Faust Among Equals

by Tom Holt

  ‘Memo from H.B.,’ he said. ‘Apparently, he wants permission to -’ The Finance Director squinted at the paper in front of him. ‘- to drill a hole in the bottom of the sea somewhere off America, install a steam turbine on Number Six furnace, and - you know, his handwriting is abysmal - and he says there’s a bit of old metal rod he wants from out of the Bonded Stores. He doesn’t say what he wants it for, but I for one wouldn’t understand if he did. Any objections?’

  Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades high over-arched embower, the Directors shook their heads, until the boardroom resembled nothing so much as a display of car rear-window ornaments produced by the design team for Alien. If Ronnie wanted it, Ronnie could have it.

  ‘That’s fine, then,’ said the Finance Director, initialling the pink chit. ‘Same time next week?’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ‘Who, me?’

  Lucky George leant forwards slightly. A persuasive enough man at the best of times, he was giving it everything he’d got. An Arab coming up against George in this frame of mind would have found himself the bewildered owner of many cubic tons of very expensive sand.

  ‘Yes, Lenny,’ he cooed, ‘you. You’ve got just what it takes to be a success in politics, hasn’t he, Helen? I mean, you’d vote for him, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Like a shot,’ Helen replied, not looking up from her callisthenics book. She’d just got to the bit where the heroine had wrapped her left leg round her neck, with the heel sticking in her right ear; and she wanted to find out how the hell the author was going to engineer a happy ending out of that lot.

  ‘There, you see? The women’s vote tied up, just like that. C’mon, Lennie, don’t be a loser all your life. Just for once . . .’

  ‘I dunno.’ Leonardo da Vinci stroked his beard, a full-time job in itself. ‘To be absolutely frank with you, George, I don’t think I’m really, you know, qualified to stand. Like, you know, not eligible.’

  Lucky George gestured impatiently. ‘Rubbish,’ he said. ‘What on earth gave you that impression, Len?’

  ‘Well,’ said Leonardo, counting on his fingers, ‘number one, I’m Italian. I always thought that to be president of the USA you had to be American . . .’

  George laughed. ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘We get you US citizenship first, naturally. And then, of course, you’ve got the Italian vote sewn up before you even start.’

  ‘Retrospectively, even,’ Helen murmured. Nobody heard her.

  ‘Also,’ Leonardo went on, ‘I’m dead.’

  ‘So?’

  Leonardo waved his hands feebly. ‘So I guess that’s not exactly going to inspire confidence in the electorate, George. I mean, Vote for daVinci, he would have made a good president if only he’d lived isn’t the best sort of platform you could—’

  ‘On the contrary,’ George replied. ‘Look at the Kennedys. Secret of their success, that was.’

  Leonardo shrugged. ‘Odd you should mention them,’ he said. ‘Did you know that it was really the Milk Marketing Board who were behind the—?’

  ‘Besides,’ George went on, ignoring him, ‘there you are, dead, running for the White House, that’s the disabled vote in the can, right from the word go. Plus, being dead, I guess that makes you a sort of minority group figure . . .’

  ‘Being dead? A minority ? You’re crazy, man, there’s millions of us out there.’

  ‘Yes,’ George replied, ‘but not that many of you down here, that’s the whole point. Being dead, you say, that really gives you an insight into the problems of the victims of bigotry. Because when you’re dead, you add, every man’s hand is against you. Segregation, reservations, cheap dead trash - you’ve got it absolutely made, Lenny, you really have. The only thing that surprises me is why you haven’t stood before.’

  ‘Better things to do with your time, probably.’

  ‘Be quiet, Helen, you’re not helping. Come on, Lenny. What have you got to lose?’

  ‘All right.’ Leonardo backed away slightly. ‘But anyway, isn’t it a bit academic? I mean, the election’s tomorrow, there really isn’t time . . .’

