by Dan Willis
Alex had done magic for most of his life, but nothing he could do compared to this dimensional pocket trick that sorcerers did. Worst of all, they made it look so easy, so casual. It simply wasn’t fair.
“I have a boat stationed out in Gravesend Bay,” Barton explained as he focused the telescope. After a minute he clapped his hands together with a fierce, toothy grin and stood back so Alex could look.
The telescope was focused on a small boat, bobbing in the gentle chop of the bay. A large electric lantern with a green filter was mounted in the back of the boat, and it glowed with an intensely bright light.
“How is that light so bright?” Alex asked, stepping back from the telescope.
“It’s an arc lamp,” Barton said. “Very bright but it takes a fair amount of power. The fact that it’s working so well means we now have full power projection all the way down to Fort Hamilton and the river. That’s all thanks to you,” he went on. “It took that nutcase Bradley almost two months to connect the Bronx Relay, but you did it in just a couple of weeks.”
“I'll have Sherry remind you of that the next time you call and I’m out on a case,” he said with a grin.
Barton reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out two cigars, passing one to Alex.
“Don’t get too comfortable in your fancy new digs,” he said, pausing to bite the tip off the cigar. “The Jersey City Relay broke ground last week, so there’s lots to do.”
“Speaking of lots to do,” Alex said, flicking his lighter to life and holding the flame to the tip of his cigar. “I need to get back to my job.”
Barton rolled his eyes and shook his head at that.
“I’ve got at least three other projects I could put you to work on right now,” he said, blowing a perfect ring of smoke. “I’ll even find a place for that pretty secretary of yours so you don’t have to worry about putting her out of work.”
“I like my job,” Alex said, and he meant it. Figuring out how to link a bunch of separate breakers to a single node and then link that back to Empire Tower had been fun, but it wasn’t especially taxing. If Alex had to do that for the rest of his life, he’d go mad from boredom.
“Of course,” Barton said, somewhat magnanimously. “But if you work for me, I’ll pay you fifty thousand a year. You’d have to solve a lot of cases to make that kind of scratch.”
It was tempting. Barton was offering more money than Alex would make in ten years, and he was absolutely serious. Sure, cases like Ben Asher’s paid well, but those only came along every couple of months. It had been a long time since he’d been unable to make rent, but he could live very well on fifty large a year.
“Sorry,” he said after a pause to think about it. “I’ll help out whenever you need, but I’m honestly just a detective.”
Barton held his gaze for a long moment, then he shrugged and puffed his cigar.
“My offer still stands,” he said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Alex thanked him, then descended the spiral stair back down to the control room. Since his vault was still open, he just went inside and shut the door behind him.
3
Eastern Alchemy
Alex opened the plain wooden door that covered the entrance to his vault and stepped into the little hallway that connected his back office rooms to the waiting area of his new office. Once he’d learned to open multiple doors into his vault, it was fairly easy to put a semi-permanent one wherever he wanted. The trick was that the plain wooden door that covered the opening wasn’t actually part of the vault. It was attached to the wall and only served to prevent anyone but him from entering. The actual vault door opened inward and was concealed inside the vault itself.
As Alex pushed the cover door closed, he felt the protection runes engage. They were the same ones that secured the front door of the brownstone, meaning it would take a team of men and a battering ram to get the simple wooden door to budge. Even then they might not be able to get inside.
His new private office was immediately to his left behind a cherrywood door marked private. The next door along the hall led to an empty room that was big enough for a meeting table, though Alex didn’t usually meet large groups in his office, so that room was currently empty. Furthest away was his map room where a focusing rune had been painted on the hardwood floor under a table with an enormous map of Manhattan mounted on it. At the far end of the hall was the door that emptied out into his new waiting room. As Alex started forward to check in with Sherry, he noticed a glimmer of light shining from under the map room door.
Taking hold of the handle, he opened the door to find a short, stumpy man in a grey suit laying out several items on the map table. He had a bushy blond mustache, a weathered face, rosy cheeks, and a pointed, sloping nose under dark eyes. As Alex opened the door, the man looked up from what he was doing and grinned.
“Hello, Mr. Lockerby,” he said with just the hint of Irish.
“Hi, Mike,” Alex said, giving the man a smile. Mike Fitzgerald used to work on Runewright Row selling minor mending runes, barrier runes, and a finding rune that, while not up to Alex’s standards, would work if the lost object was close. Sherry had convinced Alex to start a side business finding lost pets, so he’d recruited Mike. Since he already knew how to use a finding rune, Alex supplied his more advanced ones and Mike handled the legwork.
“Sherry’s got three cases for me this afternoon and I did two this morning,” Mike said, holding up a pair of what looked like dog collars and a fancy silver brush. It always amazed Alex how devoted pet owners were to their furry companions. He hadn’t considered pet finding worth doing, but Sherry had been right, it brought in a surprising amount of money.
“Do you need anything from me?” Alex asked.
“Nah,” Mike said with a shake of his head. “There’s plenty of finding runes in the box.” He pointed to a wooden box with a lid that sat on top of an elegant sideboard. “If this keeps up, though, we’ll need more by next week.”
