Authors: Finder
"You a copper, too?" he said to me as he came up, in a voice that shook the cross-timbers.
"No," Rico answered for me. "He's an independent contractor. Orient, this is Dave."
"Just Dave?" I asked, probably unwisely.
"Orient. You're the one who finds shit." He said it with a little snort. "Anybody who loses something deserves to be without it."
"That's kind of harsh."
"I don't owe anything, and nobody can make me do anything. You know many people in this town can say that?"
I was careful not to look at Rico.
"Did you make this?" she asked, and handed him the mauled piece of paper.
Dave took it to the door we'd come in. I noticed that he barely glanced at the writing; he turned it over to its relatively unmarked side, rubbed his thumb across it, then held it up to the light. "Yeah, I did. I remember this batch, with the silk fibers in it. And it's got part of my watermark. See?" He held it up for me, because I was closer. "Somebody cut this in half, but you can see the fish head at the edge."
The irregular pale areas, like reverse shadows cast on the paper, resolved themselves into pouting mouth, an X where the eye would be, the curve of cheek and gill. "How do you do that?" I asked him.
"Huh?" Dave said. Rico widened her eyes at me. Even I was a little surprised, actually.
"The watermark. I've always wanted to know how they're done."
Half an hour later, I knew that. I'd also had a short history of watermarks, and what Dave assured me was a quick description of the ancient Chinese method of papermaking, and an explanation of the
differences between that and the process used in Europe during the Renaissance, which Dave assured me was very close to what he was doing, and who the really great papermaking artists were and why, and how a high percentage of cloth fibers in the pulp made better paper, and that a deckle was the wooden
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frame in which the pulp was confi
ned to form sheets, that the stretched screen the pulp was spread
on
was a mold, an
d that the rough edge on the piece we'd brought him was called a "deckle edge" be
cause it
was just as it came out of the deckle, without trimming.
I got a tour of the equipment, with Rico following along, looking bemused. The steaming vat was full of a heaving white porridge of broken-down cloth and old paper. The heat from that, and from the wood fire burning in a stone-lined pit underneath it, kept me from getting close, but I craned my neck. In the vat a four-bladed wooden paddle went round and round, attached to a wooden shaft turned by a cluster of enormous wooden gears (they seemed to be the source of the humming and clunking), which were
themselves turned by another wooden shaft that disappeared out through the back wall. The shafts
looked like young tree trunks, hand-hewn.
"Got a water mill out there in the stream to turn it," Dave explained. "If I had to stir the stock by hand, it'd slow me way down. This way I can mold and roll one batch of stock while another one cooks."
There was another vat, not as hot, where the stock was thinned with water before it was scooped into the mold, and basins for sizing and starch. There was a press made from what looked like the timbers of another barn, with a huge hand screw on top, to force the water out of a stack of formed sheets. Another press was mounted with a cylinder that would squeeze the surface of a sheet down to a smooth finish.
The cylinder bore the slightly raised double-dead-fish logo at regular intervals on its polished face. On the other side of the room was a wide table with a heavy draw knife mounted in a frame, to trim the sheets to size.
My hair hung damp and curling in my eyes. I wiped it back and asked Dave, "Is there anybody else in Bordertown who makes paper?"
"A few people. Nobody with this big a setup. And nobody as high-quality as me."
"Why are you doing it all the way out here?"
"Takes lots of water," he said, waving one platter hand at the vats. "Got the stream right back of the barn to pump from."
"There's the Mad River, in town."
He made a face. "I make white paper. Nothing but. You don't make white paper from water the color of cherry goddamn soda. I'd have to put all kinds of bleach in the stock, and that's bad for the paper, and bad for the river. The little bit I use, I don't like. That's why I got the dead fish watermark, to remind me not to fuck up."
I'm sure there have been drug dealers and serial killers with environmental consciences, but I couldn't make myself believe that Dave had any active involvement in the plot Rico wanted to bust. For the first time I recalled that this was where the paper was
from
, and I understood that someone like Dave could make paper that, no matter what its subsequent history, would always bear his magical imprint, would always name him, and this place, as its origin. In spite of his opinion of my talent, I wanted to tell him that his paper remembered him. Then I looked around again, and decided that he already knew that.
In an elaborately patient voice, Rico interrupted. "I don't suppose you remember who you sold this particular kind of paper to."
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Dave lifted the awning
of his eyebrow. "That batch was five hundred sheets. That's two thousand
quar
ter-sheets, which is my usual trim for writing paper. A little under fourteen reams, if anybody bought it by the ream, which nobody does. I sell it a couple hundred quarter-sheets at a time to shops around town, then some to the big merchant families and business houses, and to individuals sometimes in quantities of maybe twenty-five or fifty. Hell, the town council's bought stationery from me. Do you want the whole list?"
