Valhalla, page 12
Kortright shook himself hard. ‘Look, you said we were going to find Carol. Where is she?’
‘In Valhalla, stupid. Where else would a dead person be?’
‘So where is she? I don’t see her. Is she out front waiting on the tables, or what?’
‘No. Look, if it helps, why not write the lines on the back of your hand? It’s crummy as hell, but it’s got to be better than going out there and just standing with your mouth shut, like you’re the President denying responsibility.’
‘But how can this be Valhalla?’ Kortright demanded. ‘Shit, Willard, I know Valhalla, I’ve been there. Where’s the guys with swords? Where’s the Vikings?’
Willard shrugged his thin shoulders. ‘Don’t ask me,’ he said, ‘I don’t follow baseball. All right, here’s an easy one for you. Absolutely no way you can fail to get a laugh with this one. What did the chief of police say when he raided the whorehouse?’
Commandments, Kortright muttered to himself. Thou shalt not bounce the Lord thy God off the walls like a squash ball. No, doesn’t ring a bell. So, if it isn’t forbidden it must be okay. ‘Listen, you asshole,’ he snarled, picking the god up by his ears and holding him a foot off the ground, ‘where the hell is my daughter?’
‘You see?’ Willard squeaked, his feet swinging backwards and forwards. ‘I was sure you’d know that one.’
Your attention, please.
Nobody paid any attention. They never do.
Thank you for flying Valhalla Atlantic. The stewardess will now demonstrate the safety procedures to be followed in the event of an emergency. Please refer to the safety leaflet which you will find in the pocket of the seat in front of you.
Nobody looked up. The stewardess took her place in the middle of the aisle. As nobody watched, she pointed out the emergency doors, swinging her arms like a gym teacher. With nobody to see her, she mimed the approved method of putting on the lifejacket, tightening the straps, blowing the cute little whistle. Unobserved, she acted out the last few desperate moments of life in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic: the frantic scrabbling at the sides of the already overloaded life raft; the agony in the arms and legs as cold and exhaustion slowly drain away the energy and the will to live; the bubbling gasp as the head ducks under the water for the first time; the slow relaxation into acceptance and death; the head, bobbing just below the surface of the water; the gradual, graceful drift to the bottom of the sea.
Thank you for your attention. The aircraft will crash into the sea in precisely two minutes.
The plume of spray thrown up as the plane hit the water rose high into the air, then fell like rain. Inside, in the back row of the passenger compartment, a smartly dressed middle-aged man with a flamboyant black moustache put down his magazine, looked out of the window and saw a shoal of fish.
Fish?
Fish, flying?
Flying fish?
Not at forty thousand feet, surely; and besides, why has the sky suddenly gone all green and murky? And why has the plane slowed down? Flying low over Los Angeles, perhaps?
As the nose of the airliner hit the ocean floor and nuzzled its way down through countless levels of grot and crap (imagine what you’d get if you forgot to clean out the goldfish tank for seven hundred million years) until it jarred and crumpled on the primeval rock, the smartly dressed man quickly ran through the possible alternatives in his mind. He hit on the right one and recognised it for what it was just in time to be able to laugh quietly at the irony of it all before water flooded the main cabin and everybody drowned. What a way to go, eh? he mused. This time, and I’m not ashamed to say it, I really am out of my depth.
So perished The Immortal Vincenzo, without any question the greatest practitioner of the art of escapology the world has ever seen. His obituaries, in twenty-seven languages, praised his effortless skill, his impeccable calm, his dazzling showmanship. Grief-stricken colleagues confided to sympathetic microphones on five continents their debt to the man who’d pioneered such bewildering stunts as the plunge from a high clifftop while sealed in a nuclear-waste-specification concrete block into the maw of an active volcano. (Old hat now, of course, but when Vinnie did it for the very first time the whole profession sat up and took notice.) There were even some who smiled enigmatically at the interviewer’s assertion that, this time, The Immortal Vincenzo had finally cashed his cheque. ‘You reckon?’ they said. ‘Lady, you never knew Vinnie’; and went on to imply that a true artist like Vincent Ehrlich would only have died to the same extent that very rich men pay their income tax in full. One close associate ventured to say that if they were to show him Vinnie’s severed head, screwed to the floor with a tungsten steel bolt, he’d still make a point of checking his wallet was still there before leaving the room. A publicity stunt, others said confidently, a great way to promote his new show on UPN, though possibly a bit rough on the other two hundred and six passengers.
