Pure Dead Batty Page 5

  The teenager in question looked up from his study of the grain pattern on the kitchen table, and Latch bit his lip to stop himself from voicing his disgust at what he saw. Rand’s entire face was punctured in countless places: His eyebrows were wrapped in so many surgical steel loops that his very skin appeared to be made from metal. His nose was studded with multiple gold dots, so that he appeared to have suffered an attack of pricelessly valuable acne. His lips and chin were also pierced and his ears were cuffed, chained, and a-dangle with crosses, ankhs, and tiny daggers. As he began to speak, Latch noted that the teenager’s top molars were inset with tiny diamonds and, horror of horrors, there was even a piercing on both his tongue and—Latch blinked—his eyeball, but … how …? The butler closed his eyes in sheer disbelief.

  However, the worst obscenity was the boy’s words. Words that pierced and wounded far more than any backstreet tattooist.

  “I’d call myself a musician, Titus, actually.” The voice was cut-glass, confident of its owner’s worth, educated enough to calculate that worth down to the last troy ounce, which was why there was no excuse for what came next: “That is, if I ever spoke to servants. Which I don’t.”

  It was at this point that the kitchen door opened and Pandora came in, her hair wrapped in a towel and her face pink and shiny from the shower.

  “Um, yes. I mean, no. I mean what?” Titus’s voice wobbled, betraying his deep desire for the earth to rise up and swallow him. He’d had no idea. Rand was behaving like a—like a total—

  “Who’s your punctured pal?” muttered Tarantella, dropping down from the cupboard and announcing herself as another witness to Titus’s discomfiture. “Doesn’t his face set off the metal detectors at airports? Let’s deport him anyway, shall we? Like, back to the seventeenth century where he belongs?”

  Latch opened his eyes and looked at Titus. He gave a stiff little bow from the waist and said, “Will that be all for now, sir?”

  “Excuse me?” Pandora laid a hand on Latch’s arm to detain him. “Did I miss something here?”

  Silence greeted her query until, finally, Tarantella took it upon herself to translate for Pandora’s benefit. “Sieve-features here”—she flung out a furry leg in Rand’s direction—“has just announced that not only is he utterly stupid—witness his facial perforations—but he also does a nice line in condescension bordering on bigotry. In short, he’s a perforated plon—”

  Whatever she’d been about to say was lost to posterity: Baci Strega-Borgia appeared in the kitchen, her recovery testament to the miraculous curative properties of inhaling burnt cashmere when suffering from morning sickness.

  “Titus, what was that man’s name?” she demanded, unaware that she’d walked into an atmosphere so poisonous one almost required breathing apparatus in order to survive.

  Unobserved, Tarantella scuttled back up to her cupboard-top vantage point and began to apply lipstick to her mouthparts as Baci babbled on. “That man—the lawyer one on the radio the other day. Oh, come on, Titus. We all heard him. That Edinburgh one who’d never lost a case. Remember? Sab said”—Baci closed her eyes, grimacing as she tried to recall the exact words—“he said if he was ever in trouble, that lawyer would be the one he’d want. Oh, if only I could remember …”

  “Munro MacAlister Hall.”

  Baci peered gratefully at Titus through eyes that swam with tears. “Darling. Thank you. And thank heavens for your good memory—you certainly didn’t inherit that from my side of the family—”

  “Mum. It wasn’t me who spoke,” Titus broke in. “It was Rand. Munro MacAlister Hall is his dad.” And that, he thought to himself, is probably why Rand is such an insufferable snot-bag. He’ll have to go, Titus decided, automatically reaching for the comfort of food. He shoveled cold oven french fries onto a plate and decanted a quivering globule of mayonnaise on top. There. First, this modest snack, I think, followed by a short practice and then I’ll pluck up the courage to give Rand the boot. He may be an outstanding keyboard player, but that doesn’t make up for treating Latch like something he’d found stuck to the sole of his shoe. Titus crammed a handful of cold chips into his mouth and chewed. He had to find a replacement for Rand. The question was when.

  He looked across the table: Rand was trying to pretend he wasn’t watching Pandora dry her hair over by the range. Yeah, well, Titus thought. There was another reason Rand had to get the heave. It was becoming horribly obvious that he had a thing about Pandora. Ugh. Titus shuddered. It was just so embarrassing. He was gazing at Pandora as if she were the first girl he’d ever seen and he couldn’t quite believe the evidence of his eyes.