Alex made a mental note to prioritize writing more finding runes, then wished Mike good luck and closed the door. When he entered the waiting area, he found Sherry sitting at her desk making notes in a case file, and she wasn’t alone. Two Oriental men stood in front of the desk with their hats in their hands. The older of the two wore a fancy embroidered jacket, loose fitting trousers, and carried a black Chinese-style hat with a tassel attached to its top. He had long hair braided into a tail that hung down his back, and he wore a pair of wire-framed spectacles. The younger man was dressed in a brown suit and carried a bowler hat. His hair was cut short, very similar to the way Alex wore his, and it was slicked back.
“Oh, Alex,” Sherry said, rising. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I just arrived,” Alex said, giving her a smile. They had agreed to pretend that the office had a private entrance to explain how Alex could come and go without passing through the waiting room.
“Are you Mr. Lockerby?” the young, suit-wearing man said. His features were Asian, but he spoke without any trace of an accent.
Alex stuck out his hand and the young man took it.
“Call me Alex,” he said as he shook the man’s hand. “How can I be of service?”
“Alex,” Sherry interjected, pointing to the young man. “This is Lung Chen, and this is his Uncle Su Hi. Mr. Su is an alchemist,” she went on. Alex gave Sherry a quick smile, he was impressed that she knew about Oriental surnames being given first. “He just received a shipment of rare ingredients from China, but they were stolen from this warehouse.” She tore a paper off the top of one of her pads and handed it to Alex.
“It’s very important that we recover our property, Alex,” Chen said, remembering to call Alex by his name. “My uncle needs them for his work, and they were very expensive.”
“If they came from China you probably had to wait a long time for them too,” Alex said.
“Exactly,” Chen confirmed. “We’re depending on those ingredients and the potions they�
��d make to keep the business running. We don’t have the time or the cash on hand to order more. Can you help us?”
“What kind of ingredients are we talking about?” Alex asked. He didn’t know much about Chinese alchemy, but he knew that it differed greatly from the Western style. Jessica had explained it to him once, saying that the way alchemists worked depended on the ingredients they were used to using.
“They’re mostly herbs,” Chen said. “Ciwuja, red and black reishi, Chinese ginseng, that sort of thing. There are a few more exotic ingredients as well, powdered chiru horn, tiger teeth, and a jar of spleens from the Yiwu salamander. Nothing dangerous or illegal.”
Alex nodded along, but his stomach soured at the report. While he was unfamiliar with the list of ingredients, it didn’t sound like anything terribly rare or special. That would mean that neither Chen nor his uncle would have any personal connection to the missing shipment. Without that connection, using a finding rune was out.
“Did anyone beside yourself and your uncle know that this shipment was going to be arriving?”
Chen turned to his uncle and said something to him in one of the Chinese dialects. After a moment, the uncle shook his head and answered.
That explains why Mr. Su had been so quiet, and why he brought his nephew. He doesn’t speak English.
“My uncle says that a lot of his customers were waiting for the potions the ingredients would have made, but no one knew when they’d be arriving.”
“All right,” Alex said, looking at the name on the paper Sherry had given him. He didn’t know the warehouse, but it was over by Grand Central Terminal. To reach New York, a shipment from China would have to arrive in California and travel by rail from there. That was bad news as well; most of the warehouses by the rail terminal saw goods and people coming and going all day, meaning that it was unlikely anyone would have noticed something suspicious.
“I’ll go over to the warehouse and see if I can learn anything there,” Alex finished.
“I thought you used a powerful finding rune to locate this kind of thing,” Chen said.
Alex took a minute to explain the ins and outs of finding runes, then gave Chen and his uncle a reassuring smile.
“There may be something the thieves left behind at the warehouse that I can use to track them,” he said. “Even if there isn’t, I can still investigate the old-fashioned way. If I haven’t located your property by Thursday, I’ll call you and let you know where I am with the investigation. Does Sherry have a number where I can reach you?”
Chen looked a bit crestfallen, but he nodded. Clearly coming to Alex had been his idea.
“I realize how important this is to you,” Alex added. “I’ll give this my full attention.”
“Thank you, Alex,” Chen said, sticking out his hand again. “And good luck.”
After a brief, whispered discussion in Chinese, Chen and his uncle departed.
“Was that as bad as it sounded?” Sherry asked.
Alex just shrugged.
“It would have been better if Mr. Su’s herbs had come from a relative’s garden in China,” he said. “Then he would have had a connection to them. Without something like that, the finding rune has nothing to grab on to. I think Mr. Chen was counting on me finding their missing ingredients today.”
“How did it go with Andrew Barton?” Sherry asked, changing the subject. “I see you didn’t take his job offer.”
Alex turned to Sherry and found her smiling at him.
“How is it you know stuff like that but not anything about Moriarty?” he said, more than a little exasperated.
Sherry just shrugged, sending her dark curls bouncing.
“My gift works how it works,” she said. “I have no say in the matter. Though I can tell you to grab a sandwich at the lunch counter in the terminal before you go. You’ll be at that warehouse for a while and it’s already two o’clock.”
