by Jim Butcher
As I walked beside him, careful to keep my pace slow enough to let him dictate how fast we were walking, it dawned on me that King Gwynn ap Nudd of the Tylwyth Teg was a baseball fan—as in fanatic—of the original vintage.
“It was you,” I said suddenly. “You were the one they threw out of the game.”
“Aye,” King Gwynn said. “There was business to attend, and by the time I got there the tickets were sold out. I had to find another way into the game.”
“As a goat?” I asked, bemused.
“It was a team-spirit thing,” Gwynn said proudly. “Sianis had made up a sign and all, proclaiming that Chicago had already gotten Detroit’s goat. Then he paraded me and the sign on the field before the game—it got plenty of cheers, let me tell you. And he did pay for an extra ticket for the goat, so it wasn’t as though old Wrigley’s successors were being cheated the price of admission. They just didn’t like it that someone argued with the ushers and won!”
Gwynn’s words had taken on the heat that you can only get from an argument that someone has rehearsed to himself about a million times. Given that he must have been practicing it since 1945, I knew better than to think that anything like reason was going to get in the way. So I just nodded and asked, “What happened?”
“Before the game was anywhere near over,” Gwynn continued, his voice seething with outrage, “they came to Sianis and evicted him from the park. Because, they said, his goat smelled too awful!”
Gwynn stopped in his tracks and turned to me, scowling furiously as he gestured at himself with his hands. “Hello! I was a goat! Goats are supposed to smell awful when they are rained upon!”
“They are, Your Majesty, sir,” I agreed soberly.
“And I was a flawless goat!”
“I have no doubts on that account, King Gwynn,” I said.
“What kind of justice is it to be excluded from a Series game because one has flawlessly imitated a goat!?”
“No justice at all, Your Majesty, sir,” I said.
“And to say that I, Gwynn ap Nudd, I the King of Annwn, I who defeated Gwythr ap Greidawl, I the counselor and ally to gods and heroes alike, smelled!” His mouth twisted up in rage. “How dare some jumped-up mortal ape say such a thing! As though mortals smell any better than wet goats!”
For a moment, I considered pointing out the conflicting logic of Gwynn both being a perfect (and therefore smelly) goat and being upset that he had been cast out of the game for being smelly. But only for a second. Otherwise, I might have been looking at coming back to Chicago about a hundred years too late to grab a late-night meal at BK.
“I can certainly see why you were upset and offended, Your Majesty, sir.”
Some of the righteous indignation seemed to drain out of him, and he waved an irritated hand at me. “We’re talking about something important here, mortal,” he said. “We’re talking about baseball. Call me Gwynn.”
We had stopped at the last display cabinet, which was enormous by the standards of the furnishings of that hall, which is to say about the size of a human wardrobe. On one of its shelves was a single outfit of clothing; blue jeans, a T-shirt, a leather jacket, with socks and shoes. On all the rest were the elongated rectangles of tickets—season tickets, in fact, and hundreds of them.
But the single stack of tickets on the top shelf sat next to the only team cap I’d seen.
Both tickets and cap bore the emblem of the Cubs.
“It was certainly a serious insult,” I said quietly. “And it’s obvious that a balancing response was in order. But, Gwynn, the insult was given you unwittingly, by mortals whose very stupidity prevented them from knowing what they were doing. Few enough there that day are even alive now. Is it just that their children be burdened with their mistake? Surely that fact also carries some weight within the heart of a wise and generous king.”
Gwynn let out a tired sigh and moved his right hand in a gesture that mimed pouring out water cupped in it. “Oh, aye, aye, Harry. The anger faded decades ago—mostly. It’s the principle of the thing these days.”
“That’s something I can understand,” I said. “Sometimes you have to give weight to a principle to keep it from being taken away in a storm.”
He glanced up at me shrewdly. “Aye. I’ve heard as that’s something you would understand.”
