ore disarming his assailant. Then Mr. Davidovich threw Officer Malloy through a window." Seeing me unharmed made Nikolai pause. Then, from out of nowhere, Malloy leapt onto him from atop a stack of crates. He struck with the sound of an egg cracked into hot skillet and was instantly flung backwards. He collided with a bulkhead and fell to the floor, stunned and bleeding from a dozen wounds. "I attempted to assist Miss Kildyusheva in getting out of harm's way. Then Mr. Davidovich rushed at me and Miss Kildyusheva. I pushed her out of the way and dodged Mr. Davidovich's rush. His own momentum carried him over the side and into Puget Sound." 'Give it up, Nikolai. We both know you can't do anything to me. I hold your measure.' He kept advancing, slowly. An awful light grew on the primstav and coiled up his arm, wreathed his shoulders and set an eldritch halo about his head. His eyes were electric with power but his voice was soft. 'Shall we see about that, failed apprentice? You are just like that old man you once called Master: blind to the inevitability of your death at my hands.' Nikolai raised the primstav and pointed it at me. Runes of power thundered from his mouth. "We didn't hear anything from him after that, as we were busy providing first aid for Officer Malloy." I raised my Beretta and shot Nikolai in the face. He flew backwards and struck the hull. He never moved after that. "A short time later Officer Nyquist came on the scene and helped us take Officer Malloy to Swedish. Miss Kildyusheva declined medical attention and left to check into a hotel, but with Officer Malloy in a bad way, Officer Nyquist requested that I come and make a statement." I pulled Dasha to her feet, helped her collect her wits, and together we half-dragged Malloy off the ship. It was pure luck Nyquist came by when he did. Dasha made sure he remembered events just the way she described them to him, then made herself scarce while I ushered Malloy to the hospital. "I was still making an official statement when you came on shift this morning and decided to involve yourself in someone else's case."
Mercer hadn't changed his position for the whole length of my recitation. I was pleased. I'd gotten it more or less verbatim from the first time I'd told it to him, about an hour ago, and kept the truth well hidden behind my eyes. He was less pleased, apparently.
"Your story doesn't hold water," he said bluntly, leaning back in his wooden chair and lighting up a cigarette. He was letting the suspect sweat and then say too much. More cop school tactics. "No one on any of the other ships in port saw anything like the altercation you described. I had men out in boats dragging the harbor for this Dah-vee-doh-vich character you claim assaulted you and Malloy. They couldn't find a body. So, did he swim away, angel?" He made little dog-paddling motions with his hands. "Out of Elliot Bay and Puget Sound, across the Pacific and back to Russia, maybe?"
I shrugged. It wasn't worth telling him what I thought. He had yet to believe a single thing I'd said. "You're the detective-lieutenant around here. I'm just an honest, hard-working citizen doing her civic duty." I gave him my brightest smile and he chewed nails for a while. Long enough to discover he didn't much care for the taste, anyway.
He made a shooing gesture at me. "All right. I'm done. Go on, get out of here." I rose. "But don't leave town, angel. You're still a person of interest until I say otherwise. If I can't lay eyes on you any hour of day or night I feel like it, we're going to have an issue and there's going to be a judge involved in it. Understand?" I did, and let him know it by carefully rolling my eyes as I adjusted my father's fedora and shrugged back into my trench coat. I'd just laid my hand on the door knob to escape when Sneer resurfaced for one last thrust.
"Oh, by the way - you wouldn't happen to know where the Lenin went, now would you?"
I gaped at him. "It's gone?"
He smiled in polite disbelief and took another drag, then shook his head as he blew out grey smoke. "I have to hand it to you, lady, you're one hell of an actress. Yeah, she's gone, angel. Vanished in a cloud of smoke. Poof." He illustrated with his hands. "Convenient. That's what we call it in the cop trade when material evidence of a crime disappears. Con-ven-i-ent." He dragged out the word.
I snorted. "Let me get this straight, Lieutenant. You let the scene of a crime disappear on you?" I snorted. "You're going to have to do better than that in the future, Mercer, or they'll take away your shiny bars and your cute little office." I let myself out before he could reply. The door closing behind me was the sweetest sound I'd heard in days.
I went out onto the street and was surprised to see it was already late afternoon. Time flies when you're arguing with idiots. I caught a trolley, riding it just long enough to make sure I wasn't followed leaving the station. I jumped off a block later and walked down Second Avenue to Yesler Street, loitered a few minutes more, then went into the Seattle Hotel. The desk clerk immediately recognized the description I gave him and told me she was in room 37.
