Dragons & Dwarves

  He raised his tongs. “Hold that thought.” He proceeded to pile four medium rare steaks on a platter. “I’ll just be a moment.”

  Baldassare walked toward the French doors that opened onto the patio with his pile of steaks. He bore a brief resemblance to a server in one of those old-world Little Italy restaurants. He left me outside to sip my drink.

  He came back without any steaks. When he saw me looking at him, he wiped his hands on his apron and said, “Oh, I’d already eaten.” He shut down the grill and shed the apron on the back of a wrought iron chair. He walked over and fixed himself a drink. “So, Kline, since when did dead dragons become political?”

  “Since the dragon was political.”

  “A little outside the City Hall beat, isn’t it?”

  “A little,” I agreed. “You knew him.”

  “The dragon?” For a few long moments he looked introspective as he sipped an unstirred vodka martini. “No, I didn’t know Aloeus.”

  I arched my eyebrow enough so he’d know that I knew of his business relationship with Aloeus.

  He acknowledged me with a shake of the head. “I’m not saying I didn’t meet him, negotiate with him, do business with him, even. But I never knew him.” He gave me a half smile, and I knew that he was having a chuckle at my expense. At how transparent I was and how easily he faked me out.

  He gestured toward a pair of wrought iron chairs that flanked a mosaic table. The motif on the table was a reproduction of some ancient Greek artwork, a serpentine monster that undulated endless coils around a naked human figure armed only with a sword. “Have a seat.”

  I took the chair, and he settled in next to me. Seated, we both looked out from the patio toward a rolling hillside that ended in the Chagrin River.

  “Kline, take out your notebook. For once, what I’m telling you is on the record.”

  “You see that hill over there? That’s where we met the first time. I still don’t know exactly how he found me, or how he knew who I was.

  “I was coming out to the barbecue, just like you saw me. I dropped fifteen pounds of baby back ribs into the dirt when I saw him. It was just the start of an early spring, about two months after the thing opened. You know what it was like then? Yeah. It wasn’t much better for me. I mean, of all the ways to lose the season. The National Guard was parked on my stadium, and it looked like the Feds were about to steamroller through everything.

  “And I walked outside and there’s this lizard as big as my house sitting on the lawn and looking at me—he looked at me like my wife’s cat looks at me. Head cocked to one side. And that neck—he was looking down on the roof. How he managed not to be seen for two months, I don’t know. I suppose there was some sort of magic involved.

  “What he looked like? I keep thinking of my wife’s cat, this arrogant Siamese with a shitty attitude. Not that he looked anything like a cat; he didn’t, but it was the body language, the way he sat and looked at you.

  “Black skin, muscles rippling like a thoroughbred, head almost birdlike. He blinked slowly, like he had all the time in the world.

  “His tail dragged in the water, and when he lowered his head toward me, I could feel his breath on my face. Smelled like flowers and brimstone, sort of a perfumed sulfur.

  “I won’t lie. I nearly crapped my pants. I thought I was going to die there and then.

  “Then it opened its mouth.

  “ ‘Mr. Baldassare, we have to talk.’

  “Now the last thing I expected from this thing was for it to talk to me. This was something out of a monster movie—supposed to eat people, not talk to them. And the voice. If James Earl Jones was a nine-hundred-foot-tall pope, he could sound like that if he was really pissed.

  “Despite that, I managed to ask it how it knew me.

  “ ‘I know many things.’

  “This was one of those moments where everything just sort of clicks. For me, this was the point when I personally realized that everything had changed forever. I backed up and sat down in the chair you’re sitting in now.

  “ ‘You know me,’ I told it. ‘I don’t know you.’ That’s one of the first rules of negotiation, never let the other side realize you’re scared and intimidated. Especially if you are scared and intimidated.

  “ ‘Call me Aloeus. I am the first of my kind to transit this realm.’

