Few Are Chosen_K'Barthan Series_Part 1

by M T McGuire

  In fact, the Resistance was far more likely to catch him, as it was offering a bigger reward for him than the Grongles were for Big Merv, a fact which had initially caused tension in the gang.

  Most anxious not to join the Resistance at any cost, The Pan had procured a disguise. When he went to collect the MK II from Merv’s lock-up before each robbery he sprayed his hair and eyebrows white, donned a flat cap and tweed suit and stuck on a false moustache. To complete the picture he wore aviator sunglasses with brown tinted lenses which faded to clear at the bottom, and when his finances and Big Merv allowed he would puff on a fat cigar as he drove (though, after the robbery he was often compelled to hand the cigar over to Harry or Frank to finish off).

  It was a pleasant enough routine. The robberies usually took place on a Wednesday afternoon every month or so – for the difficult ones, the planning process might take longer. That gave The Pan plenty of time to study the target bank, make maps and visit the site to familiarise himself with the surrounding area. The rest of the time was spent reading up on the latest gadgets for the MK II and liaising with the mechanics at Snurd to ensure it was properly prepared for its coming ordeal. He wore his disguise for all of these tasks but was especially careful at Snurd, having been there as himself, about his own wheels. With a vehicle as conspicuous as the MK II he didn’t want to run the risk of anyone there making a connection.

  Despite the relative ease with which they were escaping, there was usually damage to be patched up after each robbery before the next job. Big Merv was fastidious to the point of mania about his snurd and liked it to be at its best whenever it appeared in public.

  When the robberies took place, The Pan was never allowed to touch the loot (Harry and Frank would have smashed his face in if he had) but anything left in the snurd afterwards was considered fair game.

  “Help yerself, mate. Driver’s perks,” was how Big Merv had put it.

  The Pan felt no guilt at keeping the dropped booty. Why should he, when it was all Grongolian? Big Merv was a better PR man than to upset the populace by stealing from K’Barthan-owned banks. It also helped that K’Barthan banks were legally obliged to pay lower interest rates on savings and charge higher interest on borrowing than Grongolian banks. Nobody liked that. Of course, Grongles were the only life forms who could open an account at a Grongolian bank. As Big Merv had said:

  “If they wanted us to leave ’em alone they should’ve played fair, shouldn’t they?” And The Pan agreed.

  After each robbery he would check carefully under the seats. So far, he had acquired two gold rings, a diamond earring and a gold sovereign. Not much, but a start. He kept his booty carefully in a secret compartment behind one of the barrels in the cellar of the Parrot and Screwdriver. He planned to sell something soon to pay Gerry – the best mechanic at Snurd.

  In The Pan’s eyes Gerry was a bit of a prodigy, despite his lowly position as Work Experience Creature. Lucky that, since he was the only one whose services The Pan could afford to procure.

  Gerry had agreed to restore the SE2 in his spare time, for a small fee, to the same standard as the MK II. It was to be his apprenticeship piece. The Pan wasn’t going to be a Mervinette forever and if his identity was discovered he was going to need a premium-quality escape vehicle of his own, as there was no hope of ‘borrowing’ the MK II.

  He wasn’t a patient man and waiting until the restoration process was complete was taking all his self-control. Not that he had any choice, Gerry was doing him a great kindness taking it on. The Pan therefore drove the MK II as crazily as he could after each robbery to maximise the amount of loot which fell out of the bags. Not for his own sake, of course, but for Gerry’s.

  Chapter 18

  One Wednesday afternoon, as the antics of the Mervinettes were beginning to become a little less newsworthy, they robbed not a Grongolian but a K’Barthan bank. Low interest rates aside, many well-to-do Grongles in the city had taken note of the Mervinettes’ tactics and started to use the safety deposit facilities at K’Barthan banks for their belongings. At this particular bank, Big Merv had a man on the inside who knew which boxes belonged to whom and so, in a breathtaking PR coup, they removed every single Grongolian box and left the K’Barthan ones untouched. Having shaken off their pursuers relatively quickly, they were on their way to their secret hideout.

