by Tom Holt
‘Sure,’ said King Arthur. ‘No problem. It worked with Al Capone, so why not with this Lundqvist? Now we talk about money.’
Larry ruffled his feathers with his beak. ‘I thought we just were.’
‘Remuneration,’ King Arthur replies. ‘This sort of work I don’t do for the good of my health. Especially,’ he added, ‘now I’m dead. Now then, I charge for my work on a time basis, with a basic hourly rate of—’
‘Expense no object,’ Mike interrupted with his mouth full. One good thing about being in a grave, he was thinking, always plenty of worms. Even (he reflected queazily) if you don’t know where they’ve been.
‘Expense no object,’ King Arthur repeated. ‘The fink owes me fifty thousand marks already, he says expense no object. He’s probably planning to pay me with my own goddamn money.’
Mike swallowed the rest of his mouthful, fearful lest he’d said the wrong thing. ‘But you will do it?’ he said. ‘Only I’m sure—’
‘Of course I’ll do it,’ grumbled the Once and Future King. ‘Son of a bitch owes me fifty grand, naturally I’ll do it, or when will I ever see my money again. That George, he sure understands economics. He’s got a lawyer?’
‘Van Appin of Amsterdam,’ said Larry.
‘Oy,’ said King Arthur, impressed. ‘That’s one very expensive lawyer, the boy has taste. A good man, Van Appin, he acted for my Uncle Joe when he first came to this country from Arimathea. Artie, he said to me on his deathbed, if ever you’re in trouble with the law, see Van Appin. A goy but a good lawyer. All right, this is what we’ve gotta do . . .’
It’s bad enough having to do something you know is pointless, dangerous and doomed to failure. Having to order your subordinates to do it with you, when they’re pointing out forcefully just how pointless, dangerous and doomed to failure it is, makes being eaten alive by ants seem like the height of Sybaritic luxury.
‘It’ll be a piece of cake,’ muttered the Captain of Spectral Warriors, keeping his voice down. ‘We go in, we nick him, we leave. No problem.’
Two pairs of coal-red eyes glowed their hostility at him in the pitch darkness of the sewer.
‘You said that,’ remarked Number Two, ‘the last time.’
‘And the time bethore.’
The Captain winced. ‘That was different,’ he said. ‘Freak accident, that was. Nobody could’ve known . . .’
Somewhere in the darkness, water dripped. There are many, many strange and unexplained noises in a sewer; and Number Two, who had seen all the Mutant Turtle films, was more than usually edgy. ‘Happened, though, dinnit? So, it could happen again.’
All three sat in silence, recollecting the image of that horror. It should have been a routine job - take possession of a human body (the owner having failed to keep up the payments) and terrorise the local community with acts of demonic, hellish horror. It had, however, gone quite flamboyantly wrong . . .
‘I mean,’ said Number Two, breaking the silence like a rock thrown into a stagnant, scummy pool, ‘double booked. Never again, I said, not if they offered me a seat on the Board. I was terrified.’
‘I keep telling you,’ the Captain snapped, ‘they weren’t real devils. The people were making a film, it was all special effects . . .’
‘I know they weren’t real devils,’ replied Number Two with venom. ‘Real devils, we’d have been all right with real devils, they’d have been in the Union. Those bastards in there, it was horrible, I’ve never seen the like.’
‘All right, we needn’t go into all that—’
‘Screamin’ and hauntin’ and rushin’ about with hideous worm-eaten faces and all that stuff. I had to sleep with the light on for weeks afterwards.’
‘Well,’ said the Captain firmly, ‘there’s no chance of that happening this time, is there? The worst that can happen to us—’
‘Go and arrest Kurt Lundqvist,’ Number Two interrupted relentlessly. ‘Yeah. Worst that can happen to us is they scoop us up and take us home in a jam jar. Well, you can tell whoever it is who—’
‘Quiet!’ The Captain sat on his heels, straining for the slightest sound. It came; the signal, three knocks. ‘Right, move it out. I’ll go first. Stay right behind me.’
