‘Bloke called Julian something owns this boat,’ the ferryman replied. ‘Least, it’s a group of companies, whatever that’s supposed to be, but really it’s the same thing.’
‘One of the godchildren, is he?’
The ferryman shrugged. ‘Dunno,’ he replied. ‘Like I said, I only work here.’
‘Thank you so much for all your help.’
‘Piss off.’
It was, inevitably, Sandra who noticed it first.
‘Hey,’ she said, ‘over there, look.’
Osiris followed her pointing finger. His eyesight was not quite so good as it might have been, what with the advancing years and the fact that the Lady Isis had, on the last occasion on which she had reassembled him, put the right eyeball in back to front; but you’d have had to be stone blind not to see the big neon sign, glaring out of the inky darkness.
THE LAST SUPPER
Best Diner in Hell
TRY OUR FABULOUS SELECTION OF BAKED MEATS
‘All right,’ he sighed. ‘Maybe just ten minutes for a cup of coffee and a doughnut or something. We can ask the way.’
The diner was empty except for a waitress, two animated skeletons quietly eating Danish pastries in a corner, and a tall, thin man sitting on his own over an empty cup of coffee, apparently talking to himself. On closer inspection he turned out to be dictating into a pocket dictaphone. As Osiris’ party passed by he put the machine away sheepishly.
‘Just filing my report,’ he said. ‘Got to try and make the final edition.’
Pan looked at him. ‘The final edition of what?’ he asked. ‘Are you a journalist or something?’
The man nodded. ‘Danny Bennett,’ he said proudly, ‘special correspondent. I’m on an assignment to . . .’ He looked around furtively, and whispered, ‘to find out the truth. You know, what’s really going on around here. At least,’ he added uncertainly, ‘I assume I am. Otherwise, why the bloody hell am I here?’
Pan stroked his chin, trying to remember how you did tact. ‘Maybe,’ he said carefully, ‘it’s because you’re dead.’
There was a moment of profound silence; the sort of silence you get at the bottom of very deep wells, or the back of long-unopened airing cupboards. ‘Nah,’ the man replied at last, ‘not me. I’ve got so much to live for - you know, my career, my public, this really incredibly big scoop I’m working on right now.’
Pan nodded. ‘Been here long?’ he asked.
The man rubbed his eyes. ‘Now it’s funny you should ask me that,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so, but it’s a weird thing, trying to keep track of time in this place really isn’t easy. I may have been here weeks for all I know.’
As nonchalantly as he could, Pan looked away. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘keep up the good work.’ He drew a little nearer, and added conspiratorially, ‘if you want a hot tip, check out the ferryman back there. It’s all completely unconfirmed, of course, and don’t quote me, but . . .’
The man nodded. ‘Strictly on a sources-close-to basis,’ he whispered. ‘You have my word as a journalist.’
‘What I’ve heard,’ Pan went on, ‘is that he’s running the biggest illegal immigrant scam in the universe, right under our very noses.’
The man’s eyes widened. ‘Boat people?’
Pan nodded. ‘Thousands of ’em,’ he said. ‘I mean,’ he added, ‘you’re not going to tell me all the guys out there were born here, are you?’
The man nodded excitedly, his hand reaching for a napkin and his three-colour pen. ‘It all adds up,’ he said. ‘God, I wish I could find out who’s behind it.’
Pan looked round. ‘Who do you think?’ he said. ‘The Mob.’
‘You mean the Mafia?’
‘Nah.’ Pan shook his head. ‘Not that bunch of choirboys.
The
Mob. The Organisation.
Them!
’
Frantically the man grabbed at Pan’s sleeve. ‘The Masons?’ he demanded. ‘The Klan? The Bruderbond? M15? The CIA? The International Standing Commission on Food Additives? Come on, for Christ’s sake, you’ve got to tell me. The public have a right to . . .’
Pan looked him in the eye. ‘You mean to say,’ he hissed, ‘you don’t know who
They
are?’
‘No,’ the man said, half hissing and half screaming. ‘All my life I’ve been trying to find out and I don’t fucking know!’
‘And you call yourself a journalist?’
‘Yes. I
am
a bloody journalist. Look, you have a duty to tell me, I’m Press.’
