Faust Among Equals Read Online Free PDF

while.’
    â€˜I’ll call you,’ the fugitive replied. ‘Better that way.’
    When he’d gone, Mr Van Appin swivelled round in his chair a couple of times, chewing the end of his pencil and humming. Then he reached for the dictating machine.
    â€˜Please open a new file, Miss Duisberg,’ he said. ‘Client profile C, client name, Faust, that’s F-A-U-S for sugar -T, George Michael. Re . . . ’ He paused, wound the tape back, wound it forward again. ‘Re, dispute with Hell Holdings plc.’
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    Faust wasn’t, of course, his real name.
    Faust was just the German abbreviation of Faustus, which was the nickname he’d picked up as an undergraduate at Wittenberg. It means ‘Lucky’.
    Only goes to show how wrong you can be, doesn’t it?
    Out of a particularly ill-fated year (his contemporaries included Martin Luther, Matthias Corvinus and Hamlet, Prince of Denmark) Lucky George was the student people remembered as having come to the most spectacularly sticky end. So devastating was the ensuing scandal that the university authorities promptly dropped Black Arts from the university curriculum; replacing it, seamlessly, with economics. A wave of hysteria swept across Europe, and for the next two centuries, witchcraft and sorcery remained (so to speak) a burning issue on the agenda of the known world. Even Lucky George’s mother stopped talking about her son, the doctor, and transferred the picture of him in his matriculation robes from the mantelpiece to the coalshed.
    Lucky George was not, however, such a misnomer as all that. Nobody could deny that he had more luck than any other hundred people put together. It’s just that luck comes in two varieties.
    Call them flavours, if it makes it any easier.
    The other scoop in George’s cone, in his opinion at least, more than adequately made up for the slight downside effect he’d experienced over the soul business. All that had been a means to an end, and a very nice end it was, too. Make no mistake; Lucky George had got value for money.
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    Ronnie Bosch sat in his studio, stared long and hard at his drawing board, and groaned.
    It was, they’d told him, all part of a concept which was definitely going to be The Future as far as Hell Holdings was concerned.
    For reasons he couldn’t quite grasp, but which he couldn’t help but find mildly flattering, they were going to call it EuroBosch.
    Visit, they had postulated, a land of wonder and enchantment. Meet your favourite characters from the repertoire of Europe’s most imaginative artist face to . . . Take a ride through spectacular landscapes to see sights you’ll never see anywhere else.
    Sounded good, in theory; but Ronnie, faced with the prospect of creating seven hundred thousand different appropriate latex masks in time for the Grand Celebrity Opening, was asking himself whether they’d really thought it through properly before committing the funding.
    For a start, he muttered to himself, scowling at a recalcitrant design and then turning it upside down (much better that way), masks really weren’t going to be enough, not for some of the more outré designs. We’re talking body suits here, and quite probably bodies as well. Dammit, about forty per cent of his best work was anatomically impossible. Which meant starting from scratch.
    Yuk.
    A stray pellet of inspiration struck home, and he reached for a pencil.
    A mouse, he thought. A seven-foot, grinning, anthropomorphic mouse, with perky little front fangs and big hands which . . .
    He shook his head, as if trying to dislodge the very idea. Broad-minded he most certainly was, but there are limits. The mere thought of it gave him the willies.
    What he’d really always wanted to do, of course, was design helicopters. And parachutes, and telescopes, and wonderful ships powered by paddles driven by treadmills turned by oxen. And siege engines, and washing machines,