The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

I tried again. “Mrs. Cordero, it’s possible the medicine you received had something to do with your giving birth to an apsychic child. We have to check that out, to make sure the same misfortune doesn’t happen to someone else.”

“I don’ remember,” she repeated. Her face might have been cast in bronze. I knew I wasn’t going to get any answers out of her. I caught Father Flanagan’s eye. He nodded almost imperceptibly. Maybe he’d try to talk some more with her later, maybe he’d just ask around in the neighborhood. One way or another, I figured before too long I’d find out what I needed to know.

Ramón Cordero bent over the cradle, picked up his son. By the smooth way he held the baby in the crook of his elbow, I guessed it wasn’t his first. “Niño lindo,” he said softly. Even more softly, Father Flanagan translated: “Beautiful boy.”

Little Jesus was a nice-looking baby. “Enjoy him all you can, Mr. Cordero,” I said. “Love him a lot. This is all he has. He’ll have to make the best of it.”

“That’s good advice,” Susan Kuznetsov said. She dropped into Spainish at least as fluent as Father Flanagan’s, then returned to English for me: “I told him that many apsychics live extraordinary lives on This Side, maybe to help compensate for not going on after they die. Artists, writers, thaumaturges—”

What she said was true, though she’d just mentioned the good half. There’s pretty fair evidence that the Leader of the Alemans during the Second Sorcerous War was an apsychic, and that he promoted the massacres and other horrors of the war exactly because he wasn’t afraid of what would happen to him on the Other Side: once he was gone, he was gone permanently. That wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted to mention to an apsychic’s parents, though.

The baby wiggled, thrashed, woke up with a squall about like what you’d expect from a minor demon who doesn’t care to be conjured up. Lupe held out her arms; her husband set Jesus in them. I glanced down at my toes while she adjusted her hospital robe so she could nurse him. The squalls subsided, to be replaced by intent slurping noises.

“Tiene mucho hambre,” Lupe said— “He’s very hungry.” She seemed pleased and proud, as a new mother should. No, little Jesus’ tragic lack hadn’t fully registered with her.

I stood there for a couple of more minutes, wondering all the while if I ought to say something about Slow Jinn Fizz. Maybe—God willing—Ramzan Durani and his outfit could fill the vacuum at the center of little Jesus Cordero. From what Durani had said, he could fill it. What troubled me was whether he was creating similar but smaller vacuums in other souls. He said not, but even he’d admitted his procedure was still experimental.

In the end, I kept my mouth shut. Part of that was not wanting to raise the adult Corderos’ hopes too much. The rest was simple pragmatism: even though baby Jesus had no hope for eternal life, odds were he wasn’t going to shuffle off this mortal coil tomorrow or next year, either. He had the time to wait while the gremlins were exorcised from Durani’s jinnetic engineering scheme.

I wonder what I would have done if I’d been dealing with a seventy-year-old apsychic in poor health, someone facing imminent oblivion. Would gaining that person a soul (assuming the procedure worked) outweigh the harm inflicted on other souls in the process (assuming it didn’t work as well as Durani claimed)?

I decided I was awful glad Jesus was just a baby.

Lupe raised the little fellow to her shoulder, patted him on the back. After a few seconds, he let out a burp about an octave deeper than you’d think could come from anything so small.

“When will you be going home from the hospital?” I asked her.

“Mañana,” she said.

“I’d like to come by your home that afternoon, if I could,” I said. “I have a portable spellchecker, so I can begin investigating for toxic spells in the local environment, and I’d also like a look at whatever potion you got from your curandero.” I saw from her face that she didn’t understand everything I’d said. So did Father Flanagan. He translated for me.

Lupe and Ramón looked at each other. “No questions about nothing else?” he asked.

They were illegals, then. “None,” I promised. That wasn’t my business. Trying to find out why their son had been born without a soul was. “I swear it in God’s name.”

“You don’ make no cross,” Ramón said suspiciously.

