Dragons & Dwarves (39 page)

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Authors: S. Andrew Swann

BOOK: Dragons & Dwarves
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He steps in front of it and says, “You’ll get out. I don’t want you in here.”
“But.”
Mazurich’s expression softens. “Please, Pam. I can’t tell you what you want to hear. It’s over. Leave it at that.”
“But—”
“Let an old man go home.”
Pam knows him well. She senses the pain, which only adds to her own confusion. She’s run this man’s life for nearly two decades, set up his meetings, his travel plans, rallies large and small. She’s been a part of every decision he’s made in his public life—except this one.
“Please, Pam. You can’t help me anymore.”
Something in his voice causes her to back away, a decision she will regret the rest of her life. “Dominic, please, if you need to talk . . .”
He just nods.
“I’m your friend. We all are.”
“I know. I just need to be alone now, please.”
Pam leaves him as he picks the papers up off of the floor. Behind him, the screen of his workstation is flashing block letters on an otherwise blank screen, “Format Complete.”
 
At some point before 8:30, he drives though his hometown neighborhood, and pulls into the driveway of his two-story frame house. The house belonged to his father, and his grandfather, both steelworkers and union to the core. Twenty years ago, you could have seen the stacks of the steel plant from the front porch.
No lights greet him as he pulls in the driveway. His two children are grown and his wife is separated from him—has been for three years now. The only thing preventing their divorce is the fact that both of them still hold Catholic beliefs.
He sits in the driveway of the empty house for some time. According to a later statement to investigators, a neighbor walks his dog past Mazurich’s house and sees him sitting in the darkened vehicle at 8:30, then at 8:45.
A little before 9:00, Mazurich walks into his house. He doesn’t turn on any lights, and he doesn’t lock the side door behind him. At this point, he knows what he’s doing. He walks upstairs, feeling his way in the dark. In the bedroom he sits down on the edge of the bed, by the nightstand. He takes off his shoes and sets them neatly on the floor by the nightstand. He loosens his tie and slips it off over his head, hanging it on the corner of the headboard. He takes his wedding ring off and sets it on the nightstand. He places his wallet next to it.
Then, he opens the drawer to the nightstand and pulls out a thirty-two caliber automatic. He takes out the magazine and removes every bullet except one, setting the ammunition neatly back in the drawer. With one bullet, he replaces the magazine and chambers the round. He places the barrel in his mouth.
Sometime before 10:00 PM, he pulls the trigger.
CHAPTER ONE
 
“
W
E must never forget that Cleveland is a
city
.”
 