Vinnie Ehrlich, on the other hand, accepted his death with impressive fortitude. (Past life flash in front of his eyes? Nah. Never had that, and just as well. In his line of work, he’d have ended up seeing more repeats than a BBC viewer.) Given time to rehearse, work it all out and practise the moves, he’d have had a chance. As it was, this time they had him cold, and he didn’t begrudge it to them. As the cold salt water began to seep through the ruptures in the aircraft’s outer membranes and fill the cabin, slow but sure like the pouring of draught Guinness, he sat in his seat with his arms folded on his lap, while all around him was chaos, shrieking, thrashing, despair and disorder. By the time the water had glugged all the way up to the back row of seats and was swilling around his neck, things had quietened down somewhat. He closed his eyes and waited, feeling rather like the most overdue library book in the history of the universe.
A few minutes later, he opened them again. The water level wasn’t rising any more, and he appeared to be in a tiny pocket of air, his head and shoulders poking up through the meniscus. Against all the odds (and where’d he heard that before?) he was still very much alive.
Force of habit? Professional courtesy?
He wriggled across to the end of the row, took a deep breath and put his head under the water, allowing himself to slide down the aisle on his backside, until the effect of flotation slowed him down and he hung in the water a foot or so below the surface. Peering round through the gloom (some of the cabin lights were still, miraculously, working) he could make out a few drowned bodies, some copies of the in-flight magazine slowly drifting downwards as their pages waterlogged, and the in-flight movie still silently flickering across the miniature screen set into the back of one solitary seat.
Seen it, he muttered to himself, and bobbed back up into his private atmosphere for a change of air. It was, of course, ludicrous to imagine that he could possibly escape from this. The whole essence of the escapologist’s art is recognising what’s possible and what isn’t, and this one was a definite ‘isn’t’; all he’d achieve would be to mar an otherwise perfect record with a first-and-last failure. On the other hand, it’d be interesting, as a matter of pure research, to see just how far he could get before the referee blew the whistle. Not out of the plane, for sure; definitely not out of the plane and up to the surface. But given a good deal of luck and his highly developed ability to hold his breath underwater, he might just be able to get to the emergency door and find the handle.
You’re crazy, muttered his inner voice. Not to mention unprofessional. First rule of the business: don’t work unless you’re getting paid.
‘Oh, be quiet,’ he replied aloud. ‘I’m doing this for the good of my health.’
He took the deepest breath he could manage and dived, speculating as he went about what could have stopped the water coming in. A freak air-bubble, preserved by some fortuitous balance of external and internal pressures? Improbable, to say the least, and the same was true of such far-fetched hypotheses as displaced submarine boulders dropping into place so as to block the hole, and frogmen with a ginormous bicycle-repair kit. No; it had been done so neatly and the timing had been so perfect that he found it hard to believe it wasn’t somehow being done on purpose. Thinking about it, that might explain why he’d been given a seat in the very back row, or how come enough of the lights were still working to give him a chance of finding his way about. True, that sounded uncomfortably like paranoia, but there was a lot to be said for being paranoid and alive as opposed to entirely rational, well-adjusted and dead. Besides, who’d do such a thing - crash an entire airliner full of people into the sea, just to find out whether Vinnie Ehrlich could improvise?
He was by the door now, exploring in the gloom with his fingers for the release catch. Absolutely no chance of finding it before his lungs gave up, but it all helped to pass the time. Now then; here was something with the right feel for it. Let’s try pushing up first, then down.
