“Good morning, Professor,” Rachel said answering her phone.
“Good morning, Rachel. Want to come up for second breakfast?”
“Sure. I’ll be up in five minutes.”
I hung up and put on a small pot of coffee for Rachel’s benefit. I put four slices of bread in the toaster and wrapped a few slices of pre-cooked bacon in paper towels for the microwave. I broke five eggs into a bowl and added salt, pepper, a little garlic powder and a few drops of Tabasco. When Rachel entered a few minutes later, I poured her a cup of coffee, pushed the bread into the toaster, added a little cold water to the eggs, scrambled them up and poured them into a frying pan. When the eggs were almost done, I put the bacon in the microwave for fifteen seconds.
We hadn’t chatted much while I was cooking. Rachel sipped her coffee, lost in thought. After I had served our plates and we had started eating, I broached the subject of the previous night’s raid.
“What do you think will happen as a result of our adventure last night?” I asked.
“I don’t know. You never can tell about these things.”
“Aren’t you the least bit curious?”
“Sure, but we don’t have any spies or bugs there. We’ll just have to wait and see what develops.”
“Doesn’t that make you nervous or impatient?”
“Patience is a virtue in the P.I. business.”
“What if Wei Liu and Moshi’s boss join forces against us?”
“There’s not much chance of that happening. Wei Liu is a Chinese agent, and if Seth is Moshi’s and Debra’s boss, he isn’t going to want to team up with a Chinese government magician.”
“Come on now, Rachel, last night’s mission was your idea. What do you expect to happen? How will it help our case?”
“What I want to happen is for Wei Liu to find the burned wand, believe that it’s his Snoozer, and for him to raise hell at Moshi’s boss’s house. I want for Moshi and crew to decide that any more investigation into your Snoozer and Moshi’s failed attempt to steal it isn’t worth pursuing. I want to confuse Liu about what happened to his wand and how that fits into his investigation of the stolen jade artifacts. I want to create confusion and desperation among our enemies. I want to force Wei Liu’s hand and capture Chan, his henchman, who killed Seymour. Does that answer your question?”
“I sense that you’re a little upset with me, Rachel.”
“No, Professor, not really. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.”
“How are you feeling?”
“I feel pissed. I’m annoyed, and I don’t know why. Maybe I’m frustrated. Who knows.”
“Maybe your feeling a little loss of control.”
“Are you trying to say that I’m a control freak?”
“Actually, I’m trying not to say it.”
“OK, I admit that I have control issues. I’ve been told this before. And yes, maybe I am feeling a little loss of control. Now that I’m thinking about it, I think you’re right. I’m pissed that I’m not in control of the situation, and it’s my own fault for stirring up the pot last night.”
“Well, maybe we should do something about it.”
“Do what?”
“I don’t know. You’re the strategist.”
“Why do I always have to figure everything out?”
“Come on now Rachel, that’s just who you are. You wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“Damn it Professor, you’re right again. Sometimes you can be very annoying.”
“I’ve been told that before.”
“Are you suggesting that we go back to Moshi’s boss’s lair?”
“It would be exciting, wouldn’t it?”
“It would be dangerous; that’s what it would be. You don’t throw rocks at a hornets’ nest and then go back to see how they feel about it.”
“We could go back at night while the hornets are sleeping. It’s too bad we don’t know which time zone the hornets’ nest is in.”
“All the writing on the boxes in the closet was in English.”
“That could be the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, or even India.”
“Did you notice the power plug in the hall? It wasn’t American.”
“No, I didn’t notice,” I admitted. “What did it look like?”
“None of the three holes were round. They were all little rectangles.”
“How were the holes arranged?”
“They were in a triangle. The two bottom holes were horizontal, and the top hole was vertical.”
“That’s the UK. In Australia the two bottom holes are at a forty-five degree angle.”
“How do you know all this crap?”
“I’ve been to those places.”