  “Let’s go,” Titus mumbled, keen to put distance between his sister and his about-to-be-ex keyboard player. “C’mon. Rand?”

  Ignoring this and turning to face Mrs. Strega-Borgia, Rand shrilled, “My father’s the top criminal lawyer in Scotland,” thereby demonstrating that his face jewelry wasn’t the only piercing thing about him; his voice was as high-pitched and squeaky as it had been when he was an infant.

  “Rand,” Titus insisted, pointedly holding the kitchen door open. With obvious reluctance and a last lingering glance at Pandora, Rand climbed to his feet and slouched out, humming under his breath with an expression of deep inward concentration on his face. Titus tried not to laugh. If he wasn’t stopped, Titus suspected that Rand would begin to compose love songs in which his sister’s name would feature heavily. As he followed Rand into the corridor, a grin crept across Titus’s face. Rand, he decided, had still to discover how impossible it was to find a decent word that rhymed with Pandora.

  Brains Over Brawn

  As the first chords of “She Wore a Fedora” rattled windows and dislodged StregaSchloss roof tiles, Baci replaced the telephone handset, superstitiously crossing her fingers and hoping she’d Done the Right Thing. Over two months had passed since Mrs. McLachlan had vanished, and with Marie Bain now gone and Luciano temporarily imprisoned, Baci had been left with little choice. She had a sneaking suspicion that Titus and Pandora wouldn’t agree; would in fact throw synchronized wobblies and refuse to speak to her for at least a week, but eventually they’d get over it.

  Course they would. Wouldn’t they? Baci looked around Luciano’s study as if she could gain assurance from her husband’s possessions in much the same way as she used to from his continuing presence in their lives.… She shook her head, blinking rapidly. She simply must stop thinking about Luciano in the past tense. He’d be home just as soon as—

  Baci took a deep breath, closed her eyes, opened them, and stared at the pewter-framed photograph on the desk in front of her. There they were, she and Luciano, long before the children were born, impossibly young and totally, utterly, rapturously in love, walking hand in hand across the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna. Doves broke from the shadows, flying up on either side of them. The photograph captured that single moment forever, a second in their lives, all those years ago. She’d woven tiny cream rosebuds into her hair that day and Luciano still had all his hair then. Oh, but they looked so young and happy in that long-ago Italian springtime of balmy, blossomy promise.…

  Baci’s eyes began to swim and she shifted her gaze to the huge window overlooking the meadow. Leaden skies promised more rain, and the wind had stripped the branches of the sweet chestnut planted many years ago by Luciano’s great-grandmother. Drawing strength from the shades of Borgias long dead, Baci vowed to overcome this rather grim phase of their family history. That morning she’d engaged the services of a man who was reputedly one of the best lawyers in Scotland. This had been marginally less stressful than her next task, which she’d been unable to postpone any longer. Ten minutes ago she’d taken the first steps toward finding a new nanny for the children. It’s not a betrayal, she told herself firmly. I am not giving up hope that Mrs. McLachlan will … be found. Alive. Not at all. But right now I need to hire a temporary … replacement. Bleakly, Baci considered how impossible it was to replace Flora McLachlan. She’d been so much
more than a nanny. Flora had been a friend, a confidante, a big sister, a teacher, a mother almost.… At this last, Baci laid her head on Luciano’s desk and was on the point of bursting into tears when she was rewarded with a stiff kick in the ribs from her tiny passenger, the unborn baby Borgia, outraged at the sudden shrinkage in its accommodations.

  Also suffering from a major downsizing of his living quarters, Luciano Strega-Borgia was gazing in disbelief at what passed for lunch chez cell number three below the High Court in Glasgow. His lunch tray, slid through a hatch cut into the vertical bars of the cell door, bore one smear of dubious meat-product sandwiched between two curling slices of white bread; a plastic knife of such flimsy construction that it wilted in the heat from Luciano’s hand; and one tiny carton of tropical fruit drink. This, when opened, scored a direct hit on Luciano’s jacket with a squirt of indelible orange fluid that had no connection with the tropics or indeed with any fruit grown on earth. However, these crimes against gastronomy faded to beige beside the horrors lying in wait inside a white styrofoam cup. This held possibly the foulest, nastiest liquid ever to pass Luciano’s lips since the gluhwein Marie Bain had prepared for a StregaSchloss drinks party some years ago, ad-libbing ingredients with catastrophic effect. To that day Luciano had been unable to look at a tube of Araldite without twitching uncontrollably, and he still had nightmares about watching a local farmer trying to pry his lips apart after swilling what amounted to Super Glue diluted in hot claret; a sight Luciano was unlikely to forget. Ever.

