Faust Among Equals

by Tom Holt

  In desperation, some authorities have been illicitly shipping it out into the future, which doesn’t help exactly but at least means that it becomes somebody else’s problem.

  Unless something is done about it pretty soon, the boffins say, the whole unhappy mess is pretty soon going to go critical and start doing horrible things to the nature of reality. Already, they report (from the relative security of their nostalgia-lined bunkers), there are rumours of the spontaneous occurrence of the dreaded isotope Overtime.

  The only possible solution is recycling. Maddeningly, however, nobody has the faintest idea how to go about it.

  Nobody who’s been asked, anyway.

  One of the few people not worried sick about the problem is Kurt Lundqvist. His own proposal for getting rid of it (loading it into canisters and dropping it from a great height on South-East Asia) having been rejected, he dismissed the matter from his mind and turned his attention to more immediate issues.

  Such as nailing Lucky George. Dawn over the outer suburbs of Aspen, Colorado, found him sitting on his porch with the remains of his fifth pint of black coffee and nothing to show for his pains but a pile of screwed up bits of paper.

  He’d tried direct attack. He’d tried abduction. Dammit, what else was there?

  Like a dog returning to its own vomit, his mind kept coming full circle back to the idea of hostages. Kidnap one of Lucky George’s friends, his instincts shouted at him, and you have Lucky George himself, because the man lives and dies by his friends. The true professional prefers to attack the enemy through his strengths rather than his weaknesses - weaknesses are carefully guarded, strengths are taken for granted - and what George really had going for him, a part from a repertoire of largely meretricious magical effects, was a quite depressingly huge network of friends and acquaintances stretching throughout space and time, but centred on the University of Wittenberg, Class of ’88.

  For the twelfth time that night, Lundqvist picked up that year’s UOW Yearbook and flicked through, hoping that a name would catch his eye.

  Martin Luther (Theology). HRH Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Philosophy, Politics and Economics). Hieronymus Bosch (Design Studies). Cristoforo Colombo (Geography). Leonardo da Vinci (Business Studies).

  The sun rose on the Rocky Mountains; and suddenly Lundqvist had the answer. Simple. Of all the friends of Lucky George, who had ultimately achieved the most?

  No contest.

  He who achieves the most has the most to lose.

  Mr Van Appin leant back in his chair and rubbed his chin. Right now, he was beginning to wish he’d never taken Lucky George on as a client in the first place.

  Sure, there had been the good times. The patent applications. The intellectual property work. The trial itself, and then the appeal. There had been big money down along the line (it’s not every client who pays in genuine functional bottomless purses), not to mention the prestige and the cachet and, of course, the travelling expenses. But you had to take the holistic view; and when the presence of Kurt Lundqvist in one’s waiting room at nine o’clock on a Monday morning is taken into account, even a lawyer may be heard to speculate that money isn’t everything.

  Pure bullshit, of course. It is. But even the Pope has doubts sometimes.

  Which reminded him. He flipped the intercom.

  ‘Sonia,’ he said. ‘Ask John Paul if he wouldn’t mind coming back at half-past, and show Mr Lundqvist in.’

  In Mr Lundqvist came, like Death into the world; sat in the client’s chair and put his feet up on the desk.

  ‘Kurt,’ said Van Appin with insincere cheerfulness, ‘always a pleasure, how’s business?’

  ‘Slow,’ Lundqvist growled. ‘Listen. I need a lawyer.’

  Van Appin quivered slightly. ‘Delighted to help in any way I can,’ he said. ‘Matrimonial problems?’ he hazarded.

  ‘No,’ Lundqvist replied, ‘I need to borrow a lawyer. Not you, somebody else. You got any?’

  Mr Van Appin looked at Lundqvist over his steepled hands. ‘When would you be needing him?’ he asked.

  ‘1492.’

  ‘I’ll see who we’ve got available.’

  He swivelled his chair and tapped a few keys on the keyboard. The screen flickered.

  ‘Any particular sort of lawyer?’

