Faust Among Equals (4 page)

‘We'll just have to get him back, that's all,' he said. ‘Which shouldn't be difficult. I've had posters sent out and we can pay the reward out of the repairs and maintenance budget. It's more a question of time.'

They left the Dante and walked slowly back up towards the Mouth via the attractive and unspoilt Usurer's Quarter, pausing only to buy some locally-produced candy floss from one of the many picturesque stalls.

It comes in three flavours: sulphur, brimstone and strawberry.

‘Why?' asked the Head of Security.

‘Because,' replied the Finance Director through a mouthful of sticky yellow froth, ‘he was a Purchase, and we've got the auditors in next month.'

‘Sorry?'

The Finance Director wiped his mouth on his sleeve, which smoked. ‘A Purchase,' he repeated. ‘Sold his soul to the . . . to the previous administration. There was a lot of it went on in the old days. Sort of like subsidies. Bloody awful way to run a railway in my opinion, but what the, um, thing, it was just public money, so nobody cared. Anyway, we've got stuck with the aftermath. From an accountancy point of view, it's an absolute nightmare.'

He stopped, while the Head of Security, who had foolishly chosen the strawberry, was violently sick.

‘It's all a question of book-keeping, you see,' he went on, when the retching had subsided. ‘Purchased souls go in the balance sheet under Fixed Assets. Subject to straight-line depreciation and writing down allowance, of course, but you've got to account for them at the end of the day. If they go missing, you're in real trouble, believe me. Since miladdo's only been here, what, five hundred years, he's still got about eighty-five percent of his original value after allowances. That's one heck of a shortfall.'

The Head of Security frowned. Books in his experience were not things you kept so much as threw at persistent offenders. He groped under the sink of his memory.

‘Can't you write him off?' he suggested.

The Finance Director scowled. ‘Against what? Good debts? No, we've just got to get the bastard back again. It's as simple as that.'

‘Right,' said the Head of Security. ‘So you'll be wanting me to get a squad together and—'

‘No.' The Finance Director shook his head, nearly slicing the Head of Security's scalp off in the process. ‘Out of our hands now, I'm delighted to say.'

‘So what are we doing about it?'

For the first time that day, there was a faint glint of pleasure in the Finance Director's voice, and his third eye positively sparkled. ‘I've hired a bounty hunter,' he replied. ‘The best.'

He smiled, set light to the rest of his candy floss, and ran up the steps to his office.

 

There are three immutable laws in the Universe. Only three.

Two of them concern death and taxes, and they have been waived on occasions. Not so the third, which states:

Having played fast and loose with the other two in his time, the fugitive (now dressed in a lightweight grey suit, smart light tan brogues and a dove-grey tie) is going to have a crack at the third.

‘Excuse me,' said the receptionist, ‘but do you have an appointment?'

The fugitive turned round slowly and looked at her.

‘That depends,' he said.

‘I doubt that, sir,' the receptionist replied. If you left her tone of voice outside in the rain overnight, it'd have rust on it come morning. ‘Do you have an appointment or not?'

‘That depends,' said the fugitive, ‘on which way round you like your Time. I personally like it arse-about-face, so I make all my appointments retrospectively. Come back about five minutes ago and I'll have got it sorted for you.'

‘I'm sorry,' said the receptionist. ‘Nobody sees Mr Van Appin without an—'

‘He'll see me.'

‘With respect, sir . . . '

The fugitive smiled, and vanished.

Almost simultaneously, he rematerialised in Mr Van Appin's office, sat down in the large leather armchair and started linking paperclips together.

‘Morning, George,' said Mr Van Appin, without looking up. ‘I'll be with you in two shakes.'

Although his face did not betray the fact, the fugitive was impressed. It's not everyone who's cool enough to take the sudden materialisation of an escaped soul in torment so totally in his stride.

‘That's okay,‘ he replied. ‘No hurry.'

Mr Van Appin finished annotating the document he had been studying, put it in his out tray, steepled his fingers and leant back in his chair.

‘Long time no see, George,' he said, ‘if you'll pardon the expression.'

