Faust Amongst Equals Tom Holt

by Faust Amongst Equals (lit)

  `Quark,' interrupts a seagull quickly. `Quark quark quark.'

  `Quark,' confirms the other seagull.

  Mr Van Appin shrugs. On the one hand, he's simply not the running-about type, every minute out of the office is costing him thousands of guilders in lost fees and the course of action to which his client has apparently committed himself is extremely hazardous and liable, if it goes wrong, to have disastrous consequences both for himselfand his professional advisers. On the other hand, it's a poor heart that never rejoices.

  `Okay,' he says. `Go for it.'

  `Helen.'

  `Mmmm?'

  `Pass the maple syrup, there's a love.'

  Cleaving the air like two postgraduate smart missiles, two seagulls flash down out of the sun 'on an increasingly ragged procession hacking its way through the back gardens of the Keisergracht.

  Lundqvist sees them; and just as the penny drops and he realises that these are no ordinary herring-gulls, they bank in

  mid-air over the handcarts, snip lengths of wire off the suppressor machines with surgical precision in their sharp beaks, and beat it.

  No point even trying a shot at this range. With a snarl, he holsters his .475 Wildey, scowls horribly at his skilled assistants, and returns to the task of cleaving a path through someone's begonias with his machete.

  Three old college chums standing rather self-consciously on the banks of the Prinsengracht, wondering what they've let themselves in for.

  `You ever done anything like this before, Jule?' 'Nah. What about you, Lenny?'

  The designer of parachutes stroked his beard. `Depends,' he replied. `In 1499 I designed a contrivance for harnessing the power of the winds and the tides to operate a small, left-handthread ratchet screwdriver, not that there was any demand, bloody Luddites. Does that count?'

  The Dane and the Dutchman looked at each other. `Frankly,' said the Dane, `no. Oh well, I suppose we'll all just have to learn together.'

  Two seagulls flapped wearily over the rooftops and perched on the Dutchman's head.

  `Quark,' they said in chorus.

  `We're on, then,' said the designer of parachutes. `Over the top, and all that.'

  `You can say that again.'

  `Right,' the parachute man continued, `let the dog see the rabbit. Which one of us do you think ought to say the magic words and so forth? Any volunteers?'

  The Dane mole-wrenched his mind back from recollecting what a right pain in the arse Lenny had been in the old days, and locked it back on course. `Tell you what, Lenny,' he said, `why don't you do it?'

  `If you're sure.'

  'I'm sure.'

  'Jule? How about you"

  'Just get on with it, Lenny, please. And could you possibly

  manage to be a tiny bit less cheerful about everything, because

  you're giving me a migraine.'

  `You always were a gloomy old sod, weren't you? All right

  then, here we go.'

  Three old college chums, plus two seagulls, vanished.

  Lundqvist lowered his field glasses, licked his lips and smiled. He didn't speak, but his lips framed the word Gotcha!

  He was standing in a large, rather mangled gap in the front wall of a fine late seventeenth-century merchant's house facing on to the Prinsengracht - when serious guys take short cuts they don't muck about - and observing the rather awkward progress towards him of three giant, self-propelled windmills. Show-off, he said to himself.

  `You,' he called to an assistant demon, `full power to the suppressors, now.'

  The demon scurried away and pulled a lever. Nothing happened.

  'Excude me,' the demon said in a small, terrified voice, `only I think sud of the wired are mithing frod the machide.'

  Lundqvist stared at him for a moment, as if the demon had just leant forward and extracted all his teeth. Seagulls, he was thinking, oh shit.

  `Try the others,' he yelled. `Move it, quickly.'

  The demons, however, were backing away, muttering. As if by telepathy, they had all suddenly started thinking, Yeah, sure, we're demons, but this is spooky. A few seconds later and they'd gone.

  The windmills continued to advance. They were swinging their sails. Little puffs of superfluous flour drifted out on the wind and scattered like mist.

  You can disconcert Kurt Lundqvist, but you can't frighten

  him. It took him about a third of a second to get his head together, lose his temper, draw his gun and start firing. Bullets whistled through the sails of the windmills, melted and dropped into the canal.

