Faust Among Equals

by Tom Holt

  ‘It’s our rest and recreation period,’ the sound recordist butted in. ‘If we work in R and R time, it’s time and a half. Are you sure the firm’ll pay the mileage? Mean sods, the lot of ‘em, I remember once in Finland—’

  I neither know nor care, you bastards. Look, I’m dead, I need your help. I always thought you were my friends . . .

  The camera crew looked at each other; then they stood up and walked over to the other table.

  The other table was, of course, bolted to the ground.

  After a while, the hammering noise stopped, and the crew relaxed and calmed themselves with another round.

  ‘You know what?’ said the assistant cameraman, wiping foam off his lips. ‘That was bloody Szechuan all over again.’

  His colleagues nodded sagely. That, they felt, put it in a nutshell.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  We have touched lightly on the subject of friendship.

  The classic definition - friendship means never having to pay the full retail price for car spares - is all right as far as it goes, but there is another, more spiritual side to friendship.

  A true friend is someone who’ll lend you his Lear jet and a full tank of petrol without asking what you want it for.

  ‘Thanks,’ George shouted, above the roar of the engine.

  ‘Any time, George, you know that. Thanks for the tip, by the way.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ George yelled back. ‘It works even better if you add a thimbleful of turps.’ He opened the throttle, pulled back on the stick and let her have her head.

  At least finding her would be easy, he said to himself. It might get a bit tricky after that, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

  As soon as he’d worked out his course and pointed the plane in the right direction, he leant forward and grinned at the radio; which bleeped, crackled and homed in.

  . . . This is Radio Dante, I’m Danny Bennett, I’m your host for this afternoon, and later on I’ll be talking to Benito Mussolini in our regular Where I Went Wrong spot. But first, this.

  George twiddled a knob slightly, leant back and took the two-way control in his hand. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘How’s tricks?’

  His voice echoed over every tannoy, loudspeaker and PA in the place; and, believe it or not, there are more speakers per square metre in Hell than anywhere else in Creation. For the piped music, you see.

  The Finance Director swore.

  ‘Get him off the bloody air,’ he shouted. ‘Switch ‘em all off or something.’

  Once the nuisance had been confined to one small telephone, the Finance Director picked up the receiver and said, ‘Well, what is it now?’

  ‘I thought you said you were getting that nutcase off my back.’

  ‘We did.’

  George shook his head. ‘No you didn’t,’ he replied. ‘And he’s starting to get ever so slightly up my nose. In fact, his head is wedged up my sinuses and I want something done about it. Otherwise there’s going to be trouble.’

  The Finance Director winced. ‘We did our best,’ he mumbled. ‘Put our crack team on it. What more—?’

  ‘I heard about that,’ George said. ‘Got stuck in an onion, so I was told. Try again. Helen walks by six o’clock your time, or I won’t be responsible for the consequences.’ He paused, and the Finance Director could just picture the nasty little grin flitting across his face. ‘Well, actually I will be responsible for the whole lot of ’em, so think on. Over and out.’

  Before the Finance Director could reply, the line went dead and almost immediately, every speaker in the Nine Rings started to play Chicago, until the Chief Technician pulled out all the wires.

  The Head of Security held up both hands.

  ‘No can do,’ he said. ‘If I ask those lads to go back out there again, I’ll be going home tonight in a plastic bag. Can’t you buy him off?’

  ‘Lundqvist?’ The Finance Director considered. ‘Nah,’ he said, ‘not this time. Anyway, even if I could I don’t know where he is. He’s not answering his carphone and his bleeper’s switched off. We’ll just have to let George do his worst and then blame it on someone else.’

  The Head of Security frowned. ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied the Finance Director. ‘The CIA. The nuclear power people. The Milk Marketing—’

  ‘Which reminds me . . .’

  ‘Anyway,’ continued the Finance Director, ‘we’ll just have to do the best we can. I wish I’d never started this whole perishing thing now,’ he added.

  The Head of Security shrugged his shoulders. ‘Maybe we’re worrying too much,’ he said. ‘I mean, when it comes right down to it, he can’t do anything too terrible, can he?’

