by Dave Freer
“Not after you’ve addled them anyway,” said Fin, cheerfully. “Anyway, Gersemi’s right.”
“And the last lot of dwarves are still bitter with you about it. It’s not worth it with them,” said Gersemi.
“Of course it was,” said Freyja. “I got the Brisinghamen for it.” She did however look more slightly discomforted by the thought, which, from her, meant a lot.
There was a terrible squealing from the yard. A sound to curdle whiskey, let alone blood. I’d shucked the Glock in a hurry.
Gersemi said: “What’s that blasted pig done now?”
I had a look out, and sure enough it was coming from the battle boar. Only he wasn’t looking very battlesome. He was looking at the Harley with what could only be described as nervous piggy-awe, while backing away, his nether end hunched up. And squealing. Squealing fit to bring divine retribution on a hot hog, or at least on exhaust pipes.
It was quite inspirational, really. I hoped our little banker liked it as much as the pig had, only I wasn’t planning to let him back off. I don’t like people who rip off the elderly’s life savings, even if that life hadn’t been an example of moral rectitude at times. At my age it’s still sort of personal.
I gave Fintan a ride back to his cave. Yes, his cave. Downtown. Don’t ask. It gave me a chance to do a little digging — not in the cave, but into whatever mess I’d got myself into this time by feeling sorry for the old woman and her cats. He knew most of what there was to be known about the magical, the arcane, and women of ill-repute. And it meant he could carry the statue.
“There’s more to this than they’ve told me,” I said to him, bluntly, as we walked into his cave.
He nodded. “You don’t cheat on them. They cheat on you. Something very powerful is at work here.”
And it was on his patch, and he didn’’t like it. “Like what?” I asked.
“I am not sure. But I’ve known the old girl for the last couple of thousand years. Seen her wield her power. Men don’t betray her. They can’t. And everyone talks about Vallhol and the Valkyries carrying brave warriors to feast and drink there, in waiting for the final war… but she gets first pick of the dead heroes. They are hers to command in the last battle. I don’t want to smell Ragnarok, but I think I catch a wiff whiff of it.”
“Ah. So this isn’t just about money then,” I said with a sigh.
“No. But someone wanted them broke. Not robbed. Entrapped.”
“I’ll start with the banker then. They like that. And besides it is the only lead I have got.”
“Let me know if I can help.”
That was worrying. Fintan mac Bochra didn’t offer. He usually would help if asked.
I started, once I got home, with elementary research. The phone book. I rather like doing this kind of detecting. You can drink coffee, sit comfortably, and very rarely get shot at. Still, an individual called: P. Lattily did not appear. And neither did my searches online, or in the book of faces, yield anything local and useful. It would have to be done the hard way.
The rusty Toyota, and sufficient circling of the block, got me a parking space where I could watch the bank employees depart joyously from their durance at the grindstone. Well, unless there was any truth in the story that the elevator had special buttons that took the demons back down to hell for a bit of R&R after their day of doing their master’s work here in the upper world. But it appeared that Mr Lattily, or whatever his actual name was, left by the side door, and shortly emerged from the car park driving a puce Prius, which I got a remarkably good photograph of, despite the color, showing the number-plate well. And from there it was a small step to a contact at the DMV licensing who was happy to provide me with a name and address, after minimal screaming. It was easier than following my target home, which was plan B. He plainly wasn’t spooked, and I wasn’t planning to let him get that way until it was too late.
His name was Phil, or rather Philip, even if it wasn’t ‘Lattily’. Mr Philip Daly was overdue a visit from PI Bolg. But because I like giving little surprises and not getting them, I did a bit of research on my quarry. He didn’t practice target shooting, or any exciting martial arts. He did collect stamps of a sort. His Facebook page told me that ‘Phil’was enamored with his idea of décor, fine clothing and a great deal of partying at certain clubs. Which did explain how he’d managed to trick a fertility goddess. He was immune to her charms. Her brother Frey would have besotted Phil.
