The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  With a sigh, Gino picked up the stack of trays and glanced down at the ticket. He groaned.

  “Not them again,” he said unhappily. “Hey, Zelda, why can’t someone else go this time?”

  Zelda looked up from her table. “Get outa here,” she said. “You should be grateful you got a job at all.”

  “Okay, everyone,” said Lucrezia Borgia cheerfully, “pizza’s here.” She took the pile of trays, handed over a handful of gold coins and gave Gino an unpleasant grin. “I’ll just heat them through and then it’s pizza time,” she called back over her shoulder. From behind her came happy, hungry noises; Lucrezia’s parties were always popular. For some reason.

  “Excuse me,” Gino said.

  Lucrezia looked at him. “Sorry,” she said, “wasn’t that the right money? Just a moment, I’ll get my purse.”

  Gino took a deep breath. “It’s not that,” he said cautiously. “Money’s exactly right, thank you. It’s just . . .”

  “Hm?”

  “Miz Borgia,” Gino said, “please, I’m sorry if I’m talking out of turn here, but these pizzas—”

  “Yes?”

  “You do like our pizzas, don’t you?”

  Lucrezia frowned. “They’re very good,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

  “And you know we can do you any extra toppings, whatever you want? All you gotta do is ask.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind. And now if you’ll excuse me—”

  “Only,” Gino said, “I get the impression you, um, add things to them. Extra, er, toppings and stuff. There’s no need, really.”

  “Oh yes there is,” Lucrezia said, with a smile.

  “Really,” Gino said desperately, hopping from foot to foot, “you shouldn’t have to bother, a busy lady like yourself. Next time, if you just let us know—”

  “It’s fine, really,” Lucrezia replied. “Many thanks. Goodbye.”

  She closed the door. Gino raised his hand to knock again, but let his knuckles relax. Not his place to go interfering, after all. It wasn’t as if they were doing proper sit-down catering.

  He climbed back into the anomaly, pulled out the choke and pressed the starter. It wouldn’t go. That was another thing Carlo was going to have a look at as soon as the rush was over, and at times it was a damn nuisance. Once it had flatly refused to work at all, and he’d been left hanging around for thirty-six years until he’d made another delivery in the neighbourhood and had been able to hitch a ride back with himself.

  Sometimes it helped if you kicked it. He kicked it. It didn’t help.

  Bugger.

  He sat down and wondered what to do. If the worst came to the worst, it wouldn’t be long before Lucrezia placed another order; but Renaissance Italy wasn’t the sort of place he wanted to hang about in for too long if he could possibly help it. He could ask Lucrezia if he could borrow her phone; no, that wouldn’t work, because she didn’t have one. Only a few very special customers had fully operational anachronisms; the rest patched their orders through by leaving messages sealed in bottles or buried in lead cylinders, which were subsequently dug up by archaeologists and phoned in from the twentieth century or later; the pizzas could then be delivered retrospectively in the usual way. Stupidly, Gino had come out without a bottle or a lead cylinder; and somehow he didn’t fancy knocking on the door of the Borgia residence and asking if he could borrow a spade and bury something in their back garden. There was no telling what you might dig up if you tried that.

  He was considering scratching something on a nearby statue when someone coughed meaningfully behind him, trying to attract his attention. That was odd; apart from when he was making the actual delivery he wasn’t supposed to be visible.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Hello,” replied the stranger. “You’re Gino, aren’t you?”

  The stranger was a short, fat man with grey hair and a cigar sticking rather incongruously out of his Renaissance face. Gino wasn’t sure what to make of that; still, none of his business.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Sorry, do I know you?”

  The man smiled. “Not yet,” he replied. “But I have a feeling you will. You’re the pizza delivery boy, right?”

  Gino nodded. He wasn’t sure he liked what appeared to be going on. He didn’t know exactly how it worked (it was one of the things Zelda always did; she’d promised to explain it to him as soon as the rush was over), but there was a system whereby nobody was supposed to take any notice of the delivery guys. As far as the customers were concerned, they were just a collection of arms and legs who stood behind the pizza boxes when the door opened. If this man knew who he was, something had gone wrong. Still, he couldn’t say that without being rude.