Rico sighed. "Not really, but I'll take it, anyway. I have to check 'em all."
Dave looked closely at her, for the first time, I think. "What the hell is this about?"
"Somebody is making and distributing some stuff that kills people, and I want to find and stop the somebody. That note on your paper was part of a trap laid to kill a guy who might have talked about it.
Instead, it almost got my associate and me last night." She nodded in my direction.
"My paper?" Dave echoed, his voice surprisingly small. He looked as if someone had told him his kid had shot a liquor store clerk. He shook his head slowly, twice. Then he glowered at Rico. "That's the other reason I live out here. I forget it sometimes."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because people suck." He turned his back on us and headed for a flight of wooden stairs up to the loft.
"I'll get you my customer list. Then you can get out of here."
Conversation was formal and drastically limited after that, until Rico and I got back in the Spitfire. Then she made a U-turn in a spray of dust and gravel, and I said, "Now what?"
"Now a lot of boring flatfoot police work, unless another lead turns up." She tapped the sheaf of papers tucked between her seat and the gear shift. "I go around and talk to all of these. Which means you're out of the cop biz for a while."
We shot past the bent tower. Ahead, through the heat haze, I could see the buildings on Dragon's Tooth Hill, and past them, the suggestion of Faerie's rolling meadows and forested slopes. The Ticker had assured me that the view was a glamour, part of the barrier of the Wall, but she'd never described what it really looked like. "Different," she'd said, and we'd both changed the subject.
"Happy?" Rico's voice cut across my thoughts.
"Um? About what?"
"About being out of the cop biz."
"Oh." I shrugged against the shoulder harness. "Neutral."
"Well, that's an improvement."
"It's a job."
"Some people like their jobs. Especially people who get to be their own bosses."
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I thought a
bout that. "I'm self-employed. I'm not exactly my own boss."
"I don't get it."
"Putting this thing to work so that it feeds me, that's good. It's better than the reverse, which is when it feeds on me. But when I use it,
it's
calling the shots."
"Uh-huh. As in, 'Yank, yank.' You could quit."
Except that I didn't know any way to turn it off. Once I'd had a concussion, and my talent had gone away. It would have been a wonderful couple of days, if only the events surrounding the concussion hadn't been such a nightmare. I shook my head. "If you're already a geek, you're better off joining the sideshow and biting the heads off chickens, because at least it's a regular paycheck."
"Don't tell that to your pal Lobo. He might part your hair for you. Where'd you get the idea you're a geek?"
"I grew up with it," I said, looking at her profile. "Sort of like your teddy bear."
We were back in town; I recognized the edge of the Scandal District. She said, "I didn't mean to push your buttons."
I don't know what I would have answered, because that was when the big Norton, painted metalflake olive and cream and brilliant with original chrome, slewed out in the street next to us. Rico said something sharp and pulled over.
The motorcyclist yanked his helmet off to reveal Linn's ascetic pale face. It was bloodless to the lips this time, lines drawn sharp between the eyebrows, eyes a little wide and mouth laid tight closed.
"Sunny! There's another one," he said.
"Hell," Sunny Rico breathed, and it sounded less like an epithet than a description of the circumstances.
"Bolt Street emergency, and not much time." Linn pulled his helmet back on and throttled the Norton into the street and around the corner.
Rico turned to me. "I can't take you home right away. I'm sorry."
"It's all right," I said, suspecting that whatever was going on was not all right for somebody. We sped off in pursuit of Linn.
The clinic on Bolt Street was almost a real hospital, certainly as close as you were likely to get south of Ho. Sometimes they even charged patients for treatment, when it seemed like they could afford it. Four doctors kept their offices there for outpatients, but there were also a few recovery rooms and a
surprisingly well-outfitted ER. It was outside this that Rico bumped her front wheels up over the sidewalk. I hadn't exactly been invited, but when she came flying in the door, making everyone in the hall leap back with startled looks at her shoulder holster, I was pretty close behind.
She grabbed the first person in white she came to, a middle-aged woman in tunic and trousers, and said,
"You had an O.D. admitted, very recently. Where?"
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"You're w
ith Detective Linn?"
"Yes. Where?"
"That hall, third door. And who the hell are you?" she said to me, straight-arming me in the chest.
"I'm with her," I answered, and dodged past.
By the time I reached the door, the place had caught up with me. There was the smell, of course: