Overtime (19 page)

The Chief Warden hung his head, waiting for the feel of the guard's hand on his shoulder. Instead, he heard the half-man's voice again.

‘I told the driver to come back in five hours' time,' he said, ‘so we're stuck here till then. How about a game of something?'

‘Thank you,' said the Chief Warden, ‘but I don't really feel in the mood for ...'

‘I wasn't talking to you,' the half-man said. ‘Julian, what about a rubber of bridge? You and you against me and Mr ... Oh, sorry, I forgot. Can't bid when you're being Infallible, might go two no trumps and get doubled, and what would that do to the Ninth Lateran Council? Oh well, this is going to be a jolly evening, isn't it?'

There was a long silence, during which the Chief Warden stared at the wall. By now, his wife would have given up waiting and served the cold beetroot soup with sour cream and chives. Where he was going, he reflected, not only would he never taste his wife's cooking ever again; he would also never have eaten it in the first place. The corners of his lips rose involuntarily.

‘I spy,' said the half-man, ‘with my little eye ... Literally, in my case, of course. Let's see. Something beginning with ... Chief Warden, is this a
complete
set of Blondel recordings?'

The Chief Warden nodded.

‘Including the 1196 White Album?'

Without wanting to, the Chief Warden smirked. ‘Yes, sir,' he said.

‘The pirate edition, naturally?'

‘No sir,' the Chief Warden replied - O grave, thy victory - ‘the official recording, sir. With,' he added vindictively, ‘Gace Brulé on drums.'

‘I see,' said the half-man. ‘Chief Warden, have you, er, made a will?'

The Chief Warden nodded.

‘Yes,' said the half-man, ‘I expect you probably have. Invalid, of course. If you never existed, you can't have made a will, which means that all your property will be forfeit to the—'

‘If I never existed, sir,' replied the Chief Warden, with relish, ‘then I could never have bought the very last copy of the
official
recording of the 1196 White Album. Which means,' he added happily, ‘that somebody else must have bought it, sir. Don't you think?'

‘I...'

‘Which is a pity, sir, wouldn't you say, since I left it to you in my will.'

‘I...'

‘Specifically. And there's the Chastelain de Coucy,' said the Chief Warden, as if to himself, ‘on tenor crumhorn. Blow that thing!' he added.

‘Chief Warden!' The half-man's voice was suddenly as hard as diamonds. Black diamonds, industrial grade. ‘Look at me when I'm talking to you.'

The Chief Warden turned smartly and smiled. No worries about looking that half-skull in the eye; not in the circumstances. For it had occurred to the Chief Warden that, if his collection of Blondel records still existed, then Blondel too must have existed; and if he had existed, then he must, somehow or other, have got out of the Archive. In which case, sang the Chief Warden's heart within him, I'm going to get out of this mess somehow or other, quit this bloody awful job, find another copy of the 1196 White Album and retire.

‘Have you any idea,' said the half-man, ‘how serious an offence it is to attempt to pervert the course of my justice?'

‘No, sir.'

‘Well,' said the half-man, ‘it's very serious. So don't do it, d'you hear? Leave it out completely. Understood?'

‘Sir.'

‘Splendid. You, whatever your name is.'

Pursuivant lifted his head from his notebook and clicked his heels smartly under the table. ‘Yes, Your Highness?' he said.

‘Is that the court record you've got there?' the half-man enquired.

‘Yes, Your Highness.'

‘Hand it to me.'

Pursuivant closed the notebook and passed it over. The half-man took it, flipped it open, and took hold of several pages between his teeth. Then he leaned his head back and pulled. The pages ripped away from the spiral binding, and the half-man stuffed them into his half-mouth, chewed vigorously with his half-set of teeth, and swallowed.

‘Yuk!' he said.

‘Sir!' Pursuivant shouted. His eyes were so far out of his head that he looked like a startled grasshopper. ‘You can't do that!'

The half-man looked at him. Of that look there is nothing to say, except that a few hours later Pursuivant showed up at the sick bay waving a studded club and demanding to have his memory wiped.

‘Next time,' the half-man said, ‘don't use pencil, it tastes horrible. Shut up, Julian, you'll sprain your hands. Now then, Chief Warden. John,' he corrected. ‘Or rather, Jack, my old son. Why didn't you tell me you were a Blondel man?'

‘Well, sir ...'

‘Tony,' said the half-man. ‘Call me Tony.'

‘Well, Tony,' said the Chief Warden, ‘I wouldn't have thought ... In the circumstances, I mean—'

‘Nonsense,' said the half-man. ‘Just because I don't hold with the feller personally doesn't mean I can't admire his music. And I may only have one ear, but it isn't made of tin. Is it really Gace Brulé on drums?'

The Chief Warden nodded. ‘There's this incredible riff,' he said, ‘in the bridge section in
Quand flours et glais . . .
'

‘Cadenet on vocals?'

‘They do this duet,' replied the Chief Warden, ‘in
San'c fuy belha...'

There was silence for a while, broken only by two - one and a half - men humming. Julian looked at each other and shook his heads sadly.

‘Anyway,' said the half-man, with an effort, ‘this court finds insufficient evidence of the charges alleged and rules that these proceedings be adjourned
sine die
with liberty to restore.' He tried to wink but, naturally, failed. ‘And let that be a lesson to you, Chief Warden.'

‘Sir.'

The half-man rose to his foot. For the record, he moved in a strange - you might say mysterious - way; the half of his body which was there moved as if the other half was there too. ‘All rise,' he said. ‘Come on, Julian on your feet. Go and make a cup of coffee or something. You too, whatever your name is. Go and see if you can raise that blasted driver on the radiophone. Now then, Jack ...'

