Monsters and Magicians (21 page)

And misfits they all were; even though it went hard against the grain, David Klein had had to recognize and admit to himself that unpalatable fact early on in his enforced relationship with them. Von Fridley had led him to expect a staff of dedicated social activists, highly skilled and polished legal crusaders in constant defense of the impoverished, disadvantaged victims of a callous, brutal, degrading society, and David was certain that that was just how Fridley viewed them and they viewed themselves and each other. But David was realist enough right from the start to understand just what was the truth of the matter.

As compared to conditions in the densely populated and ethnically diverse urban area from which David had come, there was very little crime of a

serious nature in that part of the state that fell under the scope of Fridley and his overstaffed office. The bulk of the clientele of his department's young attorneys consisted of beer-bar fights, chronic speeders, common drunks, joy-riding car thieves, spouse beaters, occasional burglars or house-breakers, accused prostitutes, more rarely a bootlegger or a marijuana dealer or grower, and very rarely a case of manslaughter or murder. Unlike the dockets clogged for years by backed-up cases in and around the city of David's birth, the conduct of legal affairs in the environs of his first job was slow, unhurried, done in traditional fashion and presided over by gentlemen judges of the old school, the stripe of jurist that David had been taught to despise. In this small city, suburban, and rural setting, plea-bargaining was quite uncommon, the expected norm being trial by jury even in matters that would have been considered of so little consequence or importance in David's home city as to be heard, if at all, by a police-court judge or a magistrate.

David felt terribly misplaced and lonely in so provincial a setting, but he was also by then aware that he was very lucky to be holding any sort of job in the legal profession. True, by big-city standards his yearly remuneration was a very sick joke, but he knew it to be a third again higher than that of most public school teachers in the locality and, considering the much lower costs of living in these boonies, it could be tolerated and could even have served to support him after a fashion, but of course he could also count on a couple or three hundred each month from his doting mother up north.

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It was because of his maternal parent's largesse that David had been able to secure a furnished apartment rather than move into a rooming house like the rest of Fridley's motley crew. But as he always had been surrounded by friends or reasonably friendly acquaintances, owned inbred social graces and usually made friends quickly and easily, he soon found himself feeling miserably lonely and alone in his new home and workplace.

Although they might and did often compete fiercely in court, David's father, uncle, brothers and cousins and their professional peers were almost all friends in private life: belonged to the same clubs, played the same golf courses and bridge tournaments, lunched regularly in the same places, even kept their boats in the same expensive marinas.

That similar civilized civility was the practiced norm of behavior in this smaller city, too, became obvious to David at just about the same time that he discovered that he and any other attorney employed by Von Fridley was automatically beyond the pale, a pariah, barely acceptable as human and then only in performance of duty. Even merely touching his hand or being seen talking to him outside the environs of the courthouse seemed to be further than any of his fellow professionals was prepared to go.

David could not understand the situation into which he had found himself flung, and neither Fridley nor any of the others of his staff had been able or willing to offer any reasons that made sense to the urbane scion of the House of Klein, for he knew of more than one practicing attorney in the city area who was far more of a real leftist than was Fridley but was still

treated with personal and professional respect by those with whom he had cause to move in the course of his practice of the law.

It had not been until he had deliberately poured on his not-inconsiderable charm that he had gotten some hard but eminently believable answers from a middle-aged, plump and dowdy but very garrulous court clerk. Once he had heard of the strange types who had worked for Fridley within the past decade, of their at least singular personalities, quirks and generally unenviable ends, he understood the open suspicion, verging upon hostility, with which he and the other P.D.s were being treated.

Mattie Querry knew all and freely told all, gravely but with easily discernible relish in the recountals. She was nearing her retirement date, she knew where fully as many bodies were buried as did Von Fridley and, therefore, she moved and spoke in no slightest fear of the man, unlike many others on the courthouse staff.

