I turned to find Olga levering herself to her feet. “Come.”
She led me out the back door and into a small parking lot, where a specially built van was parked. She settled herself into the passenger’s side while the van’s struts creaked and groaned. Four hundred pounds of troll is a lot of troll, although she’s considered pretty petite for her species.
The supernatural community in New York is broken into sections, much like the human city. The vamps prefer Manhattan; the mages have their East Coast base in Queens; and the Weres live mostly in rural areas upstate. Brooklyn, on the other hand, is fey territory. To be more precise, it’s a Dark Fey stronghold where the creatures who populate Earth’s nightmares hang out and attempt to make a living.
A sizable minority of these are trolls, the human term for a wide variety of Dark Fey with a few obvious similarities. In reality, “trolls” were made up of dozens of different species, many of which had been enemies back in Faerie. But in the unfamiliar landscape of the human world, they’d bonded to form a tight- knit community. Olga’s late husband hadn’t even reached her waist.
The rain had slowed everything down, and we got stuck in traffic going over the Brooklyn Bridge. “I hate Manhattan,” I said, itching to get there already.
Olga nodded sympathetically. “In Faerie, Earth considered hell dimension.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yes.” She caught my expression. “Upper hell,” she said, placatingly.
“I guess that’s something.”
Traffic started to move again, and we inched into the city. There was no parking near our destination, so I dropped her off and went to find a garage. By the time I got back, she’d disappeared into a dimly lit restaurant decorated with raffia-wrapped wine bottles and paint-by-number images of Italy.
It was fey run, meaning she could drop her glamourie like a coat at the door, the restaurant’s camouflage ensuring that everyone looked more or less human. Most of them were, but I spotted the slightly blurred outlines of at least three Others at the bar and a couple more eating spaghetti Bolognese at a corner table.
“Lucas,” Olga told the waiter, who was in a glamourie to match the decor—dark hair, perfect little mustache, slight paunch, balding. What he actually looked like—or what he actually was—was anyone’s guess. I could detect glamouries unless they were very, very expensive ones. But I couldn’t see through them.
That was, after all, kind of the point.
The little man took us over to a table where a distinguished white-haired gentleman of maybe seventy was enjoying some cacciatore. His wrinkles were discreet, like the subtle stripe in his four-thousand-dollar suit and the shine on his Prada loafers. He seemed human enough, as far as I could tell, but he didn’t so much as blink as Olga explained what we wanted.
“You check,” she finished, summoning the waiter with a regal gesture.
“My dear lady, I don’t have to check,” he said, blotting a daub of sauce off the end of his chin. “I can assure you, nothing like that is being offered for sale in New York.”
“How can you be so sure?” I asked, as Olga basically ordered the menu.
“Because it is my business to know!”
“And your business would be?”
“I find rarities for discerning purchasers, matching specialized items with buyers able to appreciate them. I know the inventories of all the major auction houses, as well as quite a few of the small ones.”
“But not all. I mean, there have to be hundreds in this country alone—”
“My dear young lady,” he said severely, “no small house would handle a prize like that. Naudiz is one of a set of runes rumored to have been carved by Odin himself. It would be worth… Well, in essence, it is priceless. If it came up for sale, it would cause a stir around the world. It would be as if the Hope Diamond came up for auction in the world of jewelry.”
I munched a bread stick and thought about it. “No, it would be as if the Hope Diamond was stolen, and then someone had to figure out a way to sell it. A minor jewel would be no problem; you could unload it anywhere. But the Hope freaking Diamond?”
“Well, one could always cut down a diamond,” he said, starting on a supersized gelato. “Not that it would be necessary in the case of such a famous stone. A discreet sale to a private collector would be more likely, if the thief wasn’t a total novice. But it is a poor analogy since a magical object cannot be divided in such a way.”
“So how would he do it? If someone wanted to fence it?”
He quirked an eyebrow. “One doesn’t ‘fence’ an item of that quality.”
“Then what does one do, hypothetically speaking?”
He shrugged. “Arrange a private sale, as I said, or a small auction, by invitation only, for a select company. The latter would be slightly more risky, but would also probably result in a greater return.”
I accepted a glass of wine from the bottle the waiter had brought Olga, and sipped at it as I thought it over. “Say he’s a novice. First-time thief. He wants the maximum return, so he needs to arrange a small, private auction. Who could do that for him?”
“Any number of people. There are many unscrupulous types in our business, I am afraid. And quite a few others who could be persuaded into error by such a commission.”
“But how do I narrow it down?”
“Do you know what auction houses the individual has dealt with in the past?”
“None, as far as I know.”
“Does he have any contacts in this world, people who might have been able to provide him with suggestions?”
“I don’t know.” The Blarestri, Claire’s group of Light Fey, didn’t venture into our world that much, but there was no law against it. The guard could have been here, either officially or not, any number of times, and there was no way to know who he’d met.
“Hm.” He thought about it while Olga dug into a party-sized platter of antipasto. She pushed it at me, and I figured what the hell? I’d finished another glass of wine and enough prosciutto to kill an average person by the time he nodded. “If you can’t narrow it down on his end, the only thing you can do is to narrow it down on ours.”
“Meaning?”
“There is a good deal of fraud, in the case of some unscrupulous auctioneers, and it is often buyer beware. But no one would even attempt to sell something like this without providing cast- iron proof of its legitimacy. A valuation would need to be performed, to convince the potential buyers that it was, indeed, what the auctioneer said it was.”
“And who would do this valuation?”
“It would have to be an unquestionable authority, probably fey since the item is so, of proven discretion and sterling record.”
“Do you know anybody like that?”
“Oh, yes.” His spoon rang on the side of his glass and he sat back with a sigh. “Assuming you can find the little tick.”
The heavy old slab of wood and metal, a relic of a twenties-era speakeasy, groaned as I pushed it open. “SHUT THE DOOR!” The usual chorus greeted me as I slipped inside and turned to shove the door closed behind me.
With the daylight firmly shut out, the stairwell was dim enough that I had to be careful of my footing heading down. The bouncer at the bottom, a large water troll, raised a clammy hand in greeting as I entered the large cellar. It was a lot easier to see here, and not just because of the lanterns scattered about.
Graffiti scrolled down the wall, golden lines rippling as they passed over the spaces between bricks. Some near the ceiling were written in black and stayed in place, as static as if they were drawn with paint instead of magic. But the rest flowed down the walls and onto the cracked cement floor, constantly uncurling and rewriting themselves as the odds changed.
It had odds on everything from dog racing and jai alai, to table tennis and golf. Not that the fey needed a sport to bet on. A couple of dwarves at the bar were raptly watching a pint to see which bead of condensation would hit the bar first. The bartender, who was also the owner, scowled at them, preferring bets to be made with him instead of one another. But at least the winner bought another round.