The Most Amazing Man Who Ever Lived (25 page)

‘Are we
just going to leave them to get caught?’

‘No,
we’ll phone up to Rune’s room from reception to warn them he’s coming.’

‘And
then?’

‘Then
we get away. At the hurry-up.’

‘I’m
with you there.’

‘OK, Cornelius. I’m with
you now.

Cornelius
made and unmade fists. Flung the made ones up into his hair and beat himself on
the top of his head with them. ‘What did I say to you, Tuppe? What did I say to
you?’

‘You
said, “It’s a trap, don’t try to follow me m.

‘And?’

Tuppe
looked up at Cornelius. The two stood side by side inside the glass cubical.
They were so close to the big stack of money that you would have thought they
could just have reached out and touched it.

‘But it
seemed so simple,’ said Tuppe. ‘I didn’t see how you could have got stuck.’

“What
about
now?’

‘Oh
yeah,
now
I can see how you got stuck. Clever, isn’t it?’

‘Ring’
went the telephone. ‘Ring, ring,’ then nothing.

‘Three
rings,’ said Tuppe.

‘Oh
dear,’ said Cornelius. ‘Another three coming.’

‘Ring,
ring, ring,’ the telephone replied.

‘Rune’s
on his way!’ Tuppe began to flap his hands about. ‘We have to get out of here.
Do something, Cornelius, do.’

The lift containing Hugo
Rune and Stephen Craik rose at a leisurely pace. Pink mirror tiles on the walls
and ceiling. Understated. Classy.

Mr
Craik jiggled nervously from foot to foot.

‘Calm
yourself,’ said Hugo Rune. ‘He that dares to steal from me, does so at extreme
peril.’

‘Shouldn’t
you have got some help or something?’ mumbled Mr Craik. ‘They might be armed.’

‘They?’
asked Rune. ‘Not
he?’

‘They,
he? I don’t know.’

‘Oh,
but I think you do. It will be my beastly son and his little gnome. Time to
teach them both a lesson they won’t forget.’

‘Whatever
do you mean?’ Mr Craik really didn’t want to know. ‘Layabouts and
ne’er-do-wells,’ said Rune. ‘Time they took some regular employment. Settled
themselves down to a bit of hard work. And I know just the company to take them
on.

‘Come on, Cornelius, come
on.

‘I
can’t come on, Tuppe, if I’d been able to come on I wouldn’t have called for
your help.’

‘This
doesn’t look very good for us, does it?’

‘Not
very good at all, no.’

Clunk, click and ding,
went the lift. Very much as another in a faraway place had done. And there was
the similarity between the lift travellers. The identicality, in fact.

Hugo
Rune issued from the lift with a gliding stride and a lot of green tweed. He
moved as in slow motion: jowls a-rippling, ponderous, heavy, purposeful.

Deadly.

The room
key in his right hand.

A large
handgun in his left.

Click
of key into lock.

Turn of
key.

Turn of
handle.

Swing
open of door.

Then
burst into room. All in slow motion again. The big man dropping down onto one
knee, the gun held now in both hands. Two startled faces. One high, one low.

Close
up of evil black eyes with hideous white pupils.

Close
up of finger puffing trigger.

Bang.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

Smoke.

Shattered
glass.

And two
new candidates for employment at The Universal Reincarnation Company.

Rune
blew into the barrel of his pistol.

‘Gotcha,’
he said.

29

‘Look on the bright side,’
said Jack Bradshaw. ‘You may be dead, but at least now you’re in regular
fall-time employment.’

‘I’ll just charge you my
time for working on the car,’ said the mechanic to the breathless Thelma.
‘There’s no parts involved, because I can’t find anything physically wrong with
it.’

‘Physically?’
Thelma tore the cheque with the signature she had secretly forged upon it, from
the chequebook she had liberated from Mr Craik whilst helping him back onto his
chair, and handed it to the mechanic.

‘Yeah,’
said he. ‘Everything’s working OK. But there’s something odd about this car.
You take it back and good luck to you.’