The Anti-Pope and his previous life shrugged and went to look for a kettle. Pursuivant, mentally exhausted, found a cupboard under some stairs and went to sleep in it. From the Chief Warden's office came the sound, in perfect Dolby stereo and highly amplified, of Blondel singing
L 'Amours Dont Sui Epris.

If anybody - apart, of course, from the man and a half in the office - joined in the second verse, nobody heard.

 

The waiter who brought him his iced coffee and a glass of water looked familiar, and Blondel asked him his name.

‘Spiro,' the waiter said.

‘Yes,' Blondel replied, ‘but Spiro what?'

‘Maniakis,' the waiter replied. ‘Is it important?'

Blondel shrugged. ‘Did your family use to farm down near Mistras, a while back?' he asked. The waiter looked at him. ‘Do excuse my asking, but you remind me of someone I used to know.'

‘Really?' The waiter gave him an even stranger look.

‘A hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty years ago, my mother's family lived in a village near Mistras. What of it?'

Blondel suddenly remembered who the waiter reminded him of. ‘Sorry,' he said, ‘my mistake. Sorry to have bothered you.'

The waiter shrugged and walked away, whistling. The tune, incidentally, was a very garbled recollection of
L'Amours Dont Sui Epris,
which the waiter had learned from his great-grandmother. Blondel finished his coffee quickly and left.

A tiresome sort of day, so far, he said to himself as he wandered back towards the Town Hall; and it had been just as well that he'd noticed the door marked
Staff Only, No Admittance
in that split second before the oil rig blew up. It was good to be out of the Archives again, but disturbing that he'd heard someone singing the second verse of the song. It could just have been a coincidence, of course; but he had the feeling, although he had no scientific data to back it up with, that coincidences didn't happen in the Archives. Something to do with the climate, perhaps. Another missing person to look for, too. Just one damn thing after another.

He looked at his watch. In twenty minutes or so he planned to sing the song under the ruined Crusader castle on the promontory; then (assuming no response) he ought to be getting along to the 1750s, where he'd pencilled in a couple of Rhine schlosses to round the day off with. Then, with any luck, bed, with the prospect of looking for two characters lost in history instead of just one to look forward to. Well, it doubled his chance of finding something, if you cared to look at it that way, although it could be argued that twice times sod all is still sod all.

He decided to walk down to the promontory by way of the market, just for the hell of it. It was nine months and seven hundred years since he'd been here last - the time before that had been fifty years in the future, but that had been years ago now - and he liked to see what changes had been, or were to be, made in the places he visited. Had they filled in the enormous pothole in the road just opposite the Church?

He had stopped to buy a packet of nuts in the market and was just walking up the hill towards the steps when somebody waved at him — just waved, as if to say hello to a not particularly close acquaintance - and walked on. This was, of course, an extremely rare occurrence. He looked round and tried to find the face in the crowd by the motorcycle spares stalls, and was just about to write if off as another very distant cousin when the wave came again, causing Blondel to drop his packet of nuts.

Oh
bother,
Blondel thought.

‘Hello?' Guy said.

In the darkness, something moved; something small and four-legged. Guy, who was not the sort of person who readily backed down from positions of principle, nevertheless began to wonder whether he'd done the right thing. La Beale Isoud wasn't his cup of tea, but at least she wasn't four-legged and didn't scuttle about in pitch darkness. Not so far as he knew.

‘Hello?' said a voice in the darkness. ‘Is there somebody there?'

‘Yes,' Guy replied, feeling that his line had been stolen. ‘Er ...' he continued.

‘Make yourself at home,' said the voice, and something in its tone implied that it really meant it. ‘Don't mind the rat,' the voice went on. ‘It doesn't bite. It's a cousin of a rat I used to know quite well, actually.'

‘Oh yes?'

‘Yes indeed,' the voice went on. ‘The rats here are all related, you see. Generations of them. It doesn't seem to have had any adverse effect on them. If anything, it seems to have made them unusually docile and friendly.'

‘Right,' Guy said. ‘Good. Is there any light in here?'

‘I'm afraid not, no,' said the voice. ‘Are you from the cell next door?'

Guy quivered slightly. ‘Excuse me,' he said, ‘but did you say cell?'

‘Well,' said the voice, ‘yes I did, actually.'

‘You mean,' Guy continued, ‘that this is a, well, prison?'

There was a brief silence. ‘So I've been led to believe,' said the voice. ‘It's always seemed fairly prison-like to me, at any rate.'

‘Oh.' Guy paused for a moment and reflected. ‘You've been here a long time, then?'

‘Quite a long time, yes.'

‘How long?'

‘Now,' the voice said, ‘there's a good question. Let me see now; five, ten, twenty, twenty-five ... I make it about a thousand years, give or take a bit.'

Guy made a sort of noise. This was not his intention; he had been trying to say, ‘But it's impossible for anyone to be still alive after a thousand years, let alone a thousand years in a place like this,' but it came out wrong. The owner of the voice, however, seemed to get the gist of it.

‘It does seem rather a long time, doesn't it?' he said, as if he was mildly surprised himself. ‘It's amazing, though, how quickly you fall into a sort of a routine, and then the time just flies by. Of course, I haven't been
here
for all of the time.'

‘I was just about to say—'

‘For about - oh, nine hundred and ninety-nine years and eleven months, I was in the cell next door,' the voice said. ‘Then they moved me in here. I must say, it is an improvement.'

‘Improvement,' Guy repeated. Although it was pitch dark, his senses were sending him a series of reports of their initial findings, which were generally rather negative. Probably just as well, they were saying, that it is pitch dark in here. So much less depressing.