  But the contents of that cup, masquerading as cappuccino … Tears came to Luciano’s eyes as it dawned on him that this vile liquid might be the closest he was going to get to coffee for some time. He’d tasted better bathwater. As Luciano peered morosely at his reflection in his pretend coffee, his morale sank to an all-time low. Looking around the cell, he sensed that low was a relatively elevated position when compared to the depths to which his cellmates had fallen.

  Slouched on the bench opposite was a pallid mountain of human flesh propped up on one side by what Luciano initially took to be a bundle of jaundiced sticks. He blinked. The sticks folded themselves into a different arrangement, revealing as they did so that they were the limbs of one of the most skeletal human beings he had ever seen. The sticks gave voice, rubbing their tonsils together in such a fashion that Luciano feared they’d set their owner on fire.

  “Right, big mawn,” they rasped, “seez a cup a coffee. A’m that thirsty ah cud spit.” And with this logic-defying statement, the sticks toppled backward onto the bench. The man-mountain heaved and shuddered, stretching out one vast arm toward the cell door, where another tray had been pushed through the hatch.

  “Err yiz go, Malky,” said Man-Mountain, flashing Luciano what might have passed for a polite smile in shark society, then snapping his teeth shut before continuing, “Ah wiz gaggin’ fir this, me.”

  Luciano smiled nervously; he prayed that this hadn’t been an utterance requiring an answer, since he had no idea what had just been said. In his confusion and embarrassment he bent his head and took a large gulp from his coffee cup before he remembered how bad it tasted. Halfway through an automatic swallow, he tried to apply reverse thrust and succeeded only in spraying his front with regurgitated coffee-faux.

  Across the cell Malky and Man-Mountain watched with interest, pausing only to take long slurping mouthfuls of their own identical beverages. When Luciano’s splutters had ceased and he could once more draw breath without choking, Malky stretched out a scrawny arm in his direction. Puzzled, Luciano held out his hand, wondering if even in this place good manners were still the norm.

  “Naw, naw,” Malky grated. “Ah don’t wan’ ter shake yer haund. Ah’m no wantin’ your germs. Geez yer coffee if yer no wantin’ it.”

  Luciano obliged, passing across the cup with a hand that he could not stop from shaking.

  “Awwww. The wee man’s feart,” observed Malky; he drained Luciano’s cup and narrowed his eyes with pleasure, though whether this was at the joy of drinking more execrable coffee or of realizing that he’d successfully intimidated Luciano it was hard to tell. “Eh, Big Brian,” he continued, sinking an elbow into his companion’s considerable gut, “see if the wee man’s got any snout on him. Ah fancy a smoke, eh no?”

  Luciano shut his eyes in horror. He was going to die. He just knew it. Here, in a filthy cell below the ironically named Courts of Justice, he, Luciano Perii Strega-Borgia—an innocent man, a man who paid his taxes on time, a man whose family’s considerable tax burden had probably helped build this hellhole, a decent man who had never laid a finger on another being with harmful intent, a kind man who rescued spiders from baths and loved his wife and children to distraction …

  “Aw look, Brian,” the hateful rasp continued. “The wee man’s cryin’.”

  Luciano opened his eyes and saw that if he died now, the last written words he’d ever clap eyes on were:

  scrawled in what looked ominously like blood on the wall behind Malky’s head. Taking a deep breath, Luciano called on his ancient Roman heritage and stood up, fixing Man-Mountain with what he hoped was a flinty stare. To his astonishment, Luciano realized that what was needed here was intelligence, not brute strength.

  “I only wish you’d given me a chance to warn you about that coffee,” he began, giving a rueful and faintly apologetic smile before continuing, “But you were in such a hurry, you’d drunk it before I could explain. I wonder, do they have an isolation unit in this building? Infectious diseases unit? Barrier nursing, breathing apparatus, air scrubbing? Heavens, I do hope so. Wouldn’t want to be responsible for wiping out the entire population of the west of Scotland—”

  “WHAT?” Malky sat bolt upright. “What’re youse on about?”

