Faust Among Equals (8 page)

‘Well I didn't,' the leader replied. ‘Just count yourselves lucky this is a university. Here, the weird is commonplace, so we should be okay. Let's go and have a drink in the bar.'

‘Have they got a bar, skip?'

‘They'd bloody well better have.'

They did. Huddled in a corner of the Junior Common Room over three pints of Abbot Ale, just under the dartboard, they looked totally inconspicuous.

‘Real bummer, Howard getting run other like that,' observed Number Three, wiping froth from the mouth-hole of his balaclava.

‘Yes.'

‘You'd have thought they'd have warned uth.'

‘Yes.'

‘Maketh you thick, thometimeth.'

‘You are already, Vernon.'

‘What, thick?'

‘Yes.'

Number Three considered. ‘No I'm not,' he replied, puzzled. ‘I had a headache thith morning, but . . .'

The leader cleared his throat with a semblance of authority, before the whole bloody thing degenerated into farce. ‘According to the plan,' he said, ‘the library is up the stairs on our left as we came in, keeping the hall doorway to our right. Got that?'

‘Sure thing, skip.' Number Two finished the last of the salted peanuts. ‘What is it we're looking for, exactly?'

‘A lead,' replied his commanding officer, with wasted irony.

‘What thort of a lead?'

‘Any sort of a lead.'

‘Only,' Number Three continued, ‘there'th a lead coming out of the back of thith computer game thing, if that'th any help. It goeth right acroth the wall and back into the—'

‘A clue. Something to go on. A material fact.'

‘What sort of a material fact, skip ?'

One of the minor tragedies about being a spectral warrior is the fact that, being inhuman, they can't settle down and have children. Just now, the leader felt, he had an inkling of what he was missing.

‘All right,' he said. ‘Listen carefully. There's this bloke called George Faustus, right?'

‘You mean Lucky George.'

‘You got it. Now, shortly after he was arrested - very shortly, in fact - this nerd of a playwright called Christopher Marlowe wrote a play all about him. Lots of details in it that he couldn't possibly have known unless he was privy to some pretty restricted stuff. Marlowe was a student here at the time. The idea is, perhaps there's some papers or diaries of his lying about here somewhere which might put us in the right direction. Understood?'

Number Two considered the proposition, and clearly found it counter-intuitive. ‘Hey,' he said, ‘that was years ago. Unless they're really, you know, untidy...'

‘My couthin Thimon'th very untidy. He keepth all hith old electrithity billth and gath billth and water billth and—'

‘Not for over four hundred years he doesn't, I bet.'

‘That'th becauth he'th only thirty-thickth. Give him a chanthe.'

‘No, listen,' interrupted the leader, slightly desperate. ‘Marlowe's a great playwright. When you're a great playwright, they keep all your letters and papers and things. It's called research.'

‘My couthin Thimon'th not a playwright.'

‘Vernon.'

‘Yeth?'

‘Shut up.'

At twenty to twelve, the bar steward turned them out and they wandered about in the night air for a while, waiting for the college to go to sleep. At half past one, they crept noiselessly, or relatively noiselessly, to the library door, and the leader fumbled for his skeleton key.

‘Keith.'

‘Yes, skip?'

‘Whose turn was it to bring the key?'

‘Yours, skip.'

‘Kick the door in, Keith.'

‘Okay, skip.'

It was, they realised, a big library. Big as in huge. There were, as Number Three percept ively remarked, books everywhere.

‘All right,' the leader said, raising his voice to a whimper. ‘Let's make a start, anyway. Those shelves over there.'

They hadn't been at it for more than an hour, scrabbling aimlessly by the light of small dark torches, when all the lights suddenly went on. They turned, to see a small, bald man in a dressing gown bearing down on them.

‘Thkip.'

‘What is it now?'

‘Can we do the thilent killing, thkip? It'th my turn to do the thilent killing, and you promithed.'

‘It's not really appropriate right now, Vern. Next time, I give you my word.' The leader then straightened his back, smiled and said, ‘Can I help you?'

The bald man stopped in his tracks for a moment. ‘Who the hell are you?' he asked.

The leader thought quickly. ‘Interloan,' he replied. ‘We got here late, your librarian's gone home for the night, we're in a bit of a hurry, so . . .'

The words dribbled away like a test-tube of water into the Gobi desert. The bald man shook his head.

‘I know who you are all right,' he said.

‘Oh.' The leader frowned. ‘I don't want to sound facetious, but you don't seem terribly frightened, in that case.'

The bald man snorted. ‘Frightened?' he replied. ‘Frightened of you? Don't make me laugh. It'd take more than a cack-handed attempt at academic espionage to frighten me.'

The leader felt a nudge at his elbow. ‘What'th academic ethpio—?'

‘Well,' the bald man went on, ‘you can jolly well think again, because it's not here. I suppose that rat Amesbury sent you, didn't he?'

Why not? ‘That's about it,' the leader said. ‘Mind, we're only obeying ord—'

‘Appalling! Going about trying to steal another man's research papers and you call yourselves scholars! Where's your ethics?'

‘Hang on, I know that. It'th the one between Kent and Thutholk, ithn't it?'

The bald man blinked twice. ‘What?'

‘Ethekth.'

Just for once, the leader was glad he had Vernon along. Someone capable of saying something so completely disconcerting at a time like this was worth his weight in gold. He decided to press home the advantage.

‘Right,' he said. It was his favourite word. Positive without meaning anything. ‘That's enough out of you, Grandad. You tell us where it is, or it'll be the worse for you.'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘He thaid . . .'

