Uptown Local and Other Interventions (17 page)

The screen said,  PALETTE 254, 266. 266, 268

“There are the pallet numbers where the bars in question are to be found,” Falera said with satisfaction. “It’s not a caged area: we won’t need the wirecutters. Here—” He noted the pallet numbers down and handed the whole pad to Harris. “Now we can get out of here and make the call that will take care of the entry proper.” He tapped at the keyboard again.

NO CARRIER, the screen said, and then another phone number appeared on it, and the computer began dialing again.
 
“You’re sure you’re allowing yourself enough time?”

“If the vault map you sent us is accurate, yes,” Harris said.

Falera nodded. The computer made another modem connection, shrieked briefly, fell silent again.
 
“This should take less time,” he said. “Can I interest you in another beer? The weissbier is really quite good.”

Harris shook his head. He watched the computer’s screen fill up again with query and response, query and response, and finally, after several screenfuls of security queries and passwords, a menu labeled ZUGANG ZUM TRESOR, with blanks for time and date input. Falera touched a key, and his computer went automated again, filling in the necessary data. GERETTET, the screen said after a moment.

“There,” Falera said.
 
“It’s saved the new access and exit times. That’s our work done, Mr. Harris.”

A few more messages fleeted across the screen, followed at last by the NO CARRIER herald. Falera sat back and pulled the cellphone’s connector lead out of the back of the computer, tucking the phone into his jacket pocket.

“That’s it,” he said. “Now all you need to do, Mr. Harris, is meet me at Linth-Escher-Gasse 16, by the delivery entrance, fifteen minutes before the time appointed for entry into the vaults. There should be no problem with passing security, but for the sake of outward appearances, in case anyone should pass and see us in the street, I’ll be sending you  Swisscom coveralls to wear: the understanding will be that we’re there to do something about the phones. You won’t be changing addresses between now and then?”

“No, we’re at the same rental apartment in Zug.”

“Very good. Until then—” And Falera turned his attention back to his computer.

Harris got up and walked slowly away down the winding cobbled street, heading for the train station. He was absolutely determined that this should be the last time that the man would dismiss him like a schoolboy.

Behind him, Falera slipped his cellphone out of his pocket and began dialing.

*

Their third and final meeting took place at one twenty-three in the morning, on the fourteenth of the month, outside a dark doorway in Linth-Escher-Gasse in Zurich. The doorway was set in a bland-looking limestone-faced building: it was a silvery aluminum  accordion-folding doorway, big enough to admit trucks, with PARKEN VERBOTEN painted across it. A small door in its side was open, and inside a man-shaped shadow waited for them: Falera, in another of the yellow PTT coveralls, carrying a toolbox.

Silently they slipped through the door, and Falera closed it behind them. “To the back of the loading ramp, if you please,” he said, “the door on your right. Turn right as you go through it and proceed down the hallway.”

“You first,” Smyth said.

“With pleasure,” Falera said, as if totally uncaring of the tone of menace in Smyth’s voice. He led them up the steps of the concrete loading ramp where trucks would normally park, through the doorway he had indicated, and down the hall. It was a perfectly ordinary-looking hallway, painted in the kind of industrial beige-yellow that typifies office-building basements. He pulled open a door on his left: it squeaked loudly as it opened, and they went through it, following him down the flourescent-lighted stairwell.

They went several floors down, Harris judged, before coming to the bottom of the stairs and another door. Falera opened it and went ahead of them into a long bare hallway—beige-painted walls, beige linoleum floor. It sloped very gently downwards, and stretched ahead of them for what must have been about a city block. It was about halfway down it that Harris realized how completely all noises of the city had now faded away. The silence was total, except for their footsteps.            

At the end of the long corridor was a bare steel wall. The three stopped,  and Smyth stared at it. “Now what?”

“Now we wait,” Falera said softly. “A few extra minutes were budgeted into the timing to allow for delays.”

They waited. Smyth was quite calm about it: Harris was more excited—both by the prospect of what they were about to pull off, and by the prospect of what Headquarters had told him he would be allowed to do to Falera in a week and a half. Falera, for his part, stood there as calmly as if he were waiting for a bus
. Enjoy it while you can, you arrogant little fucker,
  Harris thought.

