Dangerous Hardboiled Magicians

by Mel Gilden

  I had a moment of comfort when the elephant weight lifted. Then somebody picked me up, put me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and carried me up some steps into a building. I heard a game show on a TV, and a few heckling male voices asked Rudy what he was carrying. Rudy, who I assumed was carrying me, didn’t answer.

  I could tell by the sound of Rudy’s footsteps that we moved through several rooms and then along a hallway. He carried me down a flight of stairs and dumped me onto a cold cement floor. Rudy trudged up the stairs, shut the door at the top, and locked it with an old-fashioned mechanical lock.

  When nothing else happened for a minute or two, I managed to weasel out of the fertilizer bag. I was on the floor of a small room lit by a single fluorescent tube of the kind you don’t see much any more because will o’ the wisps put out a more flattering light. Down here the quality of the light didn’t matter. The room was obviously used for storage, filled as it was with unmatched tables and chairs and hundreds of cardboard boxes. The air was musty, but after the fertilizer it smelled like springtime. The place had no windows, and the only door was the one at the top of the narrow wooden staircase Rudy had carried me down.

  I walked up the stairs feeling as if I were carrying a safe on my back, and carefully reached out for the handle that would move the deadbolt. Something slowed my hand down and prevented it from reaching the door. As I’d expected, the door had a fortification spell on it to prevent me from doing exactly what I was trying to do. “Hey,” I called out.

  A moment later footsteps approached.

  “Pipe down or we’ll put leeches on you,” a guy called through the door. He strolled away laughing.

  I didn’t think Rudy really had leeches available, but I also didn’t think that calling through the door would do anything but make my throat sore. I went back down the stairs and sat on the second step from the bottom. I pulled out my telephone and experimentally spoke Harold Silverwhite’s phone code. I suspected I would miss our appointment at the Magic Vault that evening. I should probably have called Lord Philpot and Astraea too, just to be polite, but all my good intentions went for nothing. I might as well have been holding a bar of soap. My phone was dead; I heard neither buzzing nor static. Apparently abducting me had not been a spur-of-the-moment decision. Someone had taken the trouble to set fortification spells on the door lock and dampening spells that would prevent anyone in this basement from using a cell phone. I spent quite a bit of time wondering who that person might be and whether I would leave the basement alive.

  In a corner crowded with mops and brooms I used a tiny, fragrant, and none-too-clean bathroom, then looked for a place to sit that would be a little more comfortable than a wooden step. Among the furniture I found an easy chair with gritty tufts of ancient cotton batting escaping from places on the arms where hands had rested for years. But it was good enough for me. I was a man who’d spent the past hour in an old fertilizer sack.

  I loosened my tie and waited to see what would happen.

  * * * *

  When I awoke the next morning, the basement had not changed. My watch said it was six-thirty, meaning the sky would be fairly bright by now. Something might happen at any minute, or it could be days before anybody looked in on me.

  Except for a couple of minutes when herds of some animal galloped up and back along the floor above me playing basketball, I’d spent a quiet day and even quieter night. I’d done a lot of thinking and had been able to make connections I’d been too busy to see before.

  I tried my phone again with the same disappointing result, then sat in my trusty armchair for a while, dozing and thinking about how hungry I was. Breakfast was very important, and I’d be more than a little cranky if I missed it, especially because I had sucked on my tie for dinner. At exactly seven by my watch someone turned the lock in the door at the top of the stairs. I stood up and watched the door swing open. A man descended the stairs carrying a covered tray. The aroma of coffee made me want to float up to meet him. He looked familiar but at the moment I couldn’t remember why.

  The man carrying the tray was a little shorter than I was. He wore gray work clothes and heavy, blotchy work shoes that looked as if they’d seen a lot of use. A thin frizz of white hair stood up from his head as if he were perpetually frightened. The wrinkles on his big-featured brown face were deep enough for agriculture.

