Good Omens (13 page)

She could feel generations of Agnes Nutter's descendants laughing at her.

Even if those two were honest enough to want to return it, they'd hardly go to all the trouble of finding a cottage they'd barely seen in the dark.

The only hope was that they wouldn't know what it was they'd got.

AZIRAPHALE, LIKE MANY Soho merchants who specialized in hard-to-find books for the discerning connoisseur, had a back room, but what was in there was far more esoteric than anything normally found inside a shrink-wrapped bag for the Customer Who Knows What He Wants.

He was particularly proud of his books of prophecy.

First editions, usually.

And every one was signed.

He'd got Robert Nixon,
¹⁶
and Martha the Gypsy, and Ignatius Sybilla, and Old Ottwell Binns. Nostradamus had signed, “To myne olde friend Azerafel, with Beste wishes”; Mother Shipton had spilled drink on his copy; and in a climate-controlled cabinet in one corner was the original scroll in the shaky handwriting of St. John the Divine of Patmos, whose “Revelation” had been the all-time best seller. Aziraphale had found him a nice chap, if a bit too fond of odd mushrooms.

What the collection did not have was a copy of
The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter
, and Aziraphale walked into the room holding it as a keen philatelist might hold a Mauritius Blue that had just turned up on a postcard from his aunt.

He'd never even seen a copy before, but he'd heard about it. Everyone in the trade, which considering it was a highly specialized trade meant about a dozen people, had heard of it. Its existence was a sort of vacuum around which all sorts of strange stories had been orbiting for hundreds of years. Aziraphale realized he wasn't sure if you could orbit a vacuum, and didn't care;
The Nice and Accurate Prophecies
made the Hitler Diaries look like, well, a bunch of forgeries.

His hands hardly shook at all as he laid it down on a bench, pulled on a pair of surgical rubber gloves, and opened it reverentially. Aziraphale was an angel, but he also worshiped books.

The title page said:

THE NIFE AND ACCURATE PROPHEFIES
OF AGNES NUTTER

In slightly smaller type:

Being a Certaine and Prefice Hiftory from the Prefent Day
Unto the Endinge of this World
.

In slightly larger type:

Containing therein Many Diuerse Wonders and
precepts for the Wife

In a different type:

More complete than ever yet before publifhed

In smaller type but in capitals:

CONCERNING THE STRANGE TIMES AHEADE

In slightly desperate italics:

And events of a Wonderful Nature

In larger type once more:

‘Reminifent of Noftradamus at hif beft'—Ursula Shipton

The prophecies were numbered, and there were more than four thousand of them.

“Steady, steady,” Aziraphale muttered to himself. He went into the little kitchenette and made himself some cocoa and took some deep breaths.

Then he came back and read a prophecy at random.

Forty minutes later, the cocoa was still untouched.

THE RED-HAIRED WOMAN in the corner of the hotel bar was the most successful war correspondent in the world. She now had a passport in the name of Carmine Zuigiber; and she went where the wars were.

Well. More or less.

Actually she went where the wars weren't. She'd already been where the wars were.

She was not well known, except where it counted. Get half a dozen war correspondents together in an airport bar, and the conversation will, like a compass orienting to North, swing around to Murchison of
The New York Times
, to Van Horne of
Newsweek
, to Anforth of I.T.N. News. The war correspondents' War Correspondents.

But when Murchison, and Van Horne, and Anforth ran into each other in a burnt-out tin shack in Beirut, or Afghanistan, or the Sudan, after they'd admired each other's scars and had downed a few, they would exchange awed anecdotes of “Red” Zuigiber, from the
National World Weekly
.

“That dumb rag,” Murchison would say, “it doesn't goddamn know what it's goddamn got.”

Actually the
National World Weekly
did know just what it had got: it had a War Correspondent. It just didn't know why, or what to do with one now it had her.

