“We don’t have the budget,” said Tristan, and took a bite of his tuna sandwich. He had said nothing about it, but his mysterious revenue stream seemed to be drying up. Deliveries of liquid helium were fewer and further between, and seemed to involve his spending a lot of time in exhausting phone conversations. He kept having to call Frank Oda in to help debug the ODEC, which I could see he felt bad about, since Frank wasn’t getting paid. And he kept pressing our Lukes and our Vladimir into service doing things that, to judge from the looks on their faces, weren’t in their job descriptions. Tristan had always suffered from a certain ADHD-ness, which was alternately charming and exasperating. His phone had lately been going off every few minutes, which made this even worse. He’d programmed it to produce different ringtones and vibrate-patterns for different incoming callers, so he could tell without even looking at it who was bothering him. One of those was a snatch of John Philip Sousa’s “Liberty Bell March.” It was typical American patriotic bombast, military parade stuff. Overlaid on that was a whole different set of associations based on the fact that it was the theme song for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Every so often I would hear it coming out of Tristan’s phone. When it did, he would drop what he was doing and visibly snap to attention and take that call without delay, hurrying off to a quiet part of the building and saying “Sir!” and “Yes, sir!” a lot. Obviously, this was the ringtone he’d assigned to his boss. What I didn’t know, and what I was dying to ask, was its meaning. Was “Liberty Bell March” just a snatch of patriotic music to him, or a wry allusion to an absurdist British comedy show that had been canceled before he had been born?
We were in the office just outside the ODEC, at the small table where I usually interviewed Erszebet. I had been about to suggest we repair outside to stroll down to the Charles, perhaps even drive to Walden Pond for some fresh air and sunshine (it was Memorial Day weekend in New England and we were living, working, and sleeping in a basement under fluorescent lights. I mean really, WTF.). Often I still wonder how things would be different now if I had pressed for such a constitutional. Surely in some other—better—universe, Mel made that suggestion, and so the trio left the building and was not there when General Schneider arrived.
But in our universe, the trio stayed in the basement, having this conversation:
“If you cooperate with us,” Tristan continued, swallowing his bite of tuna salad, “we can probably get funding, and then if you really want to go spit on the graves of your enemies, we can discuss it.” And then, putting down his sandwich, eyes lighting up: “Wait a minute! We can get our own funding. If you can change water to salt water . . . why not change—”
“—lead to gold,” she said with him, with an adolescent groan of disapproval. “Or anything to gold. That is the most unoriginal suggestion in the world. From the dawn of magic this is the first thing people ask of witches.”
“And?” prompted Tristan.
“We don’t do it,” she said. “Obviously.”
“Why not?”
“Ask the Fuckers.”
“What!?” Tristan and I exclaimed in unison. Erszebet had many disagreeable traits, but use of vulgar language was most certainly not one of them.
She was taken aback by our reaction. “The Fuckers,” she said. “You know. The Fuckers.”
Tristan and I looked at each other as if to verify we’d both heard it.
Erszebet laughed in a way that suggested she wasn’t really all that amused. “You people have such dirty minds. It is a perfectly normal German name. Maybe you spell it F-U-G-G-E-R just to be polite.”
“Oh,” I said, “Fugger, as in the old German banking family.”
“As in them, yes.”
“So, back to where we were,” Tristan said, shaking his head. “You’re saying we should ask some old dead German bankers why you don’t change lead into gold.”
“They are not all dead,” Erszebet corrected him. “If you go down to the financial district, you can probably find one right now, sitting in a nice discreet office.”
“Well,” I said, “obviously bankers would have something to say about changing lead into gold.”
“They would not like it,” Erszebet said. And this was the first time I ever got the sense from her that she actually cared whether someone else would or wouldn’t like a thing. She considered Fuggers—or Fuckers, as she pronounced the name—people to be reckoned with.
“Let’s try a different example, if you don’t like gold,” Tristan said. “I’m going to show my cards a little bit more than I usually do.” And he pocketed his phone, which he’d been looking at under the table, and laid both hands on the table’s upper surface—as if literally showing his cards. “To hell with gold. Could you produce enriched uranium?”
She considered it. “The stuff they use in bombs?”
“The stuff they use in bombs.”
She shook her head. “Certainly not. This would cause too much change too quickly, and bad things happen when magic is used that way.”
“What bad things?”
“Bad things,” she said with finality. “Worse than your ‘nukes.’ We don’t even have words to describe them. So we don’t do that.”
“Then there are rules,” I said, opening the laptop to take notes. “Not changing things too quickly is a rule. What are some other rules?”
“There is no rule,” she said. “We just don’t do it. Is there a rule telling you not to jump off a cliff? No. But you don’t do it.”
“What else don’t you do?” asked Tristan.
“What a ridiculous question,” she said. To me: “He only asks ridiculous questions. I hope he is not your lover, because he is not worthy.”
“Why is it a ridiculous question?” pressed Tristan.
“Can you tell me all the things you would not do? No. You only know what not to do when you’re faced with the prospect of doing it. It’s like that with everything, including magic.”
“Can you give me some examples?” he asked with exaggerated patience.
She looked thoughtful, and for a happily deluded moment, we both thought she was going to be cooperative. “I am tired of doing all the giving,” she said. “So. Your turn to give me something. You will give me a cat.”
After a confused pause, I asked, “As a pet?”
“No, as a cat,” she said.
“A live cat?” asked Tristan.
“Of course a live cat! What would I do with a dead cat?”
“Okay, you can have a cat,” said Tristan indulgently. “We’ll get you a cat next week, as soon as you’ve done something we can show the brass.”
“I will show the brass something after you give me a cat,” she corrected triumphantly.
“Erszebet,” I said in a friendly, intimate tone. “We have no time to go fetch you a cat, or a litterbox, or any of the other stuff a cat needs. But if you would like to be employed again by powerful people, who can give you as many cats as you like, then please cooperate with us for the next few days.”
She pursed her lips and glanced between the two of us. “Put me with those people you speak of. Why am I wasting my time doing stupid tricks for minions?”
“Because these minions have an ODEC,” said Tristan abruptly and openly irritated. “Without this ODEC, you are nothing. And this ODEC is ours. So play nice.”