  He noticed me watching him and smiled with embarrassment as he descended the last few steps. Then the smile went away, and he wrinkled his nose. “You smell as if you spent the night in a field,” he said as he put the tray on a stack of cardboard boxes.

  “Fertilizer bag,” I said. “Almost the same thing.”

  He shrugged and turned to go.

  “Not so fast,” I said.

  “I got work to do,” he said without looking at me. “Plugged sink upstairs.” He sounded worried and defensive.

  “The sink’s not going anywhere,” I said. “What is this place? What am I doing here?”

  He shuffled in place. “I’m not supposed to talk to you,” he said and put one foot on the lowest stair.

  “I promise not to tell,” I said.

  He sighed. “A couple of the frat boys picked you up,” he said. “Just youthful high spirits, you know?”

  “Sure. I’m kinda cute sometimes. But which frat boys? What fraternity? And were they really just feeling their oats, or is something else going on?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just the janitor, you know?”

  “I know. When you don’t know, you don’t know.”

  He turned and tried a smile on me. “Yeah. That’s right.”

  I had the beginnings of an idea how to get out. “Wait for the tray,” I said. “I can have a little company and you can take the tray back with you.”

  “I don’t know anything,” the janitor reminded me.

  “That’s fine. You can tell me baseball scores or something.”

  His eyes looked all over as if searching for an escape route, but at last he agreed. With a great show of heartiness, I pulled the cloth from the tray and discovered that it carried an individual serving box of corn flakes and a small carton of milk in addition to the coffee in a foam cup—not exactly my dream breakfast, but better than an empty stomach.

  I opened the cereal box along a scored line and poured in the milk. While I ate with a plastic spoon, the janitor told me about the plugged sink and the broken window and the loose carpeting. I nodded and grunted amazement at appropriate moments, and he seemed satisfied. Soon the cereal was gone. I swallowed the last of the coffee, now tepid, and covered the remaining mess with the cloth.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “No problem,” he said, and picked up the tray. “I’m sure somebody’ll be down soon to tell you what’s going on.”

  I nodded and waved. “Thanks again,” I said as he ascended the stairs. At the top he turned the knob on the door to pull back the dead bolt. Obviously the fortification spell worked only on me. He went out and I heard him turn the lock on the other side of the door.

  I waited exactly five minutes by my watch. Then I skulked up the stairs to the door, got as close to it as I could, and listened. I heard all the activity one might expect in a crypt.

  I took a step back and studied the door. I had never been much of magician, but one thing Lord Slex had always said stuck with me—”Remember your basic fundamentals. The most complicated magic problem can be broken down into smaller simpler problems.”

  That’s what I had done. I hadn’t wanted the janitor to stay just because I was starved for company. I wanted him to stay because he would take the remains of my breakfast away when he left, long before he might take them otherwise. Those utensils I’d used, infected with whatever makes me me, were now fairly nearby on the other side of the door. By the law of contagion and using the right spells, I would act on them at a distance and they would act on me.

  I grumbled my spell—all I wanted was to hook up with my trash on the other side of the door
—and pushed against the fortification spell. Nothing happened, but I may have pronounced some of the words wrong. I tried again, grumbling a little louder. This time when I pushed against the fortification spell I sank through it as if through molasses. I felt the fortification spell circling my wrist and then farther up my arm as I pushed ahead and at last touched the knob that moved the deadbolt. I turned it and had the satisfaction of hearing the deadbolt slam back into its groove.

  I waited to see if I had attracted any attention. When nothing continued to happen, I slowly pulled the door open and looked through a long hallway that had been painted landlord-white before I was born. A single will o’ the wisp in the ceiling, faded with long use, did its best to illuminate the area. The surface tension of the fortification spell slid across my body as I stepped into the hallway. I moved along it without any trouble to a kitchen full of dirty dishes and old food, some of it so dry it no longer smelled. For some reason the place looked familiar. While I tried to figure out why, I moved through the kitchen to the next room. Though for my own protection I didn’t touch anything, I did surprise a roach, which scuttled under a drift of ancient pizza cartons.

