Paint Your Dragon

by Tom Holt

  A guard nodded. ‘It chased all the visitors out,’ he said, ‘threw a couple of glass cases at them. We’ve sealed all the exits so it’s not going anywhere, but it looks like it’s in a mean mood.’

  The Chief grimaced. ‘We’ll see about that. There’s no room for frigging wild men in my museum. Okay, going in!’

  He applied his boot to the door, which opened inwards. A fraction of a second later, his knife-edge reflexes propelled him backwards, just in time to avoid an airborne bronze bust, which would have reduced him to the consistency of strawberry jam had it connected. He slammed the door quickly.

  ‘Fuck me,’ he said, ‘it’s gone bloody berserk. Of course, doesn’t help that it’s one of the really big buggers. You get thirteenth-century Sienese ivory miniatures running about the place, all it takes is five minutes and a stiff broom.’ He hesitated, then turned to the head porter.

  ‘Get me a bullhorn,’ he ordered. ‘Evacuate the museum, then get on the red phone to the army, Special Art Service. Tell ’em unless they get their bums in gear, it’ll be the Wallace Collection all over again.’

  When the bullhorn came, the Chief tested it to make sure it worked; then, using a broom handle, he poked the door open a crack and waited. Nothing.

  ‘You in the gallery!’ he shouted. ‘Come out with your hands up and nobody’s gonna get broken. You hear me?’

  Silence.

  ‘You’ve got till ten to give yourself up, then we come in. One.’

  ‘Hey!’

  A high-pitched voice, the Chief noted, ear-splittingly sonorous but basically reedy and terrified. But those are often the most dangerous. His mind went back to the early days, the time he’d had to talk down the Elgin Marbles. Maybe, he said to himself, I’m getting too old for all this.

  ‘I hear you,’ he replied.

  ‘I’ve got the Pietà, Saint Matthew and a big bimbo provisionally attributed to Giovanni Bellini,’ yelled the voice. ‘You come in here and they all get it. Understood?’

  ‘Loud and clear, son, loud and clear.’ He frowned and switched off the loudhailer. ‘Was it just the David,’ he asked, ‘or were any of the rest of them at it as well?’

  ‘Not that I saw, Chief,’ replied the guard. ‘Just the big guy.’

  ‘Hmm.’ The Chief rubbed his chin. ‘Thought you said he was acting confused, like he didn’t know what was going on.’

  ‘Looked like that to me, Chief.’

  ‘Yeah. Only now he sounds like he’s pretty well clued up. Like, the big bimbo, I mean the Venus di San Lorenzo, the attribution to Bellini was only in last month’s Fine Art Yearbook. Somebody’s in there with him.’

  ‘You on the outside!’

  The Chief ducked down. Behind him, thin young men with wavy hair, black silk Giorgio Armani jump-suits, Gucci balaclavas and bazookas were filing noiselessly into the corridor. The Chief waved them into position and switched on the bullhorn.

  ‘Receiving you, over.’

  ‘Here’s the deal—’

  ‘Different voice,’ muttered the head porter.

  ‘Yeah,’ replied the Chief. ‘Shuttup.’

  ‘Here’s the deal. We want no guns, no police, no army. Have a Sikorski airfreighter in the Piazza in thirty minutes. We want ten million dollars in uncut diamonds, clearance to land in Tripoli and a free pardon. Do as we say and the rocks walk.’

  ‘Actually,’ interrupted another voice.

  (‘That’s him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘David.’

  ‘Yeah. Shuttup.’)

  ‘Actually,’ said the second voice, ‘they don’t. Do they? And anyway, haven’t you got to fall over first?’

  This exchange was followed by several seconds of heated whispering, which the Chief couldn’t quite catch. By the time they’d brought up the boom mikes, the debate had ended.

  ‘Okay, guys,’ muttered the Chief, ‘here’s the plan. You boys go round the side, abseil in through the skylight. Use smoke grenades and thunderflashes. You six come with me, in through the door. I’ll cover the David, you take out the other sucker, whoever the fuck he is. Remember,’ he added gravely, thinking of the high velocity bronze bust, ‘they’re presumed armed—’

  ‘Busted.’

  ‘—Busted and dangerous, so if there’s any hint of trouble, get your shot in first and let the guys with the dustpans and glue sort it out later. Ready?’