  There’s a time differential between Hell and the rest of the cosmos, naturally. In Hell, however, time is told not in hours and minutes but episodes, such as half past four on a Sunday afternoon when there’s nothing on the television except the Olympics, or three minutes after the bar you’ve just walked into closes.

  One minute past six in Infernal Mean Time is, therefore, the split second between the moment when you’ve just let go of the china ornament that’s been in your employer’s family since 1868 and the point in time when it hits the lino. To match this up with Greenwich, you multiply by four, divide by six and forget to turn off the gas before leaving for a fortnight’s holiday.

  And that was the precise moment when . . .

  ‘Brilliant,’ said the Finance Director, between gritted fangs. ‘You’ve got to hand it to him. For sheer brilliant simplicity . . .’

  ‘The switchboard,’ reported the Marketing Director, ‘has just overloaded.’

  ‘Oh good. Now perhaps we can hear ourselves think.’

  (In the clouds above New South Wales, Lucky George felt a tug on one of the tendrils of his mind. He smiled, and four hundred thousand miles of fused fibre-optic cable running through the centre of the earth took on a new lease of life . . .)

  ‘Malcolm!’ The Finance Director waved a hand vaguely at the Duty Officer. ‘Get that for me, will you?’ He turned to his fellow directors. ‘Let’s go down to the executive lavatory for a bit. There’s no phones there.’

  ‘Basically,’ he went on, when the meeting had reconvened,

  ‘the situation is that, thanks to Lucky George and his magic bloody wand, the entire human race have all gone on holiday at precisely the same moment.’ He paused and tried to take a sip from his glass of water, the meniscus of which danced like a formation flamenco team. ‘This has, of course, produced complete and utter havoc in every country in the world except France, where they’re used to it. The tailbacks on all major roads leading to airports and coastal resorts are causing a critical mass which is threatening to send the whole works shooting off into another dimension, and the price of a pair of Bermuda shorts has now risen to approximately twice the gross national product of the United States. Now, what are we going to do about it?’

  He looked up. The room was empty.

  ‘Come back!’ he roared, and flung open the door.

  He was just in time to see the Production Director and the Marketing Director, in bathing trunks, heading for the car park with a plastic bucket and spade and a large rubber ball.

  And there it was. Plain as the proverbial pikestaff.

  A three mile tailback of articulated lorries in the middle of the Australian Outback, it is fairly safe to say, is probably a symptom of something; apart, that is, from road works. George peered down from the cockpit of the Lear, grinned and circled away.

  His second pass over the traffic jam, a few hundred feet lower, simply confirmed his diagnosis. He read the names on the sides of the lorries and that was enough. Certainty.

  There were soft-furnishing lorries, DIY homecare lorries, carpet vans, lorries of all descriptions, delivering to a small, bleak wooden shed in the middle of half a million acres of wind-scoured, sand-blasted nothing. What you might call a woman’s touch.

  In the back yard of the
shed, a team of forklifts were staggering about like exhausted dung-beetles under enormous loads of big cardboard cartons, while on the other side, a team of crack carpenters were starting work on a huge, Versailles-dwarfing extension to the shed, presumably to provide a bit of space for all the stuff to go. Two enormous industrial cement-mixers stood like hormone-stuffed dinosaurs round the back, while conveyor belts fed them unlimited supplies of cans of paint. George nodded; Helen’s favourite colour, what she in her artistic way called Harvest White. Many years ago, George had made himself temporarily unpopular by pointing out that you could get exactly the same effect by painting the room in question ordinary white and smoking unfiltered cigarettes in it for twenty years.

  He knew without having to look that one of the giant artics backed up out there in the desert was carrying a cargo of forty square miles of anaglypta.

  With a flick of a wingtip he turned the plane round and headed off. When the curvature of the Earth had hidden him from the shed, he landed the plane, got out and whistled . . .

  . . . Whereupon two seagulls drifted down out of the sky, perched on his tail plane and tried to eat it.

  ‘Dry old place, this,’ said Larry, critically. ‘Gives me bad vibes, to be honest. Dunno where my next fish is coming from.’