  The doorway on the other side of the kitchen let me into what may have once been a formal dining room. It looked as if chimpanzees had been having a party there for some months. On the wall were posters of sports figures and naked women, sometimes posing together. Outside, branches of camellia bushes brushed against the windows like people trying to see in through the dirty panes of glass.

  I heard a sound coming from the room beyond the dining room and froze. It was a dry sound, the kind a grasshopper might make turning over in bed. It came again, and then a grunt. I tiptoed across the floor and glanced sideways into the next room. A boy was sitting reading in a wingback chair that had seen better days, though by far it was the nicest piece of furniture in the room. A pair of brown oxfords rested on the floor next to the chair. Using one finger he pushed a pair of glasses up his nose, then turned a page of the book he was reading, making the grasshopper sound again.

  The chair was one of half a dozen in front of a fireplace full of old fast-food wrappers. On the mantle were a crowd of loving cups and trophies. Over them, instead of a naked girl or a football player, was a framed painting of Lord Trask solemnly pulling a rabbit from a top hat. The artist who’d painted the portrait had tried to improve Lord Trask’s appearance, but he still looked like a stately prune wearing a monocle and a thin mustache. Over the portrait was a metal plate with words engraved on it: Our Founder. Now I knew why the place looked familiar. Having been abducted and taken here fit nicely into what I’d been thinking during the night.

  The nose of the lad in the chair twitched, and he looked up with surprise. “What’s that smell?” he asked pleasantly.

  “My sparkling personality,” I said.

  “Oh, a wise guy,” he remarked. He looked at the dining room door through which I’d come. “I thought I was alone,” he said with sudden suspicion.

  “I was in the basement,” I said. “That probably doesn’t count.”

  “What were you doing in the basement?” he asked. “For that matter, what are you doing here at all? You’re not a brother.”

  “I was, though, some years go,” I said.

  “Oh, an old boy,” he said, liking the idea. He smiled again. “Reliving former Abracadabra glories?” he asked.

  “Not exactly,” I said. “I was brought here.”

  “By whom?” The lad was now entirely mystified. I didn’t think I’d be able to help him much.

  “A group of your frat brothers,” I said.

  “But why?”

  “Just high spirits?” I suggested.

  “Huh?” he replied.

  “Nothing,” I said as I walked quickly to the front door. “Sorry to have disturbed you.”

  He pondered me as I crossed the room, but he lost more interest with every step I took. When I reached the front door, I looked back at him. He was reading quietly again as if nothing had happened. Strange men emerging from the basement may have been fairly common occurrences for the current Abracadabra House. Not like in the good old days.

  Once outside I stood on a cement porch looking up and down the block, which was crowded with big old two-story Craftsman houses, many flying colorful fraternity flags. Across the street a few houses down, five or six guys in shorts were sitting on their own front porch proving their manhood by drinking beer for breakfast.

  I moseyed to the end of the block, the corner of Sorrento and Franklin. I pulled out my phone and was pleased to hear a dial tone. A two-word spell brought up my personal directory and I made it dial a number. One of Astraea’s grandmothers answered the phone. She didn’t seem surprised to hear from me, and she put Astraea on immediately.

  I apologized for standing her up the night before, and suggested that if she picked me up and gave me a ride home, I would explain all.

  “This is good,” she said. “I will be there soon.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS

  About ten minutes after I disconnected, a sedan chair floated to a stop in front of me. It was draped in various shades of orange that varied from tangerine to the color inside a conch shell. It was carried by four small white horses, none bigger than a standard poodle, each with a pair of wings growing from its withers. The feet of each horse trotted in its own small apricot cloud. I had seen fancier rigs, but not often.

  Astraea leaned out at me and smiled, giving me that warm and fuzzily embarrassed feeling I found so pleasant. “Get in,” she said.