Time to get moderately heavy, the leader decided. From behind his back he produced a heavy black metal object that glinted unpleasantly in the fluorescent light of the library. It was, in fact, the remote control for opening the trapdoor, and likely to break or come loose if you so much as breathed on it, but not enough people knew that for it to be a problem. ‘Show me where it is or you'll get it, understand?'

There was a pause, just long enough to set the leader wondering what he was going to do when the old man said
What are you pointing that remote control key at me for?
Then he started to back away. About bloody time too.

‘You won't get away with this.'

‘That's our business. Come on, move.'

Slowly, and with deadly hatred written all over him, the bald man opened a cupboard and produced a folder.

‘I'll make you pay for this,' he said.

‘Hey, thkip, that'th not right. I thought thith wath a library. You can take thingth out for free from a library, that'th the whole—'

‘Okay,' the leader snapped, ‘that'll do. Come on, move it out. Now.'

It was a close-run thing, at that. Eluding the porter and his wife's Yorkshire terrier wasn't a problem, and neither was the Yale lock on the main gate. What they hadn't bargained for was the Rugby Club, celebrating defeat at the hands of a superior Magdalene Fifteen.

‘Hey skip,' Number Two panted as they fled along the High Street, hotly pursued. ‘You know back there, when you said, Show me where it is or you'll get it.'

‘I know.'

‘But,' Number Two persisted, ‘if he knew where it was, surely he'd got it already.'

The leader pulled up short, too breathless to run any further. The pack was about forty yards behind, and closing.

‘Stone me, Keith, I never thought of that. Right, lads, going down.'

The trapdoor opened, just in the nick of time. For the reasons stated above, the manuscript, when it eventually reached the Hot Seat, was soggy, curled at the edges and just a little smelly. But nobody noticed.

It was Professor Ambermere's long-awaited disclosure of his researches into new material on the life and works of Christopher Marlowe, based on recently discovered manuscripts.

The so-called Amsterdam Archive.

T
hanks to research carried out in the last twenty-odd years, it is now tolerably well known that once they reach the stage of being able to make articulate sounds, all babies, regardless of nationality, ethnic grouping or environment, make virtually the same noises.

Far from being meaningless gurgles, these noises are the only words human beings ever get to speak in their own basic, unpolluted, indigenous language, of which the myriad tongues of Mankind are mere vulgar and corrupt dialects. Within weeks of finding their voices, human infants begin the long process of soaking up the stimuli of their immediate surroundings, and by the time they reach five months old, the Old Language has been supplanted in their centres of speech by the variant they will usually speak and think in for the rest of their lives.

What they are saying, in those initial weeks of vocalisation, is, ‘You
bastards
! Get me back up there
immediately
!'

The Old Language is, of course, not confined to the newly born; it is also the lingua franca of the dead, the immortal and the ineffable. And magicians, necromancers and conjurors also speak it, albeit with an accent that makes them sound like the Germans in war films. For the convenience of our readers we shall ignore this and translate simultaneously as we proceed.

‘Ronnie, old mate,' said Lucky George. ‘Wonderful to hear from you. How in buggery did you get my number?'

In his office in Pandaemonium, Hieronymus Bosch glanced furtively about him and cupped his hand tight round the receiver.

‘Shut up and listen,' he hissed. ‘I'm only doing this because I owe you one, right? Remember that. If they catch me, my life won't be worth . . .' He hesitated. ‘Sorry, Freudian slip. Anyway, they'll bloody well crucify me. Look, George, they're on to you.'

‘They are?'

‘Believe it. I got this number from your dossier, okay? That suggests they're pretty well informed about your whereabouts, doesn't it? They got it all from your diary.'

‘My diary? I've never . . .'

George stopped, blinked and then winced.

‘Sod it,' he said. ‘That's really aggravating, that is.'

Everyone, at some stage of their lives, keeps a diary. Now, the usual reason for doing so is to help you remember, years later, what you did in the past.

Trust Lucky George to be different from everybody else. ‘Where was it?' he asked.

‘Long story,' Bosch replied. ‘To cut it short, though, it showed up in Amsterdam, about twenty years ago. I think you left it on a tram or something.'

‘Did I?'

‘Not did. Will. I think. Did you ever read it, by the way?'

‘What, and find out my future? No fear. I wouldn't be able to sleep nights.'

Bosch shrugged. ‘Anyway,' he said, ‘never mind all that. It's showed up at last, some of our boys from the Spooks department raided some university somewhere and got hold of a copy. The rest is history, if you'll pardon the expression.'

George frowned. ‘Thanks,' he said. ‘Now I owe you one. Has Lundqvist seen it yet, do you know?'

‘It's a reasonably safe bet,' Bosch replied. ‘Of course, they've undertaken to you to call off all their people from persecuting you, so they couldn't have shown him openly. I did hear, though, that once they'd read it, they deposited it in the maximum security vault of the Credit Infernale, with fifteen armed guards and a hi-tech laser-assisted alarm system. Where Lundqvist's concerned, that's the next best thing to pinning it on the notice board in the staff canteen. He's bound to have seen it. It's also on the database, of course, which is what I'm looking at, but Lundqvist's computer-illiterate.' Bosch raised his head, glanced round once more and added, ‘I have an idea they also know about Nellie, so maybe you'd better . . .'

George shook his head. ‘Nah,' he said, ‘that's all right, Nellie can look after herself. Well, thanks a lot, Ronnie. I won't say
Be seeing you
, but take care, be good.'