"Yeah, but if stardust is leaking, what else is getting out with it?" Michael had had to make that obvious point for me; now I took malicious pleasure in hitting Sudakis over the head with it He was tough. I'd known that already. "You didn't find anything else, did you?" he demanded.
"No, but we will. Us only a matter of time and thaumaturgy, and you know it as well as I do." I took a deep breath, tried to calm down. "Anyway, that isn't what I came up here for. I wanted to find out who you called when Michael and I got to work out here. Whoever it is either did the kidnapping themselves or else called somebody to arrange to have it done."
The only call I made was to the Devonshire Land Management Consortium office," he said. "I had to let them know so-they-could-" He ran down like a mechanical watch as he realized what he was saying. He kicked at the cement under his feet "Oh, shit."
Them or somebody connected with them," I said. "It just about has to be."
I thought he'd give me more arguments, more denials, but he didn't "Yeah," he said in a voice like ashes.
"So what are you going to do about it?" I said, pushing hard. "Be a good little consortium soldier and pretend none of this has ever happened? You can. It would be legal. You'd probably even get promoted. But could you look at yourself in the mirror whenever you went into a men's room?"
"Fuck you, Dave," he said evenly. I did try to hit him then.
He caught my fist before it connected. I'd known he was stronger than I am, but not how much. If he'd hit me back, somebody else would be telling you this story. But he didn't He just hung onto me for most of a minute, then said, 'You done being stupid?"
I nodded. He let me go. "Good. You don't want to fay preaching at me again. It won't push me in the direction you want me to go. You got that?" He waited until I nodded again before he went on, "Okay. Now that you've got that straight I'd do everything I can to help you get your lady back. For my reasons, mind you, not yours. We're wasting time here."
"I don't think I understand you at all," I said.
"I don't think you do, either." It wasn't pejorative: more as if he was stating a law of nature. Maybe he was. As I've said, I'd never dealt with anybody of European origin who still clung to his people's old gods, not in an artificial cult like that of Hermes, but as part of a tradition as old and serious as my own. Balance of Powers, I thought and then wondered whose side Perkunas was on. After enduring umpty hundred years of Christianity, the Lithuanian Power might be as eager as Huitzilopochtte to get his own back.
But no matter where his god stood, I thought Tony stood with me. Almost dragging me in his wake, he started down the walk toward the exit. I happened to look back toward his office at just the right time. "Wait!" I exclaimed, and grabbed his arm.
It was like taking hold of the Juggernauts car; once he got moving, he didn't want to stop for anything. "Look back there," I said in a tone heading toward desperate. That's what I was talking about before."
Grudgingly, he turned around. "I don't see anything," he said.
"I don't see anything, either," I answered. "I see Nothing.
Here, stand right where I am now." I moved off the spot he moved onto it. He shook his head, started to go. Now I was desperate. "Stand on tiptoe," I suggested; I'm several inches taller than he is.
He gave me a look that would have wilted me under any other circumstances. When I stayed crisp, he shrugged and went up on his toes. A second later, he said something in Lithuanian that I didn't understand. Then he dropped back into English: "You were right after all, Dave. I don't know what that is."
Neither did I. At the moment, I couldn't see the Nothing; the dump just looked like a weedy vacant lot. But when I'd stood where Tony was now, the wall beyond that point seemed to recede into infinite space. And yet, at the same time, it was obviously right where it belonged. I don't know how to explain it any better than that; I got the feeling I wasn't sensing it entirely through normal vision.
Tony Sudakis came down off tiptoe. He was, as usual, briskly derisive. "When you see something you don't understand in a toxic spell dump, you'd better start trying to find out what it is just as fast as you can," he said. "Why don't you call your wizard - his name was Manstein, right? - and have him get up here? The sooner he can find out what's going on over there, the sooner we can start trying to deal with it"
"Aren't you the same fellow I heard yesterday talking about how if Michael or I set so much as a toe inside the confines of the dump, your people would sue us until the vulture let Prometheus' liver alone?"
"Go ahead, rub it in," he said. "Yeah, I'm that guy. But I'm also the guy you've finally convinced. So come on back to my office."
I was never so happy to turn around in my life. As we headed back toward the squat, ugly fortress, I asked, "Do you know what got dumped in that area? The more I can tell Michael, the quicker he'll be able to identify what's going on.
"Makes sense," Sudakis said. He looked over toward where we'd seen that. Nothing. It wasn't there now, of course, because we weren't in the right spot. "That'd be about, hmm. Area 37. I'll check for you."
He pawed through the files, muttering all the time: "No, can't be that one - that one was exorcised two years ago…
"Maybe this one? No, forget it - I know everything roc's eggshell can do… Hah!"
"Hah?" I echoed.
"Gotta be this one, Dave. Three-four months ago, one of the Baron's Watchers of the Shore found the remains of what sure looked like a major conjuration out on Malibu Beach.
They tested the junk for thaumaturgical activity, but it came back negative - and I mean real negative, like there'd never been any magic around it since time began. Nobody believed that, not from the way the stuff was laid out. so they brought it here and dumped it in spite of the tests."
"I remember that one," I said. There were letters in the Times complaining about the waste of taxpayers' crowns."
"That's it," Tony agreed. "You ask me, me only thing worse than the government spending money when it doesn't need to is not spending it when it does need to."
I started to pick up the phone, then stopped. "You said 'stuff was laid out. What kind of staff?"
He looked down at his parchments. "Funny stuff - like nothing I've ever seen before. Staffs with stone disks mounted on one end, others with those shells called sand crowns instead. If I had to guess, I'd say the stones were carved flat to look like the sand crowns. And there were other staffs, long and short, topped with feathers. Looked like some kind of Indian ritual, maybe, but not one I know."
"Okay." I got on the phone and called Michael. While I waited for him to answer, I worried some more: balance of Powers. Indian magic would not be well - inclined toward what I drought of as peace and order, not now.
"Environmental Perfection Agency - Michael Manstein speaking."
"Michael? Hi, it's David Fisher. Listen, I've got a new job for-"
Michael interrupted, something he hardly ever does:
"David, where are you. What on earth are you up to? Bea is quite vexed" - a word only he would come up with - "with you and Boss is practically in tears."
That made me feel bad, but it would have made me feel worse if I didn't feel pretty bad already. In words of one syllable, I explained where I was and what I was up to. I also told him about Judy, which explained why I was up to it "Good heavens, David," he said, about as big an outburst as you'll ever hear from him. "No wonder your behavior was so anomalous."