top of my to-do list.” I shoved the parchmentacross the desk at her.
She looked at it, she looked at me, she shook her head slowly back and forth a couple of times. In that church-choir voice of hers, she said, “David, why do I get the feeling the main reason you’re showing me this list is to get my approval in advance for what you intend to do anyway?”
With some bosses, wide-eyed innocence would have been the best approach: Me? I can’t wtagfne what you’re talking about. Try that with Bea and she’d rap your knuckles with a ruler, maybe metaphorically, maybe not. I said, “You’re right. But I really think these are the things that need doing. I’ll handle as much of the rest of the stuff as I can, but I’m not going to worry if I get behind on it while I’m settling the big things.” If I’d had to, I’d have told her about Charlie Kelly then. That would have shown her I wasn’t taking the spell dump case too seriously.
But she looked at me again, nodded as slowly as she’d shaken her head before. “David, part of being a good manager is giving your people their heads and letting them run with their projects. I’m going to do that with you now. But another part of being a good manager is letting people know you’re not here to be taken advantage of.”
“I understand,” I said. And I did: if these cases turned out to be inconsequential, or if they were important and I botched them, she’d rack me for it. That was firm, but it was fair. Bea is a good manager, even if I do hate staff meetings.
“All right, David,” she said with a faint sigh. “Thank you.”
Rose gave me a curious look as I emerged from Bea’s office. I flashed a thumbs-up, then waggled it a little to show I wasn’t sure everything would fly on angels’ wings. She made silent clapping motions to congratulate me. “Oh, David, what was mat bird the constabulary legate called you about?” she asked.
“As a matter of fact, I still don’t know myself,” I said. “I went to the reference center to look it up, but I couldn’t fend it there. That means it’s not local, whatever it is. I’ll call Kawaguchi back this afternoon and find out I’ll let you know as soon as I do.” One way to keep a secretary happy is not to hold out on her.
I went back to my office, dug through my notes, found the phone number for Bakhtiar’s Precision Burins, and called. The way my luck had been running, I figured a thunderbolt would probably smite the Confederal Building just as I made the connection.
And I was close. The phone at the other end had just begun to squawk when a little earthquake rattled the building.
I sat there waiting, wondering the way you always do whether the little earthquake would turn into a big one. It didn’t; in a few seconds, the rattling stopped. Along with (I’m sure) several million other people, I breathed a prayer of thanksgiving.
The secretary for Bakhtiar’s Precision Burins and I spent a little while going “Did you feel that?” and “I sure did” back and forth at each other before I confirmed my appointment and hung up. Then I got back on the phone— this morning I’d used it as much as Bea usually does—and called Tony Sudakis. “HeDo, Dave,” he said. “I was wondering when I’d hear from you again. Thought maybe my file fell behind your desk or something.” He laughed to show I wasn’t supposed to take him seriously.
I laughed too, to show I didn’t. “No such luck,” I told him.
“This is just to let you know that we will be doing a sorcerous decontamination check of the area around your site as soon as we can get the apparatus together. I appreciate the courtesy of the call, Inspector,” he answered slowly—I wasn’t Dave any more. I have to tell you, though, we still deny any contamination. You’ll need a show- cause order before you can start anything like that, and we’ll fight it.”
“I know,” I said. “When your legal staff asks you, tell them the case is under the jurisdiction of Judge Ruhollah”—I spelled it for him—“since he granted me the original search warrant.” If the EPA couldn’t get a show- cause order out of Maximum Ruhollah, I figured it was time for us to fold our tents and head off into the desert.
“Judge Ruhollah,” Sudakis repeated. “I’ll pass it along.
’Bye.” I didn’t think he knew about RuhoBah. But the consortium’s lawyers would.
I moved parchments from one pile to another on my desk, called Legate Kawaguchi again and found out he was still at the crime scene, then ate a rubberized hamburger at the cafeteria. I washed it down with a cup of hot black mud, slid down the parking lot, and headed up into St. Ferdinand’s Valley again.
