by Tom Holt
‘What, thick?’
‘Yes.’
Number Three considered. ‘No I’m not,’ he replied, puzzled. ‘I had a headache thith morning, but . . .’
The leader cleared his throat with a semblance of authority, before the whole bloody thing degenerated into farce. ‘According to the plan,’ he said, ‘the library is up the stairs on our left as we came in, keeping the hall doorway to our right. Got that?’
‘Sure thing, skip.’ Number Two finished the last of the salted peanuts. ‘What is it we’re looking for, exactly?’
‘A lead,’ replied his commanding officer, with wasted irony.
‘What thort of a lead?’
‘Any sort of a lead.’
‘Only,’ Number Three continued, ‘there’th a lead coming out of the back of thith computer game thing, if that’th any help. It goeth right acroth the wall and back into the—’
‘A clue. Something to go on. A material fact.’
‘What sort of a material fact, skip ?’
One of the minor tragedies about being a spectral warrior is the fact that, being inhuman, they can’t settle down and have children. Just now, the leader felt, he had an inkling of what he was missing.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Listen carefully. There’s this bloke called George Faustus, right?’
‘You mean Lucky George.’
‘You got it. Now, shortly after he was arrested - very shortly, in fact - this nerd of a playwright called Christopher Marlowe wrote a play all about him. Lots of details in it that he couldn’t possibly have known unless he was privy to some pretty restricted stuff. Marlowe was a student here at the time. The idea is, perhaps there’s some papers or diaries of his lying about here somewhere which might put us in the right direction. Understood?’
Number Two considered the proposition, and clearly found it counter-intuitive. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘that was years ago. Unless they’re really, you know, untidy...’
‘My couthin Thimon’th very untidy. He keepth all hith old electrithity billth and gath billth and water billth and—’
‘Not for over four hundred years he doesn’t, I bet.’
‘That’th becauth he’th only thirty-thickth. Give him a chanthe.’
‘No, listen,’ interrupted the leader, slightly desperate. ‘Marlowe’s a great playwright. When you’re a great playwright, they keep all your letters and papers and things. It’s called research.’
‘My couthin Thimon’th not a playwright.’
‘Vernon.’
‘Yeth?’
‘Shut up.’
At twenty to twelve, the bar steward turned them out and they wandered about in the night air for a while, waiting for the college to go to sleep. At half past one, they crept noiselessly, or relatively noiselessly, to the library door, and the leader fumbled for his skeleton key.
‘Keith.’
‘Yes, skip?’
‘Whose turn was it to bring the key?’
‘Yours, skip.’
‘Kick the door in, Keith.’
‘Okay, skip.’
It was, they realised, a big library. Big as in huge. There were, as Number Three percept ively remarked, books everywhere.
‘All right,’ the leader said, raising his voice to a whimper. ‘Let’s make a start, anyway. Those shelves over there.’
They hadn’t been at it for more than an hour, scrabbling aimlessly by the light of small dark torches, when all the lights suddenly went on. They turned, to see a small, bald man in a dressing gown bearing down on them.
‘Thkip.’
‘What is it now?’
‘Can we do the thilent killing, thkip? It’th my turn to do the thilent killing, and you promithed.’
‘It’s not really appropriate right now, Vern. Next time, I give you my word.’ The leader then straightened his back, smiled and said, ‘Can I help you?’
The bald man stopped in his tracks for a moment. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he asked.
The leader thought quickly. ‘Interloan,’ he replied. ‘We got here late, your librarian’s gone home for the night, we’re in a bit of a hurry, so . . .’
The words dribbled away like a test-tube of water into the Gobi desert. The bald man shook his head.
‘I know who you are all right,’ he said.
‘Oh.’ The leader frowned. ‘I don’t want to sound facetious, but you don’t seem terribly frightened, in that case.’
The bald man snorted. ‘Frightened?’ he replied. ‘Frightened of you? Don’t make me laugh. It’d take more than a cack-handed attempt at academic espionage to frighten me.’