  ‘Yes,’ George replied. ‘Putting that to one side for a moment, I want you two to do something for me.’

  ‘You’re sure you like it?’ Helen enquired. ‘I mean, really really sure?’ She observed Lundqvist carefully. ‘You aren’t, you know. Admit it.’

  ‘It’s fine.’ Lundqvist ground the words out like flour. ‘I love it. Really.’

  ‘No.’ Helen shook her head. ‘You’re just saying that to please me.’ She leant out of the window, picked up the loudhailer and shouted, ‘Excuse me!’

  The wall paper-pasting squad heard her, downed tools and signalled to the rest of the workforce, using flags and mirrors. A few minutes later, there was silence.

  ‘Sorry to be a pest,’ Helen loudspoke sweetly, ‘but I’m afraid we’ve changed our minds again. Could we try a paleish sort of Chrysoprase White on the walls of the ballroom, please, with Crushed Eglantine on the ceilings and the Summer Caramel carpet. No, not the Axminster, the Wilton. Thank you.’

  There was a moment of complete stillness; then a great deal of subvocal muttering; then an emptying and refilling of cement-mixers, a ripping-up of carpets and a cleaning of brushes, like the foreriders of a tsunami hitting the outlying coral reefs of a Pacific atoll. There was a certain practised resignation about the whole scene. Not all that surprising; it was the fifth time she’d changed her mind that morning.

  ‘Now then,’ Helen said brightly, ‘if you don’t like it, promise you’ll say, won’t you? I mean, you’ve got to live here too, you know.’

  ‘Gr.’

  ‘And, like you said, we might be here for some considerable time before George does the sensible thing and gives himself up.’ She smiled warmly, like the sunrise. ‘And you did very sweetly say I could tidy the place up and give it a lick of paint and so on, didn’t you?’

  Lundqvist nodded sadly. His ‘Yeah, sure, do what you like’ in this context clamoured for inclusion in the Library of Congress Index of Incredibly Unfortunate Remarks, along with such classics as ‘Of course it isn’t loaded’, ‘Let them eat cake’ and ‘When I leave school, I want to be a solicitor’. However, even the meanest street punk in the barrios knows that any kidnapper who values his professional credibility doesn’t welch on a deal unless he wants the word to get around that he’s a two-face who can’t be trusted. It was just a pity he’d also told her his AmEx Gold Card number.

  ‘Well,’ Helen said, putting her feet up on a Louis Quinze fauteuil and leafing through the colour charts, ‘this is cosy, don’t you think?’

  ‘Mmm.’ Lundqvist nodded as if his head had just been replaced with a large log. ‘You think so?’

  ‘It’s coming along, anyway,’ Helen replied. ‘I mean, we’re not there yet, but we’re beginning to see the light at the end of the . . . Oh.’

  She broke off and held the colour chart up against the wall. Inside his chest, Lundqvist’s heart stopped and tried to burrow its way into his intestines.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Helen said. ‘Yes, I think I’m on to something here. What do you think?’ She pointed to a small square in the middle of the page. As far as Lundqvist could tell it was exactly the same colour as the seventy-four other little boxes. ‘For the ballroom, the main hall, the drawing room, the sitting room, the front stairs, the back stairs, the pantry, the scullery, the study, the loft conversion, the annexe, the loggia, the cloister, the fifth spare bedroom and the observatory? Then we can do the rest out in Orchard Haze and have the Golden Wave curtains in the back hall and the conservatory.’ She paused. ‘What d’you think?’

  Lundqvist considered. It took him a long time.

  ‘I think,’ he said, ‘it’d be very easy to escape from here right now. Very easy indeed.’

  Helen raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t dream of trying to escape. After all,’ she added mercilessly, ‘you told me not to.’

  Lundqvist scowled. ‘You don’t want to take any notice of all that,’ he said. ‘That’s just bluster. I mean, all you’d have to do,’ he went on, pouring out a cup of coffee and passing it across the table to her, ‘is, say, throw a cup of coffee in my face, run across to that door there, the one that’s conveniently ajar right this very minute, and—’

  ‘Not really,’ Helen interrupted.

  ‘Oh I think you’ll find you could.’

