The Dwarves of Whiskey Island

I SHOULD HAVE known better. Hell, I did know better. At quarter to seven I was staring up at the vast glass canopy that roofed the Old Arcade and telling myself that I never really expected anything to come from my anonymous caller. I sat back in one of the chairs lining the railing of the first mezzanine level and looked at my little neon-green pamphlet.

The author had certainly gotten his money’s worth out of me. Something about it had me thinking about the backlash coming against the Portal. What exactly would happen when the author ’s point of view became a majority position, or even a plurality?

A shadow glimpsed out of the corner of my eye brought me back to the here and now. A very tall shadow. I looked up and saw an elf standing by my table. Not just any elf either.

“Commander Maelgwyn Caledvwlch,” he responded with none of the irritation that a human would lend to the correction. His voice was cultured and much too light for someone eight-and-a-half feet tall. His accent carried a hint of the West Indies, though the magical influence of the Portal would keep him from ever traveling any farther south than the edge of Columbus before the life drained out of him.

When I first met him, under less pleasant circumstances, he was a senior detective in the Special Paranormal Unit. He had since graduated to running the whole SPU, which made him probably the highest ranking nonhuman in the city government.

“What can I do for you?” I asked. I reached over and picked up my coffee, trying to remain casual in front of Caledvwlch. It took an effort. Not just because he was physically intimidating; he ran tall even for an elf, and his eyes were featureless metallic reflections that hid any slight emotion that might pass over his impassive face. What really made me ill at ease was the fact he was a cop, the SPU commander, and in two years he had never once said one word to me that was not part of some official communication.

For one brief moment I thought that he might have been my anonymous caller. But that wasn’t Caledvwlch’s style, and he certainly would not have any issues contacting me whenever he wanted.

“I wish to ask you some questions in connection with a police investigation.” He drew the seat away from the other side of my small table. He folded into the seat without asking my permission. Even seated, I had to look up to see his face.

Reading his expression was hopeless. I took a sip from my coffee and asked, “Am I a suspect, a witness, or a victim?” I told myself not to be too worried. For the past two years my brushes with the law had been largely benign, limited to two speeding tickets, contempt of court for not revealing a source, and one bogus trespassing charge brought by a councilman who felt I shouldn’t be spending time watching city employees unload kegs of Miller Lite behind a bar owned by the councilman’s brother.

Caledvwlch reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a picture. His long fingers covered it as he slid it facedown across the table.

I looked down at the white glossy back of the picture as his hand withdrew. Fresh inkjet print on cheap paper, still curling a little, as if it had just come out of the printer.

Cops, even elven ones, are nothing if not predictable. If Ossian Parthalán had meant anything to me, looking at a picture of his mutilated corpse probably would have provoked some incriminating reaction. I was very aware of Caledvwlch watching me stare at the gruesome crime scene picture.

Someone really did not like Mr. Parthalán. They had cut out his eyes, sliced his mouth open, and chopped off his hands, among other things. The blood was so bad that it took a moment for me to realize that Parthalán wasn’t human.

I lifted the picture reluctantly. “Dwarves,” in this case, referred to the humanoid race that came over from the other side of the Portal. Dwarves weren’t squat humans. Their skin was different, wrinkled, thick, the color and texture of weathered leather. Their skulls were flatter and wider, a thick jaw usually hidden behind a thick beard. There were a whole litany of subtle differences in internal organs and skeletal structure . . .

The body was sprawled on a hardwood floor. Blood had spattered everywhere. The camera looked straight down, framing the body. There were few other details visible. I looked up at Caledvwlch and asked, though I already suspected the answer, “How does he know me?”

“The last time we know Mr. Parthalán contacted anyone while he was alive was one phone call he made at 12:45 PM today.”

I looked back down at the body. This was the person I had come here to meet. The person who knew why Council President Dominic Lloyd Mazurich put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

I looked up at Caledvwlch and felt a little uneasy. I had been dismissive about conspiracies involving Mazurich’s suicide, but the dwarf’s death lent substantial weight to whatever suspicions he did have.

However, while Caledvwlch was one of the few cops in the city I could say for certain wasn’t crooked, that didn’t mean I trusted him.

Caledvwlch shook his head. “I know humans, Mr. Maxwell. I know you. What did Mr. Parthalán discuss with you?”

I sipped my coffee. I have two personality traits that, in most professions, would be self-destructive. The first was a cultivated paranoia that, in my more self-aware moments, I told myself was a natural journalist’s instinct not to take people’s motivations at face value.

The second was, whenever anyone attempted to pressure me to do anything, I tended to behave in the exact contrary manner.

Caledvwlch retrieved his photograph and replaced it in his pocket. “There are very few facts. Mr. Parthalán died two hours ago. He was killed in rooms above a tourist bar, the Nazgûl, on the West Side of the Flats. Authorities there for an unrelated matter became aware of a disturbance and broke into the room Mr. Parthalán had locked himself inside. He was dead when they found him. In the room was the phone he had used to call you.”

“Dwarves do not use magic,” Caledvwlch said. “They cannot manipulate mana, and are largely immune to its effects.”

Despite my contrary streak, I saw no good reason to obstruct a police investigation. “He said that his life was in danger, and he wanted to talk to me about Mazurich.”

Very, very slightly, an eyebrow arched on the elf’s face. Given their almost pathological reserve, I counted that as the equivalent to a human expression of stunned disbelief. Nothing altered in the timbre of his voice, so I might have imagined it. “Council President Mazurich?”