  “ ‘What do you want?’ I was doing my damnedest to stay calm with this thing’s breath smelling of wet sulfur and wearing a lizard grin that had incisors the size of Mike Tyson’s biceps. It wasn’t easy. But I kept thinking, I’ve talked turkey with folks in Youngstown who’d kill me as easy as this thing, and probably in more creative ways.

  “ ‘You know the ruler here, the local baron?’

  “It took me a moment to get it. ‘Dave Rayburn?’

  “ ‘Dave Rayburn.’

  “ ‘Yes, I know him. I helped get him elected. He’s the mayor, though, not a baron—he doesn’t even have any jurisdiction here—’ I waved at the hills and the Chagrin River over there. ‘His authority stops at Cleveland’s border.’

  “ ‘I have known mayors. His rule extends beyond that title.’

  “I didn’t correct him. States of emergency do tend to amplify executive power. But, Dave had only been in office half a term, and while the Portal business solidified his support in the city initially, that was a short honeymoon. Right at that moment, Dave was probably at his lowest ebb, fighting the Feds, the state, the Council. He wanted to hold the Portal, but he was only inches from caving. I was not telling the dragon that. I was hoping he knew something I didn’t.

  “In retrospect, he did.

  “I asked, ‘What do you want with the mayor?’

  “ ‘We need to discuss his future, and ours.’

  “I won’t bore you with the details, but we talked through the night. He told me what the Portal could mean to both our peoples.

  “What did it mean? Well, to Aloeus and his kind—and I mean kind to include the elves, griffins, unicorns—it was an escape from the tyranny of Ragnan, the realm on the other side of the Portal. To us, it was a window to possibilities that we couldn’t have dreamed of before. At that point we were still dealing with the negative side effects of the Portal—Aloeus wanted to be sure we saw the positive ones.

  “Yes, and he wanted the Portal to remain under local control.

  “When dawn broke he said, ‘Go now, bring him here.’

  “I tried to tell him that there was an emergency going on here, and pulling the city’s mayor out to the suburbs might not be that easy.

  “Aloeus held out a clawed fist in front of me. His hands seemed tiny in proportion to his body, but that fist was still the size of my head. He opened it, and laying in his hand was a loop of solid gold chain. ‘Take this to him. He will come.’

  “I picked it up, and it was warm to the touch. At the time I thought it was from being held, but now I’m pretty sure it was the heat of some sort of enchantment. I took it as a good faith offering.

  “Of course, when I managed to corner Dave in the HQ they’d set up at the Justice Center, he looked at me as if I were nuts. There were a few moments that morning when I was convinced that we’d finally parted company.

  “Then I gave him the chain, which was still warm.

  “I told you about the moment when everything clicks? I think that was the point where Dave had his click. He handled that chain for a few moments, and he must have felt something I couldn’t, because right then was when he told the U.S. Army to go to hell.

  “That had been the decision he’d been struggling with the past week or so. The federal government was moving into position to cap this Portal thing; they were just waiting for the mayor. He handled the chain, looked out the window at the stadium, and called in his aides.

  “He gave them the first notice that David Rayburn wasn’t going to play ball. Instead, he told them to request the governor to send in every available National Guard unit to, in his words, ‘help hold the city.’
It was as much to hold it against the Army, as the Portal.

  “That evening, a motorcade came down here. We had Dave, about six police cars, and two Hummers carrying National Guardsmen. Dave didn’t talk on the way out here, he just kept staring out the window and fondling that chain. He was looking out at what had happened to the city already. Even on the outbound Shoreway, you could see the damage. Boarded-up storefronts, boarded-up banks. National Guard on patrol through the streets of Cleveland—and once we crossed the border we saw some of the Army units, tanks and all.

  “When we left 271, we passed through three blackout zones.

  “I know he was thinking about the city. At that point I don’t think he was sure that keeping the Feds out was the right thing. You must remember what it was like the first two months. Everyone—I mean everyone—was calling for Dave’s head. The President was calling him an insane autocrat for trying to retain control of the Portal. I mean, in the third week of the crisis, Dave had to go as far as to get a federal judge to issue a restraining order to keep the Army from taking over.

  “For two months he had been resisting. And it looked, then, like he had committed political suicide. I was close to the only ally he had left—and frankly that was because I had some vested interest in keeping the Feds from taking over the stadium. It was getting to the point where I felt that we were going to need to let the Feds in just to get the city under control. I mean, it wasn’t money anymore, it was getting to be things like food—

  “Yeah? I know about those rumors. I’m not going to venture an opinion. I have no direct knowledge that the Army was blocking aid into the city to put pressure on Dave. I know that shipments were making it into the suburbs, but not over the border. That could just as well have been the jurisdictional chaos the Army blamed it on. The Senate hearings found no wrongdoing, so I’m not going out on a limb to say there was any.

  “Anyway, what I was saying was that Dave was taking a hell of an unpopular position at that point. People were starting to go hungry, and it was his fault. No one saw the Portal as anything other than a bizarre natural disaster. The federal government wanted to take it over, and he was the only one who saw any reason not to let them.

  “Aloeus had stayed, as promised, and when the motorcade rounded the driveway, I was worried that the Guard, or the police escort, would start shooting. This huge lizard hadn’t become any less intimidating while I’d been gone. Fortunately, Aloeus didn’t make any sudden moves, and I doubt he considered the threat from the Guardsmen or the police as significant. Or, more likely, considering where he came from, he considered it only appropriate that the local baron have an honor guard.

  “The security people didn’t want Dave to leave the car, but Dave shook them off. I moved to accompany him, and he just shook his head. ‘No, Leo. Just me.’ The first words he’d spoken to me since we started down here.

  “I didn’t hear what they talked about. But it took longer than my talk with the dragon. Dave, to his credit, didn’t appear intimidated by the fact that he was talking to a hundred-foot lizard with a set of jaws that could bite him in half at the waist. He paced. He waved his arms. He shouted. Just like he talks to the Council.

  “No, I never got to know exactly what they talked about. But I do know he asked what the chain meant. I saw him hold it up, and I could read the question on his lips. I only heard a fragment of an answer, “ ‘. . . a sign of what is at stake . . .’

  “After that, Dave ordered the escort back, and after about a fifteen-minute argument with the ranking cop and the ranking Guardsman, we all pulled back out of earshot.

  “It was hard to believe that Aloeus could whisper.

  “Yes, it did influence Dave’s stand against the Feds. It seemed to solidify his initial instincts. Of course, it didn’t help his standing with anyone when the rumors started that he was talking to something that’d come out of the Portal. I mean the elves were still sitting in a tent city, behind a razor wire wall at Burke Lakefront.

  “If Valdis, Ragnan’s reigning god-king hadn’t fallen about four months into it, Dave wouldn’t have survived. Council was already getting together the legal machinery to remove him, and the courts looked like they were beginning to lean against him. The deal he struck with Zygmund, the rebel overlord who’d defeated Valdis, was nothing less than a political miracle.

  “When food started coming out of the Portal, all of Dave’s enemies were struck dumb for about a month. You know that Dave made damn sure that everyone knew that it was him, his administration, that was bringing the food in. That was when the tide turned. Especially when, after it was obvious that no aid was necessary, the federal government started its other moves to take over the Portal.

  “It was almost two years through the appeals, and the court orders. It was scheduled before the Supreme Court before the Congress decided to decide the issue for everyone. By Dave’s reelection campaign, he was a hero. The man who stood up to the Feds.

  “I know, we’re talking about Aloeus. I didn’t have much personal contact with him after those initial meetings. I was just a mid- dleman. I know that he was active in helping the administration draft legislation to deal with our new paranormal citizenry. The kind of thing that allowed some rights to these critters, at least on the local level.

  “The deal with the stadium? That was just an arrangement to compensate me for the rights I—and the Browns franchise—had to give up so that the city could administer the Portal. I know, the city does own the property, but there was a twenty-five-year lease that both I and the city were obligated to. The fees I get from the stadium are simply compensation for the city breaking the lease.

  “No, I don’t think Aloeus had anything to do with that deal.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  AFTER Baldassare finished his story, we both sat for a few long moments of silence. While the story itself was good background, it omitted more recent history, specifically Forest Hills and property deals. I knew the omission was intentional, Baldassare was more than adept enough to know why I was here. Either he didn’t want to talk about it, or he wanted me to ask.

  “I have a few other questions,” I said quietly.

  “I was sure you would,” he said, smiling.

  It was a chess game now. Baldassare had stopped volunteering information. He wanted me to probe. That way, he would get a measure of exactly what I did and didn’t know. Which meant that, if I asked the wrong questions, in the wrong order, he would blithely allow me to stumble down the wrong path.

  I bore him no malice for that; it was part of the game, after all. He treated prosecuting attorneys and Council committees no differently.

  “You said you did business with him?” I opened.

  “To be precise,” he said with a bit of a grin, “I said I didn’t deny doing business with him.”

  “But you did.”

  “His company, yes. I presume you knew that.”

  “What kind of business did you engage in with him?”

  Baldassare steepled his fingers, “You should understand that I’m under contractual obligations. I can’t just itemize business dealings ad hoc. I can refer you to the quarterly shareholder’s report—”

  I shook my head. “Just, in general, what did Forest Hills Enterprises provide Aloeus?”

  “Aloeus, Incorporated, Kline. He may have died, but the legal construction carries on without him.”

  Interesting point. “So Forest Hills provided what?”

  “It is a real estate development company. Forest Hills does with Aloeus, Inc., what it does with everyone else. It buys and sells commercial development properties.”

  “In Mexico?”

  “Forest Hills Enterprises holds properties all across North America.”

  “And why would Aloeus, Inc., want to buy acres of undeveloped property in Mexico?”

  Baldassare looked at me, “I suspect you would have to ask Aloeus that question.” He sipped his drink, and I had the eerie feeling that in our little game of convers
ational chess I had suffered a fool’s mate.

  I didn’t let him go at that. “Why would you think he bought property in a place he would never be able to go?”

  “If I were to theorize, which I do not, I would say that the property was purchased for the same reason it was sold. To make a profit.”

  “You’re saying that Aloeus was speculating in real estate.”

  “That seems to be the obvious conclusion.” He set the empty glass on the mosaic table. “Do you have any other questions?”

  “Do you associate with any other dragons?”

  “Some business contacts. They tend to be private creatures.”

  And wealthy, I thought. The community of money could inspire more solidarity than nationality or—I suspected in this case—species. “Do you know any who might talk to me?” I asked him.

  “Interesting question,” Baldassare shook his head. “They don’t line up for interviews.”

  “Could you set up a meeting?” I asked.

  “You don’t ask small favors.” Baldassare said.

  “I rarely ask any,” I replied. In his case, it was true. In my years of our relationship, I’d never asked him to perform any actions on my behalf. Not so much as an introduction. I had always felt the dynamic between us was too fragile and too one-sided for me to push things with him.

  I don’t know why I asked him to introduce me to a dragon. I suspect that Baldassare was as surprised that I’d asked as I was. I suspect that what prompted it was a gut-deep instinct that he would. I don’t know why I felt that way, unless it was an overall impression from Baldassare’s monologue, but it proved correct.

  “I can set up an appointment for you,” he said after a long, thoughtful pause. “An associate who might be willing. Her name is Theophane. She resides in the BP Building.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Kline, goodwill is a fragile thing with these creatures. Don’t make me sorry I did you this favor.”

  “You won’t be,” I assured him.

  I drove away from Baldassare’s estate with two conflicting emotions fighting for airtime in my head. First off, I was really pleased with myself for landing an interview with a dragon. That would be a real coup if I could pull it off. I certainly wouldn’t find a better source for background on Aloeus.