by Ari Marmell
I’ve said it before: for all his temper, and people skills to make Vlad the Impaler blanche, the spriggan actually ain’t too shabby at his job. He understood the song I was singing.
“Either what y’need’s big enough that ya’d put yerself in debt for it,” he grunted sourly, “or it’s somethin’ y’figure she’ll help y’with for her own interests.”
Bugganes and spriggans. Like everything else bigger’n me, it was all about knowin’ how to handle ’em.
“Not bad. Now, in either of those cases, you wanna be the one to explain why you didn’t give the boss the chance to hear the skinny’n make up her own mind?”
He just sorta deflated back to his normal three feet’n change.
“I’ll go tell Ms. Ielveith yer here.”
“You stomp off sullenly and reluctantly do that.”
* * *
Ielveith’d greeted me friendly enough, but she also didn’t make too sincere an effort to hide her suspicion. When I’d gotten into some of the basics of why I was droppin’ in on her, she started shakin’ her head.
“You cannot possibly be serious,” she said when I’d finished.
“Well, I can. I just usually make a point of avoiding it.”
If Queen Victoria’d risen from the dead right then and spouted her “We are not amused!” routine, she’d still’ve gotten more of a laugh outta that than my fellow aes sidhe.
Ielveith was straight-laced, beautiful, kinda severe, and her office matched.
Yeah, I was in another office.
I’m so damn sick of offices I could scream. And no, I’m not gonna describe it in detail. You know what the Fae aesthetic looks like, you know what an office looks like. Paint your own damn picture.
She was ensconced behind the desk; I was plunked in a chair opposite; and Slachaun sat rigid on a sofa to my left, almost quiverin’ with the urge to do… something. I couldn’t say what, but if someone’d offered odds that I wouldn’t find it pleasant, well, I wouldn’t bet against it.
“Look, Ielveith—” I started.
“No. Mick, I’ve had enough trouble keeping out of Ylleuwyn’s sights since you were last here. The Lambton doesn’t play favorites, and in exchange, we don’t have enemies. Or we didn’t. I know what you’re looking for on the other side. A lot of us do. I wish you luck, but I’m not going to stick my neck—”
“Just take a gander at this, would ya?” I shoved the list into her hands before she could protest. “Any names ring a bell?”
“I just said I’m not—”
“This ain’t just for me, Iel. This is bigger’n me. Might even be bigger’n the Spear of Lugh.”
That got me an eyebrow, but her blinkers flicked down to the paper.
“I recognize a few,” she admitted, after a brief pause. “I’ve had a few dealings with Mr. Horton, here, actually. How is he doing?”
“Dead.”
Ielveith shrugged, let the paper drift down to her hardwood desk.
“Ah, well. They go so quickly. I still don’t—”
“They’re all dead, Iel. Every name on that list. All within the last few weeks. All in ‘accidents.’”
Her fingers scrabbled to recover the list, audibly crinkling the paper.
“Lemme guess,” I said as she went over it again. “In addition to your pal Horton, every name you know has some tie or other to some Seelie or another.”
“I only recognize a few, Mick.”
I decided to take that as confirmation.
“Sure. You wanna wager a free week in the presidential suite that the others do, too?”
The spriggan leaned forward on the sofa.
“What’re y’suggestin’, exactly?”
“I’m suggesting that the Unfit are workin’ some kinda Chinese angle. You know how much extra violence the city’s seen with all those redcaps in it? Zip. Bupkis. They’re keeping a low profile, and redcaps don’t do low profile unless they absolutely gotta. Meanwhile, a whole truckloada mugs got themselves chilled off. All rich’n powerful. And the only connection I found so far between any of ’em is the Seelie Court. So whaddaya think I’m suggestin’?”
“What you’re describing,” my host said slowly, her fingers clenched and nails scraping against the desk, “comes perilously close to an act of open war.”
“Yeah, I’d noticed that.”
