`Ruffles,' boomed a voice high up in infinity. `You goddamn crazy cat, what d'you think you're playing at? Gitoutavit!'
Ruffles froze in mid-swipe, horribly self-conscious, as if he'd been discovered at an all-night catnip party without his collar on. He tried to explain, but his vocal chords jammed and all that came out was, `Mew.'
`You dumb bastard,' the boom went on, `you've knocked over your milk. Here, it's back in your basket for you.'
A hand like the Hand of God scooped up the cat and vanished with it. The three spectral warriors crawled into the gap between the bottom of the fridge and the floor and lay there, shattered. The light went out.
`Okay,' said the Captain, five minutes or so later. `I thought we'd had it there, lads, didn't you? Narrow scrape, I thought. Still, you've got to laugh, haven't you, or where would we all-?F
'That wath him, wathn't it?'
`Maybe,' replied the Captain. `I'm not committing myself till we get a closer look, but provisionally. ..'
`You want uth to arretht him.'
`There may be some unforeseen technical glitches, but...'
'Thorgetit. I'm going home. Now.'
With which, Number Three drew himself up to his full height and walked away. Unfortunately, he went in the wrong direction.
He didn't realise this until he bumped into something,
which happened to be the back of the electric plug.
A word of explanation. Lundqvist's flat was last rewired many years ago, and in places the wiring is a bit dicky. Thus, when Number Three bumped into the back of the plug, he came into contact with four millimetres of uninsulated, live, wire.
Zappo.
The immediately perceptible effect was the fridge falling over on its side, crushing the kitchen table. It did this because a six-foot-four man had suddenly materialised underneath it.
`There,' said the Captain, slightly unnerved but triumphant. `Told you we'd cope and we did. All we had to do was bodge up a substitute transformer, and...'
The rest of his remarks were lost as he instantaneously went from twenty-five millimetres to six foot seven, landing up lying heavily across the remains of the pedal bin. Number Two joined them a moment later and came to rest on top of the cooker.
`Ruffles, you scumbag, what the fuck do you think you're ...?' The light flicked on, and the three spectral warriors turned to see Lundqvist, in a tartan wool dressing gown and slippers, standing in the doorway.
The Captain reacted well. The revolver was out of his holster and in his hand before Lundqvist could move.
`Put 'em up and keep 'em where I can see 'em. That's the way. Right, Kurt Lundqvist, I have here a warrant for your arrest, you are not obliged-'
'thkip..
`Not now.'
'Yeth, but I've got the warrant, it'th here in my ... Oh, no, that'th not the warrant, that'th the tranththorm-'
`Don't touch...'
Lundqvist stood for a moment, puzzled. One moment there had been three spectral warriors draped all over his kitchen. The next moment, nothing. The cat, meanwhile, was staring
reproachfully at him from over the rim of its basket with an I-told-you-but-you-wouldn't-listen expression on its face. It was as bad as being married.
Then the penny dropped.
`Okay, Ruffles,' he said, shutting the door firmly. `This is your show now. Kill.'
It took the spectral warriors three days to escape, but in the end they made it. Their story is one of the most moving documents of courage, endurance and sheer dogged refusal to lie down and die since the escape from Colditz.
The movie rights are, incidentally, still available.
It was the Captain's idea to try and make it to the rubbish bin. Rubbish, he argued, gets chucked out sooner or later, and in the meantime there were a thousand and one places in a black plastic sack full of decaying kitchen refuse where they could hide.
The only problem, of course, was that the rubbish bin was, to all intents and purposes, a hundred and fifty stories high. King Kong might just have climbed it, with oxygen, on a good day.
Despair, gangrene of the soul, was just about to set in when Number Two noticed the onion. With a voice quivering with emotion, he explained his plan. They listened. It was a long shot, they decided, but there wasn't really any choice.
