Emerald City Blues

by Smalley, Peter

  I had to hope not. In the mean time, I had a few new leads to chase. I dashed off a quick letter to Gerd's next-of-kin, Ms. Zimmerman, explaining a few of the less odd things about the situation and asking her to write me back should she know anything about anything. It was vague as hell, but sometimes that gets people to tell you more than asking too many specific questions straight out.

  That left the ship from Albert King's inscrutable warning. No matter how much necromancy spooked me, I couldn't afford to ignore a potentially useful lead when it showed up with my name monogrammed on it in gold letters. Ah King was trying to tell me something, but what? The dead might have some strange ideas of what was important to the living, or so it seemed to me. I didn't know if I could take his fortune cookie warning at face value. All I knew was I couldn't ignore it.

  My apartment seemed suddenly close and confining. It was time to get back to work. I put on a trench coat and my father's fedora against the drizzle outside and left the tea cold and lonely on the windowsill.

  +++

  After posting my vague and probably useless letter to Ms. Zimmerman, I thought about catching a cab down to the waterfront. That was pleasant for exactly the three seconds it took me to remember I had almost no money left to speak of - not even enough for the trolley if I also wanted to eat tonight. Time to get a little exercise, then. I pulled down the brim of my father's fedora, turned my collar against the damp, and set off in the direction of First Avenue.

  I tried to do some figuring while I kept an eye out for suspicious black A-Models tailing me. Ah King's warning had said something about how the tiger was a stranger, but the one who sent it - her, rather - was not. I was all right with strangers. Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind meeting the Russian girl again under the right conditions. Without a crowbar in hand, for starters.

  I mulled what she had said to me, that night on the pier. I asked her why she was beating the tar out of me. For power, she had said. And through the icy Russian accent I had heard it in her voice: the overtones of someone whose tongue was accustomed to pronouncing the Götterreden, the words of power Gerd had begun to teach me so long ago. The legends said they had been passed down among mortals since the age when gods walked among men. They were a rare and sacred tradition used by only a handful of practitioners on earth. Gerd had them from his own master, and his master before him, and so on and so forth back until dirt was new. But I didn't recognize the Russian Tiger from the Circle or its extended membership. And she didn't look old enough to predate it. That meant she had to have been taught the Götterreden after the Great War. After Gerd and his Circle were dead on a muddy field in France. How was that possible?

  Humans are predictable. They all tend to have the same needs, desires, and motivations. I'd grown pretty used to working through those patterns and coming up with the ugly truth, so when things just won't add up right, I know there's sure to be something I'm not taking into account. I squinted my eyes against the rain and went into serious gumshoe mode. It was time to try on a few theories.

  What if Gerd were somehow still alive? The idea twisted me up inside. I wanted him to be alive, but I didn't want to believe he could still be alive without having contacted me somehow. We had been close, or at least I had thought we were. Could the war have changed him? I'd met a few veterans of the Great War who worked for the SPD, and according to my father some of them were very different men than when they had left. But I still couldn't believe Gerd would train someone as cruel and as obviously power-hungry as the woman who had beaten me "for power." It matched nothing of what he had taught us about how to use the power of the Art, nothing of what he had been like as a person. It just didn't add up. Gerd was the best judge of character I had ever met; often it seemed he knew what we were thinking even before we did ourselves. Even if he were somehow alive after all these years, he would never be fooled into thinking the Russian Tiger was anything but a predator.

  That thought took me out of my ruminating and reminded me of something else. I let my right hand curl around the reassuring grip of the Beretta deep in my right pocket. It had been in the pocket in my trench coat the night I'd been cold-cocked with a crowbar and left for the police to find by the light of a burning warehouse. I was amazed the bluebottles let it slide through, but maybe since Tommy hadn't been shot the police figured they had nothing on me. Or maybe they were just waiting for me to shoot someone so they could hang Tommy's murder on me too. I didn't want to shoot the Russian Tiger, not unless I had no choice. She had caught me unawares that night. But not today. Today I was hunting tigers.