  “That’s right,” he said. “But if you want to place an order, you’ve got to call in. I just do the deliveries.”

  The man shook his head. “It’s okay,” he said. “I already ate. There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about. You got a minute?”

  Gino bit his lip. “Actually,” he replied, “we’re really busy right now.” He thought of something. “Maybe I could get back to you once the rush is over,” he suggested.

  “I don’t think so,” the man replied. “You aren’t going anywhere or anywhen, because the anomaly’s busted. Am I right?”

  “Yes. Hey, how do you know about that?”

  The man fished in his pocket and produced a brilliant node of blinding orange light. “Because I busted it,” he said, and put the light away again. “Now, let’s talk.”

  “Hey,” Zelda called out, “anybody seen Gino? He’s been gone a long time.”

  Keeping track of the deliveries was one of Zelda’s principal nightmares. Because, on paper at least, everything in the kitchen was happening at the same time, Frankie and Ennio and young Gino really ought to be making all the deliveries simultaneously, which should mean they were (a) always here, just about to go out or just coming back; (b) never here, because they were out delivering; and (c) never anywhere else, because nobody can be in two places at once. Sometimes it could get quite awkward, and it was then that she missed Nicky, who used to be the fourth delivery boy until he left to set up on his own as Father Christmas.

  Not, of course, that he’d left yet. Or, indeed, that he’d ever worked there at all. That was something else she was going to have to do once she had a moment’s peace; make up Nicky’s back wages. At a rough guess, she owed him something between an infinite sum of money and nothing at all.

  “Gino’s out on a call,” Frankie said as he dashed past, a quivering tower of boxes balanced in his arms. “Here, I’ll take his order if you like.”

  “Okay.” Zelda pointed, and Frankie scooped up twelve further trays. “But you can’t do it all. If he’s got held up in traffic or something, someone else’ll have to make his calls instead.” She looked round, but there was no way she could spare anybody right now. Maybe later, when it wasn’t quite so busy, but . . .

  Unless—

  “Hey, Poppa,” she yelled, drowning out the scream of the antimatter blender. “You wanna make a few calls for me? I don’t like to ask, but you can see how we’re fixed.”

  Poppa Joe opened one eye. “Sure, Zelda,” he muttered. “Anything you say.”

  Carlo looked up from the tray of pizzas he was watching. “Just a minute, Zelda, you can’t go sending Poppa out on calls. He ain’t up to that sort of thing no more.”

  Poppa glared at him out of his one good eye. “You shut your face, Carlo,” he grumbled. “I was delivering pizzas before you were even born.”

  “Poppa, I was delivering pizzas before I was ever born, that don’t mean to say you can go wandering off at your . . .”

  Wisely, he left the sentence unfinished. Most of the time, Poppa Joe sat in his chair, no trouble to anybody; but he was still the owner of the business, and their father. He wasn’t so old he couldn’t still give them a smack round the ear, even if, in Carlo’s case, he’d have to stand on a chair to reach.
/>   “Thanks, Poppa,” Zelda said. “The address is on the ticket. Mind how you go.”

  “It’s quite simple,” the man said. “All I want is a lift. Not far out of your way,” he added. “After all, what is?”

  Gino shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but we’re not allowed. If Zelda found out—”

  The man nodded. “Your sister Zelda. Formidable woman. But how’s she going to find out ever? And if you don’t, how are you going to get home without a main anomaly drive?”

  Gino fidgeted nervously. Things like this didn’t happen to Frankie or Ennio, only to him. Just because he was the youngest. It wasn’t fair.

  “All right,” he said. “Where do you want to go?”

  The man smiled. “That’s better,” he said. “Actually, it’s more a case of when. You wait there, I’ll be right back.”

  The man’s name was Edwin Potter, and he was an art dealer. Thanks to a chance discovery he’d made in his youth, he was the richest and most successful art dealer ever. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Edwin Potter, there probably wouldn’t be any art at all. That didn’t necessarily make him a nice man.