With Ruffles wandering around like a resentful tyrannosaurus, making a move from under the cooker to the vegetable rack in daylight was out of the question. As soon as night fell, however, they scrambled out, hoisted themselves up into the rack and set to work hacking a secure chamber in the side of the mouldy onion. It took them a little over eight hours, working in shifts, with nothing but their combat knives and belt-buckles to dig with. Once it was done, all they could do was climb in and wait for the onion to be noticed and thrown away.
Two days deep inside an onion is a long, long time.
Even then, it was touch and go. The hunt was still on, and despite the masking smell of the onion, Ruffles paused in his relentless prowl round the kitchen and sniffed horribly every time he passed the vegetable rack. On the evening of the second day, Lundqvist came home at a quarter to one in the morning and started to make himself a Spanish omelette. He had picked up their onion and raised the knife before he noticed anything wrong with it; and he'd stood staring at their entrance tunnel for a full two seconds before throwing the onion in the bin and selecting another one. For years afterwards, the Captain was wont to swear blind that Lundqvist must have noticed something. He could only conclude that the bounty-hunter's mind was elsewhere.
Which, in fact, it was. At that precise moment, he'd forgotten all about the spectral warriors and everything else, and was pottering around the kitchen in a stunned daze.
So would you if, returning from a hard day's work, you found lying on the mat a demand from the Revenue for over five hundred years' back taxes.
THERE are few experiences quite as nerve-frayingly horrible as being investigated by the Revenue. Hell (especially now that the new management team have taken over) is mild by comparison. For all his faults, the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman, or so Shakespeare would have us believe. The Inspector of Taxes, on the other hand, is an unmitigated bastard.
A week after receiving the assessment, Lundqvist was dragged out of his well-earned sleep at three in the morning by five carloads of weazel-faced young men and women in grey suits, who walked straight past him as if he wasn't there and impounded his files, records, books and bank statements. When he tried to scare them off with a 20" Remington Wingmaster they impounded that too, murmuring something about discrepancies in his claims for writing-down allowance on plant and machinery. Then they gave him a receipt and left.
When they'd gone he sat down and pulled himself together. As soon as he'd managed to overcome the feeling of having all his teeth simultaneously extracted by an army of hamsters, he got on the phone to the Duty Officer at Pandaemonium and demanded to know what they were going to do about it.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
`Pardon me?' said the Duty Officer.
`Don't give me none of that crap,' Lundqvist roared. `Get these guys off my back. Do you realise they've taken all my records back to 1456?
'I'm terribly sorry,' the Duty Officer replied, `but it's completely out of our hands. They're an entirely separate agency, you see. There's absolutely no way we can interfere with ...'
Lundqvist managed to keep his temper remarkably well. Apart from formally requesting that Hell use its good offices to have the investigation suspended and formally undertaking to pull the Duty Officer's kidneys out through his nose if his papers weren't returned by five past nine the next day, he accepted the situation with a good grace and hung up. Then he burst into tears.
Business, he decided next morning, as usual. The programme for the day was to visit the Delphic Oracle and sweat out of her details of where Faust was hiding. To do this, he needed to get to the airport. Since he was short of ready cash for taxi-fares, he popped down to the cas
h dispenser on the corner, which took his card, informed him that his account had been frozen, and referred him to Head Office.
Ten minutes with a Sykes-Fairburn fighting-knife and the piggy-bank he kept the gas money in produced enough loose change to get him as far as the airport, where he waved his credit card at the check-in girl and demanded a seat on the first flight to Athens. The girl smiled politely and asked him to wait just a moment while she ran the routine checks on his card ...
Fine, he thought, as he slouched disconsolate and ticketless away from the desk. I can't buy a ticket, I'll have to hijack a plane. No worries.
He was strolling up and down the observation area, casting his eye over the various airliners and deciding which one he liked the look of, when a discreet cough at his elbow made him turn.
`Excuse me, sir,' said a weazel-faced man in a grey suit, `but if you were thinking of leaving the country, I'm afraid that's out of the question. Not until the investigation is completed, sir. We'll get a court order if necessary.'
