The kid clutched the packet and retreated. Odd. My internal reaction wasn’t overpowering, but it was of a strength usually reserved for those darlings who make priests regret their career choices.
I opened the door. The ragamuffin slid out and scurried away, hunched like he expected to get hit. He didn’t slow down till he reached the intersection of Macunado Street with Wizard’s Reach.
He looked back while he was eating, saw me watching. Startled, he zipped around the corner.
Buzz! Buzz! Tinkling, musical laughter. Something tugged my hair. A tiny voice piped, “Garrett’s got a girlfriend.”
“Hello, Marienne.” Marienne was an adolescent pixie of the female variety. A squabbling nest of the wee folk live in the voids inside the exterior walls of my house. Marienne loved to give me a hard time.
“Looked a little young to me,” a second voice observed. My hair suffered again. “Too tender for a butcher whose forest is getting a little thin in back.”
“Hollybell. You horrid little bug. I knew you’d never let Marienne out of your sight.” Hollybell and Marienne are inseparable. Before the leaves finish falling, though, they’ll discover boys who aren’t all smell and dirt and stupid. Soon the slightest sigh would have universe-shuddering importance.
“Mr. Garrett?”
Dean wanted me. He always horns in when I want to play with little girls.
2
Dean had fetched the message packet. “Go in your office. Figure out what this is. I’ll bring tea and biscuits, then get breakfast started. I was thinking those little sausages and soft-boiled eggs.”
“A real treat.” I gave the old boy the fisheye. “What are you up to?”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said. You’re up to something. It might include that kid-who the pixies say is really a girl.” The red-blooded Karentine boy inside me had sensed the truth. “If you turn polite and start acting like a real housekeeper, you’re up to some villainy. There’s no need for a show of wounded dignity, either.”
The old-timer needed to polish his act. He was as predictable as me.
I settled behind my desk, in the glamorized janitor’s closet I use for an office. I turned sideways, blew a kiss at Eleanor. She’s the woman in the painting hanging behind my chair. She’s fleeing a brooding mansion on a really stormy night. A light burns in one window only. She’s terrified. But she was in a good mood at the moment. She winked.
I opened the message wallet. A sheaf of documents fell out.
They were from Harvester Temisk. A lawyer. The kind who is at home in lawyer jokes. But with a perpetually dumbfounded look on his clock.
Harvester Temisk has just one client. Chodo Contague, erstwhile emperor of TunFaire’s multiple kingdoms of crime. The king of kings of the underworld. The head crook.
These days Chodo snoozes along in a coma while his beautiful, criminally insane daughter runs the family business. Belinda pretends she gets instructions from the emperor’s own lips.
Dean brought orange tea and sugar cookies. “The sausages are cooking. And there’ll be stewed apples instead of eggs. Singe wants stewed apples.”
More proof Dean was up to no good, serving specialty tea and sweets. “She’d live on stewed apples if she could.” Pular Singe has weaseled herself into an apprenticeship and is angling for junior partner. She’s good people and good company. She keeps me from turning into a disgusting old bachelor.
Dean scurried away. Yet more proof. He didn’t want to be questioned.
I started reading.
Harvester Temisk reminded me that I’d promised to visit him once I wrapped the case I was working last time we met. I never got back to him. “Dean!”
“I’m cooking as fast as I can.”
“I can’t find my notes about Chodo’s birthday party: When did I say it was supposed to be?”
“It’s tonight. At The Palms. Miss Contague reserved the whole club. How could you forget?”
“Maybe I didn’t want to remember.” You don’t want to socialize with the Contagues. Well… Belinda… when she isn’t totally psychotic…
Belinda Contague is the perfect beautiful woman without mercy. The grim, unforgiving world of organized crime quickly grew deadlier after her advent. Only a few people know she’s the true brains of the Outfit. The fact that her father is comatose is a closely held secret. Maybe five people know. One of those is Chodo.
I worry about being one of the other four. I have no trouble seeing the logic of reducing four to a more manageable three. Or even two.
The Outfit may collapse into civil war when the underbosses find out that their orders come from a woman. Though Belinda has worked hard to restructure the organization, advancing people she finds more congenial.
I didn’t want to attend Chodo’s party. Too many people connect me with the Contagues already. My being there would only convince the secret police that I’m more significant than I am.
Beyond the accusatory note, the packet contained documents signed by Chodo. Before the incident that resulted in his coma, presumably. Maybe Chodo saw it coming.
Harvester Temisk held the opinion that his employer conspired against the future as a matter of course. He had given Temisk a power of attorney, picked some fool named Garrett to handle his mouthpiece’s legwork.
All through his dark career Chodo had guessed right. He’d been in the right place at the right time. The exception-perhaps-having been that one time when it had become possible for his daughter to live a nightmare, keeping the man she hated most where she could torment him daily.
The Contagues aren’t your ideal, warm and loving, fuzzy family. They never were. Chodo murdered Belinda’s mother when he found out she was cheating on him. Belinda is still working on forgiving him. She hasn’t had much luck.
Dean arrived with breakfast.
Temisk didn’t say what he wanted me to do. Mostly, he was worried about whether or not I would keep my word.
I thought and ate and couldn’t conjure one workable way to weasel out of the obligation.
I owed Chodo. Multiple ways. He’d helped me frequently, without being asked. He’d known me well enough to understand that I’d trudge through life oppressed by the imbalance.
As well as always being in the right place at the right time, Chodo understood what made people work. Except Belinda. The mad daughter was his blind spot. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be in a wheelchair drooling on himself.
Dean brought more tea. “Do we have a new case?”
He was up to something for sure.
“No. I’m about to pay the vig on an old debt.”
He grunted, underwhelmed.
3
Pular Singe wandered in later. She didn’t fit well, on account of her tail. She lugged a big, steaming bowl of stewed apples. “Want some?” She was addicted to stewed apples, a food you don’t usually associate with rats.
“No, thank you.”
TunFaire is infested with rats, including two species of the regular vermin and several kinds of ratpeople. Ratpeople are intelligent, smaller than human critters, with ancestors who came to life in the laboratories of mad sorcerers early last century. As ratpeople go, Singe is a genius. The smartest I’ve ever met, the bravest, and the best tracker ever.
“What’ll you do after you’ve gobbled this year’s whole apple crop?”
She eyed me speculatively, sorting potential meanings. Ratpeople have no natural sense of humor. Singe does have one, but it’s learned and can take a bizarre turn.
She knows that when I ask a question with no obvious connection to daily reality, I’m usually teasing. She even manages the occasional comeback.