“Well aren’t you the world traveler, and me never having been anywhere.”
“I’ll take you to all those places someday.”
“You’re sweet, Professor. I might take you up on that—someday.”
“So we were in the UK. They’re eight hours ahead of us. We could go at four o’clock. It would be midnight there.”
“I don’t know Professor.”
“Come on, where’s your sense of adventure?”
“Believe it or not, I try to avoid adventure. Adventure just seems to find me.”
“And that’s what makes you so adorable. Let’s do it.”
“Aren’t you the sweet talker. OK, we’ll do it, but we have to be careful.”
“Great! How will we be careful?”
“For one thing, I don’t want to pop up into that hallway or some random room in the house. I want to scope the place out from the outside first.”
“No problem, we’ll use a really big magic circle that won’t fit into any reasonably-sized room in a house.”
“How big will that have to be?”
“I’d guess about twenty feet.”
“The biggest circle we’ve ever used was on that canvas tarp of yours. How big was that?”
“About seven feet in diameter.”
“How are we going to manage twenty feet?”
“I don’t know. Maybe fourteen feet would do.”
“It would probably do. I haven’t seen many residential rooms with more than fourteen feet of unobstructed floor space.”
“We could do fourteen feet in the basement.”
“You already have a circle down there. How big is it?”
“It’s only six feet, but we could erase it and draw a bigger one.”
“There’s a lot of stuff down there.”
“We could shove it all back toward the walls. We can free up fourteen feet.”
“OK then, let’s go do it.”
“Now?”
“Yes now. Let’s go.”
“OK. I have a mop and chalk down there. I also have string, so let’s go.”
We went down to the basement, and the first thing I did was to erase the existing circle using the mop. Then we cleared all the floor space we could, and it came to eighteen feet. We used a string and chalk to draw the two concentric circles, about six inches apart, on the cement floor.
“This is even better than I expected,” I said. “This circle won’t fit into many rooms. I am a little worried about getting all the symbol cards in exactly the right positions, though. They’ll be so far apart that it will be hard to eyeball it.”
“Get out your protractor and dividers or whatever tools you engineers use and figure it out,” Rachel said. I’ll meet you in your apartment at about a quarter to four.”
Rachel went upstairs and left me to figure out the geometry of the huge magic circle. I did figure it out. I used a protractor and a laser level to mark the positions around the circle. Then I measured the straight-line distance between each of the points to make sure it was all accurate. After I finished, I was confident that I could place the symbol cards inside the circle to cast the Spell of Translocation.
At three fifty-five that afternoon, Rachel came up we
aring her black translocation outfit. I was similarly attired.
“You didn’t bring your fighting staff,” I observed.
“No, I’m leaving the bo behind. You have your Snoozer, and I have my ceramic knife and Mojo. That’s good enough for me.”
“I’ve got all my magic paraphernalia in my little backpack, including some glow sticks,” I said. “Shall we proceed to the basement?”
“Let’s hit it.”
Without further ado, we went to the basement, and I cast the Spell of Translocation. As a homing beacon, I once again used the torn coupon whose mate was hidden in the sandalwood box. Shimmer, flash, shimmer, and we were standing in a dark field watching a large house being engulfed by flames.
Chapter 26
“Oh my God!” Rachel exclaimed.
“This may be the last time we get to use that coupon as a homing beacon,” I remarked. Sometimes my voiced thoughts aren’t entirely appropriate to the situation. “You know where we are, don’t you?”
“Yeah, we’ve been here before chasing Seth’s henchmen. We’re at Haverglade Manor, Seth’s estate,” Rachel answered.
“Seth’s former estate, now” I corrected.
“Did Wei Liu burn down Seth’s house?”
“He must have been pissed,” I remarked.
“I guess he found the burned wand and decided to retaliate in kind.”
“I wonder if there were any fatalities.”
“We’ll check the internet news in the morning.”
“What do we do now?” I asked.
