Marlowe and the Spacewoman

by Ian M. Dudley

  “R.E.T.?” asked Nina.

  “Rapid Expungement Team,” filled in Jebediah.

  “This sounds kinda iffy to me,” said Nina. “What if Obedere doesn’t get wind of the warrant request, or sends someone other than the R.E.T? And what if he does send the R.E.T., but doesn’t call them off?”

  “House ran the numbers, and says there’s a 98.4% chance this is how Obedere will respond to the warrant request.”

  “And what if Obedere shows up?”

  Marlowe didn’t have a ready answer for this question. Leave it to Nina to ask the tough ones. “He’s unlikely to be present if we’re about to burst in with a warrant. He’ll want to be as far away from the cleanup team as possible, to give himself plausible deniability.”

  “What about me?” Jebediah looked somewhat concerned. “What am I supposed to do after sending the email?”

  “Join us at the evidence site.”

  “Oh, and how am I supposed to do that?”

  “Once we arrive, and the R.E.T. leaves, I’ll send Assistant Director Thinners an email with a number in it. You will open the email, see the number, and then look it up on the clipboard. House compiled and numbered a list of 284 potential sites. Go to the one whose number matches the one I’ll send in the email.”

  “And if the site isn’t on House’s list?”

  “In that case, I’ll send you the number of the site on the list nearest the target, and one of us will wait for you there.”

  A surge of adrenaline pumped through Marlowe, along with a severely queasy sensation in his stomach. His hands were shaking a little, which he covered up by making a fist. “Good. Nina, you’re with me. Let’s go.”

  Amazingly, everything seemed to go according to plan. Marlowe and Nina reached the R.E.T. team office with two minutes to spare. Emboldened by their encounter with Mandelbrot, they rode the elevator up to level +15. An office on positive floor was deemed prestigious, and Marlowe had no doubts that Obedere wanted to keep his R.E.T. people happy. He’d heard rumors of more than one department disappointing Obedere and being packed up and pushed down into the nether regions of the Ministry building. Or worse. One source confided to Marlowe that after the parrots had bird bombed City Hall, the Animal Control and Enforcement, or ACE division, had been tasked to round up and exterminate all the genetically modified parrots in the City. Their failure was so egregious they were actually moved to a satellite office in the middle of the Trooper firing range. Obedere also stripped them of their medical coverage, a costly loss of benefits given their new location.

  As they stood outside the gilded double doors leading to the R.E.T. offices, studiously examining their clipboards in an effort to look inconspicuous, Nina cleared her throat. A quick look showed the corridor was clear.

  “Yes?”

  “How much longer until we see something?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll wait a while, and if nothing happens, we give up, get father, and head home.”

  At that moment, a team of six burly men and women in tanbark brown jackets over mauve jumpsuits and beige riot helmets burst through the gilded double doors of the R.E.T. office and rushed passed them. The Rapid Expungement Team walked in lockstep, their boots clacking sharply as they moved down the corridor. If they jogged, Nina and Marlowe could just keep them in sight. It was here that their plan hit its first snag. The cleanup crew had reached the elevators, and Nina and Marlowe could just make out their stony faces as the doors started to close.

  “Hold that elevator!” called out Nina.

  “Can’t, official police business,” called back the team leader as the doors slid shut over his face. A thin sliver of light shone through the crack, and it slowly descended until the line of illumination winked out.

  “Now what?”

  Marlowe looked at Nina, the mirrored elevator doors, and then Nina again. “I don’t know. I didn’t think of this.”

  “Didn’t House?”

  “No.”

  Nina jammed her thumb over the elevator call button. “I don’t see any indicator showing which floor the elevator is on. What do we do if we lose them?”

  “Go home empty-handed.” Marlowe closed his eyes, trying to still the sudden din in his head.

  “Marlowe, are we just going to stand here? We’re losing them!”

  “Shh, I can’t hear myself think. Wait a second, that’s it!” Marlowe opened his eyes, and let out a cry of triumph when he saw the entrance to the stairs. “Come on, and be quick about it! I only hope we aren’t too late.”

