‘Oh I shall, I shall. My sincere apologies to you. We seem to have clipped your hedge.’
Rex gazed bitterly at the large and ragged hole. Christeen wasn’t going to like that. He gave the driver a careful once-over. A weaselly-looking blighter with a pointy nose, closely-set eyes and a mean little mouth. These dishonest features were currently fixed into an expression of impeccable honesty. Rex glanced at the car. Long, green and expensive-looking.
‘A Volvo.’ Fido woofed appreciatively. ‘XL 5. Fuel injection. Top of the range.’
‘You certainly know your cars, young pup.’ The driver stooped to pat pooch. Fido bared his fangs. Rex came forward to take a closer look at the car. A look of alarm appeared on the driver’s face. It had nothing to do with Fido’s dental work.
‘I shouldn’t touch the bonnet, sir. A bit hot, wouldn’t want you to hurt your hand.’
‘Get off my land,’ said Rex.
‘Of course, of course. No wish to make offence. We will naturally reimburse you for any damage done.’
‘Naturally.’ The driver’s companion appeared from behind the car. He was somewhat stouter than his colleague. Rex gauged accurately that of the two he was the more dangerous. ‘We haven’t introduced ourselves have we? I am Ed Kelley and this is Mr Johnny Dee. And you are, sir?’
‘Angry,’ said Rex. ‘Get off my land.’
‘I see. And hello, what do we have here then?’ Mr Kelley pushed past Mr Dee and approached Rex’s statue. ‘What is this?’
‘A family heirloom.’ Rex folded his arms. ‘Extremely valuable. Please don’t touch.’
‘Valuable, you say?’
‘Extremely. Where did you get this car from?’
‘The car?’
"The car. There are no cars here. This is the new Eden. Where are you from?’
‘Who is the statue of?’ Mr Kelley enquired.
‘My grandfather. About this car . . .’
‘A handsome chap, your granddaddy,’ said Mr Dee. ‘I see the strong family resemblance.’
‘Pity about the nose though, John. Considerably reduces the value does that.’
‘The value?’ Rex looked bewildered.
‘Sadly so,’ Johnny agreed. ‘And it’s not a particularly good example. Strictly “school of”. How much did you say you wanted for it?’
‘I didn’t.’
‘I suppose we could go as high as five. What do you think, Ed?’
‘We’d be cutting our own throats. But I suppose at a push.’
‘What are you talking about? Five?’
‘Million.’ said Mr Dee. ‘You didn’t think thousand, did you?’ He and Ed laughed mirthfully. ‘Whatever do you think we are?’
‘I don’t know. What are you?’
‘Men of the trade. Men of the trade.’
‘The antique trade,’ muttered Fido. ‘By their Volvos so shall ye know them.’
Mr Dee gave Fido such a vicious look that the dog became quite wobbly at the knees.
‘All right, sir.’ Mr Dee was all smiles again. ‘You strike a hard bargain. We will call it six.’
‘Get into your car and drive away while you are still able.’
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ Mr Kelley sighed deeply. ‘We really have got off on the wrong foot. Please let me explain. We purchase old broken statues like this one.’
‘For charity,’ Mr Dee put in. ‘There’s little enough in it for ourselves of course.’
‘Exactly. This is a happy coincidence really. We being here. This being here and you being anxious to sell.’
‘I’m not.’
‘And we being in the position to make you so generous an offer.’
‘I don’t call seven million all that generous as it happens.’
‘Seven? Oh I see. Quite so, sir. Seven and a half then. Shall we spit upon palms and close the deal?’
‘No,’ Rex said. ‘We shall not. The statue isn’t for sale. And even if I was prepared to part with it, which I’m not, no amount of money could purchase it. This is the new Eden and money has no meaning here. Now I don’t know where you’ve come from, neither do I care. But I suggest you return there with great speed, before my rabid friend and I set about you with violent intent. Do I make myself absolutely clear?’
‘I can dig it, man,’ woofed Fido. ‘What’s the fuel consumption like on this model, by the way? I understand the triple carbs have a tendency to eat petrol.’
‘Moderate to good,’ said Johnny. ‘I closed off one of the carbs and put in a by-feeder. You get nearly forty to the gallon on a straight run.
‘Diesel?’ Fido asked.
‘Fido!’ Rex made throttling motions.
‘Sorry, man.’
‘I think I’ll need a hand with this.’ Ed was becoming overly intimate with the statue. “This second-rate marble is a tad weighty.’
Rex knotted his fists. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’
‘Of course we did, sir.’ Johnny Dee smiled sweetly. ‘You said that you wanted no money for the statue. Noble gesture. We appreciate it.’
‘That’s not what I said at all.’
‘Then if it’s goods in kind you want. No problem.’ Johnny considered the garden. ‘Perhaps an electric shovel, or we have a solar-powered trenching tool which might be right up your street. And fertiliser, do we have fertiliser. Your paw paws look a mite jaded.’
‘Jaded, eh?’ Rex now had a definite twitch on. Enough was enough. ‘Just stay here,’ he said. ‘Don’t move and keep your hands off that statue. I won’t be a moment.’ He turned away and stalked across to the house.
Entering his kitchen he selected a murderous-looking meat cleaver from the rack above the Aga, tested its weight and found it adequate for the potential task in hand. He then returned to confront his two uninvited guests, who were even now worrying at his statue.
‘Do you see this?’ he asked. Johnny Dee nodded gravely.
‘Then hear this. Leave upon the instant or henceforth all will know you by the appellation “Headless” Johnny Dee.’
Johnny had one last smile left in him. He offered it to Rex.
‘Just give us a hand to load up the statue and we’ll be on our way then.’
Rex raised his cleaver. The red mist was coming on and the psychotic glitter in his eyes wasn’t lost upon Mr Dee, who saw it at very close quarters. ‘No sale then?’
‘No sale!
‘My dear sir, if only I might . . .’
‘Kill!’ ordered Rex.
Emboldened by his master’s fearsome aspect, Fido had a sudden adrenaline rush and set about Johnny’s ankles.
‘All right, all right. We’re leaving . . .’ Dee and Kelly were all at once back in their Volvo and the Volvo was all at once making a very swift departure. It tore back into the hedge with much grinding of metalwork. The open passenger door was ripped from its hinges and slapped down on to the dirt. Rex and his dog peered through the brand new hole in the hedge. The not-too-pristine top-of-the-range model diminished and very suddenly vanished into nothingness. There was a bit of a silence in Rex Mundi’s back garden. Fido looked up at Rex and Rex looked down at Fido.
There was a bit more silence.
Presently the scanderoons returned to perch in a sombre row upon the roof-top. There was a little bit more silence, but not quite as much as there had been on the first two occasions. Finally there was no more silence at all.
‘Well,’ said Fido, in his finest Jack Benny.
‘Well, what?’
‘Just, well. That’s all.’
‘Just well? Nothing more?’
‘Nothing more, man.’
‘What? No smart Alec rejoinders, no snappy chapter-closing one liners? Nothing but well?’
‘Not after the kind of day you’ve had. No sireee.’
‘Well,’ said Rex. ‘I appreciate that.’
‘Least I can do, man.’ Fido turned upon his grubby heels and trotted away. Rex heard the undisguised canine chuckle and the words ‘Simon Dee? Folk will ha
ve to look that one up in Wikipedia’
Rex leapt forward to level his foot at the dog’s rear end, tripped and vanished once more into the hole of his making
For he that diggeth a hole will fall into it..
2
And Elvis said unto Eve, ‘Put down that apple and back away from the tree.’
The Suburban Book of the Dead
New Eden did boast some really spectacular sunsets. They were red and gold and glorious. Folk sat upon the hillsides and watched them and sighed deeply. Oooooooooooooooo, they went.
On this particular evening Rex Mundi didn’t. Not that he often did anyway, preferring the pleasures of the pot room to the marvels of the firmament. On this particular night Rex prepared his own supper and made up a bed in the spare room.
Christeen’s ears were deaf to tales of unearthed statues and mystery Volvos. Septic tanks were as ever the mainstay of her conversation. And as, for now, she had at least stopped throwing, Rex felt it prudent to avoid mention of the punctured privet.
Now he lay upon the uncomfortable single guest-bed he had been meaning to have finished and stared up at the ceiling he had been meaning to get plastered. His thoughts were his own and as they weren’t particularly interesting they will remain unrecorded.
Rex smoked a long joint, made a mental note that he really should have the room’s windows glazed sometime soon, and at long last fell into a troubled sleep and dreamed about holes.
It was an hour before sunrise when Fido returned home. He had spent the night at a canine carouse and was now somewhat unsteady about the paws. As he neared Mundi Towers he paused to consider the nature of the strange lights he saw moving ahead.
‘Now,’ said Fido, with more than a hint of a slur. ‘Now, what have we here?’ He crept forward and did his best to focus.
‘Those,’ he told himself, ‘would be torches going to and fro.’ And indeed they were, and as Fido slunk nearer he found that he could hear voices also. And these said things like ‘keep your end up’ and ‘to me, to you, to me, to you,’ and, ‘I’ve got it, back to me a bit’ and ‘it weighs a ton’.
And as he slunk even closer still he could see dark figures moving in the murk. Two dark figures struggling to drag something not nearly so dark toward something which even in the uncertain light displayed the classic contours of ... ‘A Volvo estate,’ whispered Fido. ‘Bastards!’
‘Raise the alarm, hairy boy,’ said Fido to himself. Then. ‘Woof! Woof! Woof! Rex! Rex! Rex!’
‘It’s that bloody dog,’ came the voice of Mr Johnny Dee. ‘Shoot it.’
‘Oh Shiva!’ Fido took to his heels. He zipped between the legs of Ed Kelley and made for the family home. A beam of yellow light whisked over his head and melted Rex’s parsley patch. ‘Oh double Shiva.’ Fido made haste towards the dog flap. He legged it up the stairs and into the guest bedroom, where he correctly surmised Rex would be bedding down. Rex was already on his feet, glavanized into action by the noises. ‘What’s going on?’
‘The Volvo. Dee and Kelley. They’ve got guns.’
‘Let’s get them.’
‘Not me, man.’ Fido took cover beneath the bed.
‘Me then.’
‘That’s the fellow. Better be quick, man, they’re ripping off your statue.’
‘Bastards!’
‘That’s what I said.’
Now Rex was angry. In fact he was very angry. He was seething, fuming, frantic and frenzied angry. He snatched up the spade, which Christeen, upon departing for bed, had flung into his room, and rushed down the stairs. He wasn’t exactly clad for combat, wearing only his underpants. But he rippled though, in all the right places and shone well in the moonlight. Not quite Conan the Barbarian perhaps, but definitely your pocket Hercules.
Ed and Johnny were loading at the hurry-up, the alarm now having been raised. ‘I can’t shut the tailgate,’ grumbled Ed.
‘Leave it then. Let’s go.’
Johnny leapt into the driver’s seat and pressed buttons, Ed fell in beside him. The car started first time, the way those expensive lads always do. And they’d had the door replaced. It had been colour-matched. And you couldn’t even see the difference. Bastards!
‘Let’s go.’ Johnny jiggled the automatic shift-stick and as he did so a ferocious figure rose up before him, spade held high as the Hammer of Thor.
‘It’s Conan,’ wailed the fatter felon.
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Let’s get out of here.’
Thor swung his hammer. The Volvo’s windscreen became a million plexiglass fragments. Naturally the inner safety skin, which is standard issue on all the top-of-the-rangers, shielded the occupants from harm. And the insurance company was bound to pay up without a murmur. Bastards!
‘I can’t see.’
‘Back up. Let’s get.’
Johnny swung the wheel. The Volvo pulverized the petits pois and slewed into another section of Rex’s prize hedge. It reversed over the oriental fishpond, discomforting the Koi carp and stunning the stone gnomes. Rex flung himself at it. His spade skimmed over the roof raising a fine shower of sparks and removing three layers of enamel paint, two of primer and one of a rust- resistant additive with a complicated chemical composition.
“The Hyperborean Hero,’ shrieked Ed, who was really showing his true colours. ‘Shoot him.’
‘I can’t shoot him. You know that,’ Johnny stuck the automatic into ‘drive like the Devil’ mode. Rex threw his spade aside and himself at the open tailgate. His fingers caught hold and he left his feet. The car surged forwards, the engine purring like a good ‘n even though the revs were well into the red range, and then suddenly fell silent. And all manner of very strange things began to happen.
‘You have now entered free space,’ said a disembodied voice. ‘Please observe the following safety procedures. Secure all doors.’ Rex, realizing that he was now floating weightlessly, hauled himself into the Volvo and slammed down the tailgate.
‘Make extra certain that your co-ordinates have been doubled-checked and are mapped, logged and correctly aligned. Do not leave the vehicle for any reason whatsoever. Do not litter the lanes and under no circumstances tamper with the particle flow of ionized beta photons.’
‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ said Rex.
‘We thank you for travelling in the cause of Ultimate Truth. Have a nice tomorrow.’
A nice tomorrow? Gravity made a surprise return and Rex plunged heavily to the floor. He mouthed bitter words and climbed slowly to his feet.
Now you shouldn’t be able to climb to your feet in the rear of a Volvo estate and this did cross Rex’s mind when he found himself able to do so with no difficulty at all.
In fact, when he reached up he discovered that he couldn’t touch the roof and when he looked around, a long strangled kind of a gasp escaped his lips.
Although he knew he hadn’t left the Volvo, Rex found himself standing in the entrance to some kind of gigantic cargo hold. It was monstrous, vast. The Volvo’s rear quarters owed more than a little to the interior of a certain doctor’s telephone box. And even though spacious, it was extremely crowded. ‘Art,’ whispered Rex. ‘It’s art.’ And indeed it was. Art by the gallery load. Row upon row of titanic paintings, framed in gilt, hung upon steel racks. Rex wandered amongst them, awestruck. There were statues and busts, sections of wall frescos, tapestries and mosaics. Hundreds of them. No, thousands. Rex hooched up his Y-fronts. He was in a serious museum here and no mistake about it.
His own statue lay on its side in the cargo bay, for such the inner tailgate appeared, and it didn’t look out of place one jot with the stored collection surrounding it. And for why? Well, I’ll tell you for why. Because, wherever Rex wandered amidst these treasures of the ancient world, his eye was drawn to a single detail. On each and every one of the pictures, murals, icons or whatever, the self-same face grinned out at him.
Here it was grinning over Caesar’s shoulder as Brutus put the knife in. And here, lit t
o perfection amongst the Night Watch. And surely that was it third from the right in Georges de la Tour’s ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’. Yes indeedy.
It was a face Rex knew almost as well as he knew his own. A face like no other that had been before or would ever come again. The face of Elvis Aaron Presley. The man, the lip and the legend.
‘Elvis,’ said Rex Mundi in a small and troubled voice. ‘What in God’s name have you done now?’
My office isn’t exactly what you’d call fancy. There’s a desk I sit at and a chair I sit on. There’s a watercooler that ain’t too cool and a fan that don’t write me no letters. A telephone that won’t speak to me and a carpet I wouldn’t pass the time of day with if it did. I got a hat stand without a hat to stand on and a filing cabinet full of memories. Oh yeah, and I got a door.
And that’s where I come in. The name’s Woodbine. Lazlo Woodbine. Private Eye. And although this is Chapter 2 and there’s been a lot of coming and going that I ain’t had a hand in, I happen to be the real hero of this little epic. The Tempus Fugitives it’s called, (A Lazlo Woodbine Thriller.)
Now I ain’t enigmatic, so don’t expect too much art for art’s sake. I ain’t cheap, but I’m thorough and I get the job done. With me you can expect a lot of gratuitous sex and violence, a trail of corpses and a final roof-top showdown. No loose ends, no spin-offs and all strictly ‘first-person’ only. That’s the way it is and the way it always has been. And this is the way it always begins.
It was another long hot Manhattan night. Shirtsleeve and singlet weather in the big city. My office was like the back seat of Guy Stravino’s Chevy, no place to be after six p.m. I wrung the top from another bottle of Bud and fanned myself with a copy of Wet Girls in the Raw. Summer had the city by the throat. The small-time heisters and back-row pocket dukes had taken a powder, the cops ran to fat on the street corners and the cars crawled by like fluff on a gramophone needle. My water cooler steamed gently and the ceiling fan turned at three revolutions an hour. It was hot.
I removed my trenchcoat and mittens. ‘Dammit,’ I said to myself, ‘if it gets any hotter I’m taking my pullover off.’