I nodded. “One of the hundreds of conspiracy theorists out there. He said he knew something about his death but couldn’t talk about it on the phone. That’s pretty much it.”

Caledvwlch nodded and stood. “Thank you, Mr. Maxwell. I will contact you if we need to discuss this further.”

Mazurich was union to the core, the kind of traditional working-class Democrat that didn’t even have to ask the locals for support. It just sort of happened. So it made sense that dwarves had an interest in him.

Dwarves were labor personified. One of the dwarf clans in Cleveland was responsible for most of the construction that Gregory Washington had been complaining about. The dwarves at the local Ford plant were, to my understanding, the most productive workers on the North American continent. During the exodus of skilled labor in the chaotic years following the Portal’s opening, dwarves had slid into dozens of niches in the economy, from plumbing to civil engineering.

And, while a lot of dwarven individuals were part of the Teamsters, or the UAW, and so on, the dwarven clan system was more powerful than any union. You cross a dwarf, you’ll not only lose your dwarven employees, but your clients will lose theirs. And their dwarven customers. Down to dwarven contractors abandoning construction sites if the owner was too cozy with someone on their shit list.

I was certain that dwarves would have a political affinity with Mazurich. A lot more so than with the opposite pole of Cleveland politics, Mayor Rayburn.

Rayburn was, according to his critics, autocratic, authoritarian, elitist.... A top-down type of politician whose view of the world was more in sync with elves and dragons.

Mazurich, to the same people, was populist, egalitarian, a small “d” democrat . . . a man whose grass-roots politics would certainly be more in tune with the dwarven clans.

I sighed to myself. I was a political reporter, but the politics I reported on were almost universally human. It was inevitable, I suppose, a white journalist in the Deep South during the days of Jim Crow wasn’t going to be very good at discerning the internal politics of the civil rights movement. I was in the same position, trying to understand a culture—a series of cultures—I wasn’t a part of.

However, when I parked behind my condo, I had enough professional sense to realize that all my speculation up to that point was just that. Speculation. Nonhuman politics happened behind closed doors, out of view of the media.

I stepped out of my Volkswagen, raised my collar against the snow, and walked around my building to the front entrance.

Willie Czestzyk—the doorman for my building who looked at least as old as it was—let me in to my condo.

“Old politicians never die, they just become the focus of conspiracy theories.” I shook my head and walked into the lobby. I didn’t like that I was still thinking about the dead dwarf. Ever since my divorce I had made an effort to leave my job at the office—as if I was still trying to fix my marriage.

So, trying to think happy thoughts about my daughter’s coming visit this weekend, I gathered my mail and took the elevator up to my condo. I noticed a new set of charms riveted to the doors as they slid open. Building management must be upgrading security again.

My condo lived on the third floor of a line of buildings built in the nineteen-thirties. Originally intended as apartments for professionals commuting via the brand new light-rail line downtown, it sat just on the suburban side of Shaker Square. My place was one of the lesser residences, some of the suites here ran larger than some good-sized houses, with an inflated mortgage to match.

I had one of the more reasonable condos, four rooms if you counted the bathroom, five if you designated the living/dining room space as two separate areas.

I let myself in and collapsed on the couch that dominated half of the living room area, and scattered my mail on the coffee table. Bills mostly.

I checked my watch and saw that it was still before five on the West Coast. My daughter usually didn’t call until after she ate dinner, so I picked up the remote, intent on watching something brainless on my new fifty-inch Panasonic LCD flat-screen. I powered it on and waited while the electronics between it and the satellite dish established a reliable digital connection and filtered enough of an incoming signal through the Portal interference.

I set down the remote and picked up the envelope. It was an odd size, and a little lumpy. My address was written across the front in an elaborate cursive hand. The postmark was local, a post office downtown, dated yesterday. Two fifty-cent Ronald Reagan stamps. No return address.

Holding the corners of the envelope, I walked to the kitchen with it. I set it down in the basin of the sink and pondered what to do with it.

Unfortunately, I work in a profession that is a lot more likely to receive dangerous things in the mail than most.

I went into the bedroom, grabbed a table lamp, stripped off the shade, and carried it into the kitchen. I plugged it in and turned the thing on.

Then, feeling like an idiot, I grabbed a pair of tongs and picked the letter up by the corner and held it up between me and the incandescent bulb. I stared at it, lit from behind.

The good news: no wires, no electronics. It contained a folded piece of paper with some writing on it in the same hand as the envelope. The lumpy bit was something else, rectangular, about the size of the two stamps on the envelope. There seemed to be some transparency to it. When I tilted the letter, it stayed in the same place, as if it was taped there.

The fact was my self-destructive curiosity was getting the better of me. I figured I was safe from most hostile magic, I certainly paid enough for the wards in this building, a nasty enchantment shouldn’t have made it through the front doors. Mundanely, there didn’t seem to be any surprises inside this letter.

Even so, I got a pair of latex gloves out from under the sink and dug out the sharpest paring knife I could find. With the envelope flat on the table, I very carefully slit open one side of the letter. Then I backed up and spread the opening with the end of my tongs.

Figuring I was safe, I drew the letter out of the envelope. Still wearing the gloves, I opened it and laid it flat on the table.

The object taped to the letter was a small ziplock bag that contained a few grams of some granular white substance. I looked at it and shook my head.