I went up the stairs, weary and yet elated. I'd unraveled a major case, brought Tommy's murderer to justice, and kept myself alive. Now I was about to pay a call on a beautiful woman who had more than one excellent reason to keep me happy. If I could just discover I'd been adopted by the Rockefellers, life would be peachy.
I stopped to rest at the top of the stairs to the third floor. Maddening as Mercer's ham-handed interrogation techniques were, they had given me a chance to figure out something that had been bothering me ever since I woke up in chains in the hold of the Lenin. Gordon Beskins, my eternally patient lawyer, had come down to the police station to protest the unconscionable mistreatment of his client et cetera et cetera. But while he had the bluebottles running out to fetch me coffee and a sandwich and for goodness sake just look at her, am I the only one with common decency in this sorry excuse for a police department, he slipped me a note. It was his research on Gerd's bequest. As I was still a minor at the time of Gerd's death, it had been given over to my father in trust for me. But I wouldn't have to go far to find it. I was wearing it now: his fedora.
After Gordon took point on keeping the blue-uniformed dogs at bay, I went to the ladies' room and sure enough, inside the hat band was a thin coil of blood-stained silk thread, exactly the length of the perimeter formed by the pentagram of Nikolai's head and outstretched limbs. Nikolai's measure had been in my father's hat all along. No wonder I hadn't noticed it when I tried that Seeing on the dock - it was on top of my own head. And a good thing I was still wearing that fedora when I was chained up, let alone when I confronted him there in the bowels of the Lenin.
The enormity of everything that had happened still hadn't quite sunk in. The context mattered, but I'd been betrayed, struck unconscious, hung from chains, suffered interrogation - twice - and shot a man to death, all in the last twelve hours. And now I felt nothing but exhaustion and a mounting sense of anticipation at the prospect of meeting Dasha. Shouldn't I feel something more? Guilt, perhaps? Relief? All I felt was a tension, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Promising I'd feel something all right, and soon at that, I straightened my back and walked down the hall to room 37. I rapped on the door and waited forever, give or take. I rapped again. The sound was hollow. No answer. Then I tried the handle. It was open.
The room was empty. The bed had not been slept in.
I don't remember walking in. I just remember standing at the window looking out over Elliot Bay, reading the handwritten note I'd found on the sill.
The primstav for my measure. That is my price. Meet me in Belgorod-Dnestrovskaya Citadel, Odessa. Hurry, vozlyublennaya. Hurry. -D
A cold wind blew in off Elliot Bay and lodged itself inside my chest. At least now I knew who'd commandeered the Lenin. Though just how she had guessed that I found her measure on Nikolai's body, I wasn't so sure. I put a hand in my pocket and touched the knotted-cord bracelet I had fashioned just this morning from the long silk thread stained with her blood. Maybe it was too late for some things between us, but there were definitely other possibilities to be explored instead.
I would find a way to go to Odessa. I would find her again. With her measure wrapped around my wrist, she would make a fine
master indeed.
FROM THE AUTHOR
The world of Maddie Sheehan is modeled closely on our own, including many pieces of history the careful reader will have noticed already. Set in a version of Seattle, Washington circa 1929, the story features historical events such as the Klondike Gold Rush, the Denny Regrade, and the building of Harbor Island. Important historical personages from the colorful history of Seattle are encountered, including John Considine and Ah King, and all of the streets and buildings mentioned are as close to accuracy as my research could make them, right down to the Horseshoe Liquor Company and the date on which the Ford Motor Company released the Model T. The (deliberately spare) details regarding Meister Gerd, the Circle, and topics relating to the Art were drawn from pre-Germanic magical traditions, and required much more creative additions than did other parts of the setting.
It bears mention that, as often happens in works of speculative fiction, certain factual details must be amended in order to facilitate the story. To any true historians who have read this work, I assure you such alterations were made with deliberation and not caprice. It is, however grounded in loving amounts of research, a work of fiction.
Though the story of Maddie Sheehan and the Circle resides firmly within the borders of the realm of fantasy, I trust the reader will understand that the lessons learned there need not necessarily remain there. Certainly I have found it so.
Peter Smalley
Seattle, Washington
April 11, 2013
Emerald City Blues Page 7
