Dragons & Dwarves

  I wondered what kind of doctor he was.

  “Mr. Maxwell?”

  Lucas stood by an open door, waiting for me. I stepped away from Dr. Pretorious and into Lucas’ office. “So how did you come to be part of Magetech?”

  Lucas closed the door after us. “I’ve always been a part of Magetech.”

  “Then why isn’t your portrait on the founder’s wall back there?”

  “I do not work for that kind of recognition.” He held out a hand toward a chair at a large oval conference table. “Have a seat.”

  The office was impressive, almost the size of the lobby downstairs. Two walls were glass, looking out at the Cleveland skyline, and everything was appointed in black-lacquered hardwood, chrome, and leather. It made me wonder what the CEO’s office was like.

  “You are here to talk about our history,” Lucas said as he walked around me to fold himself into another chair across the table.

  I held my notebook in front of me and nodded. “I’m doing a story about Councilman Mazurich’s influence on the city.”

  “That was a tragedy,” Lucas said. “He deserves a proper elegy.”

  At first, I thought Lucas misspoke. However, he didn’t strike me as one to make a casual slip of the tongue. He was very controlled. It made me think of what Teaghue Parthalán said, “A soul like Mazurich should have an epic written to him.”

  I nodded, “I’ve talked to dwarves that have the same sentiment.”

  Lucas leaned forward. “They told you much of the late Councilman Mazurich?”

  “They expressed gratitude for the efforts he conducted on their behalf.”

  Lucas leaned back. “Impressive efforts they were. He did much to create their world on this side of the Portal.”

  “Such as helping to found this company?”

  “Yes, the councilman was instrumental. He brought all the initial people together, including myself. He was adept at recognizing a problem, and seeing who might have potential solutions.”

  “The interference from the Portal.”

  “Our first viable product was a police radio and a walkie-talkie for the National Guard. Those first government contracts were the seed money that allowed all of this to happen.”

  I rubbed my forehead. The phrase “government contract” clicked one of the journalistic circuit breakers in my brain. “Was Mazurich involved in getting Magetech that kind of business?”

  It was the obvious question, but it was also a loaded one.

  Politicians, especially at the city and county level, were always open to the charge of conflict of interest. It would be hard to find a local official who didn’t have an incestuous relationship with local business. That was the nature of the beast. As long as the politician in question wasn’t directly involved in the decision to award largesse, there wasn’t anything criminal to it.

  But there’s something called, “the appearance of impropriety.” And, of course, it’s the job of every corporate hack and politician to keep that “appearance” minimal.

  Therefore I wasn’t prepared when Simon Lucas said, “Again, he was instrumental.”

  I looked up from my notes, “Are you saying that the councilman helped steer contracts toward Magetech?”

  Lucas smiled. The grin was predatory, and disturbing. As if Hieronymus Bosch did a hairless portrait of Jack Nicholson. Though the surreal appearance of Mr. Lucas might have had more to do with the office I found myself in. I got the continual sense of something trying to pry itself into my skull.

  “Mr. Maxwell, the councilman did everything in his power to help our enterprise . . . Are you feeling all right, Mr. Maxwell?”

  It was the damn reflections again. With all the lacquer and chrome in the office, wherever I looked, evil gibberish tried to drill itself into my eye sockets. “I’m fine . . .” I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths. “Did he benefit financially from those contracts?”

  “Mr. Maxwell.” Mr.Lucas steepled his too long fingers. “I assumed you realized he was part owner of this company.”

  He was still smiling. I couldn’t read him at all. He had to know that he was dangling red meat for a political reporter like me. Mazurich was not just a corporate kingmaker, bringing all the principals together, brokering the deals that formed Magetech.

  Lucas had just told me that he was a principal investor, and benefited personally from city contracts with the new company.

  “Mr. Lucas, are you saying . . . ?” I sucked in a breath and looked down. I was getting a deep sense of vertigo.

  “You do not look well. Let me get you a glass of water.”

  I nodded as I heard Lucas get up. In a moment I heard glass rattling.

  “Are you saying that Mazurich helped award contracts that he benefited from?”

  “Yes, he did.” I heard water pouring over ice. “It was a different time, and Magetech was the only company available to do what needed to be done. As I said, he recognized a problem, and found solutions.”

  My brain was swirling inside my head. He’s just told me that our late council president was profiteering off the chaos from the Portal.

  I felt his hand on my shoulder. “I think you need to drink something . . .”

  I nodded, weak and light-headed, the claws of a migraine just beginning to bite into my forebrain. “How much . . . ?” I couldn’t actually complete the sentence. I closed my eyes, knowing that this wasn’t right, that nothing about this was right.

  Lucas asked for me, his voice low and breathy. “How much is his portion of Magetech worth?”

  I could just manage a nod.

  Lucas told me a figure that would make a dragon blush.

  I opened my eyes to take the glass. My hand shook.

  I looked down into the icy water and saw a skull in the ice, laughing at me. The glass slid from my hand and, while I remember hearing a shattering noise, I don’t think I ever saw it hit the ground.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I’M not often prone to nightmares. I usually don’t remember my dreams at all. This one, however, was a bad one.

