He rummaged in the glove compartment, fumbled a tape at random, and slotted it into the player. A little music would . . .
. . . Bee‑elzebub has a devil put aside for me, for me . . .
"For me," murmured Crowley. His expression went blank for a moment. Then he gave a strangled scream and wrenched at the on‑off knob.
"Of course, we might be able to get a human to find him," said Aziraphale thoughtfully.
"What?" said Crowley, distractedly.
"Humans are good at finding other humans. They've been doing it for thousands of years. And the child is human. As well as . . . you know. He would be hidden from us, but other humans might be able to . . . oh, sense him, perhaps. Or spot things we wouldn't think of."
"It wouldn't work. He's the Antichrist! He's got this . . . sort of automatic defense, hasn't he? Even if he doesn't know it. It won't even let people suspect him. Not yet. Not till it's ready. Suspicion will slide off him like, like . . . whatever it is water slides off of," he finished lamely.
"Got any better ideas? Got one single better idea?" said Aziraphale.
"No."
"Right, then. It could work. Don't tell me you haven't got any front organizations you could use. I know I have. We could see if they can pick up the trail."
"What could they do that we couldn't do?"
"Well, for a start, they wouldn't get people to shoot one another, they wouldn't hypnotize respectable women, they‑"
"Okay. Okay. But it hasn't got a snowball's chance in Hell. Believe me, I know. But I can't think of anything better." Crowley turned onto the motorway and headed for London.
"I have a‑a certain network of agents," said Aziraphale, after a while. "Spread across the country. A disciplined force. I could set them searching."
"I, er, have something similar," Crowley admitted. "You know how it is, you never know when they might come in handy . . ."
"We'd better alert them. Do you think they ought to work together?"
Crowley shook his head.
"I don't think that would be a good idea," he said. "They're not very sophisticated, politically speaking."
"Then we'll each contact our own people and see what they can manage."
"Got to be worth a try, I suppose," said Crowley. "It's not as if I haven't got lots of other work to do, God knows."
His forehead creased for a moment, and then he slapped the steering wheel triumphantly.
"Ducks!" he shouted.
"What?"
"That's what water slides off!"
Aziraphale took a deep breath.
"Just drive the car, please," he said wearily.
They drove back through the dawn, while the cassette player played J. S. Bach's Mass in B Minor, vocals by F. Mercury.
Crowley liked the city in the early morning. Its population consisted almost entirely of people who had proper jobs to do and real reasons for being there, as opposed to the unnecessary millions who trailed in after 8 A.M., and the streets were more or less quiet. There were double yellow no‑parking lines in the narrow road outside Aziraphale's bookshop, but they obediently rolled back on themselves when the Bentley pulled in to the curb.
"Well, okay," he said, as Aziraphale got his coat from the back seat. "We'll keep in touch. Okay?"
"What's this?" said Aziraphale, holding up a brown oblong.
Crowley squinted at it. "A book?" he said. "Not mine."
Aziraphale turned a few of the yellowed pages. Tiny bibliophilic bells rang in the back of his mind.
"It must have belonged to that young lady," he said slowly. "We ought to have got her address."
"Look, I'm in enough trouble as it is, I don't want it to get about that I go around returning people's property to them," said Crowley.
Aziraphale reached the title page. It was probably a good job. Crowley couldn't see his expression.
"I suppose you could always send it to the post office there," said Crowley, "if you really feel you must. Address it to the mad woman with the bicycle. Never trust a woman who gives funny names to means of transport‑"
"Yes, yes, certainly," said the angel. He fumbled for his keys, dropped them on the pavement, picked them up, dropped them again, and hurried to the shop door.
"We'll be in touch then, shall we?" Crowley called after him.
Aziraphale paused in the act of turning the key.
"What?" he said. "Oh. Oh. Yes. Fine. Jolly good." And he slammed the door.
"Right," mumbled Crowley, suddenly feeling very alone.