Pan looked round once more, lifted the sugar jar and shook it, and put his hand over the spout. ‘I suggest, he said, ‘you look them up in the phone book. Under T.’
‘Right.’ The man jumped up, scrabbled up his notebooks, pens and scraps of paper, and ran for the door. Pan shook his head sadly.
‘I don’t mind there being one born every minute,’ he said. ‘It’s one dying every minute that lowers the tone of this place so much. Here, Sandra, mine’s a cappuccino, three sugars.’
‘Well,’ Pan said, ‘here we are.’
It was a door. Just a door, painted white, with a round doorknob and a brass plate, set in an entirely conventional doorframe in a perfectly nondescript wall. The two gods looked at each other.
‘I think,’ Pan went on, ‘we’ll just wait for you, um, out here. Don’t want to intrude, after all.’
‘Oh.’
‘I mean to say, if you’ve got private family matters to discuss, last thing you’ll want is us lot standing around gawping.’
‘That’s very . . .’ Osiris paused, trying to find the appropriate words. ‘Nice of you,’ he continued, failing. ‘I don’t, er, expect I’ll be long.’
‘You take your time,’ Pan replied, turning up the collar of his coat and trying to hide behind it. ‘All the time in the world. We’ll just hang about here and, well, admire the scenery.’
No god has ever really mastered the knack of lying - not for want of trying, but simply because it’s alien to their intrinsic natures, in the same way that water finds it hard to be thirsty. There was no scenery, none whatsoever. Apart from the building they were standing in front of, there was nothing to be seen in any direction.
‘Be seeing you, then,’ Osiris said.
‘Bye.’
With his free hand, Osiris turned the doorknob, opened the door and wheeled himself through. He found himself in a marble-floored hallway, and in front of him were the doors of an impressive looking lift. Over the doorway, in neon letters, was the word:
while the ornate oak-banistered staircase in the corner of the hallway was marked:
Osiris pressed the call button, and almost instantaneously the lift doors opened. He wheeled himself in and closed the doors, noticing as he did so that they were made of seasoned, exquisitely polished pine, fitted with elegant brass handles. The inside of the lift was lined with red satin.
A moment later the doors opened again, and Osiris found himself facing a broad, impressive-looking desk, with four telephones on top of it and a middle-aged lady with a pleasant smile behind it. He rolled forward and said, ‘Excuse me.’
The lady looked up. ‘Mr Osiris?’ she asked brightly. ‘We’ve been expecting you.’
Osiris nodded. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Is he ready for me now?’
The woman looked down at a display board with coloured lights on it. ‘He won’t be a moment,’ she said, ‘he’s just on the telephone. If you’d care to wait.’
‘That’s fine.’
‘And.’ The lady smiled. She looked for all the world like the better class of aunt; the sort that doesn’t expect thank-you letters and doesn’t mind a bit if you forget her birthday. ‘The payment, please.’
Osiris blinked. ‘In advance, is it?’ he said. The lady nodded, and Osiris handed over the bearer bond. It went in a drawer and was gone.
Twenty minutes later, a buzzer went on the nice lady’s desk. She looked up and smiled.
‘You can go in now, Mr Osiris,’ she said.
The god sighed, put down the August 1974 edition of
Practical Fishkeeping
and grasped the handrails of his chair firmly.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’
‘My pleasure.’
As the door closed behind him, the nice lady made a note in the visitors book and scratched her ear with the end of her pencil; then she vanished, and was replaced by a thirty-foot coiled serpent with five heads and fangs like pickaxe blades. She still looked like someone’s aunt, because even serpents have families, but not quite so reassuring and friendly.
‘Mr Osiris. Please sit down. May I offer you a cup of tea?’
The lawyer turned round in his swivel chair, picked up a handful of something white and fluffy, and dropped it into a big, chrome-plated shredder that stood beside his desk. There was a chomping sound, and the very faint echo of distant screams.
‘No thank you,’ Osiris replied. ‘Can we get straight down to business, please?’
‘Of course.’ The lawyer was fat, even by the standards of his profession, bald-headed and dressed in a rather shiny blue suit with a faint white pinstripe. It suddenly occurred to Osiris that the fluffy things were souls.
‘Quite right,’ the lawyer said; nodding. ‘When people say that I’m in a soul-destroying line of work, they don’t know how right they are. Now then, what seems to be the problem?’
