City of Death

by Douglas Adams

  And tonight he’d wandered off. So full of idiotic joie de vivre. Romana looked around, at the warmly lit bars, at the crowds of happy people wandering down the street, at the man squeezing a box until it begged musically for mercy. Paris. That was it. The Doctor was so idiotically full of the joys of Paris that he’d gone gambolling off. Without her, he was doomed. He could end up absolutely anywhere in time and space. Or a sun. Again. Serve him jolly well right.

  But what about her? Romana looked around herself. At Duggan, glaring at her with a kind of slack-jawed expectancy. Well. She could team up and have adventures with him, she supposed. She thought about that for a bit.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ said Duggan.

  ‘Oh, nothing.’ Romana set off. ‘Come on. Let’s go and save the Mona Lisa.’

  * * *

  The Doctor stood inside the TARDIS and wondered about things. He was helped in this quest by his robot dog. K-9 had wandered across to greet him eagerly.

  ‘Hello, K-9,’ he’d beamed. ‘How are you?’

  K-9 had begun a lengthy diagnostic report, complete with a list of complaints about malfunctioning servo units which had yet to be replaced despite frequent requests, a fluctuating diode in his vocal circuits, and a disappointing charge in his new battery. Thank heavens K-9 had not yet discovered how to fill in complaint forms.

  The Doctor loved having a robot dog. Unlike humans, K-9 asked relatively few questions, nearly always provided answers, and didn’t go wandering off and then have to be rescued from the Ogrons. However, the Doctor had very deliberately left him out of the trip to Paris. He’d made the quite reasonable argument that K-9 would find it difficult gliding across the cobbled streets, but really, really, he rather thought that K-9 would miss the point of Paris entirely. He would just not enjoy himself. There was no poetry in K-9’s soul.

  ‘Good boy, K-9,’ said the Doctor, cutting across the dog’s list of grievances. He applied himself to the task of setting the coordinates.

  Tricky. The TARDIS had shown a remarkable improvement in her behaviour recently. He wondered if fitting the Randomiser had helped. Relieved of the pressure of constantly being asked to land somewhere specific and then missing, the TARDIS instead could arrive anywhere and anywhen in total confidence that she wasn’t disappointing. This meant that, on the rare occasions when the Doctor asked her to do something specific, such as, say, hop five hundred years that-a-way and a few countries to the right, well, things went better than ever before.

  Although, all of a sudden, staring at the array of slightly alarmed dials and big red buttons, the Doctor suffered a rare pang of self-doubt. That time when they’d been aiming for the Horsehead Nebula and, quite remarkably, hit it? Hadn’t Romana been standing at his side? And also, when they’d arrived at the Medusa Cascade, hadn’t Romana been standing just opposite, her hands idly close to the drift compensators? Funny how that kept happening. Curious.

  The Doctor dismissed the idea as ridiculous, paranoid fantasy. It was all down to how much better the TARDIS was behaving these days. They’d learned to respect each other. Just plug in the date which one did simply by . . . well, a bit like that, wasn’t it, K-9, no quiet I’m thinking, ah yes, splendid, and then nudge the location over there by . . . now, were we talking miles or kilometres? When did the French go metric, that might well be important. Or not, as the case may be.

  The Doctor crossed his fingers, ignored an urgent warning from K-9 and pulled a lever. Here goes nothing, he thought.

  * * *

  ‘Oh,’ said the Doctor later as the thumbscrews approached. Funny the difference a syllable makes. Take ‘Leonardo’, for example. One of the most romantic names in any language. ‘Leonard’, not so much. It lacked that certain . . . je ne sais quoi, that was it. What a lovely French expression. How silly of him not to have used it while he was in France. Rather than . . .

  * * *

  Brilliant Italian Renaissance sunshine poured through the windows of the studio. It had that smug quality of light that said, ‘You will paint something wonderful about me, won’t you?’ And the man who lived in the studio (not owned, he didn’t own anything, really) had certainly made every effort to paint that sunshine very hard indeed.

