Overtime (21 page)

‘Oil rig?'

‘They have them in the Archives sometimes,' Blondel explained. ‘It's strictly forbidden, of course. I was lucky enough to find a door just before some idiot blew the whole lot sky high. But there was definitely someone down there singing the second verse of the song - you know,
L'Amours Dont
... Pity I couldn't stay and find out, really. May have to go back.' He stopped and looked at Guy. ‘By the way,' he said, ‘you haven't told me how you—'

Just then, a centurion and two troopers came up behind them and shouted at them. They turned and were about to ask politely if there was anything they could do for anyone when they were accused, in rather intemperate language, of being spies in the pay of Pompey and the Senate, and ordered not to move. Naturally, they ran for it.

‘I said,' Caesar repeated, ‘dismiss.'

Nobody moved. They had all turned their heads to watch something directly behind Caesar's right shoulder.

‘Hey,' Caesar protested, ‘so what's so bloody interesting all of a sudden that—' He looked round too, and saw a large group of angry soldiers chasing two eccentrically dressed men through the camp. They were heading directly for the oak tree.

‘Don't just stand there, you morons,' Caesar snapped. ‘Grab hold of them and find out what—'

He got no further. The more brightly coloured of the two intruders had come dashing up, exhibiting a quite remarkable turn of speed, and collided with the military tribune Titus Labienus, sending him reeling back. Labienus lost his footing on the damp grass, wobbled violently, and fell over. The intruder recovered his balance with an effort and was about to continue running when Caesar himself reached out a long thin arm and attached it to the intruder's ear.

‘Ouch,' the intruder said. He froze.

‘Now then,' Caesar said, ‘just what the hell do you think you're doing, barging in here when I'm having a—'

‘Let go!'

The words came from the second intruder, who was standing about ten yards away from the tree, with a mob of soldiers gaining on him fast. The second intruder didn't seem to be paying any attention to them; he was pointing at Caesar with a small black metallic object in his hand.

‘Let go!' he repeated.

‘Hoy!' Caesar replied angrily. ‘Who do you think you're talking to?'

The brightly dressed intruder squirmed in Caesar's grip. ‘For crying out loud, Guy,' he yelled, ‘put that confounded thing away! You know what happened the last—'

‘If you don't let go,' said the other intruder, ‘it'll be the worse for you.'

Caesar gave him a blank stare; then threw back his head and burst out laughing, at the same time giving the ear in his grip a savage tweak. The second intruder swore, and then there was a loud crack, like a thunderclap. Caesar's hat jumped about a foot into the air, was caught by a gust of wind, and floated away towards the river.

‘My hat!' Caesar shrieked, and clapped his hands to his bald head, too late to stop a great long lock of damp grey hair from slithering off his bald dome and flopping down over his ear. He directed a murderous look at the two intruders and set off in furious pursuit of his floating hat.

‘Guy, you pillock,' Blondel panted, ‘now look what you've done.'

They watched as Caesar, intent only on the recovery of his hat, dived into the waters of the river and started to swim. The current was almost too strong for him but he struck out vigorously, reached the other side and flung himself with a cry of exultant triumph on the hat, which had come to roost in the branches of a stunted thorn bush.

The army, meanwhile, was watching with fascinated attention. As soon as Caesar set foot on the far bank, a great whoop of joy rose from the ranks, as thirty thousand men shouted, all at once;

‘The die is cast! Caesar has crossed the Rubicon! To Rome! Rome!'

Caesar looked up, the hat wedged once more over his slightly protruding ears. A look of supreme disgust crossed his face.

‘Oh
shit,'
he said.

The army had started to cross the river. Someone had hoisted up the sacred Eagle standards. They were singing the battle song of the Fifteenth Legion.

‘I told you,' Blondel said. ‘Didn't I tell you?'

They were alone now in the abandoned camp. On the other side of the river Caesar was being carried on the shoulders of his bodyguard, on inexorably towards Rome and Empire.

‘But I thought that was what was supposed to happen,' Guy whimpered.

Blondel shook his head. ‘In a sense, yes,' he replied. ‘But ... oh, never mind. Let's get out of here and go and have a drink.'

