City of Death

by Douglas Adams

  ‘Yes, today.’ The dangerous smile became exactly thirteen per cent more dangerous and twenty per cent firmer.

  Kerensky was as baffled as he was concerned. ‘Count, I think this is wonderful work, but I do not understand this obsessive urgency.’

  For a moment it looked as though Count Scarlioni was going to give him a proper answer. Instead he tossed the Professor’s words back at him. ‘Time, Professor. It is all a matter of time.’

  * * *

  ‘There’s something the matter with time,’ the Doctor said.

  Romana didn’t answer. She was looking sadly at the sketch.

  Feeling in need of a breath of fresh air, they had moved to sit outside the café. The air no longer seemed quite so warm, the afternoon no longer quite so welcoming.

  As the chill spread, there were fewer people drinking out in the square. The exception was provided by two Englishmen sharing what was clearly not their first bottle of wine. They were talking about how terrible it was working in television. One kept glancing over at the Doctor and shaking his head.

  The puzzling drawing sat on the table between the Doctor and Romana. The Doctor was staring at it. I know where this is going, thought Romana sadly. The Doctor opened his mouth to speak. Oh, here we go.

  ‘I think something is the matter with time,’ he repeated.

  Romana glanced up at the sky. It looked like rain.

  ‘Didn’t you feel it?’ the Doctor pressed on.

  ‘Well, just a twinge,’ Romana admitted. ‘I didn’t like it.’

  Just a twinge? Really? It had felt like falling off a roller coaster and then back onto it again. An explanation presented itself to the Doctor. ‘It must be because I’ve crossed the time fields so often. No one else seemed to notice anything at all.’ He gave Romana a friendly grin. ‘You and I exist in a special relationship to time. Perpetual outsiders.’

  Definitely rain, thought Romana. In about two point three one minutes. ‘Oh, don’t be so portentous,’ she said.

  ‘Portentous?’ The Doctor stabbed the drawing with his finger. ‘Well, what do you make of that then?’

  Romana ducked the question, wondering whether Paris sold umbrellas. ‘At least on Gallifrey we can capture a good likeness. Computers can draw.’

  Sometimes Romana could be so naive! ‘What? Computer pictures? You sit in Paris and you talk of computer pictures?’ The Doctor sprang to his feet, folding the drawing away in a pocket (we’ll never see that again, thought Romana) and strode through the square, startling a taxi driver. ‘Come on,’ his voice boomed over a car horn. ‘I’ll show you some real pictures done by real people.’

  That was it with the Doctor. He’d only just convinced her there was a problem worth investigating, and now he’d completely forgotten all about it. Rassilon alone knew what his sock drawer must look like. ‘But what about the time slip?’ she called after him.

  The Doctor was already striding down the sloping street back towards the city, his hands jammed into his pockets, scarf trailing through autumn leaves.

  ‘Oh, let time look after itself for a change,’ his voice drifted back to her. ‘We’re on holiday.’

  * * *

  The Louvre had once been a palace. Now, one bloody revolution later, it was an art gallery. That didn’t strike Romana as particularly auspicious. If they were keeping any paintings worth talking about then they’d have surely built something specially. The Doctor was having none of it as they strode towards it through the rain.

  ‘The Louvre. One of the greatest art galleries in the galaxy!’

  ‘Nonsense!’ Romana shot back at him. She may have been on shaky ground with computer pictures, but the Academy had had a reasonably good pan-cultural studies course. It certainly hadn’t included a large cake with a rather disreputable-looking lead roof. ‘What about the Acadamia Stellaris on Sirius Five?’

  The Doctor made a noise. It wasn’t complimentary.

  ‘Or the Solarium Pinaquotheque at Strikian?’

  The Doctor made the same growl that she’d heard Parisians make when tourists asked for directions.

  She tried a third time. ‘Or the Braxiatel Collection?’

  The Doctor scowled. ‘No, no, no, no. This the THE Gallery. The only gallery in the whole of the known universe which has a picture like . . .’

  And then he showed her.

