Faust Among Equals

by Tom Holt

  Nationality: British

  Smoking or non-smoking: non-smoking

  Evening meal?

  And so on. The form scrolled forward - breakfast is served in the dining area between 7.00 and 9.00, the fire escapes are situated at the end of the corridor, if you have managed to take it with you, please deposit it in the safety deposit box in the front office - and as it did so, Danny realised something.

  A common factor. A link. New South Wales, a sheep station, Kurt Lundqvist.

  Me!

  Lundqvist! Bloody hell fire, I’ve been hit by a hit-man!

  Danny’s spiritual remains sat bolt upright, and where his eyes had once been shone with ecstatic joy. For, in a moment of transcendent knowledge such as one tends to associate with the Great Transition, Danny had suddenly realised that all his life, everything he’d fought and worked and sweated and been humiliated for, must have been worthwhile.

  ‘Hey!’ he yelled, ‘this is great! I’ve been silenced! I must have known too much!’

  And then the reaction, deadening and crushing as a piledriver. Absolute Sunday-morning-and-no-milk-left despair.

  Yes, obviously he’d known too much. Obviously he’d been put out of the way, by Them, by the unseen conspirators . . .

  (All rooms must be vacated by 12 noon on Judgement Day. Please do not place objects down the toilet bowl. If you would like your past life to flash before you, please dial your credit card number down to the front desk and select channel 12 on your remote control handset . . .)

  Unfortunately, he hadn’t the faintest idea what it was he’d known too much about.

  CHAPTER TEN

  George frowned. This, he couldn’t help feeling, was a trifle disturbing.

  Your dinner, the kidnap note had said, is in the fridge. Upon inspection, however, the fridge turned out to contain nothing but vegetables. One of the things that he’d always liked about Helen was that, unlike ninety-five per cent of the rest of her sex, she didn’t confuse food with scenery. Had she chosen this moment of all moments to go to the bad? Or had she simply written ‘fridge’ when she meant ‘freezer’?

  The latter hypothesis proved to be correct, since the freezer turned out to contain two frozen pizzas and a microwave lasagne. He decided on the lasagne, turned it out of its foil container on to a plate, and smiled at it.

  Then he frowned at it, to give the melted cheese on the top that distinctive browned-under-the-grill look.

  Callous? Insensitive? Just like a man? These are hard thoughts, and not really applicable. It’s true that there have been heroes and men of action who’ve gone haring off to rescue damsels on an empty stomach, but what the epics don’t tell you is that their subsequent performance was considerably hampered by indigestion and heartburn. Your class hero knows this. Hercules, for example, had a double cheeseburger with fries, coleslaw and an ambrosia shake before snatching Alcestis out of the arms of the King of Death, and Sir Lancelot always insisted on a round of cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off before so much as looking at a dragon.

  Logic, said George to himself. A spot of logic is called for here.

  Who’d want to kidnap Helen of Troy? Well, yes, that’s a pretty dumb question, so let’s rephrase it. Apart from every red-blooded male in the world, who’d want to kidnap Helen of Troy? Easy. Lundqvist.

  By way of confirmation of this working hypothesis, there was the tape in the video camera which some untidy person had left lying about by the silage clamp, right next to the corpse. George wound back the tape and sat for a few minutes, his mind turning over like Mozart in his grave during a Jonathan Miller production of Cosi fan Tutti. Then he suddenly scowled and snapped his fingers.

  Two seagulls hopped down and perched on the top of the telly, trying to eat the aluminium trim.

  ‘Hey,’ George said, ‘this isn’t on, you know.’

  ‘Quark?’

  ‘Kidnapping people,’ George explained. ‘My compliments to Mr Lundqvist, and ask him if there’s any particular order he wants his bones broken in.’

  ‘Quark.’

  ‘No.’

  The seagulls flapped their wings and lifted out of the window. George played the video through once more. Then he made a phone call. How! This is a recorded spirit message. Kindly leave your name and a medium through whom you can be contacted and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

  He shrugged and tried a different number. When it answered, his side of the conversation went like this:

  ‘Hello? Yes, could I have Mr Bosch, please, extension 3092? Yes, thanks, I’ll hold.’