He poked his head up into the mouth of the pipe, took a deep breath (being a spectral warrior he had no lungs, but somehow it always made him feel better) and started to wriggle his way up. His two henchmen followed, grumbling on the threshold of sound as they squirmed.
A few minutes later, the Captain’s head popped up through the sink trap in Kurt Lundqvist’s kitchen. Having paused to make sure the coast was clear and lever a squashed pea and a horribly limp tube of macaroni out of his path with the shaft of his ice axe, he scrambled out, looked round and hissed, ‘All clear. Come on, we haven’t got all damn night.’
‘It’th really yuk down there,’ snarled Number Three, hauling himself out and wiping himself against a pair of rubber gloves beside the plate rack. ‘And they didn’t ithue uth with protective clothing or anything. If we catch anything nathty, we could thue.’
They abseiled down from the sink to the floor. It was a long way, and en route Number Two was at pains to point out to his companions that he suffered from vertigo. By an error of judgement they all landed up in a saucer of milk left out for the cat.
‘He’s got a cat?’ said Number Two, as he lay gasping on the rim of the saucer. ‘Wouldn’t have thought he’s the type, somehow.’
‘Wasn’t in the briefing,’ admitted the Captain. ‘Now then, who’s got the transformer? Better get ourselves back to our proper size quick, before the bloody cat wakes up.’
Pause.
‘I said, who’s got the transformer?’
Long pause. During this pause, if the perceived length of time passing correlates in any way to objective criteria - time as recorded by a clock, for instance - you could have built the pyramids and watched them fall down.
‘Fine,’ said the Captain, ‘we’ve forgotten the transformer. Never mind. We’ll just have to cope. Follow me.’
It was probably the noise made by Number Three walking into the foot of the vegetable rack and dislodging a potato that woke up the cat; either that or Number Two tripping over a grain of spilt sugar. Details are not important. What is germane to the issue is that the cat woke up, pricked up its ears and jumped out of its basket. Its tail lashed. For a cat, it had a highly developed sense of cultural integrity, and as a rule there were no mice in the house. This led to frustration, self-doubt, crises of identity and long periods of black depression, when it would sit motionless at the top of the stairs waiting to be sent to the newsagents to collect the paper in its mouth. Now at last, it seemed, the mice had arrived. Destiny called.
‘Thkip.’
‘Shuttup, Vern.’
‘Yeth, but thkip, there’th thomething big and horrible over there watching uth.’
‘It’s just your imagination, Vern. Now shut up and—’
The cat sprang. It was not a classic spring; the head a trifle too low, perhaps, the fore paws not completely extended, the back not quite unflexing like a longbow at the moment of release. But it was the best the cat could do at such short notice, being out of practice and more than a little overweight, and it reckoned it would probably do. There was a thump and a squeak . . .
‘Hold on, Vern, I’m coming.’ The Captain drew his revolver and sprinted back, to be confronted with a nightmare mass of convulsed fur, a waking horror of green eyes and teeth like ploughshares. He stopped, raised his arms and fired three times.
Shrink a revolver, even a Smith & Wesson 686, down to 1/72 scale, and the noise it makes on firing is slightly less deafening than a grain of rice falling two inches on to a cushion. Its effect on a healthy cat is of the same order of magnitude. Chances are it didn’t even notice.
Number Three was, however, making a pretty good fight of it. By virtue of his being about the size of a small spider and reasonably agile, he wasn’t the easiest thing in the wor
ld to catch hold of with non-prehensile paws. Attempts to swat him were foiled by the rapidity and random nature of his movements. The deciding factor, however, was the fact that he kept yelling out blood-curdling threats in cat-language (which all demons speak fluently), which the cat couldn’t help but be intimidated by.
This pantomime had been going on for quite a while when suddenly the kitchen was flooded with light, and a slipper the size of the Flatiron Building planted itself within a few millimetres of where the Captain stood, rooted to the spot.
‘Fluffles,’ boomed a voice high up in infinity. ‘You goddamn crazy cat, what d’you think you’re playing at? Gitoutavit!’
