City of Death

by Douglas Adams

  Really? Romana’s sudden fascination with the real estate possibilities of the Château rather disappointed the Doctor. It was one thing to get locked up. It was quite another to start redecorating.

  ‘I think there’s a room bricked up beyond it,’ she announced excitedly.

  ‘Is that important?’ Duggan sounded thoroughly bored.

  That made up the Doctor’s mind. ‘There’s only one way to find out isn’t there? Let’s go have a gander.’

  8

  UNIQUE PLURALS

  The Louvre at night is a remarkable place with a magic all of its own. If you can ignore the patrolling security guards, the gentle buzzing of the alarm systems, and the distant roar of truly dreadful plumbing, if you can ignore all that, then it’s a place where the faces of generations stare at each other. The Venus de Milo flirts with an Egyptian scribe, and shipwrecked sailors call for help from the Emperor Napoleon. It is a firmly egalitarian court, presided over by a woman who wasn’t even French. That’s probably why she’s smiling.

  The Count walked up to the case which had been erected around the Mona Lisa. ‘So, there is the problem.’

  There had been many attempts to steal the Mona Lisa. The Count was aware of several, some of which he had had a hand in preventing. The least successful schemes had been foolishly elaborate, and some of the most successful had been carried out by fools, such as when an Italian handyman simply walked out of the Louvre with the Mona Lisa hidden under his coat.

  The Count had not been unduly worried by such attempts. After all, a little notoriety had vastly increased the painting’s value. However, the surprisingly small, sweet portrait also had become the centre of an entire industry aimed at thwarting theft, acid attack and over-affectionate tourists. The Mona Lisa was protected by the strongest security systems in any art gallery on Earth. There was, however, a way around everything.

  ‘The painting is encased within a box constructed of steel and plate glass. But that’—the Count waved at it—‘is merely a physical barrier to protect the painting from attack.’

  He nodded. Hermann’s cat burglars crept forward, holding suction pads.

  The Count stayed them with a tut. ‘No. First, we use an ultrasonic knife to disintegrate the alarm circuits.’

  Hermann produced a device, not unlike a large fat Montblanc pen. Indeed, the Doctor would have stared at the ultrasonic knife with surprise and admiration. Hermann swept it with the slow, steady hand of a surgeon, going around the borders of the case. As the machine’s whine crept up, the cat burglars eased the suction cups gently, so gently onto the glass. Too early and they would trigger the alarms. Too late and the glass would fall and shatter.

  An alarm dinged. Just once. No one breathed. Hermann stopped, holding the sonic knife perfectly still. The alarm’s single chime faded away, showing no signs of turning into a trill. Hermann resumed cutting.

  The Countess checked her watch. Perfectly according to plan.

  With the most delicate of steps, the cat burglars lifted the plate glass out of the way like a mime act.

  The painting sat there, exposed and yet still smiling placidly. Bring it on, she seemed to say. If she’d had eyebrows, she would have raised them. One of the burglars couldn’t resist reaching out to touch her. The Count swept him aside. ‘Wait! Now we come to the second, and far more interesting line of defence. The laser beams.’

  The Count clicked his fingers and a criss-cross grille of red light appeared over the painting.

  ‘Interrupt these beams,’ the Count’s lecture continued, ‘and every alarm in France will go off instantly.’ A slight exaggeration. But let them feel afraid. ‘To get through these beams we must change the refractive index of the very air itself.’

  He nodded to Hermann. Hermann who was always prepared. The butler positioned two small spheres on extendible tripods. He placed them in front of the painting and switched them on. The air seemed to ripple, and the light beams bent and sagged, peeling away from the wall and onto the globes, as though drawn by magnets. There was now a large gap between them.

  One of the cat burglars went to lift out the painting, but the Countess was there already, her breath audibly excited. She stepped in with the grace of a trained dancer, leaning into the case, plucking the Mona Lisa delicately off the wall, lifting it from the single, normal nail which held it there, and carrying it, gently, thrillingly, over to her husband.

  ‘Excellent,’ smiled the Count.

