The gendarme has summed up the victim as mentally disturbed and is just about to render psychiatric first-aid with his truncheon when he catches sight of the banknote tongue, still thrashing about, trying to feed three inches of tie in through the cash slot. He stares.
The machine stares back. Then - there's no other way to put this - it sticks its tongue out at the policeman.
The gendarme stiffens. There are certain things you just don't do, no matter how many branches and wholly-owned subsidiary companies you've got.
It only takes him a fraction of a second to bark out the obligatory warning. The tongue extends further and waggles about. In fact, it connects with the gendarme's kepi, twists it round a couple of times, and stuffs it into the cash slot. There is another burp. A button lands on the pavement and rolls drunkenly away.
The rest is most definitely not silence. Out comes the gendarme's 9mm service automatic. Three cracks, like the breaking of a giant's leg bones. The machine goes on grinning.
It displays a derogatory message on its screen.
All this is well known, of course; you'll find it in any history book, in one version or another. What isn't so well recorded - probably because it's so very unnerving, and mankind can only take so much reality before it starts demanding that something be done about it - is the fact that when the gendarme in question received his bank statement at the end of the month, he was disturbed to find an entry recording three rounds of 125-grain full metal jacket 9mm Parabellum credited to his account on the day in question.
With interest. And, of course, basic rate tax deducted at source.
Shortly after the first reports of this contretemps had reached the Hot Seat and were dismissed as being a rather offbeat practical joke, a fax machine in Toronto grabbed a secretary by the wrist as she was feeding paper into it, hurled her across the ionosphere and dumped her down in Winnipeg, in the front office of a highly respected firm of water diviners.
To make matters worse, it was a wrong number.
Microwaves the length and breadth of Florida burst simultaneously into song until switched off, while a team of firemen in Tokyo fought for two hours to release a chat-show host from the interior of a portable television set. When the unfortunate man was eventually freed, he was found to have broken several small bones in his wrists while hammering on the inside of the glass.
In Novosibirsk, an entire warehouseful of retractable ballpoint pens was destroyed by long-range artillery fire after turning into small but incredibly agile yellow snakes. The President of Venezuela appeared on national television to appeal for calm after all the office dictating machines in the country started answering back. Large parts of the centre of Perth were sealed off, leaving a handful of bemused Marines to watch the stately dance of the traffic lights over the sights of their machine-guns. In London, all the telephones refused to speak to each other for three hours, but nobody noticed. Workers on a People's Farm at an undisclosed location in Shantung province were frightened out of their wits when they reported for work only to find that the newly planted ricepaddy had spontaneously landscaped itself into an eighteenhole golf course, complete with electric carts, clubhouse and conference facilities.
Absolutely nothing peculiar happened in Ireland at all, which was perhaps the most disconcerting part of it. No statues of the Virgin Mary moved their arms or were seen to weep tears for a period calculated to have been in excess of three hours.
In Paris, the Mona Lisa giggled.
`Okay,' said the Finance Director. `You win. We're withdrawing our agents.'
`And about time too,' replied Lucky George. He fumbled in his pocket for a coin to feed the phone box, but could only find a small, bent washer. He smiled at it. `Just count yourselves extremely lucky I'm a bit out of practice.'
`You won't get away with it, you know. You can hide, but you can't run.'
`Shouldn't that be the other-'
`Think about it.'
Lucky George thought about it and decided he didn't like the Finance Director's tone, with the result that back in the hastily prepared emergency rooms at Pandaemonium, the receiver gave the Finance Director's ear a big, wet kiss. The Finance Director wound his handkerchief round the earpiece and went on:
`Tell you what we'll do, George. Give yourself up, come quietly, we'll forget all about it. You can even have your old job back in the ... We'll give you a nice cushy job in the kitchens. Now I can't say fairer than-'
The mouthpiece of the telephone popped an apple neatly into the Finance Director's mouth, and the line went dead. Lucky George hung up, smiled the phone booth back out of existence, and crossed the road to a cafe, where he ordered a beer and a toasted sandwich.
