The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

need. I almost wished Judaism had a convenient gesture like the sign of the cross. I could have used one just then. To say I was flummoxed is to put it mildly.

“Let’s try it again,” I said, as much to steady myself as for any other reason. I tried again, from square one, shutting down the spellchecker and reactivating it. You have to be careful if you do that more than once in a short time: the spirits inside can take on too many spirits from the wine and lose memory. But it did make them stop screaming.

This time I reversed the normal order and had them analyze the sorcerous component of the tonic, not the physical ingredients that went into making the complete magic. That’s what I tried to do, at any rate. The screaming started again as soon as the probe got anywhere near the jar.

I looked at the ground glass to see what the microimps had to say. They expressed their opinion in two words: UNIDENTIFIED—FORBIDDEN. They wrote those two words until the whole screen was full, then started underlining them. Whatever had gone into that tonic, in analyzing it I’d sent a boy to do a man’s, or maybe a giant’s, job.

Even moving the probe away didn’t calm the spellchecker imps. They stopped underlining only when I closed the jar as tight as I could. Even then, none of the usual commands or invocations would clear the ground glass or make them stop screaming. I had to shut down the spellchecker to get them to shut up.

“Mrs. Cordero, whatever is in this potion, it’s very strong magic and very dark magic,” I said. Magdalena translated for me. “My spellchecker won’t even confront it, you see. I want two things from you, please.” She nodded. I went on, “First, I want to take this jar to a proper thaumaturgical laboratory for full analysis.”

“Sí, take it,” she said.

“The other thing I want is the name of the curandero who sold it to you,” I said. “Mrs. Cordero, this stuff is dangerous. Do you want another mother to have a baby born like Jesus?”

“Madre de Dios, no,” she exclaimed.

“Good,” I answered, more abstractedly than I should have. I was wondering if the hellbrew in the tartar- sauce jar had caused all the apsychic births around the Devonshire dump. If it had, then the biggest part of the case for leaks against the dump had just collapsed. But if the dump and everybody using it were innocent, who’d torched the Thomas Brothers monastery, and why? All at once, nothing made sense.

I pulled my attention back to the tacky little living room in which I stood (I’m sorry, but an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, while undoubtedly effective as an apotropaic, is not to my mind a work of art if it’s painted on black velvet in luridly phosphorescent colors). Lupe Cordero still hadn’t said who the curandero was. I realized she was waiting to be coaxed. Okay, I’d coax her. “Please, Mrs. Cordero, this information is very important.”

“You don’ tell him who you hear it from?” she asked anxiously.

I hedged. “I’ll try not to.”

To my relief, that was good enough for her. “Okay,” she said. “He call himself CuauhtÇmoc Hernandez, and he have his house up near Van Nuys Boulevard and O’Melveny.” I noted the irony of a curandero operating by a Dutch and Erse corner; Angels City is changing. Lupe went on, “His sign, it say curandero in letters red an’ green.”

“Thanks very much, Mrs. Cordero,” I said, and meant every word of it. I wrote down what she’d told me so I wouldn’t forget it, then left the house and started flying around looking for a public pay phone. I finally found one outside a liquor store whose front window said CERVEZA FRIA in letters three times the size of the ones that advertised COLD BEER.

I called the office from there, and got Rose. When I asked to talk to Bea, she said, “I’m sorry, Dave, she’s already on the phone with someone.”

“Could you ask her to come out to your desk, please?” I said. “This is important.”

One of Rose’s many wonderful attributes is her almost occult sense of knowing when somebody really means something like that (and if there’s a spell to produce the same effect, way too many secretaries have never heard of it). Half a minute later, Bea said, “What is it, David?” It had better be interesting lurked behind her words.

When I’d told her what the spellchecker had done with Lupe Cordero’s potion, she sighed and said, “Well, you were right: that is important. Bring it in to the laboratory right away, David, and we’ll see what really is in it. Then we and the constabulary will drop on Mr.—Hernandez, did you say his name was?—like a ton of bricks. Most of the time these curanderos are only guilty of venial sin, but desouling a baby isn’t even slightly venial.”

“If that’s what did it,” I said cautiously. “But yeah, I’m on my way. I’m just glad the lab survived last year’s budget cuts.”

“So am I,” Bea answered.

Farming things out to private alchemists and wizards would have eaten up just as much budget as maintaining our own analysis unit: specialists, naturally, charge plenty for their expertise. You’re not just paying for what they know now, but for what learning it cost them. And besides, this way we didn’t have to stand in a queue in case we needed results in a hurry.

As soon as I got back to the Westwood Confederal building, I took the jar over to the lab. It’s on the same floor as the rest of the EPA offices, but tucked into a corner and hedged around with protective charms not much different from the ones on the fence outside the Devonshire dump.

Our principal thaumaturgic analyst (bureaucratese for wizard, in case you’re wondering) is a balding blond fellow named Michael (not Mike) Manstein. He’s very good at what he does; he brings an Alemanic sense of precision and order to what’s too often a chaotic art. That he makes me want to stand at attention and click my heels every time I go in to talk with him is by comparison a detail.

“Hello, David,” he said, looking up from the table where he was inscribing a circle with his black-handled knife. “What can I do for you this afternoon?”

I gave him the tartar-sauce bottle and explained where I’d got it and how my spellchecker had reacted to it. His eyebrows came together as he listened; a little vertical crease appeared just above his nose. I finished, “So I’d like you to find out what really is in the jar here and what spells made it strong enough to set off my spellchecker like that. I may have to exorcise it before I can use it again.”

“Interesting.” Michael took the jar from me, wrapped it in a green silk cloth with several magical symbols inscribed on it in pigeon’s blood. “When must you have results from the analysis?”

“Yesterday would be good,” I said. He laughed the small, polite laugh of a man who not only doesn’t have the best sense of humor ever hatched but also has been besieged by importunate clients more times than he cares to remember. I went on, “Seriously, if I can have this tomorrow some time, that would be great. The stuff is suspected of being involved in an apsychia case, and may be linked to several others up in the Valley.”

“Ah, I see. This tells me what I need to set my priorities for the coming work.” Michael Manstein is too compulsively precise to get sloppy with the language and say things like prioritize.

“That’s nice,” I said. Whatever his priorities were, the potion wasn’t at the top of them. He went back to scribing his circle. I turned to go; trying to hurry Manstein is like trying to make the sun rise faster. Then I had an afterthought. “Whose sorcerer’s tools do you use, Michael?”

He finished the circle before he answered; one thing at a time with Michael Manstein. “I order them from Bakhtiar’s,” he said at last. “They’ve always given me good results.”

Back before the Industrial Revolution, a wizard had to be his own smith, his own woodworker, his own tanner. If he didn’t make his instruments himself—sometimes right down to refining the ore from which a metal would be drawn—they wouldn’t be properly attuned to him and would give weak results or none at all.

Modern technology has changed all that. Correct application of the law of contagion allows thaumaturgical tools to keep the mystic links to their original manufacturer even when someone else uses them, while the law of similarity permits their attunement to any wizard because of his likeness to the mage who made them. Some firms take one approach, some the other, some seek to combine the two.

Michael asked, “Why do you want to know that?”

“Because I thought you used Bakhtiar’s tools,” I answered, “and because Bakhtiar’s may be somehow connected to the jar of potion I just gave you. What I know is that Bakhtiar’s dumps at Devonshire, and there may be an involvement between the Devonshire dump case and this stuff. It’s a circumstantial link if it’s there at all, but I figured you ought to know about it.”