by Tom Holt
Colin shook his head. ‘She may not have known that,’ he protested. ‘About the waiting-to-be-told rule. She’s only been here five minutes, after all.’
‘No, she’d have been told,’ Connie insisted. ‘Julie or Christine would’ve given her the standard dos-and-dont’s lecture as soon as she’d taken her coat off.’ She sighed. ‘Dunno why I’m sitting here theorising without data. Let’s go down to the front office and ask her, and then we’ll know.’
‘Fine,’ Colin said; then, immediately, ‘No.’
‘No?’
He nodded. ‘It’d be, sort of, awkward. You see,’ he went on, ‘when I came in here and saw her on the front desk, I asked her to go with me to Vanuatu.’
Connie’s eyebrows shot up like teal off a pond. ‘Vanuatu?’
‘Or somewhere,’ Colin said. ‘What I mean is, her and me go away from here for ever and start a new life. She said she’d think about it while I was in seeing Cassie about the stupid bloody contract. The contract,’ he repeated. ‘Oh shit, what’m I going to do about that}’
‘Later,’ Connie said firmly. ‘One world-shattering nightmare at a time, please, or I’ll just get muddled.’ She frowned, collecting her thoughts. ‘Right, I can see why you don’t want to talk to her right now, so you stay here and I’ll do it. Or better still, you can go and find Cassie and tell her you didn’t mean it, before she slashes her wrists in the ladies’ bog. You thoughtless, insensitive git,’ she added. ‘How could you possibly have said that with that poor girl sitting right there?’
‘But’ Colin protested, then decided not to bother. ‘I’ll do that,’ he said. ‘Where’s she likely to be?’
‘Don’t know, but it won’t be hard to locate her. Just listen out for the sound of heartbroken weeping.’
Connie left him and trotted down the stairs, glancing at her watch as she went. It was getting late, and the last thing she needed was to get left behind in the building at half-five when the doors were locked and the goblins came out to play. She marched up to the reception desk and called out, ‘Hello?’
The new girl, whom she’d barely registered earlier, popped out from the back office. ‘You’re Fam Williams,’ Connie said.
‘That’s right. Sorry, I’ve only just started here, so I don’t actually’
‘Connie Schwartz-Alberich,’ Connie replied briskly. ‘Mining and mineral rights. Got a minute?’
‘Sure.’
‘Splendid.’ Connie perched on the edge of the desk. It felt odd, she realised, seeing a normal-looking person on reception at 70 St Mary Axe. She was, of course, perfectly accustomed to seeing a new and invariably perfect face behind the desk every morning; it didn’t bother her in the least, since she knew perfectly well that all those red-lipped, cornflower-eyed supermodels were either Rosie Tanner or Rosie’s cousin Vee. Someone normal in that context, by contrast, stood out like a Klingon in Debenhams. ‘Right,’ she went on. ‘A bit earlier, you took up a tray of tea and bickies to Cassie Clay’s office, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Who asked you to do that?’
One of those awkward moments. The girl Fam, Connie thought, funny name, wonder what it’s short for? - was looking at her as though it was a trick question. ‘Sorry?’ she said.
‘Someone rang down, or came and saw you,’ Connie said, ‘and asked you to take some tea into Cassie’s office. I need to know who it was. Okay?’
A frown, then a shrug. Connie could feel her patience running out. ‘Well?’ she snapped.
‘Well,’ Fam said, after another pause. ‘You know perfectly well. It was you.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Benny Shumway lived in a small house - two down, two even further down - a quarter of a mile under Fulham Broadway. He’d moved there when his fifth marriage self-destructed in a blaze of emotional fireworks; he’d needed somewhere to move out to in a hurry, and it so happened that a distant cousin of his had the place on his hands and was looking for a short-term tenant. Ten years later Benny was still there, having bought the freehold from his cousin. It suited him; he liked traditional dwarf-built houses, laboriously chipped out of the living rock with hand tools, and it was conveniently situated, small enough to be no bother to maintain, and separated from its nearest neighbour by five million tons of solid sandstone. He only went there to eat, sleep and iron shirts, so its bare functionality suited him perfectly. A bachelor pad, a pied-sous-terre. Just the ticket.