I took myself around to visit him, which was kind of odd of me, because I don’t like men… or not in the way he did. Only, I had left it too late. I considered checking out his normal hangouts, but decided that he’d come to me if I waited. I find repelling the assumptions that get made, just because I’ve walked into a gay bar, hard work. It’s not that I object to maiming people, but the level of persistence gets wearisome.
I’ve had a lot of practice waiting, especially as his Scotch was expensive, if not good, and downloading the contents of his hard drive and installing the bug in his landline took time.
At three AM I decided that he was better at not coming home, than I was at waiting. His home computer had not provided any clues to his profitable pastime of robbing Norse Fertility goddesses, and I had no interest in his porn or his other little interests. His books were the kind that the ‘right’people buy and do not read. I’d considered them, and decided that, despite the fact that they’d had their dust disturbed, this time, the ‘right’people might actually be onto something, at least with the ‘not reading’them part. He had a bank to go to in the morning. I’d get him there. In the meanwhile I’d catch up on my sleep, something he obviously could do at work.
Now that I had a name, I could start to work out just where to find him in that ant-farm. So the next morning, I tried the internet, and got no closer to what he spent his daytime hours doing. So I decided I’d have to chance my arm dealing with either a direct query, or little bit of help from Fintan. The latter was more dangerous, but more familiar.
“A name is a start,’said Fintan mac Bochra. Well, Fin’s name was just about the start. The start of everything, that is. “And there are various forms of leximancy or nomaturgy I could use. But banks… they are remarkably full of paper, are they not?”
“Yeah. Some of it is green. Most of their victims think the green pieces belong to them. And then there are lots of records.”
“Bound to be several species of imp there. They’re particularly fond of records. Have a drink,” he said, getting to his feet and picking up a gilded cage from one of the large benches in this part of the cave. “I’ll be back presently.”
He was away awhile, but not long enough for me to consider helping myself to a drink in his cave. Ever since the cat urine, I even avoid sealed bottles there. The philosophers and alchemists who believed transmutation would lead to the betterment of the world, and greater prosperity and world peace, are wrong. I mean yes, beer into horse-pee is natural enough and many would barely notice, but to do that to Scotch is a crime against nature, let alone me. I’m sure that wasn’t what Fin had intended, but it made me considerably more sensible about touching anything in that cave.
He came back with a small, plainly very angry black-and-white imp in the cage. It was panting and clinging to the bars and shaking with impish rage, uttering little high-pitched shrieks.
“Calm down,” said Fintan, clearing a surface and putting it down. The surface began to move, slowly. “It’s a Möbius strip that you’re on,” he said conversationally. “Turn you outside in. Make you human.”
The little creature fell to its knees and began to keen.
“I could stop it, if you told me what I wanted first. I might even have some old parchments to reward you, and then I’ll take you back.”
“Stoppit, stoppit,” it squeaked. “Imp be good-good.”
“You swear by the Thing from the black lagoon?”
It nodded gloomily. “Swear-swear by the Thing.” It looked apprehensively around as it said that.
The strip stopped. “Now,” said Fintan. “Write the name down for him, Eochaid.”
I did, on a blank page of my diary. Handed it to Fintan, who pushed it through the bars.
“Good ink,” said the little creature, picking it up and tasting it, licking hungrily with a little black tongue. “Real ink, not ball-point.”
“Do you know the human with that name-taste?” asked Fintan.
It nodded. Very soon I knew Philip Daly was an investment product sales consultant — the imp excreted the words onto a clean sheet of paper — his office was on the third floor, in the corner that faced the sun. Fin took it back, with a piece of well-aged vellum with illuminated letters and the imp chortling with glee.
He came back a little later, while I sat and thought about it. “You’re the Thing, aren’t you?”
He looked faintly guilty. “Yes. But it would have been paralyzed with fear if it knew that. Best to keep it anonymous. How did you guess?”
“Experience,” I said wryly. “Did you create them?”
“Yes. It seemed wise with the proliferation of records. They consume the ink and allow a safe level of chaos to remain.”
