Monsters and Magicians (12 page)

Off in the distance, in the quiet, dark, drizzly night, the wail of sirens could be heard, approaching.

Now sweating almost as profusely as his sometime-attacker, Pedro thought hard and fast to cull up names of government types he had defeated or put down hard enough to merit this kind of violent retribution, over the years. "All right, Mr. Harrison, I'm going to call off some names. You tell me if any of them are the name used by Mr. Meems ... or if any of them even sound like that name. Okay?"

The black man's head bobbed. "Yessuh."

Still thinking even as he spoke, Pedro said, "Baxter? Terry Baxter? Bendarian? Bryson? Banduccu? Bloom?"

"Suh . . . ?" Harrison stopped him, hesitantly, "That there last name you named off . . . that won't the name Mr. Meems used . . . but it had a sound suthin like the firstest part of it ... at least I thinks so. . . ?"

The sirens were getting closer and louder, moving far faster through the benighted, near-empty streets than they ever could have moved during any weekday.

Pedro thought even faster. "Bloom? Bloooom? Blum? Blue, maybe? No, Harold Blue was one I defended, and won, too; so he wouldn't be sending thugs after me. Bloom? Bloo—of course! Of course, that cruel, vindictive bastard will be a long time forgetting—and he'll never ever forgive—what I did to him that day out at Fitz's place, and in front of a woman—Danna—and one of his fellow agents, too."

To the sweating, crying, trembling Harrison, he said, "Here's another name for you: Blutegel, Henry Fowler Blutegel."

"Thai's it!" gasped Harrison, "Oh, thank you dear Lord God, that's the name, suh! Blooot-ehgul, that's the funny name of that feller Mr. Meems said a couple times comin' ovuh here in that car Junior'd done found and hot-wired."

When he had used his special key to unlock the door which led from the parking garage to the Mutual Building, Pedro handed the hulking Harrison two twenties and a ten, plus his business card, hurriedly saying, "Okay, Mr. Harrison, I'm fulfilling my part of our bargain. I always keep my promises, remember that. Get in touch with me sometime after this mess has all cooled down. We may be able to do occasional business, you and I; there are times when a big, strong, intimidating man could come in handy for me and my firm. Now, you take the stairs down to the lobby, make sure the watchman doesn't see you, and go out one of the doors on Fifth Street, that's a long block from here. And try to stay out of trouble, eh?"

He shut off Harrison's blubberingly tearful thanks by firmly closing the door and using the key to once more throw the deadbolt and activate the alarm. Then he trotted back up the ramp to where Mr. Meems still lay moaning and clutching himself at the epicenter of his pain. He had but just reached his victim when the first police cruiser sped out of the up-ramp and onto Blue Level.

Clearing the pistol and expertly locking the slide open, he expelled the magazine and handed all three

items over to the first officer to get out of the cruiser, saying, "There he is. I doubt he'll be any trouble for awhile, not after being kicked in the balls as hard as I kicked him."

"Where's the other one, mister?" demanded the second officer, "The feller called us said it was two of them."

Pedro shrugged, shook his head and said, ruefully, "He got away, officer, I thought he was down for the count, too . . . but I must not have hit him as hard as I'd thought I did. Anyway, he just jumped up and ran down the exit ramp. I might have shot at him, under other circumstances, but just look at the sad shape that pistol is in. Would you shoot it if you didn't have to, officer?"

"Could we see some identification, please?" the second one asked in a near-polite manner. "I know who the guy on the phone said you were, you understand, but I need to see for myself, too."

With his identity clearly proven, the two men became much more friendly and almost fawningly polite. They took down his description of the other assailant (not that he gave them a completely accurate one) and, upon the arrival of a second car bearing aboard a sergeant, a search of the premises was ordered and commenced. Of course, said second assailant was not found and it could only be assumed that, in order to avoid the exit gate and guards, he had possibly climbed down the outside from the second or third level to a point where he could safely drop to the sidewalk.

"I 'spect that there boy's long-gone by now, Mr. Goldfarb, sir," averred the sergeant, "but his de-

scription's out by now and all the rolling patrols'll be on the lookout for him. Can you go back down to the precinct with me and look at some mug-books, tonight, sir?"