  “They arrested me at Glasgow Airport,” Luciano improvised. “I’m a scientist. I synthesize tropical diseases. You know? Things for which there is no cure. Like bilharzia, dengue hemorrhagic fever, plague, hantavirus, Ebola, Lassa fever …”

  Malky’s complexion had bleached to light oak rather than sunbed-assisted mahogany. “Whit’s he sayin’, Big Brian? Ah don’t understaun’.”

  “I imagine, since it’s the enhanced laboratory version I’m carrying, it shouldn’t take more than about an hour to kick in,” Luciano mused happily. “Of course, with the antidote, you might stand a chan—”

  “GUARD!” Malky was on his feet, crashing his tray against the bars of the cell. “GUARD! AH’M GONNY DIE! GET ME OOTA HERE!”

  Luciano risked a look at Big Brian, who was regarding him with a calculating eye, obviously weighing up his chances of exacting revenge for his colleague’s condition.

  “So damned infectious,” he muttered to himself, smiling sadly at Big Brainless and raising his voice in order to make himself heard over Malky’s screams. “Droplet, saliva, sneezes, even just being within, pfffff, say, twenty feet of an infected person is enough to—”

  The bars shook with the impact of Big Braindead adding his weight to the plea for guards.

  Luciano took a deep breath and sat down again on the bench, taking a huge bite of his curly sandwich. Suddenly he was starving.

  S’tan on the Skids

  Facedown on a black leather massage table, S’tan, FIRST MINISTER OF THE HADEAN EXECUTIVE, gave a roar of anguish as His masseur dug his fingertips into the back of His neck.

  “GO EASY, SCUM,” He hissed, clenching His fists so hard that two of His fingernails snapped off and pinged across the room.

  Seeing this, the masseur tutted reprovingly. “Now look what You’ve gone and done to Your Self. Silly boy. We’ll have to give You a manicure next. Just lie still and we’ll be all done in two shakes of a lamb’s tail—”

  “LAMB?”

  “Ooops. Sorry. Forgot You’re not too keen on them. Two shakes of a goat’s tail, then. Now relaaax. Chill—”

  “CHILL?” S’tan’s voice was menacing in the extreme. “I DON’T DO CHILL, CRETIN. THIS IS HELL, AFTER ALL. ROAST, BRAISE, BOIL;
ABSOLUTELY. FLAMBÉ, SEAR, TOAST IF YOU MUST—BUT CHILL? THAT IMPLIES A PROBLEM WITH ONE’S FURNACE.”

  “Heck no. I … I … I never meant You had a problem with Your furnace, most Igneus One … um, er …” The masseur sensed that he was heading for permanent chilling unless he made good the damage he’d already done. He opened his mouth again and popped both his cloven feet straight in. “Goodness me, no, O Pyretic Premier,” he squeaked, aware that beneath his fingers S’tan’s muscle tone had turned from floppy flab to reinforced concrete. “Oh, Lordy, never, Your Imperial Inflammableness, long may Your chimneys smoke—”

  “GOODNESS? LORDY?” Here S’tan sat up so abruptly that he knocked the hapless masseur to the floor. “I DON’T THINK SO. GUARDS. ANOTHER ONE FOR INVOLUNTARY VOLUME DOWNSIZING.”

  “Pardon me?” squeaked the masseur.

  “TOO LATE. NO PARDONS GIVEN.”

  “B-b-b-but what do You mean?” squalled the masseur as two lumpen trolls entered the S’pa and began to drag him away. “What’s involuntary volume downsizing? Your Maleficence?” His voice died away down the corridors, fading to silence immediately after uttering one tortured scream as, presumably, one of S’tan’s guards enlightened him as to the purpose of the pruning shears carried by all members of the Executive Guard.

  S’tan rolled Himself off the massage table and stood up, rubbing at the knot at the back of His neck and forcing Himself to unclench His jaw. How long had it been now? Ten days? Give or take a minute or two? Ten days since that idiot Isagoth had failed to make the deadline of the autumnal equinox. Ten days since that same dunderheaded demon Isagoth had vanished off the face of the planet, either because he’d failed to find the Chronostone by the due date or because he’d found the Chronostone and intended to hang on to it, thank You very much and with all due respect, Boss, now I’ve got the stone, You can go boil Your bottom in sump oil for all I care.