  Behind the safety of the MK II’s tinted windows Merv, Frank and Harry reviewed the day’s haul as they drove. Most of it was gold and jewellery.

  “Whatsis?” said Harry as he went through the bag he’d removed from one of the final boxes, “I thought you said this was all Grongle stuff?”

  “Yeh. Should be,” said Big Merv.

  “Don’t look like it to me.” Harry passed it over to the front seat where Big Merv – who was a delicate traveller at the best of times, let alone when The Pan was driving – always sat. Big Merv rummaged around in the bag. Out of the corner of his eye The Pan watched his boss remove the items one by one. There was a small screw-top jar labelled ‘prunes’ in old-lady copperplate handwriting, a metal thing not unlike a gyroscope and a small leather pouch which Merv didn’t even bother to open.

  “Nah, load of junk,” he said. “Here, driver’s perks,” he told The Pan, “you have it.”

  The Pan reasoned that while it appeared to be old junk, it must be worth something to somebody or it wouldn’t have been put into a safety deposit box, so he accepted Merv’s uncharacteristic gift with alacrity. He became certain of its worth when he returned the snurd to Merv’s lock-up on his own and had the opportunity to examine the contents of the bag more closely.

  The pouch, which Merv had left unopened, contained a small leather case and a large signet ring. The ring was gold and inset with a huge ruby. It was old, truly old. It should have been in a museum. The gold was that special shade of yellow that says, ‘I am more ancient than anything you will ever see, let alone be able to afford’. The Pan knew it must be worth more than enough to complete the restoration of his snurd and probably enough to pay for a small house on top. He wouldn’t get that for it, of course – there was a ceiling on the worth of even the most precious stolen goods – but it would still fetch enough to finish the snurd.

  For a moment he was tempted to keep it. It was big enough to be a bloke’s ring – too big for The Pan – but despite its huge size it felt surprisingly natural to slip it onto his finger. He stuck his hand out and examined it thoughtfully.

  Had it? Yes. It had shrunk to fit.

  Interesting.

  He spread his fingers apart and turned his hand upside down but the ring stayed where it was.

  Weird ... and cool.

  “Looking good,” he said aloud. Yes. Jewellery, on a Hamgeean man – not likely and yet, it suited. Wearing it felt right, and normal, as if it belonged to him, as if it was part of him.

  Yeh, of course, to a man who had never worn jewellery in his life? One who came from a nation of men with a macho thing about adornment. No, he decided, he had standards to keep. Hamgeean men were not comfortable with wearing jewellery – not even wedding rings. Anyway, a ruby that large was too striking and too unequivocally stolen to wear for some years.

  “Pity,” he said.

  The leather case contained the strangest item of all. It was a sewing kit. There were some needles, a pair of scissors, a thimble and three bobbins, each of which held saffron thread of varying shades. Either Big Merv’s contact had made a mistake and this box was the property of a priest or it was looted from the High Temple by one of the Grongles. He put the items back in the bag, along with a gold sovereign he found under the carpet in the back of the MK II. Then he locked all the doors, took its tailor-made dust sheet out of the boot and went round to the bonnet.

  “I don’t like this,” The Pan said aloud.

  The thought that he might have taken part in a theft from a priest made him feel uneasy. He was old fashioned like that. K’Barth had never had an official state religion as such, but the religious elde
rs commanded more than respect – awe. They elected the national leader using, The Pan shrugged ... yeh, weird stuff and a dash of hocus-pocus.

  It wasn’t so much that religion and politics weren’t mixed, more that religion was so ingrained in everyone that nobody noticed and, of course, it made politics easy.

  The proper K’Barthan ruler, the Architrave, was neither a politician, nor a religious leader, nor born of a ruling dynasty. The Architrave was simply a person who had the right physical signs and there was only ever one at a time. Anyone, or any species, could be Architrave, from the richest person in the world, to a street urchin, Swamp Thing to Hamgeean.

