then we can get married and buy a house and have a family, and stuff like that. It’s really sad, but they don’t know me from a hole in the ground.”
Paul shrugged. “At least they seem to like you,” he said. “Mine don’t, or they wouldn’t have buggered off to Florida.”
Sophie frowned. “When was the last time you heard from them?”
“I got a postcard last week,” Paul replied, “from the Grand Canyon. Apparently they’ve bought one of these giant camper-van things and gone off touring round America for six months. They did say they’d ring when they got back, to tell me what a wonderful time they’ve been having.” Paul stopped, and furrowed his brows. “You know,” he said, “I’ve just realised, we’re the perfect people for JWW to pick on. I mean, even if we were to try and tell someone about them, like what they’re really up to, there’s nobody for either of us to talk to, not even our families. Yours wouldn’t listen, and mine aren’t even there. I wonder if they knew that, from the start.”
“Probably,” Sophie said.
“Though of course,” Paul went on, “you did have a boyfriend when you started work; the one who suddenly got interested in Gilbert and Sullivan.” He looked up at her. “Do you think that was—well, them, as well?”
She nodded. “I’ve wondered about that,” she said. “Not that he’d have been a threat, exactly. I mean, I’d never have tried to tell him. He wouldn’t have heard me. He never did hear me much, thinking about it. I’m not sure he even liked me much.” She shrugged. “I don’t think Shaz does, either.”
“Oh,” said Paul. “Do you like him, then?”
She thought about that. “No, not really,” she said. “He’s got an unfortunate manner, and he doesn’t always smell very nice. But he’s very creative, and his lifestyle’s very—well, it’s pretty cool, living in a bus and working with your hands, but artistic, and very committed, of course. It’s what I ought to have done, I should have been a sculptor or a blacksmith, something like that. Instead—”
“Instead,” Paul said, “you’re a witch. Trainee witch,” he added quickly.
She started to scowl, then smiled. “Yes, but I commute and I wear suits and court shoes, and my parents approve of me.”
“Fine,” said Paul. “So if you could wear a black pointy hat and travel to work on a broomstick, that’d be okay?”
“It’d be better,” Sophie conceded. “But—”
“I know,” Paul said. “Besides, the JWW mob aren’t wizards and witches, they’re business people who happen to be in that line of business.” He grinned. “If you were like them and had a broomstick for flying about on, it’d have to have a sticker on the back saying My Other Broom’s An Addis.”
She laughed, though it was more out of solidarity than amusement. “You know,” she said, “if this has taught me anything, it’s that it’s not what you do that matters, it’s who you are while you’re doing it. I mean, we get these crazy ideas, about ourselves and other people; and then all of a sudden the other people turn out to be sorcerers and goblins, and we—” She shrugged. “If I was like really brave, I’d sneak into that boardroom place and take a good long look at my reflection in that table top. Who knows, I might learn a thing or two.”
Paul shook his head. “I’m not brave enough for that,” he said. “I’ve got a pretty good
idea I’d know exactly what I’d see.”
“You think so. Maybe you’re wrong.”
At that moment, Paul wished he had the bag of not-chocolate raisins handy. He also felt mortally embarrassed, but he was used to that. “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m hungry.”
“You’re hungry. I didn’t have any lunch.”
“You did. At least, you ate the chips, when you thought Mr Wells wasn’t looking. I saw you.”
She grinned. “All right, so I did. I need my lunch. If I don’t eat at lunchtime, I get bad-tempered.”
“You don’t say.” Paul nodded. “What do you like? Food, I mean.”
“Oh, I’m not bothered. Pizza?”
So they went and had a pizza, just like regular folks, except that Paul felt like he was in one of those old war movies, where the gallant British airmen are escaping through occupied France, trying their best to act and sound like they’re French. Any minute now, he felt, someone from Real Life was going to show up and demand to see his identity card, and as soon as that happened, it’d be obvious that he had no right to be here, having dinner, on a date with a girl, and they’d arrest him and drag him back to the PoW camp, solitary confinement for life. It was all rather unfair, he couldn’t help thinking. Even Steve McQueen had had a motorbike; all he had was a portable door, and so far it hadn’t really been much good to him.
But that aside—that aside, he found that the less hard he tried, the easier it got. For one thing, it was almost as though Sophie was on his side, rather than being the opposition. It occurred to him that she’d been wanting someone to talk to for quite some time—the last few weeks, ever since Goblin Night, when their world had changed for ever; and ever since then, the logical choice, her colleague, had refused to say a word to her, apart from What’s the time? and Have you finished with the Sellotape? Bloody strange state of affairs, that, and she must have wondered what on earth was going on. It was lucky she was grown-up enough to be able to put it behind her so easily.