Faust Among Equals Read Online Free PDF Page B

and refrigerators, and combination tin-openers and potato-peelers, and space-saving compact disc racks, and ironing-boards that ingeniously fold away into nests of coffee tables. He would have been good at it, too. In fact, he’d invented the Swiss Army Knife before the Swiss even had an army.
    Unfortunately, he’d been too successful as a commercial artist and illustrator, at a time when what the public wanted was spare-part-surgery demons and hideously teeming egg-shells. It was a bit like being a fashionable book-jacket artist, only not quite so well paid.
    And then it had started coming rather too easily. Even when he shut his eyes. Particularly when he shut his eyes. Like now, for example.
    How about an enormous mutant duck, with huge oval eyes and a beak the size of a tennis racket, and a hideous sort of hungry leer which made you think it was about to . . . ?
    Quickly, he opened his eyes, rubbed them with the knuckles of his fists, and swallowed a heaped handful of librium.
    He started to draw a cow.
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    Drawn-faced, travel-sore and ever so slightly out of his head with fatigue, Lundqvist pushed open the door of the American bookstore in Paris and leant both elbows heavily on the counter.
    â€˜Goethe,’ he said.
    â€˜Pardon me?’
    â€˜You deaf or something? I said Goethe.’
    The girl behind the counter adjusted her spectacles. ‘You want a book by Goethe?’ she hazarded.
    â€˜You got it.’
    The girl considered. ‘I think we’ve got one somewhere,’ she said. ‘We used to have, anyway. I haven’t been here long.’
    â€˜Fetch.’
    The girl went away; shortly afterwards she came back.
    â€˜You’re sure the book you wanted was by Goethe?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜We’ve got this one.’ She handed over a dusty paperback with the air of someone who’s been asked for some pretty daffy things in their time but is still just occasionally capable of surprise. ‘Is this the . . . ?’
    Lundqvist glanced down at the spine. Faust . Parts One and Two. Complete and unabridged. A Mentor Classic. ‘Yeah,’ Lundqvist growled. ‘Marlowe.’
    The girl took a look at his hard-worn trenchcoat and the bulge under his left arm. ‘That’s your name, right?’
    â€˜Christopher Marlowe,’ replied Lundqvist, suggesting that his patience was not unlimited. ‘British sixteenth-century dramatist. Complete works. Move it.’
    The girl went away again, and again came back.
    â€˜We’ve only got Volume One in the NEL edition,’ she said. ‘I can order . . .’
    Lundqvist took the book, flipped it open at the list of contents and nodded. ‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘No problem. Keep the change.’
    On a bench beside the Seine, Lundqvist ripped open the paper bag in which the girl had insisted on wrapping the books, selected the Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, and began to read.
    He found it hard going. His usual reading matter tended to be terser and less flowery (‘Step three; wire up the timing device to the detonator’) and he knew for a fact that large parts of Marlowe’s version were heavily embroidered, fanciful or just plain wrong.
    He wondered why. For a start, the jerk he’d known all these years had his faults, God knows, but even he didn’t go around talking poetry all the time, like some goddamn faggot.
    Eventually, however, he found what he was looking for. Having underlined it heavily in yellow marker pen and noted down the page number in his notebook, he opened the Goethe version and, after a great deal of tedious slogging through, found the passage that corroborated exactly what he’d found out in the Marlowe. Fine.
    He stuck the books in his pocket and went off to buy a 55mm recoilless rifle.
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    The Company Secretary looked up, his hand over the mouthpiece of the receiver.
    â€˜It’s him ,’ he hissed. ‘What do I