Pizza To Go: The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy Read online

  Almost anything.

  Almost anything so far.

  And now, he reflected as he walked back towards the Borgia house, he was in a position to complete the set. How nice.

  “Oh dear,” Lucrezia said, looking around the table. “It must have been something they ate.”

  Bianca di Fiesole stared dumbly at the corpses, unable to move for sheer horror. All her family, the entire ruling house of the Duchy of Arezzo, was slumped over the odd-looking boxes and the half-eaten slices of pizza. All, it seemed, except her. And, of course, Lucrezia.

  “Probably just as well you and I had the Hawaiian Surprise,” Lucrezia added cheerfully. “I think I’ll write and complain. Now then, let’s give you a moment for your dinner to go down, and then we can have the wedding.”

  “Wedding?” Bianca croaked. It seemed such an incongruous thing to say. Presumably cousin Lucrezia had meant funeral.

  “That’s right, dear. Oh, didn’t I mention it? I’ve arranged a wedding for you. Very nice man, you’ll like him.” She leaned over and pulled up a corpse by its hair. “Oh drat,” she added, “I forgot we’d need a priest.” She slapped the corpse’s face. “Cardinal Ordelafo? Are you still with us? Oh dear,” she sighed, letting the head fall forward into a slice of tuna and anchovy, “some people have no consideration for others. Never mind, you’ll just have to get married when you get there.”

  “Where?” Bianca demanded, as the shock thawed into fear. “Cousin Lucrezia … “

  “It’s all right, dear,” Lucrezia Borgia replied, “you’ll like it when you get there. Or should that be then? Anyway, you’ll like it.”

  Bianca stood up, her mouth open to speak; but Lucrezia popped an apple into it, then hit her over the head with a candlestick. Crude; but she didn’t have time for pre-wedding jitters.

  As if on cue, Edwin Potter strolled in, paused to admire a vinegar-stained Giotto canvas—

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “What? Oh, that. Last night’s chips came in it. Why?”

  —and helped Lucrezia Borgia to lug his unconscious bride out of the door and into the anomaly.

  “It’s quite simple,” Potter explained, as he wired the main drive back in. “I fancied her the first time I saw her, when I was in these times on business. So I thought, why not? These things are so much easier to arrange now than they will be in my time; you just find the senior relative and haggle over money for a bit.” He frowned. “Actually, Bianca’s father refused to be reasonable, he wanted far too much. So I suggested to my old friend Lucrezia that we might find it easier to sort out if we discussed it over dinner at her place.”

  “Oh,” Gino said.

  “Quite. It worked out rather well for both of us, because Lucrezia’s now the heir to the Duchy of Arezzo, and she’s also Bianca’s only surviving relative.” He smiled pleasantly. “I think she wanted Arezzo to make up the set, like in Monopoly. There,” he added, dropping his screwdriver back in his top pocket, “I think that ought to work now. New York 1997, please, as near to Fifth Avenue as you can make it.”

  Gino pulled out the choke and put the anomaly in gear. “But what about when she wakes up,” he objected. “Won’t she—?”

  Potter shook his head. “That’s the beauty of it,” he said. “Now you and I are used to whizzing about through time so it doesn’t affect us; we’re hardened to it. She isn’t. Do you remember your first trip?”

  Gino thought for a moment. “No,” he admitted.

  “Of course you don’t. The first time you go through, it wipes your memory clean. I nearly found that out the hard way myself. So, when Bianca arrives in my time, she won’t remember anything at all. Which is where I patiently explain that she’s had a bang on the head and lost her memory. Then I tell her that we’ve been married for three years, her father used to run a shoe factory in Queens until her whole family died in a fire last year, and that we’re extremely happy together and very much in love. Neat, yes?”

  “That’s awful,” Gino said.

  “So glad you think so. It means we’ll have to skip the actual wedding, which is a pity. I was going to ask your lot to do the catering. Well, come on, I haven’t got all day.”

  “No,” Gino said, “I’m not going to do it. It’s kidnapping and brainwashing and what’s that you’re pressing into the back of my neck?”

  “The course of true love never did run smooth,” Potter replied. “Now get this thing moving before I slit your throat.”

  Poppa Joe, who in some respects was eighty-seven, was also as young as he felt. He’d started out in the catering business as a pizza delivery boy, and now here he was again, delivering pizzas. He grinned as he closed his fist and tapped it against the door. Right now, he felt like he was fourteen again. The smell, the warmth soaking through the tray onto his skin; it surely took him back—

  —And forwards, too, of course. Sometimes it got confusing that way. A lifetime in the business, millions of deliveries all over space and time; there were the inevitable disconcerting moments when his skinny, spotty fourteen-year-old self dashed up the stairs of a block of flats and passed a wheezing, knock-kneed old wreck coming down, and the old man looked at him sadly and said, “Save your energy, son, they weren’t in.” Sometimes, the frustrations of his physical age tempted him to cheat. It would be so easy for him to be twenty-one again (and again, and again …); except that, when he looked back, what had he ever done with his youth except deliver pizzas?

  If I had my time over again …

  The door opened.

  “Two Seafood Deluxe and a Napolitana,” he said, with an echo of the old cheerfulness, “that’ll be $10.65 - Gino, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Gino’s face fell. Oh well, he said to himself, it seemed like a good idea at the time; to offer to help Potter carry the unconscious Bianca up the stairs, then quickly phone through an order and hope that Frankie or Ennio would turn up and help him right the terrible wrong he’d been forced to participate in. Even if he’d turned up, he’d have been better than nothing; two of him would have stood a chance against Potter and his knife, or at least they could have made a fight of it. But Poppa Joe—

  “It’s okay,” he muttered. “Leave the pizzas, let’s go home.” But Poppa Joe stood his ground. “Not so fast, kid,” he said. “There’s something the matter. What’s up? You tell Poppa.”

  Gino shrugged and explained, and Poppa Joe listened. When he’d finished, he saw that the old man was actually grinning.

  “Bianca di Fiesole,” he muttered under his breath. “Well, if that don’t just beat all. You know, I was just thinking about her the other day.”

  “Other day?”

  Poppa joe waved his hand impatiently. “You know what I mean,” he said. “Kid, you know what? This is going to be good. You wait there, don’t even move.”

  “Poppa Joe? Where are you going?”

  “Just stay there, that’s all. And look after your momma.”

  “My what?”

  —Back to a time, in the late fifteenth century, when a princess in Arezzo had opened a door to a pizza delivery boy, and their eyes had met across the centuries …

  Not that he’d done anything about it, not then; she was a princess and he delivered pizzas, and in fifteenth-century Italy that was an end to it. Still gazing dumbly at the girl of his dreams, drowning in the sudden and unexpected love he saw reflected in her eyes, he thrust the trays into her hands, stepped back and—

  Bumped into an old man, who pushed him aside and said, “Get outa the way, kid. You leave this to me. Hey, Bianca, wait up.”

  The vision of loveliness hesitated for a moment. “Me?” she said.

  “Yes, you. Now you be quiet and do what you’re told, ‘cos I’m old enough to be your grandfather and I know about things. You see that kid there? You gonna marry him, okay?”

  “Marry him?” Bianca repeated, stunned. “What… ?”

  “Marry him,” the old man said categorically. “Elope. Now. ‘C
os if you don’t, you gonna get kidnapped through time and space and all your family gonna get murdered by the Borgias. And,” he added thoughtfully, “a whole lot of other things ain’t gonna happen, which’d be a real shame, believe me.” He stopped, as if aware that he was rambling. “Now you tell me something. Do you love me? I mean, him.”

  The girl hesitated, then nodded firmly.

  “You want to run away with him and get married and have kids, maybe start a good, sound family business, possibly in catering?”

  Bianca looked bewildered, then nodded again.

  “Good,” the old man said. “So grab your coat and get outa here.” He reached back and grabbed the young boy’s collar. “The two of us.”

  Gino blinked, and looked at the door.

  A moment ago, he could have sworn it was open and he was standing inside it. Now he was outside, holding a stack of trays.

  The door opened; but it wasn’t Potter who answered. It was an elderly black woman with a nice smile, who said thank you and gave him the right money. He shrugged and walked down the stairs to the anomaly.

  Something about looking after his momma?

  Which was crazy; Momma wasn’t here, she was back in the kitchen where she’d always been, answering the phone, ruling the place with a rod of iron—

  —Because this is Bianca’s kitchen, possibly the most extraordinary place in spacetime. From this small prefabricated industrial unit - well, indeed, skip all that. We may have been here before.

  There’s Rocco and Tony, who make the bases; Freddy and Mike, who do the toppings; Carlo, who minds the ovens; Rosa and Vito and Zelda, who chop the vegetables and deal with the side-orders; Frankie, Ennio and, of course, young Gino, who do the deliveries; and there’s Momma Bianca, who takes the orders, writes out the tickets and does everything. Occasionally her eldest daughter Zelda suggests it might help if she were to take a turn answering the phone occasionally, so as to give Momma a break at her age. And Bianca says yeah, that’d be good. As soon as the rush is over.

  When people ask her how she copes, Momma Bianca grins. “It’s a family business,” she says. “We manage.”

  And in the far corner sits Poppa Joe, grunting and mumbling in his sleep, remembering the way things were and how they might have been.