  I chase someone. I run through back alleys and scrap yards piled with engine blocks and old suits of plate mail. I run through the ruins of old steel mills and find myself at the Magetech complex, a maze of mirrored glass.

  I hear a muffled voice calling for me . . .

  “Dad?”

  “Sarah!” I scream at the mirrored glass, and pound at the doors.

  In front of me, the building implodes. It shatters as if there’s no substance to it other than the mirrored glass skin. Shards fall and swirl around me, like a lethal snowstorm, flying daggers all reflecting my daughter’s face.

  “Sarah!” I call again, feeling my flesh cut to ribbons.

  The shards swirl into a glass vortex, a chromed tornado falling into a spherical void that becomes the twin of the Portal itself.

  I take a step forward, naked, bleeding and sliding on my own blood.

  I am thrown back as a quartet of horsemen erupts from the Portal. Upon the pale horse that tramples me, I see a skeleton wrapped with raw flesh stitched together with steel wires.

  The figure of death leans toward me, opens its mouth, and makes an electronic beeping sound.

  Waking up didn’t make the beeping go away.

  I kicked off the covers, completely disoriented as to time and place. Three things managed to sink in the first ten seconds. I was in my own bed, my phone was ringing, and I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten here.

  I grabbed the phone, hoping for some clue to how I got back here.

  No such luck.

  “How could you put her up to this?” I could tell it was bad. Margaret had already skipped two preliminary octaves in the conversation and was a just a few sentences away from dog-whistle pissed.

  Despite my disorientation, something about talking to my ex made it very easy to slide right into the argument. “You know I didn’t put our daughter up to anything.”

  “You didn’t tell her not to
apply to those places.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, you’re living a few thousand miles away—”

  “There’s a reason for that.”

  “—and when the subject came up, I told her to tell you about it.”

  “And make me the bad guy? That isn’t fair, and you know it!”

  I sighed. I try hard to be a good long-distance father, and I’ve done my best to keep Sarah from playing us off against each other. But somehow, that never seemed good enough for Margaret.

  “Damn it, Kline, what am I supposed to do?”

  “You’re supposed to be her goddamn mother.” I must have really been stressed out, because I was harsh enough to actually leave Margaret speechless. “You’re the parent, you set the boundaries. You are the bad guy, by definition.”

  “I just want some support.”

  “What the hell do you think I’ve given you? Do you have any idea how often she tries to get me to tell her that you’re being stupid and unreasonable? How many times I’ve told her you’re the boss, and I’m not going to second-guess you. I’m not there—”

  “You should have told her that she shouldn’t have applied—”

  “I told her she shouldn’t have lied to you.”

  “You should have never let her fly up there.”

  “I shouldn’t have let her?” My hand was trembling and my teeth were clenched so tight that my voice could barely come out.

  “Kline?”

  “I gave you everything you asked for, the divorce, custody, the nodding assent of every stupid soft-headed hysterical parenting decision you ever made—But I am not going to tell my daughter that I don’t want to see her.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking—”

  “What, then? What are you asking? I’ll tell you right now that there’s nothing I’m going to tell her that will keep her from resenting our breakup.”

  “That’s not what this is about!”

  “So you’ve talked to her?”

  “I’ve told her—”

  “I know exactly what you’ve told her. Did you ask her anything? Like why she feels she has no chance discussing this with you?”

  “This isn’t a negotiation! She knows how I feel about this, and she went ahead anyway.”

  “Went ahead and what, Margaret?”

  “You know what she did. She went behind my back—”

  “—and was accepted into Kent State University.”

  She was quiet for a moment.

  “You know how most parents I know find out about their kids going behind their back? A call from the cops. I want to know if you’d be coming down nearly as hard on her if that had happened. She applied to a college—you want to know how many parents would give anything to see that kind of rebellion in their kids?”

  “Stop it! You don’t understand.”

  I took a few breaths and released my grip on the phone. It was the first time in a few years that I had really lost my temper and let loose on Margaret, and it made me feel like an asshole.

  Not that I was completely pure in this relationship. In my more self-aware moments I knew that a lot of my identity as a parent was tied up in being the reasonable one—an easy role when you’re nowhere near the teenage epicenter.

  “I’m sorry. I’m a little stressed out.”

  “A little?”

  “She did wrong. I know it, and she knows it.”

  “What about her trip? She’s coming to see you. She’s been looking forward to this for a year.”

  My daughter’s voice from my nightmare was ringing in my ears. “They’re refundable tickets, aren’t they?”

  “I can’t just cancel it.”

  “No, that would be a bit too much. But you can reschedule it, can’t you?”

  “You mean ground her for a month?”

  “And send her over in January.”

  “You’d be willing to give up the holidays?”

  I sighed. “I hate to say this, but it might actually work out better with my job.”

  “Great.” Somehow she was able to subliminally insert the entire history of our divorce in that one word.