  George smiled. ‘Is that all you’re worried about?’ he said. ‘Look. I anticipated you’d jump at the chance, so I took the precaution of registering you as a candidate . . .’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘Retrospectively, of course. Easy if you know how. And before you say you haven’t got time to do any campaigning, I managed to get you on the Ed Sullivan show - he’s a friend of mine, it wasn’t a problem - so you’ll have at least fifteen minutes prime time, that ought to be enough. The trouble with most campaigns is, you see, they’re too long’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘Which reminds me,’ said Lucky George. ‘You’re on air in about twenty minutes, so if I were you I’d be getting along.’

  With retrospect, the pundits say, it was clear the moment the Utah results came in that it was going to be a da Vinci landslide.

  By 3.20 a.m., the results were in from fourteen states. All had voted da Vinci.

  By 5 a.m., it was all over.

  Interviewed on the Johnny Carson show later that fateful day and asked to explain why the pollsters had once again got it completely wrong, the head of the Gallup organisation said in his defence that the election had turned on factors which couldn’t have been foreseen at the time the polls were taken. Such factors as (among others):

  a. a personal endorsement of the da Vinci platform by the Mona Lisa, interviewed live on NBC five minutes before voting began.

  b. the invasion of New York by hundreds of thousands of strange, unearthly gibbering fiends threatening to burn the city down if da Vinci wasn’t elected.

  c. the simultaneous withdrawal by all the other candidates, accompanied by a passionate appeal from each one to vote for da Vinci and a better America.

  And if that wasn’t enough, he continued, wiping his forehead with a large red silk handkerchief, there was the intrinsic merit of the da Vinci manifesto to consider. Admittedly, it had only been released hours before the election, but its basic inspired simplicity made that a plus rather than a minus. When a guy stands up and says, Listen, America, all we need do in order to stop inflation, restore full employment, revitalise the dollar, put the USA back in her rightful place as the leader of the free world and give those scumsucking Ayrabs a stomping they’ll never forget is to link up every building from the Rockies to the Rio Grande with a network of steel scaffolding pipes, not forgetting to install at least ten heavy-duty cup-hooks on all roofs, gable-ends and porches at the same time, and there’s no way you’re going to lose. With a message like that, even Jimmy Carter could have got elected . . .

  At which point, the pollster’s eyes seemed to glaze over, and he sat motionless in his chair with an expression of extreme bewilderment until the ads came and covered his embarrassment.

  The only other dissentient voice to be heard that day was that of a caller to a low-rent phone-in show broadcast on a small-town radio station somewhere in the back end of Iowa. Giving his name as Danny Bennett and his address as the Burning Fiery Pit, the caller claimed that the da Vinci victory was the result of gross electoral manipulation, using magic, necromancy and other forms of unconstitutional inducement, on the part of one Lucky George Faust, a fugitive from Hell with a colossal price on his head. The caller was in the middle of a confused tirade about international hit-men and plots against his life (rather peculiarly phrased in the past tense) when the workmen installing the steel girders to link the radio station building with the delicatessen next door dug through a tele phone cable, cutting the caller off. Since ninety per cent of the calls to any local radio phone-in anywhere are comprised of this sort of material, none of the show’s seven listeners took the slightest notice.

  ‘Great,’ said Lucky George, switching off the television. ‘Now all we need are the balloons.’

  Repossessing a country is not, perhaps, the most straightforward of op
erations. It ought to be, but it isn’t.

  In theory, the bailiff goes along to the head of state with the necessary paperwork and delivers it, and that should be that. What’s then supposed to happen is that the population leave the country in question, taking with them all movable items (but no fixtures, fittings, mineral resources or growing plants or trees) by twelve noon of the day specified in the court order. Tenants’ improvements are then set off against dilapidations, and any sum required to be paid to either party by way of adjustment is lodged with the court office pending a final decision by the arbitration officer.

  In practice, though, there is always hassle and not infrequently trouble; sometimes even violence. That is why most repossessions these days are handled not by the everyday court bailiff but by a firm of specialist certificated bailiffs, of which there is one: Kurt Lundqvist Associates.

  Once Lundqvist is on the job, things move fast. His record for clearing a country is thirty-nine seconds, although in fairness we ought to point out that it wasn’t a particularly big country. Certainly not by the time he’d finished with it.

