Gently, his face sad, the priest redonned the crucifix. Susan Kuznetsov said, “Father Flanagan called me first thing this morning. Of course, I came out immediately. He repeated the test in my presence then, and I made others so as to be absolutely certain. This baby, though otherwise healthy and normal, possesses no soul.”
Tears stung my eyes. Having something so dreadful happen to a poor tiny kid who’d never even had the chance to commit a sin struck me as horribly unjust. Not even Satan got anything out of it, either, because when Jesus Cordero died, he’d just be gone. What did it mean? Far as I could tell, it meant only that we don’t understand the way things work as well as we’d like to.
“Sir,” I said to the baby’s father (his name was Ramón; his wife was Lupe), “I’d like to ask you some questions, if I may, to see if I can learn how this unfortunate thing happened to your son.”
“Sí, ask,” he said. He understood English, even if he didn’t speak it too well. His wife nodded to show she also followed what I’d said.
The first thing I asked was their address. I wasn’t surprised to learn they lived within a couple of miles of the Devonshire dump; we were only five or six miles away there at the hospital. Then I tried to find out if Lupe Cordero had used any potent sorcerous products during her pregnancy. She shook her head. “Nada,” she said.
“Nothing at all?” I persisted; contact with magic is such a part of everyone’s everyday life that sometimes we don’t even think about it. “Your medical treatments were all of the ordinary sort?”
She answered in rapid-fire Spainish. Father Flanagan did the honors for me: “She says she had no medical treatments till birth; she could not afford them.” I nodded glumly; that’s the story with so many poor immigrants these days. Through the priest, Lupe went on, “The only thing even a little different was that I had morning sickness, so I went to the curandero for help.”
Speaking for himself, Father Flanagan said, “Probably something on the order of camomile tea; few curanderos traffic with Anything important.”
“Probably,” I agreed, “but I have to be thorough. Mrs. Cordero, can you give me the name and address of this person?”
“I don’ remember,” she answered in English. Her face closed up. I could guess what that meant: it was bound to be somebody from her home village back in Aztecia, somebody she didn’t want to see in trouble.
I tried again. “Mrs. Cordero, it’s possible the medicine you received had something to do with your giving birth to an apsychic child. We have to check that out, to make sure the same misfortune doesn’t happen to someone else.”
“I don’ remember,” she repeated. Her face might have been cast in bronze. I knew I wasn’t going to get any answers out of her. I caught Father Flanagan’s eye. He nodded almost imperceptibly. Maybe he’d try to talk some more with her later, maybe he’d just ask around in the neighborhood. One way or another, I figured before too long I’d find out what I needed to know.
Ramón Cordero bent over the cradle, picked up his son. By the smooth way he held the baby in the crook of his elbow, I guessed it wasn’t his first. “Niño lindo,” he said softly. Even more softly, Father Flanagan translated: “Beautiful boy.”
Little Jesus was a nice-looking baby. “Enjoy him all you can, Mr. Cordero,” I said. “Love him a lot. This is all he has. He’ll have to make the best of it.”
“That’s good advice,” Susan Kuznetsov said. She dropped into Spainish at least as fluent as Father Flanagan’s, then returned to English for me: “I told him that many apsychics live extraordinary lives on This Side, maybe to help compensate for not going on after they die. Artists, writers, thaumaturges—”
What she said was true, though she’d just mentioned the good half. There’s pretty fair evidence that the Leader of the Alemans during the Second Sorcerous War was an apsychic, and that he promoted the massacres and other horrors of the war exactly because he wasn’t afraid of what would happen to him on the Other Side: once he was gone, he was gone permanently. That wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted to mention to an apsychic’s parents, though.
The baby wiggled, thrashed, woke up with a squall about like what you’d expect from a minor demon who doesn’t care to be conjured up. Lupe held out her arms; her husband set Jesus in them. I glanced down at my toes while she adjusted her hospital robe so she could nurse him. The squalls subsided, to be replaced by intent slurping noises.
