Harry Turtledove - The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

I sat there waiting, wondering the way you always do whether the little earthquake would turn into a big one. It didn’t; in a few seconds, the rattling stopped. Along with (I’m sure) several million other people, I breathed a prayer of thanksgiving.

The secretary for Bakhtiar’s Precision Burins and I spent a little while going “Did you feel that?” and “I sure did” back and forth at each other before I confirmed my appointment and hung up. Then I got back on the phone—this morning I’d used it as much as Bea usually does—and called Tony Sudakis. “HeDo, Dave,” he said. “I was wondering when I’d hear from you again. Thought maybe my file fell behind your desk or something.” He laughed to show I wasn’t supposed to take him seriously.

I laughed too, to show I didn’t. “No such luck,” I told him.

“This is just to let you know that we will be doing a sorcerous decontamination check of the area around your site as soon as we can get the apparatus together. I appreciate the courtesy of the call, Inspector,” he answered slowly—I wasn’t Dave any more. I have to tell you, though, we still deny any contamination. You’ll need a show-cause order before you can start anything like that, and we’ll fight it.”

“I know,” I said. “When your legal staff asks you, tell them the case is under the jurisdiction of Judge Ruhollah”—I spelled it for him—“since he granted me the original search warrant.” If the EPA couldn’t get a show-cause order out of Maximum Ruhollah, I figured it was time for us to fold our tents and head off into the desert.

“Judge Ruhollah,” Sudakis repeated. “I’ll pass it along.

’Bye.” I didn’t think he knew about RuhoBah. But the consortium’s lawyers would.

I moved parchments from one pile to another on my desk, called Legate Kawaguchi again and found out he was still at the crime scene, then ate a rubberized hamburger at the cafeteria. I washed it down with a cup of hot black mud, slid down the parking lot, and headed up into St. Ferdinand’s Valley again.

Normally I wouldn’t go up there ten times a year. I’d been doing it so often lately that I was starting to memorize the freeway exits. I got off at White Oak and flew north toward Balditiar’s Precision Burins. On the way, I passed a church dedicated to St. Andrew: actually, to San Andreas, because it was an Aztecan neighborhood. A line of penitents was filing in. I wondered why; St Andrew’s feast day isn’t until November.

Then I remembered the morning’s earthquake. No doubt they were calling on the saint to keep more and worse from happening. Their chants rang so loud and sincere, they made me sure that if another earthquake did strike, it wouldn’t be San Andreas’ fault I flew into the parking lot behind Bakhtiafs Precision Burins a couple of minutes early. The building that housed the outfit was four times the size of Slow Jinn Fizz’s fancy establishment on Venture Boulevard, and probably cost about a fourth as much to rent It had the virtue of absolute plainness—one more industrial building in an industrial part of town.

The receptionist who greeted me was about a fourth as decorative as the one at Slow Jinn Fizz, too. So it goes. But she was friendly enough, or maybe more than friendly enough. “Oh, you’re Inspector Fisher,” she said when I showed her my EPA sign. “Did the earth move for you, too?”

She giggled.

I didn’t know what to make of that If I’d been unattached, I might have been more interested in finding out As it was, I figured the best thing to do was let it alone, so I did.

I said, “Is Mr. Bakhtiar free to see me?”

“Just a minute, I’ll check.” She picked up the handset of the phone. Bakhtiafs Precision Burins wasn’t in the high-rent district but it used all the latest sorceware. The silencing spell on the phone was so good that I couldn’t hear a word the receptionist said till she hung up. “He says he can give you forty-five minutes at the most. Will that be all right?”

“Thanks. It should be fine, Mistress Mendoza,” I answered, reading the name plate on her desk:CYNTHIA MENDOZA.

“Call me Cyndi,” she said. “Everybody does. Here, come on with me. I have to let you into the back of the shop because of the security system.”

I followed her back down the hall. Balditiar’s doorway wasn’t hermetically sealed; as I’ve said, only really big firms and governments can afford that much security. But he did have an alarmed door: if anybody who wasn’t audiorized touched the doorknob, it would yell bloody murder.

Cyndi Mendoza took the knob in her hand and chanted softly from the Book of Proverbs: “ ‘She criedi at the gates, at the entrance of the city, at the coming of the doors,’ ” and then from the Song of Solomon: “ ‘I rose up to open to my beloved. I opened to my beloved.’ ” The knob turned in her hand. She waved me through ahead other, then murmured something else to the door to propitiate it for having let me through.

“Do you know,” she said as she led me through the burin works to Bakhtiar’s office, “the same charm that persuades the alarmed door to open peaceably is also used sometimes as a seduction spell?”

“Is that a fact?” I said, though it didn’t surprise me: nothing in the Judeo-Christian tradition blends sensuality and mystic power like the Song of Solomon.

She nodded. “It doesn’t get tried as often as it used to, though—it only works on virgins.” This brought forth more giggles.

She couldn’t have made it more obvious she was interested in me if she’d run up a flag. A man always finds that flattering, but I wasn’t interested back. I said, “Is that a fact?” again. It’s one of the few things you can safely say under any circumstances, because it doesn’t mean a thing.

“Well, here we are,” Cyndi said, stopping in front of a door that had ISHAQ BAKHTIAR, MARGRAVE painted on it in black letters edged with gilt She tapped on the door—which mustn’t have been alarmed, since it didn’t scream—then headed back toward her own desk. I’m afraid she gave me a dirty look as she went by.

Ishaq Bakhtiar opened his own door, waved for me to come in. He didn’t look like a corporate margrave; he looked—and dressed—like a working journeyman wizard.

By stereotype, Persians come in two varieties, short and round or long and angular. Ramzan Durani of Slow Jinn Fizz had been of the first sort. Bakhtiar exemplified the second.

Everything about him was vertical lines: thin arms and legs, his big, not quite straight nose and the creases to either side of it, the beard worn short on the cheeks and long on the chin that made his face seem even narrower than it was.

Like Ramzan Durani, he wore a white lab robe. Unlike Durani’s, his didn’t give the impression of being something he put on to impress visitors. It wasn’t what you’d call shabby, but it had been washed a good many times and still bore faint stains that looked like old blood and herbal juices.

When we clasped hands, his engulfed mine—and I’m not a small man, nor one with short fingers. But if he hadn’t gone into sorcery, he would have made a master harpsichordist; those spidery fingers of his seemed to reach halfway up my arm.

“I am pleased to meet you, Inspector Fisher,” he said with a vanishing trace of Persian accent that did more to lend his English dignity than to turn it guttural. “Please take a seat”

“Thank you.” I sat down in the chair to which he waved me. It wasn’t very comfortable, but it was the same as the one behind his desk, so I couldn’t complain.

“Will you take mint tea?” he asked, pointing at a samovar that must have come from a junk shop. “Or perhaps, since the day is warm, you would rather have an iced sherbet?