  As she handed the painting to him, the Mona Lisa vanished. Along with the Louvre.

  Blinking, they found themselves all back in the ballroom. The Count bent over the cube on the card table, and deactivated it. Its metal sides stopped glowing and became dull. The Count straightened up, looking around with a pleased smile.

  The others seemed stunned. The holographic projection had been more real than any of them had been expecting. For a moment, the Countess had felt the texture of the Mona Lisa under her fingertips, the surface coarse as sandpaper. She could have picked at a priceless dab of paintwork with her fingernail. Now nothing. Except Carlos, who was as placid as if he’d just treated them to an illustrated lecture on butterflies.

  Smoothly he plucked the bracelet from the top of the box and handed it to the Countess.

  ‘A useful little device, I think you’ll agree,’ he said. ‘Wear it always.’

  The Countess slipped the bracelet back on, feeling its familiar tingle as it closed around her wrist. ‘My dear,’ she breathed, ‘you must be a genius.’

  Her husband shrugged at the compliment. Fair enough. ‘Shall we say I come from a family of geniuses?’

  He bent forward to kiss her on the lips. She craned her neck up, excited.

  Then, at the last moment, the Count seemed to remember Hermann and his two thieves standing watching them. He turned to them, clapping his hands. ‘Tonight! We have had enough of rehearsals. Tonight, the real thing!’

  Then he turned back to his wife. With delicate formality, he bowed forward to kiss her hand, his lips brushing just a little against the bracelet.

  * * *

  Romana sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by an impressive pick ’n’ mix of acids, spatulas, reagents and scientific etcetera, all collected from Kerensky’s laboratory. Using her straw boater as a makeshift mask, she was pouring a noxious solution down a funnel into a small hole in the wall. The mortar was fizzing and smoking.

  The Doctor surveyed the lethal cloud spilling from the wall with alarm, yanking his scarf out of the way. ‘Your geometry is remarkable, yes. But your chemistry leaves something to be desired.’

  The smoke began to clear. A disappointingly precise hole had appeared in the masonry and the already filthy air of the storeroom now smelt of fish oil and vinegar, reminding the Doctor of a chip shop on the Old Kent Road.

  He picked up the disreputable lamp and held it up to the crack, trying to see into the room beyond. Nothing except that intangible feeling of cold, ancient air seeping slowly out.

  Romana tapped one of the stones. It shifted as little as a wonky milk tooth. But still, it shifted.

  ‘This brickwork is very old,’ she remarked.

  ‘Four or five hundred years,’ mused the Doctor.

  Duggan didn’t like it. Not one bit. There was something about that hole. There was something about that wall. Duggan liked his walls to be solid. He liked certainties. He liked hitting bad people. That was how you knew who the good people were.

  Upstairs, some bad people were going to steal a nice thing and ruin his reasonable career and reliable pension. Yet here he was, in a cellar in a weird cave. Next door was a man who played with chickens. And here were two ludicrously dressed people making him stare at a hole in a very old wall. Something about that hole made him feel uncomfortable.

  He reached into the cupboard of his emotions, felt around for Fear, couldn’t quite find it,
but had no trouble locating Anger.

  ‘Five hundred years?’ he sneered. ‘In which case it can wait an hour or two more whilst we go and sort these Johnnies out.’

  Well of course, thought the Doctor sadly, Duggan would call all foreigners Johnnies. ‘In my view,’ he cajoled, ‘a room that’s been bricked up for nearly five hundred years is urgently overdue for attention. It certainly gets my vote.’

  He stuck his hand in the air. Romana enthusiastically added hers. Two against one.

  A true Englishman, Duggan had never really been that impressed by democracy. ‘Come on,’ he said firmly. ‘Let’s get out of here. We’ve got the Mona Lisa to worry about.’

  It was Romana who halted him in his tracks. She was pointing towards the dark hole in the wall, from which air, so very stale, so very cold, was gently drifting. Had the hole grown in size a little?

  Very quietly, Romana spoke. ‘You can’t cope with what we might find, can you?’