I spread my hands and tried to sound diffident. “There must be some way of evening the scales between the Cubs and the Tylwyth Teg,” I said. “Some way to set this insult to rights and lay the matter to rest.”
“Oh, aye,” King Gwynn said. “It’s easy as dying. All we do is nothing. The spell would fade. Matters would resume their normal course.”
“But clearly you don’t wish to do such a thing,” I said. “It’s obviously an expenditure of resources for you to keep the curse alive.”
The small king suddenly smiled. “Truth be told, I stopped thinking of it as a curse years ago, lad.”
I arched my eyebrows.
“How do you regard it, then?” I asked him.
“As protection,” he said. “From the real curse of baseball.”
I looked from him to the tickets and thought about that for a moment. Then I said, “I understand.”
It was Gwynn’s turn to arch eyebrows at me. “Do ye, now?” He studied me for a time and then smiled, nodding slowly. “Aye. Aye, ye do. Wise, for one so young.”
I shook my head ruefully. “Not wise enough.”
“Everyone with a lick of wisdom thinks that,” Gwynn replied. He regarded his tickets for a while, his hands clasped behind his back. “Now, ye’ve won the loyalty of some of the Wee Folk, and that is no quick or easy task. Ye’ve defied Sidhe queens. Ye’ve even stuck a thumb into the Erlking’s eye, and that tickles me to no end. And ye’ve been clever enough to find us, which few mortals have managed, and gone out of your way to be polite, which means more from you than it would from some others.”
I nodded quietly.
“So, Harry Dresden,” King Gwynn said, “I’ll be glad t’ consider it, if ye say the Cubs wish me to cease my efforts.”
I thought about it for a long time before I gave him my answer.
MR. DONOVAN SAT down in my office in a different ridiculously expensive suit and regarded me soberly. “Well?”
“The curse stays,” I said. “Sorry.”
Mr. Donovan frowned, as though trying to determine whether I was pulling his leg. “I would have expected you to declare it gone and collect your fee.”
“I have this weird thing where I take professional ethics seriously,” I said. I pushed a piece of paper at him and said, “My invoice.”
He took it and turned it over. “It’s blank,” he said.
“Why type it up when it’s just a bunch of zeroes?”
He stared at me even harder.
“Look at it this way,” I said. “You haven’t paused to consider the upside of the Billy Goat Curse.”
“Upside?” he asked. “To losing?”
“Exactly,” I said. “How many times have you heard people complaining that professional ball isn’t about anything but money these days?”
“What does that have to do—”
“That’s why everyone’s so locked on the Series these days. Not necessarily because it means you’re the best, because you’ve risen to a challenge and prevailed. The Series means millions of dollars for the club, for businesses, all kinds of money. Even the fans get obsessed with the Series, like it’s the only significant thing in baseball. Don’t even get me started on the stadiums all starting to be named after their corporate sponsors.”
“Do you have a point?” Donovan asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Baseball is about more than money and victory. It’s about facing challenges alone and on a team. It’s about spending time with friends and family and neighbors in a beautiful park, watching the game unfold. It’s …” I sighed. “It’s about fun, Mr. Donovan.”
“And you are contending that the curse is fun?”
“Think about it,” I said. “The Cubs have the most loyal, diehard fan following in Major League ball. Those fans aren’t in it to see the Cubs run rampant over other teams because they’ve spent more money hiring the best players. You know they aren’t—because they all know about the curse. If you know your team isn’t going to carry off the Series, then cheering them on becomes something more than yelling when they’re beating someone. It’s about tradition. It’s about loyalty to the team and camaraderie with the other fans, and win or lose, just enjoying the damned game.”
I spread my hands. “It’s about fun again, Mr. Donovan. Wrigley Field might be the only stadium in professional ball where you can say that.”
Donovan stared at me as though I’d started speaking in Welsh. “I don’t understand.”
I sighed again. “Yeah. I know.”