There was a clicking noise, loud as a revolver being cocked. Both men’s heads snapped around to stare at Falera, but he only smiled slightly at them, and looked back at the steel wall.

The wall swung outward toward them. Harris and Smyth hurriedly backed away from it as it swung out, and Falera immediately slipped in through the widening opening. They went in after him.

At first there was nothing to be seen but another hallway, identical to the first, about a hundred yards long. They hurried down it, toward the unmarked door at its far end. Falera reached it first, pulled it open: darkness lay on the other side. They followed him.

Inside the door, as it closed behind them, they stopped. It was not truly dark; the lighting was simply dimmer than the hallway outside, and it took a moment for their eyes to get used to it. Harris and Smyth looked around them. They were standing in a long, long room, surprisingly high-ceilinged, that reached far off to the right and left of them, and was about a fifty feet wide where they stood.
 
They had little time to tell anything more about it: for piled up on row after row of pallets, stretching away to right and left, lay something which mellowly reflected the lights in the ceiling in many soft bright patches of sheen and glimmer.

Gold. Gold. Gold by the acre....

“This way,” Falera said, heading off to the right. It was a moment before either Harris or Smyth could react, for the sheer presence of so much gold in this dimness made the place seem more like a church than a vault. There was a smell to it, a warm metallic scent, as if it were something alive. Slowly at first, then more swiftly, they made their way after Falera. The pallets had numbers stamped on them: they were only in the mid-100’s. Falera was well ahead, and shortly they caught up with him. The warm smell of the gold seemed to get stronger as they went. They walked for what seemed a dreadfully long time, though by Harris’s watch it was only three minutes.

“Pallet 254,”
 
Falera said. Harris looked down, there to their left, and saw it: gold in a single layer, the bars labeled 999 FINE,  and there among them one that had more than the bare words, but the eagle gripping the laurel wreath that encircled the swastika, and the registration number starting with DB14 stamped on it. He reached into his coverall for the soft leather bag he had had stowed inside it, unfolded it and reached down to the gold bar.

It took both hands to lift it, and two tries: the first time he pinned his index finger under the thing and blacked the nail, and swore as he got it up at last. Behind him, Falera was already leading Smyth further down to pallet 266. Smyth bent over the pallet, found another of the Nazi-stamped bars, picked it up more carefully and put it in his bag, then started on the second. Harris went along to pallet 268, where the last bar lay: he huffed and puffed as he carried the bag with the first one, not being able to do it two-handed because of the injured finger. At pallet 268 he stopped, found another of the bars with the eagle and wreath, lifted it and slipped it into the bag. The sound of gold striking gold was soft and final, like the door of an expensive car shutting.

Then he heard another sound: a long, slow, soft growl.

Harris saw the gleam of gold in the dimness: but the gold moved.

He fumbled inside his coverall for his gun, and swiftly looked around for Falera. Falera was nowhere to be seen.  

“Come out, you bastard!” Harris shouted, as Smyth came up behind him. “Come out or we’ll waste you!”

“No,” said Falera’s voice softly, from somewhere deeper in the dimness, somewhere behind whatever it was that was golden, and moved:
 
“no, whatever is wasted today, it will not be me.”

The gold moved again, and abruptly Harris saw the eyes looking at him and Smyth. They were golden too, and from the head in which they were set, that warm, metallic scent breathed thick. The eyes watched them, and they stood horrified as the slow shape clambered over pallet 270 and slipped toward them, deliberate-footed, heavy and huge.

Smyth pulled out his gun and shot the thing, most precisely, between the eyes.

The bullet whined away, making a dull clunk as it ricocheted into a gold bar somewhere else in the room. “Oh, no,” Falera’s voice said from behind the huge golden creature. “It takes a bit more than that to kill a
felddrache
. I should know.”

The long, low, lizardy shape stepped toward them, gleaming dully in the dim light, and Harris and Smyth stepped back.

“You wouldn’t have had much data about them, I suppose,” Falera’s soft, dry voice said. “They were all over Europe, once. Except Ireland, of course: the druids got rid of them, although Padraig took the credit, didn’t he? Never mind. They were everywhere, the drakes. A plague. It was a specialty of mine, killing them: I was much in demand. Of course I didn’t know back then what I found out later, that the drakes weren’t from here, originally, but from some other reality. That  if you were exposed to their blood too often, there were side effects. A taste or so, and you might come to understand their tongue. More than that... and wounds wouldn’t take, the skin would harden, organs would regenerate. After that, if you still kept exposing yourself... long life. Surprisingly long.”