  The single religion, Nimmism, took its name from its founding prophet, Arnold of Nim. Everyone could believe in the eternal – and let’s face it, blindingly obvious – truths of Arnold The Prophet, because it was easy. The single, central commandment of Arnold of Nim was that people should be decent to one another. There were eight books of prophecies and another seven books of handy hints on how to be decent to one another, but everyone knew that was all optional stuff.

  “Do the decent thing and you are in the clover,” as The Pan’s dad had often put it.

  The High Temple was in Ning Dang Po and good Nimmists were supposed to visit once a year, but since every town had a temple of its own, not everyone did. Worship comprised turning up for a service every once in a while, singing a few rousing songs, eating a large meal and going home full of wine and bonhomie. Most people liked it. The Nimmist priests were kindly men and women who were often excellent company and provided quality food and drink in suitable abundance. All they asked in return was a few pence in the collection tin and a pretence of listening while they tried to persuade their audience to treat each other with kindness.

  For The Pan, as for many others, it had seemed a thoroughly sociable habit, especially when you didn’t have to join. Openly practising Nimmism nowadays bore the penalty of beheading. Then again, there were so few distinguishing features (apart from the saffron coloured robes worn by the priests) that it was difficult to identify a Nimmist. You couldn’t go to the temple any more, of course, but otherwise it was perfectly possible to be ardently religious and go around being fanatically decent to people without anyone noticing.

  The Pan finished draping the dust sheet over the bonnet and unrolled it gradually along the roof to the back of the snurd. He took time and care.

  He had never quite understood why the Grongles had sacked the High Temple and beheaded all the religious leaders, but assumed it was because they never had got the hang of being decent to each other, let alone others. Perhaps they thought that without a religion, the K’Barthans would cease to notice how horrible the Grongles were or start being equally horrible themselves. Whatever the reason, nothing much had changed; most people in K’Barth were still Nimmists; they just had to forego the songs and eat the meals in smaller groups at each other’s houses.

  He smiled to himself. Yeh. Passive non-cooperation, that was the K’Barthan way, unless you were a member of the Resistance. Every psychotic nutter in the country had joined them.

  With the dust sheet in position he walked round, straightening the edges until he was satisfied that the MK II was suitably cocooned.

  “One day ... one day ... I will have a real life. You are my passport out of here,” he told it, patting its roof. “Sleep tight.”

  He shook his head in disbelief. What a spanner. Talking to a snurd and it wasn’t even his.

  “I talk to the trees and they put me away,” he sang to himself as he turned out the lights. Remembering he was in disguise and that he had to walk as if he was suffering from mild arthritis, he stepped out into the street and closed and locked the door.

  Chapter 19

  The Pan left the lock-up, edged carefully along in the shadows to the end of the street and set off on his usual route home.

  ****

  “That him?” asked a voice in the darkness, once it was convinced he was safely out of earshot.

  “Yup?”

  “That old duffer?”

  “Yup.”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding. Denarghi must be out of his mind. What now then? Do we follow him?”

  “Yup.”

  “Alright, then. You go first.”

  Two dark figures slipped out of their hiding place and set off in the direction The Pan had taken. Their quarry moved with surprising speed for an old man and by the time he reached the end of the street he was so far ahead they had to run a little way to catch up. They didn’t want him getting away again. Denarghi had made it very plain how important it was that they followed this old gimmer home, tonight, and found out where he lived.

  Chapter 20

  Not far away.

  In another part of the city.

  A darkened room.

  On a desk, in the pool of light thrown by a single spotlight, a small machine sits spinning. It looks a little like one of those toy gyroscopes, only not. It is very similar to the one The Pan is carrying home.

  A pair of hands clad in black suede gloves – with the rings on the outside – performs a complicated set of movements over the spinning dial. The needle flips from one end to the other and stops.

  Somebody breathes out. Slowly. And then laughs. A soft, malevolent laugh which has nothing to do with anything being funny.

  “A little more information and then ...” says a quiet voice. Yes. “Someone’s life is about to become seriously unpleasant. How unfortunate for them.”

