Faust Among Equals by Tom Holt Read Free Book Online Page B

as he opened the door and walked out of the washroom. If he’d been any good at all, it was a safe bet that he’d have made bloody sure he spent Thursday March 16th, 1498 in a locked stone-walled room surrounded by armed guards.
    It had been a long time since Lundqvist had last been in Amsterdam, or almost. In fact, he’d been here the previous week - May 9th to 16th, 1995 - but that was seven years ago . . .
    He tried to remember if there were any warrants out for his arrest. Or was that next month? Probably, he decided with a grin, that was after he’d done whatever it was he’d come here to do.
    Lucky George.
    George and Lundqvist went way back (and forwards, of course). Not that he’d ever had a failure, exactly; at the end of the day, he’d served the warrant, collected the subject and delivered him, in accordance with the terms of the retainer. But even he had to admit that Lucky George hadn’t come quietly. In fact, he’d come very noisily indeed, and nearly taken a substantial tranche of the fabric of reality with him. There had been moments - April 1563, for example, and December 1749, not to mention February 1255 and August 2014 - when he’d been sure that the bastard was slipping through his fingers. Likewise, just as the thing any cop dreads most of all is having his own gun used against him, he particularly resented the way George had made him look a fool in the final showdown. Even bounty-hunters have their feelings, and nobody likes being chased round the centre of a densely populated city by a seven-foot-tall scale replica of himself, brandishing an array of hopelessly anachronistic weapons and calling out for all to hear, ‘Look at me, I’m a pillock!’
    And they’d let him escape! The idiots!
    Outside the airport he found a telephone booth with a directory in it. He skimmed through it until he found what he was looking for.
    TROY, H.O.
    Relieved, he made a note of the address, fed the machine some money and dialled the number.
    The lady in question was, just then, having a bit of a problem at the port of Rotterdam.
    She’d got as far as ‘I name this ship . . .’, and then dried. Buggery!
    Trying not to appear conspicuous, she glanced out the corner of her eye at the big letters painted on the side. That wasn’t much help; they called ships some pretty weird things these days, but even so she had a feeling that Passengers are not allowed beyond this point probably wasn’t the damn thing’s name. She’d have to mumble.
    â€˜I name this ship rhubarbrhubarbrhubarb,’ she therefore said, ‘and God bless all who sail in her.’ Then she smiled. That was okay.
    I needn’t have worried, she told herself later, on her way home. The chances of anybody listening to what Miss World actually says are pretty minimal. In fact, it’s reasonably safe to say that nobody takes any notice of Miss World at all, except in a fairly superficial way. Otherwise, how come she’d held the title forty-seven times under various assumed names, and nobody had ever noticed? The number of people who look at her face is, after all, limited; the number who remember it, more limited still.
    Which was, she reflected, a pity, for them. It was a nice face, besides having been extremely useful over the years to the shipbuilding industry.
    For the time being, Home was a flat in one of the terribly old, terribly beautiful houses beside the Kaisergracht. It was hellishly expensive and the stairs half killed her unless she took her heels off and walked up them in her stocking feet, but that’s the price you have to pay for being sentimental. For it was in this very room, in this very building, that she and George . . . She blushed.
    The building had been new then; in fact, not completely and one hundred per cent finished. No roof, for one thing. But they’d been young, and in love, and it’s nice to be able to lie in each