  ‘Property lawyer.’ Lundqvist laughed, a sound like sandpaper on sharkskin. ‘Little development project I got in mind.’

  ‘In 1492?’

  Lundqvist shrugged. ‘Tax reasons,’ he explained.

  ‘Bit out of your usual line, isn’t it?’

  ‘It pays to diversify.’

  ‘True.’

  Lundqvist leant forward. ‘One other thing,’ he said. ‘What we’re talking here is utmost good faith stuff. I don’t want anyone to know, you got that? Especially any of your other clients.’

  ‘Hey, Kurt.’ Mr Van Appin gestured his protest. ‘I got my ethical position to think of.’

  He hesitated. For some reason he was finding it hard to concentrate on anything apart from the muzzle of the .40 Glock that had suddenly appeared in Lundqvist’s hand.

  ‘Ethical,’ he said slowly, ‘schmethical. Hell, Kurt, what are friends for?’

  Lundqvist considered for a while. ‘Decoys,’ he replied.

  Imagine . . .

  You can’t, of course. It’s impossible. Nobody in the plush suburb of History we call the twentieth century could possibly conceive of the stunning, mind-stripping shock of seeing, for the first time . . .

  It is 1492. Three tiny wooden shells bob precariously on the meniscus of a blue-grey infinity. High in the rigging, a man turns, stares, opens his mouth to shout and closes it again.

  There is, he decides, no tactful way to put this. But he’s going to do his best, anyway.

  ‘Hey, skip!’

  On the deck below, a short, weary individual looks up from a chessboard and shouts back, ‘Well?’

  ‘Skip . . .’

  ‘What’s the matter, Hernan?’

  ‘Skip . . .’ Hernan bit his tongue. ‘I spy,’ he said, ‘with my little eye, something beginning with A.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘With A, skip. I spy it. With my, um, little eye.’ Hernan drew in further supplies of air. ‘It’s a game, skip. You’ve got to guess what it is I’ve—’

  ‘Have you been at the applejack again? You know it’s reserved for the scurvy.’

  ‘Go on, skip, be a sport.’

  ‘Look . . .’

  ‘Three guesses?’

  Columbus sighed. Sixty-one days he’d been cooped up on this floating strawberry-punnet with these idiots. A lesser man, one without his inexhaustible patience, would have blown the ship up by now.

  ‘Albatross.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Aurora borealis.’

  ‘No. Hey skip, you aren’t even trying . . .’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ Columbus thought hard. When dealing with morons, he’d learnt the hard way, the trick is to think like a moron. This is no mean accomplishment. ‘Arquebus,’ he said. ‘Am I right?’

  Hernan lifted his eyes and gazed for two seconds at the distant coastline, the one that quite definitely wasn’t India, and said to himself, Look, why me, whoever says it first is going to get lynched, they’ll know soon enough without me telling them. ‘You got it, skip,’ he replied. ‘Oh, and by the way, land ahoy.’

  ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘Land, skip. Ahoy. Just over there on the left.’

  ‘What ahoy? Speak up, you’re muttering.’

  ‘Land, skip. L for laundry, A for Amer . . . I mean arquebus, N for . . .’

  As Columbus jerked like a shot deer and started capering hysterically up and down the deck, Hernan leant back in the crow’s nest, shrugged and found the remains of his apple. He’d been nursing it along, one nibble per day, for a fortnight, saving it for a special occasion. He looked at it and chucked it over the side.

  A freak gust of wind carried up to him scraps of the conversat
ion buzzing away below - Roderigo was saying that as soon as they got in he was going to have a roghan ghosh with spicy dall and nan bread, Diego was saying no, make mine a chicken tikka with pilau rice and spoonfuls of mango chutney. The poor fools, Hernan thought. It was going to be bad enough when the crew found out, but that was likely to be nothing compared to the embarrassment that would ensue when the news was broken to their Most Catholic Majesties back in Madrid. Well, no, ma’am, not India as such, in fact more like a clump of hot, scrawny little islands populated by savages with no commercially useful exports of any kind; we were thinking of calling it San Salvador.

