Post by skybright on Dec 14, 2005 14:44:30 GMT -5
The easiest three hundred bucks I ever made was paid to me by a greasy little German immigrant guy with a pencil mustache. It was a milk-run job, and I did it cleanly and exactly to the letter, just like it said I would in the newspaper ad. I finished the job and I got the three hundred bucks, and so by all rights I should have long since forgotten about the whole affair. But real life never works quite like that, and that three hundred bucks is still bothering me, even four years later. Let me tell you about it, and maybe you'll see why.
*****
Wilhelm Schultz had a just-off-the-boat German accent -- funny how you never think of immigrants being from that kind of country anymore. Haiti and Puerto Rico and Pakistan, sure; but somehow nobody but New Yorkers realize that the town's also still full of the old-fashioned kind of immigrant: European, Irish, Chinese. And, in Mr. Schultz's case, German.
Mr. Schultz was a thin, nervous guy with lank blond hair and a mustache that looked like it'd given up trying. To be factual, every inch of Wilhelm Schultz looked like it'd gotten off the boat, looked around New York a little, and promptly given up trying. He sat dejectedly in the office chair, looking round-shouldered and beaten and twisting a Mets cap in his hands. I'm a Yankees woman myself, principally because I know from my own snooping around that the Mets screen for the X-Gene before they draft their players. But it's not the sort of thing that's common knowledge and I'm not the sort to make baseball a point of war anyway; so I didn't grudge Mr. Schultz his choice of sporting teams. I did grudge him the fact that he wouldn't come out and say why he wanted to hire me.
Grimalkin, Inc. is the only investigative firm in New York City operated by and principally for mutants. At least, that's what the word-of-mouth that does most of my advertising says. I happen to know for a fact that there's two others with mutant 'eyes' on the payroll, and one other run by a trio of former vampires (that's all kinds of a different story). But Grimalkin is the only one that's really part of the mutie underground, and the better part of my clientele is mutant. In the fourteen years I've been with the agency Grimalkin has never taken two cases in a row that were straight-human jobs, not mixed up somehow with the mutie culture. Word seems to have gotten around that I'm the eye to see for all jobs in the mutant sector. Maybe it's the fur.
Mr. Schultz was one of the more-fortunate offspring of the X Gene -- one of those who can, to steal the term from another subculture, "pass". But after about three days in the mutant subculture you learn how to smell your own kind (literally, in my case; but again, that's a different story). Schultz looked normal, but he was pure mutant; and what's more, he was pure scared mutant. So scared he didn't even feel like telling me what he wanted. Either that, or all he wanted was to sit in my office chair and wring his hat.
Grimalkin, Inc. was run aground on a shoal of lousy luck at the time; cases had been sparse and the cupboard was starting to look pretty bare. I'm not known for patience when times are good and I go steadily downhill when they get bad; so before long I fixed him with my best cat-eyed stare and asked him to please either tell me his business or leave his hat to die in peace somewhere else.
He cleared his throat and apologized in his thick accent. His English was the precise, by-the-book kind that comes from studying your old high-school language texts over and over again, which was probably exactly how he'd learned it. "Forgive me. You see," He did some more hesitating, "I have a problem, Frau Dawson."
"So I gathered." I leaned back in my chair. "The funny thing about my business, Mr. Schultz, is that nobody comes to see me unless they have a problem. Nobody ever drops in just to chat. They only come in to tell me their problems and strangle their hats at me." I was fairly sure that I had stolen this line from a Raymond Chandler novel, but Mr. Schultz didn't strike me as the type who would be well-read enough (in English, anyway) to know that.
At any rate he just nodded and took a deep breath. "I am thirty-four years old. Fifteen years ago I came to this country as a student. I have never been anywhere but New York City; and I find, now, that I wish to go elsewhere."
"You leaving a woman, Mr. Schultz?" I don't do divorce work -- divorce is an ugly enough business without me wading around in it -- and I figured if it was that he was after, it was best to get him out of my office now.
Schultz's pale skinny eyebrows shot up, but he shook his head. "No. There was a woman -- Emily. But she is already gone, three weeks ago. She left no reason, but I suspect that she left because she discovered that I was," He hesitated, cleared his throat, and lowered his voice. "You know. A mutant."
What he actually said was ein Exzentriker; but among my array of startlingly useless talents, I know the slang words for mutant in seven languages. "There's no need to lower your voice, Mr. Schultz. And you can say it in English." I said, a little more brusquely than I'd really meant to. I have an awfully low tolerance for people who are ashamed of their mutations, particularly when, like Schultz, they can pass. I pushed my hat back on my head and leaned closer to him, just to make it even more painfully obvious to the little normal-looking guy that I look like an extra from Revenge of the Cat People. "I assure you, I know what you mean anyway."