Withdrawing all their agents. Like hell they were.
He sat for a while and smoked (a process which in his case did not involve tobacco) and then reached for his glass, upended it on the table, and began a seance.
In order to conjure the spirits of the dead, you need to link up at least three pairs of hands. Although he was alone, Lucky George didn't seem to find this a problem.
`You there, Bull?'
The saucer with Lucky George's unpaid bill in it rocked backwards and forwards a couple of times. Lucky George grinned and slipped a coin under the rim ...
Oh. You thought it was the waiter who took it. Sorry to have disillusioned you.
... Whereupon a cloud of ectoplasm materialised above the table and hovered there, refracting light. A man in a bow tie and a black waistcoat hurried up, and took its order for coffee and a slice of cheesecake.
How.
`Sheer bloody-mindedness, mostly,' replied Lucky George. `And you?'
Not so dusty, replied the shade of Sitting Bull. They've
recently transferred me to a job in Administration. `Administration?' Lucky George raised an eyebrow. `Why
-- was that, Bully?'
Search me. The only reason I could come up with was that my name fitted. Like, you do a lot of sitting and-'
`Quite so,' Lucky George replied. `Anyway, to business. I seem to remember you owe me a favour, Bully.'
The ectoplasm shook its head violently, causing a fortuitous rainbow.
Don't make me laugh, paleface. Your people stole our lands. They wiped out the buffalo. They raped our hunting-grounds with the telegraph and the iron horse. They massacred us when we tried to fight and drove us into reservations. They destroyed our unique and vital cultural traditions and poisoned our youth with fire water and flame grilled spicy bisonburgers. I don't seem to recall owing any favours to anyone with skin that particularly revolting shade of pinky-apricot.
Lucky George frowned. `Short memory you've got, Bully,' he said. `I'm amazed you've forgotten who it was advised you to invest heavily in railroad bonds and Wells Fargo Unsecured Loan Stock back in the early 1870s. Maybe I'm thinking of somebody else.'
The ectoplasm quivered slightly, like a fluorescent jelly. Point taken. All right, what do you want?
Lucky George paused while the waiter brought the coffee. They shared the cheesecake.
'To tell you the truth, Bully,' said Lucky George, `I find myself in a bit of a jam.'
You don't say.
`Leave heavy irony to the living, Bully, they've got a flair for it. The point is, I need a spot of help. From someone on the inside on the Other Side, if you follow me.'
You want jam on it, you do.
`Do I?' George replied mildly. He smiled at the remains of
the cheesecake, rendering it inedible under two centimetres of damson preserve. `It's not a lot to ask. Of course, if you want the entire Sioux nation to find out about your career in bondwashing...'
All right, there's no need to get nasty. They've called off all their agents, just like they said.
George raised both eyebrows. `You surprise me, Bully, you really do.'
Freelances, on the other hand, are not covered by the term `agent'. In contract law, as no doubt you recall, no contract of agency subsists in the case of a
unilateral, open-ended contract (such as the offer of a public reward) until the contracting party signifies his acceptance of the offer by actually performing the contract. The leading authority on this point is the old case of Carlill versus the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company, in which-'
`I beg your pardon?'
I'm taking law at night school. No way I'm going to be just another dumb Injun all my life. I'm allergic to sun-dried buffalo and wampum gives me eczema.
`Good for you, Bully. Any particular freelance you have in mind?'
The ectoplasm began to laugh; and laughed so violently that it shook its fragile manifestation out of existence and vanished, absent-mindedly taking the rest of the cheesecake with it. Lucky George sighed.
`Oh,' he said. `Him. I might have guessed.'
Ask any detective, and he'll tell you that getting the initial lead is the difficult part. Once you've got something, however slight, to go on, it's just a matter of inspired perseverance. The problem is getting that initial lucky break.