  Chapter 21

  As usual, The Pan feared he was being followed and a quick glance at the road behind him confirmed that yes, he was, for the second consecutive night. He hefted the sack over his shoulder, and thanking The Prophet for equipping him with his handy set of extra eyes, prepared to take the scenic route. He doubled back a couple of times until he was sure he had lost the two burly gentlemen who had been shadowing him, then he went back to the Parrot. He entered the usual way, by going down a side alley, climbing up a drainpipe and wriggling in through the landing window. Even The Pan would have admitted this behaviour was a trifle paranoid, but it did save him having to explain why an elderly gentleman in a tweed suit arrived at the Parrot and went upstairs and a shifty young man wearing dark blue canvas jeans and a loud purple and green paisley shirt came down again.

  Having to take such a meandering detour made him late and having to wash the white dye out of his hair and eyebrows made him later. Gladys and Ada were annoyed. The Pan cooked his own meals, but they always made supper for him on Wednesdays because on that day he routinely returned from ‘work’ a couple of hours after his accustomed time. Gladys and Ada knew The Pan worked for Big Merv but not, officially, what he actually did. Unofficially, however, they had a shrewd idea. If his habit of departing for work, in disguise, via a drainpipe, instead of using the door like anyone else hadn’t given them a few clues, the fact his rent was discreetly paid, in cash, by one of Big Merv’s henchmen probably had. Gladys berated him for missing her meticulously prepared evening meal by explaining, in graphic detail, just how good it had been. She was an excellent cook so he had no trouble believing her. She usually made fish pie on Wednesdays and he almost wished he’d been a little less wary about returning home unobserved.

  “You ain’t got no consideration for others,” she told him, “breezing in here at all times of the day an’ night. Serves you right if you gets yerself killed.” All of them were aware that she didn’t mean it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said humbly.

  “So you should be, young man,” said Ada tersely, “couldn’t you have called and said you were going to be late?”

  “Not really, no,” he said, thinking of the size of the two men who’d followed him and what might have happened if he’d allowed them to catch up by stopping to make a phone call. Doubtless Smasher Harry, Frank the Knife or Big Merv would have made short work of the pair of them but The Pan knew his limitations. His talents lay in running away.

  “Why no
t?” demanded Ada. “We worry.”

  “You shouldn’t,” he said, “I’m well protected.”

  “Yer?” Gladys’ voice was full of disbelief, “how come?”

  “I meant that I work for Big Merv.”

  “That was Gladys’ point, dear,” said Ada.

  “But it means there is nothing to worry about, tonight I was just ...” he held his hands out, palms upwards and shrugged in a characteristically Hamgeean fashion. The Pan, like all Hamgeeans did a lot of his talking with his hands. “I was held up. You know I often work after hours and I can look after myself, not that I need to, Big Merv takes care of my safety.”

  “That’s why we worry, dear,” said Ada.

  “Well that’s why you shouldn’t,” he forced a confident smile. “I’ve been GBI since I was sixteen years old; five whole years, give or take a day or two. I’m not going to die for a while.”

  Gladys frowned at him in a way that suggested she didn’t buy his attempt at being upbeat. He didn’t bother to argue because he didn’t buy it either. Once he’d moved into the Parrot’s spare room, Gladys, Ada and Their Trev had quickly become his substitute family, but he had no illusions about his situation. He was blacklisted, immersed in the world of organised crime, and the one Grongle he had chosen to annoy, albeit a mere sergeant at the time, had since been promoted at astral speed and was now in a position to make life very dangerous for him. He was already living on borrowed time.

  “We didn’t eat your supper,” said Ada, clearly satisfied that he was suitably contrite for being late.

  “Ner,” said Gladys, “it would have served you right if we had, mind.”

  “Exactly,” said Ada, “but we kept it hot.”

  “Yer. It’s in the oven. I done it special. It weren’t fish pie neither. It were calamaries.” Gladys pronounced the word very carefully as if it might bite.