– – -
Torchlight flicked in the lanes.
The trouble with trying to find a brown‑covered book among brown leaves and brown water at the bottom of a ditch of brown earth in the brown, well, grayish light of dawn, was that you couldn't.
It wasn't there.
Anathema tried every method of search she could think of. There was the methodical quartering of the ground. There was the slapdash poking at the bracken by the roadside. There was the nonchalant sidling up to it and looking out of the side of her eye. She even tried the one which every romantic nerve in her body insisted should work, which consisted of theatrically giving up, sitting down, and letting her glance fall naturally on a patch of earth which, if she had been in any decent narrative, should have contained the book.
It didn't.
Which meant, as she had feared all along, that it was probably in the back of a car belonging to two consenting cycle repairmen.
She could feel generations of Agnes Nutter's descendants laughing at her.
Even if those two were honest enough to want to return it, they'd hardly go to all the trouble of finding a cottage they'd barely seen in the dark.
The only hope was that they wouldn't know what it was they'd got.
* * * * *
Aziraphale, like many Soho merchants who specialized in hard‑to‑find books for the discerning connoisseur, had a back room, but what was in there was far more esoteric than anything normally found inside a shrink‑wrapped bag for the Customer Who Knows What He Wants.
He was particularly proud of his books of prophecy.
First editions, usually.
And every one was signed.
He'd got Robert Nixon,[16] and Martha the Gypsy, and Ignatius Sybilla, and Old Ottwell Binns. Nostradamus had signed, "To myne olde friend Azerafel, with Beste wishes"; Mother Shipton had spilled drink on his copy; and in a climate‑controlled cabinet in one corner was the original scroll in the shaky handwriting of St. John the Divine of Patmos, whose "Revelation" had been the all‑time best seller. Aziraphale had found him a nice chap, if a bit too fond of odd mushrooms.
What the collection did not have was a copy of The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, and Aziraphale walked into the room holding it as a keen philatelist might hold a Mauritius Blue that had just turned up on a postcard from his aunt.
He'd never even seen a copy before, but he'd heard about it. Everyone in the trade, which considering it was a highly specialized trade meant about a dozen people, had heard of it. Its existence was a sort of vacuum around which all sorts of strange stories had been orbiting for hundreds of years. Aziraphale realized he wasn't sure if you could orbit a vacuum, and didn't care; The Nice and Accurate Prophecies made the Hitler Diaries look like, well, a bunch of forgeries.
His hands hardly shook at all as he laid it down on a bench, pulled on a pair of surgical rubber gloves, and opened it reverentially. Aziraphale was an angel, but he also worshiped books.
The title page said:
The Nife and Accurate Prophefies of Agnes Nutter
In slightly smaller type:
Being a Certaine and Prefice Hiftory from
the Prefent Day Unto the Endinge of this World.
In slightly larger type:
Containing therein Many Diuerse Wonders and
precepts for the Wife
In a different type:
More complete than ever yet before publifhed
&nbs
p; In smaller type but in capitals:
CONCERNING THE STRANGE TIMES AHEADE
In slightly desperate italics:
And events of a Wonderful Nature
In larger type once more:
'Reminifent of Noftradamus at hif beft'
‑Ursula Shipton
The prophecies were numbered, and there were more than four thousand of them.
"Steady, steady," Aziraphale muttered to himself. He went into the little kitchenette and made himself some cocoa and took some deep breaths.
Then he came back and read a prophecy at random.
Forty minutes later, the cocoa was still untouched.
– – -
The red‑haired woman in the corner of the hotel bar was the most successful war correspondent in the world. She now had a passport in the name of Carmine Zuigiber; and she went where the wars were.
Well. More or less.
Actually she went where the wars weren't. She'd already been where the wars were.
She was not well known, except where it counted. Get half a dozen war correspondents together in an airport bar, and the conversation will, like a compass orienting to North, swing around to Murchison of The New York Times, to Van Home of Newsweek, to Anforth of I.T.N. News. The war correspondents' War Correspondents.