  Maybe they could just sort of hush the whole thing up. Forget about it. Pretend they got to the edge of the world, turned round and came straight back.

  Nah.

  Hernan shook his head sadly. Some fool would be bound to let something slip, and then where would they all be?

  Anyway. Hernan leant his elbows on the rail of the crow’s nest and took a long, hard look. Okay, so it wasn’t up to much, but it was a new country. A new continent, maybe. And here he was, the first man ever to set eyes on it. That was something. Not much perhaps, but something.

  Wrong.

  Because, at the precise moment when Columbus was ordering the lads to lower a rowing boat and feverishly trying to remember the exchange rate for moidores into rupees, a small, bedraggled man in a Brooks Brothers suit and waders was dragging a rubber dinghy behind some bushes on the seashore and opening a small suitcase.

  The man was one Morrie Goldman, and the suitcase contained a portable fax machine with the special digital transtemporal wave shift function.

  He looked at his watch. Mr Van Appin had been very insistent that he log in the precise moment of landfall. Having dictated a note into his pocket dictaphone, he switched on the fax and started typing out the message on his laptop word processor.

  Not exactly an orthodox assignment, he reflected as he typed. Whizz back through time to the late fifteenth century, go to San Salvador, arriving at such and such a time, send a fax to the Land Registry stating time of arrival, and then clear off. Not perhaps the most complex matter he’d ever handled from a legal standpoint, but the travelling expenses were going to be just out of this world.

  From: Maurice Goldman, Messrs Van Appin & Co

  To: The Chief Registrar, Central Land Registry

  Message: Arrived 3.25 p.m. precisely. Please accept this communication as our indefeasible claim of title to the continent edged red on the plan annexed hereto and confirm registration by return of fax.

  He paused for a moment. If he was discovering this place, wherever in hell it was (geography wasn’t his thing), he supposed he ought to give it a name, if only to enable it to be sufficiently identified.

  Newly discovered territory to be known as Goldmannia.

  No. You couldn’t call a country Goldmannia. It lacked that certain something.

  He deleted Goldmannia and typed in Mauretania.

  No. There was somewhere else called that. Try again.

  He deleted Mauretania and . . .

  Nice snappy name. Something that’d look good on the stamps. The United States of something. Life is all right in something .The business of something is business. The something dream. Bye bye, Miss something Pie.

  It was on the tip of his tongue.

  He typed in Lundqvistia, hit the Send button and made himself scarce.

  Scroll fast forward through Time, until the monitor reads 1996, and hold. The place: the Polo Lounge, Valhalla. Christopher Columbus discovered, nursing a long, cool drink and smoking a big cigar.

  Not, of course, that Valhalla’s what it was. Gone are the deep leather armchairs, the inedible food, the self-effacing spectral waiters. Evening dress is no longer a prerequisite for the Carousing Hall, and people no longer glare at you if you refrain from shouting in the Fighting Room. Mead has been replaced by fiddly things in stemmed glasses in the Members Bar, and the iron-corseted Valkyrie barmaids have been quietly replaced by less statuesque, softer beings with names like Cindi, Nikki and Cheryl. Nevertheless, it still has a certain cachet, and visitors still steal the headed notepaper from the library.

  ‘Paging Mr Columbus. Visitor for you at the front desk. Thank you.’

  Columbus got up and made his languid way to the lobby, his mind still lovingly turning over the thought of next month’s ground rent payment. There were those, he knew, who referred to him behind his back as the biggest slum landlord in the universe, but that was just jealousy.

  ‘You said there was a message for me?’

  ‘Over there, Mr Columbus, by the fountain of milk and honey.’

  ‘Him in the mac?’

  ‘That’s him, Mr Columbus.’

  ‘Right.’

  He finished his drink, placed the empty glass on the desk and wandered over to the stranger . . .

  Who served him with a Notice to Quit.

  Mr Van Appin leant back in his chair and replaced the telephone.

  ‘That was Goldman,’ he said. ‘Everything according to plan. Columbus should be getting the eviction papers any minute now.’