  Never mind, there was still the flame-thrower. A few deft twists on the fuel tap, and a billowing, wind-blown rose of red flame swept across the street and licked the brickwork of the windmills.

  Complete waste of time. Goddamn, the Dutch pioneered fire regulations.

  He could feel the backdraught from the sails now, as the three shadows fell across him. Time to withdraw and regroup. What would Napoleon have done under the circumstances?

  Swish!

  Okay, Napoleon would most probably have curled up in a ball and screamed, and likewise Hannibal and Irwin Rommel. Alexander the Great, however, would have jumped back into a shop doorway, grabbed the first thing that came to hand - in this case, a long wooden pole with a hook on the end, used for raising and lowering shutters - and attacked, by golly. And what was good enough for Alexander was good enough for Kurt Lundqvist.

  He tucked the pole under his arm, lowered his head, and charged.

  A taxi drew up at the intersection of Radhuisstraat and Prinsengracht, and a man got out. He was late for a college reunion.

  `How much?' he demanded, shocked.

  The taxi driver said it again. Muttering darkly about inflation, the passenger paid him and looked down the street.

  Because, like the other Old Wittembergers present that day, he was dead and buried, the theoretical invisibility effect cut

  no ice with him. He therefore saw, in the distance, a man running frantically backwards and forwards, trying to prod three windmills with what looked like a spear.

  `Damn,' muttered Don Quixote de la Mancha. `Buggers have started without me.'

  Okay, thought Lundqvist, as a sail whistled past his ear and cut off a button from his sleeve, that's what Alexander would have done. Any other suggestions?

  He thrust hard with the shutter pole, and had the satisfaction of connecting with a bit of winding mechanism. The pole broke.

  Ulysses S. Grant. A really savvy guy. He'd have dropped the pole and run like buggery.

  Also Belisarius, Cortes and the Duke of Marlborough.

  The edge of a sail whirled past his head as he ran, parting his hair down the middle and making him look like a nineteenth-century curate. As he sprinted past the now useless suppressors his subconscious mind was thinking, About three feet of ordinary insulated cable and I'll have you yet, you bastard. His conscious mind was saying, Help, help, very loudly.

  Lundqvist was a good runner. Usually, of course, he ran after people, not away from them, but the principle is pretty well the same. On the corner of Prinsengracht and Berenstraat he was able to stop, lean heavily against a wall and catch up on his breathing, secure in the knowledge that the windmills were a long way behind.

  He looked up.

  Those windmills, sure. The three animated monsters advancing towards him, sails slicing the air like so much salami, were probably entirely different windmills, or else the same windmills, cheating. Did it really matter? He picked up his feet and ran.

  Not noticing that overhead, two seagulls were floating on a thermal, in their claws two string bags. Simultaneously they let

  go their payloads, said `Quark!' and banked off.

  The bags hit the pavement and burst, scattering bulbs everywhere. Ordinary everyday tulip bulbs, only recently snatched up from a stall in the flower market.

  They started to grow.

  Fortunately, Lundqvist still had his machete with him, and by hacking away for all he was worth,
he was able to clear a path through the thicket before the horrible snapping flowers could reach down and wrap their petals round him. Gasping for air and soaked from head to foot in sticky green sap, he staggered out, only to find himself surrounded by furiously sprouting daffodils. Meanwhile, two seagulls were hovering in the still air, string bags clutched in their talons ...

  The windmills were closing. The tulips were opening a path for them, letting them through ...

  The key thing to do in situations like these is to keep your head, Lundqvist remembered, as a sail-edge grazed his collarbone. He ducked down on his hands and knees, machete between his teeth, and crawled. The sails couldn't reach him down here, neither could the carnivorous flowers. If he met an ant, at least it would be hand-to-mandible fighting, he'd have a chance.

  Behind him, he heard a rumbling sound, like thunder, and the nauseating squeaking of living tissue being crushed. He cast a quick glance over his shoulder, and saw...