‘It’s like this,’ Osiris replied; and as he went through the facts of the matter, he couldn’t help noticing that the lawyer’s eyes were very round and green, and not in the least human. Par for the course, he rationalised, and nothing to worry about; but nevertheless. There was, he calculated, more humanity in a nest of soldier ants.
‘I see.’ The lawyer put the tips of his fingers together, and sniffed. ‘We seem to have reached an impasse,’ he said. ‘And you want my advice as to what you should do next.’
‘That’s right.’ Any minute now, Osiris said to himself, that tongue’ll come darting out, wrap round somebody and dart back in again. ‘So what do you . . . ?’
The lawyer leant forwards, giving Osiris a splendid opportunity to confirm his earlier observation that there were no lids to those bright green eyes.
‘If I were you,’ he said, ‘I’d settle.’
There was a moment’s silence.
That is a very dull, banal way of putting it; try again. There was a short interval of the sort of silence usually associated with the fraction of a second between the referee dropping the handkerchief and the faster of the two duellists pulling the trigger of his pistol. Or: there was a pause, with sound effects reminiscent of that small, sharp splinter of time that separates the mighty upward swing of the bat and the crunch of broken glass, during which time all the persons present stand rooted to the spot, watching the ball follow its inevitable parabola greenhouse-bound across the sky.
‘Oh,’ Osiris said. ‘You would, would you?’
The lawyer nodded. ‘I don’t want to be overly downside-orientated, ’ he said, ‘but I can’t help but feel that the term
hiding to nothing
has a definite relevance in the context in which we presently find ourselves. Obviously,’ he went on, leaning back slightly and patting the sides of his gut with the palms of his hands, ‘you’re right up close to the problem, so objectivity might be a little bit on the problematic side, but for me as an outsider looking in,
not
looking at the situation through rage-tinted spectacles, so to speak, I think you really ought to seriously consider the potential negative fallout of defending this action, both finances-wise and in general terms, viewing the position as a whole and from a holistic viewpoint.’
‘You mean,’ said Osiris slowly, ‘you think I’d lose?’
The lawyer spread his hands, as if waiting for mustard-and-cress seed to fall from heaven. ‘We have a saying in litigation,’ he said, ‘along the lines of, Going to law is a bit like picking a fight with a fifteen-stone, six-foot-nine policeman made entirely out of horseshit; even if you win, you may very well end up wishing you’d never got involved in the first place. Your best bet is to try and get the best terms you can and bow out gracefully, and I say that on the basis of five thousand years in the Law. I’m sure that, given time, I could negotiate for you a very worthwhile financial settlement, very worthwhile indeed.’
Osiris scowled. ‘I’m not interested in money,’ he said.
The lawyer’s eyes grew rounder and rounder, making him look even more like a locust than he had done previously. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I said I’m not interested in money,’ Osiris replied. ‘I’m a god, remember. Money means nothing to me.’
‘Really?’ The lawyer scratched his ear, perplexed. ‘We are talking about the same thing here, aren’t we? Crinkly paper stuff with someone’s head on one side and—’
‘Yes. Money. The hell with it, as far as I’m concerned.’
‘No, but really, I think you must be getting confused here, I’m talking about
money
, the stuff that goes in banks, makes the world go . . .’ The lawyer fell silent, sat still for a while and then shook his head until his chins danced. ‘My word,’ he said, ‘maybe it is time you ret . . . I’m sorry, I’m digressing. Very well,’ he continued, smiling a smile not entirely unlike the grin of a peckish hyaena, ‘now you’re about to say that this is a matter of principle and you’re damned if you’re going to let the proposed plaintiff push you around, and all the rest of it. Well, that’s all very fine and splendid and I want you to know that I respect principles very much, in a general sense. On a more particular level, looking towards a more balanced position of principle tempered with healthy pragmatism, I’d say forget it. I mean, what on earth do you stand to gain? You’ve retired anyway. Why not let Julian take some of the load off your shoulders? I mean, you can trust him implicitly, after all, he’s a lawyer, for God’s sake. No, I really must urge you to consider matters very carefully, taking account of all the circumstances of the case and not allowing your judgement to be clouded by extraneous factors in any shape or form.’
Osiris bit his lower lip thoughtfully. ‘You ever met my godson Julian?’ he asked.