  Helen shook her head. ‘Because,’ she explained, ‘in about thirty seconds the men are going to take that door out and make a start on the French windows.’

  ‘French windows? In a hideout?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Helen replied. ‘Then, I thought, you’ll be able to keep a good watch out to see if anybody comes up trying to rescue me. And if we put a couple of yards of old Venetian lace curtain across - I saw some in one of the catalogues, it’s only ninety dollars a metre - then they couldn’t see in. And of course, there’s the locks.’

  ‘Locks?’

  Helen nodded. ‘I told them, we want deadlocks and mortice locks on all the doors and windows. After all, security’s the one thing you’ve got to have in a place like this, isn’t it?’

  Lundqvist choked back a whimper, with indeterminate success. Back in the second millennium BC, when the Greeks besieged Troy, things had been a whole lot different. Carpets, for example; the most expensive carpet you could get back then was little more than rush matting with ideas above its station. Velvet curtains were still over a thousand years in the future. Split-level grills and co-ordinated built-in kitchen units were nothing but a troubled oscillation in the subconscious mind of God. It had been, in other words, a very basic and primitive trial run, nothing more.

  ‘Okay,’ Lundqvist said. ‘Sure, if I’m conscious it might be a bit tricky getting out of here. But if I was accidentally to slip on something and knock myself out . . .’ He picked up a banana from the fruit bowl and unobtrusively started to peel it.

  ‘Unlikely,’ Helen replied with a smile. ‘That’s why I insisted on wall-to-wall fitted carpets.’

  Lundqvist abandoned the banana. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘point taken. Something might land on my head, though. Have you thought of that?’

  Helen frowned. ‘Such as what?’

  ‘Well,’ Lundqvist said, looking round, ‘say a big glass ashtray. Like this one here, for example.’ He tested it in his hand for balance. ‘Knock a guy out cold with no trouble at all, something like this.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  Lundqvist grinned at her, threw the ashtray up in the air and ducked under it. It landed on his head and broke cleanly in two.

  ‘Thought not,’ Helen said. ‘If I were you, I’d put iodine or something on that cut.’

  Muttering something under his breath about goddam cheapskate Taiwanese glassware, Lun
dqvist stood up and walked to the door.

  ‘Hey,’ he observed, as he reached for the doorhandle, ‘my back’s turned. Just thought I’d mention it.’

  He went out, found the iodine, applied it liberally, counted up to a thousand, and went back. Helen was still there, her feet up on the sofa, reading a glossy magazine.

  ‘There’s a really good bit in this about ideas for brightening up drab mezzanines,’ she said. ‘Have a look.’

  Lundqvist stood in the doorway and growled for a moment. Then he cleared his throat.

  ‘Good lord,’ he said. ‘I left my gun right there on the coffee table, just where you could reach out and pick it up. How careless can you—?’

  With a quick movement, Helen reached out and grabbed for the gun. Her fingers closed tight around the Pachmayr grips . . .

  ‘Okay,’ Lundqvist started to say, ‘you win, I’ll come - what are you doing?’

  ‘Catch.’

  The gun flew through the air towards him. It took a considerable effort of will to suppress the instinct to catch it. There was a thud as it hit the door.

  ‘Butterfingers,’ Helen remarked tolerantly. ‘Now that door’ll have to be painted again. While we’re at it, actually, I thought of having all the woodwork a sort of light Drowned Violet . . .’

  Lundqvist closed his mouth, which had frozen open, just as his mother had warned him it would all those years ago. Nevertheless. He was as patient as he was resourceful.

  ‘Just come wonder,’ he said, without moving. ‘Lucky you don’t know about the other gun, the one hidden under that cushion you’re leaning against right now.’ To reinforce the statement, he smiled; a pleading, rather endearing little smile, which Helen ignored.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, her head in a pattern book. ‘Isn’t it?’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ‘Come in,’ said the Finance Director, ‘sit down, make yourselves at home. What can I get you to drink?’

  The Captain of Spectral Warriors looked round suspiciously, perched on the edge of a chair, and said that he’d quite fancy a small Babycham, if that wasn’t too much trouble.