  ... A huge yellow wheel, at least twelve feet high at top dead centre, flattening a squishy path straight at him. Not a wheel. A cheese.

  Lundqvist stood up. He'd had enough.

  `You bastard!' he screamed. `You fucking bastard! Can't you take anything seriously?'

  Then he threw himself at the cheese, tripping over tuliproots, dodging the murderous sails, soaked in sap and threequarters blinded with pollen. As the leading edge of the cheese rushed towards him he hurled himself sideways, cannoning

  into a tulip stem, bouncing off the rubbery surface, being hurled like a baseball at the mountainous flank of the cheese. He thrust the machete out in front of him and screamed ...

  And found himself sitting in the gutter, a bent machete in one hand, a large slice of Edam in the other, surrounded by a crowd of bemused onlookers and wearing a baseball cap inscribed with

  I LOVE AMSTERDAM

  Five minutes later, a police car came and picked him up. He was later charged with obstructing the highway, disorderly conduct and fourteen breaches of the street trading regulations.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THERE was, of course, only one course of action open to Lucky George after the battle of Amsterdam: retribution. Immediate, savage and on a sufficient scale to convey the magnitude of his displeasure.

  Not that he minded. Not one little bit.

  As soon as he had thanked his old college chums, therefore, and caught the first available flight to his next port of call, he settled down and worked all the details out in his mind. Then ...

  The first intimation that the members of all the governments of all the nations of the earth had been turned overnight into farmyard animals came from the BBC radio news, with its crack-of-dawn summary of yesterday's proceedings in Parliament. Being a radio broadcast, there was no visual confirmation; and at first the grunts, squeals, clucks, squeaks, miaows and moos were interpreted as the combined effect of atmospheric disturbance, a fault on the line somewhere and the full and free exchange of views in the most highly respected democratic forum in the world. It was only when the breakfast television pictures started to come through that anyone was able to bring himself to put a more logical interpretation on the data.

  Toast-crunching news addicts were greeted with footage of the pleasant green lawn-cum-verge outside the House of Commons, where the House was dividing on the third reading of the Finance Bill. The doors opened, and what can only be described as a flock shambled out, led by an extremely old, indifferent-looking sheepdog in a full wig.

  The flock divided; the goats wandering into one lobby, the sheep into the other. After the tellers had done their work with their customary speed and efficiency, the sheepdog sat up on its hind paws, waggled its tail, and proclaimed that the meeeehs had it.

  Simultaneously, in Washington DC, an old grey mule opened the day's proceedings of the Senate by eating the order papers and kicking the Barker of the House with his offside rear hoof. In the Knesset building the rows of seats were empty, and the elected representatives present wheeled and banked under the ceiling as the hawks tried to catch up with the swifter but less agile doves. This was at about the time when the German parliament adjourned for Swill, oblivious of the fact that across the border in France, the nation's leaders had abandoned a crucial debate on the economy to chase a catnip mouse round the boiler room. The Japanese legislature twice narrowly missed complete annihilation; first when somebody spilt a kettle of boiling water down a crack in the floor, and second when the Peruvian foreign minister arrived in the building for a top-level meeting and nearly swept the whole lot of them up with one lick of his long, sticky tongue. The Belgian government buried the contents of the Exchequer under a tree, curled up in little nests of scraped-together leaves and went to sleep for the winter.

  Perhaps the most startling manifestation of all was in Iraq, where the entire government were changed overnight into human beings.

  `I suppose we ought to, really,' admitted the Marketing Director, wistfully. `Seems a shame, though.'

  `We've got to,' replied the Production Director, stifling a giggle. On the TV screen in front of him were satellite pictures of the emergency debate in the European Parliament, meeting for the first time in that august body's history on the summit of a steep cliff outside Ostend. `I mean,' he went on, `fun's fun, but ...' He broke off and stuffed his tie in his mouth as a cascade of small, scuttling, furry-bodied politicians streamed off the edge of the cliff into the waves below. Further out to sea, the Council of Ministers were leaving a sinking ship.

