Harry Turtledove - The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

“Okay,” I said, shrugging; he undoubtedly knew the arcana of his own field, “But you must spend an awful lot to time just sitting and waiting. Why don’t you bring along something more interesting to read than that?” I pointed at the catalogue.

But he recoiled with as much horror as if I’d offered him a bacon cheeseburger. “Anticipating idleness would constitute moral turpitude on my part. Good day to you, sir.” He edged around me and fled.

Rose and I looked at each other. She said, “If I spent a lot of working time waiting, I’d bring something interesting, too.” That relieved my mind; if Rose doesn’t think something involves moral turpitude, you can take it to the bank that it doesn’t.

All the way home, I thought about what had gone on at Bakhtiai’s. It was of a piece with everything else connected with the Devonshire dump case: as far as I could tell on a quick visit, everything there was on the up and up, and the boss loudly denied doing anything that could possibly make toxic spell byproducts get out of the containment area and into the environment. Somebody was lying, but who? Not knowing was devilishly frustrated.

I was going to call Judy after I finished dinner, but she called me first “Want to do something perverse?” she asked.

I know a straight line when I’m handed one. “Sure,” I answered, “Do you want to fly up here, or shall I go down there?” Besides, the very male part of me panted, there was always the outside chance that was what she had in mind.

The snort she gave me said it wasn’t—and also said she’d fed me the line on purpose. Maybe she wanted to see what I’d do with it, or maybe she’d already guessed what I’d do with it and wanted to see if she was right. She said, “I was thinking more along the lines of a Monday night date.”

That’s perverse, all right,” I agreed. “Why Monday night?”

“Because I read in the Independent Press-Scryer that a new Numidian restaurant is opening up Monday night about six blocks from here. Feel like coming down and trying it with me?”

“Numidian, eh?” Jews often go to Muslim-style restaurants, and the other way round, too; no need to worry about pork on the menu or back in the kitchen. And Aside from that, I like North African food. Couscous, salata meshwiya—tuna salad with chili pepper, eggs, tomatoes, and peppers, dressed with olive oil, lemon juice, and salt—chicken with prunes and honey, the lamb soup called harira souiria, with onions, paprika, and saffron… my stomach rumbled just thinking about it. “Sounds wonderful. Only thing is, how crowded will it be?

“We can find out. Of course, if you don’t want to—”

“I said it sounded wonderful.” I really had, too, so I got points for that “What time do you want me down there?”

“What time do you want to come?”

“Listen, Mistress Ather, this is your date, so you tell me what to do.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Is that how it’s supposed to work? Okay, I’ll play along—is a quarter to eight all right?”

“Sure—by the time we get there, I’ll be hungry enough to do proper damage to the menu. And afterwards—always assuming I don’t fall asleep on your couch because I’m so full—maybe we can do something perverse.”

She snorted again.

Monday shaped up as a very good day. Not only did I have a date with Judy, but Maximum Ruhollah had come through with the show-cause order that would let me—Michael Manstein and me, actually—go up and examine the area around the Devonshire dump to see what was leaking and, God willing, find out why. That happened Thursday. He spent Friday quashing appeals from the Devonshire Land Management Consortium.

The order was still good when I got to the Confederal building Monday morning. Had one of the appeals succeeded, the words would have faded right off the page.

They tell stories about officials who go out to conduct their business, open up their briefcases, and pull out a blank sheet of parchment. Nobody dies of embarrassment, but sometimes you wish you could. I reminded myself to check my document before I handed it to Tony Sudakis. If there was anybody I didn’t want laughing his head off at me, he was the guy.

I met Michael Manstein up on the seventh floor. He was packing vials of this, jars of that, silk bags full of other things and tied with elaborately knotted scarlet cords into his little black bag. I scratched my head. “Why not just take a good spellchecker?” I asked.

He glanced up from what he was doing. “I am operating under the assumption that we will be searching around the walls for leaks, David,” he said, as patiently as if I were a kiddygarden pupil. The containment spells would degrade the performance of the microimps in a spellchecker.”

That had certainly happened when I used my own portable to run an unofficial scan of the dump: it hadn’t picked up anything but the containment cantrips. I’d figured a more sensitive model would overcome the interference, but the reason I had Michael along, after all, was that he knew more of such things than I did. “You’re the wizard,” I told him. “Shall we go? Your carpet or mine?”

We ended up taking his; he’d had a special option package installed to insulate his sylphs from the potent magics he often flew with. I didn’t care to risk having my carpet break down and strand me in the middle of nowhere (for which, as detractors of Angels City will tell you, St. Ferdinands Valley is an excellent substitute). As we slid down to the lot, I grinned—no staff meeting for me today.

Michael Manstein flew exactly as you would expect: exactly at the speed limit, exactly where he ought to have been, every change of height or direction signaled at exactly the right time. Exact fits Michael exactly, as you will have gathered.

He parked his carpet in the same lot I’d used when I first came up to the Devonshire dump. We got off and started across toward the dump. I’d taken maybe three steps when I said, “Didn’t you forget to activate your anti-theft gear? You ought to go back and do it; this isn’t a saintly neighborhood.”

His thin, rather pallid face took on an expression I’d never seen there before. If you can believe it, Michael Manstein looked smug. He said, “What’s sorce for the gear is sorce for the gander.”

Sometimes magicians are irritating people. All right, so Michael had better theft protection on his carpet than the usual gear woven into the fibers while it’s still on the loom.

All right, so even if someone succeeded in beating that protection, he’d still be able to tell where his rug had gone. But was that excuse enough for making bad puns about it? I didn’t think so, especially not early in the morning.

The security guard sitting in his glass booth was a different fellow from the one who’d been there the last time I went up to the dump, so he didn’t recognize me. Two EPA sigils and a show-cause order prominently displayed (yes, it still had writing on it) were plenty to get his attention, though. He picked up his phone, called Tony Sudakis, then came back out to us and said, “He’ll be here in a minute.”

Sudakis took longer than that, but not much. The guard set the insulated footbridge over the barrier so Tony could come out and talk with us. He gave me a bonecrusher handclasp, made Michael wince with another one, and said,

“Okay, let’s see the order.”

I gave it to him. He read it carefully, handed it back to me.

“This says you’re authorized to search ‘the surround of the aforementioned property.’ ” He made a face. “Lawyer talk. Anyway, this doesn’t say thing one about coming inside.”

That’s right” I nodded. “We’re trying to see what’s leaking out, after all.”