  * * *

  When Madame Henriette later recounted the story to her cats, she would remember the man’s eyes. As terrifying as everything else about him was, his eyes seemed nice. Eyes that had been places. When she conducted her tours, she liked to think of them as exclusive and with a touch of luxury. Her guests (never customers, guests) looked to her for advice, a bit of valuable local insight into a few select treasures in the Louvre. There was so much to choose from, but she picked her way through with judicious consideration, pointing out artworks as though she was greeting favoured old friends.

  She was good at reading the mood of her groups as she led them around the galleries. It was always the same. Genuine interest which segued into politesse (one had to do a few Dutch Masters, even if no one enjoyed them) and then mounting excitement as they ascended the majestic Daru Staircase before she finally let them approach The Painting. Sadly, the only reason most people ever really came to the Louvre. She sometimes wondered why they didn’t move it to its own museum, which would give some of her favourite exhibits a real chance to breathe on their own. A little limelight never hurt anyone, did it?

  She turned the corner, as she did so many times a day, getting ready to unveil the painting to another group of enquiring minds with cheap cameras. She was used to finding a small crowd around the painting, but she had never before found it dominated by one man. One man who had quite remarkable eyes and who was astonishingly cross.

  * * *

  The Doctor hadn’t bothered with any of the other stuff (‘Mostly rotting fruit and so on,’ he’d snapped). He’d just hurried her to the star exhibit, of this museum or any other. He’d stormed up to the painting, shooing aside some gawpers like pigeons, Romana following apologetically in his wake.

  When he was three paces away from the painting he pointed at it. Ta da!

  Romana followed the line of his excitedly pointing finger.

  She could see a rectangular board that was 77 centimetres tall and 53 centimetres wide, housed in a frame that looked very pleased with itself. A lot of the paintings they’d dashed past had shown the grisly deaths of saints, or violent battles in heaven. This one showed an unremarkable woman who was merely sitting down. She was wearing a gown. She was sat on a balcony. Behind her was a landscape you wouldn’t go on a walking holiday in. The woman, well, not much more than a girl really, looked about to say something. Possibly that she was a little bored.

  ‘The Mona Lisa!’ announced the Doctor proudly.

  4

  LOOK TO THE LADY

  Romana regarded the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa regarded her.

  The Doctor was waiting for one of them to say something.

  ‘Y-ess,’ announced Romana eventually. ‘It’s quite good, isn’t it?’

  ‘Quite good! Quite good!’ Outraged, the Doctor was shouting now, and he really could shout. ‘One of the priceless treasures of the universe quite good?’

  Here he goes. Romana made frantic flapping gestures with her arms. They’d had such a lovely day and now, here he was attracting attention. There was the vaguely belligerent man three point four metres away to the right. There was the immaculately dressed woman, sat on a bench two point four metres behind them. They’d do for a start. ‘The world, Doctor, the world,’ Romana hissed.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ thundered the Doctor.

  When the Doctor was like this, Romana concentrated more on the stray details. She calculated the weight of the strongly built meaty man. She estimated the thickness of the paint o
n the walls of the gallery and compared it to the mean average thickness of the paint on the canvases. She idly wondered why the stylish woman was turning her bracelet around her thin wrist so precisely. And she wondered why the Doctor could be such a childish buffoon when he got carried away with himself. ‘Not “the universe” in public, Doctor,’ she admonished. ‘It only draws attention.’

  ‘I don’t care!’ Sometimes the Doctor behaved like a child of eighty. ‘This is one of the greatest treasures in the universe.’ Rassilon help us all, he was starting to address the crowd. ‘Let ’em stare. Let ’em gawp! Let ’em gape!’

  Romana looked helplessly at the painting, wondering if there was something about it that she’d missed. Oh yes, there was. ‘Why hasn’t she got any eyebrows?’ she asked.