 

Giovanni smiled.

‘What I always say to people in your situation,' he said, ‘people who've fallen off the edge of the world and are sailing aimlessly about, is that one of these days you're bound to find your way back again, and in the meantime, don't you think your money should be working for you as hard as it possibly can, so that when you do finally get out of here ...'

The Genoese merchant gave him a blank, empty-eye-socket stare. Giovanni kept going. In his youth, when he was just another Florentine wide boy hawking scarlet hose and fragments of the True Cross door to door through Gascony, he'd come up against harder nuts than this.

‘Think how long you've been down here,' he said. ‘A hundred years? Two hundred? Would five hundred be nearer the mark, maybe?'

The Genoese made a little muffled noise, somewhere between a moan and a shriek. Giovanni nodded.

‘Okay,' he said, ‘call it four hundred and fifty years, give or take fifty on either side. Now, a modest stake of say one thousand bezants, invested at twenty-five per cent compound interest, tax-free for four hundred and fifty years ...'

The Genoese suddenly howled and tried to bite Giovanni in the neck. Being a man of action as well as a man of intellect, Giovanni sidestepped, picked up an oar and clubbed him savagely on the head. Being an insurance broker he mentioned to him the benefits of proper accident insurance and private health cover. Before he could get any forms out or unscrew the top of his fountain pen, however, the Genoese stopped twitching and lay still. Giovanni sighed; an opportunity lost, he couldn't help feeling.

‘Is he ...?' Marco asked.

Giovanni nodded. ‘Fool to himself,' he said. ‘I suppose we could retrospectively insure his life for a couple of grand, but it hardly seems worth the bother. Come on, let's try over there.'

They walked on over the insubstantial sea, keeping their spirits up by offering passing ships the opportunity to take advantage of low-start endowment mortgages. After about an hour, they came to what looked remarkably like a bank.

‘Don't look at it,' Giovanni said, ‘it's probably just a mirage or something.'

Iachimo shook his head. ‘Look,' he said, ‘they're members of FIMBRA, it says so in the window. It must be a bank.'

‘Iachimo ...'

‘But Giovanni,' Iachimo said, ‘they aren't
allowed
to display the FIMBRA logo unless they're . . .'

Giovanni shrugged. If he was going to start hallucinating, a bank was a nice thing to hallucinate. Especially a bank which, in the circumstances, must count as definitively offshore.

‘We might just wander in,' he said tentatively. ‘Just on the off chance, you know ...'

It was a very nice bank, and before he knew what he was doing Giovanni had filled his pockets with leaflets. Then he noticed something.

‘Iachimo,' he said, ‘Marco, there's nobody here.'

Iachimo sniffed like a dog. ‘You're right,' he said. ‘Completely deserted. How can they be members of FIMBRA if there's nobody ...?'

Giovanni rang the bell; nobody came. Mind you, that didn't mean very much. Next he tried the door that led to the area behind the bulletproof screen. It opened.

‘Coming?' he asked.

Marco looked nervously at the security cameras. ‘Do you think we should?' he said. ‘I mean, we are in the Archives, and—'

‘There's nobody here,' Giovanni replied. ‘Come on.'

They walked through. At once, all the computer screens, which had been blank, sprang into life. They started displaying stock market results from all over the Universe. There were one or two that Giovanni had never heard of before.

‘Here, Iachimo,' he said, ‘you know about these things. What's the ψγ↑γβ←↔↓φ 600 Share Index when it's at home?'

Iachimo frowned and shook his head; clearly, it worried him that he hadn't heard of it. Giovanni, meanwhile, had sat down in front of one of the consoles and was tapping keys. After a while, he looked round.

‘Lads,' he said, ‘I think I've sorted it out.'

The others looked at him.

‘It's pathetically simple, really,' Giovanni said, with a grin. He tapped a key, and a dazzling display of little twinkling figures appeared on the screen in front of him. He paused for a moment and read them. ‘Getting us out of here is going to be no trouble at all. Iachimo, what's the sort code for our bank in Geneva?'

‘7865443,' Iachimo said promptly. ‘Why?'