Fluffles froze in mid-swipe, horribly self-conscious, as if he’d been discovered at an all-night catnip party without his collar on. He tried to explain, but his vocal chords jammed and all that came out was, ‘Mew.’
‘You dumb bastard,’ the boom went on, ‘you’ve knocked over your milk. Here, it’s back in your basket for you.’
A hand like the Hand of God scooped up the cat and vanished with it. The three spectral warriors crawled into the gap between the bottom of the fridge and the floor and lay there, shattered. The light went out.
‘Okay,’ said the Captain, five minutes or so later. ‘I thought we’d had it there, lads, didn’t you? Narrow scrape, I thought. Still, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you, or where would we all—?’
‘That wath him, wathn’t it?’
‘Maybe,’ replied the Captain. ‘I’m not committing myself till we get a closer look, but provisionally . . .’
‘You want uth to arretht him.’
‘There may be some unforeseen technical glitches, but . . .’
‘Thorgetit. I’m going home. Now.’
With which, Number Three drew himself up to his full height and walked away. Unfortunately, he went in the wrong direction.
He didn’t realise this until he bumped into something, which happened to be the back of the electric plug.
A word of explanation. Lundqvist’s flat was last rewired many years ago, and in places the wiring is a bit dicky. Thus, when Number Three bumped into the back of the plug, he came into contact with four millimetres of uninsulated, live, wire.
Zappo.
The immediately perceptible effect was the fridge falling over on its side, crushing the kitchen table. It did this because a six-foot-four man had suddenly materialised underneath it.
‘There,’ said the Captain, slightly unnerved but triumphant. ‘Told you we’d cope and we did. All we had to do was bodge up a substitute transformer, and . . .’
The rest of his remarks were lost as he instantaneously went from twenty-five millimetres to six foot seven, landing up lying heavily across the remains of the pedal bin. Number Two joined them a moment later and came to rest on top of the cooker.
‘Fluffles, you scumbag, what the fuck do you think you’re . . . ?’ The light flicked on, and the three spectral warriors turned to see Lundqvist, in a tartan wool dressing gown and slippers, standing in the doorway.
The Captain reacted well. The revolver was out of his holster and in his hand before Lundqvist could move.
‘Put ’em up and keep ’em where I can see ’em. That’s the way. Right, Kurt Lundqvist, I have here a warrant for your arrest, you are not obliged—’
‘Thkip . . .’
‘Not now.’
‘Yeth, but I’ve got the warrant, it’th here in my . . . Oh, no, that’th not the warrant, that’th the tranththorm—’
‘Don’t touch . . .’
Lundqvist stood for a moment, puzzled. One moment there had been three spectral warriors draped all over his kitchen. The next moment, nothing. The cat, meanwhile, was staring reproachfully at him from over the rim of its basket with an I-told-you-but-you-wouldn’t-listen expression on its face. It was as bad as being married.
Then the penny dropped.
‘Okay, Fluffles,’ he said, shutting the door firmly. ‘This is your show now. Kill.’
It took the spectral warriors three days to escape, but in the end they made it. Their story is one of the most moving documents of courage, endurance and sheer dogged refusal to lie down and die since the escape from Colditz.
The movie rights are, incidentally, still available.
It was the Captain’s idea to try and make it to the rubbish bin. Rubbish, he argued, gets chucked out sooner or later, and in the meantime there were a thousand and one places in a black plastic sack full of decaying kitchen refuse where they could hide.
The only problem, of course, was that the rubbish bin was, to all intents and purposes, a hundred and fifty stories high. King Kong might just have climbed it, with oxygen, on a good day.
Despair, gangrene of the soul, was just about to set in when Number Two noticed the onion. With a voice quivering with emotion, he explained his plan. They listened. It was a long shot, they decided, but there wasn’t really any choice.
With Fluffles wandering around like a resentful tyrannosaurus, making a move from under the cooker to the vegetable rack in daylight was out of the question. As soon as night fell, however, they scrambled out, hoisted themselves up into the rack and set to work hacking a secure chamber in the side of the mouldy onion. It took them a little over eight hours, working in shifts, with nothing but their combat knives and belt-buckles to dig with. Once it was done, all they could do was climb in and wait for the onion to be noticed and thrown away.
