City of Death

by Douglas Adams

  Romana knew then what it was to be alive and exactly why the Doctor cared so much about these funny humans and their wonky planet. It was because, even when you were being chased through a city at night by men with dogs, it could offer you up a tiny moment of surprise and wonder. She nodded to Paris.

  Duggan grabbed her arm. ‘What are you dawdling for?’ he growled, steering her by the elbow. ‘You can send yourself a picture postcard later.’

  That wasn’t even funny, thought Romana as he shoved her into an alley behind some bins and then darted off, drawing their pursuers away.

  * * *

  Kerensky scrambled through the rough opening and trod awkwardly up to the six paintings smiling at him.

  ‘But . . . Mona Lisas,’ he murmured, baffled and despairing.

  He spent a few moments wondering if he’d be better off asleep, and then he noticed the body on the floor.

  It was Count Scarlioni.

  Kerensky knelt down, arguing with himself. If the Count was dead, was that it, the end of his work? He’d never be paid, but did that mean he was free? Facing unemployment but freedom? He checked the Count for a pulse. He was still breathing. But even so. Kerensky could risk it. No one had come down looking for him or the Count. People were always looking for the Count. Ergo no one was around. He could do it. He could escape.

  Kerensky edged out back into the laboratory and glanced up to the top of the cavern’s steps. Freedom, possibly. Even if he was stopped, he could claim he was looking for assistance for the Count. But he suspected, he very much suspected, he wouldn’t be stopped. He could do this.

  He put his foot on the first step. And then thought about it some more.

  The work, the Count’s work was important. Someone had tried to kill him for it, they had tried to dissuade Kerensky from taking part in it. The Count was a strange man, yes, but he was a great benefactor to all humanity. And, if Kerensky left the basement and the Count died after all, then that would be on his conscience. Also there might never be a Kerensky Accelerator.

  Slumped, Kerensky trooped reluctantly back into the hidden room, and bent over the Count. He felt the Count’s forehead, testing it for lumps. He stopped, concerned. The Count’s head felt wrongly spongey. Had he been more badly hurt than it appeared? Even in his sleep, the Count was smiling slightly.

  At Kerensky’s touch the Count stirred, his voice little more than an urbane croak.

  ‘Doctor, would you care to explain to me how you come to be in Paris 1979?’

  * * *

  ‘Doctor, would you care to explain to me how you come to be in Florence 1505?’

  Captain Tancredi was proving how easy it was to lounge in thick leather armour. He placed his elaborately feathered helmet on a table, drumming his gauntleted fingers on the surface. ‘I am waiting, Doctor.’

  It was curious the way he said it. Both as though he was impatient and as though waiting was all he really did in life. Well, that would make sense. A lot of things made sense. Obvious really. If you’re a long-lived species, simply get Leonardo to paint seven Mona Lisas and then wait five hundred years until they became really, really fashionable and there were exactly seven people willing to buy one.

  No. That was nonsense, wasn’t it. Exactly seven buyers? And how would you know that you’d backed the right horse? You could have got Signorelli to knock up half a dozen Nude Youths and be left with nothing but a cupboard full of biceps and disappointment.

  Also, and this was the really good point, how on Earth did Captain Tancredi know he’d met him before later? Oh dear. Tenses were going to prove a problem here. How awkward. Unless Scarlioni was another time traveller or simply living his life backwards. There was a third possibility, one so nonsensical that the Doctor pocketed it to use on a future occasion. Actually, now would do nicely.

  ‘Ah well . . .’ He looked up at the Captain with complete candour. ‘You want to know how I come to be here? Well, the truth is, I tend to flit about a bit. Here and there.’

  ‘Through time?’ offered the Captain.

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose so,’ the Doctor agreed gratefully. Have I thought this through? Yes, yes. Pretty watertight.

  ‘How, precisely?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Oh dear. Well, at least that much was just about the truth. The Doctor filled in a bit of time by saying ‘ah’, ‘well’, ‘oh’ and ‘hum’. Always fooled Romana. ‘It just happens.’ He shrugged around the guard’s rapier resting lightly on his shoulders. ‘You see, there I am peacefully walking along minding my own business and suddenly pop! there I am in a different time, or even a different planet. I had a very traumatic childhood.’ The dolorous touch at the end was good.