‘Because,' Giovanni replied, ‘I'm going to pay us into our deposit account there. By telegraphic transfer. A doddle, really. Hold tight.'

He typed in 7865443, then a couple of codes, and then their names. A moment later, they had vanished.

They stayed vanished.

‘Giovanni!' Iachimo screamed. It was dark and cold and he had the sensation of falling and he couldn't feel anything - anything - with any of his limbs or senses. ‘What's happening? Giovanni?'

‘Sod it,' came Giovanni's voice, drifting in nothingness. ‘We must be after business hours. The bastards have put us on hold.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘Means we've got to stay here till the bank opens for the next day's trading,' Giovanni yelled back. ‘Means we'll lose a whole day's interest. When I get out of this, somebody's going to get sued.'

As if in response, there was a deafening crackle and the three brothers felt as if they were being squeezed, like toothpaste, through some sort of nozzle. Then there was a crash, and they fell, head-first, through a computer screen.

‘Giovanni,' Marco said, ‘you've got a bar code printed all over your forehead.'

‘So have you,' Giovanni replied. He picked himself up, dusted splinters of broken cathode ray tube out of his hair, and smiled at the terrified computer operator in whose lap he had landed. She stared at him and then, without removing her eyes from his face, started to fill in an Input chit.

‘Right then,' Giovanni said. ‘Come on, you two. Mademoiselle,' he asked the girl, ‘je vous prie, où sommes-nous, exactement?'

The girl replied that they were in Geneva, and did he want to be taken off deposit? Giovanni confirmed that he did, and the three brothers walked out of the bank into the open air.

‘Quick thinking, that, on my part,' Giovanni said, ‘wouldn't you say?'

‘We should have offered to pay for the broken machines,' Marco replied. ‘They aren't cheap, you know.'

They found a café and had a drink. They could afford it, after all; Marco's lucky silver threepenny bit, which he kept on his key ring, had just accumulated 10,000 Swiss francs interest. Accordingly, it was adjudged to be his shout. He paid.

‘The next thing on the agenda,' Giovanni said, ‘is to find Blondel.'

Iachimo shook his head. ‘Can't do that,' he said. ‘That man said he'd been destroyed, right? Blown up in a Time Archive. Means he never existed.'

Giovanni put down his glass, wiped his lips on his tie and sighed. ‘Don't be a prawn, Iachimo,' he said. ‘If he never existed, how come we both know who I'm talking about?'

‘Who are you talking about?' Marco asked. They ignored him.

‘Stands to reason,' Giovanni went on. ‘If we both remember him, it follows that he must have existed. Thus he can't have been killed in the Archives. Furthermore, if we can remember him here, Topside, then he must have got out of the Archives somehow. In which case he's still here somewhere.
Capisce?'

Iachimo wrinkled his brows, thought about it and then nodded enthusiastically. ‘That's brilliant,' he said. ‘How do we find him?'

Giovanni shrugged. ‘There,' he said, ‘you have me. That's a difficult one. I mean, we had enough trouble finding him last time.'

‘You could try the phone book,' Marco said.

‘I suppose,' Giovanni went on, ‘we could try going back to all the gigs we set up for him which he never actually did and see if he's done any of them yet. Then we could sort of work backwards, and ...'

‘There's a phone book here,' Marco said. ‘Look.'

‘Alternatively,' Giovanni continued, ‘we could hire an enquiry agent. There's Ennio Sforza, only he's semi-retired. Or maybe we could try Annibale Tedesci; I know he really only does cross-temporal divorce work, but he might be prepared to stretch a point...'

‘Here we are,' said Marco. ‘Blondel. Blondelle Cash & Carry, Blondella Hydraulic Systems, Blond Elephant Night club ...'

‘Do you know how much Annibale Tedesci charges per hour?' Iachimo replied. ‘We'd have to do extra gigs just to cover the fees. How about if we did a credit search? We could go back in time, issue him with a credit card, and then ...'

‘Blondel,' Marco said, ‘32 Munchenstrasse.'

His brothers turned and stared at him.

‘32 Munchenstrasse,' he repeated. ‘Here, look for yourselves if you don't—'