“Tiene mucho hambre,” Lupe said— “He’s very hungry.” She seemed pleased and proud, as a new mother should. No, little Jesus’ tragic lack hadn’t fully registered with her.
I stood there for a couple of more minutes, wondering all the while if I ought to say something about Slow Jinn Fizz. Maybe—God willing—Ramzan Durani and his outfit could fill the vacuum at the center of little Jesus Cordero. From what Durani had said, he could fill it. What troubled me was whether he was creating similar but smaller vacuums in other souls. He said not, but even he’d admitted his procedure was still experimental.
In the end, I kept my mouth shut. Part of that was not wanting to raise the adult Corderos’ hopes too much. The rest was simple pragmatism: even though baby Jesus had no hope for eternal life, odds were he wasn’t going to shuffle off this mortal coil tomorrow or next year, either. He had the time to wait while the gremlins were exorcised from Durani’s jinnetic engineering scheme.
I wonder what I would have done if I’d been dealing with a seventy-year-old apsychic in poor health, someone facing imminent oblivion. Would gaining that person a soul (assuming the procedure worked) outweigh the harm inflicted on other souls in the process (assuming it didn’t work as well as Durani claimed)?
I decided I was awful glad Jesus was just a baby.
Lupe raised the little fellow to her shoulder, patted him on the back. After a few seconds, he let out a burp about an octave deeper than you’d think could come from anything so small.
“When will you be going home from the hospital?” I asked her.
“Mañana,” she said.
“I’d like to come by your home that afternoon, if I could,” I said. “I have a portable spellchecker, so I can begin investigating for toxic spells in the local environment, and I’d also like a look at whatever potion you got from your curandero.” I saw from her face that she didn’t understand everything I’d said. So did Father Flanagan. He translated for me.
Lupe and Ramón looked at each other. “No questions about nothing else?” he asked.
They were illegals, then. “None,” I promised. That wasn’t my business. Trying to find out why their son had been born without a soul was. “I swear it in God’s name.”
“You don’ make no cross,” Ramón said suspiciously.
Father Flanagan was giving me a questioning look, too. “Tell them I’m Jewish,” I said. His face cleared. I was sure he didn’t care much for my beliefs, but that’s okay: I wasn’t fond of all of his, either. But we acknowledged each other’s sincerity. He spoke way too rapidly for me to follow what he said to the Corderos, but they nodded when he was through.
Lupe said, “You go, you look, you find out. We trus’ you, the padre say we can trus’ you. He better be right.”
“He is,” I said, and let it go at that. If I’d taken another oath, the Corderos might have thought the first one wasn’t to be trusted. Father Flanagan nodded slowly, understanding what I’d done.
Susan Kuznetsov said, “Besides, Jesus there is a native-born citizen of the Confederation, and entitled to all the protection of our laws.” When she turned that into Spainish, the Corderos beamed; they liked the idea. The woman from the Bureau of Physical and Spiritual Health quietly added, “I just wish our laws could do more for the poor little guy.” Neither she nor Father Flanagan translated that.
I said my goodbyes, collected Mistress Kuznetsov’s carte de visite, and flew back to the office. The elves hadn’t magically cleaned up my desk while I was gone. I didn’t care. It could stay dirty a while longer. I picked up the pho
ne and called Charlie Kelly.
The yammering at the other end went on for so long that I wondered if he was back from lunch yet. It was well past two back in D.St.C.; where the demons did those confounded Confederal bureaucrats get the nerve to keep swilling at the public sty like that? All I needed was a minute of no answer on the phone to swell up and bellow like an enraged bull taxpayer, when after all I was a confounded Confederal bureaucrat my very own self.
“Environmental Perfection Agency, Charles Kelly speaking.” Finally!
“Charlie, this is Dave Fisher in Angels City. We just had another apsychic birth close by the Devonshire dump. That makes four in a little more than a year. This isn’t going to be a quiet investigation any more, Charlie. I’m going to find out what’s leaking and why, no matter how noisy I have to get.”
He kind of grunted. “Do what you think necessary.”