  Except the Beretta might not be enough. When the chips were down and the bluffs called, I could see her crowbar and raise her a pistol, but I was not foolish enough - or arrogant enough - to think I stood much chance against someone truly trained in the Art. I had been a wunderkind once, sure, but that was ten years ago. I was severely rusty, if that, and it could get me killed if I wasn't damned careful. I hated to admit it, but for this I needed some serious, not-kidding, really-for-real back-up. And that wasn't going to be easy to come by.

  I tried to come up with a list of people I knew who might be convinced to risk their lives to help me, without knowing what they were up against, and without being paid handsomely to do it. I'd accumulated something less than a single name when I reached the waterfront. It smelled of petrol, saltwater, and low tide. The bells of a passing trolley made a cheerful sound at odds with the mournful dirge of the ferry horn drifting in from somewhere on Elliot Bay. I knew which one was closer to my mood.

  I pulled the brim of my father's fedora down lower and began the slow process of looking for a ship. The one Ah King warned me about. Or threatened me with. Take your pick.

  The big ships gathered mostly down on the south end of Elliot Bay, between the mainland-side port and Harbor Island. I still called it Denny Island, a private joke since most of the dirt forming it came from the regrade of Denny Way back when I was learning to walk and put food in my mouth without help. The big ships were where I wanted to start looking because, as I figured it, a Russian Tiger might have come into town aboard a vessel sailing from one of the Russian ports on the Pacific. It was a long shot but I have good aim.

  That's detective humor. I'm here all week.

  Anyway. It took a lot longer than I thought. Turns out it's not the easiest thing in the world to tell where a ship is from just by looking at it. Flags hang limp and fade to grey in the cold Seattle drizzle. The names of the ships, once proudly lettered in bright-colored paints on their bows, grow tarnished and illegible by constant exposure to salt water. And for some reason sailors don't like landlubbers poking around their ships, asking questions, and not giving answers. I guess I should have anticipated that. But Ah King's ship had to be here somewhere. I needed to know where it was so I didn't accidentally board it and end up on a one-way cruise to the Big Sayonara.

  By the time the light was fading, so was I. And I was no closer to finding a ship that made my gumshoe instincts light up like Frederick and Nelson's at Christmas. I was tired, hungry, footsore, and about as grumpy as you'd expect. Naturally, that's when the idea hit me like the business end of a nightstick.

  I went inside a Bartell's Drugstore and asked to use their phone. Five digits later I was talking to the one man I knew of who had a real live reason to help me in spite of the real live danger, and who might just help me stay a real live me at the end of it. I was about to get some back-up I could trust.

  He met me half an hour later at the south end of pier where my father used to take me fishing. He knew the place. He ought to. Sergeant Joe Malloy had fished with us there more than once.

  "What've you gotten me into now, Miss Sheehan?" Malloy groused, but grinned that Irish cop grin at me that I remembered all too well. My father had had that grin too, though without the wire brush mustache. Malloy was dressed in a grey wool suit and overcoat. He'd been off-duty when my call came. So much the better - I didn't want Lieutenant Sneer anywhere near me when
this came to a head.

  "Remember the other day when you and the Lieutenant paid that lovely social call on me? You told me to call if I remembered something about the Cooke case. You also said I could have the police dispatcher put it through to you at home if it was urgent." I gave him a sidelong look. "Well, it's about the Cooke case, and it's urgent. But you're free to go home if your beauty rest is more important than solving a homicide."

  "Been a long while since I had either rest or beauty," he grunted. He gave me a look that said he knew he wasn't going to like what I had to say, but that it didn't matter. "All right. Out with it, lass. What have you been a-doing since the Lieutenant let you out of the lockup?"

  I told him. No, not everything. Not even close. I told him Tommy had come to me for help the night before the murder. I told him about the threatening note, and the blond man in a black A-model who had come by Tommy's office the day before he was murdered. I told him I had a lead on a suspect tying him to a boat here in port. I left out that the death threat was in Latin. I also failed to mention the Russian woman, the warehouse - and my Beretta, if he didn't already know about it. When I was done, he let out a low whistle.