  Tancredi said nothing. He just regarded him slowly and longly, as if he were a glass of lemonade on a hot day.

  ‘So . . .’ The Doctor hated a silence. ‘Enough about my problems. What are you doing here, old chap?’

  ‘Being.’ Captain Tancredi paused for a moment, and then nodded, presumably to himself. He paced the room, selecting the most ornate chair in the room and settling in it. Still on his knees, the Doctor shuffled across to him. The guard let him go. The Doctor had long ago mastered the art of humiliating people from a position of unimportance.

  Tancredi waved a hand magnanimously, and the Doctor settled himself cross-legged on the rug, like a child ready for story time.

  ‘I will tell you,’ began the Captain. ‘The knowledge will be of little use to you since you will shortly die.’

  ‘Is that so?’ The Doctor took the announcement casually. ‘I did wonder when that would happen.’

  Tancredi almost didn’t seem to be listening. ‘I am the last of the Jagaroth. I am also the saviour of the Jagaroth,’ he announced grandly.

  ‘Well, if you’re the last of them, then there can’t be that many about to save . . .’ the Doctor began helpfully, and then frowned. ‘Wait a minute, the Jagaroth?’

  ‘You’ve heard of us?’ Tancredi smiled suspiciously.

  ‘Well,’ said the Doctor as vaguely as possible. ‘On one of my odd little trips. You all killed yourselves with a massive war, oh, way back when . . .’ Now when was it? It would come to him in a soned.

  ‘I think four hundred million years is the figure you are looking for, Doctor.’

  Ah yes. ‘Is it really? How time flies.’ Did that mean that Tancredi was four hundred million years old? You’d need quite a cake to fit the candles on that. No wonder he looked so uninterested by life. ‘So what are you doing here?’

  ‘Surviving,’ Tancredi admitted candidly. He seemed different to Scarlioni. More serious. Less louche. ‘Survival is the prime motive of all species. We were not all destroyed in the war. A few escaped in a crippled spaceship and made planetfall on this world in its primeval time. We found it uninhabitable.’

  ‘Four hundred million years ago?’ consoled the Doctor. ‘Yes, the place would have been a bit of a shambles. No life yet to clean it up.’ A terrible thought struck the Doctor. ‘No life?’ he muttered under his breath.

  ‘We tried to leave, but the ship blew up,’ Tancredi announced simply. He was urbane, yes, but beneath that there was almost no emotion. ‘I was fractured. Splinters of my being are scattered in time. All identical, none . . . complete.’

  Extraordinary, thought the Doctor. You’d need a pretty unique blend of collapsing warp bubble, unstable gravity and atmospheric pressure to cause that. How odd. So there were bits of Jagaroth all over time. Nonsense, which made a lot of sense. Presumably the different fragments were all able to communicate sporadically, with different levels of self-awareness. Otherwise Scarlioni would have recognised him instantly, wouldn’t he? Did that ring true? Oh, it was all so tricky. This was going to require a serious amount of thinking.

  The Doctor suddenly realised the Count was staring at him. Severely. The guard flashed him a grin, barely looking up from polis
hing his rapier with spit and a grubby cloth.

  ‘Doctor.’ Tancredi’s tone was that of a tolerant headmaster. ‘I’m afraid I am not satisfied with your explanation.’

  ‘Well, as I told you . . .’ began the Doctor. Perhaps he should suggest that, see, there’d been an explosion in his spacecraft and he’d just found himself scattered across time. He’d heard that recently somewhere, hadn’t he?

  Tancredi suddenly noticed the large blue box in the corner. He found it strangely reassuring. How curious. He gave it a leisurely thwack with his sword. ‘What is that box?’

  ‘That?’ The Doctor sounded surprised. ‘I don’t know. Do you think it might have been following me?’

  Tancredi suddenly sprang to his feet, furious. ‘I want the truth, Doctor!’

  The Doctor sprang to his feet as well. ‘Don’t we all.’

  For a moment the two stared at each other, eye to eye. There was something about the Jagaroth and the number of their eyes, wasn’t there? The Doctor scratched his brain and tried to remember.

