Paint Your Dragon (24 page)

‘I
t's obvious what we've gotta do,' Kurt replied impatiently.

‘We've gotta leave the country.'

Seventeen former statues looked at him as though he were mad, making him grateful his band wasn't a democracy. He did his best to ignore them.

‘Leave the country?' David asked. ‘Why?'

David had, somehow, been elevated to the rank of spokesman-cum-courier; that is to say, the other ex-statues tended to hem him in and hiss, ‘Go on,
you
tell him,' in his ear. They also complained to him about the food, the transport and the accommodation; remember, although their outward husks were Italian, inside they were British.

‘Because,' Kurt replied, still wondering what in blazes had led him to go back for this miserable lot, ‘we've got this job to do. And we can't do it here. Okay?'

‘Don't think we can leave the country,' muttered the Giambologna
Mercury.
‘We'd need special export licences, surely.'

‘Stolen property,' agreed a Bernini bronze. ‘They got these computerised lists, international, worldwide. I saw it on
Lovejoy.
We'd never get past the duty-free lounge.'

Amateurs, muttered Kurt to himself. ‘Absolutely right,' he sighed, the sarcasm going so far over his listeners' heads that you could have bounced radio signals off it. ‘That's why we've gotta hijack a plane.'

That left them speechless; but not for long enough. A Donatello Crucifixion objected that surely hijacking was illegal. The Canova demanded to speak to the manager. Kurt bashed the packing case with his fist for silence.

‘Okay,' he snarled, ‘that's it. I've had enough of this goddamn whimpering out of you guys. The next one of you I hear any shit from ends up at the bottom of the Arno with a human being tied to his ankle. You got that? Good. Now then, this is the plan.'

In the shocked silence that followed, it occurred to Kurt that he hadn't yet formulated a plan. Kurt Lundqvist without. a plan; impossible. Easier to imagine a Tory minister without a mistress. Something would occur to him, it always did.

‘The plan,' he went on, ‘is, naturally, top secret. I'll announce the various stages in due course, on a strictly need-to-know basis. The first stage is getting to the air terminal. This is what we do.'

Kurt spent the rest of the day shoplifting, hotwiring vehicles, breaking into police station armouries, mugging tourists for their passports, faking photographs, wiring up al fresco bombs and generally relaxing after all the strain he'd been through lately dealing with objects only one step away from being people. By one o'clock in the morning, he felt refreshed and invigorated. He now had at his disposal a carabinieri armoured van, eighteen assault rifles, ditto Beretta 9mm handguns, three cases of grenades, five twenty-pounder bombs, flak jackets, black balaclavas, matching ski-suits, two-way radios, state-of-the-art communications and radio jamming equipment, sandwiches, chocolate and a thermos flask of decaffeinated coffee.

At three am precisely, air traffic control received an ominous message on the security hotline. Flight TCA8494 from Istanbul, scheduled to refuel before heading on to London, due to arrive at 03.24, had armed hijackers on board. They'd wired up bombs, and were demanding the release of prisoners and a huge cash ransom. A special security team was on its way; in the meantime, act naturally, refuel the plane, pretend nothing untoward is happening. Message received and understood.

At 03.34, the carabinieri van drew up at a side gate. Kurt flashed an impressive-looking pass (actually an Academy Museum season ticket, but it was dark and Kurt kept his thumb over the words) under the sentry's nose, hissed a few words in his ear and was let through. At 03.40, eighteen shadowy, ferociously armed figures scrambled up the gangway into the plane and burst into the passenger compartment.

‘Okay!' Kurt roared. ‘Nobody move!' He paused, for effect. ‘Okay,' he said, ‘where's the hijackers?'

The cabin staff stared at him. They were just rewinding the in-flight movie, handing out the freeby glossy magazines. ‘What hijackers?' they said.

Kurt assumed a pained expression. ‘Jesus, not
another
false alarm,' he sighed. ‘You
sure
there hasn't been a hijack?'

The purser nodded. ‘We'd have noticed,' he said.