“Shit, Charlie, you’re the one who sicced me onto this.” I’m not usually vulgar on the phone and I’m not usually vulgar in the office, but I was steaming. “Now you’re making it a lot harder than it has to be.”
“In what way?” he asked, as if he hadn’t the slightest idea.
When Charlie Kelly goes all innocent on you, check how many fingers and toes you’re wearing. The odds are real good they’ll add up to a number smaller than twenty. I can’t imagine how I kept from screaming at him. “You know perfectly well. Tell me about the bloody bird that keeps singing in your ear.”
“I’m sorry, David, but I can’t,” he said. “I never should have mentioned that to you in the first place.”
“Well, you did and now you’re stuck with it,” I said savagely. “There’s something rotten in the area of that dump. People are being born without souls. People are dying, too, if you’ll remember the Thomas Brothers fire. You started me on this and now you won’t give with what you know? That’s—damnable.”
“I have to pray you’re wrong,” Charlie answered. “But whether you are or not, I can’t give you what you’re asking. This whole matter is bigger than what you seem to grasp—bigger than I thought, too. If I could, I’d shut down your whole investigation.”
This, from a high-powered EPA man? “Good God, Charlie? What are we talking about here, the Third Sorcerous War?”
“If we were, I couldn’t tell you so,” Kelly said. “Goodbye, David. I’m afraid you’re on your own in this one.” My imp stopped reproducing his imp’s breathing; he’d hung up on me.
I don’t know how long I stared at my own phone before I hung up, too. Jose Franco walked past my office door. I think he was just going to nod at me, the way he usually does, but he stopped in his tracks when he saw my face. “What’s the matter, Dave?” he asked, real concern in his voice. He’s a good guy, Jose is. “You look like you just saw your own ghost.”
“Maybe I did,” I said, which left him shaking his head.
Why in God’s name was Charlie Kelly acting altogether too serious about a Third Sorcerous War? The first two were disasters beyond anything imaginable even in nightmares before this century. A third one? If mankind was stupid enough to start a Third Sorcerous War, we’d probably never have to worry about a fourth one, because nobody’d be left to fight it.
And Charlie wouldn’t even tell me who the enemy was liable to be. You ever look back on your life and notice just how many sins you’ve committed to get where you are, how everything that always seemed solid all at once starts to crumble under your feet until you’re peering straight down into the Pit? That was what I felt like after I got off the phone with Kelly. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. No wonder I’d alarmed Jose.
Afterwards, I needed to give myself a good hard shake before I went back to work. When you’ve spent a while contemplating Armageddon, environmental concerns don’t look as big as they did. If the Third Sorcerous War comes along, there won’t be any environment left to protect, anyhow.
I drowned my sorrows in a cup of coffee, wishing it were something stronger. Then, more or less by main force, I made myself call Legate Kawaguchi to find out how Erasmus was doing. People are like that: the world may be going to hell around them (and the Third Sorcerous War would be a reasonable approximation, believe me), but they try to keep their own little pieces of it tidy.
“Ah, Inspector Fisher,” Kawaguchi said after I’d made it through the maze of constabulary operators to his phone. “I was going to phone you in the next few days. We expect that access spirit to become accessible to interrogation within that time frame.”
“That’s good,” I said, both because I hoped I’d learn something that would help my case (and, presumably, Kawaguchi’s) and because I was glad Erasmus would make it. “What other news do you have about the fire?”
“Investigations are continuing,” he answered, which meant he had no news.
Or maybe it meant he just didn’t feel like telling me anything. Constables are like that sometimes. I decided to give him a nudge, see if I could shake something loose: “Have your forensic sorcerers made any progress in analyzing those strange traces the thaumatech picked up at the scene, the ones the consecrated ground erased before she could fully get them into her spellchecker?”
“You have a retentive memory, Inspector.” Kawaguchi did not make it sound like a compliment: more as if he’d hoped I’d forgotten. Yet another phone pause, this one, I suppose, while he figured out whether to try to lie to me. Interesting choice for him. Sure, I was a civilian, but a civilian who worked for a Confederal agency. If he did lie and I found out about it, my bosses could make things unpleasant for his bosses, who would make things unpleasant for him.
