Valhalla, page 15
‘No,’ Willard replied. ‘Neat trick, huh?’
‘Decidedly. Could you see your way clear to getting rid of it? I don’t think it blends in too well with rest of the colour scheme.’
‘Jump.’
When the Lord thy God says ‘Jump’, all you ask is ‘How high?’ ‘But if I do that . . .’
‘I’ll save you,’ Willard murmured. ‘Promise. God’s honour. Now jump.’
So Kortright jumped. When he landed the hole wasn’t there any more. ‘Ow,’ he said, as the force of landing on the hard tiled floor of the dressing room jarred his left ankle.
‘You do believe. That’s all right, then. Right, I’d better make the most of being able to get a word in edgeways while I still can. Lyndon, you’re a jerk.’
‘I am? Well, if you say so.’
‘Scumbag. Dirtball. Asshole.’
‘If you say so, Lord,’ Kortright replied humbly, keeping his feet absolutely still and groping for the edge of the dressing table. ‘Here endeth the first lesson, huh?’
‘You know why you’re a scumball and a dirtbag and an asshole? ’
‘I don’t need to know,’ Kortright said, with utter sincerity. ‘I just believe, is all.’
Willard shook his head. ‘Because, after all this time, you still don’t recognise me,’ he said. ‘You don’t, do you?’
‘Um. Well, in the sense that I recognise that you exist, you bet I do. Because, you see, I believe. I do believe in you, just like I believe in this extremely hard and unyielding floor.’
‘Not in that sense,’ Willard said harshly. ‘I mean recognise like regular people do. Face rings a bell, that sort of thing.’
‘Sorry. And I’ve got this really good memory for faces, too. I guess I must still be feeling a bit shook up after you slammed me against the wall.’
‘Odd,’ Willard mused. ‘And not encouraging. I mean, how am I supposed to have faith in an agent who doesn’t even recognise me when he sees me?’ The scowl on his face melted into a smile. ‘I had faith in you, Lyndon. I believed you could work miracles. I worshipped you. And look what you did to me.’
‘Sure. What did I do?’
‘What did you do?’ Willard’s voice became a shriek of rage, and Kortright tightened his grip on the dressing table. ‘I’ll tell you what you did, you bastard. You landed me with this goddamn lousy job, is what. “Trust me,” you said, “I’ll see you right, in no time at all you’ll have your own pantheon, they’ll be standing in line to see your second coming,” you said. And what’s this wonderful job you got me, Lyndon? I’m a fucking janitor. Looking after dead people. And the worst part - you know what the worst part of it is, Lyndon? You don’t even know who I am.’
The world wobbled under Kortright’s feet, but this time Willard was only indirectly responsible. ‘Odin?’ he whispered. ‘That you?’
Willard nodded. ‘Now he recognises me,’ he jeered. ‘You know what? From now on I’m gonna have to call you Doubting Lyndon. Yes, you turd, it’s me, Odin. Your client.’
‘Oh.’ Kortright tried to grin. ‘So,’ he said, ‘got your own show and everything, huh? Glad to see you’re doing so well.’
The blue lightning-flash that hit him this time was approximately three times as hard as its predecessor; any harder, and there’d have been a Kortright-shaped hole in the wall, in best Tom-and-Jerry fashion. ‘Of course,’ Kortright went on, as he struggled with the pain of breathing in, ‘maybe round about now’d be the best time for you to re-evaluate your career direction. I mean, if you feel you’ve explored this phase in your professional life as far as you can go—’
‘Faith!’ Willard screamed. ‘Trust! Belief! You betrayed me, Kortright, and now I’m gonna give you something you can really believe in; you and your damn bitch of a daughter.’
Kortright looked up sharply. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Are you telling me you killed Carol, just to get back at me?’
There was a short silence while Willard/Odin considered his reply. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You want to make something of it?’
‘Dammit, Willard, you’re a god. And gods don’t do that kinda thing.’
Willard shook his head. ‘Janitor gods do,’ he replied. ‘So long, Lyndon.’
