surely the mark of a desperate man. And,' he added, 'you've pushed Hercules out of the trenches into the firing line. Another egregious error. Our job has just been made ten times simpler.'
Sam, beside him, couldn't help but sound a note of caution. 'What if he did it on purpose?'
'The thunderstorm? No, Sam, that was pure lack of self-control.'
'Hercules, I mean. These New Labours. What if it's… well, I hate to say, but a trap? What if Hercules is simply bait?'
'Dangerous bait, don't you think? Like putting dynamite on the hook instead of a juicy worm.'
'Dynamite still brings home dead fish.'
'Fair point. But no, I don't believe Zeus would be prepared to risk sacrificing one of his own, merely to get us.'
'Why not? He's not that fond of Hercules. Hercules has always been a liability, a loose cannon. If there was one Olympian Zeus would consider expendable, one he wouldn't mind if he lost, Herc is it.'
'Sam.' Sternly.
'I'm just saying.'
'I know. Don't you have a Minotaur to attend to?'
Sam stopped herself from going on. Obstinacy could be confounded by only one thing: greater obstinacy from someone else. Landesman was in charge. He had always been in charge. She was coming to understand that her leadership had been a token, his to grant, his to rescind at will. Landesman had used her to get the Titans to this point. She'd captained the ship out of harbour. She'd navigated through the early, relatively calm part of the voyage. But now, with rough seas ahead, he was very firmly taking the helm.
She went straight from his company to the Minotaur's, and of the two it was the latter she found more congenial. Five days into her allotted week, she was sure she had gained the monster's confidence. Its eyes, though still fearsome in their redness, looked at her now with something like trust. The monster almost seemed glad to see her whenever she entered the pen. At first she'd thought this was because she brought food — a straightforward stimulus response, animal conditioning. But then she'd tried going in empty-handed, and still the Minotaur seemed glad. It approached her expectantly, but wasn't angry or disappointed to discover she didn't come bearing sustenance.
That afternoon, after butting heads with Landes-man, she plucked up the courage to touch the Minotaur. She placed a hand on its brow, taking time over the movement so as not to startle the beast. The Minotaur, to her surprise, didn't object, didn't toss her hand aside. Instead it crooned softly at the physical contact. Sam began to stroke and scratch the knotty tuft of hair between its horns. The Minotaur almost cooed with delight.
She knew then.
She had mastered the monster.
42. THE NEW LABOURS
T he first New Labour that Hercules performed was demolishing a condemned tenement building in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant district. He collapsed the derelict three-storey brownstone with his bare fists, and took tangible delight in doing so. Then he cleared away the rubble, piling it by the armful into a fleet of municipal dumper trucks. The site was slated to be turned into a play park and sensory garden for kids in the neighbourhood.
The second New Labour involved a hunt for one of the urban-legendary giant alligators reputed to lurk in the New York sewer system. Much to everyone's surprise, Hercules returned from his jaunt into the underworld hauling the corpse of just such a beast, a caiman some 25 feet long from nose to tail which was taken to the American Museum of Natural History on Central Park West to be stuffed, mounted and put on display.
New Labour number three was a somewhat controversial one. Hephaestus had fashioned a statue of none other than Zeus himself, 112 feet tall, one foot taller than the Statue of Liberty, and similarly made of copper. Hercules helped hoist the Zeus statue into place on a plinth on Governors Island so that it gazed across the Upper Bay towards Manhattan and dominated the view southwest from Battery Park much as the Statue of Liberty did. Naturally, plenty of New Yorkers grumbled. They all knew what the Statue of Liberty symbolised. What did the statue of Zeus stand for? Some, however — people who were perhaps of a more sentimental outlook — felt that after all these years of solitary spinsterhood it was high time ol' Lady Liberty had a mate.
Hercules's fourth New Labour was unplanned and impromptu, and occurred just as he'd completed the third. One of the Staten Island Ferry boats got into difficulties coming in to dock at Manhattan. The captain would later profess himself mystified as to what happened. He'd made the back-and-forth trip countless times and thought he knew the tides and currents in the bay intimately. He could have berthed that boat blindfolded. But then a sudden, inexplicable and very powerful rip caught the ferry, twisted her round and began pushing her sideways towards the pier at great speed. Nothing the captain could do would impede her progress or correct the profound list to starboard she had developed. Two likely outcomes awaited: either the ferry would hit the pier broad abeam, crushing dockworkers and possibly holing herself and sinking, or she would roll over and capsize. Neither was, to say the least, desirable.
Then, salvation.
It came in the form of Hercules, who had just alighted from a coastguard motor launch and who now leapt into action, bracing himself between the ferry's hull and the pier. With his immense strength he halted the boat, staved off a collision, and averted disaster. A couple of hundred commuters cheered and the captain hooted his foghorn in appreciation. Hercules took a bow — hero of the hour.
That night, in a comedy club just off Times Square, a young rising star of the circuit made an observation that drew boos and jeers and caused a number of his audience to walk out in high dudgeon. What if, he mused, the ferry 'accident' hadn't been accidental? What if Poseidon had been lurking somewhere on the sidelines and had created the freak current that imperilled the boat? What if, in other words, the whole event had been staged? A put-up job?
But you didn't say such a thing, not so soon after a near-calamity and not when your audience was made up of locals who were becoming increasingly enamoured of Hercules and were inclined to forgive him for his past misdemeanours. You might think it, but you certainly didn't say it. Or, if you were going to say it and you were in a comedy club, you should at least try to make a joke out of it.
New Labour number five seemed trivial by comparison with the previous one: laying the foundation stone for a new shopping mall in Rockaway. A half-ton foundation stone, admittedly, the hefting and placing of which by one man, unaided by machinery, was no mean feat. But still, after he had saved all those lives, somewhat underwhelming.
The sixth New Labour was begun but never finished.
43. OSCILLO-KNIVES
T hey were digging up the roads around Gramercy Park. They'd been digging them up for weeks. They dug them up day and night, night and day. Resurfacing was in progress. Soon there would be new silk-smooth asphalt. But in the meantime, as the stressed, bleary-eyed residents of the area knew all too well, there was digging-up. Jackhammers clank-clattering away well into the small hours, interspersed with truck-reversing warning klaxons and the sound of workmen hollering. Arc-lights that glared at the dark and made it go away. Continuous racket and hassle, meaning no sleep in the city that never sleeps.
Hercules came one evening to help speed things along. He stamped on the old asphalt, breaking it away in chunks from the layer of Portland cement concrete below, and then he tossed the chunks into skips to be carted off at a later date. Workmen leaned on their idle tools and were duly impressed, although their union representative did put in a call to his boss, the general president of the local Teamsters chapter, just to check whether Hercules's voluntary contribution to the project would affect his men's overtime bonuses. He was told that the mayor had