Except, of course, on dustbin day. There were some dwarves, avant-garde young tearaways with no respect for tradition, who’d installed lifts to take them to and from the surface, but Benny wasn’t one of them. His link with the open air was a spiral stone staircase, as tightly coiled as a spring, each step worn glassy smooth and, of course, no lights and no handrail. It deterred
unwanted visitors, for one thing; it looked right. it was good exercise and you weren’t at the mercy of electricity. But the fact had to be met squarely and head-on - it was a real bummer hauling the dustbin bags up it once a week.
Benny paused halfway up and caught his breath. He knew perfectly well what the black sack over his shoulder contained: styrofoam pizza trays, cardboard toilet-roll tubes, empty beer cans, a few discarded plastic carriers. Nothing heavy. He sighed, and shifted the sack across to his other shoulder. Maybe just a small lift, exclusively for dustbin days. Nobody would ever know.
Nobody but me, he thought bitterly, and continued to climb.
To take his mind off his aching neck, Benny considered the previous day’s events. There had been a lot of them. The door being open, for one. Somebody must’ve opened it; somebody on this side of the Line. Motive? That set him thinking about the thin-faced girl and what precisely she’d seen earlier in the corridor. Apparently.
At the top of the stairs, he opened the door, heaved the bag out onto the pavement and began the slow descent. The final act of yesterday’s comedy of bewilderments, he remembered, had been his frantic, futile, high-speed tour of the building in search of the two dead people that the thin-faced girl had claimed to have seen. He’d wasted most of the afternoon on it, and eventually he’d ended up in the closed-file store, a place he’d never liked much. No dead people in there, and he’d finally come to the conclusion that Thin-face had either been hallucinating or else she’d told him a deliberate porky just to be mischievous. As he’d been about to leave he’d noticed that someone had left the card-index drawer open, and had been rummaging about like a terrier among the letters F and H. That had in turn prompted him to waste another hour doing some research of his own, the results of which had been mildly interesting. In fact, it was probably a clue, possibly even The Answer, but that wasn’t really any help if he couldn’t understand it.
Back down the stairs, to finish his lukewarm tea. put on his tie and his overcoat; the back up the stairs again to the bus stop.
All the way from Fulham to the City, Benny worried away at the problem, or at least the parts of it he could get at. It was a bit like doing one of those huge, annoying jigsaws, where the top half of the picture is nothing but uniform blue sky. He’d found two identical sky-blue corners, but that (he was forced to concede) was about as far as he’d managed to get. It was infuriating and humiliating, and he devoutly wished that he’d never got involved in the first place. On the other hand, all the evidence seemed to suggest that Connie’s job was on the line, so quietly forgetting all about it wasn’t an option.
Thanks to roadworks and other examples of divine spite, Benny arrived on the office doorstep at seven minutes past nine. He hated being late, but at least there didn’t seem to be anyone on reception to notice. He barged through the front office and sprinted up the stairs to his office.
He’d read once that the wicked multinational capitalist thugs were despoiling the Amazon rainforest at a rate of twenty-five acres a minute. Bad, obviously; but not his immediate concern. He’d wondered, however, what on earth they actually did with all those trees; and now, it seemed, he had the a
nswer. They mashed them into wood pulp, rolled them out into paper, printed stupid annoying forms on them and piled them up on his desk the moment his back was turned. Benny sighed, sat down behind his desk and realised that, thanks to the magnitude of the pile, he could no longer see the door he’d just come in through. Wonderful.
On top of the pile was a memo from Dennis Tanner - handwritten rather than typed, which was probably significant, only Benny couldn’t be bothered to work out why. The auditors, it seemed, were still on the premises; this time, they’d called for seventeen closed files, a printout of dollar/yen exchange rates for 1972 to 2004 inclusive, the Greater London phone directory, a quart of tequila and a compass. Benny read it through twice, shrugged and put it somewhere where he’d be sure to forget about it.