(All right; but what if this was all in order to discredit him in the eyes of the profession? Didn’t they have gadgets that record the dying moments of aircraft? What if the purpose of all of this was to show his peers the spectacle of The Immortal Vincenzo taking the ghost of a chance he’d been offered, and failing? Obviously you’d have to be pretty sick to do such a thing, but . . . Well, there was his ex-wife, for one thing. No matter how many welded-shut safes at the bottom of flooded mine shafts he’d managed to get out of over the years, the greatest and most rewarding escape of his entire life had been divorcing Becky Ehrlich, formerly Becky Stein, best known to the public as Vanishing Velma from Valparaiso; a hell of an escapologist, but about as easy to get along with as a hand-grenade sandwich, and vindictive - compared to Becky, elephants write their names on the soles of their feet and have macramé handkerchiefs.)
The door opened a crack, but no more; there were quite a few million tons of Atlantic Ocean pushing on the outside, and just Vinnie Ehrlich on the opposing team. This was, in fact, as good a place as any to give it his best and start inhaling water; but then a mental image of Becky floated into his mind, arms folded and lips pursed, and he hurled himself against the door so hard that he felt something go sproing in his shoulder. Never mind; he’d widened the crack between door and frame, more than enough for the Vinnie Ehrlich who (so the hype went) had to walk very carefully indeed along the sidewalk for fear of falling down between the slats of drain-covers. One highly successful impersonation of toothpaste leaving a tube later, and he was outside, thrashing about in open water, suddenly eyeball to eyeball with—
Becky?
Close, but no cigar; it was, in fact, a fully grown hammer-head shark, its bizarrely transverse snout delicately sampling the smear of blood from the slight cut on Vinnie’s wrist like a stockbroker savouring a fine claret. Easy mistake to make, though.
Problems, problems. Bracing his foot against the side of the fuselage, he pushed off and scooted under the shark’s chin until he could reach out and grab a fin. The shark, startled by this, instinctively flicked its massive tail (another similarity), propelling itself through the water like a young torpedo hearing the school bell. Vinnie clung on with one hand and with the other began tickling the shark’s armpit. He had no idea whether sharks were ticklish or not, but he’d known the technique work on his Uncle Maury’s springer spaniel, compared to which this shark was the proverbial woolly lamb.
Add to the sum of human knowledge this rare jewel: sharks, when tickled on their tummies, swim upwards in an attempt to get away from the source of the aggravation. Although handicapped by the human being clinging to its starboard fin the shark made good time, almost but not quite fast enough to start Vinnie worrying about the bends. As it neared the surface, it accelerated, and the faster it went, the more vigorously Vinnie tickled, with the result that when the shark broke through into the upper air and immediately collided with the side of a large ship (the Market Forces, three days out of Reykjavik with a cargo of vacuum-sealed cod fillets in parsley sauce) it dealt itself such a ferocious blow on the head that it left a small but perceptible mark in the hull.
Jammy, muttered the Immortal Vincenzo to himself as he bobbed up and down like the last apple left in the barrel and waited for the pains in his chest to subside to mere agony, but still perfectly legitimate; and any slight edge I might have had because this ship was conveniently here’s more than made up for by that entirely uncalled-for and gratuitous shark. Not a serious problem in itself, as it had turned out, but scary - dammit, it had her eyes and the same firm set of the jaw. For a moment there he’d thought he was in real trouble.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘Strike,’ repeated the Viking, nodding vigorously. ‘We are knowing what is strike. Is hitting, ja?’
Carol sucked air in through her teeth. ‘Not that kind of strike,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s after your time. A strike is where you guys refuse to do any more work until management agrees to your demands.’ She hesitated and played back that last sentence in her mind, scanning for long, difficult words. ‘I’ll put that another way,’ she said. ‘You tell Odin, no more fighting till he gives you what you want. Okay?’
Twelve benchfuls of puzzled Vikings stared at her as if her ears had just burst into flower. True, she hadn’t expected miracles; she’d had enough difficulty when she was alive trying to organise the workers back at the bar, and at least they hadn’t kept bashing each other with axes while she was talking. But some tiny spark of comprehension, one tiny hint that they had the faintest idea what she was talking about; too much to hope for? Apparently.
