Faust Among Equals (5 page)

And then it had started coming rather too easily. Even when he shut his eyes. Particularly when he shut his eyes. Like now, for example.

How about an enormous mutant duck, with huge oval eyes and a beak the size of a tennis racket, and a hideous sort of hungry leer which made you think it was about to . . . ?

Quickly, he opened his eyes, rubbed them with the knuckles of his fists, and swallowed a heaped handful of librium.

He started to draw a cow.

 

Drawn-faced, travel-sore and ever so slightly out of his head with fatigue, Lundqvist pushed open the door of the American bookstore in Paris and leant both elbows heavily on the counter.

‘Goethe,' he said.

‘Pardon me?'

‘You deaf or something? I said Goethe.'

The girl behind the counter adjusted her spectacles. ‘You want a book by Goethe?' she hazarded.

‘You got it.'

The girl considered. ‘I think we've got one somewhere,' she said. ‘We used to have, anyway. I haven't been here long.'

‘Fetch.'

The girl went away; shortly afterwards she came back.

‘You're sure the book you wanted was by Goethe?'

‘Yes.'

‘We've got this one.' She handed over a dusty paperback with the air of someone who's been asked for some pretty daffy things in their time but is still just occasionally capable of surprise. ‘Is this the . . . ?'

Lundqvist glanced down at the spine.
Faust
. Parts One and Two. Complete and unabridged. A Mentor Classic. ‘Yeah,' Lundqvist growled. ‘Marlowe.'

The girl took a look at his hard-worn trenchcoat and the bulge under his left arm. ‘That's your name, right?'

‘Christopher Marlowe,' replied Lundqvist, suggesting that his patience was not unlimited. ‘British sixteenth-century dramatist. Complete works. Move it.'

The girl went away again, and again came back.

‘We've only got Volume One in the NEL edition,' she said. ‘I can order . . .'

Lundqvist took the book, flipped it open at the list of contents and nodded. ‘That's fine,' he said. ‘No problem. Keep the change.'

On a bench beside the Seine, Lundqvist ripped open the paper bag in which the girl had insisted on wrapping the books, selected the Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, and began to read.

He found it hard going. His usual reading matter tended to be terser and less flowery (‘Step three; wire up the timing device to the detonator') and he knew for a fact that large parts of Marlowe's version were heavily embroidered, fanciful or just plain wrong.

He wondered why. For a start, the jerk he'd known all these years had his faults, God knows, but even he didn't go around talking poetry all the time, like some goddamn faggot.

Eventually, however, he found what he was looking for. Having underlined it heavily in yellow marker pen and noted down the page number in his notebook, he opened the Goethe version and, after a great deal of tedious slogging through, found the passage that corroborated exactly what he'd found out in the Marlowe. Fine.

He stuck the books in his pocket and went off to buy a 55mm recoilless rifle.

 

The Company Secretary looked up, his hand over the mouthpiece of the receiver.

‘It's
him
,' he hissed. ‘What do I do?'

The Finance Director frowned. ‘I'll take the call,' he said. ‘You get Security to see if they can get a trace on the line.'

He lifted the telephone in front of him, took a deep breath, and said, ‘Yes?'

‘Hi.'

The Finance Director thought for a moment. ‘It's a terribly bad line,' he said. ‘You'll have to speak up.'

‘Listen,' replied the voice at the other end. ‘I'm giving you fair warning. No doubt you've got people on my trail. Call them off. Otherwise, you'll regret it. Got that?'

The Finance Director smiled. ‘I think so,' he said. ‘You're saying that unless we leave you alone, something
bad
is going to happen to us.' He paused, for effect. ‘Hasn't it crossed your mind that every conceivable bad thing there is has probably happened to us already? Bearing in mind—'

The line went dead.

‘No luck,' said Security. ‘Not enough time. Somewhere in Europe, probably late twentieth, early twenty-first century. Otherwise . . .'

‘It doesn't matter,' the Finance Director replied with a sigh. ‘The chances of him doing anything silly and giving himself away are a snowflake's chance in . . . Anyway,' he went on, ‘at least we're in communication. Of a sort. We'll have him, don't you worry.'

The Company Secretary stroked his chin, causing sparks. ‘Excuse me if I'm barking up the wrong tree here,' he said, but wasn't that a threat he just came out with?
Otherwise, you'll regret it
, something like that?'

The Finance Director shrugged. ‘Bluster,' he said.

‘Ah,' replied the Company Secretary. ‘For a moment there I thought it was a threat.'

‘Same thing. Bluster is a threat you make when you're backed up against a wall facing certain death at the hands of overwhelmingly superior forces.'

‘Ah. Like, Bluster's last stand, sort of thing?'

The Finance Director gave him a look, and he grinned sheepishly. They both knew what the Company Secretary had originally been sent down for; and it wasn't simony or stealing sheep. You'd have thought he'd have learnt his lesson by now.

‘Don't worry,' the Finance Director said. ‘There's no threat he can possibly pose to anyone. He's got nothing up his sleeve except his arm, take it from me.'

N
ot long afterwards, Lucky George started his reign of terror.

That's overstating the case somewhat. More a series of brisk showers of extreme aggravation.