A typical
National World Weekly
would tell the world how Jesus' face was seen on a Big Mac bun bought by someone from Des Moines, with an artist's impression of the bun; how Elvis Presley was recently sighted working in a Burger Lord in Des Moines; how listening to Elvis records cured a Des Moines housewife's cancer; how the spate of werewolves infesting the Midwest are the offspring of noble pioneer women raped by Bigfoot; and that Elvis was taken by Space Aliens in 1976 because he was too good for this world.
¹⁷

That was the
National World Weekly
. They sold four million copies a week, and they needed a War Correspondent like they needed an exclusive interview with the General Secretary of the United Nations.
¹⁸

So they paid Red Zuigiber a great deal of money to go and find wars, and ignored the bulging, badly typed envelopes she sent them occasionally from around the globe to justify her—generally fairly reasonable—expense claims.

They felt justified in this because, as they saw it, she really wasn't a very good war correspondent although she was undoubtedly the most attractive, which counted for a lot on the
National World Weekly
. Her war reports were always about a bunch of guys shooting at each other, with no real understanding of the wider political ramifications, and, more importantly, no Human Interest.

Occasionally they would hand one of her stories over to a rewrite man to fix up. (“Jesus appeared to nine-year-old Manuel Gonzalez during a pitched battle on the Rio Concorsa, and told him to go home because his mother worried about him. ‘I knew it was Jesus,' said the brave little child, ‘because he looked like he did when his picture miraculously appeared on my sandwich box.”')

Mostly the
National World Weekly
left her alone, and carefully filed her stories in the rubbish bin.

Murchison, and Van Horne, and Anforth didn't care about this. All they knew was that whenever a war broke out, Ms. Zuigiber was there first. Practically
before
.

“How does she do it?” they would ask each other incredulously. “How the hell does she do it?” And their eyes would meet, and silently say: if she was a car she'd be made by Ferrari, she's the kind of woman you'd expect to see as the beautiful consort to the corrupt generalissimo of a collapsing Third World country, and she hangs around with guys like us. We're the lucky guys, right?

Ms. Zuigiber just smiled and bought another round of drinks for everybody, on the
National World Weekly
. And watched the fights break out around her. And smiled.

She had been right. Journalism suited her.

Even so, everyone needs a holiday, and Red Zuigiber was on her first in eleven years.

She was on a small Mediterranean island which made its money from the tourist trade, and that in itself was odd. Red looked to be the kind of woman who, if she took a holiday on any island smaller than Australia, would be doing so because she was friends with the man who owned it. And had you told any islander a month before that war was coming, he would have laughed at you and tried to sell you a raffiawork wine holder or a picture of the bay done in seashells; that was then.

This was now.

Now a deep religio-political divide, concerning which of four small mainland countries they weren't actually a part of, had split the country into three factions, destroyed the statue of Santa Maria in the town square, and done for the tourist trade.

Red Zuigiber sat in the bar of the Hotel de Palomar del Sol, drinking what passed for a cocktail. In one corner a tired pianist played, and a waiter in a toupee crooned into a microphone:

“AAAAAAAAAAAonce-pon-a-time-dere-was

LITTLE WHITE BOOOL

AAAAAAAAAAAvery-sad-because-e-was

LITTLE WHITE BOOL … ”

A man threw himself through the window, a knife between his teeth, a Kalashnikov automatic rifle in one hand, a grenade in the other.

“I glaim gis oteg id der gaing og der—” he paused. He took the knife out of his mouth and began again. “I claim this hotel in the name of the pro-Turkish Liberation Faction!”

The last two holidaymakers remaining on the island
¹⁹
climbed underneath their table. Red unconcernedly withdrew the maraschino cherry from her drink, put it to her scarlet lips, and sucked it slowly off its stick in a way that made several men in the room break into a cold sweat.

The pianist stood up, reached into his piano, and pulled out a vintage sub-machine gun. “This hotel has already been claimed by the pro-Greek Territorial Brigade!” he screamed. “Make one false move, and I shoot out your living daylight!”

There was a motion at the door. A huge, black-bearded individual with a golden smile and a genuine antique Gatling gun stood there, with a cohort of equally huge although less impressively armed men behind him.

