Faust Among Equals (13 page)

‘So?' Helen said. ‘Any bright ideas?'

George nodded. ‘Sure,' he said. ‘That's why we're here. Although,' he added, looking round, ‘when I said find me the most desolate, godforsaken place in the Universe, I didn't actually
mean
the most desolate, godforsaken . . .'

‘Don't be silly, George. There are far worse places than this.'

‘Name me one.'

‘Adelaide.'

‘Ah.' George raised an eyebrow. ‘I take it she's Sydney's sister.'

‘No, that's Victoria. You think we can just hide out, then, and wait for him to biodegrade or something?'

George shook his head. ‘No such luck. No, what I had in mind was something quite different.'

He leant back in his chair, waiting for her to ask him what he had in mind. She, however, folded her arms and started telling him all about the First Fleet, Ned Kelly and Aussie Rules football. ‘What I had in mind,' said George, raising his hand for silence, ‘was going on the offensive. A pre-emptive strike, in fact.'

Helen picked up a crystal of coffee sugar and bit on it. ‘And how are we going to do that from here, may I ask?'

A grin spread across George's face like a late-summer sunset; or, if you prefer, an oil slick. ‘We're not,' he replied. ‘However, there's this bloke I know owes me a favour . . .'

 

Two seagulls, circling in the first light of dawn.

‘Maybe,' screamed one above the hissing of the wind, ‘I should just call them, check they've delivered the canned tomatoes.'

‘Cool it, Mike,' screeched Larry. ‘They're perfectly capable of running the joint for a few weeks without any help from us. We've just gotta concentrate on the job in hand, okay?'

Mike stared down through the quickening light at a wet green landscape. In the distance there was a hill, curiously man-made in appearance, crowned by what looked like a church tower without the church. At its foot, like a spilt plate of seafood risotto, sprawled a small, untidy town, coagulated around the ruins of a monastery.

‘You're sure he's in?'

Larry turned his head and tried to endow his windlashed eyes with a look of contempt. ‘He's been in his grave for a thousand years, Mike. Dead guys don't just slip out for a pizza.'

They waited for a suitable downdraught, adjusted their wing angles and swooped.

 

It used to say:

in rather wobbly capitals on a piece of broken millstone. In 1259, however, a passing blacksmith in need of a bit of something to sharpen scythes on removed the original memorial, and the spot remained unmarked until the middle of the twentieth century, when the appropriate government department replaced it with a large concrete slab bearing the suitable inscription:
which is, considered all in all, perhaps the finest obituary a man can ask for.

 

Two seagulls dropped awkwardly out of a thermal and flumped on to a concrete slab.

‘You do it,' whispered Mike. ‘I'm sick of always having to be the one who gets landed with all the talking.'

‘All right,' Larry said irritably. ‘What do I do now?'

The seagulls looked around, and then at each other. ‘Search me,' said Mike. ‘Knock. Ring the bell.'

Larry thought about it for a moment, and then addressed the side of the slab with his beak. He rapped three times, and waited.

The seagulls looked at each other again. The voice hadn't come from anywhere; nor, strictly speaking, had it been a voice. If it resembled anything at all from the realms of conventional experience, it was a vague recollection of hearsay.

‘We aren't collecting,' Mike replied. ‘We've got a message. From George Faustus.'

This time, however, the recollection was of a statement that had turned out, on closer inspection, not to have been true. A false rumour, perhaps, which proves impossible to pin down to any specific source.

‘Mr Faustus says,' Larry went on, ‘that if you've never heard of him, then you can't ever have lent him the fifty thousand marks, which means he doesn't have to pay you back, and sorry to have—'

‘Really?' said Helen, impressed in spite of herself. ‘He's a friend of yours too?'

George made a slight face. ‘Friend is maybe an over-statement,' he said. ‘We did some business together, I owe him money, he owes me a few favours. No, I guess friend is okay, on reflection, just so long as you leave out the affection side of things.'

‘Gosh.' Helen dabbed powder on her nose and put the compact away. ‘And did he really have a round table full of knights and a magic sword and a Holy Grail and all that?'

George nodded. ‘Sure thing,' he said. ‘Brilliant camouflage,' he added.

Helen looked up at him sharply. ‘Camouflage?'

‘Naturally. What else?' An idea struck him. ‘You didn't think all that stuff was for real, did you?'

Helen nodded. ‘Insofar as I believed he existed,' she added.

George laughed. ‘Strictly for the customers, all that,' he said. ‘Sure, Arthur was the best king Albion ever had, absolutely marvellous administrator, had the rivers running on time, that sort of thing. But you don't manage that just because you've got a few hundred idiots in steel long johns on the payroll.'

‘You don't?'

‘'Course not.' He turned his head and smiled. Immediately, the waiter brought him the bill, which shows just how unimaginably powerful George's magical powers were. ‘Think about it. If you want to conquer inflation, revitalise the moribund standing stone circle industry, eliminate racial tension between the Wee Folk and the Nixies in the Inner Toadstools and stabilise the magic ring against the deutschmark, what you need is sound fiscal policies, not a bunch of brainless pillocks on horses and an overgrown letter-opener that glows in the dark. Dammit, you don't drag a whole nation kicking and screaming into the Dark Ages without a firm grasp of the principles of revenue management, and that's what Arthur had. That,' he added, with an unwonted tang of respect in his voice, ‘is why they called him the Once and Future Accountant. A reputation like that, it's something you've got to earn, believe me.'

‘Oh.' There was just the tiniest hint of disappointment, disillusionment even, in Helen's voice. ‘An accountant. How unspeakably romantic.'

‘Yes,' George replied. ‘And that's why he's just the man we need.'

 

Say what you like about accountants . . .

Finished?

Good.

Say what you like about accountants, for clarity of thought and an ability to get to the heart of the matter, they have few rivals. Accordingly, it took the greatest accountant in history roughly the same amount of time to grasp the proposition and reach a decision as, say, the shutter of a Leica is open when taking a picture of a moving object on a very bright day.

‘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.