  "Sure and you've always been good at finding trouble, Maddie Sheehan," he said, his light brogue noticeably huskier than usual. "You've dug yourself deep this time. And now you want me to fetch my shovel and jump in the hole with you, is that it? I'd say you're ready for the loony bin but I'd be wasting my breath." He looked unhappily at me, and I almost sent him home. Then my bruised side cleared its throat, reminding me of why I needed back-up so desperately. I nodded, and he sighed. "All right then. Where are we off to on this fine foggy night?"

  He was right. The drizzle had faded with the sunset, leaving behind a thick damp haze that made the street lamps into islands of blurry light in a sea of murky condensation. Good conditions for a gumshoe looking to poke her nose into places she shouldn't be. "I think whoever murdered Tommy might have come into town on a ship. I need to go snooping around the port, maybe find out which ships were in port that night. That way I can narrow down the list." Malloy nodded thoughtfully and fell in beside me as we trudged off the pier and turned south along First Avenue.

  I had to hand it to Malloy: having a police officer along - especially one who looked like a plainclothes detective - made things remarkably easier. Instead of having to badger or bribe the port official at the night desk, I barely had to ask twice before we were shown a ledger of incoming maritime traffic. I perused the list, but didn't see anything that jumped out at me immediately.

  "What about this one?" Malloy pointed. I read the handwritten line: Steamship Lenin, arr. 5 Nov. Why hadn't I seen that right off? Then I remembered I hadn't eaten today. Had I eaten yesterday? I couldn't recall.

  "All right laddie, let's see a ship’s manifest then. There's a good man." Malloy pushed just enough, and the port official grudgingly dredged up a neat clipboard with the numerous sheets of information so beloved by bureaucrats and customs agents. I'd have had to slip him a Hamilton to get even a quick glance at that clipboard.

  Letting Malloy continue to chew the fat in his garrulous Irish baritone, I took a few steps away and began to leaf through the documents. The Lenin – originally known as the Simbirsk, before the Russian Revolution of ten years ago changed much more than just the names of ships – had sailed from Vladivostock on 7 October and arrived in Seattle almost a month later. It was carrying a cargo of steel, copper, and other industrial goods, as well as a few crates described as "luxury items." I wondered what that meant. I also wondered about passengers – or the lack of them, rather. Even though the Lenin had a listed capacity for 676 passengers, the only mention of actual human beings on board were the crew, including one Captain Eugene S. Gernet. Something about that smelled off to me. So did the fact that the Lenin had made port in Seattle just two days before Tommy was murdered. So did the lack of a declared port of call after Seattle.

  I walked back to where Malloy was sharing a cigarette with the port official. He was a lot better at this gumshoe thing than I would have given him credit for. I cleared my throat to get their attention. "Well, I don't see anything unusual here. Time to call it a night. If we have any more questions, we'll come around in the morning. Thanks for your time." The official nodded, too busy with his cigarette to talk to a dame but not too busy to thank Malloy. I tried to keep my expression neutral instead of stalking off. Malloy followed a few seconds later, and we were quickly lost in the fog again.

  "Nothing unusual? And just what are you up to now, Maddie Sheehan? Lenin was the only boat that came close to matching your description. Why aren’t we were going to have a look at it?" Malloy sounded a bit put out as he hurried to catch up with my quick, purposeful strides.

  "We are. I just didn't want him to think we were going anywhere but home."

  Malloy nodded, his expression a mixture of tired and reluctant. No doubt he'd prefer to be headed home. Tough. I had work to do, and I needed him to help me do it. We trudged along the waterfront fog and I tried not to let the damp into my thoughts. The waterfront had once been part of Malloy's beat, so he took the lead in navigating the port through the grey mist until we reached the pier where the manifest said the Lenin should be. And there she was, silent and dark and ominous - the steel barrel of a Russian revolver pointed at the city’s waterfront. The ship’s long black silhouette loomed in the heavy fog, its stern fading into obscurity beyond the dim illumination of the streetlights along the waterfront.