But when Murchison, and Van Home, and Anforth ran into each other in a burnt‑out tin shack in Beirut, or Afghanistan, or the Sudan, after they'd admired each other's scars and had downed a few, they would exchange awed anecdotes of "Red" Zuigiber, from the National World Weekly.
"That dumb rag," Murchison would say, "it doesn't goddamn know what it's goddamn got."
Actually the National World Weekly did know just what it had got: it had a War Correspondent. It just didn't know why, or what to do with one now it had her.
A typical National World Weekly would tell the world how Jesus' face was seen on a Big Mac bun bought by someone from Des Moines, with an artist's impression of the bun; how Elvis Presley was recently sighted working in a Burger Lord in Des Moines; how listening to Elvis records cured a Des Moines housewife's cancer; how the spate of werewolves infesting the Midwest are the offspring of noble pioneer women raped by Bigfoot; and that Elvis was taken by Space Aliens in 1976 because he was too good for this world.[17]
That was the National World Weekly. They sold four million copies a week, and they needed a War Correspondent like they needed an exclusive interview with the General Secretary of the United Nations[18].
So they paid Red Zuigiber a great deal of money to go and find wars, and ignored the bulging, badly typed envelopes she sent them occasionally from around the globe to justify her‑generally fairly reasonable‑expense claims.
They felt justified in this because, as they saw it, she really wasn't a very good war correspondent although she was undoubtedly the most attractive, which counted for a lot on the National World Weekly. Her war reports were always about a bunch of guys shooting at each other, with no real understanding of the wider political ramifications, and, more importantly, no Human Interest.
Occasionally they would hand one of her stories over to a rewrite man to fix up. ("Jesus appeared to nine‑year‑old Manuel Gonzalez during a pitched battle on the Rio Concorsa, and told him to go home because his mother worried about him. 'I knew it was Jesus,' said the brave little child, 'because he looked like he did when his picture miraculously appeared on my sandwich box."')
Mostly the National World Weekly left her alone, and carefully filed her stories in the rubbish bin.
Murchison, and Van Home, and Anforth didn't care about this. All they knew was that whenever a war broke out, Ms. Zuigiber was there first. Practically before.
"How does she do it?" they would ask each other incredulously. "How the hell does she do it?" And their eyes would meet, and silently say: if she was a car she'd be made by Ferrari, she's the kind of woman you'd expect to see as the beautiful consort to the corrupt generalissimo of a collapsing Third World country, and she hangs around with guys like us. We're the lucky guys, right?
Ms. Zuigiber just smiled and bought another round of drinks for everybody, on the National World Weekly. And watched the fights break out around her. And smiled.
She had been right. Journalism suited her.
Even so, everyone needs a holiday, and Red Zuigiber was on her first in eleven years.
She was on a small Mediterranean island which made its money from the tourist trade, and that in itself was odd. Red looked to be the kind of woman who, if she took a holiday on any island smaller than Australia, would be doing so because she was friends with the man who owned it. And had you told any islander a month before that war was coming, he would have laughed at you and tried to sell you a raffiawork wine holder or a picture of the bay done in seashells; that was then.
This was now.
Now a deep religio‑political divide, concerning which of four small mainland countries they weren't actually a part of, had split the country into three factions, destroyed the statue of Santa Maria in the town square, and done for the tourist trade.
Red Zuigiber sat in the bar of the Hotel de Palomar del Sol, drinking what passed for a cocktail. In one corner a tired pianist played, and a waiter in a toupee crooned into a microphone:
"AAAAAAAAAAAonce‑pon‑a‑time‑dere‑was
LITTLE WHITE BOOOL
AAAAAAAAAAAvery‑sad‑because‑e‑was
LITTLE WHITE BOOL . . ."
A man threw himself through the window, a knife between his teeth, a Kalashnikov automatic rifle in one hand, a grenade in the other.