‘Good of you to fit me in at such short notice,' the fugitive replied. ‘Look, I'm in a bit of a jam, I wondered if you could help me get it sorted out.'

The cigar box on Mr Van Appin's desk floated across the room and opened itself under the fugitive's nose. He shook his head slightly.

‘I'll do my best,' Mr Van Appin said. ‘Tell me all about it.'

The fugitive grinned. ‘Starting where, Pete?'

Mr Van Appin considered. ‘Well,' he said. ‘I think we can take all the In-the-beginning-was-the-Word stuff as read and pick up the story where you'd sold your soul to the Very Bad Person and he'd taken delivery. To be honest with you, George, I took that as being a suitable juncture to close my file and send in my bill.' Mr Van Appin frowned. ‘Did you ever pay it, by the way?'

‘By return,' George replied. ‘Or rather, my executors did. I saw to that well in advance, believe me. I may have been facing eternal damnation, but I didn't want to get into
real
trouble.'

‘Ah yes.' Mr Van Appin's brow cleared. ‘I remember now. Anyway, to get back to what we were saying just a moment ago, I'd rather assumed that that was it, as far as you were concerned. Terribly sorry to lose you as a client and all that, but these things happen. In fact, the term “banged to rights” did float across my mind more than once in connection with your affairs. Nobody followed you here, did they?'

‘Unlikely,' said the fugitive. ‘As far as I can see they haven't the faintest idea when I am, let alone where. Listen, Peter, I want to fight this one.'

Mr Van Appin raised an eyebrow. ‘Fight it, George?'

‘Yeah.' The fugitive nodded. ‘Call it a matter of principle.'

Mr Van Appin frowned again. ‘That's expensive talk, George.'

‘I've got the money.'

Mr Van Appin shrugged. ‘I don't doubt that you do. Even then, I can't really hold out much prospect of success. Those soul-and-purchase contracts are the nearest things you'll ever get to watertight.'

The fugitive looked amused. ‘Are they really.'

‘'Fraid so, George,' replied Mr Van Appin. ‘I drafted them myself. And,' he added, with a wisp of nostalgia, ‘I was good then. Just starting up, I was, anxious to make a name for myself. Landing a client like that, I wanted to make a good impression.'

‘So you don't think it's possible?'

‘I think it'll be very, very difficult,' Mr Van Appin replied. ‘Mind you, I'm looking at the worst possible scenario here, you understand.'

‘Playing devil's advocate, in fact.'

Mr Van Appin smiled without amusement. ‘You could say that,' he said. ‘Actually, I don't act for them any more. All their work's done in-house these days.'

‘Really?'

Mr Van Appin nodded. ‘Makes sense,' he said. ‘After all, they get their pick of the entire profession down there, sooner or later.'

‘Except you, Pete.'

A faint pinkness experimented with crossing Mr Van Appin's cheeks. ‘Flattery will get you nowhere,' he said. ‘I'm not saying it's impossible, George. Nothing's impossible. I just can't see how, that's all. Maybe I'm getting old or something.' He stopped, tapped his teeth with a pencil, and considered for a moment. ‘That's a thought, actually,' he said. ‘A hundred years ago I'd have accepted like a shot. Why don't you try our office then?'

(As a result of the unique nature of his practice, Mr Van Appin found it convenient to have a main branch office in every century, with sub-offices at thirty-year intervals to take over his practice each time he retired. Because of his equally unique skills, he had never been able to find a worthy partner or associate, with the result that he ran all his offices simultaneously, thereby taking the concept of overwork into a whole new dimension.)

The fugitive shook his head. ‘Nah,' he said. ‘I've got other business to attend to in this decade, Pete, I couldn't find the time.'

There was a long silence.

‘It'll cost you, mind,' said Mr Van Appin.

‘Like I said,' the fugitive replied. ‘No worries.'

Mr Van Appin grinned. ‘In that case,' he said, ‘I'll need a copy of the original agreement, a signed affidavit from the Holy Ghost and fifty billion guilders on account.'