  Marlowe bounded through the doors. “Down, the elevator went down. Stop at each floor and listen!”

  They went down one flight and stopped, Marlowe in the lead, his hand raised in the air. Silence greeted them.

  “What are we listening for?” asked Nina.

  “Marching!”

  They went this way down seventeen flights, pausing for a few seconds to listen, before moving on. At floor -2, they were rewarded with the sound of the R.E.T. team’s clip-clopping march.

  “Come on, before they get too far from the elevators to find!” Marlowe hoofed it through the door and promptly plowed into the Rapid Expungement Team leader, sending him sprawling.

  “Watch where you’re going, you stup…sir!” The swarthy man, ‘Icasiano’ stitched over his left breast, had recovered enough from the collision to notice Marlowe’s lack of a name tag. “Begging your pardon sir, very clumsy of me. Official police business, can’t stay any longer.” The team started up their marching again, and Marlowe just leaned against a wall to catch his breath.

  “Damn, what are the odds of that happening?”

  Nina patted him on the back. “We’ll have to ask House when we get back. But shouldn’t we follow them now?”

  “What? Oh yes, absolutely.”

  It wasn’t hard. What they achieved with speed, the R.E.T. paid for with subtlety. Marlowe and Nina were able to keep well behind the team, simply following the echoes of their boots. Marlowe had fired up his clipboard and was paging through House’s list of suspected sites.

  “There’s only one site on this floor. I know where they’re heading.” Marlowe stopped short. “We should find a terminal and send a message to father, to cancel the request.”

  “And if House is wrong?”

  Marlowe looked at Nina with mock shock. “House wrong? Please.”

  They found a small room crowded with cubicles under flickering yellow lights. A lot of tiny, cramped cubicles. Marlowe stormed over to the nearest one, which contained a desk, a terminal, and a phone. He logged into the terminal as Thinners and sent himself an email with the site number from House’s list. Twenty seconds later he had an email reply from himself, saying simply “All taken care of.”

  “Right, father’s done it. Let’s go. Hopefully that cleanup team will be recalled before they have a chance to successfully expunge anything important.”

  Much to their relief, a very obviously dejected group of softly walking expungement professionals sulked past them as they headed toward the site indicated on Marlowe’s clipboard map.

  They reached the indicated room. Nina tried the door. “It’s locked.”

  “Hang on, I’ve got a lock pick set sewn somewhere into this unif-”

  The sound of a door frame cracking interrupted Marlowe. Nina shoved the somewhat bowed door open. “Not a problem.”

  “I hope there wasn’t an alarm on that door.”

  “One step ahead of you, Sherlock. I asked House about that, and he felt the odds were so low as to be off the charts. What place is more secure than the Ministry of Policing building? Well, supposedly secured, anyway.”

  “I haven’t been called Sherlock in years!”

  Nina grabbed Marlowe’s arm. “Come on, we’re not supposed to dawdle, remember?”

  They crossed over the threshold together into the dark unfathomables of Obedere’s secret lair.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE GREAT PAPER CHASE

  OR
/>   THE WHOLE IS GREATER THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS

  The secret lair was a bright, well appointed oval room. Dark cherry wood panels lined the walls, crowned by a gold and inlaid pearl dome ceiling. A large, four-paneled Virtu-window took up an entire wall, displaying a rocky coastal outcropping enduring the pounding of a raging late-night thunder and lightening storm. Facing the window, and set back from the wall a couple of meters sat a squat, cherry wood desk consisting of a wide, gleaming top and three drawers on the right side. An antique chair with plush royal purple cushions framed by yet more dark cherry wood stood inattentive guard over the desk, its back to Marlowe. Extending out from either side of the desk and wrapping around the length of the room like large segmented antennae were oak cabinets stained dark brown, containing three drawers each. There was another cabinet, different from the others, at the apex of the antennae. This cabinet, shorter and wider than the others, was made of beige plastic.

  They approached the desk quickly. Marlowe felt a chill run down his spine as he explored the desk top. The strange, alien objects on it were no doubt fiendish devices of torture used by Obedere to delight himself in the wee morning hours.