"I glaim gis oteg id der gaing og der‑" he paused. He took the knife out of his mouth and began again. "I claim this hotel in the name of the pro‑Turkish Liberation Faction!"
The last two holidaymakers remaining on the island[19] climbed underneath their table. Red unconcernedly withdrew the maraschino cherry from her drink, put it to her scarlet lips, and sucked it slowly off its stick in a way that made several men in the room break into a cold sweat.
The pianist stood up, reached into his piano, and pulled out a vintage sub‑machine gun. "This hotel has already been claimed by the pro-Greek Territorial Brigade!" he screamed. "Make one false move, and I shoot out your living daylight!"
There was a motion at the door. A huge, black‑bearded individual with a golden smile and a genuine antique Gatling gun stood there, with a cohort of equally huge although less impressively armed men behind him.
"This strategically important hotel, for years a symbol of the fascist imperialist Turko‑Greek running dog tourist trade, is now the property of the Italo‑Maltese Freedom Fighters!" he boomed affably. "Now we kill everybody!"
"Rubbish!" said the pianist. "Is not strategically important. Just has extremely well‑stocked wine cellar!"
"He's right, Pedro," said the man with the Kalashnikov, "That's why my lot wanted it. 11 General Ernesto de Montoya said to me, he said, Fernando, the war'll be over by Saturday, and the lads'll be wanting a good time. Pop down to the Hotel de Palomar del Sol and claim it as booty, will you?"
The bearded man turned red. "Is bloddy important strategically, Fernando Chianti! I drew big map of the island and is right in the middle, which makes it pretty bloddy strategically important, I can tell you."
"Ha!" said Fernando. "You might as well say that just because Little Diego's house has a view of the decadent capitalist topless private beach, that it's strategically important!"
The pianist blushed a deep red. "Our lot got that this morning," he admitted.
There was silence.
In the silence was a faint, silken rasping. Red had uncrossed her legs.
The pianist's Adam's apple bobbed up and down. "Well, it's pretty strategically important," he managed, trying to ignore the woman on the bar stool. "I mean, if someone landed a submarine on it, you'd want to be somewhere you could see it all."
Silence.
"Well, it's a lot more strategically importan
t than this hotel anyway," he finished.
Pedro coughed, ominously. "The next person who says anything. Anything at all. Is dead." He grinned. Hefted his gun. "Right. Now everyone against far wall."
Nobody moved. They weren't listening to him any more. They were listening to a low, indistinct murmuring from the hallway behind him, quiet and monotonous.
There was some shuffling among the cohort in the doorway. They seemed to be doing their best to stand firm, but they were being inexorably edged out of the way by the muttering, which had begun to resolve itself into audible phrases. "Don't mind me, gents, what a night, eh? Three times round the island, nearly didn't find the place, someone doesn't believe in signposts, eh? Still, found it in the end, had to stop and ask four times, finally asked at the post office, they always know at the post office, had to draw me a map though, got it here somewhere . . ."
Sliding serenely past the men with guns, like a pike through a trout pond, came a small, bespectacled man in a blue uniform, carrying a long, thin, brown paper‑wrapped parcel, tied with string. His sole concession to the climate were his open‑toed brown plastic sandals, although the green woolen socks he wore underneath them showed his deep and natural distrust of foreign weather.
He had a peaked cap on, with International Express written on it in large white letters.
He was unarmed, but no one touched him. No one even pointed a gun at him. They just stared.
The little man looked around the room, scanning the faces, and then looking back down at his clipboard; then he walked straight over to Red, still sitting on her bar stool. "Package for you, miss," he said.
Red took it, and began to untie the string.
The International Express man coughed discreetly and presented the journalist with a well‑thumbed receipt pad and a yellow plastic ballpoint pen attached to the clipboard by a piece of string. "You have to sign for it, miss. Just there. Print your full name over here, signature down there."
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