He finally said, “The traces remain vanishingly faint, but enhancement techniques seem to indicate some sorceries of Persian origin.”
“Do they?” I said. Slow Jinn Fizz moved up a few notches on the suspect list. So did Bakhtiar’s Precision Burins, an outfit I hadn’t yet got around to visiting. I asked him, “What enhancement techniques do the Angels City constabulary use?” I hoped my own shop could learn something new and useful.
But he answered, “Nothing out of the ordinary, I’m afraid. We had our best results with an albite lens focusing the rays of the full moon on the spellchecker chamber that holds the memory microimps.”
“Yes, that’s pretty much standard,” I agreed. Only a constable would call it albite; the more usual name is moonstone. Because it’s opaque, a moonstone lens removes moonshine from moonbeams, thereby improving recollections.
“Is there anything else, Inspector Fisher?” Kawaguchi asked.
I wondered if I ought to tell him one of my superiors was afraid the case was connected with the Third Sorcerous War. He’d probably think I was moonstruck—or lunatic, if you prefer the Latin. I hoped he’d be right. Better that than Charlie being right. Besides, Kawaguchi had enough worries of his own; a constable’s job is neither easy nor pleasant.
“Anything else?” the legate repeated, more sharply this time.
“No, not really. Thanks for your time. Please do keep me informed on how your investigation is going, and let me know the moment Erasmus becomes available for questioning.”
“I will do that, Inspector. Good day to you.”
The work I’d meant to do that morning took up the afternoon instead. I had to keep up with it somehow, which meant I didn’t get out to Chocolate Weasel as I’d planned to do. I wouldn’t manage to do it tomorrow, either, because I was going to take my little portable spellchecker over to the Corderos’ house to see what it could find there. And after that, I figured Bakhtiar’s Precision Burins had moved ahead of it on my list if Persian magic was involved in the Thomas Brothers fire.
People complain that bureaucracies never accomplish anything. I mean, I complain when a bureaucracy I’m not part of succumbs to inertia. Half the time, though, the problem is too few people trying to do too many things in not enough time. I felt like Sisyphus, except getting over to Chocolate Weasel was just one of the stones I had to try to shove to the top of th
e hill. I kept running back and forth between them, keeping them all from rolling down to the bottom again but not moving any up very far. And every so often, whether I got one of the old stones to the crest of the hill or not, new ones appeared.
All in all, the image was enough to get a man down on ancient Greek religion.
I shoved stones around till it was time to go home. After supper, I called Judy. One of the things that makes troubles smaller is talking about them. Actually, I suppose the troubles stay the same size, but when they’re spread between two people they seem smaller. I told her about poor little Jesus Cordero, and also about what Charlie Kelly had had to say.
“Maybe one of these days Ramzan Durani can synthesize a soul for the little boy,” she said. She has a knack for remembering names and other details that slip through my fingers like sand. Now she went on, “But this other… My God, David, was he serious?”
“Who, Charlie? He sure sounded that way to me. What really frosts me is knowing how much he knows that he’s not telling.”
“I understand,” she said. “But what are we supposed to do while he’s not telling? Just go on with our lives as if we didn’t know anything was wrong? That’s not just hard, that’s impossible.”
“I know, but what choice do we have?” I answered. “People have been doing it as long as there have been people: carrying on inside their own little circles and holding their affairs together as best they could no matter what was going on around them. If they didn’t, I’ve got a feeling the world would have torn itself to pieces a long time ago.”
“Maybe you’re right,” she said, and then, suddenly, “Come over, David, would you? I don’t want to be alone, not tonight, not after what you just told me.”
“Be there in half an hour,” I promised.
I made it, too, with a good five minutes to spare. Judy lives in a flat down in Long Beach, in a neighborhood marginally better than mine. The Guardian at the outer entrance to her building knows me by now, so I didn’t have any trouble getting in. Fair enough; I went there about as often as she came to see me.
The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump Page 12