  Edwin Potter had a small but functional single-seater anomaly of his own, which he used to transport paintings by struggling young artists from the fifteenth century forward in time to where he could sell them for the sort of money that avarice only dreams of if it’s been breathing in glue fumes. If he wanted to, he could even sell the same painting over and over again (which is why there are several versions of the same Leonardos and Michelangelos, all fervently claimed as genuine by their owners, who have the receipts to prove it). True, there was only room in the anomaly for himself and one medium-sized canvas balanced awkwardly on his knees; but at approximately 9 million per cent pure profit per trip, he was prepared to rough it. Accordingly, he was rich; so rich, in fact, he could have anything he wanted.

  Almost anything.

  Almost anything so far.

  And now, he reflected as he walked back towards the Borgia house, he was in a position to complete the set. How nice.

  “Oh dear,” Lucrezia said, looking around the table. “It must have been something they ate.”

  Bianca di Fiesole stared dumbly at the corpses, unable to move for sheer horror. All her family, the entire ruling house of the Duchy of Arezzo, was slumped over the odd-looking boxes and the half-eaten slices of pizza. All, it seemed, except her. And, of course, Lucrezia.

  “Probably just as well you and I had the Hawaiian Surprise,” Lucrezia added cheerfully. “I think I’ll write and complain. Now then, let’s give you a moment for your dinner to go down, and then we can have the wedding.”

  “Wedding?” Bianca croaked. It seemed such an incongruous thing to say. Presumably cousin Lucrezia had meant funeral.

  “That’s right, dear. Oh, didn’t I mention it? I’ve arranged a wedding for you. Very nice man, you’ll like him.” She leaned over and pulled up a corpse by its hair. “Oh drat,” she added, “I forgot we’d need a priest.” She slapped the corpse’s face. “Cardinal Ordelafo? Are you still with us? Oh dear,” she sighed, letting the head fall forward into a slice of tuna and anchovy, “some people have no consideration for others. Never mind, you’ll just have to get married when you get there.”

  “Where?” Bianca demanded, as the shock thawed into fear. “Cousin Lucrezia . . .”

  “It’s all right, dear,” Lucrezia Borgia replied, “you’ll like it when you get there. Or should that be then? Anyway, you’ll like it.”

  Bianca stood up, her mouth open to speak; but Lucrezia popped an apple into it, then hit her over the head with a candlestick. Crude; but she didn’t have time for pre-wedding jitters.

  As if on cue, Edwin Potter strolled in, paused to admire a vinegar-stained Giotto canvas—

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “What? Oh, that. Last night’s chips came in it. Why?”

  —and helped Lucrezia Borgia to lug his unconscious bride out of the door and into the anomaly.

  “It’s quite simple,” Potter explained, as he wired the main drive back in. “I fancied her the first time I saw her, when I was in these times on business. So I thought, why not? These things are so much easier to arrange now than they will be in my time; you just find the senior relative and haggle over money for a bit.” He frowned. “Actually, Bianca’s father refused to be reasonable, he wanted far too much. So I suggested to my old friend Lucrezia that we might find it easier to sort out if we discussed it over dinner at her place.”

  “Oh,” Gino said.

  “Quite. It worked out rather well for both of us, because Lucrezia’s now the heir to the Duchy of Arezzo, and she’s also Bianca’s only surviving relative.” He smiled pleasantly. “I think she wanted Arezzo to make up the set, like in Monopoly. There,” he added, dropping his screwdriver back in his top pocket, “I think that ought to work now. New York 1997, please, as near to Fifth Avenue as you can make it.”

  Gino pulled out the choke and put the anomaly in gear. “But what about when she wakes up,” he objected. “Won’t she—?”

  Potter shook his head. “That’s the beauty of it,” he said. “Now you and I are used to whizzing about through time so it doesn’t affect us; we’re hardened to it. She isn’t. Do you remember your first trip?”

  Gino thought for a moment. “No,” he admitted.

  “Of course you don’t. The first time you go through, it wipes your memory clean. I nearly found that out the hard way myself. So, when Bianca arrives in my time, she won’t remember anything at all. Which is where I patiently explain that she’s had a bang on the head and lost her memory. Then I tell her that we’ve been married for three years, her father used to run a shoe factory in Queens until her whole family died in a fire last year, and that we’re extremely happy together and very much in love. Neat, yes?”