MY TICKET WAS for general admission, but I thought I’d take a look around before the game got started. Carlos Zambrano was on the mound warming up when I sat down next to Gwynn ap Nudd.
Human sized, he was considerably over six feet tall, and he was dressed in the same clothes I’d seen back at his baseball shrine. Other than that, he looked exactly the way I remembered him. He was talking to a couple of folks in the row behind him, animatedly relating some kind of tale that revolved around the incredible arc of a single game-deciding breaking ball. I waited until he was finished with the story and turned back out to the field.
“Good day,” Gwynn said to me.
I nodded just a little bit deeply. “And to you.”
He watched Zambrano warming up and grinned. “They’re going to fight through it eventually,” he said. “There are so many mortals now. Too many players and fans want them to do it.” His voice turned a little sad. “One day they will.”
My equations and I had eventually come to the same conclusion. “I know.”
“But you want me to do it now, I suppose,” he said. “Or else why would you be here?”
I flagged down a beer vendor and bought one for myself and one for Gwynn.
He stared at me for a few seconds, his head tilted to one side.
“No business,” I said, passing him one of the beers. “How about we just enjoy the game?”
Gwynn ap Nudd’s handsome face broke into a wide smile, and we both settled back in our seats as the Cubs took the cursed field.
In this tale, set between Turn Coat and Changes, I got to do one of the most enjoyable things a writer working on a really giant story possibly can do: write from the perspective of another pivotal character in a series.
John Marcone has been an underworld establishment in the Dresden Files since the first book of the series—longer than anyone except Bob, Murphy, and Harry himself. Keeping that position in the Dresden Files story world has required him to be a very smart, tough, resourceful, and dangerous human being. Marcone, much like Dresden, has been challenged by increasingly dangerous interlopers, and he has grown more cunning, dangerous, and ruthless by way of adapting to the challenges they’ve presented.
In this story, we get to see a little bit of Marcone operating in his own world—a place considerably more grey and nebulous than the relatively clear-cut moral environment Harry Dresden has created with his choices. It is probably worth remembering that Marcone, despite some of the more vile things he presides over, would probably have been considered a rather decent sort of leader for the majority of recorded human history—he is, in fact, rather strongly modeled on the ideals of medieval barons, who, it seems to me, would have made surpassingly excellent and dangerous crime lords. Here we see Marcone, operating from the bastion of his power, as the only mortal man considered competent and dangerous enough to join the Unseelie Accords of the varied supernatural nations.
A successful murder is like a successful restaurant: Ninety percent of it is about location, location, location.
Three men in black hoods knelt on the waterfront warehouse floor, their wrists and ankles trussed with heavy plastic zip ties. There were few lights. They knelt over a large, faded stain on the concrete floor, left behind by the hypocritically named White Council of Wizardry during their last execution.
I nodded to Hendricks, who took the hood off the first man, then stood clear. The man was young and good-looking. He wore an expensive yet ill-fitting suit and even more expensive yet tasteless jewelry.
“Where are you from?” I asked him.
He sneered at me. “What’s it to y—”
I shot him in the head as soon as I heard the bravado in his voice. The body fell heavily to the floor.
The other two jumped and cursed, their voices angry and terrified.
I took the hood off the second man. His suit was a close cousin of the dead man’s, and I thought I recognized its cut. “Boston?” I asked him.
“You can’t do this to us,” he said, more angry than frightened. “Do you know who we are?”
Once I heard the nasal quality of the word are, I shot him.
I took off the third man’s hood. He screamed and fell away from me. “Boston,” I said, nodding, and put the barrel of my .45 against the third man’s forehead. He stared at me, showing the whites of his eyes. “You know who I am. I run drugs in Chicago. I run the numbers, the books. I run the whores. It’s my town. Do you understand?”
His body jittered in what might have been a nod. His lips formed the word yes, though no sound came out.
