Overtime by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Format: epub

The waiter who brought him his iced coffee and a glass of water looked familiar, and Blondel asked him his name.

‘Spiro,’ the waiter said.

‘Yes,’ Blondel replied, ‘but Spiro what?’

‘Maniakis,’ the waiter replied. ‘Is it important?’

Blondel shrugged. ‘Did your family use to farm down near Mistras, a while back?’ he asked. The waiter looked at him. ‘Do excuse my asking, but you remind me of someone I used to know.’

‘Really?’ The waiter gave him an even stranger look. ‘A hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty years ago, my mother’s family lived in a village near Mistras. What of it?’

Blondel suddenly remembered who the waiter reminded him of. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘my mistake. Sorry to have bothered you.’

The waiter shrugged and walked away, whistling. The tune, incidentally, was a very garbled recollection of L ‘Amours Dont Sui Epris, which the waiter had learned from his great-grandmother. Blondel finished his coffee quickly and left.

A tiresome sort of day, so far, he said to himself as he wandered back towards the Town Hall; and it had been just as well that he’d noticed the door marked Staff Only, No Admittance in that split second before the oil rig blew up. It was good to be out of the Archives again, but disturbing that he’d heard someone singing the second verse of the song. It could just have been a coincidence, of course; but he had the feeling, although he had no scientific data to back it up with, that coincidences didn’t happen in the Archives. Something to do with the climate, perhaps. Another missing person to look for, too. Just one damn thing after another.

He looked at his watch. In twenty minutes or so he planned to sing the song under the ruined Crusader castle on the promontory; then (assuming no response) he ought to be getting along to the 1750s, where he’d pencilled in a couple of Rhine schlosses to round the day off with. Then, with any luck, bed, with the prospect of looking for two characters lost in history instead of just one to look forward to. Well, it doubled his chance of finding something, if you cared to look at it that way, although it could be argued that twice times sod all is still sod all.

He decided to walk down to the promontory by way of the market, just for the hell of it. It was nine months and seven hundred years since he’d been here last — the time before that had been fifty years in the future, but that had been years ago now — and he liked to see what changes had been, or were to be, made in the places he visited. Had they filled in the enor­mous pothole in the road just opposite the Church?

He had stopped to buy a packet of nuts in the market and was just walking up the hill towards the steps when somebody waved at him — just waved, as if to say hello to a not particu­larly close acquaintance — and walked on.

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