“We may never know,” said the man, who was the king’s son. “All we know is that, whatever power this pillow has, it has saved the kingdom.”
“We shall put it in the treasury,” the king decreed, “and all my magicians shall study it to find out what magic it possesses to so frighten a dragon.”
“It’s the stain,” murmured the man with the grey beard, but he took the tuffet to the treasury.
The tuffet waited there for a number of years, but no magician could ever decide why the dragon had turned and run. At length the young man became king himself and had the tuffet put in a public museum as a trophy of his greatest battle. The people came from miles around to see this and the dagger and the fangs of the dragon.
“Do you know, dear,” a middle-aged woman told her daughter, “I used to have a tuffet just like that when I was your age. I wonder whatever became of it.”
The tuffet studied the current size of the former Miss Muffet and shuddered. That, it thought, would be worse than spiders.
Something to Sell
by Matt Hughes
When he sees the piece in the morning paper, Mikey’s hand comes up and smacks his forehead medium hard, the sound like an echo of Ken Griffey’s bat saying hello to a fastball.
“Am I an idiot?” he asks the flaking walls of his bare-bones studio in a rotting concrete high-rise above English Bay. The last time the address was fashionable, so were wide-wale corduroy bell-bottoms. “I’m a total idiot. I been throwing away the jewels, selling the freaking boxes.”
He cuts the item out of the tabloid and takes it over to East Vancouver to show Cheeks. His pee-o-ess Toyota pickup with the cracked fiberglass canopy stalls on the off ramp of the Georgia Viaduct, then the battery dies before he can get it going again, so he has to give a cabbie his last twelve bucks for a jump start.
The fat man is in the back room eating little cake doughnuts, one bite apiece, while his bratwurst fingers poke around in the guts of a Trinitron spread over the repair bench.
“You got something for me?” Cheeks says. He always looks first to see if there’s anything in Mikey’s hands before raising his beer-colored eyes to the burglar’s face.
“I got opportunity is what I got,” says Mikey. “Check this out.”
Cheeks reads the clipping, flakes of powdered sugar falling from silently moving, pink lips. Halfway through, he pushes the little square of newsprint away. “What is this crap? All I see, some broad is counting whales, somebody lifts her laptop, now she’s crying about it.”
“Go all the way to the end,” Mikey says.
Cheeks sighs and rubs the roll of suet that is the nape of his neck, then works his way to the last paragraph. He reaches for another doughnut. “So?”
“You don’t see it?” Mikey says. “It says five grand reward.”
“So what? We ain’t got what she’s paying for.”
Mikey wants to hit his forehead again. Instead, he spells it out for Cheeks. “Okay,” he says, “the broad is a scientist, right, she’s out looking at whales — what’s it say there? — three years, making her notes, keeping track. All this work she puts into her laptop, which is this total junk Panasonic 386 that’s worth, tops, ten bucks to some crackhead who busts her car window and hustles it in the beer parlor.”
Cheeks digs around in his teeth for a glob of doughnut, sucks it off his finger. “I got stuff to do here,” he says. “Whaddaya trying to say?”
“I’m saying the hardware is worth it all. The information, man, that’s gold.”
Another doughnut. “When does this add up to something for me?”
Mikey walks him through it. Two years he’s been bringing Cheeks any computer hardware he picks up. The fence breaks up the desktop PC’s, reformats the disks, and sells them along with the CPU’s and RAM chips on the gray market. Notebooks stay in one piece, passed on whole to a collector who ships them to Eastern Europe.
“But some of these decks, man, they’re full of information that’s worth a whole lot to the schmuck that lost them. I mean, this babe with the whales, probably doesn’t own one pair decent shoes, she’s ready to drop five grand. So what’s some suit gonna pay, we can give him his whole business back?”
Cheeks pulls something out of the Trinitron, looks at it, and gropes around under the doughnut box, hunting up his multimeter. “The guy’s gonna have backups, disks.”
“Miss Whale Watcher got no backups.”
“So she’s stupid.”
“People weren’t stupid, how’d we make a living?” Mikey says. “ ’Sides, half the time I’m in somebody’s place lifting a deck, the backup disks are right there, on the shelf maybe, in the drawer.”
Cheeks finds the multimeter, tests the component, puts it back. He pulls at his nose, makes a horse noise with his lips, then says, “Nah. My business, I just want something to sell. What you’re talking, you gotta make contact, stage a drop, use cutouts. That’s complications. One little thing goes wrong, bang, it’s you in the jackpot.”
“I already worked it out,” Mikey says. “I got it covered, Cheeks.”
“Uh-uh.”
Mikey lets out his breath. “Listen, you don’t want in, fine. But how ’bout you front me maybe two, three grand to set it up? I’ll give you payback outa the first score plus, say, twenty points the first year, ten points the second.”
“Gross or net?” Cheeks wants to know.
“Gross.”
Cheeks considers it but shakes his head. After the last shake his jowls are still moving. “Nah. People should be what they are. You’re a pretty good burglar. I’m a good fence. Let’s leave it like that. Bring me something I can sell.”
“Okay,” says Mikey, talking to the Toyota’s dashboard as he nurses it back to the West End. “The hard way.”
He knows there are really two hard ways. But he’s not going to take the one where he goes to Angie Tedesco and borrows at six for five. ’Cause it might turn out, just maybe, he doesn’t have it covered the way he was telling Cheeks.
“Then I’m screwed, blued, and tattooed,” he says to the yuppie in the Saab who’s nuzzling the pickup’s back bumper, itching to cut around and get downtown and make some more deals.
“I can’t pay the vig, Angie seizes my collateral, then he twists them off.”
The other hard way is one Mikey’s been thinking about since the time he was on probation and working as a window cleaner and got a look into the government office at lunchtime. He still has the big squeegee and the jumpsuit he kept when probation ended and he stopped going in.
It’s daylight work, scary. But he doesn’t give himself time to think. A few minutes past noon he walks into the Sinclair Center on West Hastings. The words E-Z KLEEN are stitched across his back in faded blue thread, and the squeegee sticks out of a gym bag stuffed with crumpled newspapers. Mikey moves against the flow of civil servants heading for the food fair or the up-market Italian restaurant. The commissionaire looks him over.
“How’s it going?” Mikey says.
The face is familiar enough that the guard nods.
Six minutes and Mikey’s in the pickup again, pulling away. Sweat sticks the coverall to his back, but the bag on the seat beside him now holds four good notebooks, retail eight to ten grand apiece, that would not be waiting on their owners’ desks after lunch.
Cheeks pays seven fifty each for the decks. “You get more, I’ll take ’em,” he says. “These I can sell.”
Mikey buys phony I.D.’s from the guy at the photocopy store, then spends a couple of days opening bank accounts, fifty or sixty bucks each, at branches all over the city, all under different names. Each account gets him an over-the-counter ATM card. He has the banks send the PIN numbers to a post office box he rents at a no-questions place on West Broadway.