Historians have, after exhaustive research, pinpointed what you might term the Sarajevo or Harper's Ferry of Lucky George's war against humanity. It was half past six on a Friday; the place, the centre of Amiens. The victim, a young insurance salesman whose name is not recorded. As a result, the annual wreaths are laid at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, although soldier is probably pushing it a bit.

The victim, hurrying to catch his bus, pauses for a moment outside a branch of the Credit Lyonnais. He fumbles in his wallet until he finds his cash dispenser card. He inserts it. He waits.

After five seconds or so (which is a long time when you're standing out in the street, painfully conscious of the ebb and flow of the French provincial bus service passing you by) the cash dispenser makes a noise. Par for the course, sure; but this isn't part of its usual repertoire.

It burps.

The victim frowns. He presses the button marked
Cancel Transaction
, and waits.

The lights flicker. The machine spells out a message.

it says. Then it flickers again.

The victim raises an eyebrow. Some last smear of the basic survival instinct spattered across the back of his mind prompts him to take a step back. The lights dance.

This time, the victim can actually smell the danger, but it's too late. The machine is looking directly at him. In fact, it's smiling.

There is a fundamental and rather dangerous urge in all of us to try and cling to the jagged edge of normality, even when it's blindingly obvious that the longer you hold on, the further you're going to fall when your grip finally fails. The victim presses
Cancel Transaction
again. Bad move.

The victim tries to back away, but the machine is doing a very good mongoose impression. It seems to have a direct line to the victim's feet.

The victim's first thought is to apologise, but the dead hand of normality is gripping the scruff of his neck. You can't talk to these machines, he's thinking, they're just machines, they can't . . .

A stream of banknotes, glued together to form something disquietingly like a tongue, lashes out of the cash slot, flails horribly in the air, and lands on the victim's tie. Then it retracts.

Just as the victim's nose is pressed up against the perspex screen, his chin flattened against the diagram showing the Right Way Up, the tortured fibres of the tie give way, leaving the tongue wrapped round three inches of terylene, and the victim flat on his back in the gutter. But not for long.

He scrambles to his feet. He runs. In his haste to get away, he fails to notice the patrolling gendarme and collides with him heavily. There's a short interlude, while the gendarme brushes the insurance salesman off his lapels.

‘Monsieur!' There's a wildness in his eyes that commands attention, and fair enough. When a Frenchman is palpably more afraid of something that he's recently seen than a gendarme he's just knocked over, there's got to be something badly the matter. ‘Monsieur, the bank just tried to kill me. It swallowed my card, and then it ate my tie.'

The gendarme has summed up the victim as mentally disturbed and is just about to render psychiatric first-aid with his truncheon when he catches sight of the banknote tongue, still thrashing about, trying to feed three inches of tie in through the cash slot. He stares.

The machine stares back. Then - there's no other way to put this - it sticks its tongue out at the policeman.

The gendarme stiffens. There are certain things you just don't do, no matter how many branches and wholly-owned subsidiary companies you've got.

It only takes him a fraction of a second to bark out the obligatory warning. The tongue extends further and waggles about. In fact, it connects with the gendarme's kepi, twists it round a couple of times, and stuffs it into the cash slot. There is another burp. A button lands on the pavement and rolls drunkenly away.

The rest is most definitely not silence. Out comes the gendarme's 9mm service automatic. Three cracks, like the breaking of a giant's leg bones. The machine goes on grinning.

It displays a derogatory message on its screen.

All this is well known, of course; you'll find it in any history book, in one version or another. What isn't so well recorded - probably because it's so very unnerving, and mankind can only take so much reality before it starts demanding that something be done about it - is the fact that when the gendarme in question received his bank statement at the end of the month, he was disturbed to find an entry recording three rounds of 125-grain full metal jacket 9mm Parabellum credited to his account on the day in question.

With interest. And, of course, basic rate tax deducted at source.

 

Shortly after the first reports of this contretemps had reached the Hot Seat and were dismissed as being a rather offbeat practical joke, a fax machine in Toronto grabbed a secretary by the wrist as she was feeding paper into it, hurled her across the ionosphere and dumped her down in Winnipeg, in the front office of a highly respected firm of water diviners.

To make matters worse, it was a wrong number.

Microwaves the length and breadth of Florida burst simultaneously into song until switched off, while a team of firemen in Tokyo fought for two hours to release a chat-show host from the interior of a portable television set. When the unfortunate man was eventually freed, he was found to have broken several small bones in his wrists while hammering on the inside of the glass.

In Novosibirsk, an entire warehouseful of retractable ballpoint pens was destroyed by long-range artillery fire after turning into small but incredibly agile yellow snakes. The President of Venezuela appeared on national television to appeal for calm after all the office dictating machines in the country started answering back. Large parts of the centre of Perth were sealed off, leaving a handful of bemused Marines to watch the stately dance of the traffic lights over the sights of their machine-guns. In London, all the telephones refused to speak to each other for three hours, but nobody noticed. Workers on a People's Farm at an undisclosed location in Shantung province were frightened out of their wits when they reported for work only to find that the newly planted rice-paddy had spontaneously landscaped itself into an eighteen-hole golf course, complete with electric carts, clubhouse and conference facilities.

Absolutely nothing peculiar happened in Ireland at all, which was perhaps the most disconcerting part of it. No statues of the Virgin Mary moved their arms or were seen to weep tears for a period calculated to have been in excess of three hours.