You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps (37 page)

‘All right,’ Connie said warily. ‘So?’

‘So what does that tell you?’

Connie frowned. ‘Some cheapskate’s been outsourcing their bookkeeping to the Andaman Islands?’

‘I,’ Benny said gravely, ‘compiled that balance sheet. Therefore, I know for a stone-cold dead absolute unalterable certainty that the numbers should add up. They don’t. Therefore,’ he went on before Connie could say anything, ‘it inevitably follows that the laws of mathematics aren’t working properly.’

The tip of Connie’s nose twitched. ‘The anomaly,’ she said.

‘Exactly. And,’ Benny went on, ‘I think I’ve got an idea why. That contract you were telling me about.’

‘The Hollingshead boy?’

‘That’s right. When he dies, his soul goes to Hell, right?’

Connie nodded. ‘Which is a bit unfair,’ she added. ‘I mean, yes, he’s neither use nor ornament, but—’

‘And if your soul goes to Hell, you can’t reincarnate.’

‘Sure,’ Connie agreed. ‘But so what? Doesn’t have to, if the anomaly can be put right. True love till death is what’s needed. After death, they can drag him down to the brimstone pit and set him to lighting Bill Clinton’s cigars for all eternity and it won’t make a bit of difference.’

‘Possibly,’ Benny replied, frowning. ‘But I’ve got a theory about that.’ His frown deepened. ‘Tell you later,’ he said. ‘First things first. We’d better have a word with young Cassie, don’t you think?’

Connie shrugged. ‘If you think it’s important,’ she said. ‘It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do, apart from finishing off some piece-of-shit stuff for Cas Suslowicz.’

Benny stood up. ‘It’s important,’ he said. ‘They pay me to keep the books straight, and I can’t do that if the laws of mathematics are up a tree. Let’s go and find Cassie.’

They found her in her office. She was sitting in her chair with a typescript in front of her: the Hollingshead contract, with big teardrop-shaped splodges all over it.

‘Oh, for crying out loud,’ Connie said. ‘No pun intended,’ she added, as she noticed the contract. ‘Have you been sitting there moping all morning?’

‘Yes,’ Cassie said. ‘And I know,’ she added, with a faint trace of her old self, ‘it’s pathetic and stupid, and also it’s not me. But—’

‘Quite,’ Connie said. ‘Look, I’ve brought Benny up to speed, and he seems to think—’

‘Listen, will you?’ Cassie snapped. ‘Yesterday, when we were talking, I quarrelled with Colin and went running off, and then it was going-home time so I tried phoning him at home and he wasn’t there.’

Benny shrugged. ‘So?’

‘So I phoned again. All evening, and then first thing this morning. I kept getting his mother,’ Cassie added, with a faint shudder, ‘and she kept asking who I was, it was really embarrassing. Anyway, the point is, he didn’t go home last night and they don’t know where he is. And the representative from the Very Bad People’s been ringing too, apparently, which is very bad, because if Colin misses so many days at work without a doctor’s note or a good excuse they can forfeit the contract. I’m orried about him, Connie. After you left him yesterday, did he say where he was going?’

Connie scowled. ‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘I told him to go and find

you.’

Two and a half seconds of dead silence.

‘I see,’ Cassie said quietly. ‘You sent an outsider to go searching the building on his own, just before locking-up time, at which point the goblins are unleashed and let out to play—

For a further second and a quarter, Connie was uncharacteristically silent. ‘I’m sure nothing’s happened to him, Cassie, she said. ‘I mean, the goblins can be a bit rough-and-tumble sometimes, but they don’t actually eat people-‘ She hesitated. Not recently,’ she added. ‘It must be, what, seven years since the

last—’

‘Five,’Benny muttered.

‘And anyway,’ Connie struggled on, ‘if that’d happened there’d have been bones and stuff, we’d have heard about it by now, you know what gossip’s like in this place. Benny,’ she added savagely, ‘you really are a complete bastard, scaring the poor girl like that.’

‘He’s dead,’ Cassie said mournfully. ‘He came looking for me because I’d been horrible to him, and he got lost and they locked the doors and the goblins got him and it’s all my fault, and I’ll never ever forgive myself and—’

‘He can’t be dead,’ Benny said suddenly. ‘Think about it. If the Very Bad People have been ringing his house asking where the hell he’s got to, he must still be alive. If he was dead, they’d be the people most likely to know about it, after all.