Under normal circumstances, the next that anyone would have seen of the young man would have been his head, separated from his body, on some railings somewhere. So demoralising, however, is the cumulative effect of having the taxman after you that Lundqvist simply whimpered and walked away in the opposite direction. He found he had just enough change left for the bus-fare home.
Okay, so he couldn't leave the country. Nothing to stop him leaving the century. He phoned his usual firm of timetravel agents and asked for a reservation for the fifth century BC, first-class, non-smoking, not too near the engine.
`I'm terribly sorry, Mr Lundqvist, but we've had instructions. No credit till further notice.'
`But I've got an account,' Lundqvist screamed. 'Dammit, I've been travelling with you since five hundred years before you first set up in business. I've got a goddamn gold card. Doesn't loyalty count for anything?'
`I'm afraid your account has been suspended, sir. Court order. Injunction. Terribly sorry, but we can only help you if you can make it cash in advance.'
`Tell you what,' Lundqvist was physically shaking with rage by this point, hardly able to hold on to the receiver. `Take me back to last Thursday and I'll pay you anything you like. My credit rating'll be fine then, I give you my word. Only for Chrissakes get me out of here.'
`Sorry, sir, but I've got my orders. If you'd care to come round to our offices with the money, we'd be only too pleased ...'
He slammed down the phone and snarled impotently. Then he pulled open his desk drawer, slipped something under his shoulder and walked out.
He couldn't withdraw anything from the bank, huh? We'll soon see about that.
`Stick 'em up,' he hissed across the counter. `This is a fortyfive automatic and I don't care if I use it. Fives and tens, and take it real easy.'
`Certainly, sir,' replied the cool and efficient girl behind the till. `Please bear with me a moment while I get your money for you.' She leant back and called to someone behind the scenes. `Yvonne, could you bring me some more fives, please? Gentleman robbing the bank.' An unseen hand passed her a wad of currency notes, which she dropped into the little perspex shuttle thing and passed over. `Thank you for calling,' she said. `While you're here, can I perhaps interest you in our new range of personal equity plans, specially tailored to meet your individual investment requirements and help you plan for a secure and prosperous future?'
Lundqvist had got through the door and had his hand on the door-handle of the getaway car when a discreet cough at his elbow made him freeze in his tracks.
`Excuse me, sir,' said a weazel-faced man in a grey suit, `but I trust you're going to declare all that? Let me see.' He took the money from Lundqvist's unresisting fingers, counted it and handed it back. `I make that fifty thousand dollars which, seeing as how it's the profits of a crime, malfeasance or illegal enterprise, is taxable at your highest applicable rates under Schedule Nine Case Six. Plus, of course, grossing up to allow for notional basic rate tax deducted at source, leaves you with ..."Me young man produced a calculator from thin air, pecked at it with a moist fingertip and nodded sagely. `I make that a deficit of two hundred and sixty-three dollars, sir. If you'd just sign here, please.'
Dazed, Lundqvist signed the receipt, allowed himself to be relieved of the money, and fell limply into his car, where he sat for about twenty seconds until the police arrived and he had to drive like buggery to shake them off. By the time he'd done
that, he'd used up all his remaining petrol and had precisely one dollar and two cents to his name. He dumped the car and walked home.
`That's all very well,' said Lucky George, `but I'm buggered if I'm staying here. I mean, look at it.'
He waved his arm in an histrionic gesture and scowled.
`I think it's very nice,' said Helen. `A bit suburban, maybe, but-'
`Suburban!' George turned up the malignity in his scowl. `For pity's sake, woman, the only difference between this and where I've just come from is you don't have to die to get a visa.' He threw himself into a chair and grabbed a can of beer out of the coolbag. Helen gave him a disapproving look.
`You're exaggerating a little, I think,' she said coolly. `No little men with pitchforks, for a start. No roaring flames. No-'
`You're wrong there,' George interrupted. `Except here they shove bits of raw meat in front of them and call it a barbie. When I was a boy in Nurnberg we had a thing, I think it was called an oven. Wonder if the patent's expired, because you could make an absolute fortune...'
