“I have a few other questions,” I said quietly.
“I was sure you would,” he said, smiling.
It was a chess game now. Baldassare had stopped volunteering information. He wanted me to probe. That way, he would get a measure of exactly what I did and didn’t know. Which meant that, if I asked the wrong questions, in the wrong order, he would blithely allow me to stumble down the wrong path.
I bore him no malice for that; it was part of the game, after all. He treated prosecuting attorneys and Council committees no differently.
“You said you did business with him?” I opened.
“To be precise,” he said with a bit of a grin, “I said I didn’t
deny
doing business with him.”
“But you did.”
“His company, yes. I presume you knew that.”
“What kind of business did you engage in with him?”
Baldassare steepled his fingers, “You should understand that I’m under contractual obligations. I can’t just itemize business dealings ad hoc. I can refer you to the quarterly shareholder’s report—”
I shook my head. “Just, in general, what did Forest Hills Enterprises provide Aloeus?”
“Aloeus, Incorporated, Kline. He may have died, but the legal construction carries on without him.”
Interesting point
. “So Forest Hills provided what?”
“It is a real estate development company. Forest Hills does with Aloeus, Inc., what it does with everyone else. It buys and sells commercial development properties.”
“In Mexico?”
“Forest Hills Enterprises holds properties all across North America.”
“And why would Aloeus,
Inc.
, want to buy acres of undeveloped property in Mexico?”
Baldassare looked at me, “I suspect you would have to ask Aloeus that question.” He sipped his drink, and I had the eerie feeling that in our little game of conversational chess I had suffered a fool’s mate.
I didn’t let him go at that. “Why would you think he bought property in a place he would never be able to go?”
“If I were to theorize, which I do not, I would say that the property was purchased for the same reason it was sold. To make a profit.”
“You’re saying that Aloeus was speculating in real estate.”
“That seems to be the obvious conclusion.” He set the empty glass on the mosaic table. “Do you have any other questions?”
“Do you associate with any other dragons?”
“Some business contacts. They tend to be private creatures.”
And wealthy,
I thought. The community of money could inspire more solidarity than nationality or—I suspected in this case—species. “Do you know any who might talk to me?” I asked him.
“Interesting question,” Baldassare shook his head. “They don’t line up for interviews.”
“Could you set up a meeting?” I asked.
“You don’t ask small favors.” Baldassare said.
“I rarely ask any,” I replied. In his case, it was true. In my years of our relationship, I’d never asked him to perform any actions on my behalf. Not so much as an introduction. I had always felt the dynamic between us was too fragile and too one-sided for me to push things with him.
I don’t know why I asked him to introduce me to a dragon. I suspect that Baldassare was as surprised that I’d asked as I was. I suspect that what prompted it was a gut-deep instinct that he would. I don’t know why I felt that way, unless it was an overall impression from Baldassare’s monologue, but it proved correct.
“I
can
set up an appointment for you,” he said after a long, thoughtful pause. “An associate who might be willing. Her name is Theophane. She resides in the BP Building.”
“Thank you.”
“Kline, goodwill is a fragile thing with these creatures. Don’t make me sorry I did you this favor.”
“You won’t be,” I assured him.
I drove away from Baldassare’s estate with two conflicting emotions fighting for airtime in my head. First off, I was really pleased with myself for landing an interview with a dragon. That would be a real coup if I could pull it off. I certainly wouldn’t find a better source for background on Aloeus.
But, on the other hand, I kept feeling that I’d slipped up somewhere with Baldassare. That thought kept nagging at me as I drove up the curvy, wooded road paralleling the Chagrin River. It kept nagging at me until my cell phone rang.
I flipped it open to familiar static and incomprehensible whispering voices fading in and out.
“I am determined to prove a villain—”
“Hello, who is this?”
“Plots I have laid—” Then a sudden series of clicks and a dial tone.
Christ, what the hell is this?
I knew that it had to be the same person who’d called me with the
Macbeth
quote. This new one sounded vaguely Shakespearean as well. It made me wish I’d paid a little more attention in my English Lit classes in college.
Normally I hate people who chatter on cell phones in the car, but the heat of curiosity was on me. So, after I had again determined that the last caller was from an unknown number, and made sure that it was still before eight, I called up one of my research sources.
“Cleveland Public Library, archives. How can I help you?”
“Eric, it’s Kline.”
“Kline? I can barely hear you. Where are you?”
“On my cell phone, quick question—how’s your Shakespeare?”
“My Shakespeare? What you working on?”
“Can you ID a quote for me?”
“Speak up, what?”
“‘I am determined to become a villain. Plots I have laid’ What’s that from?”
“Can you repeat that?”
“‘I am determined to become a villain!’”
I yelled into the phone.
“‘Plots I have—’”
I was just making a blind turn on a road following the edge of the Chagrin River, I looked up and suddenly there was a rider in front of me. I dropped the phone and slammed on the brakes, pulling the Volkswagen into the wrong lane and off the road.
In front of me the blinding-white animal turned and reared. I don’t know how I missed it, a cloven hoof seemed to come close enough to touch the windshield.
The car came to a stop with one front tire tilted into a ditch. My neck felt as if the shoulder belt had abraded it raw. I popped the door and released the seat belt. I stepped out and almost tumbled downslope into the river.
“Are you all right?”