  Lundqvist attributes his success in this line of work to forward planning, executive efficiency, a calm and reasonable attitude towards the resolution of difficulties and an absolutely fucking enormous satellite-mounted industrial laser, capable of vaporising a land mass down to bedrock level at the rate of three hundred and twenty-five thousand square miles per hour.

  He calls it the Denver Blowtorch.

  Maybe, he says, it makes a mess of buildings, infrastructure and, indeed, mountain ranges. On the positive side, it clears up unsightly litter deposits, disinfects unhygienic areas and leaves a pleasant glassy-smooth surface all ready for the new tenant to build what he likes on. After all, he argues, the first thing you do when you buy a house is strip off the wallpaper and take up the old carpets.

  Right down at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, the deepest point in the whole of the ocean, there is no light whatsoever. The strange and uncanny creatures that grope out a nightmare existence down there at fifteen-tons-per-square-inch pressure are born, live and die without even rudimentary traces of eyes, although there are two schools of thought as to why. One says: no light, why bother? The other replies: if you’d ever seen one of those weird buggers they’ve got down there, the last thing you’d want any truck with ever again is vision.

  When working on the bottom of the Trench, therefore, it’s vitally important to remember to bring a torch.

  ‘What, me, thkip? I haven’t brought it. Thorry, I thought you’d got it.’

  ‘I haven’t got it. Keith, you got the torch?’

  ‘Not me, skip. I thought Vernon was going to bring it.’

  ‘Fine. I see.’

  ‘You thure about that, thkip? I can’t thee a thing.’

  ‘I was speaking figuratively.’

  The three spectral engineers (recently transferred at their own request from the Security division) trod slime for a moment, reviewing the situation.

  ‘Bloody dark down here, skip.’

  ‘All right, so it’s a bit dimpsy. We’ll just have to do the best we can.’

  ‘We seem to do rather a lot of that, skip, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

  ‘It’th what we’re betht at,’ replied his colleague proudly. ‘Muddling through.’

  ‘Right. Now look, maybe we haven’t exactly got off to a copybook start here, but so long as we all keep our heads and don’t go all to pieces, this is going to be a piece of cake, all right? Or would you rather go back to playing seek and destroy with Kurt Lundqvist?’

  There was a heavy silence.

  ‘It’s dogged as does it, skip, that’s what I always say.’

  ‘You bloody liar, Keith, what you always say is, “Oh my God, we’re all going to die.”’

  ‘With good reason, skip, be fair.’

  ‘Ekthcuthe me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Would thith help?’

  The other two turned, and became conscious of a light. Not a wholesome, help-you-see-in-the-dark sort of light, more your ghastly livid green glow. It proceeded from the tail of a sort of flatfish thing; a flatfish, that is, such as Ronnie Bosch might have thought up on one of his gloomier days and then painted over because it gave him the willies.

  ‘Stone me, Vern,’ gasped the Captain, ‘what the hell have you got there? It’s awful.’

  ‘It’th a fith, thkip, with a light in itth tail. I thought it might come in handy, thkip, inthtead of a torch . . .’

  ‘All right, all right.You hold the, er, thing while we do the hole.’

  In order to dig holes in the bottom of the deepest point in the ocean, you need a large cordless drill, an enormously long drill bit and a pressure hose to blast away millions of years of accumulated, undisturbed slime. And, of course, the chuck key for the drill.

  ‘Right, Keith,’ panted the Captain. ‘Gimme the chuck key, and I’ll just . . .’

  ‘Now hold on a minute, skip, you know perfectly well you’ve got the . . .’

  ‘Oh shit!’

  ‘Ekthcuthe me again, Thkip, but would thith be any good?’

  The other two engineers turned and stared.

  Basically, it was a sort of depraved looking crab. With a most peculiarly shaped tail.

  ‘This is bloody ridiculous,’ muttered the Captain.

  ‘Dead handy, though.’

  ‘There’s still no guarantee it’ll fit,’ the Captain grumbled. ‘I mean, it might be a metric size or something . . .’

