City of Death Read online

  Le Patron heartily wished someone with a gun would turn up. What was it with the English and water? A century ago a man called Wallace had arrived in Paris, realised the city had no clean drinking water, and insisted on building fountains that provided it, free of charge, to whoever wanted it. Ever since, Parisians had regarded the English as unnecessarily obsessed with water. And here were three of them, taking up a table which could be used for the drinking of wine. No wonder people kept pointing guns at them.

  * * *

  Romana couldn’t see what the fuss was about. She’d studied the History of Art on the Planet Earth extensively (well, she’d read a book about it that morning) and had emerged from the experience baffled.

  Humans had been making art for almost as long as they’d been humans. The idea seemed to have come to them in a cave. Initially it had made up for a lack of language, providing an effective way of inviting your friends out for a pleasant afternoon’s bison hunting simply by drawing one on a wall. The next step had been commemorative, drawing a picture of that afternoon’s jolly good bison hunt to raise a smile on the long ice-age evenings. And then people had started drawing bison simply because they liked looking at bison.

  After that, Romana thought it had all got out of hand. For a long time, art had been about great warriors and hunters and their food and that was fine. Then, unable to make up their minds about the existence of higher beings, humanity had started including them in their paintings. Quite a lot of these showed gods turning up to surprise young ladies in the bath. The resulting trouble allowed for even more paintings of glorious battles and nice meals.

  Maybe it was because gods and food stopped being interesting, but art gradually turned its attention to other things—flowers, sunsets and the seaside and so on. This was all very well, as it was what people wanted to look at because it made them somehow feel good about themselves. But for some reason artists then decided that that wasn’t the purpose of art at all, and started painting things that weren’t so nice to look at.

  As Romana had reached the end of her book on art, she’d decided that artists were now doing this to be deliberately annoying. It was no good asking them for pictures of flowers and sunsets and bison. Instead, art galleries were full of things which made people think and so made them unhappy. In Romana’s experience, human beings were at their happiest when they weren’t thinking. In their short lives they were so rarely happy that the idea of creating a leisure activity that deliberately made them miserable seemed rather mean.

  Equally perverse was what humans valued in their art. As it was all so terribly fragile, bits would fall off, get cut off, eaten or just generally damaged, and instead of throwing it away and making a new one, humans simply valued it all the more. As far as she could tell, humanity seemed to reward things for being old and mostly intact. They didn’t even have to make that much sense. On that basis you may as well put the Doctor in a museum. Actually . . .

  * * *

  Duggan was in full flow, his face lit up with a rather piggy enthusiasm. ‘So you can imagine the furore . . .’

  ‘The what?’ Romana tried to show that she was paying attention.

  ‘The uproar.’

  ‘Oh, the uproar.’ She rested her head on her hand and stared through the café window. Outside, it looked as though Paris was having such a fun day, and all this sounded so complicated. Duggan was explaining how in recent months the whole Art World had been plunged into a furore and an uproar. Masterpieces that had apparently been missing for centuries just started turning up in auction houses across the world.

  ‘All fakes of course,’ interjected the Doctor airily.

  ‘Well, they’ve got to be, haven’t they?’ said Duggan. ‘Haven’t they?’

  ‘Are they?’ Romana asked.

  Duggan paused. ‘They’re very, very good ones. They stand up to every scientific test.’ He made it sound as if there was something wrong with science.

  The Doctor was finally, properly intrigued. ‘And the only connection in all this is the Count?’