  * * *

  Much has been written over the centuries about the Mona Lisa. Some critics have acclaimed it as the first portrait of an ordinary person just being ordinary. Others have claimed it contains mystical and hidden symbolism, from pyramids to a self-portrait of the artist. Some have speculated as to why the painting languished in relative obscurity until the turn of the twentieth century, when it suddenly rocketed in both fame and value. Very little has been written on the tricksy topic of exactly why Leonardo da Vinci left the eyebrows off. Possibly because, up until that precise moment in Paris, Earth 1979, no one had ever really spotted that this was a problem.

  * * *

  ‘What? Is that all you can say? No eyebrows! This is the Mona Lisa you’re talking about.’ The Doctor whipped around, startling someone from Portugal who was about to risk flouting the ban on flash photography. The Doctor glared at the painting. It was the same look he’d recently used against the Black Guardian while he was mending the universe (which he had done by switching it off and then back on again). ‘The Mona . . . Good Lord, you’re right, she hasn’t got any eyebrows, has she? You know, I never noticed that before.’

  Stumped, the Doctor ground to a halt.

  Romana marked up her attempt at gently distracting the Doctor as a decided failure. He really could be terribly hard work. If only K-9 were here. He’d make a pithy remark about pigments, or his batteries would run down, or some tourists would try and buy him or something, anything. As it was they were very much the centre of attention. She’d already spotted seven surveillance cameras, fourteen thief-baffling devices and one security guard frantically stabbing a concealed button in the wall. The good news was that, thanks to the TARDIS’s telepathic translation circuits, the French she was soon going to need for ‘Please release my uncle from that straitjacket’ would be impeccable.

  * * *

  It was at this point that several very remarkable things happened, spelling a sudden and complete end to the Doctor and Romana’s plans for a holiday.

  THING ONE

  As Madame Henriette would later tell her cats, ‘He was crowding the painting so. I am quite sure he was English.’

  During the Liberation of Paris from the Germans, Madame Henriette had once hidden an English airman behind the water tank in the attic. It had been the most exciting period of her life, and also one of the most annoying, as, after he had gone, she found that he’d drunk all of her father’s carefully hidden vintage wines. They’d survived searches, pillaging, and quite a lot of bombing, but not the English.

  If the treasures of the Louvre were left unguarded, the Americans would try and buy them, the Japanese would photograph them, and the English would load them all cheerfully into the back of a taxi and then not tip the driver. That was Madame Henriette’s considered opinion. What else was the British Museum other than the world’s greatest display of kleptomania? Of course, there were some who argued that the Mona Lisa herself belonged to Italy, but that was different. After all, when one has lived in Paris for a while, does it not become one’s true home?

  As her discreet, select and deluxe tour approached the Mona Lisa, for once Madame Henriette wasn’t actually looking at her. She was vaguely aware of discontent in the room, and hunting out the source of it while reciting the spiel that had long ago entered her dreams.

  ‘And over here, ladies and gentlemen, we have possibly the most famous exhibit in this gallery.’ Tiny pause for laughter. ‘The Mona Lisa—La Gioconda—painted by Leonardo da Vinci—’ And here she popped in the brackets. Everyone loved a date. Even if it became immediately forgotten. ‘(1452–1519).’ Always went down well.

  Then she stopped. The cause of the commotion was not the Rosbif in the tattered raincoat. Or the glamorous woman who appeared to have come to the Louvre to read Le Figaro. It certainly wasn’t that wretched-looking schoolgirl. Nor the tourists itching to take a flash photograph. Or Claude, the security guard who was making frantic gestures with his bulbous nose.

  No.

  It was the bobo man with the eyes, standing pressed up against the Mona Lisa as though she had personally upset him.

  Madame Henriette had dealt with this sort of situation before, using all of the tact and gentility with which she would direct her select guests to the bathrooms. She began with a gentle ‘Excuse me, m’sieur . . .’

  When that failed to attract his attention she tried tapping the man on the shoulder. He whirled round, halfway through muttering what sounded like ‘I knew it! If only I’d told him,’ then brought those eyes to bear on her. So dazzling was their ferocity she let out a little squeak. But no. This would be fine. She had once successfully moved on a party of Australians who were posing for pictures in front of the painting with their thumbs up. One man in a scarf would not be a problem.