Normally I wouldn’t go up there ten times a year. I’d been doing it so often lately that I was starting to memorize the freeway exits. I got off at White Oak and flew north toward Balditiar’s Precision Burins. On the way, I passed a church dedicated to St. Andrew: actually, to San Andreas, because it was an Aztecan neighborhood. A line of penitents was filing in. I wondered why; St Andrew’s feast day isn’t until November.
Then I remembered the morning’s earthquake. No doubt they were calling on the saint to keep more and worse from happening. Their chants rang so loud and sincere, they made me sure that if another earthquake did strike, it wouldn’t be San Andreas’ fault I flew into the parking lot behind Bakhtiafs Precision Burins a couple of minutes early. The building that housed the outfit was four times the size of Slow Jinn Fizz’s fancy establishment on Venture Boulevard, and probably cost about a fourth as much to rent It had the virtue of absolute plainness—one more industrial building in an industrial part of town.
The receptionist who greeted me was about a fourth as decorative as the one at Slow Jinn Fizz, too. So it goes. But she was friendly enough, or maybe more than friendly enough. “Oh, you’re Inspector Fisher,” she said when I showed her my EPA sign. “Did the earth move for you, too?”
She giggled.
I didn’t know what to make of that If I’d been unattached, I might have been more interested in finding out As it was, I figured the best thing to do was let it alone, so I did.
I said, “Is Mr. Bakhtiar free to see me?”
“Just a minute, I’ll check.” She picked up the handset of the phone. Bakhtiafs Precision Burins wasn’t in the high-rent district but it used all the latest sorceware. The silencing spell on the phone was so good that I couldn’t hear a word the receptionist said till she hung up. “He says he can give you forty-five minutes at the most. Will that be all right?”
“Thanks. It should be fine, Mistress Mendoza,” I answered, reading the name plate on her desk:CYNTHIA MENDOZA.
“Call me Cyndi,” she said. “Everybody does. Here, come on with me. I have to let you into the back of the shop because of the security system.”
I followed her back down the hall. Balditiar’s doorway wasn’t hermetically sealed; as I’ve said, only really big firms and governments can afford that much security. But he did have an alarmed door: if anybody who wasn’t audiorized touched the doorknob, it would yell bloody murder.
Cyndi Mendoza took the knob in her hand and chanted softly from the Book of Proverbs: “ ‘She criedi at the gates, at the entrance of the city, at the coming of the doors,’ ” and then from the Song of Solomon: “ ‘I rose up to open to my beloved. I opened to my beloved.’ ” The knob turned in her hand. She waved me through ahead other, then murmured something else to the door to propitiate it for having let me through.
“Do you know,” she said as she led me through the burin works to Bakhtiar’s office, “the same charm that persuades the alarmed door to open peaceably is also used sometimes as a seduction spell?”
“Is that a fact?” I said, though it didn’t surprise me: nothing in the Judeo-Christian tradition blends sensuality and mystic power like the Song of Solomon.
She nodded. “It doesn’t get tried as often as it used to, though—it only works on virgins.” This brought forth more giggles.
She couldn’t have made it more obvious she was interested in me if she’d run up a flag. A man always finds that flattering, but I wasn’t interested back. I said, “Is that a fact?” again. It’s one of the few things you can safely say under any circumstances, because it doesn’t mean a thing.
“Well, here we are,” Cyndi said, stopping in front of a door that had ISHAQ BAKHTIAR, MARGRAVE painted on it in black letters edged with gilt She tapped on the door—which mustn’t have been alarmed, since it didn’t scream—then headed back toward her own desk. I’m afraid she gave me a dirty look as she went by.
Ishaq Bakhtiar opened his own door, waved for me to come in. He didn’t look like a corporate margrave; he looked—and dressed—like a working journeyman wizard.
By stereotype, Persians come in two varieties, short and round or long and angular. Ramzan Durani of Slow Jinn Fizz had been of the first sort. Bakhtiar exemplified the second.
Everything about him was vertical lines: thin arms and legs, his big, not quite straight nose and the creases