‘Not necessarily,' Kurt replied, motioning to his team to fan out, start frisking the passengers. ‘Like, there's these new fundamentalist religious fanatics, some name like Meek Militant Action. Their aim's to inherit the Earth, provided nobody objects. We'd better check things out, just to be sure.'

The purser, who had the muzzle of a Heckler & Koch G3 sticking in his ear - not because he was a suspect, it was just rather a cramped aircraft - shrugged and nodded. ‘Suit yourselves, guys,' he said. ‘Better safe than sorry, I guess. While you're at it, would you mind taking round the duty-frees?'

Kurt's men duly searched; wonder of wonders, they found no fewer than five twenty-pound bombs wired up to the doors, fuel lines and in-flight catering packs. Gee, muttered Kurt, just as I thought. We'd better stay with this flight till it gets to London. What a truly splendid idea, the captain replied, his subconscious wrestling with the problem of where he'd seen some of these guys before (you don't like to say to a SWAT team officer that you're sorry, you didn't recognise him with his clothes on). While they were at it, he added, maybe they could help out with serving the meals and checking the seat-belts.

As the plane took off, a Bernini took Kurt aside and asked him to explain something.

‘Thought we were meant to be hijacking the plane,' he said.

Kurt nodded. ‘Neat job, huh?'

‘But we're pretending to be the army. The good guys.'

‘So?'

‘Does that mean we're the good guys or the bad guys? I'm confused.'

Kurt shook his head. The ignorance of some people. ‘Son,' he said, ‘I'm gonna tell you something that's gonna help you a lot in years to come, supposing you last that long. Good guys is just a fancy way of saying Us. Bad guys is only ever Them. You remember that, you won't go far wrong. Okay?'

‘But what about moral imperatives? What about Good and Evil?'

The Bernini suddenly found himself about a centimetre from Kurt's taut face and industrial-laser eyes. ‘Where I come from,' he said, ‘Evil's a stunt man's Christian name. Now go over there, sit down and shut up. Does that answer your question?'

‘Comprehensively.'

‘Great. Always knew I shoulda been a philosopher.'

Attack philosopher, naturally.

 

Although the dragon had immediately recognised the sheer brilliance of Chubby's method of travelling back through Time, he'd had an intuitive feeling from the outset that there was one tiny flaw in it somewhere. Now, back in the air and soaring at ninety thousand feet over Angola, he knew for certain what it was.

It didn't work.

Twenty-seven hours he'd been up here; twice round the predetermined circuit, airspeed and course exactly as specified to the knot, to the metre. All he'd managed to achieve was to distance himself from home by a further twenty-seven hours. Bloody marvellous.

By the time he was overflying Botswana, he'd worked it out. The course as plotted was half an hour out of synch; the fools hadn't taken into account the time he'd be spending on the ground. He cursed them and himself; if he'd spotted the mistake earlier, he might just have been able to compensate. By now, though, the history nodes would all have moved on so far that it'd be impossible to rechart the course without all of Chubby's formulae, calculating software and history-industry infiltrators' input. He was stuck.

When in shit, use brain. All the necessary kit would, of course, still be in Chubby's office. All he had to do was drop in, explain the problem - or would Chubby be expecting him? After all, once he got back he'd tell him all about it, with the result that by the time they got back here, sorry,
now,
Chubby would already
know—
but if that was the case, he'd have known to correct the error in the first place, oh
fuck,
this is complicated ...

He flew, nevertheless, to Chubby's office, only to find it boarded up, with no forwarding address. Nothing in the phone book. No trace anywhere. Maybe when he got back he was going to roast Chubby alive (sorely tempted), which in turn would mean no Chubby now, just when he needed him most. Hey, maybe it really
is
impossible to travel backwards in Time. Starting to look that way, no question.

He slowed down, drifting gracefully high above Madagascar. The hell with this, let's try another way.

Such as?

If you don't know, his old mother used to say, ask someone who does.

Think, dragon, think.

Thirty-two hours ago, he'd seen a newspaper headline saying that twelve hours before that, he'd been killed. Okay.

If I was killed before I got here, then it stands to reason that I got back in time to be killed before I got here. Therefore I, the late lamented I,
requiescam in pace,
must know how I got back. So I should ask myself. Only that's going to be tricky, because I'm dead.