Harris finally saw where Falera was standing, pulled his own gun and shot him, too, in the head. Falera staggered a bit with the impact, but immediately straightened and laughed.
 
Harris emptied the clip, but the shots went wide, or else Falera simply shook himself and stood upright again, behind the huge golden dragon that still stepped slowly toward them.

“They could die, though,” Falera said. “So many of them did. At first, when I started work, it was a blessing. But later, when there were almost none left...I realized they had to be preserved: they were part of our history, no matter how terrible a one. They were a deadly intelligence, but an intelligence nonetheless...and who knew whether there were any more of them back where they came from? Who dares stamp out utterly a species that some God made? I found I couldn’t do it. ...This last one, who lived down in the mountains south of Chur...I protected him as long as I could. It was always a problem: they crave gold as they crave blood. But finally, after many, many years, I found a way to turn that to our advantage. And the banks don’t mind one having one more secret to keep. —External security, mechanical security, can always be beaten—but not instinct, not the
drache
’s chief urge. Gold to guard...blood to drink. They don’t have to eat often... just every now and then. Often enough for the bank’s purposes, and their own...for nothing satisfies them like a nice fresh thief. —Fear,” Falera added as if an afterthought, “improves the flavor for them. It’s the sudden rush of hormones, I suspect.”

Harris and Smyth cowered toward each other. Smyth emptied his own pistol at the dragon: Harris turned and fled desperately for the doorway through which they had entered the vaults.

“It’s locked itself again, of course,” Falera said calmly, as the dragon advanced. “I have my own way out: for security personnel, there’s always a back door. But as for you—you didn’t even watch the screen to make sure of the times I was inputting. So sure of yourself, and yet so easily distracted by a little criticism.” There was humor in the voice now. “You just don’t think things through, do you?”

Smyth screamed. Harris began hammering on the door. But there was no point in it. Shortly thereafter, it having dealt with Smyth, a kind of gold which Harris had not sought came seeking him, and trod him under foot, and tore away at the choicest flesh, so that blood spattered its own golden hide and the gold piled up around.

Silence fell after a while. “You’re going to have to clean those up,” Falera said.

“Later, Gieri,” said the slow, growling voice.

Harris was not quite gone yet: though it would only be a matter of minutes now, since the dragon had bitten his leg off above the knee, and what shock had not yet managed, the hemorrhage from the femoral artery would shortly complete. “Gieri...” he whispered.

“It would have been ‘George’, in the English,” Falera said.

And there was silence again: and nothing else but the gleam of gold.

The Irish Thing can hardly avoid being part of the “ground of being” of someone who’s lived in Ireland for nearly a quarter-century. That familiarity, though, with the way things really are here (insofar as anyone, “blow-in” or native, can ever tell what’s really going on in this island…) can make the inhabitant a little impatient with the perceptions of outsiders: particularly those who think Ireland is some kind of theme park that should be preserved to match its overflow into the last couple of centuries
’ popular culture. I have actually stood in Dublin Airport and heard fellow Americans complaining that Ireland has broadband: as if it’s somehow polluting the cultural purity of the place. (I saw another American look around absolutely without irony or humor intended and say, disbelieving, “I thought it was supposed to be thatched.”
The airport. Was supposed. To be thatched.)

…Yeah. So you will understand that when I was invited to participate in an anthology called
Emerald Magic: Great Tales of Irish Fantasy,
before I decided what story I wanted to write, I asked casually if I could see a list of the other contributors. When I saw the list, it was as I thought: only one of them (our former neighbor Morgan Llewellyn) had ever lived here. One of them (the excellent Tanith Lee) might have at least
been
here. And I knew in my bones what way everyone else would be going with their stories: the Celtic twilight, thatch everywhere, the soft green countryside, the old school Ireland and the old-school myths of a century or so back. I immediately thought,
Somebody’s got to actually get into
Dublin,
where a third of the damn population lives! Somebody’s got to at least spend a
little
time in the here and now. …I’m going urban on this one.

Hence the following.