The floor vanished, probably went to floor heaven, where good lino tiles go when they’re all worn out, and Kortright fell into the hole. He fell for what seemed like a very long time; he closed his eyes (because seeing yourself go splat can cause deep-seated personality traumas, leading to self-doubt and a crippling loss of self-confidence) and waited not to see what would happen next. He hadn’t read the script, but he had the feeling that when they next met, Mr Ground wasn’t going to be his friend—
—And suddenly he wasn’t falling any more; he was standing, out on his stage in front of his audience, who were staring at him as if he’d just been fished out of the Bay after a three-week underwater swim. He felt, in rapid succession, relief, joy and an excessively mature tomato hitting him in the face.
Valhalla, he thought. Home.
‘Thanks,’ said the Great Vincenzo through chattering teeth, as they helped him sit down and draped a blanket round his shoulders. ‘If it hadn’t been for you guys—’
The skipper of the Market Forces made a deprecating gesture, body language for Forget it, no big deal, and Vinnie smiled and nodded. The rest of the crew went back to what they’d been doing, technical stuff to do with the transportation of frozen fish in bulk. The captain, a tall, blond Viking-looking type, stayed behind.
‘You are from Valhalla?’ he asked.
Vinnie looked up at him. ‘Excuse me?’ he said.
‘Valhalla Atlantic. You are survivor?’
Vinnie nodded. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Say, do you know if anybody else made it? As far as I know, I’m the only one.’
The captain nodded. ‘Radio from Reykjavik says look for survivors, but we find none except you. All the rest—’ He drew a finger across his throat. ‘Tragedy.’
‘Right,’ said Vinnie absently. In his mind he was already analysing his escape from the plane, examining the moves from a professional point of view. There was something odd about something.
‘We go now back to Iceland,’ the skipper went on. ‘One day, maybe two. Meanwhile we radio, say you are safe. Your name?’
‘Vincent Ehrlich.’
The skipper looked at him, then grinned. ‘Same name as - how you say - great escaper. Escapeling. Escapist?’
‘Escapologist.’
‘Ja, escapologist. I am of his work a great admirer.’ He paused and looked at Vinnie a little more closely. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘you are looking like him. Coincidence.’
Vinnie shook his head. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I’m Vinnie Ehrlich the escapologist. I’m amazed you heard of me, though. Do you guys get any of the US stations on Iceland, then?’
‘By—’ The skipper described the shape of a satellite dish with his hands. ‘We are greatly enjoying your show,’ he said. ‘Whenever we are in port, we are watching.’
‘Tha—’ Vinnie swallowed the rest of the word. ‘What show?’ he said.
‘The Great Vincenzo,’ the skipper said. ‘On UPN. It is in Iceland very popular.’
‘But that’s—’ Vinnie couldn’t think what to say for a moment. ‘That’s not possible,’ he said. ‘We haven’t even started filming the pilot yet.’
‘Pilot? You film escape from aircraft? Crash of Valhalla Atlantic was part of your show?’
‘Pilot episode. It’s the sample programme, to see how well the show goes over.’
The captain looked puzzled. ‘You mean for next series?’
‘No, this one. The first one.’ Vinnie narrowed his eyes. ‘Hey, that’s crazy. How can you have seen the show when we haven’t even filmed it yet?’
‘Excuse?’ the captain said; but that was as far as it went. Suddenly the whole ship shuddered, like a wet dog shaking its coat, and the captain let out a yell of horror. ‘Iceburgers,’ he yelled. ‘My God, the ship!’
Why the Market Forces sank so quickly, Vinnie didn’t know, though he was dimly aware that the speed a ship sinks at is determined by its design. Whatever the technical details, this one went down faster than shares on a bad day on Wall Street. Vinnie had been in slower elevators.
There was no question of launching lifeboats. Even if there had been time, they were the only two people in the cabin, Vinnie and the skipper, and the skipper just stood there, wailing and cursing in what sounded to Vinnie like Klingon, though he guessed it was whatever they speak in Iceland. When he grabbed his shoulder and shook him, he pushed him away, gabbling something about Dennis Jones and going down with his ship; and by then it was too late anyway. When Vinnie managed to scramble his way across the sloping floor to the porthole, all he could see out of it was water.
Again, he thought. Hm.