The leader felt a nudge at his elbow. ‘What’th academic ethpio—?’
‘Well,’ the bald man went on, ‘you can jolly well think again, because it’s not here. I suppose that rat Amesbury sent you, didn’t he?’
Why not? ‘That’s about it,’ the leader said. ‘Mind, we’re only obeying ord—’
‘Appalling! Going about trying to steal another man’s research papers and you call yourselves scholars! Where’s your ethics?’
‘Hang on, I know that. It’th the one between Kent and Thutholk, ithn’t it?’
The bald man blinked twice. ‘What?’
‘Ethekth.’
Just for once, the leader was glad he had Vernon along. Someone capable of saying something so completely disconcerting at a time like this was worth his weight in gold. He decided to press home the advantage.
‘Right,’ he said. It was his favourite word. Positive without meaning anything. ‘That’s enough out of you, Grandad. You tell us where it is, or it’ll be the worse for you.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘He thaid . . .’
Time to get moderately heavy, the leader decided. From behind his back he produced a heavy black metal object that glinted unpleasantly in the fluorescent light of the library. It was, in fact, the remote control for opening the trapdoor, and likely to break or come loose if you so much as breathed on it, but not enough people knew that for it to be a problem. ‘Show me where it is or you’ll get it, understand?’
There was a pause, just long enough to set the leader wondering what he was going to do when the old man said What are you pointing that remote control key at me for? Then he started to back away. About bloody time too.
‘You won’t get away with this.’
‘That’s our business. Come on, move.’
Slowly, and with deadly hatred written all over him, the bald man opened a cupboard and produced a folder.
‘I’ll make you pay for this,’ he said.
‘Hey, thkip, that’th not right. I thought thith wath a library. You can take thingth out for free from a library, that’th the whole—’
‘Okay,’ the leader snapped, ‘that’ll do. Come on, move it out. Now.’
It was a close-run thing, at that. Eluding the porter and his wife’s Yorkshire terrier wasn’t a problem, and neither was the Yale lock on the main gate. What they hadn’t bargained for was the Rugby Club, celebrating defeat at the hands of a superior Magdalene Fifteen.
‘Hey skip,’ Number Two panted as they fled along the High Street, hotly pursued. ‘You know back there, when you said, Show me where it is or you’ll get it.’
‘I know.’
‘But,’ Number Two persisted, ‘if he knew where it was, surely he’d got it already.’
The leader pulled up short, too breathless to run any further. The pack was about forty yards behind, and closing.
‘Stone me, Keith, I never thought of that. Right, lads, going down.’
The trapdoor opened, just in the nick of time. For the reasons stated above, the manuscript, when it eventually reached the Hot Seat, was soggy, curled at the edges and just a little smelly. But nobody noticed.
It was Professor Ambermere’s long-awaited disclosure of his researches into new material on the life and works of Christopher Marlowe, based on recently discovered manuscripts.
The so-called Amsterdam Arch
ive.
CHAPTER FIVE
Thanks to research carried out in the last twenty-odd years, it is now tolerably well known that once they reach the stage of being able to make articulate sounds, all babies, regardless of nationality, ethnic grouping or environment, make virtually the same noises.
Far from being meaningless gurgles, these noises are the only words human beings ever get to speak in their own basic, unpolluted, indigenous language, of which the myriad tongues of Mankind are mere vulgar and corrupt dialects. Within weeks of finding their voices, human infants begin the long process of soaking up the stimuli of their immediate surroundings, and by the time they reach five months old, the Old Language has been supplanted in their centres of speech by the variant they will usually speak and think in for the rest of their lives.
What they are saying, in those initial weeks of vocalisation, is, ‘You bastards! Get me back up there immediately!’
The Old Language is, of course, not confined to the newly born; it is also the lingua franca of the dead, the immortal and the ineffable. And magicians, necromancers and conjurors also speak it, albeit with an accent that makes them sound like the Germans in war films. For the convenience of our readers we shall ignore this and translate simultaneously as we proceed.