‘Thanks,’
Thelma pulled Mr Craik’s cheque card from the wallet she had also liberated. It
had a £500 limit. She handed this to the mechanic. ‘Fill in how much you want,’
said she.

‘Thanks.
£500 limit. Exactly right.’ The mechanic slipped off into his office to do the
dirty deed.

‘What
now?’ Louise asked.

‘Drive
back to the Grande, sit outside with the engine running, hope the boys have
managed to get out.

‘By now
they might have got out and gone.’

‘Then
they’d come here for the car.’

The
mechanic returned with keys and card. ‘Here you go,’ he said.

‘If our
boyfriends come to pick us up here by mistake,’ said Thelma, ‘would you tell
them we’ll be waiting in the car-park outside the Grande, please.’

‘Sure,
no sweat. Bye then. And take care.’

‘Bye.’
Thelma and Louise climbed into the Cadillac and drove away. The mechanic put on
his jacket, locked up his office and went home. In the forecourt of his garage,
the headlights of the expensive cars blinked on and their engines began to
growl.

‘What is this?’ This growl
came from the large controller. He stood before the karmascope with the
computer screen. His unsavoury eyes flashed along the rows of numbers Claude
had punched up onto that screen. A look of terrible rage knotted the corners of
his mouth. ‘The little red-haired sod. He’s escaped. He’s shot himself down to
Earth. To Murphy!’ The large controller rocked back and forwards on his great
heels and roared invective towards the black dome of space that spread all
around and about.

Behind
a nearby chugging flywheel, Old Claude tittered to himself. ‘That’s only the
first of your worries,’ he whispered. ‘I’m gonna screw you right up, you see if
I don’t.’

‘Don’t stand around,’
roared Hugo Rune to Mr Craik. ‘Gather up everything. Pack my bags. We are
leaving at once.

The
fire-alarm bells were ringing again. The smoke from Rune’s pistol had set them
off.

‘Get to
it!’ roared Rune. ‘Don’t just stand there like a dithering twat!’

‘Yes,
sir. At once, sir. But, sir?’

‘What?’

‘Why
did you shoot that empty glass showcase to pieces, sir?’

Cornelius and Tuppe were
sitting on the roof.

Cornelius
had a serious shake on.

‘He’d
have killed us.’ The tall boy’s teeth went chitter-chatter-chitter, much after
the fashion of the mummies on the bus.
[19]
‘He just burst into the room and shot straight at the cabinet. He’d have killed
us. Killed
me.
My own father. He didn’t care.’

‘He’s
barking mad.’ The teeth of Tuppe offered a castanet accompaniment. ‘Did you
see his eyes? Black with white pupils. What’s that all about?’

Cornelius
shook his shaking head. ‘Something’s very wrong. I could smell it in there when
I was searching the place. The room smelled of him, yet it didn’t.’

‘Strangely
I don’t follow that.’

‘I know
the smell of my own father. It was the smell of him, but at the same time it
wasn’t.’

‘There
is only
one
Hugo Rune,’ said Tuppe. ‘And that one wants locking up. Go
to the cops, Cornelius. Let them sort it out.’

‘What,
tell them how we broke into the suite, stole all this money, and were a bit
peeved about being shot at while making our escape? And how
did
we make
our escape, by the way?’

Tuppe
managed a bit of a grin. ‘It was all very straightforward. There was no trick
involved.’

‘Go on,
tell me.’

‘Well,
you will recall how moments after the phone rang it occurred to you that you
should use your remarkable sense of smell and sniff our way out?’

‘Yes,’
said Cornelius. ‘And when I suggested this to you, you were already outside the
cabinet with all the money.

‘Yep.
And then I went back inside and brought you out also.’

‘Just
tell me how,’ said Cornelius.

‘Hall
of mirrors,’ said Tuppe. ‘Clever one — revolving panels, one-way mirrors,
rotational floor. Clever one, but hall of mirrors all the same.

‘So?’