At that point, the air around us started to shimmer, there was a flash of light, and we were back in my basement.
“My bad,” I said. “I forgot to break the spell, and we automatically snapped back.”
“It’s just as well. I think we found out everything we were going to find out.”
“That was exciting though, wasn’t it?” I teased.
“Yes, Professor, that was exciting. Are you happy now?”
“Well, I don’t know if I’m exactly happy that Seth’s mansion burned down, or is it burned up? I wonder why ‘burned down’ and ‘burned up’ mean the same thing.”
“Your mind works in strange ways, Professor. Let’s go up to your apartment and have a beer.”
Back in my apartment, I opened a bottle of Stella Artois for each of us.
“You know, I feel a little bad about Seth’s house being burned down, or up,” Rachel admitted.
“Think of it as collateral war damage. Whenever two powerful bad guys like Seth and Wei Liu collide, sparks are going to fly—literally, in this case.”
“Seth’s catastrophe has certainly improved your mood, Professor. I don’t know what to think about that.”
“My mood is improved, but it’s not because we witnessed a catastrophe; it’s because I know how the chapter ended. I was bummed out because I wasn’t going to know what resulted from our raid last night. Now I know, and I don’t feel left out.”
“Jeez, I actually know what you mean, and I don’t know what to think of that. Am I turning into a nerd like you.”
“That’s a little too much to expect, don’t you think?”
“Give it a rest, Professor. This is serious.”
“It’s serious to Seth and Wei Liu, but it’s because they are both evil. Remember that Seth ordered his henchmen to kill us—and they would have killed us if you hadn’t stopped them. If Seth and Liu were two good guys, and you played the same prank on them, things would have worked out much differently. When Liu found the burned wand, he could have said,
‘Oh, Mr. Seth, you have burned my Snoozer. Why did you do that?’
‘Sorry, old chap, but I didn’t burn it. It spontaneously burst into flame.’
‘With all due respect, Mr. Seth, that is hard to believe.’
‘Nevertheless, it is quite true, Mr. Liu. Let us discuss this over tea.’
‘Very well. That is most gracious of you, Mr. Seth. I wonder who the rascals are that played this prank on us.’”
“You’re a riot, Professor.”
“Really, you aren’t responsible for Seth’s house burning down. You threw a raw steak between two wolves. If they had been house cats, things would have worked out differently.”
“Yeah, the cats would say to each other, ‘Raw steak? At least she could have cooked it for us.’”
We had a good laugh and finished our beers. Rachel went down to her apartment to change into regular clothes, and I did the same after putting away all the magic paraphernalia. Just to be safe, I put the torn coupon back into the steel box in case the sandalwood box wasn’t consumed in the flames.
My mood had certainly improved. All it took was a terrible catastrophe for Seth. I wonder what that says about me. Maybe I’m not the upstanding moral person that I think I am. Does another person’s pain make me happy? If so, then I might be a narcissist, or worse yet, a sociopath. Am I a potential cat torturer? A serial killer? A cereal torturer? There I go again, making a joke out of anti-social behavior.
That’s it, I’m a narcissist. Now I’m in a bad mood again. Wait, that’s a good thing. If thinking I’m a narcissist puts me in a bad mood, maybe I’m OK after all. No, that’s what a narcissist would think. Would a narcissist worry about being a narcissist? Crap! My brain’s in a tailspin. This happens to me all the time. I need to turn off my brain. Maybe I should take up Transcendental Meditation, or Accidental Medication. Stop it brain!
Chapter 27
About an hour later, Rachel came back up to my apartment.
“I called Charlene,” she said. “I told her that we had found the guy whose fingerprint matched the one on the murder weapon. I told her about our translocation to China. She was pleased with our progress and agreed that we just needed to find a way to bring Seymour’s killer to justice.”
“Easier said than done,” I remarked.
“It’s the job we signed up for.”
“What’s our next step?” I asked.