‘Ronnie, old mate,’ said Lucky George. ‘Wonderful to hear from you. How in buggery did you get my number?’
In his office in Pandaemonium, Hieronymus Bosch glanced furtively about him and cupped his hand tight round the receiver.
‘Shut up and listen,’ he hissed. ‘I’m only doing this because I owe you one, right? Remember that. If they catch me, my life won’t be worth . . .’ He hesitated. ‘Sorry, Freudian slip. Anyway, they’ll bloody well crucify me. Look, George, they’re on to you.’
‘They are?’
‘Believe it. I got this number from your dossier, okay? That suggests they’re pretty well informed about your whereabouts, doesn’t it? They got it all from your diary.’
‘My diary? I’ve never . . .’
George stopped, blinked and then winced.
‘Sod it,’ he said. ‘That’s really aggravating, that is.’
Everyone, at some stage of their lives, keeps a diary. Now, the usual reason for doing so is to help you remember, years later, what you did in the past.
Trust Lucky George to be different from everybody else. ‘Where was it?’ he asked.
‘Long story,’ Bosch replied. ‘To cut it short, though, it showed up in Amsterdam, about twenty years ago. I think you left it on a tram or something.’
‘Did I?’
‘Not did. Will. I think. Did you ever read it, by the way?’
‘What, and find out my future? No fear. I wouldn’t be able to sleep nights.’
Bosch shrugged. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘never mind all that. It’s showed up at last, some of our boys from the Spooks department raided some university somewhere and got hold of a copy. The rest is history, if you’ll pardon the expression.’
George frowned. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Now I owe you one. Has Lundqvist seen it yet, do you know?’
‘It’s a reasonably safe bet,’ Bosch replied. ‘Of course, they’ve undertaken to you to call off all their people from persecuting you, so they couldn’t have shown him openly. I did hear, though, that once they’d read it, they deposited it in the maximum security vault of the Credit Infernale, with fifteen armed guards and a hi-tech laser-assisted alarm system. Where Lundqvist’s concerned, that’s the next best thing to pinning it on the notice board in the staff canteen. He’s bound to have seen it. It’s also on the database, of course, which is what I’m looking at, but Lundqvist’s computer-illiterate.’ Bosch raised his head, glanced round once more and added, ‘I have an idea they also know about Nellie, so maybe you’d better . . .’
George shook his head. ‘Nah,’ he said, ‘that’s all right, Nellie can look after herself. Well, thanks a lot, Ronnie. I won’t say Be seeing you, but take care, be good.’
‘Don’t worry about it, George. Oh, George.’
‘Yes’
‘You didn’t mind me reversing the charges, did you? Only they check the phone bills now, and—’
‘No problem, Ronnie. Ciao.’
History, most aggravating of the Nine Muses, has forgotten what the favour was that Lucky George did Hieronymus Bosch all those years ago, when they were students at Wittenberg together. History’s other infuriating habit, apart from forgetting things, is using all the sugar in the communal kitchen and never replacing it.
The first thing George did after replacing the receiver was to turn round, very slowly. Nothing untoward happened. Good.
Next on the agenda was getting the hell out of town, but there were a couple of things he had to see to first. First Van Appin, then Nellie. Or maybe the other way round.
He was trying to make a decision on this point on his way downtown when a choice became unnecessary. A girl on a bicycle drew up beside him with a screech of brakes, walloped him on the back and said, ‘Hello, George.’
Now then. We want this to be a civilised book. There are some authors, prurient types with the morality of paparazzi, who stoop so low as to eavesdrop on their characters’ most private and personal moments and then print the whole lot, verbatim. Well, not quite; they do leave some bits out. In all the works of D.H. Lawrence, for example, the girl never once says to the man, ‘Hold on a minute, my arm’s gone to sleep.’ Nevertheless, standards in this respect are deplorably low. It’s time something was done about it.
We therefore rejoin the narrative at the moment when Helen of Troy and Lucky George have got over the emotional side of meeting again for the first time in over four hundred years, and are discussing what they should do next over coffee and pancakes.