  Duggan explained how the Count’s name kept on cropping up. The great auction houses of Europe prided themselves on their discretion. Sellers were rarely named (for fear of revealing a reversal in the fortunes of a country, or worse, a famous family). Even so, it was sometimes possible to find out who was selling what. Very rarely would the Count ever directly be the vendor. Occasionally he would be acting on behalf of one of his many friends. Sometimes a piece was being sold by one of his dear friends. Maybe the Count would appear in an auction room on the Drouot to bid on some rarity (which cleared him, of course. It was unthinkable that Count Scarlioni would bid on his own auction even if he never won). Perhaps the Countess would be there, flicking ash as she leafed through the brochure, smoking through a cigarette holder and looking quite beautifully bored. Occasionally they would be spotted at a soirée, making a beeline for a boorish American billionaire, smiling pleasantries as they listened to tiresome anecdotes about frogs’ legs and snails. Sometimes Hermann, the Count’s right-hand man, would be seen driving back across from the Italian border. After one such trip, a hasty inspection at a garage had uncovered what might just have been a repaired bullet hole. Once, when the Count had been in Tokyo, Hermann had been to Buenos Aries. Visiting relatives, he had claimed.

  ‘But nothing dirty can be proved,’ Duggan concluded ruefully. ‘The Count’s absolutely clean. So clean he stinks.’

  ‘He isn’t clean any more.’ The Doctor tapped the side of his nose. ‘The Countess has that bracelet.’

  Good point, thought Duggan. Or was it? The Doctor had, after all, stolen it. The Countess had simply retrieved it. And Duggan only had the Doctor’s word that the bracelet was in any way unusual. What was it he’d said? Something about a hidden camera in it or something? Come to think of it, that sounded a bit fishy.

  Suspicious of everyone and everything was Duggan’s natural state. ‘How much would you say that bracelet is worth?’ he asked. What if the Doctor really had just been trying to steal it? What if he’d just traded confidential Department secrets with a Parisian pickpocket? Oh, that would look bad. The Chief would no doubt say something withering.

  ‘What’s the bracelet worth?’ The Doctor lowered his voice mysteriously. ‘Well, that rather depends on what you want to do with it.’

  Romana coughed.

  The Doctor straightened up, neatening his scarf. He nodded and waved, as though to an old acquaintance across a crowded room.

  Two men in suits had come in. Two different men in suits. Holding guns.

  Le Patron pointed immediately to the table of foreigners. The men nodded their thanks.

  Everyone else in the bar suddenly looked elsewhere.

  ‘Do you know’—the Doctor already had his hands in the air—‘I rather think we’re being invited to leave. The dear Countess, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  Romana broke into a radiant smile and put her hands up enthusiastically. Sounded like fun.

  Le Patron watched with relief as the foreigners were led out of his café at gunpoint. One of the men in suits nodded to him, and left a generous tip on their table. A true Frenchman.

  * * *

  Cinq à sept is a rich Parisian tradition you won’t find in the guidebooks. Between the hours of 5 and 7 p.m., the city is at its most discreet. They are the hours when husbands announce they must, regrettably, work late, and when wives suddenly bump into an old friend in town and just have to have a catch-up. They are also the hours when certain hotels fill temporarily with the sounds of laughter and popping corks.

  Between cinq and sept, the minds of all good Parisians are on anything other than the whereabouts of their spouses. To even ask would be unthinkable. And yet, this particular afternoon, the Countess was bored.

  The Countess had nothing to do. She had ordered Duggan brought to the Château, she had watched Hermann executing his henchmen, a
nd she had finished her letters. An empty patch of time stretched ahead of her. There was no sign of Carlos and nothing to do. So it was that some neglected wives took to eating chocolates and growing fat.

  Idly, she tugged at a bell pull and Hermann entered the library, his uniform surprisingly immaculate.

  ‘My lady?’ he enquired.

  ‘Hermann, where is the Count?’

  ‘Down in the laboratory, my lady.’

  ‘With that professor again.’ She didn’t bother to hide her distaste. She knew she had no right to criticise his diversions. She knew it was all something to do with one of the Count’s grand schemes. And yet, well, that windowless room, that terrible little man, and all that equipment. How frightfully dull.

  ‘No, my lady,’ Hermann corrected her gently. ‘The Professor is resting in his room.’ Hermann had carried the exhausted man there himself.

  ‘Oh. Thank you, Hermann.’ The Countess dismissed him, puzzled. What would Carlos be doing down in the cellar alone?