Cassie looked at him in mid-sniffle. ‘True,’ she said. Thank God. But -‘

‘Tell you what,’ Benny went on firmly, ‘why don t you ring again now - his house and the factory - and see if he s still missing. Bet you he’s turned up by now. Probably what happened was, after you’d run off blubbering - don’t pull faces at me, Connie, you’ll stick like it – Colin felt really rotten about it, went down the pub, drowned his sorrows and spent the night sleeping it off in a skip somewhere. It’s what I’d do. Have done many times,’ he added, with a faint nostalgic smile. ‘Go on. Or better still,’ he added, ‘Connie can ring instead, she’s marginally more coherent than you are right now. Where’s the number?’

So Connie rang; and no, Colin hadn’t come home, which was most unlike him; and no (Rosie Tanner at the factory said), hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him all morning, and that Oscar’s really getting steamed up about it, and normally Oscar wasn’t her type at all but there was something about him when he was angry that reminded her a bit of Hugh Grant, or maybe Paul Newman—

‘Fine,’ Benny said, as Connie replaced the receiver. ‘So he’s not at home, he’s not at the factory and he’s not dead. So where the hell is he?’

‘Sorry?’ Colin said

‘There is no need for apology,’ replied the elderly Chinese gentleman who’d just materialised out of absolutely nothing at all, with that special kind of automated politeness that only comes through long, bitter years of dealing with the public. ‘You do not know me. I…’ He paused, and a trivial asymmetry at the ends of his mouth could just about have been mistaken for a smile. ‘I have been aware of you for a while. You,’ he added carefully, ‘in various versions. In fact, I knew you long before you were born, which is in itself ironic’ He frowned, as if acknowledging a rebuke. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘My name is Dao Shan-Chen. I am the chief cashier and acting deputy assistant manager of the Bank of the Dead.’

‘Bank of the—’

‘Exactly what it sounds like,’ Mr Dao confirmed. ‘Like so many of the world’s great institutions, a Chinese invention; set up to make it possible for the living to send money across the Line to pay for the maintenance of their deceased ancestors in the afterlife. Of course, we have moved on since then, expanded our operations, to the point - ‘ This time Mr Dao’s smile was almost pronounced. ‘To the point where we’re even bigger than Tesco. For the time being, anyway. Although, strictly speaking, time has no meaning here.’

‘So you’re saying,’ Colin said, very deliberately, ‘that this is sort of the afterlife.’

Mr Dao nodded elegantly.

‘But I thought—’ Colin’s eyes opened wide. ‘How did I get here, then? A moment ago I was in a building in the City of London, and—’

‘Ah.’ Mr Dao beamed, and nodded. ‘Seventy St Mary Axe. J. W. Wells & Co.’

‘That’s right,’ Colin said. ‘I was looking for - for someone,’ he went on quickly, ‘and I sort of wandered into one of the offices, and there was another door inside the room, so I opened it, and then I was here.’

He paused. That was a rather bland way of putting it. What had actually happened was that he’d opened the door and immediately tumbled through out of the light into what he could only describe as a total absence of anything at all. No light, no floor, no walls; no air (but he could still breathe), no sound, nothing he could feel with his feet or hands; nothing. And then, just as he’d filled his lungs with lack-of-air for a really big scream, Mr Dao had popped up—

‘Quite so,’ Mr Dao said. ‘And here you are.’

‘The afterlife.’

‘Yes.’

‘So I’m dead.’

At the very least, Colin had anticipated feeling fear; also despair, maybe a little anger. Instead, just a thick skin of bewilderment overlying a total deficiency of emotion. ‘But I thought the afterlife was Heaven and Hell,’ he said. ‘Well, Hell, at any rate - I’m not fussed about Heaven one way or another.’

‘Ah.’ Mr Dao moved his head in a small gesture of uncertain meaning. ‘Many cultures believe in a very bad place and a very good place. In order to meet their requirements, the Bank has various subsidiary franchises in, let us say, the hospitality and entertainment sector. Those who seek Hell will find it here, and just because it has been carefully designed to accord exactly with their expectations doesn’t mean it isn’t entirely real.’

Colin nodded. ‘The very bad place,’ he said.

‘Quite so.’

‘Right. And the very good place?’

Mr Dao sighed. ‘You just left it.’

‘Oh.’ Colin thought about that for a moment. ‘So I’m really dead?’

Mr Dao chuckled. ‘Of course not, Mr Hollingshead. You would know it if you were. Instead, you accidentally strayed though the connecting door installed in the cashier’s office at J. W. Wells & Co. You are still completely and perfectly alive.’