  I got in and reclined next to her on a lot of puffy pillows. Astraea grabbed a set of golden reins that waited for her in midair, and the sedan chair floated away.

  Astraea looked terrific, as usual. She wore tight pants of some buttery yellow leather, with a matching jacket. Under the jacket was a white satin blouse with a deep V neck. Her sunlight-colored hair was tousled, which somehow only added to its perfection. It would still be nice to make love to this woman, but I’d gotten used to the idea that it would probably not be possible. Or I’d convinced myself that I’d gotten used to the idea, which was much the same thing.

  I told her where I lived, and she nodded. “You have a peculiar smell,” she said as she maneuvered through traffic easily, using the golden reins as if they controlled a single horse.

  “It’s a long story. But that smell is the reason you and I didn’t go to the Magic Vault last night.”

  “I was worried. I did not like to think of you as unreliable.”

  “Thanks. I don’t like to think of myself that way either. But you knew I would show up at last, didn’t you?”

  “I hoped.”

  I guess she wasn’t going to say anything about her grandmothers and the information they could have given her if they were the Fates. “What kind of a vehicle is this?” I asked instead of digging further.

  “It is this year’s Bellerophon,” she said proudly.

  “Never heard of it,” I admitted. “Import?”

  “It has a limited availability,” she said.

  We were moving along at a good but normal clip. For a moment I watched the muscles in the backs of the front two horses moving under their skins. “How did you get here so fast?” I asked. “I couldn’t have made it from Venice in less than forty minutes.”

  “I am Justice,” she said. “I have ways. Tell me about the smell.”

  We should all have such useful ways. What she had done was impossible at any time of the day or night. I told her about being taken to the Abracadabra House in a fertilizer bag and spending many hours in the basement. I tried to make the story funny and was rewarded with occasional laughter like cold water over smooth stones.

  “The dragon attack yesterday morning might be coincidental,” Astraea said, musing. “Old magic does rise from the tar pits occasionally. But your abduction to the fraternity house seems directed at you specifically. And taken together, these two even
ts seem even more suspicious.”

  “Do you believe in coincidences?” I asked.

  “Not very much,” she said.

  “Me neither.” I flicked a speck of fertilizer out the window. “I think Lord Philpot and Lord Trask were responsible for my most recent adventures.”

  “Many people at PrestoCorp could manifest a dragon,” Astraea reminded me. “And not a few at Cal Thau or at Thau Tech could do it.”

  I nodded. “That already occurred to me. But to use the magic in the tar pits you need a connection with it. That means whoever conjured up that dragon had to be doing magic during Prohibition. Dr. Hamish at PrestoCorp and members of her staff I saw were just kids back then. And I checked on the lords at Cal Thau and Thau Tech. Every one of them was back east during Prohibition. The chance they would have magic in the tar pits is slim.”

  She said nothing until we pulled up for a red light. Then she looked at me and raised an elegant eyebrow. “Did one of them kill Misty, and the other steal Eulalie Tortuga’s soul? Or did they do both together?”

  “None of the above, I think. I think both of them are running scared about other things entirely—things I was getting close to without even trying.”

  “What other things?”

  She turned back to the traffic as we began to move again. “Things,” I said. “For instance, Lord Philpot enjoys extracurricular activities with his students.”

  “They do not visit museums together, I suppose,” Astraea said, and she smiled in a way women have been smiling since the dawn of time.

  “No. He sleeps with his students—at the moment with a good-looking blonde lady named Marjory. I was introduced to her at the Broken Wand, a student hangout. Yesterday, when I called Lord Philpot to make an appointment to see him, she answered his phone.”

  “Perhaps she is his assistant.”

  “Perhaps,” I admitted. “And perhaps he helps Marjory with her homework, too. She’s cute, but she has no more talent for magic than a couple of crossed sticks. Why would Lord Philpot chose someone so magically inept for an assistant unless he had something besides magic in mind? For that matter, without his help how would she become a student at Stilthins Mort in the first place?”