  She wandered through the halls of the Château, past several Rembrandts, half a dozen Canalettos and a Matisse that could do with a clean. She ignored a dusty row of the Count’s family portraits done in oils, a series of men, all with a strong resemblance—that same wonderfully bored smile. Her fingertips strayed over a collection of vases so beautiful a pasha had put out the potter’s eyes so he could make no more. She didn’t even see them. Rotten floorboards bounced beneath her feet as she traversed a corridor skirted with entwined marble lovers by Bartolini. She paused to use the proffered conch of a Michelangelo nymph as an ashtray, then crossed to a door leading down to the cellar. She had, she’d decided, come to see what Carlos’s Great Project was all about.

  The door was locked. Oh.

  ‘Carlos?’ she called. She rattled the handle.

  * * *

  Down in the cellar, the Countess’s voice drifted through the wine racks, past the banks of the mighty computer and echoed off the great glass spires of the Professor’s device.

  But the Count did not hear her. Or if he did, she was not important. Not right now.

  Count Carlos Scarlioni’s right eye was twitching.

  It had started as an itch. It had grown.

  The Count had been wandering through the basement, altering a setting here, a dial there, really little more than tidying up (and, in the process, advancing the Professor’s work by a good few months).

  He’d caught up with his face in a shaving mirror. That smile.

  He was struck by a thought, one that started to make sense of everything.

  He’d always known and yet he’d never quite known.

  He was transfixed by his own reflection. And yet it wasn’t his reflection. Not really.

  He scratched again at the skin above his right eyebrow.

  He paused.

  He touched the skin again, delicately. It felt, for the first time in his life, odd.

  He caught sight of his smile. It was broad now. Eager for him to know.

  He reached up to touch the skin again and instead of scratching, he tugged at it, curiously, wondering what would happen. With horrid ease, the skin came loose. He carried on pulling at it, a strip of it peeling away and opening out, falling across in the centre of his face. Curiously, he didn’t feel any pain, or any sensation at all.

  Count Carlos Scarlioni didn’t feel anything as he pulled his face slowly, methodically apart. Piece by piece.

  As he opened up the flesh, the voices came pouring out.

  And this time, he knew what they were saying.

  They were calling his name.

  The last of his face fell away in ribbons to the floor. The Count continued to stare into the mirror.

  There was no blood. There was no skull under the skin.

  The single eye, the green tentacles that made up the true face of Scaroth, the last of the Jagaroth, stared back at him.

  PART TWO

  I love Paris every moment.

  Cole Porter

  6

  PARIS IN A DAY

  The Count began to remember. The ship, the terrible sky of that lifeless world. Being caught in an explosion so endless it was still ongoing.

  * * *

  So, I’m the last of the Jagaroth, Scaroth thought. For as long as that lasts.

  The warp field finally, mercifully, collapsed. The fragments of Scaroth’s ship, squeezed into place by impossible forces, at last felt free to fling themselves in burning splendour far and wide across the surface of the dead planet.

  Scaroth died. And then the surprising thing happened.

  * * *

  Pinioned by unimaginable forces at the heart of the warp field, Scaroth found himself very briefly sharing space with the entirety of time. The Jagaroth’s last great achievement was time travel. Of a sort.

  * * *

  ‘It’s sensational, isn’t it?’ oozed Elena.

  Harrison Mandel glanced around the gallery and wished for a nice cup of tea.

  Elena had dragged him to a ‘happening space’. It was somewhere beyond Montparnasse, a crumbling commune on the Boulevard Arago. He felt at any moment he was going to get his pocket picked. He really didn’t want to be here. But Elena had been most insistent. She’d bought him a horrible glass of wine on the way in and that, at least, had made the whole thing slightly bearable.

  The happening space was everything Harrison had dreaded. Smell of joss-sticks? Check. Ravi Shankar LP? Check. Coats that smelt of dead sheep? Check.

  Someone was even playing the bongos.