  How on earth had I missed it earlier? It was huge, perhaps hundred yards long, with two big steam pipes jutting up behind the white two-story bridge. And there, right along the edge of the dark steel bow, were the Cyrillic letters I assumed translated as Lenin. There was no way I should have missed seeing this clearly Russian ship when I came looking earlier today. I could chalk it up to exhaustion and hunger, but that seemed too easy an explanation. Nothing that big could possibly go unnoticed. Unless...

  Unless it was done with the Art.

  I hadn’t wanted to confront this, but here it was staring me in the face. I had carefully avoided even considering the possibility I might have to swim in those deep waters again, ever since the night Tommy came begging for my help against some unknown arcane threat. Then there was that close encounter with Ah King, a warning from beyond the grave. I had to accept it: solving the case would require delving back into the world of the occult. And here it was right in front of me. The moment of choice had arrived. But now that it came right down to it, I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to go through with it. Using the Art again, that is. It had been a decade since I'd done serious study, and in that span I’d done my best to destroy my liver and ignore a steamer trunk full of bad memories. But you don't just hide a ship in plain sight. Where there was one use of the Art there were bound to be more. I had to know what I was up against, or I was likely to end up sorry I hadn’t. If I was alive to be capable of it, that is.

  Shit.

  “Malloy, can you scout around the other side of this tub and see if anyone’s watching?” It was a weak play, but the best I could come up with on the fly. He hesitated, looked as if he wanted to say something, then shrugged and went off, vanishing quickly into the fog. The dim, ghostly lights along the docks illuminated almost nothing. I hoped.

  Was I really going through with this? I was even less of an apprentice of the Art than I was a detective, and some days I didn't feel much like that either. It had been years since I'd spoken the simplest of runes. I wondered what I would do if what I was about to attempt drew unwelcome attention. I almost hoped I failed utterly. Better that I merely fail than bring the Russian Tiger down on my head again. Worse, what if I blundered and Something Awful happened? It was possible. I felt like I was pointing a gun at my own head. At least that would only hurt for an instant.

  This was ridiculous. I was working myself into a state of nerves. The Art required complete confidence and focus. What was it Gerd had told his overpowered pup
il, so long ago? Be like a swan, he had said after his youngest apprentice’s latest efforts had wrecked the sanctum – again. The swan glides in effortless serenity on the still pool, but beneath the water her feet are busy. I swallowed and took a stance, formed my hands just so. Oh, Gerd. Here went nothing.

  The Götterreden tolled low and resonant as the harmony of temple bells. The syllables rolled off my tongue sweet as Kentucky bourbon, potent as leashed thunder. I still had it, after all these years of pretending my apprenticeship had never happened. I still had it. And just like that, I Saw. The world grew faint, not dark but somehow distant. As if to compensate, workings of the Art leaped out in blazing relief all over the Lenin. The warding runes set around the hull of the ship. The grim banes on the second-story bridge deck. The charms for fair winds and safe journeys near the bow and stern. And draping over it all, the ghostly aura of an Unknowing, pushing the eye away, away...

  So that was how I missed the Lenin earlier.

  It was a masterful display. No matter how much I tried not to be, I was impressed at the skill and power of whoever had spoken the runes for these workings. Almost as impressed as I was at just how easily my mouth recalled how to pronounce the Götterreden. I realized I was panting, suddenly feeling as if I had just sprinted four blocks in hot pursuit of a suspect. Then a fragment of memory came back to me, and I could have kicked myself. Growing winded was the most common side-effect of any working, I remembered belatedly. Especially if one were out of practice. Like me. No doubt Gerd would have tutted in Teutonic perfectionism at how easily winded I was - not to mention my atrocious accent - but the runes of Seeing had breathed true just the same. I shook my head again as I studied the workings set about the Lenin. Whoever did this work was all but Gerd's equal in mastery of the Art, and likely in sheer power. Perhaps more.