“If it’s true,” she added. She wasn’t pacing, given the whole “seated in chair” thing, but she managed to convey the impression of it. “The idea of the Unseelie using the search for Gáe Assail as a diversion to target mortal allies of the Seelie Court is…”
“Pretty tough to swallow,” I finished for her. “And as soon as we find out that the rest of those names ain’t connected to the Court, or you can offer me a better theory that fits all the facts, we can just leave that ridiculous notion behind.”
“Slachaun?”
“Right, Ms. Ielveith.”
He didn’t even look resentful, now, just took the list and slipped from the office. Guess he saw clear as she did: if I was right, no matter how off the chance, this wasn’t just about me, or even about the spear. Not anymore.
The pair of us sat’n waited, sipping on dew-sweetened fruit juice and thinkin’ our own private and mostly unpleasant thoughts.
Even Ielveith’s connections weren’t gonna let her private dick dig into the whole friggin’ list, especially not over a couple hours. But between the Lambton’s important guests, her own political allies, and Slachaun’s drive—I’ll give him credit where he earns it, sure—they ran down a solid handful.
Enough that nobody coulda even tried to pretend it was coincidence anymore. Nah, they weren’t all allies or servants of Seelie Fae, but most of ’em were. And even those who weren’t? Were still among the ranks of Chicago’s elite who’re wise to our existence. They just hadn’t hitched their wagons to either Court.
“Explain something to me, Mick,” Ielveith asked. We were both packin’ up to leave, me to get my tail outta Elphame, her to go finish up identifying the Fae connections to the rest of the list. We figured, solid as our evidence was, it’d take overwhelming proof to cut through the political bullshit that’d otherwise entangle the whole damn Court when she tried to warn the rest of ’em about this.
“Sure, if I can.”
“Why?”
I halted in the middle of the room. “Why what?”
“The Unfit. Sure, this is clever, if this really is the first step in a bigger play. Except… They risk losing the race to the spear by splitting their attention this way, don’t they? Bad as it’s going to hurt us to lose so many of our mortal connections, isn’t Gáe Assail a much greater prize?”
Fact is, I’d had that exact thought. And it weighed on me, heavy, that I didn’t have an answer.
What were the bastards up to? Why escalate hostilities now? Why risk the grand prize pursuing an honorable mention?
What the burning, flickering hell did they know that I didn’t?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Heya, Franky.” I spoke soon as he clicked on the lights, since the place was curtained up tight enough to be where nighttime slept. He’d been out when I showed, but I don’t mind waiting.
Actually, that’s hooey. I hate waiting. But I’m pretty good at it.
I never seen Four-Leaf freeze that way. Pretty sure Medusa woulda moved on, figurin’ she’d already given him a once-over. Handful of roaches, who’d scattered when I let myself in but slowly re-emerged during my wait, scattered again, fleeing the light. Even motionless, Franky managed to give me a pretty strong impression he wanted to do the same.
“Don’t do anything rattle-brained,” I told him. “I’m just wiped out enough that chasing you down would seriously sour my sunny disposition, but not so much I wouldn’t catch you up.”
Franky gulped hard enough to swallow a bowling ball, and took a step away from the door.
“How’d you live like this?” I asked him. “I seen cleaner walls in a nuthouse, the
roaches just got done dialing pest control to deal with the silverfish, and the carpet don’t need to be vacuumed so much as aerated and tilled.”
“I—” he started, quivering.
“Yeah, I know. You’re lying low. And I gotta say, this was a pretty solid choice. Ain’t even any gold stashed away. Nobody’d think to look for you in a dump like this, and if they did, they wouldn’t find anything to suggest you’d been here.”
“That… That was the idea. So how—?”
“I’m a detective, Franky. Nobody hides from me if I don’t like for ’em to.”
By which I meant I’d gone to one of our mutual low-life acquaintances and did the whole “shake him down then bribe him” dance, but I didn’t figure he needed to know that.
“Mick…” He raised both hands, in a way some woulda described as “beseeching” and others as “pathetic.” In the sickly yellow light of the lone bulb, his skin was sallow and his green glad rags looked to be dyed with pond scum. “You gotta understand—”
“You ran out on me, Franky-boy. That ain’t mannerly.”