I said nothing, but now I had my suspicion about computer gremlins, and their origins. Instead, armed with a little knowledge — always a dangerous thing, and without my Glock, or even a suitable two-headed axe — they have metal detectors — I went to the bank.
The woman at reception, when I got to the head of the queue, looked down on me. I’m used to that, at my height, even with the high heels and latex mask. None-the-less, coming from a bank employee it could possibly have made me a little more gruff than usual. “I want see a Mr Philip Daly. About an investment product.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“Yes.” I have been given quite a lot, and never returned any. Royal ones too, and they’re supposed to last better. I was appointed holder of the royal trousers once, but only once.
She frowned at her screen. “I don’t have a record of it. What is your name please?”
“Dickson.” I’d been told there were a lot of them, and in a way we all are.
She shook her head. “Sorry. You can’t see Mr. Daly without an appointment.” She sounded very pleased about that.
“But my friend Mr. Jasmin” — I had the Vice President’s (Investments) name from the ever informative internet — “assured me he would see to it that I got an appointment.”
That plainly was a different matter entirely. “I’ll just see if he’s free, Mr. Dickson.”
And indeed, he was. How surprising. I was escorted up to his office.
Given the timing - and the night before, he was drinking coffee and trying to look awake and enthusiastic. He failed at both. The poor fellow looked as if he could use a purge, so I helped him along in that direction. They scan you for firearms, but not rapid and violent laxatives. Fintan had needed elephant dung in a hurry at one stage of some of his experiments, and had run a little batch of this stuff up. It had almost destroyed the circus I’d been working at, at the time. I kept some for other people’s emergencies.
A little misdirection, a few minutes small talk about Mr. Jasmin and my acquaintanceship with him at the Country Club and wonders of our hunting golfs together, a pastime that Daly seemed to envy, and the vast amounts of money coming out of my real-estate venture… and an expression of extreme distress suddenly delightfully enlivened his beautifully shaven and rather pallid face. It was a thing of joy that I was sorry not to record for my clients. It wasn’t quite as devastating as a berserker with an axe that Gersemi had wished for, although I had a feeling Daly’s underwear might not agree with me.
I closed the door behind him, downloaded the hard-drive, photographed all the documents in his desk drawers, copied all the text messages off his mobile and buried a remote activated microphone in the potted fern, even took his wallet out of his dear little handbag and photographed the credit card slips, before taking a clipboard and some forms for a walk. With these magical talismans — anyone seeing you with them assumes you are going to ask questions they’d rather not answer — I explored the building a little in case I wanted to come back again without an appointment, and left.
I had a shower before I settled down to wade through it. It must have been the sweaty latex mask that made me feel I needed a shower, not the place I had been to, or the company I’d been keeping.
Phil’d been suddenly spending a lot of money in the last week, or at least so it appeared to me. A whole lot of fashionable men’s wear sales, and a new health and fitness club platinum membership were above my means, if beneath my desires.
The text messages were confirmation confirming, and interesting. Well, the ones around the time he’d been out to visit Freyja and Gersemi were interesting. The rest, less so. This wasn’t a divorce investigation, after all. The number he’d been calling was listed, so I called it.
“Andrew P. Cander speaking.”
“Wrong number,” I said and put it down.
Well, well, well. My study of the bank’s website had paid more dividends than any bank ever had. He was also a Vice President. (Regulatory Compliance and accounting).
There were few messages between him and Phil, but “did U get it” with “not the deeds and B” was enough for me, even if that was followed by a pithy reply that would have got his mouth washed out with soap by his mother, if he had one. A little investigation proved Andrew P. Cander had a wife, and children anyway. I hope he was doing a better job with raising them.
I looked at my watch. Phil would probably be daring to drive his Prius by now, possibly on his way to a pharmacy or doctor, or possibly just heading home. I went to his home, and beat him to it. He should have spent less on fancy clothes and more on good security. I removed his supply of toilet rolls from the bathroom — if you have something someone wants badly enough, they can be very co-operative — and sat down to wait.