Father Flanagan was giving me a questioning look, too. “Tell them I’m Jewish,” I said. His face cleared. I was sure he didn’t care much for my beliefs, but that’s okay: I wasn’t fond of all of his, either. But we acknowledged each other’s sincerity. He spoke way too rapidly for me to follow what he said to the Corderos, but they nodded when he was through.

Lupe said, “You go, you look, you find out. We trus’ you, the padre say we can trus’ you. He better be right.”

“He is,” I said, and let it go at that. If I’d taken another oath, the Corderos might have thought the first one wasn’t to be trusted. Father Flanagan nodded slowly, understanding what I’d done.

Susan Kuznetsov said, “Besides, Jesus there is a native-born citizen of the Confederation, and entitled to all the protection of our laws.” When she turned that into Spainish, the Corderos beamed; they liked the idea. The woman from the Bureau of Physical and Spiritual Health quietly added, “I just wish our laws could do more for the poor little guy.” Neither she nor Father Flanagan translated that.

I said my goodbyes, collected Mistress Kuznetsov’s carte de visite, and flew back to the office. The elves hadn’t magically cleaned up my desk while I was gone. I didn’t care. It could stay dirty a while longer. I picked up the phone and called Charlie Kelly.

The yammering at the other end went on for so long that I wondered if he was back from lunch yet. It was well past two back in D.St.C.; where the demons did those confounded Confederal bureaucrats get the nerve to keep swilling at the public sty like that? All I needed was a minute of no answer on the phone to swell up and bellow like an enraged bull taxpayer, when after all I was a confounded Confederal bureaucrat my very own self.

“Environmental Perfection Agency, Charles Kelly speaking.” Finally!

“Charlie, this is Dave Fisher in Angels City. We just had another apsychic birth close by the Devonshire dump. That makes four in a little more than a year. This isn’t going to be a quiet investigation any more, Charlie. I’m going to find out what’s leaking and why, no matter how noisy I have to get.”

He kind of grunted. “Do what you think necessary.”

“Shit, Charlie, you’re the one who sicced me onto this.” I’m not usually vulgar on the phone and I’m not usually vulgar in the office, but I was steaming. “Now you’re making it a lot harder than it has to be.”

“In what way?” he asked, as if he hadn’t the slightest idea.

When Charlie Kelly goes all innocent on you, check how many fingers and toes you’re wearing. The odds are real good they’ll add up to a number smaller than twenty. I can’t imagine how I kept from screaming at him. “You know perfectly well. Tell me about the bloody bird that keeps singing in your ear.”

“I’m sorry, David, but I can’t,” he said. “I never should have mentioned that to you in the first place.”

“Well, you did and now you’re stuck with it,” I said savagely. “There’s something rotten in the area of that dump. People are being born without souls. People are dying, too, if you’ll remember the Thomas Brothers fire. You started me on this and now you won’t give with what you know? That’s—damnable.”

“I have to pray you’re wrong,” Charlie answered. “But whether you are or not, I can’t give you what you’re asking. This whole matter is bigger than what you seem to grasp—bigger than I thought, too. If I could, I’d shut down your whole investigation.”

This, from a high-powered EPA man? “Good God, Charlie? What are we talking about here, the Third Sorcerous War?”

“If we were, I couldn’t tell you so,” Kelly said. “Goodbye, David. I’m afraid you’re on your own in this one.” My imp stopped reproducing his imp’s breathing; he’d hung up on me.

I don’t know how long I stared at my own phone before I hung up, too. Jose Franco walked past my office door. I think he was just going to nod at me, the way he usually does, but he stopped in his tracks when he saw my face. “What’s the matter, Dave?” he asked, real concern in his voice. He’s a good guy, Jose is. “You look like you just saw your own ghost.”

“Maybe I did,” I said, which left him shaking his head.

Why in God’s name was Charlie Kelly acting altogether too serious about a Third Sorcerous War? The first