  Easels and paints were everywhere. Intricate designs hung from the walls, and elaborate drawings spilled over the tables and spread out across the floor. Somewhere underneath all that sea of thought was quite a nice carpet. But all you would notice at a glance was a profusion of artistic disarray.

  This was a room crammed full to bursting with genius. Otherwise it was completely deserted.

  Right up until the moment that, with a whoop, a large blue box appeared hurriedly in a corner, shooing a lot of air molecules elsewhere. The door opened and the Doctor stuck his head out, eyes tight shut. He opened them cautiously, looked around in amazed delight, leapt outside, shut the door and patted the blue box fondly. Hadn’t they done well?

  TARDIS, by the way stood quite often for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space. Sometimes the Doctor also said it was Time And Relative Dimension In Space. Which was actually even more meaningless. Rather like the machine itself, the TARDIS’s name made sense only so long as you didn’t think too hard about it.

  Right now, the Doctor was busy being simply delighted. Here he was. Leonardo da Vinci’s studio. Even parked in the same spot as last time.

  ‘Leonardo? Leonardo!’ he called. No sign of him. Ah well. He’d be along in a moment. Probably off buying baguettes. People in the Mediterranean were always doing that.

  He pottered around the studio, looking at this, marvelling at that, happily swapping gossip with Leonardo’s songbirds. The weather had, apparently, been rather glorious recently, and the Doctor couldn’t disagree.

  ‘Ah, that Renaissance sunshine!’ he enthused, basking in it. The Doctor rarely got an opportunity to bask in anything other than his own cleverness, so he enjoyed the lazy smoky sunshine. It was one of his favourite things about this period. And he liked a lot about the Renaissance. He continued to rifle through Leonardo’s studio, chuckling at the paintings. No, the old fellow still hadn’t really finished anything. He never really did. A constant fiddler, a fellow who just couldn’t leave well alone. A meddler. Imagine that. What a pity.

  ‘Leonardo!’ he called out again. ‘It’s me, the Doctor,’ he put in reassuringly. Perhaps Leonardo was hiding somewhere, afraid his visitor was a debt collector, or a patron demanding to know why his wife’s portrait was another decade overdue. ‘Leonardo? Are you there? Hello?’ He checked behind a curtain and peeped under a table. ‘The paintings went down very well,’ he continued coaxingly. ‘Everyone loved them. So many people have said how good they thought they were. The Last Supper, remember that one?’ The Doctor had spent ages trying to sneak into it. ‘The Mona Lisa?’ he asked hopefully. No response. And yet, he was now convinced he wasn’t alone. ‘I said the Mona Lisa, remember? That dreadful woman with no eyebrows who wouldn’t sit still, eh? Leo . . . ?’

  He picked up a model, buzzed it around the room and then smiled. ‘Still, your idea for a helicopter took a little longer to catch on, but as I said, these things take time.’ That was a footstep outside. Definitely a footstep. Playing hide-and-seek with one of the greatest geniuses the world has ever known? There were worse ways to spend an afternoon.

  Any second now, Leonardo would pop out from behind the arras. That was it. He twitched it to one side.

  ‘You!’ The rapier landed on the Doctor’s shoulder and he blinked.

  He found himself facing a hog-faced guard whose armour smelt of onions.

  ‘You! What are you doing here?’

  ‘Me?’ The Doctor was all innocence. He really wished the guard would give him a chance to clean that rapier before stabbing him with it. It looked filthy. Rather like the guard. Did he sleep in that armour?

  The guard screwed up his face with suspicion, causing what
the Doctor hoped was a lump of dirt to fall off of it. ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’

  Isn’t that obvious? ‘Well, I just popped in to see Leonardo, actually. Is he about?’

  The Doctor had known that tourists, debt collectors and angry clients were a bit of a problem for Da Vinci, but had it really got so bad that Leo had hired a bouncer?

  The rapier jabbed the Doctor’s coat. ‘No one is allowed to see Leonardo.’

  ‘Is that so?’ The Doctor felt a sudden nagging worry.

  ‘He is engaged on important work’—the suspicious, feral face narrowed even further—‘for Captain Tancredi.’