Pedro sighed with a genuine weariness. "Sergeant, I can . . . but f d rather do it some other time. I have to be in court tomorrow and I think I should get at least a few hours of sleep beforehand."

"Cert'nly, sir." The sergeant preferred a card. "Just you call thishere number and ask for . . ."he took back the card briefly and scribbled a name on the back of it, then returned it, "ask for Detective Langford; I'll have been done filled him in on ever-thing, sir."

and the K-Bar and odds and ends, plus my clothes and boots and I'm bound to be carrying and carrying damned easily over two-thirds of my total body weight.

"Yet, here I am, fifty-six years old and doing it all. I was never any kind of lunatic body-builder or health nut, either. I recall that, not too long ago, I'd come in at the end of a day of lugging around just a lousy vacuum cleaner and briefcase abso-fucking-lutely exhausted, so tired it was often all I could do to put down some food for Tom, take off my shoes and coat and tie and pour myself a stiff drink. Back then, I'd have needed a dolly to move the load I'm now carrying for any distance, or a wheelbarrow, anyway. Hell, back then I'd have most likely been huffing and puffing, wheezing like a ruptured bagpipe and seriously wondering if my heart could take it from just trying to climb a slope like this carrying no load at all. So how? Why? What made me different, huh? It's almost as if I'm growing younger, for God's sake, not older! And Pedro Goldfarb, others too, have remarked that I'm looking not only more tanned, fitter, but younger, too.

"So, what brought all this about? Answer me that, Fitz, my lad. Could that be what Tom . . . Puss . . . the telepathic grey panther I keep dreaming about (but am I really dreaming at those times? It all seems so real ...?), when he . . . she talks . . . beams thoughts concerning certain powers I'm in the process of gaining or regaining, is it part of those powers, becoming younger and stronger? Maybe, but somehow I get the impression that that's not really what Puss is talking . . . thinking (oh, the hell with it!) talking about, so that still leaves me with the beginning question not yet answered.

'This island or whatever it is (and I'm starting to think it's not in the real world, the world into which I was born, at all, if any sane man or woman could believe it) is truly, unmistakeably a weird place. Just look at the wildlife, for a for instance, as Mom used to put it in her County Wicklow brogue.

"Starting out where I first started out, back to the south, on the beach, that beach and the miles of dunes that back it, just seems to go on forever; I once rode for almost three days east and never found an end or any real change to it, then did the same thing westward for the almost identical result. Its just all the same, everywhere along it I've been, sand and surf and dunes, gulls of five or six kinds, long-legged beach birds, short-legged beach birds, insects, crabs (good eating, too, most of those crabs, especially those with bodies the size of a football), driftwood and more shells than I've ever seen on any beach, anywhere, plus bunches of seaweeds of several kinds, dried sea horses and sand dollars, strands of shark-egg pouches and what have you . . . but all, every bit of it, natural, not one single bottle or beer can, no disposable diapers, no plastics of any kind, no soggy wads of paper and, with the sole exception of that wrecked hulk of a galley (no, that's right, a dromon), no worked wood even.

"Those fish I've seen or caught by surf-fishing don't seem to be unusual, though there were a few I'd never seen before. I'm sure there're more than a few fish I've never seen before back where I came from, too. The seals that occasionally flop up onto the beach look like seals. But that humongus crocodile, the one Puss calls Kassandra: now, she's some-

thing else again—at least forty feet long and with jaws ten or twelve feet long.

"She's the only weird animal I've seen on the beach or among the dunes, but the plain beyond those dunes is different. There're enough strange critters there to make up for the beach and more. And up here in the hills . . . whew! There is up here, in these hills, glens, and plateaus the damnedest mixture, the most jumbled conglomeration of animals I've ever before seen or even heard about. There're more kinds of deer and antelopes than I knew existed in any one place, easily a thousand different kinds of birds, squirrels of sizes and colors I can't find any references to in any of my wildlife books, monkeys, flying lizards like those out on the plain but bigger and more colorful. And Cool Blue's memories show lions (real lions, not ensorcelled beatnik musicians, like him), leopards, wild boar, bears, some kinds of shaggy, horned things that could be bison except their horns are too long, two or three lands of really big—moose-size or bigger—cervines with unbelievable racks of horns, and some other beasties I can't find described anywhere. Then too there's the thing that scared him out of that big swamp up north of here: his mental image looks like nothing so much as either a dinosaur or an honest-to-God, fire-breathing, mythological dragon.