"Yes. Well." He swallowed. "Without her here there is no reason for me to stay in New York. It is time to start over, somewhere fresh. Also, my employer . . . he does not like that I was involved with a human woman."
"You've been fired?"
"I . . . will be leaving the company." He blinked nervously. "I cannot tell you who I work for."
"I wouldn't want to know." Particularly since I suspected Wilhelm Schultz was only telling me a third of what there was to tell. New York has her faults, sure, but all the same very few people leave her for no real reason. And nobody leaves her as scared as Mr. Schultz was unless they have a real good reason. It wouldn't surprise me to find out that Mr. Schultz was planning to skip town with a substantial chunk of his employer's payroll: but so long as his employer wasn't hiring me, that wasn't any of my concern. "You basically want me to give you a destination."
"Yes. I need a place to make a new start. Away from New York. Preferably a place where there are a few . . . people of our type." He nodded. "And also a few hours of . . . bodyguarding? Until my bus arrives."
"And you want me to play Oskar Schindler." I winced, realizing the joke was in bad taste the minute I said it; but by then it was too late to rewind it. My mouth has the tendency to run off places with my common sense and then just keep on running by itself once my common sense has tired out and gone home. Anyway, the comment went over Schultz's head. He nodded politely but uncomprehendingly; so I elaborated. "You want me to put you in touch with someone at the other end of the bus line, buy your ticket for you, and see you safely off."
Wilhelm Schultz nodded. "You can do these things?"
"Sure thing." I scratched my head and thought for a moment. "A buddy of my late partner retired to a little town in Indiana. Paris, I think was the name of it. He's a mutant, and he seems to like it well enough. That do?"
"That would be fine, I think." He seemed more relaxed with the name of a destination in his head. "For this job, how much money would you need?"
"Oh, a couple hours of bodyguarding work and a little time on the phone; say three hundred dollars?" It was a high estimate. Jobs like the one Schultz wanted done are usually settled on the same way you buy a used car: the dealer -- that is, me -- starts high and barters down.
Schultz just nodded. "It would be satisfactory for me to pay your associate in Paris once I arrive?"
I got real suspicious, then; whatever Schultz was gonna be leaving in New York, he was anxious enough to be leaving it that he didn't mind being overcharged. But like the cliche goes, I needed the money; so we shook hands and he gave me cash to buy the bus ticket and we agreed to meet next morning at Lusus Naturae.
That night, after I'd called and arranged things with Sparky's old pal in Paris, Indiana, I snuck uptown and settled into the shadows on the 50th street side of St. Patrick's. I sat and smoked like I often do, watching people go in to Saks Fifth Avenue on the one side of the street and the confessional booth on the other; and I figured why fight it? Everyone's running from some thing or another. We all just run different ways.
********
If this was a real detective story the next day Schultz would've turned up dead, or a couple hired thugs would've roughed me up and warned me off his case, or a beautiful woman would've sauntered in and claimed Schultz was after her jewels. But this isn't a real detective story, and all that happened was Schultz and I spent the five hours until his bus left throwing darts and trading small talk with the day bartender at Lusus. Then we walked down to the station -- he only had the one bag, and he carried it himself until he handed it off to the baggage boy. His Mets cap was in his other hand and her wrung it at me a little, just for old times' sake. Then he held out his hand to me.
"Thank you for your help, Frau Dawson."
"Don't mention it. And don't be forgetting the three hundred dollars."
"No." The bus driver tapped the horn and Mr. Schultz put his baseball cap on and did what he could to square his shoulders. I shook his hand and then said, "Level with me, Mr. Schultz. You're not running to anything. You're running away."
He gave a little halfhearted smile that went with his thin, weak hair and his pencil-thin mustache. "Yes."
And before I could ask any other questions, he was gone.
My friend in Paris wired me the money three days later, and I treated myself to a batch of real groceries and a Bogart movie and figured that was the end of it.
**********
It was six months later, just as I was coming into a streak of better luck with Grimalkin, that my buddy in Paris e-mailed me to say that Wilhelm Schultz had been fished out of the river there. The police had decided he'd been hit by a car, or else punched good and hard in the guts before he was thrown over the bridge; a bunch of his organs had broken open and he'd died before he hit the water. But there wasn't a bone broken in his body, and that was the part that had caught my buddy's attention. Weird thing, he wrote, Just figured I'd let you know. He just figured he'd let me know. Man, immigrant, 34, broken to pieces, dredged out of dirty water. News of the week.
It shouldn't have bothered me much. It's a long way to Paris, Indiana and I never made any promises about him being safe once he got there. But anyways he was dead there, and I couldn't help wondering just how he died and why.
He never did tell me who he was running away from. Sometimes I think that's the only reason I'm not broken to pieces in a river somewhere. Some other times I think that my thinking so is a sign I'm too paranoid for this job.