“I’m glad you can answer a simple question,” I told him, and lowered the gun. “I want you to tell Mr. Morelli that I won’t be this lenient the next time his people try to clip the edges of my territory.” I looked at Hendricks. “Put the three of them in a sealed trailer and rail-freight them back to Boston, care of Mr. Morelli.”
Hendricks was a large, trustworthy man, his red hair cropped in a crew cut. He twitched his chin in the slight motion that he used for a nod when he disapproved of my actions but intended to obey me anyway.
Hendricks and the cleaners on my staff would handle the matter from here.
I passed him the gun and the gloves on my hands. Both would see the bottom of Lake Michigan before I was halfway home, along with the two slugs the cleaners would remove from the site. When they were done, there would be nothing left of the two dead men but a slight variation on the outline of the stain in the old warehouse floor, where no one would look twice in any case.
Location, location, location.
Obviously, I am not Harry Dresden. My name is something I rarely trouble to remember, but for most of my adult life, I have been called John Marcone.
I am a professional monster.
It sounds pretentious. After all, I’m not a flesh-devouring ghoul, hiding behind a human mask until it is time to gorge. I’m no vampire, draining the blood or soul from my victim—no ogre, no demon, no cursed beast from the spirit world dwelling amid the unsuspecting sheep of humanity. I’m not even possessed of the mystic abilities of a mortal wizard.
But they will never be what I am. One and all, those beings were born to be what they are.
I made a choice.
I walked outside of the warehouse and was met by my consultant, Gard—a tall blond woman without any makeup whose eyes continually swept her surroundings. She fell into step beside me as we walked to the car. “Two?”
“They couldn’t be bothered to answer a question in a civil manner.”
She opened the back door for me and I got in. I picked up my personal weapon and slipped it into the holster beneath my left arm while she settled down behind the wheel. She started driving and then said, “No. That wasn’t it.”
“It was business.”
“And the fact that one of them was pushing heroin to thirteen-year-old girls and the other was pimping them out had nothing to do with it,” Gard said.
“It was business,” I said, enunciating. “Morelli can find pushers and pimps anywhere. A decent accountant is invaluable. I sent his bookkeeper back as a gesture of respect.”
“You don’t re
spect Morelli.”
I almost smiled. “Perhaps not.”
“Then why?”
I did not answer. She didn’t push the issue, and we rode in silence back to the office. As she put the car in park, I said, “They were in my territory. They broke my rule.”
“No children,” she said.
“No children,” I said. “I do not tolerate challenges, Ms. Gard. They’re bad for business.”
She looked at me in the mirror, her blue eyes oddly intent, and nodded.
There was a knock at my office door, and Gard thrust her head in, her phone’s earpiece conspicuous. “There’s a problem.”
Hendricks frowned from his seat at a nearby desk. He was hunched over a laptop that looked too small for him, plugging away at his thesis. “What kind of problem?”
“An Accords matter,” Gard said.
Hendricks sat up straight and looked at me.
I didn’t look up from one of my lawyer’s letters, which I receive too frequently to let slide. “Well,” I said, “we knew it would happen eventually. Bring the car.”
“I don’t have to,” Gard said. “The situation came to us.”
I set aside the finished letter and looked up, resting my fingertips together. “Interesting.”
Gard brought the problem in. The problem was young and attractive. In my experience, the latter two frequently lead to the former. In this particular case, it was a young woman holding a child. She was remarkable—thick, rich, silver-white hair, dark eyes, pale skin. She had on very little makeup, which was fortunate in her case, since she looked as if she had recently been drenched. She wore what was left of a grey business skirt suit, had a towel from one of my health clubs wrapped around her shoulders, and was shivering.
The child she held was too young to be in school and was also appealing, with rosy features, white blond hair, and blue eyes. Male or female, it hardly mattered at that age. They’re all beautiful. The child clung to the girl as if it would not be separated, and was also wrapped in a towel.