All dwarves are occasionally plagued by self-doubt, and Benny was no exception. One thing he never doubted, however, was his own competence as the firm’s cashier. Other people might sometimes drown in the paper ocean; he had the knack of skipping light-footed across its meniscus like a crane-fly. For once, however, he found the requisitions, pink paying-in and paying-out chits, yellow designated-deposit chits, blue petty-cash chits, green client-account chits, reconciliation sheets, telegraphic-transfer authorisations and orange expense-claim dockets hard work. He was having trouble with the numbers. Balances didn’t. Twice, he even needed to use a calculator. Something, he felt sure, wasn’t quite right. It was almost as though the immutable laws of mathematics had been sat on by someone heavy, and bent out of shape. Impossible, of course, because mathematics is simply a reflection of the supreme order of things, which by definition
Unless
Benny swore under his breath, and turned in his swivel chair to look at the connecting door: the one that had been open yesterday when it shouldn’t have been. That was something else that couldn’t happen, but had. Two impossibilities; he thought about that and ran through the column of figures he’d just been adding up. He added them up again, then double-checked with the calculator, which agreed with him: 67,219. But that couldn’t be the right answer, because it had to come out the same as the total of the opposite column in the ledger - that’s the whole point of the double-entry system, around which the whole universe revolves - and he’d treble-checked that, and it refused to be anything other than 67,217.
I’m not wrong, Benny told himself. Therefore, the universe must be.
Indeed.
He leaned back in his chair and rested his chin on the tips of his steepled fingers, like an elegant saint praying in an illuminated manuscript. The universe is on the fritz; there are tiny specks of shit in the air-filter of space-time, and the gaskets of eternity are leaking entropy all over the place. Fair enough; he’d been warned. He’d been given fair notice that a serious case of time-crossed true love had been unresolved for a dangerously long time; in which case, sums not coming out right would pretty soon be the least of his problems. Pretty soon, gravity would start cutting out, light would be losing races with the second-class mail and the only watch you’d be able to rely on for the right time would be a genuine Dali. Unless, of course, someone - a genuine hero, for example - got up off his bum and did something about it.
Sod, Benny thought. There goes my lunch hour.
Someone knocked, and his door opened. Instinctively he tensed, but it was only Connie Schwartz-Alberich. He started to greet her but she cut him off in mid-syllable.
‘Benny,’ she said. ‘Found you at last. Where the hell have you been?’
He knew her well enough to realise that her question hadn’t been designed to be answered. ‘Now what?’ he said.
Connie sat down, and promptly vanished behind the mountain of paperwork. Benny sighed, and brushed the whole lot off the desk onto the floor, where a stray Filing Charm fortuitously snapped it up and sorted it into neat piles. ‘It’s got worse,’ she said.
No need to ask what It was. ‘Define worse.’
So Connie told him: about Cassie’s visit from the dead time-crossed lovers, the dosing of the tea with JWW philtre, Cassie and Colin murmuring sweet nothings at each other. When she’d finished, Benny frowned at her and said, ‘So it was you, then.’
‘Me? Me what?’
‘Set off the fire alarm. Maybe nobody told you, Con, but dwarves have sensitive hearing; comes from having evolved in dark places, I guess. Honestly, I nearly swallowed my tongue.’
Connie asked him to do something with the fire alarm that was imaginative but impossible outside a zero-gravity environment. ‘Don’t you get it?’ she went on. ‘Someone dosed that poor girl and that young clown Hollingshead with the love philtre, which means -‘
‘Which means,’ Benny interrupted, ‘that they reckoned that getting those two to fall in love would solve the anomaly and put the fabric of space-time back together again. But it didn’t work. In fact, if anything, it’s made it worse.’
Connie looked up sharply. ‘What makes you say that?’
Benny grinned. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Here, take a look at this. Or rather’ He scrabbled at the remaining papers on his desk, then jumped up and nosed through the piles on the floor. ‘Here you go,’ he said. ‘Look at that and tell me what you make of it.’
Connie stared at the piece of paper he’d given her. ‘It’s just a load of numbers,’ she said. ‘Benny, you know I’m no good at sums.’