`George.' In this light, George thought, with her hair curling like that in the evening breeze and exactly that tone of voice, she's just like my mother. And no, I will not eat up my nice parsnips. `It's only temporary,' she went on. `Until-'
`Temporary.' George grinned. `I don't think so, love. This is one case where you can't simply outlive the bastards. You know what that pompous little toad of a Finance Director told me the other day? You can hide but you can't run. He was right. And,' he added, draining the last of the beer and crumpling the can in his fist, `there's no percentage in hiding, none whatsoever. It's exactly the same porridge, only with a slightly different tin.'
Helen sighed. `That's just culture shock, George,' she said.
`We don't have to stay in Sydney, you know. It's a huge country. There's bits of it not even properly explored yet. We could go anywhere.'
`Marvellous.' George rubbed his eyes wearily. `We can go and live in the middle of the bloody desert. Hell may not be all fun and games, but -at least they've got hot and cold running water.' He considered for a moment. `Hot water, anyway. All the hot water you can use, free. Bit like an Aga.'
`Give it a try.'
`What, go straight, you mean?'
Helen nodded enthusiastically. `That's right,' she said. `We could start a sheep farm or something. It'd be fun, George, really it would. No more magic and being chased about, just you and me and-'
`A sheep farm.'
Helen frowned. `Yes,' she said. `For my sake, George, please.'
`You're serious?'
`Yes.'
He shrugged. `I've heard some pretty daffy suggestions in my time,' he said, `but this has got to be one of the daffiest. You're really saying we should set up a-'
`Yes!
'Okay, then.' He stood up, closed his eyes for a moment, and then smiled. Positively beamed.
When he opened his eyes again, they were standing in the middle of a huge, fenceless, featureless wasteland; a wasteland covered in white, seething bodies. From the air it would have looked just like a big, manky, sheepskin rug.
`You got it,' said George. `Now, what precisely do you do with the little buggers to make them grow?'
It was three months later.
Australia is an old country; very old. At a time when Paris was a soggy fen and Rome herself little more than a select new
development of starter homes for Sabine commuters, the sunbleached immensity of the Outback was already cross-hatched with a hundred tho
usand intricate songlines, scored on the folk memory and linking the Dreamtime to the nebulous future as directly and reliably as fibre-optic cable.
Stare at this brain-curdling immensity long enough and your eyes will play tricks on you. You'll start to imagine that, just at the destruction-test limit of vision, you can make out a tiny black dot, moving as slowly as an hourly-paid glacier, dawdling across the infinite. You might even take it for a human being.
Which it is. This is Tjakamarra, humming and mouthing his way along the line with the precision of a wire-guided missile and the sense of urgency of a holiday postcard. Around him the Ancestors, perceptible to all the senses except five, crowded in a happy, shuffling mass, passing him on from hand to hand like a parcel.
The song takes him across the flank of a long, low escarpment and to the crest of a ridge overlooking a few thousand acres of dead ground ...
`Stone the flaming crows,' said Tjakamarra under his breath.
In front of him was ... Well, now. Yes.
A man on a quad-bike roared up out of the shadow of the crest and stopped, leaning on his handlebars.
`Can I help you?' he said. Tjakamarra stared at him.
`Sorry, mate,' he replied. `I think we got a crossed line.'
The man with the bike raised an eyebrow. `Really?' he said.
`Too bloody right,' Tjakamarra answered. `How long's this lot been here?'
The man grinned. `Not long,' he said. `Oh, that reminds me. Is your name ...' He dug a scrap of paper out of his pocket and consulted it.'... Tjakamarra?'
Tjakamarra nodded.
`Carpet Snake clan?'
`Yeah. How did you know ...?'
Lucky George nodded. `Message for you from the Ancestors. It says, "Temporary interference with reception, please do not adjust your reception, we apologise for any inconvenience, C sharp minor, F natural, A sharp with a dot, rest, G natural." That make any sense to you?'
Faust Amongst Equals Tom Holt Page 10