“Jesus, Mick! I’d just been ear-mickeyed by a rusalka!”
“Which I saved you from,” I reminded him, slowly rising from my seat (a moth-eaten chair with less stuffing than a soup-kitchen turkey).
“Come on, pal!” His back bumped up against the door, hard enough I could see my reflection in his glasses start to shake. “You know what kinda mess it is out there right now! I didn’t want any part of that! I just wanna keep my head down until this all blows over, you know?”
“Sure,” I told him, nodding. “I know. And I want a cow that gives pure cream and plays the harp. We’re both just gonna have to soldier on.”
“Mick…”
I was right up on him, now. I’d hafta either crush him against the door or kiss him to get any closer.
“What’s gonna happen here,” I said softly, “is that you’re gonna answer a whole heap of questions. In detail, and without even thinking of pulling my leg. About anything. Then, depending on what kinda song you sing, you might maybe run a few errands for me.
“After that, maybe, if everything’s gone how I need it to, and you’ve gotten through it without queering anything I need done, I might forget that you ran out on me.”
For just a sec, he got mad. I saw it in the clench of his jaw, heard it in the rasp of his breathing. On the square, I think I’d have developed a dollop more respect for him if he’d taken a poke at me.
End of the day, though, Four-Leaf Franky’s basically a coward, and he knows I know it. He sagged, so me’n the door were all that kept him upright, and nodded. I went back to the chair, if you wanna call it that.
“We’ll start real simple,” I said. “Even when you’re lyin’ dormy, I know you keep an ear to the ground—when it ain’t got a rusalka’s fishhooks in it, anyway. Tell me about anything big been going down the last few nights.”
I almost didn’t even bother to ask him. At this point, I was pretty well convinced that, no matter how out of character it was for ’em, the Unfit were keeping a low profile. So I was pretty well expectin’ his answer.
“Umm…” Franky wandered to a nightstand, pulled a bottle of something pungent from the built-in cabinet, and took a swig. “Mick, you’re talkin’ the loud stuff? Fireworks?”
“Anything attention-grabbing, yeah. That tough for you to understand?”
“No, it’s just…” He sat hard on the nightstand, which creaked a loud protest. “Mick, other’n your impromptu clambake with Áebinn at Scola’s place—and, well, the incident with me’n the rusalka—Chicago’s been pretty quiet. I mean, not the whole city, of course. Just, uh, our half of it. Been some gang violence and all, but I ain’t heard of anything else involving Fae.”
“And what’s that tell you?”
I let him work it out. Franky don’t always make great decisions—in the same way I “sometimes” don’t like cars—but he’s no bunny. Once I got him thinking about the repercussions of what he’d just reported…
“But that makes no sense!” He sounded almost put out, as if it were my fault things weren’t adding up. “Maybe the outsiders mighta managed to keep outta the Seelie’s way, but if the Unseelie are out in force, looking for this thing… There’s no way they dodged everyone, and no way they didn’t… Mick, there oughta be a trail of human and Fae bodies a mile long!”
“Give the man a cigar. So how do you explain it?”
“Maybe I just ain’t heard about stuff—not everything comes to me, you know?—but it’s hard to figure anything too big woulda slipped by me.” He frowned, didn’t seem to really believe his own words; started to shrug, discovered he was sloshing perfectly good rotgut from the bottle, and took another gulp instead. “Maybe they coulda hidden some of it in the human gang violence, but not all of it. Beyond that…”
“Yeah.” Didn’t figure I oughta spill about the so-called accidents just yet. “‘Beyond that’… How long’s the talk about Gáe Assail been crawlin’ the grapevine?”
“Jeez, at least a few weeks? Maybe a couple months? Honestly, though, I think most of us—even those who were out lookin’—only sorta half believed at best. The search was pretty well dyin’ down until the museum break-in.”
Well, well. And could that maybe have been the point?