"And then there was that young Mr. Gluck," she began before stuffing yet another chocolate from the box David had most recently brought to her in her private office, which room reeked of the odor of camomile tea. "He didn't look too odd, you know, Mr. Klein. Really, a body would never of suspected for one minute about him. Well, he was rooming over to Gladys Parker's house, but he always kept his room locked up tight ..." Another of the chocolates was popped into her mouth. "Gladys, she didn't mind nor make anything of it at all, long as he left his dirty linens and towel and all out in the hall by his door each Friday and took in the fresh, it was that

much less work for her and Jewel, her maid then, to do. Likely, she nor nobody would of known anything hadn't come that—" another chocolate met the fate of its predecessors between her dental plates—"during the very hottest week that whole summer, something blowed out in her central air conditioning and this just terrible, awful odor started coming through the door of his room/'

As the woman had told more and more of this tale, David had tried to keep down his own gorge and had wondered just how she could tell it all and still keep stuffing herself with the dark-brown chocolate candies.

"Well now, Mr. Klein, the room that young Mr. Gluck had was one of the two at Gladys's house has a private bath and lavatory, the very same one that Miss Fisch has now, and horrible as that smell was, of course, all poor Gladys could think was the septic tank had done backed up and the toilet had overflowed. It wasn't 'til she tried to unlock the door she found out wasn't the same lock on it; Mr. Gluck had put a new lock her key wouldn't fit on it. She got mad, then, and had one of the air conditioning men come up and force the door open. He was my next-door neighbor's cousin's nephew, so I heard both Gladys's side of it all and his, too."

Having exterminated the top layer of the two-pound box of candies, the woman dumped the paper and cardboard refuse in her trash can and began on the lower layer. "Mr. Klein, all it took was one look inside that room for to tell it wasn't no overflowed toilet that awful odor was coming from. Gladys called the police, she couldn't think of anything else to do, just then, and I've seen some the pictures they took

in there, too." Politely, she finished crunching the nutmeats and swallowed before she took up her recountal.

"All over that big, lovely room, Mr. Klein—on the bureau, on the windowsill, on the dresser, even on the bedside table—it was piles and pieces of manure, human waste, all molded like children's modelling clay, and in the bathroom it was a five-gallon plastic mop bucket that had disappeared sometime before from the broom closet about half full of more manure. Could you believe it?" So saying, the woman stuffed another piece of chocolate into her maw.

"Well, when it all came to come out and all, old Carver, the janitor—you've seen him, Mr. Klein, the white-headed, light-skinned nigra-boy. Lands of Goshen, he's been here long's me!—he told everbody about finding pieces of manure all shaped up like them was found at Gladys's house in the men's washroom here in this very courthouse, too."

The upshot of the matter, she had continued, had been a testy conflict of stubbornness and political clout between Von Fridley and Judge Lisburne, which had ended with that jurist's committal of the young attorney to the state home for the bewildered, still his lodging even as she spoke. Wetting a pudgy fingertip, Mattie had probed around in the bottom of the box for crumbs of dark chocolate, while David sat immobile, watching her and wondering if he could hold down his lunch until he had departed her stuffy office.

Other days and additional boxes of candy had elicited more tales of Von Fridley's imported legal talent. One had physically attacked the aged Judge Ben

Green upon being informed that a suit and tie, not a dashiki, was the proper attire for attorneys in his courtroom. Another had been apprehended while trying to smuggle a pistol to a client in jail. Still another, upon finding himself arrested for having added a quantity of lysergic acid diethylamide to the newly delivered refill bottle of mineral water in the attorneys' lounge, had protested that his had been a well-meant act, that all his peers were "too uptight" and much in need of "untaxing." And one other had taken up an exhibit—a claw hammer—and with it gone after the prosecutor during a trial.

David's immediate predecessor had suicided in jail, while awaiting trial after being apprehended in flagrante delicto in a courthouse conference room with the retarded teenager he was just then representing.