  “Let me know if you have any trouble changing the dates. I’ll chip in any difference in the airfare.”

  “Thanks, but we have a good travel agent. I don’t think it will be a problem.”

  “She’s a good girl,” I told her.

  “I know.”

  “Tell her I love her.”

  “I will.”

  I hung up, feeling a mixture of relief and disappointment. I really had been looking forward to showing Sarah around the local tourist traps. But the nightmare image of zombie-boy was fresh in my head, and for once, Margaret’s fears about mana-infested Northeast Ohio seemed perfectly reasonable.

  Not to mention, I was still trying to figure out what day and time it was. I stumbled out into my living room, still holding my phone.

  I squinted at daylight streaming in my windows. The angle of the sun made it early evening. I glanced in the kitchen and the clock on my microwave read 4:30 PM.

  I sat down, shaking my head. I never slept during the day and waking up twelve hours off my normal schedule threw my whole equilibrium out of balance. I had no idea if I’d been unconscious for four hours, or twenty-four. My last conscious memory before waking up was talking to the COO of Magetech, Simon Lucas.

  I checked my phone messages.

  First call at 12:45, shortly after my interview with Lucas. “Hello, Mr. Maxwell? This is Nora Abrams at Magetech. Mr. Lucas wanted me to call and make sure you made it home all right. You were suffering a bad reaction, and we just wanted to check up on you.”

  “A bad reaction?” I muttered. “To what?”

  At 2:00, Sarah had called. “Dad, I told her. She went ballistic, just like I told you she would. I just know she’s going to cancel my trip up there. Call me or I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  My cell phone rang.

  I usually turn the cell off when I come home. I try to keep the cell for work, and the landline for my personal life. Not that it works particularly well.

  Probably I wasn’t in any state to remember to kill it when I came home, if I was having blackouts. Christ, what happened to me?

  I hung up the landline and answered the cell phone, mostly because my argument with Margaret was still running through my head at that point and I was half-convinced that it was my ex or my daughter trying the other phone because I had the home line tied up.

  I wasn’t thinking very clearly. Otherwise I would have looked at the caller ID.

  “Maxwell?”

  “Hello?” Male voice, odd accent . . . I shifted mental gears when I realized who it was. “Dr. Kawata?”

  “Yeah, I ran those tests like you wanted me to. You need to tell me what the hell’s going on here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, you want a list? I put that sample in the county’s brand-new spectrometer. The one that’s supposed to filter out all that damn background noise, and the bastard doesn’t work. Readings as crazy as anything on the old equipment. I ran it a dozen times to average it all out, and you know what I got?”

  “What?”

  “Run-of-the-mill sodium chloride.”

  “Salt?”

  “Salt. Plain old salt, crushed fine with a few trace mineral impurities.”

  “Shit. Why would someone send me salt of all things?”

  “That’s not the question, Maxwell.”

  “There’s more?”

  “Yeah, there’s more. I want to know why I just spent two hours being questioned by the FBI about your little package.”

  “What?”

  “What did you get me into, Maxwell? I’m a civil servant, I got a pension, I don’t need to be mixed up in this type of crap.”

  I shook my head. I hadn’t expected the FBI to catch up with this so quickly. “I’m sorry. I think the feds were investigating the person who probably sent that to me. I didn’t mean to g
et you involved with anything.”

  “Well, you find any other mystery powders, have someone else look at it. I like my job too much.”

  “What did the Feds want?”

  “Why don’t you ask them? I’m sure they’ll be talking to you.”

  Dr. Kawata hung up.

  “Salt?”

  I got dressed, trying to remember my interview with Lucas. I couldn’t remember anything past dropping the water glass. However, the sense of unease around the Magetech complex still clung to me like the stale smoke around Columbia Jennings’ office. Every time I thought of Lucas, I felt something sour in the pit of my stomach.

  There was something twisted about the guy—and my feelings about him made no objective logical sense whatsoever. Anyone looking at a transcript of my conversation with him wouldn’t see anything but a very cooperative and open interview subject. I knew, because I had that transcript. My notebook was covered with my handwriting. Notes I had no memory of jotting down

  The guy had no problem answering every question I had, in detail.

  “Maybe I was asking the wrong questions?”

  The guy was way too open. He was telling me things about Mazurich’s history with Magetech that no sane executive should be stating on the record to a political reporter.

  I apparently had a more detailed conversation with Mr. Lucas than I remembered.

  However, the highlights were clear from the prelude I could recall. I had conflict of interest in spades, and dollar amounts with enough zeros to give Gregory Washington’s creative auditors an orgasm. The fact that Mazurich’s assets were news to me meant that they were never publicly disclosed.

  I flipped through my notes and saw a road map of Mazurich’s secret finances, complete with quotes from Lucas that were marked as being on the record.

  “What the hell?”

  Lucas was giving me exactly what I should want.

  For almost every line, I could think of at least two means of independent verification. With a few hours and a few phone calls, the right questions would have this story ironclad. I could easily reconfirm any quotes with Lucas before running the piece.

  And I had a gut feeling that it was all completely accurate.