  The muzzle of the .40 Glock lifted and disappeared inside Lundqvist’s jacket. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now then, how long’ll it take to get vacant possession?’

  Mr Van Appin shrugged. ‘Say three to four weeks. Unless they appeal, of course. They may have grounds, I couldn’t say offhand. This is pretty much a grey area so far as the law is concerned.’ Perfectly safe to say that, of course; as any lawyer will tell you, the law is full of the most amazingly large and expensive grey areas, so that seen from the air it resembles nothing so much as the Confederate army camped on a shale beach on a cloudy day.

  ‘Do it in three,’ growled Lundqvist. ‘I want those bastards out of there as soon as possible, you got that?’

  Mr Van Appin twitched slightly. ‘When you say bastards, Kurt, you mean . . .’

  ‘The Americans,’ Lundqvist replied. ‘All of them.’ He grinned. ‘Goddamn trespassers. Get the place cleared, okay? And make sure they leave it clean and tidy when they go, because I might just have another tenant lined up.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  Lundqvist nodded. ‘I was thinking,’ he said, ‘of going into the private prison business. Long term, violent offenders. New York. It’s just a matter of putting a few extra bars on the odd window and cleaning the streets up a bit, and there we are, ready to start trading.’

  Mr Van Appin made a soft, lawyerly clicking noise with his tongue. ‘I don’t want to sound alarmist in any way,’ he said, ‘but something tells me the bailiffs aren’t going to find it that easy. Maybe you should just stick to raising the rent a bit. You know, gradually, a few cents per annum over say the next three hundred—’

  ‘Vacant possession, Van Appin. And if the bailiffs have any trouble,’ Lundqvist said, smiling thoughtfully, ‘just let me know. I haven’t done an eviction since Atlantis.’

  Mr Van Appin swallowed. ‘That was an eviction, huh?’

  ‘We all have our different methods.’

  ‘I guess so, Kurt. Only . . .’

  ‘Just do it.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Lundqvist rose. ‘A pleasure doing business with you, Van Appin,’ he said, adding, ‘For me, anyhow,’ and left. After he’d gone, Van Appin sat quite still for well over a minute, thinking Oh shit.

  His special lawyer’s sixth sense was telling him that there could possibly be a bit of comeback on this one. A pity, but there it was.

  Lundqvistia, he said to himself. Jesus God, what an awful name for a continent.

  Not a patch, he couldn’t help thinking, on Van Appin’s Land, or something like that.

  ‘George?’

  ‘Chris! Great to hear from you. How’s things?’

  ‘Not so hot, George. In fact, I’ve got a bit of a problem.’ Lucky George frowned and reached for the scratch-pad that lived beside the phone. ‘Fire away, Chris, tell me all about it.’

  On the other
end of the line, Christopher Columbus took a deep breath, said, ‘Well, it’s like this,’ and told him. After he’d finished, George sat for a while, chewing the end of his pencil.

  ‘You still there, George?’

  ‘Still here, Chris. Bit awkward, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the bailiffs are going in - when, did you say?’

  ‘A week’s time, George. Backed up by four million spectral warriors from the Court Office.’

  ‘Suitcases on the pavement time, huh?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  George doodled a few wavy lines, coloured in the ‘O’s in While You Were Out and chewed his lip for a moment. Then he smiled.

  ‘Don’t worry about a thing, Chris,’ he said at last. ‘I think I can see what we’re going to have to do, and it shouldn’t be much of a problem.’ He paused. ‘At least, it won’t be if we can get the right help.’

  ‘Anyone I know?’

  ‘Old friend of ours, Chris. Leave it with me, all right? It’s really just a question of hydraulics.’

  ‘Hydraulics?’

  George nodded. ‘Hydraulics, Chris. Be seeing you.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Eurobosch, the theme park to end all theme parks, was on its way. Five hundred thousand spectral construction workers laboured night and day to bring into being the most sensational leisure facility in the history of Time and Space. And all because one man dared to dream the impossible nightmare.