‘Excuse,’ called out a huge, hairy Viking on the end of the eighth row. ‘Is unclear. You to be saying, no fighting but that Odin to be granting our wishes, ja?’
Carol nodded gratefully. ‘You got it,’ she said.
‘But wrong is. Our wishes only to be fighting, already that we have. And you to be saying, not fighting. Is—’ The Viking frowned, searching for the right word. ‘Is counter-intuitive,’ he said. ‘Your idea, my French excuse, to be sucking.’
With the palm of her hand Carol rubbed her elbow where she’d banged it on the edge of the table. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘but I don’t think so. You reckon what you want is to fight all day; well, I say that’s what they want you to think.’
‘Ja,’ the Viking replied, smiling happily. ‘They are wanting, and we. Everybody to be happy.’
‘Oh, come on,’ Carol yelled. ‘That’s bullshit, and you know it. All right, you tell me something. What are you all fighting for?’
Bemused silence; then the big hairy Viking said, ‘Excuse?’
‘Well, you must be fighting about something. Anybody know what?’
The big hairy Viking shook his head. ‘Just to fight, is all. To be slashing, and heads splitting. Is - is cool.’
‘No, it isn’t.’ Carol closed her eyes for a moment and opened them again. ‘Are you really trying to tell me that beating up on each other is the most fun you guys could possibly have? More fun than, say, sex or booze or chocolate or watching a good movie?’
‘Ja.’
‘These truths to be self-evident,’ added a long, thin Viking somewhere in the middle, ‘death, killing and the pursuiting after happiness.’
Quite unexpectedly, inspiration lit a pilot light in Carol’s mind. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you want, that’s what you want. You guys really want to fight, yes?’
‘Ja.’
‘And you’ve spent all your lives being good Vikings just so you can go to Valhalla and fight all day long?’
‘You are betting.’
‘In fact,’ Carol continued cautiously, ‘you all worked so hard, you earned the right to fight, didn’t you? Well? Am I right?’
‘A mouthful you are saying, ja.’
Carol had a general idea where this was leading; she hoped the details would sort themselves out along the way. ‘And now you’re here,’ she said, ‘you fight all day, then sleep, then start again in the morning. Correct?’
‘Ja.’
‘So.’ She paused and did a quick sum on her fingers. ‘Let’s say you do twelve hours’ fighting, eight hours’ sleep, four hours’ boozing, waking up, eating and stuff. That sound about right?’
Sundry Vikings nodded, their beards waggling. ‘On the head, the nail,’ said one.
‘So what that really means is, you work your guts out—’ (unfortunate choice of words) ‘to earn the right to fight in Valhalla, but when you actually get here, half the time you ain’t fighting at all; you’re vegging out or eating or putting your pants on.’ She stopped and let the point sink in. ‘Odin’s swindling you, people,’ she said. ‘You’re being ripped off. Think about it; you’re dead, guys, you don’t need sleep or food. That’s all good quality fighting time going to waste - time you’ve earned with your sweat and blood, and you ain’t getting what you paid for. I ask you, people, is that right? Well, is it?’
Stunned silence; then a soft undercurrent of muttering.
‘A point to be having,’ one of them said. ‘To be eating and drinking is good, to be fighting better. And of sleep, the use what is?’
‘How cheap the skate,’ grumbled another. ‘Our dues having been paid, short Warfather is changing us.’
Ah, thought Carol. ‘You’re damned right he is,’ she said, clenching her fists. ‘And now I want you to ask yourselves, why is he doing this?’
More bafflement; thinking came as easily to these guys as playing the harpsichord to a cement mixer. ‘All the war to himself to be keeping?’ a fat, red-haired Viking hazarded. ‘And us half the time none to be getting?’
They didn’t like the sound of that; brows were furrowing like big furry glaciers, and they were muttering ominously in Old Norse, a language ideally suited to the purpose. ‘An unfairness!’ roared a short, thick-necked character at the front. ‘Death! Death!’ His colleagues started shaking their fists in agreement. Carol held up a hand for silence.