‘It’s looking hairy,’ George said. ‘Apparently that toad Lundqvist is after me.’
Helen clicked her tongue sym pathetically. ‘Poor lamb,’ she said, ‘what a bore. Is that what all the stuff with the credit cards and the biros and the golf courses was about?’
George nodded. ‘Actually,’ he added, ‘I quite enjoyed all that. It’s been a long time, you know.’
‘You always did have a childish streak.’
‘Maybe.’ He shrugged. ‘Comes in handy. Anyway, it didn’t do a blind bit of good. Sure, all the hobgoblins and so on were pulled off the street, but that’s neither here nor there. The day I can’t sort out a few idiots with pitchforks . . .’
Helen frowned. ‘Be that as it may,’ she said. ‘Had you got something in mind?’
‘Not really. I was thinking of keeping my head down until the lawyer’s ready, playing it by the book, that sort of thing. There’s no point looking for trouble, after all; I don’t want to start a fight if I don’t have to.’
Helen considered this as she finished her pancake. ‘Somehow I don’t think it’s going to be as easy as that,’ she said. ‘Besides, if turning all the traffic lights in Milan into sunflowers isn’t starting a fight, it’ll probably do to be going on with. That’s always been your trouble, George,’ she added sternly. ‘Too much of this silly artistic integrity stuff.’
By way of reply, George simply grinned. ‘All this,’ he said, changing the subject, ‘may look to you like aggravation, but to me it’s more like . . . What’s the word I’m looking for?’
Helen of Troy applied her mind in the search for the appropriate word. ‘Extreme danger?’ she hazarded.
George shook his head. ‘Fun. That’s the word I’m looking for.’
‘Fun?’
‘Fun.’
Helen broke off a corner of bread to mop up the last of the maple syrup. ‘Breaking out of Hell,’ she said. ‘Being hunted across the face of the earth by the most deadly contract killer history has ever known, who incidentally has a personal grudge against you. If that’s your idea of the meaning of fun, I suggest you sue the compilers of your dictionary.’
George shrugged. ‘I get what you’re driving at,’ he replied, ‘in a w
ay. On the other hand,’ he said, smiling at the empty coffee pot, ‘compared to what I’ve been doing for the last four hundred years, it’s absolutely bloody hysterical.’
Helen gave him what, in a poor light, could have been mistaken for a serious look.
‘And what have you been doing, George?’ she demanded.
‘Time.’
Funny old stuff, Time.
There is, notoriously, a lot of it about. But it is, of course, a finite resource.
This could have been a problem. Back in the dark ages, pre-ecology, the powers that be had the curious notion that they could go on pumping the stuff out indefinitely. ‘Plenty more where this came from,’ they reassured themselves, as they gaily sank new bore-holes and erected giant new rigs.
But they were wrong. Time, like everything else, is running out.
Not that you’d know it if you went by the commodities markets. Just now, for example, over-production has led to a serious glut. The price has, accordingly, tumbled. They’re practically giving the stuff away, with free wineglasses.
This state of affairs can’t last, of course, and the wiser heads are already planning for the day when the wells run dry. They’re also at last grasping the nettle of what to do with all the enormous dumps of used Time which litter up the underprivileged back lots of the Sixth Dimension, slowly rotting their half-lives away and doing awful things to the environment.
This stuff, they say, can be recycled. All we need is a little more research, one tiny breakthrough.
Which is rather like saying that Death can be cured just as soon as we can find a way of making people live for ever.
‘I’m sorry,’ the receptionist said. ‘Nobody can see Mr Van Appin without an appointment.’
The mirror sunglasses stared back at her, and she wriggled slightly.
‘That’s okay,’ said the man in the shades. ‘Seeing him is not essential. Just so long as I can kick his liver out through his ears, I’ll pass up on the visual contact.’
Before she could press the panic button, Lundqvist leant over, ripped the wires out with a tiny flick of the wrist, wrapped them round a couple of pencils, and presented them to her, corsage-fashion. Then he kicked in the door.