  “That’s awful,” Gino said.

  “So glad you think so. It means we’ll have to skip the actual wedding, which is a pity. I was going to ask your lot to do the catering. Well, come on, I haven’t got all day.”

  “No,” Gino said, “I’m not going to do it. It’s kidnapping and brainwashing and what’s that you’re pressing into the back of my neck?”

  “The course of true love never did run smooth,” Potter replied. “Now get this thing moving before I slit your throat.”

  Poppa Joe, who in some respects was eighty-seven, was also as young as he felt. He’d started out in the catering business as a pizza delivery boy, and now here he was again, delivering pizzas. He grinned as he closed his fist and tapped it against the door. Right now, he felt like he was fourteen again. The smell, the warmth soaking through the tray onto his skin; it surely took him back—

  —And forwards, too, of course. Sometimes it got confusing that way. A lifetime in the business, millions of deliveries all over space and time; there were the inevitable disconcerting moments when his skinny, spotty fourteen-year-old self dashed up the stairs of a block of flats and passed a wheezing, knock-kneed old wreck coming down, and the old man looked at him sadly and said, “Save your energy, son, they weren’t in.” Sometimes, the frustrations of his physical age tempted him to cheat. It would be so easy for him to be twenty-one again (and again, and again . . .); except that, when he looked back, what had he ever done with his youth except deliver pizzas?

  If I had my time over again . . .

  The door opened.

  “Two Seafood Deluxe and a Napolitana,” he said, with an echo of the old cheerfulness, “that’ll be $10.65 – Gino, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Gino’s face fell. Oh well, he said to himself, it seemed like a good idea at the time; to offer to help Potter carry the unconscious Bianca up the stairs, then quickly phone through an order and hope that Frankie or Ennio would turn up and help him right the terrible wrong he’d been forced to participate in. Even if he’d turned up, he’d have been better than nothing; two of him would have stood a chance against Potte
r and his knife, or at least they could have made a fight of it. But Poppa Joe—

  “It’s okay,” he muttered. “Leave the pizzas, let’s go home.”

  But Poppa Joe stood his ground. “Not so fast, kid,” he said. “There’s something the matter. What’s up? You tell Poppa.”

  Gino shrugged and explained, and Poppa Joe listened. When he’d finished, he saw that the old man was actually grinning.

  “Bianca di Fiesole,” he muttered under his breath. “Well, if that don’t just beat all. You know, I was just thinking about her the other day.”

  “Other day?”

  Poppa Joe waved his hand impatiently. “You know what I mean,” he said. “Kid, you know what? This is going to be good. You wait there, don’t even move.”

  “Poppa Joe? Where are you going?”

  “Just stay there, that’s all. And look after your momma.”

  “My what?”

  —Back to a time, in the late fifteenth century, when a princess in Arezzo had opened a door to a pizza delivery boy, and their eyes had met across the centuries . . .

  Not that he’d done anything about it, not then; she was a princess and he delivered pizzas, and in fifteenth-century Italy that was an end to it. Still gazing dumbly at the girl of his dreams, drowning in the sudden and unexpected love he saw reflected in her eyes, he thrust the trays into her hands, stepped back and—

  Bumped into an old man, who pushed him aside and said, “Get outa the way, kid. You leave this to me. Hey, Bianca, wait up.”

  The vision of loveliness hesitated for a moment. “Me?” she said.

  “Yes, you. Now you be quiet and do what you’re told, ’cos I’m old enough to be your grandfather and I know about things. You see that kid there? You gonna marry him, okay?”

  “Marry him?” Bianca repeated, stunned. “What . . . ?”

  “Marry him,” the old man said categorically. “Elope. Now. ’Cos if you don’t, you gonna get kidnapped through time and space and all your family gonna get murdered by the Borgias. And,” he added thoughtfully, “a whole lot of other things ain’t gonna happen, which’d be a real shame, believe me.” He stopped, as if aware that he was rambling. “Now you tell me something. Do you love me? I mean, him.”