‘I thought you'd say that,' replied the fugitive. He passed over the attaché case he'd brought in with him. Mr Van Appin raised the lid and nodded.

‘Where can I call you?' he said. ‘I imagine you'll need to be hard to find for a while.'

‘I'll call you,' the fugitive replied. ‘Better that way.'

When he'd gone, Mr Van Appin swivelled round in his chair a couple of times, chewing the end of his pencil and humming. Then he reached for the dictating machine.

‘Please open a new file, Miss Duisberg,' he said. ‘Client profile C, client name, Faust, that's F-A-U-S for sugar -T, George Michael. Re . . . ' He paused, wound the tape back, wound it forward again. ‘Re, dispute with Hell Holdings plc.'

 

Faust wasn't, of course, his real name.

Faust was just the German abbreviation of Faustus, which was the nickname he'd picked up as an undergraduate at Wittenberg. It means ‘Lucky'.

Only goes to show how wrong you can be, doesn't it?

Out of a particularly ill-fated year (his contemporaries included Martin Luther, Matthias Corvinus and Hamlet, Prince of Denmark) Lucky George was the student people remembered as having come to the most spectacularly sticky end. So devastating was the ensuing scandal that the university authorities promptly dropped Black Arts from the university curriculum; replacing it, seamlessly, with economics. A wave of hysteria swept across Europe, and for the next two centuries, witchcraft and sorcery remained (so to speak) a burning issue on the agenda of the known world. Even Lucky George's mother stopped talking about her son, the doctor, and transferred the picture of him in his matriculation robes from the mantelpiece to the coalshed.

Lucky George was not, however, such a misnomer as all that. Nobody could deny that he had more luck than any other hundred people put together. It's just that luck comes in two varieties.

Call them flavours, if it makes it any easier.

The other scoop in George's cone, in his opinion at least, more than adequately made up for the slight downside effect he'd experienced over the soul business. All that had been a means to an end, and a very nice end it was, too. Make no mistake; Lucky George had got value for money.

 

Ronnie Bosch sat in his studio, stared long and hard at his drawing board, and groaned.

It was, they'd told him, all part of a concept which was definitely going to be The Future as far as Hell Holdings was concerned.

For reasons he couldn't quite grasp, but which he couldn't help but find mildly flattering, they were going to call it EuroBosch.

Visit, they had postulated, a land of wonder and enchantment. Meet your favourite characters from the repertoire of Europe's most imaginative artist face to . . . Take a ride through spectacular landscapes to see sights you'll never see anywhere else.

Sounded good, in theory; but Ronnie, faced with the prospect of creating seven hundred thousand different appropriate latex masks in time for the Grand Celebrity Opening, was asking himself whether they'd really thought it through properly before committing the funding.

For a start, he muttered to himself, scowling at a recalcitrant design and then turning it upside down (much better that way), masks really weren't going to be enough, not for some of the more
outré
designs. We're talking body suits here, and quite probably bodies as well. Dammit, about forty per cent of his best work was anatomically impossible. Which meant starting from scratch.

Yuk.

A stray pellet of inspiration struck home, and he reached for a pencil.

A mouse, he thought. A seven-foot, grinning, anthropomorphic mouse, with perky little front fangs and big hands which . . .

He shook his head, as if trying to dislodge the very idea. Broad-minded he most certainly was, but there are limits. The mere thought of it gave him the willies.

What he'd really always wanted to do, of course, was design helicopters. And parachutes, and telescopes, and wonderful ships powered by paddles driven by treadmills turned by oxen. And siege engines, and washing machines, and refrigerators, and combination tin-openers and potato-peelers, and space-saving compact disc racks, and ironing-boards that ingeniously fold away into nests of coffee tables. He would have been good at it, too. In fact, he'd invented the Swiss Army Knife before the Swiss even had an army.

Unfortunately, he'd been too successful as a commercial artist and illustrator, at a time when what the public wanted was spare-part-surgery demons and hideously teeming egg-shells. It was a bit like being a fashionable book-jacket artist, only not quite so well paid.