Weird happens, in my business. Particularly if you're me in my business, and you work the mutie scene where purple fangs and extra limbs are standards. Weird happens, and you get used to it sooner or later.
But maybe now you see why that three hundred bucks still bothers me.
*****
Wilhelm Schultz had a just-off-the-boat German accent -- funny how you never think of immigrants being from that kind of country anymore. Haiti and Puerto Rico and Pakistan, sure; but somehow nobody but New Yorkers realize that the town's also still full of the old-fashioned kind of immigrant: European, Irish, Chinese. And, in Mr. Schultz's case, German.
Mr. Schultz was a thin, nervous guy with lank blond hair and a mustache that looked like it'd given up trying. To be factual, every inch of Wilhelm Schultz looked like it'd gotten off the boat, looked around New York a little, and promptly given up trying. He sat dejectedly in the office chair, looking round-shouldered and beaten and twisting a Mets cap in his hands. I'm a Yankees woman myself, principally because I know from my own snooping around that the Mets screen for the X-Gene before they draft their players. But it's not the sort of thing that's common knowledge and I'm not the sort to make baseball a point of war anyway; so I didn't grudge Mr. Schultz his choice of sporting teams. I did grudge him the fact that he wouldn't come out and say why he wanted to hire me.
Grimalkin, Inc. is the only investigative firm in New York City operated by and principally for mutants. At least, that's what the word-of-mouth that does most of my advertising says. I happen to know for a fact that there's two others with mutant 'eyes' on the payroll, and one other run by a trio of former vampires (that's all kinds of a different story). But Grimalkin is the only one that's really part of the mutie underground, and the better part of my clientele is mutant. In the fourteen years I've been with the agency Grimalkin has never taken two cases in a row that were straight-human jobs, not mixed up somehow with the mutie culture. Word seems to have gotten around that I'm the eye to see for all jobs in the mutant sector. Maybe it's the fur.
Mr. Schultz was one of the more-fortunate offspring of the X Gene -- one of those who can, to steal the term from another subculture, "pass". But after about three days in the mutant subculture you learn how to smell your own kind (literally, in my case; but again, that's a different story). Schultz looked normal, but he was pure mutant; and what's more, he was pure scared mutant. So scared he didn't even feel like telling me what he wanted. Either that, or all he wanted was to sit in my office chair and wring his hat.
Grimalkin, Inc. was run aground on a shoal of lousy luck at the time; cases had been sparse and the cupboard was starting to look pretty bare. I'm not known for patience when times are good and I go steadily downhill when they get bad; so before long I fixed him with my best cat-eyed stare and asked him to please either tell me his business or leave his hat to die in peace somewhere else.
He cleared his throat and apologized in his thick accent. His English was the precise, by-the-book kind that comes from studying your old high-school language texts over and over again, which was probably exactly how he'd learned it. "Forgive me. You see," He did some more hesitating, "I have a problem, Frau Dawson."
"So I gathered." I leaned back in my chair. "The funny thing about my business, Mr. Schultz, is that nobody comes to see me unless they have a problem. Nobody ever drops in just to chat. They only come in to tell me their problems and strangle their hats at me." I was fairly sure that I had stolen this line from a Raymond Chandler novel, but Mr. Schultz didn't strike me as the type who would be well-read enough (in English, anyway) to know that.
At any rate he just nodded and took a deep breath. "I am thirty-four years old. Fifteen years ago I came to this country as a student. I have never been anywhere but New York City; and I find, now, that I wish to go elsewhere."
"You leaving a woman, Mr. Schultz?" I don't do divorce work -- divorce is an ugly enough business without me wading around in it -- and I figured if it was that he was after, it was best to get him out of my office now.
Schultz's pale skinny eyebrows shot up, but he shook his head. "No. There was a woman -- Emily. But she is already gone, three weeks ago. She left no reason, but I suspect that she left because she discovered that I was," He hesitated, cleared his throat, and lowered his voice. "You know. A mutant."
What he actually said was ein Exzentriker; but among my array of startlingly useless talents, I know the slang words for mutant in seven languages. "There's no need to lower your voice, Mr. Schultz. And you can say it in English." I said, a little more brusquely than I'd really meant to. I have an awfully low tolerance for people who are ashamed of their mutations, particularly when, like Schultz, they can pass. I pushed my hat back on my head and leaned closer to him, just to make it even more painfully obvious to the little normal-looking guy that I look like an extra from Revenge of the Cat People. "I assure you, I know what you mean anyway."
"Yes. Well." He swallowed. "Without her here there is no reason for me to stay in New York. It is time to start over, somewhere fresh. Also, my employer . . . he does not like that I was involved with a human woman."
"You've been fired?"
"I . . . will be leaving the company." He blinked nervously. "I cannot tell you who I work for."