‘Ah.’ Colin felt his face blossom into a relieved grin. ‘So it’s all right, then. I can just turn round and go back the way I came.’

‘Alas,’ said Mr Dao, and quite possibly the compassion in his voice was entirely genuine. ‘Unfortunately, there are quite strict regulations and protocols about the use of translinear connecting doors. Access is restricted to customers of the Bank, their employees and agents. You are not, I believe, employed by J. W. Wells?’

‘No.’

‘Unfortunate. You are, of course, a client of theirs, but the connection is rather too tenuous to be construed as a form of agency. Consequently, the door is not available for your use. You will have noticed,’ he added sadly, ‘that it has disappeared. You will not be able to find it again. This is not,’ he added, ‘a matter over which I have any control. It will not allow itself to be found.’

‘But that’s—’ Colin realised he was shouting, and lowered his voice. ‘I can’t stay here,’ he said. ‘I’m alive, you just said so yourself.’

‘Indeed.’ Mr Dao nodded. ‘And you will remain alive for the rest of your natural span. Which,’ he added, ‘in the absence of food, water and air, will not be unduly long. It will then be my privilege to escort you to our associated facility, where of course you are expected, under the terms of the contract you signed with the franchisee.’

Instinctively, Colin breathed in; it felt normal.

‘A certain amount of air came through with you,’ Mr Dao explained. ‘Enough for, perhaps, fifteen minutes. If you wish, we could play chess. Or backgammon.’

‘Fifteen—’

‘Or perhaps you have unresolved issues about your past life which you would like to explore. If so, I will do my best to assist you.’

Suddenly, it was as though someone had flicked a switch and turned the power on. ‘No, fuck it,’ Colin said angrily, ‘that’s not fair. All I did was go through a door, to look for—’ He hesitated, and breathed out through his nose. ‘The point is, I didn’t do anything wrong, I just opened a door and walked through it. That doesn’t carry the death penalty, does it? I mean, not even Dave Blunkett ever went that far.’

Mr Dao shrugged slightly. ‘In these matters,’ he said, ‘context is everything. As far as the opening and use of doors is concerned, for example, it makes a considerable difference. Opening and walking through a door in your own home is generally quite safe. It would be different, however, if you were aboard a helicopter. Or,’ he added, ‘in the cashier’s office at 70 St Mary Axe. Fairness is also a relative concept. We can explore that, if you like, but I should point out that it’s a rather complex issue to cover in -‘ he paused, and muttered calculations under his breath ‘- twelve minutes and eighteen seconds.’

At various times in his life, Colin had believed he’d felt afraid; for example, once when he’d overtaken on a blind corner and found a lorry coming straight at him, and again when he’d seen Oscar for the first time. Now he realised that what he’d felt on those occasions was just a free sample, a trailer for the real thing. It was as though someone was winding his guts round a stick while crushing his chest with a hydraulic press. ‘You mean it,’ he asked ‘I’m going to die. ‘

Mr Dao nodded gravely. ‘All living things die, ‘ he said, ‘in time; and time has no meaning here. When something is too small to be measured, it might as well be treated as though it doesn’t exist. In the context of infinity, human life is that small. Had you not come through that door you might have survived, let’s say, another seventy years. Seventy years is nothing. It takes that long to grow two millimetres of a stalactite. Even if you were to spend that time travelling at ten times the speed of light, you’d still be a very long way from reaching Andromeda. Consider your loss, Mr Hollingshead: it is trivial, like dropping a penny through a hole in your pocket, hardly worth stooping to pick it up. Besides,’ he went on, ‘unlike most of your fellow humans who arrive here, you have a future. Not,’ he conceded, ‘an entirely attractive one, but the majority of our residents would consider it preferable to the alternative, which is nothing at all. Although,’ he added, ‘there is a basket-weaving class, and intermediate conversational Spanish.’

Colin was backing away, but it was like going the wrong way on an escalator. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘there must be something—’

‘No.’ Mr Dao set his mouth firmly. ‘Unfortunately,’ he added. ‘Concessions are available only in the most exceptional circumstances, such as star-crossed true love. And of course, since you have just now resolved the anomaly in which your previous incarnations were involved, that particular concession most certainly does not apply in your case. Accordingly—’

And then Mr Dao hesitated. It was as if a message had come through on headphones, except that he wasn’t wearing any. He froze, stood completely motionless for a moment or so, and then smiled.

‘Your door,’ he said, and immediately a door swung open to Colin’s left. Light streamed through it, bright and hot as a phaser beam. ‘We apologise for any inconvenience. Have a nice day.’