I turned, looking back toward the road. The rider was a young woman wearing a sea-green hunt coat and a matte-black helmet. Her steed was smaller than your average horse, cloven hoofed, golden maned, with a goatlike beard and a long spiraled horn emerging from its forehead about a handspan above its eyes.
They were both backing to a path that paralleled the road.
“I almost hit you,” I said. I walked around the edge of the car, keeping my hand on the roof for balance. “Are
you
all right?”
The unicorn kept backing away. I suspect he didn’t like me. She leaned forward and patted the creature’s neck and whispered something. I heard enough to realize that it was the elves’ language. She looked up, and I could see that it wasn’t a coincidence. Her face carried the alien lines and metallic eyes of an elf.
That explained why she wasn’t cursing me out right now. Elves had more reserve than any creature had a right to have. From a human viewpoint they had less passion than a lobotomized Englishman on thorazine.
“We are all right.” She looked down on me from her mount. “You should watch for riders in these woods, sir.”
I nodded. “Stupid mistake,” I agreed. “I’m sorry.”
“You apologies are unnecessary, and it was not as stupid as it could have been.” Something passed across her face too quickly for me to tell if it was a frown or a smile. “What is your business here?”
I was tempted to say,
none of yours.
But Hunting Valley residents were kind of touchy about outsiders, and I did just come close to running her over.
“I had a meeting with Mr. Baldassare. Down the street.”
She stared at me with alien, pupiless eyes. Trying, I supposed, to determine if I was lying. Finally she said, “I am Ysbail, sir.”
She paused long enough for me to realize that I was supposed to reciprocate. “Kline Maxwell.” I almost offered my hand, but when hers didn’t reach to meet it, I changed the gesture to rub my abraded neck.
She nodded. “You are.”
I didn’t know if I liked the way she said that. I heard a small far-away sound, and remembered my cell phone. I held up my hand, “Wait a moment, would you?”
I was already thinking that an elvish perspective on the whole thing would be a neat detail I could slip in. Keeping an eye on Ysbail, I scrambled around the front of the Volkswagen and found the phone, still open, under the driver’s seat.
She, apparently, didn’t share my plans. Her mount turned without any visible signal from her.
“Hey.
Wait!
” I called after them as they disappeared down a path that led away from the road.
“Hello? Kline?”
I sighed, shook my head, and said a curt “Yeah.” into the phone.
“What happened? I thought you were cut off—”
“Never mind that.” I kept staring into the woods. “Do you know the quote?”
“Uh-huh. I found it for you. The full thing is: ‘I am determined to prove a villain/ And hate the idle pleasures of these days. Plots I have laid, inductions dangerous/ By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams/ To set my brother Clarence and the King/ In deadly hate against one another—’”
“
You don’t have to read the whole thing. Just tell me what it’s from.”
“It’s from the opening soliloquy of
Richard III.
”
I pondered a moment. “That’s the humpbacked king who kills his nephews in the Tower of London, right?”
“You got it.”
Macbeth,
then
Richard III
? There was obviously something my anonymous caller was trying to tell me. Something about powerful men, and betrayal. But who, and what . . . ?
Mind games.
Some joker who believed that this was some form of subtlety. I shouldn’t be wasting my time on it. What I
needed
to do was get tomorrow’s dragon story into the paper. And, tomorrow, I was probably going to get to talk to a dragon in the flesh.
After putting the story to bed, I got Chinese takeout. I pulled up to my complex after dark. My condo sat just on the Shaker Heights side of Shaker Square, part of a line of Tudor-Gothic apartment buildings built in the nineteen-thirties. The doorman—a grizzled old guy named Willie Czestzyk—let me in.
“Long day, Mr. Maxwell?”
“As long as they get,” I said, holding my bag of Kung-Pao chicken close to my chest.
“What’s the news?” He always asked me that question.
“The FAA is going to form a commission to investigate dragon safety.”
Willie chuckled, like he always did, though I was unsure if I was being ironic or not. I mean, upon reflection, I would not be surprised.
Once up in my apartment I collapsed in front of the TV, promising myself that I wasn’t going to think of anything work-related until I made it to the office tomorrow.
I had an investment in that promise. The television was easily the most expensive piece of equipment in my condo. It wasn’t as hard to get video out of a piece of equipment around the Portal as it was to get video
into
it, but it was still a technological hurdle. Not only did my TV have to operate on redundant bandwidths like my cell phone to eliminate the spurious mana-related data in the signal, but the display had to be a hundred percent digital. That meant no picture tube at all. It had to be a flat screen crystal display, like my laptop.
Combine that kind of technology with the relatively low demand—after all, there were
no
local broadcast stations anymore, and the cable companies around here fell into high-speed Internet delivery out of sheer necessity—you have a boob tube that runs two and a half grand for a twenty-inch model. And, of course, after spending about a grand for a special receiver hooked up to a dish that’d give me something to watch, I had to pull the stops and get the five-grand thirty-five-inch screen model.
Being a couch potato in this city cost money. And after that kind of investment, I almost felt guilty
not
watching pro wrestling.
Anyway, that was what greeted me when I turned the set on, and I didn’t switch channels since this was the kind of mind-numbing stuff I was looking for.
I was just settling into it when the phone rang. Not my cell phone, which I switched off the moment I walked into the building, but my private line. I put down the takeout and hefted the receiver with a sigh.