“This strategically important hotel, for years a symbol of the fascist imperialist Turko-Greek running dog tourist trade, is now the property of the Italo-Maltese Freedom Fighters!” he boomed affably. “Now we kill everybody!”

“Rubbish!” said the pianist. “Is not strategically important. Just has extremely well-stocked wine cellar!”

“He's right, Pedro,” said the man with the Kalashnikov, “That's why my lot wanted it. Il General Ernesto de Montoya said to me, he said, Fernando, the war'll be over by Saturday, and the lads'll be wanting a good time. Pop down to the Hotel de Palomar del Sol and claim it as booty, will you?”

The bearded man turned red. “Is bloddy important strategically, Fernando Chianti! I drew big map of the island and is right in the middle, which makes it pretty bloddy strategically important, I can tell you.”

“Ha!” said Fernando. “You might as well say that just because Little Diego's house has a view of the decadent capitalist topless private beach, that it's strategically important!”

The pianist blushed a deep red. “Our lot got that this morning,” he admitted.

There was silence.

In the silence was a faint, silken rasping. Red had uncrossed her legs.

The pianist's Adam's apple bobbed up and down. “Well, it's pretty strategically important,” he managed, trying to ignore the woman on the bar stool. “I mean, if someone landed a submarine on it, you'd want to be somewhere you could see it all.”

Silence.

“Well, it's a lot more strategically important than this hotel anyway,” he finished.

Pedro coughed, ominously. “The next person who says
anything
. Anything
at all
. Is dead.” He grinned. Hefted his gun. “Right. Now—everyone against far wall.”

Nobody moved. They weren't listening to him any more. They were listening to a low, indistinct murmuring from the hallway behind him, quiet and monotonous.

There was some shuffling among the cohort in the doorway. They seemed to be doing their best to stand firm, but they were being inexorably edged out of the way by the muttering, which had begun to resolve itself into audible phrases. “Don't mind me, gents, what a night, eh? Three times round the island, nearly didn't find the place, someone doesn't believe in signposts, eh? Still, found it in the end, had to stop and ask four times, finally asked at the post office, they always know at the post office, had to draw me a map though, got it here somewhere … ”

Sliding serenely past the men with guns, like a pike through a trout pond, came a small, bespectacled man in a blue uniform, carrying a long, thin, brown paper-wrapped parcel, tied with string. His sole concession to the climate were his open-toed brown plastic sandals, although the green woolen socks he wore underneath them showed his deep and natural distrust of foreign weather.

He had a peaked cap on, with
International Express
written on it in large white letters.

He was unarmed, but no one touched him. No one even pointed a gun at him. They just stared.

The little man looked around the room, scanning the faces, and then looking back down at his clipboard; then he walked straight over to Red, still sitting on her bar stool. “Package for you, miss,” he said.

Red took it, and began to untie the string.

The International Express man coughed discreetly and presented the journalist with a well-thumbed receipt pad and a yellow plastic ballpoint pen attached to the clipboard by a piece of string. “You have to sign for it, miss. Just there. Print your full name over here, signature down there.”

“Of course.” Red signed the receipt pad, illegibly, then printed her name. The name she wrote was not Carmine Zuigiber. It was a much shorter name.

The man thanked her kindly, and made his way out, muttering lovely place you've got here, gents, always meant to come out here on holiday, sorry to trouble you, excuse me, sir … And he passed out of their lives as serenely as he had come.

Red finished opening the parcel. People began to edge around to get a better look. Inside the package was a large sword.

She examined it. It was a very straightforward sword, long and sharp; it looked both old and unused; and it had nothing ornamental or impressive about it. This was no magical sword, no mystic weapon of power and might. It was very obviously a sword created to slice, chop, cut, preferably kill, but, failing that, irreparably maim, a very large number of people indeed. It had an indefinable aura of hatred and menace.

Red clasped the hilt in her exquisitely manicured
right
hand, and held it up to eye level. The blade glinted.