  The worst of it all was how impossibly young and pretty everyone seemed. Have I really got so old? thought Harrison. Have I forgotten how to have fun?

  A girl danced passed him, giggling at precisely nothing and Harrison took another swig of his wine.

  Someone started to perform a prose poem accompanied by a cello. Harrison shuddered.

  They wove their way through the crowd. Someone offered round a tray full of fairy cakes. Harrison reached out for one. Elena placed her hand on his and steered him away. ‘Are they drugged?’ he asked.

  ‘But no,’ she gasped. ‘They just have rats in the kitchen. Now, here we are.’

  In a corner sat a man, drawing frantically, on the walls, on the floor and on sheet after sheet of paper, scribbling away with charcoal. He was a burly man with a beard. His pullover was threadbare and covered with black sooty smears.

  ‘He is called Bourget,’ breathed Elena. ‘I just had to bring you. He’s quite the sensation. Everyone says he’s had a breakthrough. Look.’

  All of Bourget’s drawings were of people, their faces replaced with broken clocks.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ admitted Harrison. ‘Does nothing for me.’

  ‘Alors! You must learn how to talk about art. We shall have to try and find you better words,’ Elena clucked. ‘Poor Bourget says he’s seen through the cracks of time.’

  What does that even mean? thought Harrison.

  Bourget was hastily scrawling away like a man possessed. He’d seized a tourist’s reproduction of the Mona Lisa and was sketching what looked to be a plate of calamari over it.

  ‘How daring,’ enthused Elena encouragingly. ‘What he’s done here is to set up a breathtaking conversation through a pop-art reappropriation of a standard form, don’t you think?’

  Hmmm, thought Harrison.

  * * *

  The Countess walked back through the empty halls of the Château. They kept a large number of servants, but, as was still the fashion in the very oldest of houses, they were rarely seen. A maid brought her café au lait to her room every morning, and Hermann took the Count’s to his.

  When she got back to the library, she wasn’t surprised to find the ashtrays had been emptied and her papers tidied. She wasn’t surprised because she didn’t notice.


  She sat down, toying idly with a Chinese puzzle box, her fingers working their way across the intricate inlay of the wooden surface. A twist here, a push against a slight indent there, a gentle pressure and then a slide . . . Such boxes could demand over a thousand steps before they would open, yet this one required just a couple of dozen. Even so, it had taken her a long time to learn the intricate sequence, like mastering a piano sonata. At moments of indecision, she found the box calming.

  With a cough, Hermann announced his presence in the room. ‘Countess, the people you wished to speak to are here.’

  She nodded, cheering up enormously. This would be diverting at least. ‘Show them in, Hermann, show them in.’ She favoured Hermann with a warm smile. He’d stay and help, of course.

  Hermann padded away to fetch her guests. The Countess noticed Carlos had left her bracelet on display on the table. That would never do. Swiftly she slotted it inside the puzzle box, sealed it, placed a cigarette in her holder, lit it, tucked her legs up under her on the sofa and settled back to relax and enjoy the interrogation.

  She could hear footsteps. What would they be like? She struggled to remember them. Duggan, a man and a girl. Perhaps the man would share Duggan’s somewhat bovine charms . . . And the woman? She fished around in her head for an image of English femininity and managed some sort of starched and dowdy librarian.

  A tangled man in a scarf was thrown in by Hermann. He landed in a heap at her feet, startling her out of her reverie.

  ‘I say!’ exclaimed the man, springing up. ‘What a wonderful butler, he’s so violent.’

  * * *

  The Count was standing in a corridor. In front of him an elaborate mirror stretched from floor to ceiling, its golden frame blotched with the ages. He was looking at the duck-shell blue wall, at the frame, at anything other than the mirror. He was doing whatever he could to avoid staring incredulously at his face.

  He’d stood in the laboratory, enraptured by the strangeness of his own reflection. His head had flooded with voices and thoughts, a tidal rush that would have overwhelmed him had he not already been lost.