"North of the chateau of the man he calls the Count of Saint Germaine, the one he says ensorcelled him into his current lion-body, he says there are unicorns, though he never saw any of them. He also says that this man or wizard or whatever he is keeps an assortment of monsters for pets, but I've never

been able to find a clear, close-up memory of one of them in his mind.

"Sir Gautier, now, says that he and his bunch of misplaced Crusaders wandered for awhile on and around the fringes of a plain whereon were elephants —he didn't know the name of them but his mental images were of small herds of what looked to me like Indian elephants, the ones with small ears, not big ones like the African elephants have—plus some kind of animals with bodies like big deer but with un-branched horns on their heads and a single, forked one on the nose. Then he saw some things he called Tmmpless camels,' but the picture his memory brought up looked more to me like a bastard outcome of crossing a giraffe with the biggest llama you could imagine. The other animal that made a real impression on that doughty knight was, if his memory is as accurate as usual, of a breed to make a lasting impression on anybody—the all-time biggest, bulkiest, hornless rhinoceros's body on a set of legs from a vastly oversize African elephant so that its belly is a good twenty feet of the ground. But he said that the pair of the monsters he and his men came across at the edge of the forest was very placid, just ignored them all and kept feeding of the top-shoots of thirty-foot trees.

"Still, at that time, having Cool Blue's swamp-dragon in mind, I at once thought of dinosaurs and questioned Sir Gautier in some detail, but up close they were obviously mammals of some strange breed. Their skins were wrinkled and in folds at places but not scaled, and they did have hair, though not much of it. The real proof, though, was the one he saw

closest: she had what could only have been nipples on her abdomen, four of them, each about the size of my head.

"I hope to God that if I run into anything bigger than those two, it's equally mild-mannered. But, thinking of big beasts, here I've been hiking up this glen for nearly three hours now, and the biggest things I've seen have been squirrels and birds. Where the hell is all of the game? I may just end up eating out of cans again tonight, if this keeps up."

Since Fitz had come down the northern slope of the hill and proceeded westward, the glen had opened up, become much wider, with good-sized expanses of grasses and weeds and dark-green herbs now flanking the broader, shallower and less fast and turbulent stream. But he had been hiking farther up on the hillside, at the brushy fringes of the mixed forest that clothed it, so that he would have tree trunks to blaze as mark of his passage for Sir Cautier and Cool Blue.

It had been his experience that these glens commonly teemed with small game and often larger animals as well—rabbits or hares, racoons, a multiplicity of rodents, odd little animals that Sir Gautier called desmana, birds ranging in size from sparrows to wild turkeys, occasionally a colony of oversize gopherlike animals that he had tried, at Sir Gautier's urgings, and found delicious. Sometimes there were to be found one or two or more deer of some variety in the glens, as well as opossums, armadillos, wild goats and pairs of spike-horned gazelles about the size of grown collie dogs.

But even though he was moving far enough up the slope not to spook or frighten animals down below,

nearer to the central stream, he had seen few birds of an edible size and no furry beasts bigger than a rat, save for the large and smaller arboreal beasts and birds that all seemed to be staying high up in the trees, not foraging the forest floor as was the normal wont of many of them.

"If it's been like this for long," he thought, "it's no wonder poor Cool Blue was so hungry he ate frogs. Even a good, determined hunter would have trouble feeding himself . . . and I somehow feel that Cool Blue is more determined on finding someone else to feed him than he is on feeding himself by his own efforts. Something has clearly scared all of the game into lying up in the safest places they can find, but I don't think that something was me. So what, I wonder?

"Wait a minute. Cool Blue, yesterday, when he first came into camp there by the overhang, was opining that this Saint Germain character had let loose some of his so-called pets to run in the hills and glens and that they'd scared all the game away. Then, too, last night, what was it Puss had to say about me going on west alone? Something about many and great dangers is all I remember clearly now. But Cool Blue said I should sleep in tall trees, I do recall that, and it sounds reasonable. You can't build a cooking fire in a tree, but if I have no fresh meat to cook, what the hell will I need a fire for?"