  ‘Captain Tancredi!’ gasped the Doctor.

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘He will want to question you.’ The guard nodded, in a you’ll-get-yours way.

  This might not be altogether good, thought the Doctor. The Renaissance was charming, what with that lazy smoky sunshine. But quite a lot of that smoke was caused by burning heretics, thinkers and the eccentrically dressed. Oh dear.

  ‘He’ll want to question me? Well, I expect I will want to question him.’ The Doctor, sensing a sticky wicket, realised he was being forced to his knees, and picked a nice clean spot of rug to kneel on. He might not, necessarily, have the upper hand here, but he might as well be comfortable. ‘We can have a pleasant little chat, can’t we?’

  The soldier leaned close to the Doctor and, much to his horror, breathed over him. ‘He will be here instantly,’ he announced smugly.

  Footsteps came clipping up the steps, and the door to the study flew open. A figure stood there, taking in the scene, perfectly silhouetted by that Renaissance sunshine. The man strode into the room as though he owned it. Which, in fact, he did.

  Advancing on the Doctor was a perfectly handsome man, wearing the lavish costume of a captain in the private army of an Italian duke. In order to stop things looking too severe, his armour was bedecked with ostrich feathers and fitted over a blouse. The flourishes did nothing to offset the air of lethal menace with which the figure advanced on the Doctor.

  This then was Captain Tancredi.

  Only . . .

  ‘You!’ The Doctor’s tone was grim. ‘What are you doing here?’

  The figure nodded, as though this was a fair point. If he was surprised, his face didn’t show it. Instead Captain Tancredi was smiling. ‘I think that is exactly the question I ought to be asking you.’ The smile broadened. ‘Doctor.’

  Captain Tancredi looked exactly like Count Carlos Scarlioni.

  PART THREE

  Qu’est-ce que l’histoire? Sinon une fable sur laquelle tout le monde est d’accord.

  (What is history? It’s a fairy tale we can all agree on.)

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  10

  RENAISSANCE MAN

  Getting into the Louvre was easier than Romana had expected. They’d just walked in. No one challenged them, no one called after them, no one shot at them, and no alarms went off. It was all rather refreshing.

  They wandered the corridors, Duggan’s flashlight playing cautiously across the statues. A lot of them seemed bothersomely incomplete. Romana noticed they’d placed these to one side, clearly while they went off hunting for the missing bits. A headless winged angel, for instance, was popped out of the way up a staircase. It all seemed so terribly careless. Humans were very bad at looking after things.

  She noticed Duggan’s body language was becoming increasingly tense.

  ‘I thought the Louvre was meant to be well guarded,’ she said.

  ‘It is.’ Duggan’s tone was grim. He ran a gloved hand over a box on the wall. It had once been a motion sensor. ‘It looks as though every single alarm in the place has been immobilised. A fantastic feat.’ He sounded grudgingly impressed.

  ‘The Count seems to have some clever technology here as well,’ said Romana, peering at the burned-out circuitry. Had it been knocked out by a targeted electromagnetic pulse? Fascinating.

  They wandered into the Mona Lisa gallery and Romana stepped in something. She lowered her torch and gasped. She’d trodden in the body of a security guard.

  ‘There’s another alarm been immobilised,’ growled Duggan.

  That was too much for Romana. ‘You have a pretty cynical attitude to life don’t you, Duggan?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Unapologetic, Duggan gave her a decidedly non-Gallic shrug. ‘When you’ve been around as long as I have . . . Actually, how old are you?’

  ‘A hundred and twenty-five.’

  ‘What?’

  Romana didn’t bother elaborating. She’d wandered over to the Mona Lisa herself. Or rather, the space where the Mona Lisa had once been. The case had been neatly—very neatly—broken into and the painting removed. All that remained was a lattice of laser beams, exactly taking up the dimensions of the painting. The overall effect was striking and not a little sad.

  ‘She’s gone,’ Romana said.

  Duggan knew they shouldn’t have wasted time fooling around in cellars. He buried his anger in a low growl. Part of him just couldn’t believe that the painting had actually been stolen. ‘That system around it, those beams, they should be absolutely impregnable. It can’t be turned off.’