  ‘What?’ the man bellowed.

  ‘Excuse me, m’sieur, could you move along? Other people wish to enjoy the painting.’

  The girl seemed not to have heard. ‘What did she say?’

  The man was about to reply when

  THING TWO

  The Countess wished her bracelet didn’t make that noise. It wasn’t a noise one could hear, but it was a noise one felt. As a piece of ornamentation it matched the gold necklace round her throat perfectly. The only differences were that the necklace didn’t make a noise and was easy to take off. The bracelet had a funny clasp to it. Carlos kept offering to have it mended and then never got around to it. Ah well, there were so many other things to be done. So many things in which the bracelet would play an important part.

  The Countess had never had a problem fitting in. It was one of the reasons Carlos said he adored her. She was capable of being at home in any room. Even here, in the most crowded gallery in the Louvre, she could look quite at ease, gently aloof, reading the paper and quietly noticing how many of the news stories were directly or indirectly about Carlos.

  The rising pitch from the bracelet told her that its work was nearly done. She carefully and delicately turned it on her wrist, just a little, with a practised flick, and then turned the page of Le Figaro. Ah yes, here was a tiny little paragraph about that container in Ghent.

  As she finished reading it she looked up, caught Duggan’s eye and looked away, hiding a smile. He was, she supposed, handsome enough for an Englishman. If only he’d been a little more interesting, she would have invited him around for a drink. And he would have come. Everyone came when the Countess Scarlioni asked.

  The world Heidi now lived in seemed so far away from the icy slopes of Switzerland. Nothing ran on time, the menus constantly changed at restaurants, and money was treated almost with contempt. She lived, it often felt, in an endless whirl of romance and excitement. That did not mean her life was unplanned. No, not at all.

  She had been brought up to ignore commotions. They normally signified the problems of what the French called peasants and the Swiss called the unmoneyed. These struggles were rarely about beautiful things, and, if so, then what was the point of them?

  And yet, this hubbub was becoming hard to remain detached from. For one thing, the security guard was looking around, wondering if the shou
ting of that buffoon bohemian was some kind of decoy. As if. Only an amateur would try something like that.

  She spotted a quizzical arch in Duggan’s eyebrow which she answered with a tiny shake of her head. How could you think so little of me?

  Her bracelet beeped. Its work was done. Which was good. She could leave. She stood up, straightening out the pleats of her skirt and as she did so

  THING THREE

  Duggan was hating Paris. He knew he was drinking in the last chance saloon of his career, but why did that have to be Paris? True, when everything went wrong, at least blaming Paris would sound impressive.

  ‘You won’t like it,’ the Chief had told him. ‘You’ve no romance in your soul.’

  Duggan disliked it when the Chief was right. He looked at Paris and he thought it would be all right if they spent a weekend cleaning it. It seemed to be a city of teenagers waiting for someone else to clean up after them. Even the dogs were prolifically lazy, turning every walk into a grimacing game of hopscotch.

  His last hope had been that his hotel would at least have a view. Sadly, the best that Swansea had sprung for was a grim place behind the Gare du Nord that stank of guinea pigs.

  But at least Paris allowed him to follow the Countess up close. He’d put two and two together and was, for once, convinced he’d reached four. There were rumours of a supremely audacious art theft being planned. All the sources for said rumours had later been found face down in the Seine. And the Countess Scarlioni had started spending a lot of time reading fashionable magazines in art galleries. He’d dutifully begun to trail after her like a faithful bloodhound, waiting for something to happen. And now this.

  Duggan was trying to work it all out. Something was up. Something was definitely Up. What, he could not quite tell. But up it was. The Countess had to be involved. What utterly random coincidence would bring her to this room at the same time this children’s entertainer started clowning around and shouting at the tour guide? Duggan would give the idiot one thing. It took a lot to rattle Madame Henriette. He’d seen her coldly pluck chewing gum from the breast of a Rodin and return it to a trembling high school student from Ohio.