  Captain Tancredi carried on looking at the Doctor, his smile barely flickering. Maybe this one did the planning and the Count did the smiling? Idly, the Doctor stepped away from the Captain, and whipped a cloth from a nearby easel, revealing the Mona Lisa.

  ‘Ah,’ said the Doctor, sounding completely unsurprised. ‘The original, I presume. Completed in 1503. It’s now, what, 1505? And you’re getting the old boy to knock you up another six of them, yes?’

  Captain Tancredi’s face tried to do startled. It succeeded a little. ‘Doctor,’ he hissed warningly.

  But there was no stopping the Doctor. All those little cogs and gears in his mind, even the wonky ones, were now spinning at full pelt. ‘Another six Mona Lisas, which you then brick up in a cellar in Paris for Scarlioni to find. In four hundred and seventy-four years’ time. What a very nice little piece of capital investment.’

  He smiled, to himself, the Mona Lisa, Captain Tancredi and even the guard. Only the Mona Lisa smiled back.

  ‘Doctor . . .’ Tancredi loomed over him. ‘I can see that you are a dangerously clever man. I think it is time we conducted this conversation somewhat more formally.’

  ‘Oh.’ Fair enough. The Doctor straightened the lapels of his coat and brushed away a scrap of dust.

  Tancredi turned to the guard. ‘Hold the Doctor here whilst I fetch the instruments of torture. If he wags his tongue, confiscate it.’ He made for the door.

  The Doctor felt rather dismissed. ‘How will I be able to talk if you—’

  ‘You can write, can’t you?’

  ‘Well, yes.’ The Doctor’s mouth fell open. Seeing the gleam in the guard’s eye, he shut it hastily.

  Tancredi favoured the Doctor with as much of a smile as he could muster, and left the room.

  The guard moved over to the Doctor, holding his sword to his throat.

  The Doctor swallowed, which he found surprisingly difficult. ‘Mad, isn’t he?’ He spoke with a whisper, covering his mouth with his hand. Just in case of any sudden movements. He managed to perfectly conjure the kind of whisper that suggested that it should be patently clear to both of them that Tancredi was something out of a cuckoo clock. If such a thing had been invented yet.

  The guard ignored the Doctor. The only thing he was giving away was a smell.

  The Doctor had won harder battles. ‘Tough job humouring him, I bet. Ha ha.’

  The sword at the Doctor’s throat didn’t waver by a millimetre.

  ‘You, ah, don’t believe all that nonsense then, do you?’ The Doctor risked waggling a finger towards the door the Captain had gone through.

  ‘What?’ said the guard. Finally!

  ‘Well, you know, I mean . . .’ The same finger tapped the side of his head. ‘Jagaroth, spaceships, and so on. It’s all a bit much, well, isn’t it?’ The Doctor rolled his eyes.

  ‘I am paid simply to fight,’ the guard said.

  ‘Yes, but quite honestly, when you think about all that . . . Jagaroth spaceships,’ the Doctor repeated. The phrase stuck in his mind.

  The guard shrugged, neatly bringing the point of his sword to rest against the Doctor’s Adam’s apple. ‘When you’ve worked for the Borgias, you’ll believe anything.’

  ‘The Borgias?’ Oh dear. ‘Yes, I do see your point.’

  With a casual flick of his scarf, the Doctor knocked an easel over onto the guard. The Doctor’s plan, such as he had one, had been to distract the guard for long enough to leap into the TARDIS and get out of here. The guard rather disappointed the Doctor by being a highly skilled fighter. He kicked the easel to one side, knocked the Doctor to the floor, and stood over him, the tip of his rapier pushed rather uncomfortably into his throat.

  ‘As I said,’ sneered the guard, pressing down just a little, ‘I am paid to fight.’

  ‘And as I said,’ croaked the Doctor, ‘I do see your point.’

  The soldier was standing on the Doctor’s scarf. The Doctor gave it an experimental tug. Nothing apart from a nasty smile and a little more pressure on his windpipe. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but standing on a fellow’s scarf is a bit thick.’

  A slow smile spread over the Doctor’s face. He fished around in his pocket and produced a Polaroid camera which he may, or may not, have once borrowed from a Japanese tourist to see how it worked.

  ‘What do you think of this, then?’ he asked the guard.

