“Give me a little credit,” I said. “This is my job, and I know what I’m doing. I know how to be careful.”
Slipron looked doubtful. A chair scraped next to us, and a gust of garlic announced the arrival of Gag the Hairless. The name went back to the time when the bladder of gas Gag had been using to blow open the strongbox aboard a barge had blown up in his hand instead. His hair had grown back around the flash-burn scars, but a name is a name. “The word’s out you’re looking for a snatcher,” Gag said.
“Sure,” I said, “why not? Have you got one?”
“Who knows?” Gag said. “This town’s so crowded this week, you can’t keep anybody straight.”
I tossed him an ool. Fortunately for me, Skargool’s wife was paying expenses. Gag flagged the barmaid. The barmaid brought him a bottle, which Gag upended, wiping green froth off his mustache. He burped, and said, “Okay, now,” leaning forward on one elbow. “A guy hears lots of things. You don’t always know what to think, you know what I mean? This guy Skargool, one day you hear one thing, then you hear something else. One day everybody wants to work for him, the next day you hear he’s flogging his crews.”
Slipron, whose attention had apparently wandered off to another part of the room, looked back at Gag. “Flogging?”
“Yeah, flogging,” Gag said, “I mean like with whips. All these years he’s shipping grain, oats, like, and then all of a sudden they say there’s always been loot underneath. Treasure, I mean, gold, jewels, real loot. Buried under the oats, all these years. I mean, I’ve got nothing against oats, I’ve got to eat too, but oats isn’t the same as loot.”
“That’s an interesting story, Gag,” I said. “Now work the Creeping Sword into it.”
“You out of your mind?” Gag said. “What’s that?”
“That’s what I’d like to know. You find it out and it’s worth money.”
“How’s about a, whatta you call it, a retainer?”
“I’ll pay,” I said, “when I have something to pay for. Don’t push your luck. You hear plenty of stuff, Gag, and that’s good. Find out who started this talk about Skargool.”
Gag scowled and drained the bottle. I had been keeping an eye on the rest of the room, watching for someone else, and now he came in, heading straight for a small table in the back of the place in a corner mostly in shadow. I rose and went over. A steaming casserole was already present on the table, and the guy was digging into it by the time I crossed the room.
I pulled up a chair across from him. “I want to talk to your boss,” I said.
He didn’t bother to look up; I was sure he’d spotted me on my way over. He didn’t miss much, that’s why he had the job he had. “Are you on a case,” the man said, swallowing a mouthful off his knife, “or you just looking for some action?”
“It’s a case.”
He grunted, pulled a piece of fish out of the casserole, squinted at it, and threw it over his shoulder where it stuck to the wall. “We may have a job, too. Interested in some honest work for a change?” The guy laughed a coarse harsh laugh.
“Depends on the work,” I said.
“Sure it does,” he said. “Somebody’ll come by your place.”
“Right,” I said. The table I’d shared with Gag and Slipron was empty, so I headed for the door. I was almost there when it crashed open behind a pair of lances and a rabble of tough-looking men wearing the freshly printed armbands of the Guard.
“All right, you goons,” the corporal shouted as he raised a truncheon, “this place is closed! Move out to the street and -”
The place erupted. I ducked as a small table flew over my shoulder directly toward the corporal, plunged my fist into an eye, shook my left leg loose from a set of sharp teeth, and as I shoved a hand with a knife out of my way something crashed into my back and knocked me to the floor next to the wall. Sticking close by the wall, I dodged and crawled forward and climbed through a broken shutter onto the street. A knot of fighting guys spilled through the door to my left, the three Guard mercenaries watching the front of the building turned to deal with them, and I limped away from the bar down the street and around the first corner. My back was throbbing, but I figured that was part of the job; maybe I’d sock Skargool’s wife for some extra expense money when I hit her with the final bill. I rinsed my face in a trough and walked away from the wharves into the city.
My office was over a laundry in the Ghoul’s Quarter near the wall on the south side, the clapboard sign with its open staring eye creaking gently in the breeze from the river. A man was waiting outside my door at the top of the stairs. “You are examining the disappearance of Mr. Edrik Skargool?” he said.
“What’s it to you if I am?” I said, unlocking the door.
He followed me into the office.
“I represent the Oolvaan Mutual Insurance Carriers.”
Oh, no, I thought. “Insurance?”
“Yes indeed. Mr. Skargool has a substantial policy, amounting to perhaps 140,000 zalous.”
I lowered myself gingerly into my chair. “Bonded insurance?”
“Yes, of course, bonded. Certainly.”
Insurance, dammit, insurance. This was real trouble. I’d never worked an insurance case before, and I didn’t want to start now. Look at it this way, a lawyer who’d once shared a bottle with me had explained things. When you can ride for an hour and get to a new place where there’s a totally new set of laws and jurisdiction, when people disappear without a trace all the time, either because they’re dead or just because they want to disappear, when you need to buy a policy in one city and know it’ll be recognized someplace else, you’ve got to have one key thing. You’ve got to have some widespread authority nobody’s going to argue with.
Insurance was a contract with one of the gods.
The tweedy man crossed his legs. “Unfortunately, our organization is understaffed and” (he gave a delicate cough) “chronically overworked, so it is our policy to rely on local assistance for claims investigation whenever possible.”
“Now wait a minute,” I said. “Let’s clear a few things here. I -”
“I apologize if I have not made myself clear.” With his faded tweed cloak and his slack pale face, he could have been any nameless functionary buried in a bureaucrat’s coattails. His voice, though, had the uncompromising tone of someone who always got his way, on his own terms. Even if he wasn’t dangerous himself, he had to have big-time friends. “Whenever an investigation is in progress,” he told me, “we employ its findings.”
“Come on, at least you’ve got to pay a royalty on -”
“No. Consider the effort a tax on your business practice. You may also consider it a licensing test. We expect any investigator to comply with our own standards for proof-of-claim.”
“Standards?” I said. “What do you mean, your standards? I know this job like I -”
“Then you will have no difficulties,” he said, “will you. A causal chain or other validator of legitimacy must be demonstrated. Cases of fraud or collusion are punishable, both on the part of the beneficiaries and the investigator.”
I’d never seen one of these policies, of course, but that wasn’t going to be any excuse. If you got noticed by the gods, I’d always heard that the best thing to do was keep your mouth shut and do whatever they wanted, and hope they’d forget about you when you were finished. But what would it take to get finished? “What if this, ah, investigator can’t come up with a definite solution? Sometimes nobody can tie up all the pieces, no matter how good they are.”
“Ah,” he said .”h’m. Indeterminate cases are not desirable. With proper validation and under special circumstances, they may be, ahem, reluctantly accepted. Quite reluctantly.”