Naturally, talking turkey with the government was more like watching the government carve and then eating what they gave you. And their idea of fair market value looked more like about thirty cents on the dollar to Dickie. But it was still more than plenty. Hell, when you counted the money people kept paying him to go on television or talk to a group, Dickie almost felt guilty. Randy shouldn’t have missed out.
Meanwhile, he could hardly help keeping up with the reports, even if he’d wanted to avoid them. Arcadia had changed the world, sort of. Or maybe not, but the world sure couldn’t seem to stop talking about it. Dickie mostly stuck to the Smithsonian’s running web gallery, where they posted professional-looking photos and decent little write-ups about all the new discoveries as they rinsed them off. One day he popped off so loudly that the other morning regulars at the diner stopped playing cards.
‘What’s the matter, Dickie?’ Jerry Trauerneck called over. ‘You win the lottery again?’
‘Gotcha!’ Dickie cried, pointing at the cracked screen of his ancient laptop. ‘Thought you’d gotten away with it, didn’t you? Didn’t you? Ha!’
Shelly topped off his coffee as she passed by the table, pausing to look over his shoulder. ‘Who got away with what, Mr Bierbaum? Ooh. Yuck. What is that?’
It was the first honest belly laugh Dickie Bierbaum had enjoyed in just about as long as he could remember, that was what it was. The old-timers set aside their Euchre hands and wandered over, too curious to stay away.
On the screen was a photograph of a rust-caked sawmill from Arcadia’s aft deck. Attached to the sawmill by three feet of chain: the intact, skeletal remains of a small john mule.
Dickie took great relish in recounting for them the old story, published in the paper of the day, of a Swedish trader named Frisk – the loud and proud owner of Arcadia’s only living casualty. Back then, Frisk had claimed he’d tried everything to get his poor mule ashore.
‘I’ll be damned,’ Jerry Trauerneck said. ‘The sorry thing was still tied up.’
‘History always gets its man,’ Dickie said, still grinning like a loony. He clapped his hands, wiped his eyes, and sat there shaking his head. ‘Wouldn’t budge, my ass.’
Somebody said, ‘That guy Frisk’s ass, you mean.’
‘An ass is a donkey,’ Trauerneck replied. ‘A mule’s just a mule.’
Others: ‘Isn’t a mule half-donkey?’
‘So it’s half-assed, you’re saying.’
‘Yeah, but which half?’
‘Dickie, look it up on the computer. What do you call a donkey?’
‘I ask you,’ Dickie asked them, ignoring the debate. Who cared what you called a donkey? ‘Is it not to laugh?’
‘Sure, Dickie,’ somebody else said, as the old-timers gradually got tired of looking at chained-up mule bones and wandered back the way they’d come. ‘It’s a good story.’
‘Guess it goes to show you.’
‘Just goes to show you what, Mr Bierbaum?’
Dickie thought about that, shrugged, sipped his coffee.
‘Hell if I know,’ he said.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks are due to the Arabia Steamboat Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, for providing the seeds that eventually grew into this book. Much of the Arcadia lore in these pages is based on the historical facts of the Arabia. As for historical facts, there is no evidence that the real Henry Ward Beecher ever commissioned a golem; most experts doubt that it even occurred to him to try.
Additional thanks once again to Jill Doolittle, RN, and Detective Craig Enloe, Overland Park Police Department, for providing excellent info about how far a writer might stretch the operational parameters of an ER and a crime scene, respectively. Thanks to Nathaniel G. Lew of Saint Michael’s College for the Hebrew translations, and to old pal Wayne Edwards for brokering them. Thanks to Ian Hancock of The University of Texas at Austin for the Romani translations. Thanks to Victor Gischler for letting me buy him a steak.
Finally, for excellence in monster husbandry, sincerest warmth and abiding fuzziness to David Hale Smith, my longtime agent; to Steve Feldberg, Vikas Adam, and the team at Audible Originals; and to Kate Lyall Grant, Carl Smith, Leila Cruikshank, Piers Tilbury, and the team at Severn House – thank you all!
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