Ask Kurt Lundqvist, and he'll tell you that the only way to get a break is to hit something hard. Or someone.
`Now, then,' he said, wrapping his belt round his fist. `We could do this the hard way, or...'
He paused and reflected. Nah. Why confuse the issue by introducing alternatives?
`We'll do this the hard way,' he said.
Possession of a warrant card valid in all jurisdictions, temporal as well as geographical, meant that it was no problem whatsoever for Lundqvist to nip backwards and forwards in Time in the pursuit of his enquiries. This was a great help. For one thing, if a suspect sneakily died under interrogation, he could rewind back to the deceased's last lucid moment and start all over again ...
`I've never heard of him,' whimpered the interviewee. `Honest.'
`Listen.' Lundqvist laid aside the belt and put an arm round the subject's shoulders. `Co-operate, why don't you? Do yourself a favour.' He paused and grinned. `I have to say that, you know, it's in the rules. Personally, the less you talk, the more I like it.' He picked up the belt again and waggled it meaningfully under the subject's nose.
`No, but really,' the subject said. `I honestly have never heard that name in my life before. How can I have, for Christ's sake? He won't even be born for another seven years ...'
Nostradamus paused; and bit his lip.
`Oh shit,' he said.
'Precisely,' Lundqvist replied. `Don't mind me, though. If you want to persist in fruitless denials for an hour or so, that's absolutely fine by me.'
Nostradamus passed the tip of his tongue across his bonedry lips. `All right,' he said. `All right, I admit, I've heard of him. Doesn't mean to say I know where he is. I mean, I've heard of all sorts of people, I've heard of Elvis Presley. Doesn't follow that I know where he's hiding out.'
Lundqvist raised an eyebrow. `Who's Elvis Presley?' he asked.
Nostradamus shrugged. `After your time, I suppose,' he said. `Or before. It gets a bit confusing, sometimes.'
`Yeah.' Lundqvist smiled, or at least he drew back his lips to exhibit his teeth, and clenched his fist round the belt. `You know, it's really nice of you to be so brave about this. Most guys just crack up and start talking the moment I've tied them to the chair.' He patted his knuckles against the palm of his other hand. `Say this for you, Nos, you've got balls. For now, anyway.,
'Hold on!' Nostradamus closed his eyes tightly, clenched his eyebrows together and grimaced alarmingly. `Something's coming through, right now.'
`There's a coincidence.'
`I can see ...' The prophet began to rock the chair he was tied to backwards and forwards. `I can see a man.'
`Good start.'
`He's beating up this other man. He's got a belt round his knuckles. He's punching - Ouch!'
Lundqvist grinned sardonically. `Yes?'
`The man's just broken his hand,' Nostradamus replied. `God, he's in real agony, poor devil, rolling about on the floor. Hey, that really does hurt. If only I could see who it is, maybe I could warn...'
He stopped. Lundqvist had taken hold of his ear and was trying to unscrew it.
`Thanks for the tip,' he said. `Now, try again.'
Well, Lundqvist decided as he washed his hands, it was a start. It was something.
He examined himself in the mirror, and then stopped for a moment to remove a last splash of something nasty from his left cuff.
A date, in the late twentieth century. Some rather peculiar events, which could only be explained by reference to (a) the supernatural, (b) the considerably aggrieved, and (c) the extremely childish. Could be; or was it just coincidence?
Not that Nostradamus was in fact the greatest seer the world
had ever known, he reminded himself, as he opened the door and walked out of the washroom. If he'd been any good at all, it was a safe bet that he'd have made bloody sure he spent Thursday March 16th, 1498 in a locked stone-walled room surrounded by armed guards.
It had been a long time since Lundqvist had last been in Amsterdam, or almost. In fact, he'd been here the previous week - May 9th to 16th, 1995 - but that was seven years ago...
He tried to remember if there were any warrants out for his arrest. Or was that next month? Probably, he decided with a grin, that was after he'd done whatever it was he'd come here to do.