I spent the time examining the photographs of the documents on my phone. I’d like to have spent a little longer at this with a larger screen, but, well, when there was money involved, it was best to get it back soon, before he wasted the lot and there was nothing left to pay my fee. I preferred my wastage to his, which I know is very inconsiderate of me. I’m like that.
I didn’t have to wait long before he came home and made a hasty dash for the bathroom. I was kind enough to lock his front door for him. You never know who might have come in, otherwise.
He was sitting and staring in puzzled anguish at the empty toilet roll holder, his abandoned trousers kicked half-way across his white tiled floor, when I walked in on him, holding the paperwork. Well, the paper. His mouth fell open, and he came up with what he thought was a highly original “wah-wah-wah” noise. I’ve heard it before, a few times.
“I’ve got something you need, Phil ‘Lattily ’,” I held up the roll. “In exchange I want something you promised two sweet little old ladies, namely a debit card, and all their money.”
It was a bit too late for him to go pale and shit himself. He still did his best. Perhaps toilet paper was the wrong reward. There couldn’t be much left to clean up after. Oh well, when in doubt, violence would just have to do. I produced the Glock. “Or I could just shoot you in the guts, tie you up, lock you in and leave you to die of peritonitis. It’s worse than the little flux you’ve had. A lot worse, and it lasts a lot longer.” I described it to him, which I probably shouldn’t have done, because he fainted. I hauled him out of there — I didn’t see why I should have to be in the same room as his once-white trousers, and pushed his head between his knees.
He came to, and in panic flailed his way to his feet, and sprinted for the door. I let him fight with it for a little bit, before I pointed out that I had the keys, and the keys to his car. “And you don’t have any trousers or underwear on.”
He turned to face me, and drew breath to start screaming. So I hit him in the solar plexus, so he lost that breath and sat down.
“I want their property back, Phil. And I want to know how you knew how to get it.” There was no point in leaving the same door ajar. The next time they might not try white-collar robbery. From what Fintan said… or rather left unsaid, that might just have Freyja calling for her half of the slain warriors, which could just start something no-one wanted.
“I haven’t got it! I just did what I was told. And he didn’t even pay what they promised.”
“You poor thing. Didn’t even get paid properly for your larceny.”
“It wasn’t larceny. It was just normal banking procedure! I didn’t do anything wrong,” he whined.
“Just following orders, Mr … Lattily. Completely legit. That’s why you used your own name.”
“It was all completely legal,” he said, sulkily. “They should have read the small print. There are risks. They signed the waiver. There is nothing you can do about it.”
“The small print on the microdot. Did your boss explain to you that there are risks to you too? Leaving someone trapped with an angry, hungry pig may not be legal, but once the pig has eaten them it’s hard to establish that they weren’t trespassing. Actually it’s hard to establish they were there at all.”
“You… you’d never get away with it,” he said, putting his trust in the law, which says a lot about the law.
“Why not? You seemed to think that you would. I want their gold back, Mr… Lattily. All legal and nice, otherwise I’ll take you to visit the battle-boar. You’ve obviously been told about that. It won’t mind if you’re not dead when it eats you. Pigs aren’t fussy. They’ll eat anything, even your pretty socks.”
It must have been the socks. Some people are socks obsessed, I gather. He started to cry. “I haven’t GOT the gold,” he sobbed. “It was just a job.”
I dug it out of him, piece by piece. He’d been given very precise instructions, all the documentation… and the timing from his boss’s boss. He’d known, well enough it was apparent, that it wasn’t exactly the normal banking swindle but something extra-special. He’d had to take a day off that day, rent a vehicle, and keep the matter strictly under wraps. For a large cash bonus to ‘sell’a modified reverse mortgage to these special clients… Phil had been suspicious, so he told me, but he’d looked at the legalese, and yes, it was all as within the law as banking normally is. I knew that he’d still known it was theft organized by Mr. Andrew P. Cander… because he had kept, carefully, evidence that he’d deposited the gold, and copies of the documents. If I’d finished going through all his pictures, I’d have found them. And if you thought I was joking about the micro-dot, I wasn’t.