Alex narrowed his eyes at her, but she just shrugged again and gave him a winsome smile.
“Anything else I should know?” he asked as he put his hat back on his head.
“Dr. Bell will want to discuss the news with you over dinner,” she said with no trace of a smile. “So you should probably buy a newspaper when you get that sandwich.”
Half an hour later, Alex took his third skycrawler trip of the day. The warehouse he sought was close to Grand Central and there was a crawler station right in front of it. As he waited for his stop, he ate a ham and cheese sandwich with piccalilli, which turned out to be chopped gherkins in a mustard sauce. It wasn’t bad, but he wasn’t used to it, so he was left tasting it well after the sandwich was gone.
The warehouse where Mr. Su’s ingredients were stolen went by the imaginative name of South Terminal Storage and occupied a worn-looking building near a rail siding. Alex asked after the foreman and was directed to a beefy looking man with coal black hair and no discernible neck.
“I’m very busy,” he said after a secretary in the office called him in from the floor over a P.A. system. “So make it quick.”
Alex introduced himself, passing the neckless man one of his business cards.
“You’re here about the robbery,” the man said, handing the card back. “I’ll tell you what I told that Chinaman, whoever broke in did it right under the night watchman’s nose. They hunted around till they found what they wanted, then they left, presumably the same way they got in.”
“Presumably?” Alex asked. “Do you mean to say you don’t know how they got in and out?”
The big man looked sour and Alex could hear him grinding his teeth.
“I just need the details, Mr—”
“Anthony Lockwood,” he supplied. “Look, I’d like to help you, but I just don’t know what I could say. We’ve got two night watchmen here and they make their rounds every hour. Whoever got in managed it without breaking a window, jimmying a door, or making a sound.”
That seemed unlikely to Alex. A much more plausible scenario was that the guards had fallen asleep on the job. If that was the case, though, it would mean the burglars had gotten lucky, and Alex didn’t believe in luck.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Lockwood said. “And the guards weren’t drinking or playing cards instead of working. When they start their rounds, they punch a card at the time clock. I checked their cards and they both punched in on time the whole night, right up to the burglary.”
Alex tried not to look worried at that. Thieves who could get in and out with the level of precision Lockwood was describing would have to be pros. That meant they either already had a buyer for the alchemy ingredients, or they knew they could easily sell them. That didn’t jibe with what Chen had told him. According to Chen, the supplies weren’t especially rare or valuable. If a professional thief had taken the trouble to steal them, he must believe they were worth quite a bit.
“Did the thieves take anything besides the Chinese herbs?”
Lockwood shook his head.
“They made quite a mess, but the only thing taken was the parcel from China.”
“How did they make a mess?”
Lockwood sighed and motioned for Alex to follow him. He left the office and led the way out onto the warehouse floor where row after row of shelves were stacked up, each piled with boxes, crates, and parcels of all description. Gangs of men with wheeled carts appeared to be swarming all over the warehouse. Some were taking boxes from a stack on the loading dock and distributing them to various shelves, while others were taking items down and relaying them to where people in cars and trucks were waiting to pick them up.
Alex whistled as he surveyed the chaos.
“How did they know where to find what they were looking for?” he asked.
“That’s what I mean by they made a mess,” Lockwood said. “They opened a dozen crates looking for that one from China. There were pieces of crates and shipping straw all over the floor. That’s how the night watchmen knew we’d been robbed.”
“How could th
ey do all that and still not be seen or heard by your watchmen?”
“Must have been a gang,” the foreman said with a shrug. “I can’t see any other way it could work.”
This made even less sense to Alex. The herbs would have to be valuable indeed to inspire an entire crew to attempt such a heist. Either Chen had lied to him about what was really in the container, or the thieves had grabbed the wrong thing.
“Are there any other shipments from China in the warehouse right now?” Alex asked.
“Sure,” Lockwood said. “You can get that list from our secretary. Now, if there’s nothing else, I’ve got a warehouse to run.”
Alex was sure he’d have lots more questions at some point, but right now he couldn’t think of any, so he thanked Lockwood and headed back to the office. True to the foreman’s word, the secretary came up with a list of everything currently in the warehouse.
Sitting down on the ratty waiting room couch, Alex went through the manifest page by page. It took over an hour, and when he was done, he had a list of seven containers that had come from China. Alex tried to find the containers himself, but the warehouse’s system of organization confounded him. As far as he could tell, it was impossible to find anything once it had been shelved. He was reduced to asking Lockwood to assign one of his men to help track down the shipments.
It was nearly five o’clock when Alex examined the last of the seven parcels, a sealed hatbox that was decorated with Chinese art and bore a shipping label covered with pictographic characters. He’d visually inspected all seven of the remaining Chinese shipments and they were all untouched.
“Find what you were looking for?” Lockwood asked as the whistle blew for his men to go home.
“I don’t know,” Alex admitted. “Your thieves seem to be real pros, but if that’s the case, why didn’t they know exactly where to find what they were looking for? Why did they have to break open a bunch of other crates? Are you sure nothing was missing from those other shipments?”