He tried to open the door, but it was jammed; well, God knew how many billions of tons of water outside would do that. Calm professionalism took over. He left the captain kneeling and muttering what he assumed was a prayer, and jumped up in the air, trying to get his fingers into the mesh of the ventilation grid. So far, there wasn’t any water in the cabin, which suggested that wherever the vent shaft led to - presumably one of those big U-bend things on the deck, like upended toilets - wasn’t submerged yet. It’d have been nice to see a schematic, or have a rather better knowledge of ship design, but he couldn’t and he didn’t. There didn’t seem to be any other way out, so at least there weren’t any choices to agonise over.
‘Here, you,’ he said. ‘Give me a leg up to the vent grid. I’ll pull you up after me.’
The captain shook his head. ‘No point,’ he said, staring straight ahead. ‘Better to be saying your prayers’; and he tugged at his bushy yellow beard with both hands. ‘See you in Valholl, ja?’
Vinnie gave it one last try, and this time he made it. As his fingers hooked round the bars of the grille, he felt the retaining screws pull through the soft metal, and the grille gave way, revealing a square hole about one foot by eighteen inches. The grille was hanging lopsidedly. The screws having given way on the left side only, Vinnie pulled upwards, lifting his feet off the floor. With one hand clamped in the mesh, he reached up into the shaft with the other and found a handhold. Been in worse fixes than this, he lied to himself, as he started to climb. Be out of here in no time.
The handhold was a strip of steel trim joining two plates together; there were a series of them, standing just proud enough to provide something for his fingers to grip round, and strongly enough fixed to hold his weight. With a grunt he let go of the grille with his other hand just as the second set of screws pulled out of the frame and the grille came loose. He let go of it, allowing it to fall to the floor, and reached up for the next handhold.
In order to divert his mind from the impossibility of what he was somehow managing to do, as he climbed up the shaft Vinnie thought about what the skipper had told him about the TV show. Now that was truly strange. Nobody could make a television programme in their sleep, however much evidence there might seem to be to the contrary, and he knew for a fact that he had no memory of filming anything like what the skipper had described. At the very best estimate, they wouldn’t even begin pre-production for another four months - realistically, six to eight - and the best-estimate release date was some time early in the new year. He tried to conjure up some slick explanation, but he couldn’t. Can’t have heard the guy right, he told himself, as he pulled his knee up as far as it would go and pawed at the side of the shaft in search of the strip of trim. Translation error, I guess.
Below him, the shaft was starting to fill with water. Capillary action, murmured the scientific advisers in the back of his mind; the cabin must have filled with water, and it’s being drawn up the shaft like Coke up a straw. Since the only concrete advice the voice could come up with was Climb faster, he cut off its feed and turned his mind back to the apparent time paradox thing. What had the guy actually said? The Great Vincenzo. It is in Iceland very popular. How long after a show was made did it get released on foreign satellite? His agent would know, but he didn’t. He tried to pull up the rest of what the skipper had said, but all he could remember was that last line, See you in Valholl.
Not if I see you first, fungus-face. The strain on his finger-joints was past all bearing, but he ignored that, too. By now he was able to brace his back against one wall of the shaft and force his way up by wriggling. How many levels below deck am I? he speculated, and decided it was probably better he didn’t know. Ignorance allows optimism, in roughly the same way as oxygen allows you to keep breathing. The water, however, was nudging his feet, nuzzling him like a dog with its lead in its mouth. Whatever the outcome was to be, it would soon be over—
—And, dammit, it was: light, fresh air, and a slither from the bell mouth of the upside-down toilet on to a steeply inclined deck. He managed to grab the end of a rope just in time to stop himself sliding down the slope into the water. He really wasn’t in the mood for another dead-weight climb, but what the hell, the show must go on. He hauled on the rope, feeling the rivets of the deck against his stomach and chest. Eat my dust, Harry Houdini, looks like I’ve done it again; he’d reached the end of the rope, and there were nice solid railings to pull himself up by, and a wonderfully convenient lifebelt to scriggle into before toppling over the side into the freezing cold North Atlantic.
Again.