  `Not,' commented the Finance Director, with more feeling than originality, `for the first time.' He stopped, and forcibly returned his mind to the issue in hand. `Look,' he said, `this has got to stop. Get the tiresome little man on the phone, somebody, and tell him to turn them back this instant.' He hesitated, turned his head back towards the screen, and caught a glimpse of the Parliament's select committee on agriculture scurrying frantically backwards and forwards to avoid a flock of ecstatic gannets. `Well, pretty soon, anyway,' he said, his eyes glued to a close-up of the President of the Council playing hide-and-seek with a cormorant. `By mid-day tomorrow at the very latest.'

  `That's easy enough to say,' grumbled the Marketing Director. `Got to find the blighter first. I don't suppose he's going to be all that easy to find ...'

  A telephone rang at his elbow and he picked it up.

  `Got someone called Van Appin on the line,' he said a moment later, `claims to be George's legal adviser. Anyone want to-'

  The Finance Director grabbed the receiver. `Hello, Pete?' he barked. `What the bloody he-heliotrope does he think he's playing at? Tell him to get this mess sorted out immediately, or he's going to be in real trouble.'

  At his desk, Mr Van Appin smiled. `Excuse me,' he said, `but I thought he was already. I mean, excuse my ignorance, but I thought everlastingly damned was about as in trouble as you could possibly get without actually working in advertising.'

  The Finance Director waved his hand feebly. `You know what I mean, Pete,' he replied. `For pity's sake, this is going too far.' As he spoke, the image on the television screen changed, and he found himself staring at a huge, distended anaconda which had apparently just imposed one-party rule in the small South American state of Necesidad by swallowing the Social Democrats. `All right,' he muttered wearily. `Tell me what he wants and I'll see what I can do.'

  There was a pause, then Van Appin said, `You know what he wants, Norman. He wants to be left alone. Call off your people, leave the kid in peace.'

  The Finance Director growled petulantly. `I already did that, Pete,' he said. `All agents returned to base, no further action. You want me to swear an affidavit or something?'

  `Lundqvist.'

  The Finance Director shuddered slightly. `Not our man,' he said, as casually as he could. `Nothing to do with us. Entirely freelance, you know that. I'll withdraw the reward if you like but that's the best I can-'

  Van Appin shook his head. `Don't act simple, Steve,' he replied irritably. `After yesterday
's little performance, I don't suppose the money's really at the forefront of his mind.'

  `Not my fault. Serves your client right for teasing him. Anyway, nothing we can do about it, so if you'll just-'

  `No.' Van Appin took the phone away from his ear, covered up the earpiece with the palm of his hand, and counted to ten.

  `You still there, Steve?' he asked.

  `Yes, still here.'

  `This,' said Van Appin, `is the deal. You give me your formal undertaking to do everything you can to get Lundqvist off my client's case, we'll let you have your politicians back. And that's our last offer.'

  There was a long silence.

  `And now,' burbled the television set, `we're going over live to Danny Bennett at the United Nations building in New York, where...'

  `Switch that bloody thing off!' shouted the Finance Director. `Hello, Pete? Look, I'm making no promises but we'll do our very best. Now, tell your man to stop mucking about.'

  `And you'll stop Lundqvist?'

  `I'll put my best demons on it, Pete, right away.'

  `You'd better,' Van Appin retorted. `Remember, germs are also animals, of a sort. You want the civilised nations of the world led into the twenty-first century by a bad cold, all you have to do is try and be clever.'

  The line went dead. With a long, chilly sigh the Finance Director straightened his back and turned to his colleagues. `Get me the Captain of Spectral Warriors,' he said.

  `What did you say it was called?' asked Lucky George, looking round at the thronged piazza, the buzzing crowds of cosmopolitan citizens, the emerald blue of the bay and, in the background, the dazzling white masonry of the eighth wonder of the world.

  `Australia,' replied Helen. `Have a crisp.'

  `No, thank you.' Lucky George considered. `Don't think we had it in my day,' he said. `I suppose you're going to tell me it's Progress.'