However, Clerk Mattie Querry could not be complimentary enough to David, seeing a starry future for this first of Von Fridley's choices that met her critical approval. "It's just so good, Mr. Klein, to get a young man who knows how to be p'lite to ladies and isn't a lunatic or a pervert, who wears decent clothes like he knows how to and whose shirts is always clean and all. I don't know where Von Fridley found the rest over there, but it's plumb easy to tell you come from a good, decent, law-abidin' God-fearin' fambly is all. And you wash every day, too, a body can tell that, and your hair is long like so many mens seem to wear it nowadays, but it's combed and clean and I just wish some the others over there would try to look more like you, that Mr. Mullins in partic'lar."

Having earlier reflected that it could do him no

possible harm to own and continue to cultivate at least one friend in the mostly hostile courthouse, especially one possessing the power and influence of Mattie, so he made no defense of P.D. Morris Mullins. Another part of it, of course, was that in truth he empathized with her as regarded his erstwhile colleague.

Mullins was an immense man—over six feet tall, big-boned and weighing between three hundred fifty and four hundred pounds. He perspired constantly and profusely, seemed basically averse to using much soap and water on either his body or clothes and, on a warm morning in the confines of Fridley's bailiwick, being in forced proximity to Mullins could serve fair to bring up not only your breakfast but even the squib of toothpaste you swallowed after said meal. Mullins apparently could not produce a beard or moustache worthy of those names, so he went smooth shaven, but his hair was almost waist-length and dirty as the rest of him—dull, matted, looking to never have been combed or brushed. Personal appearances and lack of grooming aside, however, David had quickly discovered that the huge, smelly, grubby man was easily the most knowledgeable and capable of the lot, so far as performance of his job was concerned.

The two other men were real oddballs, but David did not get to learn just how odd immediately. After Fridley had taken him to the courthouse and introduced him around, he had suggested that he learn the ropes through working with Amy Fisch. Had he known then to just what that assignment would soon lead, he would have begged Fridley to assign him to

any of the others, even to the hulking, stinking, probably louse-ridden Mullins, rather than the plain, but slender and shapely young woman.

Fitz found, immediately he had entered the mind of the slender Japanese with the pair of swords, that his unsuspected occupation—rather, shared occupation— of that mind was different from his dream-sequence occupations of the mind of the hybrid, Seos. In this present case, awake and not asleep, he was aware not only of his host's body and senses but of his own body and senses, high up in its concealed observation point in the tree.

In the mind of Lieutenant Kaoru Naka, however, he was become aware in bare microseconds of all that had led up to this moment on the rocky stream bank, of all the experiences that had gone to shape and determine the young officers tactics in feeing the fearsome monster with his two ranks of spearmen, something that had at his first sight of it looked to the watching Fitz like a projected exercise in a messy form of mass suicide.

Now, however, armed with the young officer's memories of all the many similar encounters of spears versus dragons—some of those bigger even than this one—he was become aware of the fact that, though ever highly dangerous to all concerned, the feat was one that had been done and could be done and would, on this as most of the other occasions, end in a dead dragon and, were the hunters lucky, perhaps only one or two lightly injured spearmen.

As the twin ranks neared the dragon and its partially eaten loll, the monster rushed forward a few

yards on all fours, then abruptly rose onto its larger, longer rear legs, hissing very loudly, its long, black-and-blue tongue flickering constantly in and out as its big, square head swivelled on the dewlapped neck and the living, ever-moving cloud of insects swarmed on and around the gore-slimed jaws.

In the portion of his mind still ensconced in his own body, Fitz thought, "Damn, now I know why I thought that thing's head looked so familiar. It wasn't that dream of Seos's land-dragon at all, it was books I read, pictures I saw on my own world, the one I came here from. Standing up like that, that damned creature looks like nothing so much as a scaled-down version of one of the reconstructions of a meat-eating dinosaur, the one they call a tyrannosaurus rex!"

Within a couple of spearlengths of their quarry, the two ranks of near-naked spearmen began to increase their intervals, first to form but a single rank of twice the frontage, then to form an arc which gradually spread about from its tips to completely encircle the towering, hissing beast of prey. Once formed, the circle began to slowly, carefully contract around the monster, the men moving lightly on the balls of their dirty, bare feet, the spears held before them at waist level, readied for a thrust or a slash with the edges.