Overtime (4 page)

‘What?'

‘The threat,' de Nesle explained. ‘I generally find - don' t you? - that when people wave weapons at you they want something. What can I do for you?'

‘For a start,' said Guy, ‘you can tell me how I get out of here.'

‘Ah.' De Nesle made a sort of a sad face. ‘That's tricky, I'm afraid. I'd have to come with you, and I
am
waiting for this
rather
important call. Do you think—'

‘No.'

De Nesle considered for a moment. ‘No, I imagine on balance that you probably don't. Sorry, that was very rude of me. But I do find being threatened puts me rather on edge, don't you know?'

Guy was beginning to feel bewildered. ‘Look,' he said, ‘exactly what is going on?'

De Nesle grinned. ‘I must say,' he said, ‘you do ask the most awkward questions. Might I suggest that you really wouldn't want to know?'

‘All right,' Guy said. ‘Just get me out of here and that's fine. I don't want you to come with me. Just show me the door.'

‘I must advise—'

‘The hell with your advice.'

De Nesle shrugged. ‘Very well, then. To leave, go through that door behind you.'

Guy frowned, suspecting a ruse to make him turn his head. He felt that eye contact should be maintained at all times in these situations. He reached behind him with his free hand and found a door knob.

‘This one?'

‘That's the one. But really ...'

Guy opened the door, backed through it, and vanished. The door, which was marked
Private - Staff Only - No Admittance,
closed behind him.

‘Oh
bother!'
said de Nesle.

He looked at his watch, a Rolex Oyster which he wore under the sleeve of this steel hauberk, frowned, and picked up the microphone of his answering machine.

‘Hello,' he said into the microphone, in the slightly strained voice that people always use for that purpose, ‘this is Jean de Nesle here. Sorry I'm not available to take your call. Speaking
after
the tone, please state the time at which you called and on my return I'll arrange to be here then. Thank you.'

He switched on the answering machine, took a sword from under his desk, and went through the door.

 

Guy was at a party.

More like a reception, actually. In the split second before his appearance, walking backwards brandishing a revolver and causing the seventy-four people in the room all to stop speaking at once, Guy thought he heard several languages and the characteristic hyena-like yowl of diplomats' wives laughing at the jokes of trade attaches.

He froze.

The men, he observed, were all wearing dinner jackets, the women posh frocks. They were holding wine glasses. Women in waitress outfits were holding trays of bits of minced-up fish and tiny impaled sausages. There was no band.

A woman screamed, in isolation. Being English and of the social class brought up to believe that being conspicuous is the one crime which even God cannot forgive, Guy began to feel distinctly uncomfortable. He tried to smile, found that he was having problems with his facial motor functions, and looked down at the revolver, which was pointing at the third waistcoat button of a tall, stout gentleman who Guy felt sure was a charge d'affaires.

‘Er,' he said.

‘M'sieur,' said the charge d'affaires. It was the way he said it that made Guy's bowels cringe; also the fact that he said it in French. Guy was no linguist, and the thought of trying to apologise, or say, ‘Sorry, I thought this was the Wilkinson's fancy-dress ball' in a foreign tongue, was too much for him. His tongue clove to the roof of his mouth so effectively that he might as well have forgotten not only Jerusalem but Damascus and Joppa as well.

He was just about to shoot himself, as being the civilised way out of it all, when a familiar figure appeared behind him. A figure in red and yellow trousers and chain mail, holding a sword, handing a piece of tattered parchment to the toastmaster.

‘Monsieur le Président de la République,'
announced the toastmaster.

There was a brief, thrilled murmur from the distinguished guests, and Guy realised that they'd forgotten all about him. They were forming an orderly queue.

De Nesle, smiling brightly, stepped forward to start shaking hands. As he passed Guy, he hissed, ‘Go back through the door you came in by, quickly,' out of the corner of his smile and passed on.

Guy needed no second invitation. Despite the fact that the door was marked
Défense d'entrer,
he pushed through it and found himself back in de Nesle's peculiar study. He sat down heavily in the chair and began to shake.

‘I warned you.'