  The guard frowned. He had absolutely never seen anything like it in his life. Almost absently, his blade nicked the Doctor’s flesh.

  ‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ the Doctor whispered reassuringly to them both. He pointed the camera up at the guard. ‘Come on, now,’ he coaxed. ‘Smile! You can do it!’

  To the Doctor’s surprise the guard produced a rather beautiful smile that reeked of radishes.

  The Doctor pressed a button and the flash went off, causing the guard to screw his eyes up and let out a whimper of terror.

  ‘Haha!’ said the Doctor, climbing to his feet as the blinded soldier staggered around. ‘Wait a tick,’ he shushed the guard, who was advancing on him menacingly. ‘Hold on . . .’ The camera whirred to itself and spat out a Polaroid print. He held the photograph up to the guard, who stared, stunned as his own screwed-up, startled face appeared back at him. He glanced around the room, at the painstaking paintings and then at this. The most perfect, naturalistic reproduction of anyone the world had ever seen. Him.

  He would probably have collapsed anyway, but the Doctor helped him down with the tiniest jab of Venusian karate. The guard sank dazed into a chair, and the Doctor made for the TARDIS. And then stopped. A rather clever idea had come over him.

  Glancing at the guard, he checked that he was still doing a remarkable impression of an expiring haddock. Excellent. The Doctor strode over to six painstakingly prepared poplar boards, all of them roughly four by three. He could guess what those were. Poor Leonardo. He so hated deadlines.

  The Doctor pulled a marker pen from his pocket and scribbled something on each of them, grinning away to himself.

  Then he darted over to Leonardo’s desk. He glanced at a mirror. Actually, he could probably manage Leonardo’s mirror writing by himself. This is what he scribbled on some parchment:

  Very pleased with himself the Doctor stepped back. Onto the point of Captain Tancredi’s sword.

  ‘Oh,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘Oh, indeed,’ echoed the Captain. ‘Just going to pop off through time again, Doctor?’ An eyebrow arched and he tutted. ‘How discourteous when I’ve just gone to the trouble of fetching you some thumbscrews.’

  * * *

  Meanwhile in 1979, Count Scarlioni was suddenly waking up to a lot of things.

  He was pleased to wake up somewhere dark. He was less pleased to see Kerensky crouching over him. He looked worried. Still, at least the fool co
uld answer a very important question.

  ‘Kerensky? Where am I?’

  ‘In Paris, of course.’ The Professor looked exceedingly worried.

  ‘Paris?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Paris.’ The Count licked his lips and was pleasantly surprised to find he had lips. ‘So it was a dream. Perhaps just a dream.’ He dismissed all the thoughts that were crowding out his head. Spaceships. Time travel. The Doctor. All merely a dream. He could get on with being, with being . . .

  ‘But who are you?’ Keresnky asked exactly the question that was occupying the Count.

  ‘I am who I am.’ The Count stood up, brushing ancient dust from his dressing gown and tried not to notice the six Mona Lisas staring at him. His tone hardened. Distract Kerensky with a threat. ‘I am the one who pays you to work.’ He gestured towards the laboratory. ‘Now, to it! Time is short.’

  Kerensky didn’t move. He was pointing at the Count in clear terror. ‘But your face!’ he wailed.

  What? The Count’s hands went to his face. It felt . . . baggy. Loose. Out of place. All things which a face shouldn’t feel. Horror crept into the Count’s soul. What if he hadn’t dreamt it? What if it was all real? ‘Do you want to pick a quarrel with my face, Professor?’ he snarled. His hands were, of all things, smoothing and patting his face down. Pulling the nose back into the centre, tugging the hairline down and evening out the ears. Easing everything back into place as though there was something terrible underneath. His hands were working with instinctive skill. How many times had this happened? ‘Beware . . . I do not choose to pick a quarrel with your face, Kerensky. I might use implements sharper than words.’

  Suddenly his face felt fine and the Count relaxed. It had all been a dream. He knew exactly who he was. He was Count Scarlioni, the most audacious art thief the world had ever know. Just that. And that wasn’t a bad thing to be at all.

  For once, Kerensky didn’t seem intimidated by the Count’s threats. ‘But Count, who are the Jagaroth?’