  * * *

  The Count and Countess had waved many people off from the gates of the Château. Royalty, the chic, everyone from the Ancien Régime to the Nouveau Riche. But tonight, as they stood at the rear gates of the Château, they watched the two cat burglars clamber into the back of a small Renault van driven by Hermann. The van was dingy, unremarkable, the number plates rubbed down with mud. No one would notice it drive through the streets of Paris, parking up between an old flower kiosk and the catering entrance to the Louvre. The path to the gallery had been carefully mapped out. A fair number of bribes had been paid. An elaborate diversion had been arranged involving a blocked-up sewer flooding a nearby Metro station. When the Metro line had been constructed seventy years previously, there had been a lot of concerns that it went too near the sewer. These had been waved aside by someone.

  The crime of the century had been meticulously planned for a very long time. And it was finally happening.

  As Hermann’s little van drove out through the gates, neither the Count nor the Countess could resist waving it off. As it went round the corner and the gates closed behind it, both sighed. The Countess felt nervous. The Count felt a curious sense of anti-climax. But, being who they were, they did not confide this in each other.

  ‘I’m going to change into something more comfortable,’ she said.

  ‘Not a bad idea,’ he agreed, smiling at her. It was a curious smile. He rubbed his hands together. ‘And then, perhaps, I should go and check on our guests.’

  He walked away.

  The Countess, left alone, looked out through the gates at Paris. People were hurrying home, going about their dull, ordinary lives. You people have no idea, she thought, no idea what it means to be alive.

  * * *

  Down in the cellar, the Doctor was chipping away at the wall. Romana had located a lump hammer and a chisel used to prise open packing cases. It was doing good, slow work on the masonry. When the Doctor wasn’t hitting his thumb.

  Behind them Duggan paced like a caged lion. Romana had learned that you could sense a lot from the reactions of primitive beasts. Cows lay down when it was going to rain. Dogs barked before thunder. And Duggan started muttering.

  ‘What’s all the equipment in the laboratory for, Doctor?’ she asked brightly. Let’s keep it light. Let’s carry on solving mysteries. Because, in Romana’s head, this was all somehow connected.

  ‘Eh?’ The Doctor paused, bashed his thumb, and sucked it elaborately. ‘Well, the Count seems to be financing some dangerous experiment with time. The Professor thinks he’s breeding chickens.’

  ‘Stealing the Mona Lisa to pay for chickens?’ Duggan piped up. He thought he’d heard them all.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Doctor sourly.

  ‘But who would want to buy the Mona Lisa?’ reasoned Romana. ‘You can hardly show it off to anybody if it’s known to be stolen.’ This is where, she thought, computer painting came into its own. There was no original, therefore there was no value in the physical painting itself, only in the artwork, thus preventing this whole tangled mess. How typical of the Earth. No wonder the Doctor liked the planet so much. Needlessly complicated. Things were so much simpler on Gallifrey, she thought, not for the first time that day.

  Duggan glanced at Romana as though she’d said something stupid. She felt insulted. ‘There are seven people in my little address book who would pay millions for the Mona Lisa just for their private collection,’ he informed her smugly.

  ‘But no one could even know they’d got it!’

  ‘Yes, it’d be an expensive gloat. But they’d buy it.’ On this one thing, Duggan was rigorously accurate. He’d spent the last eighteen months studying the circles in which the Count moved. When rumours of an attempt to steal the Mona Lisa had surfaced, he’d been not at all surprised to learn that the people most likely to want to own it all moved in the same circles as the Count. A shipping magnate in Crete. A banker in Tokyo. A playboy in New York. The list went on. All seven of them fabulously rich, but also fabulously shady. The kind of people who, if the Mona Lisa fell into their hands, would never mention it to anyone ever again. There were, careful checking had shown, precisely seven of these people. Seven people who were rich enough and who could be relied upon not to brag about it after dinner. These seven people were all, curiously enough, utterly ruthless and intensely private. Duggan had told his chief his theory. ‘You know what? If the Mona Lisa is stolen and one of the Seven buys it, it’s going to be quite the bidding war. I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets nasty.’ He was sure the Count had taken steps to make sure that it was an anonymous auction. But it wouldn’t be enough. They’d find out. They’d start killing each other. The world would be no worse off.