‘Liar. All right,’ he relented, ‘I’ll give you a clue. It’s a balance sheet. The numbers on the left are supposed to add up to the same as the numbers on the right. But they don’t.’
‘All right,’ Connie said warily. ‘So?’
‘So what does that tell you?’
Connie frowned. ‘Some cheapskate’s been outsourcing their bookkeeping to the Andaman Islands?’
‘I,’ Benny said gravely, ‘compiled that balance sheet. Therefore, I know for a stone-cold dead absolute unalterable certainty that the numbers should add up. They don’t. Therefore,’ he went on before Connie could say anything, ‘it inevitably follows that the laws of mathematics aren’t working properly.’
The tip of Connie’s nose twitched. ‘The anomaly,’ she said.
‘Exactly. And,’ Benny went on, ‘I think I’ve got an idea why. That contract you were telling me about.’
‘The Hollingshead boy?’
‘That’s right. When he dies, his soul goes to Hell, right?’
Connie nodded. ‘Which is a bit unfair,’ she added. ‘I mean, yes, he’s neither use nor ornament, but’
‘And if your soul goes to Hell, you can’t reincarnate.’
‘Sure,’ Connie agreed. ‘But so what? Doesn’t have to, if the anomaly can be put right. True love till death is what’s needed. After death, they can drag him down to the brimstone pit and set him to lighting Bill Clinton’s cigars for all eternity and it won’t make a bit of difference.’
‘Possibly,’ Benny replied, frowning. ‘But I’ve got a theory about that.’ His frown deepened. ‘Tell you later,’ he said. ‘First things first. We’d better have a word with young Cassie, don’t you think?’
Connie shrugged. ‘If you think it’s important,’ she said. ‘It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do, apart from finishing off some piece-of-shit stuff for Cas Suslowicz.’
Benny stood up. ‘It’s important,’ he said. ‘They pay me to keep the books straight, and I can’t do that if the laws of mathematics are up a tree. Let’s go and find Cassie.’
They found her in her office. She was sitting in her chair with a typescript in front of her: the Hollingshead contract, with big teardrop-shaped splodges all over it.
‘Oh, for crying out loud,’ Connie said. ‘No pun intended,’ she added, as she noticed the contract. ‘Have you been sitting there moping all morning?’
‘Yes,’ Cassie said. ‘And I know,’ she added, with a faint trace of her old self, ‘it’s pathetic and stupid, and also it’s not me. But’
‘Quite,’ Connie said. ‘Look, I’ve brought Benny up to speed, and he seems
to think’
‘Listen, will you?’ Cassie snapped. ‘Yesterday, when we were talking, I quarrelled with Colin and went running off, and then it was going-home time so I tried phoning him at home and he wasn’t there.’
Benny shrugged. ‘So?’
‘So I phoned again. All evening, and then first thing this morning. I kept getting his mother,’ Cassie added, with a faint shudder, ‘and she kept asking who I was, it was really embarrassing. Anyway, the point is, he didn’t go home last night and they don’t know where he is. And the representative from the Very Bad People’s been ringing too, apparently, which is very bad, because if Colin misses so many days at work without a doctor’s note or a good excuse they can forfeit the contract. I’m orried about him, Connie. After you left him yesterday, did he say where he was going?’
Connie scowled. ‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘I told him to go and find
you.’
Two and a half seconds of dead silence.
‘I see,’ Cassie said quietly. ‘You sent an outsider to go searching the building on his own, just before locking-up time, at which point the goblins are unleashed and let out to play—
For a further second and a quarter, Connie was uncharacteristically silent. ‘I’m sure nothing’s happened to him, Cassie, she said. ‘I mean, the goblins can be a bit rough-and-tumble sometimes, but they don’t actually eat people-‘ She hesitated. Not recently,’ she added. ‘It must be, what, seven years since the
last’
‘Five,’Benny muttered.
‘And anyway,’ Connie struggled on, ‘if that’d happened there’d have been bones and stuff, we’d have heard about it by now, you know what gossip’s like in this place. Benny,’ she added savagely, ‘you really are a complete bastard, scaring the poor girl like that.’