  Nina moved over to the largest of the strange devices, a large, oversized keyboard. The keys were arranged in the usual keyboard order, but the rows were staggered like stadium seating, the line of keys of one row being raised a half-step above the row immediately below it. It must have been a wireless model, because Marlowe didn’t see a data cable running from it. The top of the keyboard ended inexplicably in a black cylinder running the length of the device. A shiny metal lever extended from the right side of the cylinder.

  Nina ran a finger over the top of the cylinder, as if checking for dust. “Wow, a typewriter! That’s the last thing I expected to encounter here!”

  Marlowe looked at her blankly. “A what?”

  “A typewriter. You know, for typing?”

  “You mean a keyboard. It’s a weird sort of keyboard. And given you recognize it, a bit of an antique too.”

  “No, not a keyboard. A keyboard implies a computer somewhere that you’re typing your keystrokes into. The typewriter predates the computer.”

  “If your keystrokes aren’t going into a computer, where are they going?”

  “Onto paper.”

  “Paper.”

  “Yes, paper.”

  “Directly onto paper.”

  “Yes. You sound like you don’t believe me. What about that printing press you used to print your map of the sewer ? That used paper.”

  “Vellum, to be precise. But that’s a toy. Why would you want to print anything important on paper? It would be so inconvenient. You wouldn’t be able to access it with your PDI or computer…son of a parrot, the fiend’s a genius!”

  Nina clicked her tongue, her head tilted to one side. “Of course. If it isn’t in electronic format, it can’t be hacked. Paper has to be the most secure form of storage available in a place like this. House would never be able to find this stash!”

  There was a sudden thump against the door, followed by a sickening groan as the door swung open. Marlowe jumped nearly high enough to alight on the desk, but when he spun around, it turned out to only be Jebediah.

  “Great Cesar’s ghost, father, you shouldn’t sneak up on people like that!”

  “Oh really,” replied Jebediah smartly. “And I suppose I should knock loudly and announce my illegal presence for one and all to hear?”

  Nina walked over to the door and wedged it shut. “No, actually, in this case, you did exactly as you should have. We’re just a little jumpy right now.”

  Jebediah harrumphed. “How goes the search?”

  “Ah,” stuttered Marlowe, “the search. We’re just working out where to get started. We discovered this antique typewriter thing on Obedere’s desk and realized that he’s-”

  “Committing all his important stuff to paper only, to make hacking more difficult? Yes, I did the same thing when I was…well, before my…hiatus from power.”

  “It presents a bit of a problem,” said Nina. “If it’s all on paper, we’ll never be able to look through everything in a timely fashion.”

  “Not a problem at all,” said Jebediah, rubbing his hands together. “We just make copies. And if we can’t find a copier, we steal the originals.” He surveyed the room, and then jabbed a finger at the beige cabinet Marlowe had noticed upon first entering. “There’s the copier. Now to find the documents. What are we looking for again?”

  “Anything on Nina,” said Marlowe.

  “Or my mission – Odyssey I.”

  Jebediah’s eyes lost their focus as he receded into deep thought. “Now what would I file information about Nina under? N for Nina? M for Minari? O for Odyssey? Hmm. Nina, you check under N. I’ll check under M. Spares, you’re on O.”

  They searched. Marlowe found the drawer labeled ‘Oa-Or’ in one of the cabinets and opened it. Inside he found folders with tabs on the edges, each of the tabs labeled, starting with ‘Oasis Project’ at the front and ‘Orange’ in the back. The folders were in alphabetical order. Marlowe thumbed through them, but where ‘Odyssey I’ should have appeared, there was nothing.

  “Nothing,” said Jebediah. “Maybe S for spacewoman. Yes, I’ll look there.”

  “Same here in the O cabinet.” Marlowe was struck by an inspiration and abandoned the cabinets for the desk. The typewriter was centered on a rectangular piece of thick, brick red paper framed on the shorter sides by a strip of padded leather delicately embroidered with gold leaf. Two piles of paper were stacked in pewter trays next to the typewriter. The top page in both trays was blank, but Marlowe could see faint impressions in the paper of one stack. He smiled and slid himself into the chair. Once seated, he noted a faint oily odor of wood polish. He pulled open the top drawer. It contained more stacks of paper, neatly tied off with twine, a box of something called ‘typewriter ribbon’ and a small bottle of something called ‘correction fluid’. It was all quite beyond him.