"I wouldn't want to know." Particularly since I suspected Wilhelm Schultz was only telling me a third of what there was to tell. New York has her faults, sure, but all the same very few people leave her for no real reason. And nobody leaves her as scared as Mr. Schultz was unless they have a real good reason. It wouldn't surprise me to find out that Mr. Schultz was planning to skip town with a substantial chunk of his employer's payroll: but so long as his employer wasn't hiring me, that wasn't any of my concern. "You basically want me to give you a destination."
"Yes. I need a place to make a new start. Away from New York. Preferably a place where there are a few . . . people of our type." He nodded. "And also a few hours of . . . bodyguarding? Until my bus arrives."
"And you want me to play Oskar Schindler." I winced, realizing the joke was in bad taste the minute I said it; but by then it was too late to rewind it. My mouth has the tendency to run off places with my common sense and then just keep on running by itself once my common sense has tired out and gone home. Anyway, the comment went over Schultz's head. He nodded politely but uncomprehendingly; so I elaborated. "You want me to put you in touch with someone at the other end of the bus line, buy your ticket for you, and see you safely off."
Wilhelm Schultz nodded. "You can do these things?"
"Sure thing." I scratched my head and thought for a moment. "A buddy of my late partner retired to a little town in Indiana. Paris, I think was the name of it. He's a mutant, and he seems to like it well enough. That do?"
"That would be fine, I think." He seemed more relaxed with the name of a destination in his head. "For this job, how much money would you need?"
"Oh, a couple hours of bodyguarding work and a little time on the phone; say three hundred dollars?" It was a high estimate. Jobs like the one Schultz wanted done are usually settled on the same way you buy a used car: the dealer -- that is, me -- starts high and barters down.
Schultz just nodded. "It would be satisfactory for me to pay your associate in Paris once I arrive?"
I got real suspicious, then; whatever Schultz was gonna be leaving in New York, he was anxious enough to be leaving it that he didn't mind being overcharged. But like the cliche goes, I needed the money; so we shook hands and he gave me cash to buy the bus ticket and we agreed to meet next morning at Lusus Naturae.
That night, after I'd called and arranged things with Sparky's old pal in Paris, Indiana, I snuck uptown and settled into the shadows on the 50th street side of St. Patrick's. I sat and smoked like I often do, watching people go in to Saks Fifth Avenue on the one side of the street and the confessional booth on the other; and I figured why fight it? Everyone's running from some thing or another. We all just run different ways.
********
If this was a real detective story the next day Schultz would've turned up dead, or a couple hired thugs would've roughed me up and warned me off his case, or a beautiful woman would've sauntered in and claimed Schultz was after her jewels. But this isn't a real detective story, and all that happened was Schultz and I spent the five hours until his bus left throwing darts and trading small talk with the day bartender at Lusus. Then we walked down to the station -- he only had the one bag, and he carried it himself until he handed it off to the baggage boy. His Mets cap was in his other hand and her wrung it at me a little, just for old times' sake. Then he held out his hand to me.
"Thank you for your help, Frau Dawson."
"Don't mention it. And don't be forgetting the three hundred dollars."
"No." The bus driver tapped the horn and Mr. Schultz put his baseball cap on and did what he could to square his shoulders. I shook his hand and then said, "Level with me, Mr. Schultz. You're not running to anything. You're running away."
He gave a little halfhearted smile that went with his thin, weak hair and his pencil-thin mustache. "Yes."
And before I could ask any other questions, he was gone.
My friend in Paris wired me the money three days later, and I treated myself to a batch of real groceries and a Bogart movie and figured that was the end of it.
**********
It was six months later, just as I was coming into a streak of better luck with Grimalkin, that my buddy in Paris e-mailed me to say that Wilhelm Schultz had been fished out of the river there. The police had decided he'd been hit by a car, or else punched good and hard in the guts before he was thrown over the bridge; a bunch of his organs had broken open and he'd died before he hit the water. But there wasn't a bone broken in his body, and that was the part that had caught my buddy's attention. Weird thing, he wrote, Just figured I'd let you know. He just figured he'd let me know. Man, immigrant, 34, broken to pieces, dredged out of dirty water. News of the week.
It shouldn't have bothered me much. It's a long way to Paris, Indiana and I never made any promises about him being safe once he got there. But anyways he was dead there, and I couldn't help wondering just how he died and why.
He never did tell me who he was running away from. Sometimes I think that's the only reason I'm not broken to pieces in a river somewhere. Some other times I think that my thinking so is a sign I'm too paranoid for this job.
Weird happens, in my business. Particularly if you're me in my business, and you work the mutie scene where purple fangs and extra limbs are standards. Weird happens, and you get used to it sooner or later.
But maybe now you see why that three hundred bucks still bothers me.