Oh, and that reminded me: I hadda quick detour I oughta take before headin’ home, once I was through here.
“Tell me everything out of the ordinary you have heard, Franky. No matter how unimportant or small. And then, yeah, I’m gonna need you to deliver a couple messages for me.”
Franky cradled the bottle to his chest like it was a teddy bear.
“I’m not gonna care much for this, am I?”
“If it makes you feel any better,” I said, grinning, “they ain’t gonna care too much for you, either…”
* * *
The crowd was tiny.
Later in the day, even a slow one, the place’d be crawling with patrons. The buzz of conversation woulda drowned out a falling bomb, and the parking lot woulda been more steel and rubber than concrete. Hadn’t been too much quieter’n that last time I’d been here: even though it was after hours, and even though there hadn’t been that many of ’em, the bulls and newshawks had been making more than enough of a ruckus for anyone’s tastes.
But now? Early morning on a weekday? Place looked as though they oughta be throwin’ a “going out of business” sale to move the elephants along. Was only a trickle of people passin’ through the doors; a stream, at most. Nothin’ close to the normal current. Hell, since a lotta folks were still making their morning commute, the passing sidewalks were a lot busier.
Mighta been that I didn’t need to be here, that I was wasting time I couldn’t be certain I had to waste. But I couldn’t shake the memory that’d struck me a couple times already—back at Rosen’s flop, for instance—and that I’d been reminded of again at Franky’s place: so far as I could recall, I hadn’t sensed anything powerful enough to be Gáe Assail at the museum. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that the discrepancy was important, maybe even the key to this whole goofy fiasco. And that meant I couldn’t rely on recollection of “probably” and “maybe.”
I hadda be sure.
Gave some real serious thought to just walking in with the rest of the tourists and then sneakin’ my way down. Odds were good I could be quick’n quiet enough to be done before anyone noticed I didn’t belong…
On the other hand, “good odds” are still odds. Gettin’ caught red-handed could seriously gum everything up, especially if someone called the cops before I had the opportunity to, uh, talk ’em out of it, or if the security guards were packing: I could wind up taking a few nights to recover, or cooling my heels under glass. Galway and the others who’d been bamboozled into taking orders from the Seelie sure wouldn’t mind an excuse to put me away for a spell.
The other way, then.
The “gettin’ in” part wa
s the same. I paid for admission. Then it was just a matter of wanderin’ a bit until I found myself a security guard near an exhibit that was still pretty quiet. The display where I finally found him was something about gems, if I recall right. They were blue.
Gink I eventually located was a tired, doughy-lookin’ mug in uniform somewhere between a cop’s and a postman’s. He was wearing heat at his belt, though.
He didn’t much appreciate being flagged down and talked to, either.
“What do you—?”
“Mick Oberon. PI. Consulting with the police on the recent break-in.” Hey, it was only sort of a lie, right?
“I…”
Guess, on top of the talking, the guard hadn’t been prepared for anything that might require, y’know, thinking.
“How do I know you’re—?”
I slipped my PI ticket out of my wallet and thrust it at him. His brow furrowed, and I worried he might be planning to read the whole license.
But that was okay. I had him confused, the idea planted in his noggin, so now it oughta be duck soup as soon as…
He looked up. I dove in.
Into and through his eyes, easy as a pond, and I gotta say I had plenty of elbow room back there, if you get what I mean. I really didn’t need to do much more’n a poke a few thoughts to make him nice and pliable.
“’Kay,” he said dully. “So whatcha need?”
I hadn’t actually planned to grill him at all, just use him as a walking key, but… “Mr. Lydecker been behavin’ at all unusual lately?”
“Uhh… Well, yeah, a little. He’s usually down in that basement for hours after close, but accordin’ to Sal, last night was the second night he ain’t stayed late. Guess the break-in spooked him.”
It could be that simple, but I doubted it.
“Yeah, I guess. Right.” I guessed this “Sal” was one of the night guys, and Officer Moron confirmed it for me. Also confirmed, as I’d figured, that Lydecker didn’t come in this early.