‘Floor,’
said Tuppe. ‘Everyone knows that the only way to get out of a hall of mirrors
is look at the floor and follow your feet. I’m somewhat nearer to the floor
than you. Told you it was very straightforward. Dull really. Sorry it wasn’t
more clever. Thanks for helping me out of the window and up onto the roof while
Rune was shooting up the cabinet. Nick-of-time stuff. Cheers.’

‘Cheers
to you.’ Cornelius crammed the last few bundles of money into his
now-very-bulging pockets. ‘I suppose we’d best away. Fire-alarm’s on the go
once more. Off down the fire escape and farewell, Mr Rune.’

‘Sounds
good to me,’ said Tuppe. ‘What’s that?’ he added.

‘What
is what?’

‘That
there,’ Tuppe pointed. High in the clear night sky a tiny point of light was
moving. Swiftly.

‘Shooting
star,’ said Cornelius. ‘Make a wish, you saw it first.’

‘Does
that work then?’

‘You
never know, it’s worth a try.’

Tuppe
screwed up his face, closed his eyes and made a wish. ‘Huh,’ said he examining
himself. ‘Doesn’t work.’ The tall boy had no doubt at all as to what his
diminutive companion had wished for. ‘Probably doesn’t work immediately,’ he
said kindly. ‘Takes time.’

‘Here,
hang about,’ said Tuppe.

‘What
you mean it
is
working,
now?’

‘No I
mean hang about. Look at the shooting star.’

‘Eh?’

‘It’s
coming this way, Cornelius. It’s getting brighter and brighter. It’s coming
straight at us.’

‘Ooooooh!’ went Norman.
‘My bum’s on fire. I’m burning up on re-entry. Brakes. Parachute. Help!’

‘It’s a comet,’ croaked
Tuppe. ‘It’s Shoemaker-Levy 9. I knew it never really hit Jupiter, we’re all
doomed. It’s the end of the world.’

‘Abandon
roof,’ cried Cornelius, gathering up Tuppe and preparing to flee.

‘It’s
going to hit us! IT’S GOING TO HIT US!’

‘Look at that,’ said
Louise pointing up through the open top. ‘Is that a meteor heading for the
Grande, or what?’

‘I hope
it’s not some bugger from the Ministry of Defence test-flying my saucer,’ said
Boris, appearing above the back seat. ‘Hello again, girls, neither of you got
an aspirin by any chance, I suppose?’

Finding
a suitable bit of onomatopoeia to describe a substantial explosion is always
difficult. BOOM and KABOOM and all similar counterparts fall a bit short
somehow.

James
Joyce coined a word in
Finnegans Wake
to mean ‘a symbolic thunderclap
that represents the fall of Adam and Eve’.

It’s a
good word.

It’s—

BABABADALGHARAGHTAKAMMINARRONNKONNBRONNTONNERRONNTUONNTHUNNTROVARRHOUNAWNSKAWNTOOHOOHOORDENENTHURNUK.

The
sound made by Norman as, in super-heated-white-hot-soul-stuff mode, he struck
the roof of the Grande Hotel was a bit like this. But not much.

A
scream of,
‘WHAT A BUMMER!’
accompanied it. And the world caved in about
Murphy and Tuppe.

A pillar of flame rose up
into the night sky, topped off with a rolling mushroom of white smoke. The lads
on the night shift at the fire station were well impressed. They had been
ignoring the automatic alarm call from the Grande. Not to be caught twice in
the one day and all that. But this was worth a bit of the old
pole-sliding-tyre-screeching-precarious cock action that they’d all joined the
force for.

Cocoa
cups went clatter and girlie mags were cast aside.

‘We’ve
got a
shout,’
cried the gallant lads.

Whoomph! Crash! and
Explode! and Burst into flames! went Rune’s suite as slates and laths and
roof-timbers and loft insulation (in the form of many surplus swirly-whirly
carpet tiles) and Cornelius and Tuppe and the cause of the confusion all
descended in a riotous discombobulation.