Death's Mistress

Page 17

Traffic started to move again, and we inched into the city. There was no parking near our destination, so I dropped her off and went to find a garage. By the time I got back, she’d disappeared into a dimly lit restaurant decorated with raffia-wrapped wine bottles and paint-by-number images of Italy.
It was fey run, meaning she could drop her glamourie like a coat at the door, the restaurant’s camouflage ensuring that everyone looked more or less human. Most of them were, but I spotted the slightly blurred outlines of at least three Others at the bar and a couple more eating spaghetti Bolognese at a corner table.
“Lucas,” Olga told the waiter, who was in a glamourie to match the decor—dark hair, perfect little mustache, slight paunch, balding. What he actually looked like—or what he actually was—was anyone’s guess. I could detect glamouries unless they were very, very expensive ones. But I couldn’t see through them.
That was, after all, kind of the point.
The little man took us over to a table where a distinguished white-haired gentleman of maybe seventy was enjoying some cacciatore. His wrinkles were discreet, like the subtle stripe in his four-thousand-dollar suit and the shine on his Prada loafers. He seemed human enough, as far as I could tell, but he didn’t so much as blink as Olga explained what we wanted.
“You check,” she finished, summoning the waiter with a regal gesture.
“My dear lady, I don’t have to check,” he said, blotting a daub of sauce off the end of his chin. “I can assure you, nothing like that is being offered for sale in New York.”
“How can you be so sure?” I asked, as Olga basically ordered the menu.
“Because it is my business to know!”
“And your business would be?”
“I find rarities for discerning purchasers, matching specialized items with buyers able to appreciate them. I know the inventories of all the major auction houses, as well as quite a few of the small ones.”
“But not all. I mean, there have to be hundreds in this country alone—”
“My dear young lady,” he said severely, “no small house would handle a prize like that. Naudiz is one of a set of runes rumored to have been carved by Odin himself. It would be worth… Well, in essence, it is priceless. If it came up for sale, it would cause a stir around the world. It would be as if the Hope Diamond came up for auction in the world of jewelry.”
I munched a bread stick and thought about it. “No, it would be as if the Hope Diamond was stolen, and then someone had to figure out a way to sell it. A minor jewel would be no problem; you could unload it anywhere. But the Hope freaking Diamond?”
“Well, one could always cut down a diamond,” he said, starting on a supersized gelato. “Not that it would be necessary in the case of such a famous stone. A discreet sale to a private collector would be more likely, if the thief wasn’t a total novice. But it is a poor analogy since a magical object cannot be divided in such a way.”
“So how would he do it? If someone wanted to fence it?”
He quirked an eyebrow. “One doesn’t ‘fence’ an item of that quality.”
“Then what does one do, hypothetically speaking?”
He shrugged. “Arrange a private sale, as I said, or a small auction, by invitation only, for a select company. The latter would be slightly more risky, but would also probably result in a greater return.”
I accepted a glass of wine from the bottle the waiter had brought Olga, and sipped at it as I thought it over. “Say he’s a novice. First-time thief. He wants the maximum return, so he needs to arrange a small, private auction. Who could do that for him?”
“Any number of people. There are many unscrupulous types in our business, I am afraid. And quite a few others who could be persuaded into error by such a commission.”
“But how do I narrow it down?”
“Do you know what auction houses the individual has dealt with in the past?”
“None, as far as I know.”
“Does he have any contacts in this world, people who might have been able to provide him with suggestions?”
“I don’t know.” The Blarestri, Claire’s group of Light Fey, didn’t venture into our world that much, but there was no law against it. The guard could have been here, either officially or not, any number of times, and there was no way to know who he’d met.
“Hm.” He thought about it while Olga dug into a party-sized platter of antipasto. She pushed it at me, and I figured what the hell? I’d finished another glass of wine and enough prosciutto to kill an average person by the time he nodded. “If you can’t narrow it down on his end, the only thing you can do is to narrow it down on ours.”
“Meaning?”
“There is a good deal of fraud, in the case of some unscrupulous auctioneers, and it is often buyer beware. But no one would even attempt to sell something like this without providing cast-iron proof of its legitimacy. A valuation would need to be performed, to convince the potential buyers that it was, indeed, what the auctioneer said it was.”
