Dragons & Dwarves

  But, on the other hand, I kept feeling that I’d slipped up somewhere with Baldassare. That thought kept nagging at me as I drove up the curvy, wooded road paralleling the Chagrin River. It kept nagging at me until my cell phone rang.

  I flipped it open to familiar static and incomprehensible whispering voices fading in and out.

  “I am determined to prove a villain—”

  “Hello, who is this?”

  “Plots I have laid—” Then a sudden series of clicks and a dial tone.

  Christ, what the hell is this? I knew that it had to be the same person who’d called me with the Macbeth quote. This new one sounded vaguely Shakespearean as well. It made me wish I’d paid a little more attention in my English Lit classes in college.

  Normally I hate people who chatter on cell phones in the car, but the heat of curiosity was on me. So, after I had again determined that the last caller was from an unknown number, and made sure that it was still before eight, I called up one of my research sources.

  “Cleveland Public Library, archives. How can I help you?”

  “Eric, it’s Kline.”

  “Kline? I can barely hear you. Where are you?”

  “On my cell phone, quick question—how’s your Shakespeare?”

  “My Shakespeare? What you working on?”

  “Can you ID a quote for me?”

  “Speak up, what?”

  “‘I am determined to become a villain. Plots I have laid’ What’s that from?”

  “Can you repeat that?”

  “‘I am determined to become a villain!’” I yelled into the phone. “‘Plots I have—’” I was just making a blind turn on a road following the edge of the Chagrin River, I looked up and suddenly there was a rider in front of me. I dropped the phone and slammed on the brakes, pulling the Volkswagen into the wrong lane and off the road.

  In front of me the blinding-white animal turned and reared. I don’t know how I missed it, a cloven hoof seemed to come close enough to touch the windshield.

  The car came to a stop with one front tire tilted into a ditch. My neck felt as if the shoulder belt had abraded it raw. I popped the door and released the seat belt. I stepped out and almost tumbled downslope into the river.

  “Are you all right?”

  I turned, looking back toward the road. The rider was a young woman wearing a sea-green hunt coat and a matte-black helmet. Her steed was smaller than your average horse, cloven hoofed, golden maned, with a goatlike beard and a long spiraled horn emerging from its forehead about a handspan above its eyes.

  They were both backing to a path that paralleled the road.

  “I almost hit you,” I said. I walked around the edge of the car, keeping my hand on the roof for balance. “Are you all right?”

  The unicorn kept backing away. I suspect he didn’t like me. She leaned forward and patted the creature’s neck and whispered something. I heard enough to realize that it was the elves’ language. She looked up, and I could see that it wasn’t a coincidence. Her face carried the alien lines and metallic eyes of an elf.

  That explained why she wasn’t cursing me out right now. Elves had more reserve than any creature had a right to have. From a human viewpoint they had less passion than a lobotomized Englishman on thorazine.

  “We are all right.” She looked down on me from her mount. “You should watch for riders in these woods, sir.”

  I nodded. “Stupid mistake,” I agreed. “I’m sorry.”

  “You apologies are unnecessary, and it was not as stupid as it could have been.” Something passed across her face too quickly for me to tell if it was a frown or a smile. “What is your business here?”

  I was tempted to say, none of yours. But Hunting Valley residents were kind of touchy about outsiders, and I did just come close to running her over.

  “I had a meeting with Mr. Baldassare. Down the street.”

  She stared at me with alien, pupiless eyes. Trying, I supposed, to determine if I was lying. Finally she said, “I am Ysbail, sir.”

  She paused long enough for me to realize that I was supposed to reciprocate. “Kline Maxwell.” I almost offered my hand, but when hers didn’t reach to meet it, I changed the gesture to rub my abraded neck.

  She nodded. “You are.”

  I didn’t know if I liked the way she said that. I heard a small far-away sound, and remembered my cell phone. I held up my hand, “Wait a moment, would you?”

  I was already thinking that an elvish perspective on the whole thing would be a neat detail I could slip in. Keeping an eye on Ysbail, I scrambled around the front of the Volkswagen and found the phone, still open, under the driver’s seat.

  She, apparently, didn’t share my plans. Her mount turned without any visible signal from her.

  “Hey. Wait!” I called after them as they disappeared down a path that led away from the road.

  “Hello? Kline?”

  I sighed, shook my head, and said a curt “Yeah.” into the phone.

  “What happened? I thought you were cut off—”

  “Never mind that.” I kept staring into the woods. “Do you know the quote?”

  “Uh-huh. I found it for you. The full thing is: ‘I am determined to prove a villain/ And hate the idle pleasures of these days. Plots I have laid, inductions dangerous/ By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams/ To set my brother Clarence and the King/ In deadly hate against one another—’”

  “You don’t have to read the whole thing. Just tell me what it’s from.”

  “It’s from the opening soliloquy of Richard III.”

  I pondered a moment. “That’s the humpbacked king who kills his nephews in the Tower of London, right?”

  “You got it.”

  Macbeth, then Richard III? There was obviously something my anonymous caller was trying to tell me. Something about powerful men, and betrayal. But who, and what . . . ?

  Mind games.

  Some joker who believed that this was some form of subtlety. I shouldn’t be wasting my time on it. What I needed to do was get tomorrow’s dragon story into the paper. And, tomorrow, I was probably going to get to talk to a dragon in the flesh.

  After putting the story to bed, I got Chinese takeout. I pulled up to my complex after dark. My condo sat just on the Shaker Heights side of Shaker Square, part of a line of Tudor-Gothic apartment buildings built in the nineteen-thirties. The doorman—a grizzled old guy named Willie Czestzyk—let me in.

  “Long day, Mr. Maxwell?”

  “As long as they get,” I said, holding my bag of Kung-Pao chicken close to my chest.

  “What’s the news?” He always asked me that question.

  “The FAA is going to form a commission to investigate dragon safety.”

  Willie chuckled, like he always did, though I was unsure if I was being ironic or not. I mean, upon reflection, I would not be surprised.

  Once up in my apartment I collapsed in front of the TV, promising myself that I wasn’t going to think of anything work-related until I made it to the office tomorrow.

  I had an investment in that promise. The television was easily the most expensive piece of equipment in my condo. It wasn’t as hard to get video out of a piece of equipment around the Portal as it was to get video into it, but it was still a technological hurdle. Not only did my TV have to operate on redundant bandwidths like my cell phone to eliminate the spurious mana-related data in the signal, but the display had to be a hundred percent digital. That meant no picture tube at all. It had to be a flat screen crystal display, like my laptop.

  Combine that kind of technology with the relatively low demand—after all, there were no local broadcast stations anymore, and the cable companies around here fell into high-speed Internet delivery out of sheer necessity—you have a boob tube that runs two and a half grand for a twenty-inch model. And, of course, after spending about a grand for a special receiver hooked up to a dish that’d give me something to watch, I had to pull the stops and get the five-grand thirty-five
-inch screen model.

  Being a couch potato in this city cost money. And after that kind of investment, I almost felt guilty not watching pro wrestling.

  Anyway, that was what greeted me when I turned the set on, and I didn’t switch channels since this was the kind of mind-numbing stuff I was looking for.

  I was just settling into it when the phone rang. Not my cell phone, which I switched off the moment I walked into the building, but my private line. I put down the takeout and hefted the receiver with a sigh.

  “Hello,” I said while muting the Masked Avenger’s face’s introduction to Mr. Turnbuckle.

  “Daddy?” said a quiet teenage girl’s voice.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I’VE been trying to call you all day,” she said.

  “I was working.” I eased back up on the couch and stared at the ceiling. The TV carved out blue abstract patterns in the ceiling. Sarah’s voice was too damn close on the phone. I should be able to hear the distance from Cleveland to San Francisco. Her voice should have been echoey and small, not like she was down the street. “How’re you doing, kid?”

  “Awful. Perfectly rotten.”

  I’m a soft touch, and I have a pretty vivid imagination. For a few moments I was picturing everything from my ex’s townhouse burning down to the city of San Francisco sliding into the ocean. I sat up, muscles tightening in the small of my back. “What’s the matter, honey?”

  “She’s ruining my life,” she said in a harsh whisper. “The bitch!”

  To avoid hurting my daughter’s feelings, I made every effort to keep my sigh of relief from being audible. I sank onto the couch as the possible crises reduced to those of a more manageable variety. “Don’t talk that way about your mother.”

  “You don’t know what she’s doing.” It was strange to hear the California in her voice. Just enough to be disconcerting.

  “No, honey, I don’t.” I rubbed my forehead. “How, exactly, is she ruining your life?”

  “I’ve been planning to go to this concert all summer, Dad.”

  “Uh-huh.” A picture was beginning to form in my head.

  “You’ve got to talk to her.”

  “You need to talk to your mother if you want to go out.”

  Silence.

  I waited a beat before I asked, “Why did she ground you, Sarah?”

  “Dad.”

  “Why, honey?”

  “I was fifteen minutes late. Fifteen minutes, Dad, and she’s acting like I killed somebody.”

  “And this was the first time?”

  Silence again. Despite the distance between us, I knew my daughter, and I knew my ex-wife. Margaret, my ex, wasn’t one to lay down the law unless someone repeatedly ignored her warnings. I should know. “How many times did you violate curfew before she grounded you?”

  “Dad, you don’t understand, it wasn’t my fault. Chris got lost on the way back home—”

  I smiled and shook my head. “Sarah, it might not be your fault, but it is your responsibility.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing. You tested your mother enough times to use up all the slack you had coming. Now you’re calling me hoping that, since I haven’t been present for all the sordid details, I might be oblivious enough to argue with Margaret about how unjustified her punishment is.”

  “Please, Dad,” She segued into the sobby little girl voice to tug at the old man’s heartstrings. “Chris spent seventy-five bucks each for these tickets. We waited in line for hours. He’ll never forgive me—”

  “No. I’m not going to second-guess your mother. Besides, if you ask my opinion, if this Chris guy has the gall to be angry at you for a situation he created—”

  “He didn’t—”

  “You just got through telling me that he got lost and caused you to miss curfew. So it’s his fault.”

  “But—”

  “He does know to get you home by ten, right?”

  There was a long pause before Sarah said, meekly, “Eleven.”

  “Young lady, I just lost any sympathy I had for you. And you better let Chris know that if he so much as gives you a harsh look over this, I am personally going to come down there and force-feed him the entire one-hundred-fifty dollars in pennies.”

  Long silence.

  “Are you still there, Sarah?”

  “Yes.” There wasn’t any affected sobbing now. Just a sigh of resignation.

  “I’m sorry you can’t go that concert. But it’s not my place to get involved in this. You know that.”

  “I know.” Another sigh. “It just meant a lot to me.”

  “Is this Chris a good guy?”

  “Yes,” she sounded surprised at the question. “Of course he is.”

  “Is he a smart guy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does he like you?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I’m just saying that a good, smart guy who really likes you would, I think, scalp the tickets that you can’t use and save the money for another concert—or at those prices, ten or fifteen movies.”

  I heard her try to hide a chuckle. “I’ll tell him that.”

  “Good.”

  “If you don’t mind, I won’t tell him about the pennies.”

  At that point in the conversation drifted to less critical matters. I got to tell my daughter about all the weird things I was writing about in Cleveland, and I got to hear more about this Chris guy than I wanted to know. At least, more than I wanted to know when I was thousands of miles away from doing spot checks on the guy.

  All in all, though, small price to pay.

  After an hour-long talk with my daughter, I fell asleep dreaming about pro wrestlers named Chris.

  Now, the guys who woke me up would not have made the WWF All Stars. Much too scrawny. However, the nine-millimeter Glock in the short one’s hand made up for anything they lacked in the physical intimidation category.

  “Mr. Maxwell,” said the tall one. “I think the time for sleep is over.” The tall one was tall, NBA territory—if the NBA could be conned into holding all their games at the Gund Arena. The guy, all eight and a half feet of him, was an elf.

  I was still waking up, and trying to get the scene to gel into some sort of sense.

  The TV was droning on in the background showing some sort of hyper-testosterone extreme-sports broadcast involving snowboards, dog teams, and a gasoline fire. Elf One, the eight-footer, sat on the edge of my couch, just within arm’s reach—his, not mine. Elf Two, the middle one, stood off to the side where—due to the shotgun design of my condo—he could watch both entrances at the same time. Elf Three, the shortest at about six-five, stood between me and the burning snowboarders, holding the Glock pointed roughly at the half-eaten container of Kung Pao chicken between my legs.

  “Mr. Maxwell?” spoke Elf One. The accent is somewhat hard to describe if you’ve never heard it. Very cultured, soft and breathy, and higher in timbre than it should be coming from someone that tall. An Oxford-educated Jamaican recovering from a blow to the groin. “Are you awake now?”

  I doubted feigning sleep would serve any purpose. I nodded and slowly sat up.

  The trio were dressed in cheap suits that hung wrong on their nonhuman frames. That and the Glock made me think “cop.” Any other elves that would do armed home invasions would have the resources to get their suits tailored, and since the gun probably cost more than the clothes, it almost had to be department issue.

  Elvish cops carried nine-millimeter Glocks because of their biological problem with iron. The mostly ceramic weapon not only didn’t set off metal detectors, but the steel content was small enough to suffer repeated handling by elvish hands.

  Though everyone here, including the guy with the Glock, was wearing gloves.

  “Not that I mean any offense,” I said. “But you mind telling me what the fuck you’re doing barging in here . . .” I almost said, “without a warrant,” the cop smell was so strong. But these guys weren’t flash
ing badges, and disclosing my suspicions might not be the best thing to do right now.

  “No offense taken, Mr. Maxwell.” Elf One’s face was gray in the light from the TV. Its true color could be anything from powder blue to pastel rose. His eyes were metallic, with no discernable iris or pupil, nothing in them but a slightly gold-tinted reflection of myself. The face was ovoid, too angular and narrow, and surrounded by a mane of hair that—even cut short—was almost a ruff. The ears were impossibly contorted and twisting to a slightly forward curving point on their tips. While I watched, I could almost see them move in response to the noises in the room. “However, we are not here to answer your questions. I have to ask you to accompany us for a short while.”

  Very calm, very polite. I doubt that more than three humans alive had ever seen an elf nervous, or angry. They all talked with the detachment of a bored psychoanalyst.

  “It’s two in the morning. Don’t you think it reasonable that I might not want to go anywhere right now? Why don’t you come back at a more human hour?”

  He gave me a sterile smile that showed a flash of very narrow, very even, very white teeth. “Since we do not suffer the human addiction to periodic unconsciousness, following a ‘human’ schedule would be an exercise in inefficiency. I think that, upon a moment of reflection, you will see the wisdom in following our schedule.” He gave a slight nod to the elf with the Glock. “The wrong decision would be inconvenient for everyone concerned.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” I stood up, gingerly placing the takeout container on the coffee table between me and the elf with the gun. The tacky sides of the container made me overly aware of the sticky feeling of my sweat-stained shirt sticking to the small of my back.

  I gave the elf with the Glock an ironic smile. He didn’t smile back. The bastards didn’t even appreciate the effort I was making not to freak out.