“I would like to find out more about Mr. Tsong. Technically, the three jade artifacts belong to Mr. Tsong—Martingale Asian Antiquities merely has them on consignment. I want to know how much Wei Liu knows about Mr. Tsong. Why is he still alive and Seymour is dead?”
“How do we answer those questions?”
“I wish we could pop up in Mr. Tsong’s office and question him, but we don’t have a homing beacon for that. The only way we know to contact him is through email. Let’s send him another message. It’s been two days since we got that email from him. Let’s send him another one.”
“Technically, Mr. Tsong thinks he sent the email to Seymour, but I get your point. I’ll get my laptop.”
I set up my laptop on the kitchen table and opened Seymour’s Yahoo mail account.
“OK, let’s compose a message. What do you want to say?”
“Tell Mr. Tsong that we, that is Seymour, can’t sell the three ‘items.’ Tell him that two potential clients have said that they are afraid the items have been illegally exported from China. Tell him that Seymour will have to ship them back to Mr. Tsong.”
“OK. I can do that,” I said. I composed a message in the style Seymour had used in his communications with Mr. Tsong. I carefully avoided identifying the “items,” and I made sure that I referred to the items as belonging to Mr. Tsong. “Should I say anything else?”
“Let’s just leave it at that. What time is it in China?”
“Let’s see—it’s about nine o’clock in the morning in Beijing.”
“Good. Send the email. Maybe we’ll get a quick reply.”
Rachel was right. About ten minutes later, we got a reply. We both leaned over my laptop and read the email.
“Mr. Tong says that the items are merely examples of modern Chinese art reproductions. They are trade samples of pieces that Mr. Tong can manufacture and supply to Seymour’s company. The items are gifts to Seymour and should not be returned to Mr. Tong. He is sorry that Seymour cannot find a buyer for the repr
oductions, but they are entirely legal to export, and Seymour can keep them with Mr. Tsong’s good wishes. It sounds like Mr. Tsong is trying to distance himself from these artifacts,” I said.
“Yeah, this is quite a flip from a couple of days ago,” Rachel agreed. “I think that somebody has gotten to Mr. Tsong, and he’s afraid of being jailed.”
“Or maybe being killed,” I said.
“That’s certainly possible. I wonder if Wei Liu found Mr. Tsong.”
“I’ll bet that if Wei Liu found Mr. Tsong, Mr. Tsong would be deceased,” I said.
“In the previous email, Mr. Tsong mentioned that he was ‘out of contact with his agent,’ and that ‘government officials were interfering with his business.’ Maybe his agent was killed.”
“I’ll bet that’s what happened,” I agreed. “At any rate, Mary Martingale no longer owes anything to Mr. Tsong for the three jade artifacts.”
“That gives us a little more flexibility in bringing Seymour’s killer to justice,” Rachel said. Can you print a copy of Mr. Tsong’s email?”
“Sure. I’m printing a copy on my office printer now.”
“I wish we knew more about the other two jade artifacts,” Rachel said.
“Let’s ask Gabriel,” I suggested.
“He wasn’t much help the last time we talked.”
“No, but this time we don’t have an ethical question. We just want to know more about two magical jade artifacts. This is right up Gabriel’s alley, he is a wizard after all. I think he’ll be a lot more help this time.”
“OK then, let’s fire up the magic Skype bowl.” Rachel said.
I set up Gabriel’s magic mirror once more, and called his name. He answered promptly.
“Greetings again Rachel and Robert. What can I do for you?”
“Hello again, Gabriel,” I said. “I wonder if I could ask you to help identify a couple of magical objects that we think were illegally imported from China.”
“Of course. Do you have them with you?”
“No, but I have pictures of them.”
“Without being in the presence of the objects, I cannot tell you if they are really magical or if they are fake, but I can tell you the intended use of the objects.”
Crimes of Magic: The Yard Sale Wand Page 18