Lucky George.
George and Lundqvist went way back (and forwards, of course). Not that he'd ever had a failure, exactly; at the end of the day, he'd served the warrant, collected the subject and delivered him, in accordance with the terms of the retainer. But even he had to admit that Lucky George hadn't come quietly. In fact, he'd come very noisily indeed, and nearly taken a substantial tranche of the fabric of reality with him. There had been moments - April 1563, for example, and December 1749, not to mention February 1255 and August 2014 - when he'd been sure that the bastard was slipping through his fingers. Likewise, just as the thing any cop dreads most of all is having his own gun used against him, he particularly resented the way George had made him look a fool in the final showdown. Even bounty-hunters have their feelings, and nobody likes being chased round the centre of a densely populated city by a seven-foot-tall scale replica of himself, brandishing an array of hopelessly anachronistic weapons and calling out for all to hear, `Look at me, I'm a pillock!'
And they'd let him escape! The idiots!
Outside the airport he found a telephone booth with a
directory in it. He opened it until he found what he was looking for.
TROY, H.O
Relieved, he made a note of the address, fed the machine some money and dialled the number.
The lady in question was, just then, having a bit of a problem at the port of Rotterdam.
She'd got as far as `I name this ship ...', and then dried. Buggery!
Trying not to appear conspicuous, she glanced out the corner of her eye at the big letters painted on the side. That wasn't much help; they called ships some pretty weird things these days, but even so she had a feeling that Passengers are not allowed beyond this point probably wasn't the damn thing's name. She'd have to mumble.
`I name this ship rhubarbrhubarbrhubarb,' she therefore said, `and God bless all who sail in her.' Then she smiled. That was okay.
I needn't have worried, she told herself later, on her way home. The chances of anybody listening to what Miss World actually says are pretty minimal. In fact, it's reasonably safe to say that nobody takes any notice of Miss World at all, except in a fairly superficial way. Otherwise, how come she'd held the title forty-seven times under various assumed names, and nobody had ever noticed? The number of people who look at her face is, after all, limited; the number who remember it, more limited still.
Which was, she reflected, a pity, for them. It was a nice face, besides having been extremely useful over the years to the shipbuilding industry.
For the time being, Home was a flat in one of the terribly old, terribly beautiful houses beside the Kaisergracht. It was hellishly expensive
and the stairs half killed her unless she took her heels off and walked up them in her stocking feet, but that's the price you have to pay for being sentimental. For it was in this very room, in this very building, that she and George ... She blushed.
The building had been new then; in fact, not completely and one hundred per cent finished. No roof, for one thing. But they'd been young; and in love, and it's nice to be able to lie in each other's aims and look up at the stars. They'd been on a day trip to the seventeenth century, and had been so wrapped up in each other (literally as well as figuratively) that they'd missed the last time-warp home. Not that they'd minded terribly much about that. It had been, she remembered with a slight shudder, about four months before George's year ran out, and even then they'd both spent an awfully large proportion of the time Not Thinking About It.
Having paid off her taxi, she let herself in, slipped off her shoes, and trotted up the stairs. As she reached the secondfloor landing, she started to feel that faint prickling down the back of the neck that means either a premonition of terrible danger or too little fabric softener. Since she was wearing a backless dress, she decided it was probably danger.
Unfortunately, she had a very bad attitude towards danger, mainly because when she was around, it tended to be something that happened to other people. Ninja-silent in her shoelessness, she crept along the landing and pushed the door of her flat with the tip of one finger.
It swung open.
She swore.
At first sight, it looked like the aftermath of a visit from an incredibly conscientious burglar - you know, one of those dreadfully pernickety perfectionist types who insist on knifing the cushions for concealed pearls and ransacking the shelves for hollowed-out books. Unless, however, he had also been an extraordinarily picky burglar, brought up on only the finest
Faust Amongst Equals Tom Holt Page 4