“And who would do this valuation?”
“It would have to be an unquestionable authority, probably fey since the item is so, of proven discretion and sterling record.”
“Do you know anybody like that?”
“Oh, yes.” His spoon rang on the side of his glass and he sat back with a sigh. “Assuming you can find the little tick.”
The heavy old slab of wood and metal, a relic of a twenties-era speakeasy, groaned as I pushed it open. “SHUT THE DOOR!” The usual chorus greeted me as I slipped inside and turned to shove the door closed behind me.
With the daylight firmly shut out, the stairwell was dim enough that I had to be careful of my footing heading down. The bouncer at the bottom, a large water troll, raised a clammy hand in greeting as I entered the large cellar. It was a lot easier to see here, and not just because of the lanterns scattered about.
Graffiti scrolled down the wall, golden lines rippling as they passed over the spaces between bricks. Some near the ceiling were written in black and stayed in place, as static as if they were drawn with paint instead of magic. But the rest flowed down the walls and onto the cracked cement floor, constantly uncurling and rewriting themselves as the odds changed.
It had odds on everything from dog racing and jai alai, to table tennis and golf. Not that the fey needed a sport to bet on. A couple of dwarves at the bar were raptly watching a pint to see which bead of condensation would hit the bar first. The bartender, who was also the owner, scowled at them, preferring bets to be made with him instead of one another. But at least the winner bought another round.
One of the few constants about the fey was their love for games of chance. They opened betting parlors before they did grocery stores, and they’d put money on anything. And despite its fairly mean decor, Fin’s was one of the best places in Brooklyn to put down a bet.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” I asked, frowning at Fin. “You know everybody.”
“In Brooklyn I know everybody,” he corrected, hopping down from his perch on a milk crate to get me a drink. Fin was a Skogstroll, which was Norwegian for forest troll, although to my knowledge he’d never been out of Brooklyn in his life. But he still had the nose—only a foot long because he was still young—and he had to stand on a box to be able to see over the bar.
He clambered back up and slid me another longneck. “The guy you want works out of Chinatown. Manhattan’s vamp territory—you know that.”
“So what’s a fey doing there?”
Fin shrugged. “He’s Chinese?”
“He’s fey,” I repeated, pausing to drain half my drink. It was hot as hell outside, and I’d been running around all day, lugging half a ton of iron. And all I had to show for it was a pounding headache and a couple of blisters. I would have had to take the leather coat today, I thought, eyeing it resentfully.
“Yeah, but luduans left Faerie a long time ago, and most of them settled in China. The Chinese emperors used them in interrogations.”
“I know that,” I said crabbily. The human world has sodium pentothal and lie detectors; the supernatural world uses luduans—when it can find them. But this one had gotten fired from his job, wasn’t at his apartment and hadn’t been seen for two days at any of the places he liked to hang out.
A trio of trolls erupted with stomps and hoots from their primo place in front of the large mirror on one wall. It was currently reflecting the qualifying heats for the insane mage sport of ley-line racing. The World Championships were coming to town, and it was all anyone could think about. Including Fin, who was raking in the bets hand over fist.
I waited while he took some money off a Merrow, who of course was favoring an Irish driver. She wrapped her webbed hand around a pint and moved off, and I leaned over the bar. “I’m getting desperate, Fin. I don’t have time to wait around days or weeks for this guy to show. I’ve checked everywhere, and it’s like he just fell off the face of the earth.”
Fin shrugged. “All I know is he put a couple bets down with me a week ago, but never paid up. So I sent the boys after him.”
The “boys” were a couple of cave trolls, short and squat like the rest of their breed, but with the long arms and huge, shovel-like hands needed for excavating large areas of earth. Those hands were also good for slapping around welchers, so much so that Fin rarely had a problem.
“Did they find him?” I asked.
He scowled. “Not yet. They went by his job, but he wasn’t there.”
“He isn’t going to be. The management fired him after they found out about his gambling debts. I think they were afraid he’d walk off with some of the merchandise.”
Fin paused to serve another customer, with the molasses-type beer trolls prefer. I suppressed a face. You can eat that stuff with a spoon. “You’re talking about that auction house he used to work for,” he finally told me. “He got another job last week—at a gambling den in back of a pharmacy over there.”