  Twelve balaclava’d heads nodded.

  ‘Right then. On my command.’

  It was a grand spectacle, if you like that sort of thing. Crash! went the glass roof. Whoosh! went the smoke bombs. BANG! went the stun grenades. Crunch! went the big oak doors. Boom! went the bazookas, reducing to fine-grain rubble two half-length statues of constipated-looking goddesses, no loss by anybody’s standards, and a somewhat less than genuine della Robbia rood screen which had been a thorn in the gallery’s side ever since someone had noticed the words Made In Pakistan From Sustainable Hardwoods chiselled round the back.

  And Oh shit, where’ve they gone? went the Chief, standing gobsmacked by two empty pedestals. The birds had, apparently, flown.

  In the confusion, nobody noticed that the commando squad had, apparently, recruited two new members during the course of the attack; one tall, athletic-looking specimen, rather unsteady on his feet, and one short, bandy-legged example given to lurking in shadows. While the gallery was still full of smoke, shouting and the joyous sound of hobnailed boot on irreplaceable artefact, these two new recruits slipped quietly past the guards, down the corridor and, having shed their masks and swiped a couple of overcoats from the cleaners’ room, out into the street.

  ‘Yo!’ exclaimed the shorter of the two, punching the air. ‘We made it!’

  ‘Yes,’ David replied. ‘Didn’t we just.’ He stopped and looked at his companion, and a puzzled look swept across his face. ‘Excuse me.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘What the fuck do you mean,’ George screamed into the telephone, ‘not arrived?’

  ‘I mean,’ replied the arrivals clerk at Hell Central, ‘it hasn’t arrived yet. If it had arrived, it’d be on the manifest. And it isn’t.’

  ‘You sure?’

  It wasn’t a stupendously good line - think what it had to go through to get there - but George could still hear the long intake of breath, the sound of someone who spends her working life with a phone in her ear, suffering fools.

  ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘if we’d just taken delivery of a dragon, I think we’d have noticed. They are rather distinctive.’

  George used his left hand to push his lower jaw, which had dropped somewhat, back into position. ‘Are you trying to tell me,’ he demanded, ‘that the fucker’s gone to the other place?’

  ‘I can check that for you if you’d like me to.’

  ‘What? Oh, yeah. Please.’

  ‘Hold the line.’

  Chardonay, leaning over George’s shoulder, mouthed the question; What’s wrong?

  ‘Some admin balls-up,’ George replied, his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Nothing to worry about—Oh, hello. Well?’

  ‘Not there, sir. I’m sorry.’

  George had gone ever such a funny colour. ‘You can’t have checked properly, you stupid cow!’

  ‘I’m not a cow, sir,’ replied the clerk, icily. ‘I am, in fact, half-human, half-goat, with the claws of an eagle and—’

  ‘All right. Thank you.’ George let the receiver click back onto its cradle. A moment later, Father Kelly (who’d been listening in on the extension, stopwatch in hand, with a forlorn hope of claiming the cost of the call back on expenses; if Rome sold the Michaelangelos and a couple of the Raphaels, it’d sure make a hole in it ...) did the same, and then sat for thirty seconds or so as still as a gatepost.

  He’d just been listening to Hell ...

  And they sounded just like us ...

  George, meanwhile, was making a frantic search of his mental card-index to
find some way of breaking the news. ‘Boys,’ he said, ‘it’s like this.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Prodsnap replied eagerly. ‘When do we go home?’

  ‘Er.Soon.’

  ‘Great. How soon?’

  ‘Just as soon...’ No tactful way to say this. ‘As soon as we’ve killed that goddamn dragon.’

  Let’s just pause a while to nail a false, misleading anti-feminist maxim. It’s not true that Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Scorned women are Mother Theresa on her birthday compared to demons duped. Or thinking they’ve been duped.

  ‘Told you!’ Slitgrind crowed triumphantly. ‘Told you no evil’d come of co-operating with the enemy. Crafty little angel got us to do his dirty work for him and then goes and welches on us. Typical!’

  ‘Now hang on a minute,’ Chardonay started to say, leaning forward and giving George a stern look; but he never got the chance to finish his sentence, because a split second later, Snorkfrod whizzed past him, making a direct course for George’s throat. Fortunately for George, she slipped on an empty Guinness bottle and ended up sitting in the coal scuttle, making the most ferocious noises. For his part, George took advantage of the brief lull to get a good, solid utility Chesterfield between himself and the scions of Hell.

  ‘All right,’ he said, as soothingly as he could. ‘Just calm down a second while I explain.’

  Snorkfrod, having extracted herself from the scuttle, tensed for another spring, but Chardonay’s gesture restrained her. She remained crouched and ready to go, growling ominously.

  ‘We’d better hear what he’s got to say,’ Chardonay advised. ‘There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation.’

  George nodded like a frightened metronome. ‘There is,’ he said. ‘Look, we blew the statue up, but obviously we didn’t kill the dragon. God only knows how, but the little toe-rag somehow managed to clear off at the last minute.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So,’ George replied, ‘the original plan holds good. Kill the dragon and there’s your passport home. It’s just that it’s not going to be quite so pathetically simple as we originally thought it would be.’

  There were snarls and grumbles as the logic soaked in, creosote-fashion. Chardonay rubbed his chin.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But how do we find him? That’s going to be the problem, isn’t it?’

  George allowed himself the luxury of a fresh lungful of air. ‘Shouldn’t be too hard,’ he said airily. ‘I mean, the sucker’s an enormous green flying lizard. You can’t keep something like that secret for very long. And besides,’ he continued, ‘we have something he’s bound to come back for. You know, irresistible bait.’

  ‘Yeah? What?’

  George beamed. ‘Us.’

  So they waited.

  True, the last thing they wanted to do was make themselves harder than necessary to find; on the other hand, they had to be practical. The last thing any of them wanted was a nasty theological incident, such as might be caused by the discovery that a saint and five devils were wandering around loose in the twentieth century, where they had no business to be. A certain measure of discretion was called for if there wasn’t going to be a massive row, severing of supernatural relations, tit-for-tat expulsions and a spate of films with names like Demons VI and Return of the Saint.

  There was also one further practicality to be borne in mind, one whose importance grew steadily as the days passed.

  ‘I can’t stick this sodding place a second longer,’ Slitgrind growled, putting the problem neatly into words. ‘It’s bad enough being cooped up here with that pillock Chardonay and that murderous tart of his without that frigging saint and his wet sock of a priest.’

  ‘I know,’ Prodsnap replied quietly. In his case, he could hack Chardonay and Snorkfrod; with an effort and an advance on the next thousand years’ self-control ration he could even put up with George and Father Kelly (who had taken to carrying a bell and a candle round with him and reading a book while he did the washing up). What he couldn’t stand another day of was Slitgrind.

  ‘I quite like it here,’ said Holdall. On the second day, he’d discovered televised snooker and was addicted. It wasn’t that they didn’t have it back home, it was just that it was reserved for a small group of very, very special customers.

  ‘Look,’ Prodsnap said, ‘basically it’s very simple. We’ve got to get out of here before we all start climbing the walls. On the other hand, we can’t go very far, or the bloody dragon won’t know where to look for us.’

  ‘That’s your idea of simple, is it?’ Slitgrind jeered. ‘What d’you do for an intellectual challenge, bend spoons?’

  ‘Basically,’ Prodsnap repeated coldly, ‘very simple. What we need,’ he went on confidently, ‘is a miracle.’

  For the record, he’d got the technical term nearly but not quite right. What he meant was a Miracle Play, one of those rambling medieval verse dramas that have somehow eluded five hundred years of supposed good taste, and which get put on from time to time by over-enthusiastic amateurs, itinerant Volkswagen-camper-propelled bands of actors who aren’t so much the fringe as the frayed hem, and the National Theatre. Stood up on a stage in a Scout hut or church hall somewhere, Saint George, five demons and a priest in a cotton-wool beard calling himself God wouldn’t look too badly out of place; or at least no more than is usual under the circumstances.

  ‘The point being,’ Prodsnap explained to his fellow sufferers, ‘we can bumble round in a van or something and nobody’s going to take a blind bit of notice. But if Chummy really is out there looking for us, then a load of posters with SAINT GEORGE AND THE DRAGON all over them ought at least to catch the bugger’s attention.’

  It went to the vote - five in favour, two (guess which) against. Carried. That, Chardonay explained naively, was democracy in action. He was puzzled slightly by the response he got to that, each side claiming that they knew all about democracy, and that it was a dirty trick developed by the Opposition which they had taken over and skilfully converted to peaceful, beneficial uses. In any event, the ultimate consensus ran, we’ve made a decision now; let’s do something. That, however, is as far as the consensus went.

  Proximity, however, is as great a negotiator as time is a healer. Forty-eight hours of each others’ company in a relatively small house managed to achieve what a thousand diplomats, with translators, fax machines and a warehouseful of heat’n’serve Embassy function canapes would have taken six months to obfuscate. Father Kelly got a book of miracle plays out of the library and spent a busy afternoon in the Diocesan office playing with the photocopier while the girls’ backs were turned. George hotwired an old Bedford van.

  The show hit the road.

  ‘Who are you?’ David repeated.

  Being number one on the Italian police’s Most Wanted list isn’t as much hassle as it sounds if they’re looking for a twelve-foot-high nude statue, and you’re actually six foot one and wearing jeans, a standard tourist issue aertex shirt and trainers. To be on the safe side, however, David was also wearing sunglasses, and it had cost his companion dearly in both time and eloquence to dissuade him from buying a false beard.

  ‘Me? Oh, that’s not important.’

  Context, not to mention the manner in which the words were spoken, belied this remark to such an extent that David risked raising his voice - he’d been talking in what he fondly believed was a conspiratorial whisper ever since they’d broken out of the museum, and kindly old ladies kept offering him cough sweets - as he insisted on a straight answer. His companion shrugged.

  ‘My name’s Kurt,’ he said. ‘I used to be a soldier of fortune. What’s that word you guys got? Condottiere. That was me.’

  ‘Used to be? Was?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Kurt nodded. ‘I’m dead. Or I was. Jeez, this is confusing. Okay, I used to be alive, then I was dead for a while, only not properly dead. There were reasons at the time.’

  David wrinkled his classically perfect brow. ‘You didn’t die thoroughly enough?�
�� he hazarded. ‘Skimped on the actual expiry?’

  ‘Something like that. A steam engine dropped on me. But that,’ he added, fending off any request for amplification with an eloquent waft of a finger, ‘doesn’t really matter. Before I died, or did whatever I did, I used to be a bounty hunter. And a mercenary,’ he added with pride, ‘and a contract killer, and all that sort of stuff. Man, I was the best.’ He frowned. ‘Maybe I still am, I dunno. I mean, am I still me, bearing in mind that this ain’t actually my body? In fact, I don’t have a clue whose body this is.’ He cranked the frown over into a scowl and finished his coffee. ‘The hell with it, anyway. The relevant parts are, I used to be a condottiere, then I was dead, then I think I was some kinda statue for a short while, and now I’m—’ He glanced down at his arms, his expression implying that they weren’t quite a good fit ‘—whoever the hell this is.’ He glowered accusingly at David. ‘Man, this is your fault, you started this crazy subject.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Kurt waved his apology aside. ‘No worries,’ he said, and considered for a moment. ‘I think what happened to me was—’

  In actual fact, Kurt’s version was so completely wide of the mark as to be at right angles to it, and will therefore be suppressed in the interests of clarity. The truth is that, during his lifetime, an acute merchandising concern cashed in on his extreme notoriety by marketing the Kurt Lundqvist All Action Doll - $15.99 for the basic doll, uniforms and accessories extra, for complete list write Jotapian Industries, PO Box 666, Kansas City. Some time after his death, an unknown hand had smuggled one of these loathsome plastic objects into the Florence Academy and left it in a dark corner, ignoring the risk that a speck of stray dust from far-distant Birmingham might float in through an open window one sunny day and land on it.

  ‘I see,’ David lied. ‘How fascinating. So,’ he went on, sipping his glass of water. ‘What happens now?’

  Kurt shrugged. ‘I got a job to do,’ he replied. ‘You can tag along, I guess, or you can split. Up to you.’

  ‘Split?’ David looked down to check he was still in one piece. ‘You mean these body things-tear easily, or something? That’s another thing. How did we stop being statues and start being, um, people?’