Harry Turtledove - The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

For second or two, the fence around the dump seemed very far away, with a whole lot of Nothing stretching the dirt and brush the same way you’d use bread crumbs to make hamburger go farther. Astrologers babble about the nearly infinite distances between the stars. I had the bad feeling I was looking at more infinity than I ever cared to meet, plopped down there in the middle of Chatsworth. Magic, especially byproducts of magic, can do things to space and time that the mathematicians are still trying to figure out. Then I looked again, and everything seemed normal.

I hoped the wards the amber lines symbolized were as potent as the ones the red line had continued. By the data I’d taken from the Thomas Brothers’ chapter house, even those weren’t as good as they should have been.

A stocky fellow in shirt, tie, and hard hat came out of the cinderblock building and up the path toward me. He had his hand out and a professionally friendly smile plastered across his face. “Inspector—Fisher, is it? Pleased to meet you. I’m Antanas Sudakis; my job title is sorcerous containment area manager. Call me Tony—I’m the guy who runs the dump.”

We shook hands. His grip showed controlled strength. I was at least six inches taller than he; I could look down on the top of his little helmet. Just the same, I got the feeling he could break me in half if he decided to—I’m a beanpole, while he was built like somebody who’d been a good high school linebacker and might have played college ball if only he’d been taller.

He wasn’t hostile now, though. “Why don’t you come into my office, Inspector Fisher—”

“Call me Dave,” I said, thinking I ought to keep things friendly as long as I could.

“Okay, Dave, come on with me and then you can let me know what this is all about. All our inspection parchments are properly signed, sealed, blessed, fumigated, what have you. I keep the originals on file in my desk; I know you government folks are never satisfied with copies called up in the ground glass.”

“What sorcery summons, sorcery may shift,” I said, making it sound as if I was quoting official EPA policy. And I was. Still, I believed him. If his parchmentwork wasn’t in order, he wouldn’t brag about it. Besides, if his parchmentwork wasn’t in order, he’d have more to fret about than a surprise visit from an EPA inspector. He’d be worrying about the wrath of God, both from bosses who didn’t pay him to screw up and maybe from On High, too. A lot of things in the dump were unholy in the worst way.

His office didn’t feel like a citadel, even if it had no windows. The diffuse glow of St. Elmo’s fire across the ceiling gave the room the cool, even light of a cloudy day. The air was cool to breathe, too, though St. Ferdinand’s Valley, which like the rest of Angels City was essentially a desert before it got built up, still has desertly weather.

Sudakis noticed me visibly not toasting. He grinned. “We’re on a circuit with one of the frozen water elementals up in Greenland. A section of tile here”—he pointed to the wall behind his desk—“touched the elemental once, and now it keeps the place cool thanks to the law of contagion.”

“Once in contact, always in contact,” I quoted. “Modern as next week.” A lot of buildings in Angels City cool themselves by contagious contact with ice elementals. That wasn’t what I meant by modern; the law of contagion may be the oldest magical principle known. But regulating the effect so people feel comfortable, not stuck on an ice floe themselves, is a new process—and an expensive one. The people who made a profit off the dump didn’t stint their employees; I wondered how the leak had happened if they had money like this to throw around.

Once his secretary had brought coffee for both of us, Sudakis settled back in his chair. It creaked. He said, “What can I do for you, Dave? I gather this is an unofficial visit: you haven’t shown me a warrant, you haven’t served a subpoena, you don’t have a priest or an exorcist or even a lawyer with you. So what’s up?”

“You’re right—this is unofficial.” I sipped my coffee. It was delicious, nothing like the reconstituted stuff that makes a liar of the law of similarity. “I’d like to talk about your containment scheme here, if you don’t mind.”

His air of affability turned to stone as abruptly as if he’d gazed on a cockatrice. By his expression, he’d sooner have had me ask him about a social disease. “We’re tight,” he said. “Absolutely no question we’re tight. Maybe we’d both better have priests and lawyers here. I don’t like ‘unofficial’ visits that hit me where I live, Inspector Fisher.” I wasn’t Dave any more.

“You may not be as tight as you think,” I told him. “That’s what I’m here to talk about.”

“Talk is cheap.” He was hard-nosed as a linebacker, too. “I don’t want talk. I want evidence if you try and come here to say things like that to me.”

“Elf-shot around the dump is up a lot from ten years ago till now,” I said.

“Yes, I’ve seen those numbers. We’ve got a lot of new immigrants in the area, too, and they bring their troubles with them when they come to this country. We have a case of jaguaranthropy, if that’s a word, a couple of years ago. Try telling me that would have happened when all the neighbors sprang from northwest Europe.”

He was right about the neighborhood changing. I’d gone past a couple of houses that had signs saying Curandero tacked out front. If you ask me, curanderos are frauds who prey on the ignorant, but nobody asked me. A basic principle of magic is that if you believe in something, it’ll be true—for you.

I’ll tell you something I believed. I believed that if the EPA took Devonshire dump to court just on the strength of an increase in elf-shot around the area, the lawyers Sudakis’ people would throw at us would leave us so much not-too-lean ground beef. I had no doubt Tony Sudakis believed it, too.

So I hit him with something bigger and harder. “Are you going to blame the immigrants for the three cases of apsychia around here in the past year?”

He didn’t even blink. “Coincidence,” he said flatly. One hand, though, tugged at the silver chain he wore around his neck. Out popped the ornament on the end of it. I’d expected a crucifix, but instead it was a polished piece of amber with something embedded inside—a pretty piece, and one that probably cost a pretty copper.

“Speaking off the record, Mr. Sudakis, you know as well as I do that three soulless births in one area in one year isn’t coincidence,” I answered. “It’s an epidemic.”

He let the amber amulet slide back under his shirt. “I deny that, off the record or on it.” His voice was so loud and ringing that I would have bet something was Listening to every word we said, ready to spit it back in case we did end up in court. Interesting , I thought. Sudakis went on. “Besides, Inspector, think of it like this: if I didn’t think this place was safe, why would I keep coming to work every day?”

I raised what I hoped was a placating hand. “Mr. Sudakis—Tony, if I may—I’m not, repeat not, claiming you’re personally responsible for anything. I want you to understand that. But evidence of what may be a problem here has come to my attention, and I wouldn’t be doing my job if I ignored it.”

“Okay,” he said, nodding. “I can deal with that. Look, maybe I can clear this up if I show you the containment scheme. You find any holes in it, Dave”—I was Dave again, so I guess he’d calmed down—“and I will personally shit in my hat and wear it backwards. I swear it.”

“You’re not under oath,” I said hastily. If he turned out to be wrong, I didn’t want to leave him the choice of doing something disgusting or facing the wrath of the Other Side for not following through.