  ‘Well they seem to have managed it somehow.’ Romana peered at the beams. ‘Maybe by distorting the refractive index of the air.’

  ‘Umm, yes,’ Duggan muttered doubtfully. ‘But to get at that painting you’d have to pass through the beams, like this . . .’

  He stuck his hands between the lasers. If his hunch was right, the alarms wouldn’t go off.

  His hunch was not right.

  A lot of alarms went off.

  ‘Hell’s bells,’ screamed Duggan, clapping his hands to his ears.

  ‘That’s what it sounds like,’ Romana agreed, shouting over the clamour. ‘What do we do now?’ She could hear shouts. She could hear dogs. That was not good.

  ‘Split up,’ Duggan yelled over the din. ‘We’ll meet back at the café.’

  ‘Really? How do you suggest we get out?’

  ‘See that window?’ laughed Duggan. He pointed at a very nice stained-glass window at the end of the gallery. It had once belonged to a cathedral.

  ‘Yes.’

  Duggan threw himself at the window. There was the sound of breaking glass, a thud, and then more alarms went off, and the distant dogs got very excited indeed.

  Left alone in the Louvre, Romana put her hands on her hips.

  ‘All this fuss over a painting,’ she sighed.

  * * *

  Professor Nikolai Kerensky woke up. He had conflicting thoughts about this. Two periods of sleep in twenty-four hours had been a literally undreamt-of luxury, and he was rather regretting that it was over. Yet, here he was, lying on the cold stone floor and his head hurt quite a lot. Someone had broken in . . . that man with the scarf? And someone had hit him. On the other hand, the chicken experiment had been most satisfying. More or less.

  He hoisted himself up, holding on to the edge of a bench until the room settled down a little. He felt the lump that was forming on his skull tenderly and then examined the blood congealing on his hands.

  ‘Academic life,’ he sighed.

  He shook his head. It hurt.

  ‘Chickens,’ he muttered, looking at the Kerensky Accelerator. That was intact, at least. And hopefully his head was as well. If industrial saboteurs had smashed the device and injured his brain then he might not be able to build another one. He worried about that. A great loss to the world. A grave disappointment to the Count.

  Tenderly inching his way towards the stairs he realised he had to summon the Count. He would like to know there were intruders in his laboratory. He pulled the bell rope. No answer. On his way to the stairs he had realised the storeroom door was open and a strange light was com
ing from it. How puzzling.

  He noticed a hole in the storeroom wall. What had the intruders been up to? Curious, he edged inside and stopped in amazement when he saw what was on the wall of the hidden room.

  ‘Mona Lisas?’

  * * *

  The good thing about Duggan, Romana thought, was . . . well, she was sure it would come to her eventually. When she had a chance to draw breath, maybe. With the Doctor, even when he was being outrageously annoying, he would then go and do something brilliant or charming and she would remember he was the most extraordinary person she had ever met.

  Duggan was different. He was built so solidly that perhaps they’d forgotten to put any higher functions in. Brains are soft things, after all, and Duggan seemed terribly hard. Maybe he preferred to have his emotions displayed on cushions. On a previous visit to Earth, Romana had been intrigued to notice a shop selling small pillows with the names of feelings embroidered on them. The Doctor assured her that humans liked to buy these to place on their chairs. Romana was dubious. She tried to imagine Duggan sat on a chaise longue, surrounded by cushions saying ‘Love’, ‘Happy’ and ‘Hugs’. She wondered if they sold ones that read ‘Angry’, ‘Grumpy’ and ‘Fighting’.

  Right now, the two of them were fleeing through Paris, and Duggan was a puzzle that she completely forgot when they turned a corner and found themselves on the banks of the Seine, chains of lights swinging away from the black iron street lamps in endless glowing ropes that reflected perfectly on the calm waters of the night river. It was absolutely beautiful. For a hearts-stopping moment it felt as though the city belonged just to her and it was magical. It was a sensation you certainly couldn’t crochet onto a cushion.