  It wasn’t. Nor, unlike your common or garden inanimate chuck key, did it slip out of your hand just when you’re giving it that last half-turn and hide under the workbench. The Captain dabbed the trigger-button lightly, thereby confirming that all systems were operational.

  ‘Lads,’ he said quietly, just before setting drill to rock, ‘don’t you get the funny feeling that things are going a bit too well on this job?’

  The drill screamed, and started to bite. As he guided the thing, the Captain could feel his whole body juddering and stretching as the vibrations twanged through him and out into the water all around.

  ‘Thkip!’

  ‘What is it?’ the Captain screamed. ‘You’ll have to shout, I can’t hear you very well because of the noise of this thing.’

  ‘I thaid thkip!’

  ‘Yes, I heard that bit.’

  ‘Well, that’th all I’d thaid tho far.’

  ‘Then carry on,’ the Captain screamed above the sound of the drill, whining in the rock like a baby Tyrannosaurus with wind. ‘Try and maintain the admirable standard of narrative clarity you’ve set yourself up till now.’

  ‘Thorry?’

  ‘It’s all right, I was only . . .’

  ‘It’th very hard to hear you, thkip, becauthe of the drill. Can you thpeak up a bit?’

  ‘Yes. Get on with it.’

  The spectral engineer shrugged. ‘I jutht wanted to athk, thkip, why are we doing thith?’

  The Captain shuddered horribly. The drill had just touched on something it couldn’t cut, and the side-effects radiated out across the sea-bed, giving rise to duff seismographic readings right across the world.

  ‘Good question,’ he said, as soon as his teeth had stopped waltzing about in his mouth. ‘Something to do with this EuroBosch thing, they told me. Apparently, he wants to tap into this lot for the fountains in the main courtyard.’

  ‘I think,’ said the other spectral engineer, ‘it’s for drains or something like that.’

  The other two looked at him.

  ‘Drains?’

  ‘This hole we’re digging. It’s either drains or telephone wires, one or the other. Stands to reason,’ the spectral engineer asserted confidently.

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘Use your loaf, skip. Why else do people dig holes?’

  The Captain paused, drill in hand, the light from the flatfish making strange shadows on the ocean floor. Why do people dig holes? he wondered. />
  Graves.

  Mantraps.

  Planting land mines.

  Because they get told to, mostly.

  And, of course, drains. He straightened his back and looked around. Nothing to be seen, except the solid walls of the darkness all around them.

  ‘As simple as that?’ he said at last.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘No hidden or ulterior motive?’

  ‘Why should there be?’

  The Captain shrugged and repositioned the drill bit in the hole. ‘No reason,’ he said. ‘It just seems too, well, normal to me. Useful, too.’

  The drill made contact, and there was a long interval of screeching metal, spine-jarring vibrations and Keith whistling (the latter audible despite the Captain jamming the drill on to full speed). Then something gave way, and before the Captain could call out ‘I think we’re through, lads’, the water around them started to seethe and boil. Like the emptying of God’s bath, it gurgled, whirlpooled and sucked. The drill, the three engineers and forty thousand tons of yucky black goo were swept up and swallowed whole.

  The last two thoughts to pass through the Captain’s mind, before the whirlpool got him and catapulted him back into the whole tedious rigmarole of temporary death and routine reincarnation, were:

  Maybe we drilled a bit too deep.

  Funny. I didn’t remember seeing Lundqvist anywhere.

  Water. Mother Nature’s flexible jackhammer.

  Billions of gallons of the stuff, enough to fill all the swimming pools in Beverley Hills, roaring and burping down a molybdenum steel drain towards the centre of the earth.

  Ronnie Bosch was proud of that drain. Not because it was a miracle of engineering (walls only ninety thou. thick, but proofed to twenty-six tons per square inch; machined from solid out of one of the pillars used for thousands of years to support the sky until they discovered it stayed up there perfectly happily of its own accord); more because he’d managed to get it made and installed in twelve hours flat, and nobody had even troubled to ask him what he wanted it for. When you’ve been used to having to sign four pink chits and a green requisition every time you want your pencil sharpened, it comes as a bit of a shock.