As he hung in the water, he had a first-class view of the pointy end of the ship sliding under the water; a very quiet, peaceful way to go, just a slip and a glop! and that was it. Nothing to see now apart from a very substantial quantity of grey water under a grey, miserable sky.
Nothing apart from the helicopter that appeared out of nowhere, with a man dangling like a spider from a rope that fed out of the chopper’s steel tummy. Sheesh. Why am I not surprised?
‘See you in Valholl’? Guess I’m there already.
CHAPTER NINE
‘To be kidding?’ replied the fat, red-haired Viking mournfully. ‘In a war to be getting frequently killed, off a duck’s back the water. This . . .’ He sighed, and shrugged his enormous shoulders. ‘Peace is hell,’ he said.
The Valhalla strike (more properly it was a fight-to-rule; however, when Carol had tried to explain the idea, the Vikings had so much trouble with a sentence in which the concepts fighting and rules were juxtaposed that she gave it up) was still holding, though only just. This was impressive, to say the least, considering the tactics Odin and the rest of the Valkyries had stooped to in their attempts to breach the picket line that divided the kitchens and Odin’s office from the rest of the hall.
‘Still,’ Carol ventured, ‘it could be worse.’
The Viking looked at her. ‘To specify,’ he replied. ‘Please.’
‘Well . . .’ Actually, if you were the ghost (or whatever these people were; she still had no idea) of a long-dead hero who’d spent thousands of years joyously indulging himself in blood, booze and broads, it’d be hard to imagine how it could be worse, since the essentials of the strike were no blood, no booze and no broads; added to which there were the dastardly Management strike-breaking ploys. Some of them she’d anticipated: scantily-clad Valkyries prancing up and down the line waggling jugs of mead, double-headed battleaxes and untold square metres of cleavage, for example, and she’d warned them to expect it and they were being thoroughly - well, astonishingly enough, the word mature wasn’t entirely inappropriate in this context, though it helped her to understand this sudden outbreak of restraint when one of the Vikings explained that like of horses the wee the mead, of one Valkyrie the bouncy bits to have seen all of the same likewise, and for toffee even to be fighting all girls were unable. Nevertheless—
‘Hail, mariner!’ It was Big Olga, most dogged and devoted of the Valkyries, back again with more mead, a bigger axe and - God alone knew where she got it from - more cleavage. All the other shield-maidens had packed it in for the night; fair enough, after a fourteen-hour shift of mead-proffering and hip-wiggling, but Olga was apparently back for another stint, grimly determined as an asbestos moth. You had to admire her steely tenacity, although the fact that she spoke her lines as if reciting some of the gloomier bits out of Ibsen made it easier to understand how the boys managed to resist her. ‘Ho! But you are a strapping fellow,’ she boomed, reminding Carol strongly of a Marine Corps drill sergeant bawling out a crummier-than-usual bunch of recruits. ‘For a good time might you be seeking?’ She swung the pitcher of mead at the Viking’s head so fast that only his combat-honed reflexes made it possible for him to get his jaw out of the way in time. The swipe was, however, only a feint; as the Viking was swaying backwards, she brought her knee up into his groin with a crunch that was probably audible in Minneapolis. Wonderful coordination, Carol couldn’t help thinking, but in her enthusiasm she was sending out something of a mixed message.
‘Your time to be wasting, Olga,’ the Viking whispered, as he sunk slowly to his knees. ‘To be moved we shall not, shall not. Shame upon you likewise, unhappy of Odin the stooge.’
Olga grunted, kicked him in the head, and strode off. Carol helped the Viking up.
‘For a thousand years,’ he murmured, ‘after the fair one I have pursued, vainly. Were it not that of principle this a matter is—’ He looked down at his feet. ‘Egil Halfdanson,’ he said, in a rather bewildered voice, ‘my toes why are you sucking?’
‘Pardon,’ replied the other Viking, licking his lips. ‘But on your feet of mead was the Valkyrie spilling, and a long time it has been—’
The Valkyries, then, were a severe nuisance, but nothing they couldn’t handle. Odin’s approach was more subtle, and although before all this started Carol would have bet a year’s tips that subtlety used against Vikings was about as effective as an emery board on a diamond, she couldn’t deny that it was starting to get results—