Tricky, but possible. Because - give me strength! - in order to have gotten back, I must have asked myself how to do it. My dead self must therefore know that my living self is going to want to make contact, approximately now, and will be waiting in for the call, wherever the flying fuck I/he now am/is. Stands to reason.

Okay, here goes. Just hope I know what I'm doing.

He peered down. Zululand. Well, why not?

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than give you nightmares in your philosophy.

Few stranger, more wonderful or more terrible, however, than the
isangoma
—translated, with typical Colonial crass-ness, ‘witch-doctor' - of southern Africa. Now, of course, extinct; no place for that sort of thing in the twentieth century. Well, of course.

Although he knew virtually nothing about the subject, the dragon was at least able to address the small, shrivelled man sitting in front of him on a low, carved stool by his correct title:
amakhosi,
‘my lords', plural, because when you speak to the
isangoma
you're talking not to the little old man but to the countless mighty spirits who bed-and-breakfast, so to speak, in the vast mansions behind his eyes.

Nkunzana's small, tidy kraal lay in a miniature valley, a crack between two great rocks, which meant the sun's nuisance was kept to a minimum. For twenty hours in the twenty-four it was dark at Izulu-li-dum-umteto, and for Nkunzana darkness was a natural resource essential to his business, like the mill-streams of Lancashire. He himself was a comic, horrifying figure; small, crooked and smooth-skinned, like a freeze-dried child. He wore the uniform of his craft: leopards' teeth, goats' horns, pigs' bladders, gnu's tail. He looked like God's spares box. Slow to move, quick to laugh; smiling toothlessly, staring unblinking at a space two feet above and eight inches to the right of the head of the person he was talking to. A little ray of sunshine. Your local GP.

‘Sakubona, baba'.
We saw you, my father; hello. A grave nod accompanied the formal greeting. The dragon relaxed a little. He'd managed to get to see the doctor without an appointment. ‘And what can I do for you?'

The dragon licked the roof of his mouth, which was dry;
why am I afraid of this little toe-rag? I'm a dragon, for crying
out
loud ...
‘I need to speak to someone who is dead,
'makhosi,'
he replied, a little nervousness spilling out with the words. ‘For you, surely, this is possible.'

‘Possible.' The little man nodded. ‘A small matter, my father. Who among the snakes do you wish to talk to?'

The dragon hesitated. ‘This is, um, embarrassing.'

‘Relax. Say the name.'

‘Well - look, how would it be if I wrote it down on a bit of paper? Sorry to be all silly about this, but—'

‘I cannot read, my father. Say the name.'

‘All right. Um. Me.'

‘You?'

Nod. ‘Me.'

Long pause.

‘Wo, ndoda; ngitshilo.'
Hey, man, you sure said a mouthful. ‘Talking to yourself is a sign of madness. Talking to yourself, dead, is class.'

The dragon shuffled. ‘Said it was embarrassing. Can you do it?'

Nkunzana shrugged. ‘Why not?' he said. ‘If it's possible. If not, not.'

‘It's possible. Cross my heart and hope to die. Er, be dead.'

‘We will see what we can do, my father.' The old man closed his eyes, leaned forward until his knees touched his shoulders, and tossed something onto the fire. Nothing happened.

‘About time, too,' said the dragon.

The dragon looked up. ‘Aarg,' he said.

‘Have you any idea,' his deceased self went on, ‘how long I've been hanging around this boghole waiting for you to turn up? Gives me the fucking creeps, and I'm
dead.'

‘Sorry.' Really, truly embarrassing. ‘Look, I guess you know why I needed to talk.'

‘Reverse time travel, how we got home.' The dragon nodded. ‘Piece of cake. Why you needed to bother me I don't know. I managed to work it out all by myself.'

‘Clever old you, then.'

‘Indeed.' The dragon sighed contemptuously. ‘Listen carefully. I'm dead, right?'

‘Right.'

‘But I can't be, or I couldn't be talking to me, right? Say yes.'

‘Yes.'

‘Therefore I must be alive. Nod.'