Two days deep inside an onion is a long, long time.
Even then, it was touch and go. The hunt was still on, and despite the masking smell of the onion, Fluffles paused in his relentless prowl round the kitchen and sniffed horribly every time he passed the vegetable rack. On the evening of the second day, Lundqvist came home at a quarter to one in the morning and started to make himself a Spanish omelette. He had picked up their onion and raised the knife before he noticed anything wrong with it; and he’d stood staring at their entrance tunnel for a full two seconds before throwing the onion in the bin and selecting another one. For years afterwards, the Captain was wont to swear blind that Lundqvist must have noticed something. He could only conclude that the bounty-hunter’s mind was elsewhere.
Which, in fact, it was. At that precise moment, he’d forgotten all about the spectral warriors and everything else, and was pottering around the kitchen in a stunned daze.
So would you if, returning from a hard day’s work, you found lying on the mat a demand from the Revenue for over five hundred years’ back taxes.
CHAPTER EIGHT
There are few experiences quite as nerve-frayingly horrible as being investigated by the Revenue. Hell (especially now that the new management team have taken over) is mild by comparison. For all his faults, the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman, or so Shakespeare would have us believe. The Inspector of Taxes, on the other hand, is an unmitigated bastard.
A week after receiving the assessment, Lundqvist was dragged out of his well-earned sleep at three in the morning by five carloads of weazel-faced young men and women in grey suits, who walked straight past him as if he wasn’t there and impounded his files, records, books and bank statements. When he tried to scare them off with a 20” Remington Wingmaster they impounded that too, murmuring something about discrepancies in his claims for writing-down allowance on plant and machinery. Then they gave him a receipt and left.
When they’d gone he sat down and pulled himself together. As soon as he’d managed to overcome the feeling of having all his teeth simultaneously extracted by an army of hamsters, he got on the phone to the Duty Officer at Pandaemonium and demanded to know what they were going to do about it.
‘Pardon me?’ said the Duty Officer.
‘Don’t give me none of that crap,’ Lundqvist roared. ‘Get these guys off my back. Do you realise they’ve taken all my records back to 1456?’
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ the Duty Officer replied, ‘but it’s completely out of our hands. They’re an entirely separate agency, you s
ee. There’s absolutely no way we can interfere with . . .’
Lundqvist managed to keep his temper remarkably well. Apart from formally requesting that Hell use its good offices to have the investigation suspended and formally undertaking to pull the Duty Officer’s kidneys out through his nose if his papers weren’t returned by five past nine the next day, he accepted the situation with a good grace and hung up. Then he burst into tears.
Business, he decided next morning, as usual. The programme for the day was to visit the Delphic Oracle and sweat out of her details of where Faust was hiding. To do this, he needed to get to the airport. Since he was short of ready cash for taxi-fares, he popped down to the cash dispenser on the corner, which took his card, informed him that his account had been frozen, and referred him to Head Office.
Ten minutes with a Sykes-Fairburn fighting-knife and the piggy-bank he kept the gas money in produced enough loose change to get him as far as the airport, where he waved his credit card at the check-in girl and demanded a seat on the first flight to Athens. The girl smiled politely and asked him to wait just a moment while she ran the routine checks on his card . . .
Fine, he thought, as he slouched disconsolate and ticketless away from the desk. I can’t buy a ticket, I’ll have to hijack a plane. No worries.
He was strolling up and down the observation area, casting his eye over the various airliners and deciding which one he liked the look of, when a discreet cough at his elbow made him turn.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ said a weazel-faced man in a grey suit, ‘but if you were thinking of leaving the country, I’m afraid that’s out of the question. Not until the investigation is completed, sir. We’ll get a court order if necessary.’
Under normal circumstances, the next that anyone would have seen of the young man would have been his head, separated from his body, on some railings somewhere. So demoralising, however, is the cumulative effect of having the taxman after you that Lundqvist simply whimpered and walked away in the opposite direction. He found he had just enough change left for the bus-fare home.