  The hold facility on the switchboard played you the Dies Irae, as interpreted by a computer synthesizer. Eventually . . .

  ‘Bosch here.’

  ‘Ronnie,’ said George, ‘how’s tricks? The project coming together at last?’

  ‘Bloody hell, George . . .’ The voice changed in pitch, though not in volume, until it became a rather heavy conspiratorial hiss. ‘You really have got to stop calling me at work like this. You have no idea how embarrassing—’

  ‘Yes, sorry. How’s the Garden of Earthly Delights coming along, by the way?’

  Bosch sighed. ‘Don’t ask,’ he said. ‘Even if we make it out of foam rubber instead of expanded polystyrene, the ninety-foot-high cracked eggshell just isn’t going to stay up there, I just know it, and the sprinkler system’s completely up a tree. I’ve got seventy-six thousand purple tubular carnivorous plants out there dying of dehydration, but do they listen?’

  George tutted sympathetically. ‘Par for the course, it sounds to me. Look, can you do me a quick favour?’

  Bosch growled darkly. ‘Depends,’ he said. ‘I mean, there’s favours and favours. I think opening wormholes in the fabric of virtual reality for you to hide your rope ladder in probably puts us all square, don’t you?’

  George laughed cheerfully. ‘Call those wormholes, Ron?’ he said. ‘I’d have been better off stashing the gear under the bed only I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. I would also remind you of that time back at Wittenberg when I let you borrow my red slashed fustian doublet three weeks running when you were chasing after that barmaid with the big—’

  ‘All right,’ Bosch cut him short. ‘I was younger then. Dammit, I was alive then. What do you want this time?’

  ‘Just a note of where Lundqvist is right now.’

  ‘That’s all ?’

  ‘For now, Ron.’

  Meanwhile, Lundqvist was negotiating with two seagulls.

  ‘We got the Revenue off your back like you said,’ Larry croaked, ‘although we couldn’t do anything about your 1986 expenses claim. I mean,’ he added quickly, as Lundqvist’s eyes smouldered, ‘putting five thousand cubic feet of cyanide gas down as entertaining potential clients is going a bit too far, you’ve got to—’

  ‘The hell with you,’ Lundqvist snapped. ‘Those particular clients were pretty peculiar people. So what? You’ve got to be weird to need a transtemporal security consultant in the first place.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Mike. ‘But do you really expect the tax guys to believe you got through thirty-seven dozen throwing knives in one fiscal quarter. Don’t you ever re-use them?’

  A shrewd thrust from a wingtip suggested to him that this was a subject best left alone. He cleared his throat, ruffled his feathers with his beak and changed tack.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘they’ve unfrozen your bank accounts and the bailiffs have released your goods. We’ve kept our side of the bargain.’

  ‘Good,’ Lundqvist replied icily. ‘Now we can start talking.’

  The seagulls exchanged glances. ‘I thought we’d been—’

  ‘Preliminaries,’ Lundqvist said. ‘Now we get to the good stuff. That is, unless your man wants to play it the hard way. Because if he does, the only thing the girl’s gonna be launching from now on is oil rigs.’

  Larry sighed. ‘Let’s hear it, then,’ he said.

  ‘Fine by me,’ Lundqvist said. ‘I want George, I want him he
re, and no tricks. You got that?’

  ‘Quark.’

  ‘Right. Now piss off.’

  The seagulls lifted their wings and flapped noisily out through the open window. Lundqvist grinned and drew the shutters.

  ‘Actually,’ said a voice from the corner of the room, ‘would you mind awfully much leaving the window? It’s a bit stuffy in here.’

  Lundqvist snarled.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Sure. You want me to leave the window. You think I was born yesterday?’

  ‘Not really,’ Helen said, smiling. ‘If you had been, you’d be all pink and small and covered in fluffy down, and you’d need feeding all the time. Talking of which, I thought we’d have dinner around sevenish.’

  Lundqvist scowled. ‘We’ll eat when I say so,’ he said. ‘If I say so. You got . . . ?’