De Nesle was standing over him, a comforting grin on his face. A small part of Guy's mind toyed with the idea of pointing the revolver at him, but was howled down by the majority. He put the gun on the table and made a small, whimpering noise in lieu of speech.

‘Don't worry,' de Nesle went on, ‘I said that you were a new and rather over-zealous security guard.'

Guy found some words. They wouldn't have been his first choice, but they were there.

‘Are you the president of the republic?' he asked.

‘Good Lord, no,' said de Nesle. ‘I don't go in for politics much, I'm afraid. Not deliberately, anyway. I think you'd better have another drink, don't you?'

This time, Guy felt, it would be churlish to refuse; and besides, he needed a drink, dead wasps or no dead wasps. To his surprise, however, de Nesle produced a bottle of brandy from a drawer of the desk and poured out a stiff measure into two balloon-shaped glasses.

‘You must excuse my offering you mead just now,' de Nesle was saying. ‘I forgot that you don't drink mead any more, and it can be something of an acquired taste. Cheers.'

He drank and Guy followed suit. It was very good brandy.

‘Now then.' De Nesle sat down on the edge of the desk and stroked his thin moustache with the rim of his glass. He was grinning. ‘I'm terribly sorry if I've put you out at all.'

‘Don't mention it,' Guy heard himself saying. Pure reflex.

‘Nonsense,' said de Nesle. ‘If you hadn't been kind enough to give me that lift - oh yes, let's see if my call came through.' He pressed a knob on the box attached to his telephone, and then continued; ‘No, not yet, what a nuisance. If you hadn't been kind enough to give me that lift, you wouldn't have been put to all this trouble. Actually,' de Nesle said, in a confidential whisper, ‘I think you'd have crashed in the sea, because you were almost out of fuel. Can you swim?'

‘No.'

‘Oh well,' de Nesle said, ‘I needn't feel quite so bad about it after all. Still, it was a bit of a liberty when all's said and done, particularly since your friend was, well, dead. A bit tasteless in the circumstances. Still, needs must, as they say.'

‘Er,' said Guy.

‘The main thing now,' said de Nesle, ‘is to get you back where you want to be. Now I'm not sure I'm supposed to do that - they get awfully cross Upstairs when I go interfering with things that aren't really any of my concern - but if you can't help someone out of a jam, what's the point of any of it, that's what I always say. Where would you like to go?'

Guy took a deep breath. ‘Would London be out of the question?' he said.

‘By no means,' de Nesle replied. ‘Anywhere in particular in London, or can I just drop you off at Trafalgar Square?'

‘Yes,' said Guy. ‘I mean, Trafalgar Square will do fine.'

‘Splendid. Now then, when?'

‘Sorry?'

‘When would you like me to drop you off?'

Guy frowned slightly. ‘Well, now, if that's no ...'

De Nesle raised an eyebrow and pointed to the wall calendar. ‘Are you sure?' he said.

Guy looked at the calendar. It was one of those mechanical perpetual-calendar things, and the little wheels with numbers on them to represent date, month and year were spinning like the tumblers of a fruit machine, turning so fast you couldn't read them.

‘Now,' said de Nesle brightly, ‘doesn't mean a lot here. We're in the Chastel des Temps Jadis, you see. Time here is very much what you make of it.'

A very silly thought made itself known in Guy's mind, declaring to all who would listen that it might not be all that silly after all, if only it could get a fair hearing.

‘Are you trying to tell me,' he said slowly, ‘that this is a sort of, well, time machine?'

De Nesle grinned. ‘Well,' he said, ‘the strict answer to your question is No, but you're on the right lines. Now be honest; you'd really rather I didn't explain, right?'

Guy nodded.

‘Good man.' De Nesle nodded approvingly. ‘By now, I suppose you meant 6th July 1943?'

‘Well, if that's all right ...'

‘Nothing simpler.' De Nesle stood up and pressed some keys on his typewriter keyboard. The green lights on the screen flashed and then went out. A moment later they read 6/7/43; #
8765A7.