  The Doctor lifted a large stone out of the wall, waddling away with it and dropping it to the ground. The space was now large enough to show off a little of the room beyond. It seemed to be empty. Duggan found that a relief. Just some old cupboard or other. Big fuss over nothing. Like those chickens.

  Romana surveyed the wall with a huff. ‘How are we going to move this last bit?’ The chiselling had taken quite a while. Were they really going to have to carry on? At the present rate that would take them approximately 7.4 hours. They had enough oil left in the lamp for two.

  ‘I think I’ll need some machinery, heavy lifting equipment,’ said the Doctor. He doubted his thumbs could take much more.

  Duggan decided to be helpful. The sooner they got this wild goose chase over with, the better. ‘I’ve got all the machinery we’ll need,’ he announced. ‘Stand back.’

  And then, with the solid bluntness that had just about kept him employed, he shoulder-charged the wall. When Duggan had been at school, he’d been feared in the rugby scrum.

  Had it been up to Romana she would have preferred a rather more careful excavation of the wall. But she had to admit, watching him barge through the wall, he was certainly efficient. Resolute French masonry met British beef and, just this once, gave in.

  Romana waited for the dust to settle, just a little, then picked up the lamp and went through. The room beyond was precisely as small as she’d expected. Beyond a scrap of a candle and the skeleton of a mouse, there was nothing in it. Apart from the wall at the end. At first glance the wall was panelled with wood.

  Then she realised. The wall was divided into six shallow wooden cabinets.

  ‘What are they, Doctor?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The Doctor shrugged, running a thumb cautiously down one of the doors. It came away thick with dust. ‘But whatever they are, they’ve been undisturbed since this room was bricked up centuries ago.’

  Cupboards? They’d been to all this trouble for cupboards? Duggan had reached the end of his not very long tether. ‘All right,’ he groaned, rubbing his bruised shoulder. ‘Have a look. Let’s get on with it.’

  The Doctor chose the top-left cabinet. He had a little difficulty with the catch. Time had rusted it shut, b
ut he was able finally to prise it open.

  ‘Oh.’

  Romana and Duggan tried to see, but for a few seconds the contents of the cupboard were shadowed by the door. Then the Doctor swung it fully open and stepped back.

  Duggan shook the oil lamp, as though it was malfunctioning.

  Inside the shallow cupboard was a painting. Seventy-seven centimetres long. Fifty-three centimetres wide.

  ‘It’s the Mona Lisa,’ breathed the Doctor.

  The Mona Lisa smiled benevolently at everyone in the room, quietly and calmly. Do go on, she seemed to be saying.

  Romana stared at it. She mentally computed pi to a few of her more favourite places, then her less favourite ones. And then stopped thinking entirely and just gawped.

  ‘Well,’ said Duggan and then ground to a halt for a few seconds. His brain needed a moment to get a breath of fresh air and find something stupid to say. ‘It must be a fake.’

  ‘Really?’ The Doctor was peering at the painting. ‘It’s been here for centuries. Like the brickwork. Five hundred years.’

  ‘Then the painting in the Louvre . . .’ began Romana. Obviously, the one in the museum was a fake. Had been all along. That made a lot of sense. If you’d only ever been displaying the fake, then it was, as far as you knew, genuine. Again, computer painting would sidestep this logic problem beautifully.

  The Doctor shook his head. ‘The painting in the Louvre is well authenticated.’

  Duggan’s brain made a noise. Was the Doctor saying there were two Mona Lisas?

  The Doctor tapped the painting very, very gently. ‘Well, I don’t know what’s in the Louvre, but this is the genuine article.’

  ‘So is this one,’ announced Romana.

  She had opened the next cabinet. It also contained the Mona Lisa.

  Duggan, slack-jawed and drooling just a little, opened the third cabinet. Another Mona Lisa.

  They opened all of the cabinets very quickly after that.

  Hidden away for five hundred years, and now finally revealed, their smiles leaping in the flames of Duggan’s lamp, were six Mona Lisas.