Gregory Washington stood at a podium at the head of the Lakeside Baptist Church. The rally was deep in his home territory on the East Side—”Energizing the base,” as political wonks like myself would say. I sat in a front pew reserved for local press, keying shorthand notes into my PDA with a stylus.
The man oozed charisma, and had the presence of a young James Earl Jones. There was a fair bit of lay preaching in his background and it came out in his speaking voice without devolving into parody.
“Let me say again. Cleveland is a
city
. Homes. Businesses. People. Too long our leaders have bowed down before this ‘Portal’ which has appeared on our shores. The city’s budget has tripled in ten years. Have you seen that money?”
A chorus of “No’s.”
“Have your schools seen that money?”
“
No
.”
“Is it in the roads? Is it in the fire department?”
“
No
.”
“You know why? Because almost all that money has been fed into the Portal. We’ve paid lawyers millions of dollars to help us to keep this thing that’s costing us tens of millions. Last year, half our city budget—
I said half
—went to expenses related to the Portal. Let the federal government have it.”
I made a silent promise to myself that I would be the one political reporter this election who would refrain from using the phrase “paradigm shift” in an article. The rhetoric that Washington was using would have been politically inconceivable two years ago. The Portal, a mystical phenomenon about twelve years old now, had been the rai son d’être of city government for a decade. The Portal had granted Cleveland, Ohio, an association with the supernatural so pervasive and widely acknowledged that my hometown’s relationship to elves, dragons, and sorcerers was as fundamental as gaming was to Las Vegas, technology was to Silicon Valley, and politics was to Washington D.C.
However, some politically disastrous moves by the administration of the outgoing Mayor Rayburn, followed by a series of new Supreme Court rulings, had cast the relationship of the Portal to city government in a whole new light. The fact was, the Feds now had physical control of the Portal and passage through it, and the world had not ended. The streets of Northeastern Ohio were still awash with mana, mages still brokered their potions, and dragons still flew in the nighttime sky.
Of course, when federalization happened, people started asking the obvious questions; what was the big deal? Why did we waste all that money on lawyers? Even Gabriel Clifton, Mayor Rayburn’s spiritual successor and Washington’s only real opposition in the race for the Democratic spot in the next mayoral election, did not go to the mat defending the city’s stand against federalization.
Even Rayburn himself didn’t much talk about it anymore.
The fact was, what marked Cleveland’s economic boom wasn’t the Portal. It was the supernatural radiation flowing out of it. Immigration had been important, at least at the beginning, but while the novelty of passage to another universe initially commanded prices usually reserved for tickets into suborbital flight, the income from that had been surpassed by income from tourism within two years. It was always the case that more people wanted to visit the circus than there were who wanted to run away and join it.
So even with federal regulation of passage, customs, and a drop in ticket prices that made the cost closer to a one-way flight to Europe than a seat on the space shuttle, the hit to the northeast Ohio economy was practically nil.
Even if the Feds ever shut the door completely, a dozen years of near-unlimited passage from the universe next door had given Northeast Ohio enough local color to last into the next century.
So, despite the protests from the folks who ran the city, in pure economic terms it was pretty much irrelevant who had physical control of the Portal. One councilman had put it this way, “If we gave the Feds immigration control over the Sun, it wouldn’t make our streets any darker.”
People linked to the current administration were having a lot of trouble explaining how they had been on the wrong side of that argument.
Washington’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Gabriel Clifton, might have the establishment’s blessing, and the support of the man who was, at one point, the city’s most powerful and popular mayor, but people had been talking about “Rayburn Fatigue” for six months before the current mayor made the announcement that he wasn’t going to run for reelection. And there wasn’t enough daylight between Gabe Clifton and Dave Rayburn to grow a mushroom.
And, given the state of the Republican Party in Cuyahoga County, that meant that there was a pretty good chance that I was watching the next mayor of the city. Unlike Clifton, Washington had both street cred and the currently enviable position of being a complete outsider. That gave Washington, a relative unknown, a better-than-even chance to win the nomination, and—barring a massive screwup—the election.
“Do we want a city government that gives away millions in tax ‘in centives’ to corporate cronies? Two billion dollars—I said
billion
—two billion dollars in new construction downtown. Office buildings, hotels, malls. Do you know how much of that pays back the city any property taxes?
Any?
Fifteen million.”
There was a chorus of hoots.
“Ninety-nine percent of new construction since the Portal opened has been built under an ‘emergency tax-abatement incentive’ begun under the previous administration. Don’t you think the emergency is over?”
“
Yes.
”
I shook my head. His figures were a little dubious. A hell of a lot of that two billion figure represented construction by the city itself for city facilities, including the containment structure around the old Browns Stadium and the Portal inside. That probably accounted for a quarter of that figure.
Still, he did have a point. A lot of the executive bureaucracy of the city was a patchwork of ad hoc measures and emergency provisions that, when examined as a whole, made little sense. The blanket tax abatement was a case in point. The Portal opening had been an economic disaster in the short term. No one had been thinking about what things would look like a decade hence; the worry was about the social and economic collapse of the city.
But, while the emergency was long since over, it’s a fact of politics that it is a lot easier to get a tax abatement passed than it is to get one repealed.
About the time Washington began delving into a comparison between the growth rates between the city budget as a whole, versus the budget for the city schools—along with the same figures for various outlying suburbs that
still
outperformed the city in proficiency achievements and graduation rates—my cell phone started vibrating at me.
I spent a moment assessing the likelihood that Washington might deviate from the speech he distributed to the press, and whether any extemporaneous comments might be newsworthy, before I slid out of the pew and headed toward the back of the church.
When I was back and off to the side, I pulled the phone out, flipped it open, and said, “Kline Maxwell,
Cleveland Press
. Make it quick.”
“Mr. Maxwell, I wish to meet with you.”
It wasn’t a voice I recognized. I glanced up toward Washington. “I’m on assignment at the moment. You can call the main desk at the
Press
and leave me a message.”
“Please. I expended much effort to contact you. You, specifically.”
The voice had an accent. I couldn’t identify it, because my caller was disguising his voice. All I got was the occasional too-hard consonant. Middle Eastern, dwarven, or German, I couldn’t tell.
“I’m flattered,” I said. “Tell me who you are and what you want to discuss, and we’ll see if I can accommodate you.”
“I cannot over the phone. My life is in danger.”
Not German . . .
“You have to tell me something if you want me to take you seriously. Why should I be interested?”
The crowd in the church broke into a standing ovation. I had to turn to the wall and cover my other ear to hear what my caller was saying.
“What?”
“—Mazurich.”
Mazurich?
“What about him?”
“Why did he die, Mr. Maxwell?”
I grunted. “My friend, you are the latest in a long line of conspiracy theorists. I have more letters on who killed Mazurich than you’d ever care to write. I could write a dissertation of the cover-up using theories more creative than you could think up—”
“Mr. Maxwell—”
“You also want to know what I have? Police reports, forensic reports, digital images of the scene. The man killed himself. If there was anything to any of these conspiracy—”
“Mr. Maxwell—”
“I’d be the first to report it—”
“
Mr. Maxwell!
”
I stopped talking for a moment.
“Mr. Maxwell, I am not delusional. I offer you nothing that cannot be substantiated. I am aware that he killed himself.”
“What then?”
“
Why
did he kill himself?”
I remained quiet.
“Mr. Maxwell?”
“Okay,” I said, “Why did he?”
“Not over the phone. I’ve talked too long already. Meet me in the Old Arcade, mezzanine level, at 6:30.”
“How will I know you?”
“I will know you.” The phone clicked. I switched it off, turning around. As I watched Washington basking in the glow of potential constituents, I told myself that the call was a wild-goose chase.
I also knew where I was going to be at 6:30 tonight.
 
When I left the rally and returned to my Volkswagen, someone had brushed the snow away enough to slip a neon-green flyer under my windshield wiper. I had parked only a block away from the church, so I wasn’t particularly surprised when I pulled it free. On the cover was a stylized whirlpool graphic around which swirled the phrase “God’s Plan or The Devil’s Handiwork?”

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