De Nesle walked over to the door which, a few minutes earlier, had led to the diplomatic reception and pushed it open.

‘Follow me,' he said.

Just then, the other door opened and a girl walked in. She put a cup of what looked like coffee down on the desk, picked up the two brandy glasses, smiled brightly at Guy, and walked out again.

‘Er,' said Guy, ‘just a moment.'

 

When Julian XXIII was installed as the hundred and ninth Anti-Pope, his unsuccessful rivals raised a number of objections, not least of which were the undisputed facts that he had previously been the Pope of Rome, and that he was now dead.

For his part, Julian treated these objections with the contempt they deserved. Once established in his palace of the Chastel des Larmes Chaudes, he issued a bull pointing out that he wasn't dead at all, or else how come he could still do thirty lengths of the Anti-Papal swimming pool each morning, and that if he chose to travel to work each day from his home in the sixteenth century, how was that different, when you came right down to it, from the commonplace practice of millions of commuters all over the world? As to the other objection, the exact point in time he commuted from was a week before his election to the See of Rome, and thus he wasn't Pope yet, and it would be a fundamental breach of the rules of natural justice if the rules governing eligibility were to be applied retrospectively. He then had the bull pronounced by his Anti-Papal guard, who called on each of the disappointed candidates personally, usually at three o'clock in the morning and carrying big axes, and explained it carefully. As even his enemies had to admit, as a communicator Julian was hot stuff.

Once safely established in the Chastel des Larmes Chaudes, Julian set about the pressing task of clearing up the mess left over from the reign of his predecessor, the luckless Wayne XVII. Of the problems facing him, clearly the most urgent was that of Jean II de Nesle.

‘I mean,' he observed to his chaplain, a timeless figure called Mountjoy King of Arms, ‘the man's a menace. He's completely out of control. Zooming backwards and forwards between the centuries like the proverbial loose cannon. He just doesn't
think.'

‘Well,' said Mountjoy, ‘it's not really his place to think, is it?'

‘Be that as it may,' said Julian firmly. ‘What gives me sleepless nights is the thought that one of these days he might actually succeed. Find the wretched man. Then what? I don't suppose you've considered that.'

Mountjoy had the irritating habit of flickering at the edges when stuck for an answer. ‘With all due respect,' he said, shimmering, ‘that's not terribly likely, now is it?'

‘Why not?' replied Julian gloomily. ‘Stranger things have happened, you know that. I mean, by rights, none of us should be here at all.'

Mountjoy rematerialised completely. ‘That,' he said stiffly, ‘was an exceptional incident. Nothing like that could ever happen again.'

‘You reckon?' Julian shook his head. ‘Nothing like that could have happened in the first place, but it did. Now if I had my way, I'd go back and put a wet sponge down the back of his neck. That'd have woken the dozy so-and-so up right enough. Still, there we are. We're drifting away from the point. All this darting backwards and forwards has got to stop.'

‘Well...'

Julian tried giving his chaplain a hard stare, but instead found himself staring at the wall through a vague and insubstantial silhouette. ‘Go on then,' he said wearily. ‘Spit it out.'

‘With
all
due respect,' said Mountjoy, ‘I would ask you to consider whether it's really up to you whether de Nesle is allowed to continue or not. Isn't that a decision for ...?' Mountjoy made a gesture with his hands.

‘Indeed it is,' said the Anti-Pope. ‘And as his duly appointed agent, I take the view that I have full authority to ... Stop fading when I'm talking to you, it makes me lose my thread. Thank you.'

‘
Full
authority?'

Julian frowned. ‘Yes, dammit, why not?' he said. ‘Why can't I rub out Jean de Nesle?'

‘The Seventy-Fourth Lateran Council—'

‘Stuff the Seventy-Fourth Lateran Council.'

‘The Bull
Non tibi soli
—' said a patch of glittering mist.

‘Is neither here nor there,' snapped the Anti-Pope. ‘And if you don't want to do it, then I quite understand. There'll always be a job for you in the Pensions department.'

Mountjoy rematerialised with an almost audible snap. ‘I see,' he said. ‘Right.'