  Helen ignored him. With a dainty flick of her slim wrists, she wriggled free of the handcuffs and drew a liberated finger along the top of the table next to where she was tied up. It left a furrow in the dust. She didn’t say anything, but she tutted.

  ‘I’ll need some ingredients,’ she went on. ‘Four pounds of potatoes, a large cabbage, two pounds of parsnips . . .’

  ‘We’ll have corned beef and like it,’ Lundqvist grunted.

  ‘I doubt that,’ replied Helen. ‘Also some desiccated coconut, some ginger, sunflower oil - it’s better for you, more polyunsaturates - and a pound of self-raising flour. You’ll just have time to pop out before the shops shut.’

  Lundqvist turned round slowly. Helen had slipped free of all her bonds by now. She was standing up and tying a pinny round her waist. There was a horrible look in her eye, and for a moment Lundqvist’s heart stopped.

  Far back, in the left luggage room of one of the most twisted psyches in the history of Creation, a woman’s voice was calling; shrill, hard, cruel.

  Kurt, it shrieked, You come here this instant, you hear me? You want that I tell your father?

  But Mom . . .

  Kurt Lundqvist, you tidy your room, you polish your shoes, you do your homework, you practise the violin for half an hour like Miss Horowitz told you, then maybe you can go play with your impaling-sticks.

  Yes, Mom . . .

  The flashback faded, as swift and terrible as it had come, leaving Lundqvist standing with his mouth open. ‘You get back in the corner,’ he said, ‘or I’ll—’

  ‘Nonsense,’ replied Helen briskly. From somewhere - God only knew where - she’d produced a feather duster and a can of furniture polish. ‘Off you go. Don’t forget the sunflower oil.’

  Lundqvist struggled to remember. He was Kurt Lundqvist, the biggest, meanest, most savage . . .

  . . . Untidiest, scruffiest kid on the whole block. No! The most savage . . .

  ‘Sure,’ he said weakly. ‘I go out and as soon as my back’s turned you’re outa here and . . .’

  Helen smiled. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘First, I’m going to give this place a really good clean. Then we’ll be able to see what colour the curtains are.’

  She fluttered her eyelashes cruelly.

  ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘if we’ve got to be cooped up in this smelly old place, we might as well make it as comfortable as possible.’

  Lessons Learned The Hard Way Number One: Don’t Kidnap Helen of Troy.

  The wooden horse was basically a face-saving exercise, something to make it all look slightly more convincing to the outside world.

  Within three months of Helen’s arrival in Troy after her abduction by Prince Paris, there wasn’t a square inch of original carpeting in the whole city. The entire workforce had been transferred from sword-tempering and arrow-sharpening to curtain-making, and King Priam had mortgaged his empire and taken out a personal loan from the First Achaean Bank to pay for new three-piece suites in every room in his gigantic palace. It wasn’t Achilles or the wrath of the gods or the curse of Dardanus that did for Troy of the Hundred Gates; it was the sheer bloody havoc wrought on the Trojan economy by a determined home-maker with a Liberty catalogue and a Gold AmEx card.

  The reason that the siege of Troy took so long was simple. Once King Menelaus had got used to being able to wipe his hands on the towels and smoke in the living-room again, it took the concentrated moral pressure of three continents ten years to persuade him to take her back.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  There is only one bar in Potters Creek (population 53) but the awareness of its own monopoly hasn’t led its enterprising and forward-thinking management to grow complacent. Nothing is too good for the customers (especially the beer, which wouldn’t be too good for an elephant, let alone a human being) and the proprietor is constantly striving to make such improvements as his means permit. Thus, last year, he put in chairs. This year, tables.

  Around the smaller of the two tables, a film crew sat, staring into the suds at the bottom of their glasses, trying to shame each other into getting in the next round.

  ‘Reminds me of that time in Afghanistan,’ said the sound recordist.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Or that time last year in Ghana.’

  ‘That wasn’t Ghana, that was Mozambique.’

  ‘Nah,’ interrupted the assistant cameraman, ‘I’m not thinking of that time in Ghana, I’m thinking of that other time in Ghana.’

  The sound recordist nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I was reminded of that, too.’

  There was a long silence, broken only by the distant commentary of the kookaburra, and the whisper of a slight breeze in the eucalyptus.

  ‘Let’s give him till half-seven,’ muttered the chief cameraman. ‘Then we bugger off, right?’

  His companions nodded (except the continuity girl, who’d fallen asleep). Everyone fiddled with their glasses, suddenly noticing that they were empty.

  ‘Aidan,’ said the chief cameraman at last to the junior electrician, ‘go and buy the beer.’ The junior electrician, who was young, poor and saving up to buy a moped, slouched to the bar.

  ‘Sodding lousy country, this,’ opined the chief cameraman. ‘Bit like Paris.’

  The others nodded. ‘Except,’ qualified the chief electrician, ‘the handles on the bogs are on the left. Anyone else notice that? I did.’

  ‘Sodding awful place, Paris,’ continued the chief cameraman. ‘Full of holes.’

  ‘Yeah. Like Tangier.’

  ‘Or Laos. Laos is full of sodding holes. Can’t get a tripod level anywhere.’

  Under their hands, the table moved.

  Well, you know how it is with tables in bars. There are strict international specifications about precisely how much shorter one leg should be than the others. The object is to make customers spill their drinks and buy more.

  ‘I remember we were in Cairo once,’ said the chief electrician. ‘Holes and flies. Bloody horrible place.’

  ‘Like Valparaiso.’

  ‘Or Genoa.’

  ‘Venice,’ said the assistant cameraman, ‘is a real bog-hole. Armpit of the universe, Venice. You want to film something, a building or something, you step back to get the bugger in the frame, splash. Here, who’s jogging the bloody table?’

  ‘Not me.’

  Simultaneously, the film crew lifted their elbows. The table continued to move.

  ‘Hey,’ remarked the chief electrician, breaking a nervous silence, ‘this is like bloody Valparaiso.’

  ‘Yeah, or Archangel.’

  The table was balancing on three of its legs. With the foot of the fourth, it was pecking tentatively at the ground, like a spider at its first tap-dancing lesson. The continuity girl woke up, blinked, and went back to sleep.

  Help.

  ‘Did someone just say something?’ enquired the sound recordist.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Ah. Right.’

  ‘The table just said Help!’

  Listen, it’s me. Danny Bennett.You’ve got to help me.

  The crew looked at each other. They were, after all, a film crew, and he was a produce
r. Had they thought of it, they might have quoted the line about the triumph of hope over experience.

  I’m dead.

  The sound recordist cleared his throat.

  ‘Not a lot we can do about that, my son,’ he said. ‘What you need is more like a priest or something.’

  I was murdered. It was a cover-up.

  The chief cameraman checked the movement of his glass to his lips and frowned.

  ‘Jesus!’ he said. ‘Danny! That really is you, isn’t it?’

  It was a cover-up. I knew too much. They killed me because I knew too much.

  ‘Too much about what?’

  The table bucked like an unbroken colt, lifting all its feet off the ground and landing six inches from its original position. I don’t bloody well know, that’s the whole bloody point. That’s why I need help.

  The chief electrician raised an eyebrow. ‘Hang about,’ he said. ‘If you’re dead then it’s all watchercallit, academic, innit? I mean, if you’re dead, you’re dead, doesn’t matter a toss why . . .’

  The table jumped again, landing on the chief electrician’s foot.

  It matters to me, Julian. Look, about seventy miles from here there’s a sheep farm . . .

  ‘So?’

  Let me finish, will you? There’s a sheep farm, called George’s Sheep Farm. That’s where I died. I want you to go and pick up a video camera, because there may be a clue . . .

  ‘Seventy miles?’

  Yes, more or less. There may be a clue . . .

  The chief cameraman furrowed his brows, creating the impression of copulating hedgerows. ‘You want us to go there.’

  Thank you, Colin, yes.You see, there may be a clue . . .

  ‘And we can claim the mileage?’

  What?

  ‘If we go there,’ said the chief cameraman. ‘We can claim the mileage, can we, off the firm?’

  How the hell should I know? Look . . .

  The chief cameraman looked at his colleagues. ‘And it’d have to be time and a half, because by the time we get there, if it’s seventy miles like you said, not to mention getting back . . .’

  Look.