  The middle drawer yielded a couple of not-so-mysterious objects. The first was a pearl-handled, silver-plated, dual-barreled, double action, compass-set-in-the-butt-of-the-grip 12mm Walloper. Marlowe whistled. This was the James K. Polk of handguns. Next to it was a 2 liter bottle of Papa Doc Scotch, dated in the old, old calendar: 1984.

  “Tut tut, that’s a dangerous combination, alcohol and guns. I better do something about that.” Marlowe grabbed the three-quarters full bottle and slipped it into one of the hidden pockets sewn into his uniform. “And a work of art like this, it belongs in the hands of a true connoisseur, not a ham-fisted power monger like Obedere.” He pocketed the gun too.

  “Hey, stick with the program!” Jebediah’s failure to unearth anything had left him touchy. “You’ll only aggravate Obedere by stealing from him. Any luck, Nina?”

  “No, nothing yet. Maybe it’s under something else, something we haven’t thought of?”

  Marlowe had a thought. “When I first talked to Obedere about you, he called you feisty. Try looking under that.”

  “Feisty?” Indignation laced Nina’s voice.

  “Don’t get mad at me, I didn’t say it.” Marlowe reluctantly put the bottle and gun back in the middle drawer and closed it. He pulled open the bottom drawer, which contained a very battered, yellowing shoe box. Taking the lid off the box, Marlowe found hard copies of images. He started thumbing through them. Most of them were pictures of a man and woman. They were of different ages in the photos, sometimes together, sometimes with other people. The man bore a strong resemblance to Obedere. Towards the back of the pile, a child and a dog appeared. One picture grabbed Marlowe’s attention. It looked like a family portrait – the man and woman in their forties, and a hale, hearty young man between them, smiling. Marlowe recognized the young man – it was Obedere.

  “Pay dirt!” shouted Nina.

  “Pay dirt?” Jebediah looked confused. “Why would I pay dirt anything? Furthermore, what currency would it accept?
”

  “No, I found a folder labeled Feisty. Feisty, indeed. He’ll regret that.”

  “Will he?” Jebediah had moved to Nina’s side, hand extended. “And just when will that be?”

  “Someday,” said Nina, pulling the folder out.

  “So far,” said Jebediah as he took the folder from Nina, “this has been entirely too easy. Well I’ll be a son of a parrot!”

  Marlowe looked up from the photo. “What is it?”

  “The folder’s empty!”

  Nina groaned. “Empty! Then where the hell is my file?”

  Marlowe put the photos back in their box, replacing the lid and closing the drawer. “That? Oh, I found that ages ago.”

  “What!” Nina and Jebediah both exclaimed simultaneously.

  “Elementary deduction. It seemed likely it was early days yet for Obedere to actually have everything together and filed. It occurred to me that he was probably still typing everything up.” Marlowe lifted the stack of paper that had the faint impressions on it and turned it over. On the flip side was a cover sheet. In the center of the page appeared the word ‘Feisty’, and then the sentence ‘Evidence analysis and investigative results pertaining to Nina Minari, so-called spacewoman.’ The stack was quite high.

  Marlowe carried the report over to the copier Jebediah had pointed out earlier and then stopped, stumped. The top of the copier was confusing. There was a space that looked like a tray, but it was set into the top, and had rollers at one end. In the corner were a lot of buttons. “OK, how does this work?”

  Jebediah joined Marlowe and took the papers out of his hands. “Give me that. I’ll do it.”

  Jebediah put the papers face down into the incorporated tray and pressed a few buttons. Suddenly there was a whirring sound, and the pages started getting sucked into the machine, from the bottom, only to be returned a moment later to the top of the stack. On the right side of the copier, another tray folded down from within the machine and sheets of paper began to appear in it. Jebediah picked up the first sheet and examined it.