Weird Detectives (23 page)

There will be honey on buttered toast served for tea that afternoon, I fancy.

There were tales of a barbarian who passed through the village on his way east, but the people who told Old Gao this did not believe that it could have been the same man who had lived in Gao’s shack. This one was young and proud, and his hair was dark. It was not the old man who had walked through those parts in the spring, although, one person told Gao, the bag was similar.

Old Gao walked up the mountainside to investigate, although he suspected what he would find before he got there.

The stranger was gone, and the stranger’s bag.

There had been much burning, though. That was clear. Papers had been burnt—Old Gao recognized the edge of a drawing the stranger had made of one of his bees, but the rest of the papers were ash, or blackened beyond recognition, even had Old Gao been able to read barbarian writing. The papers were not the only things to have been burnt; parts of the hive that the stranger had rented were now only twisted ash; there were blackened, twisted strips of tin that might once have contained brightly colored syrups.

The color was added to the syrups, the stranger had told him once, so that he could tell them apart, although for what purpose Old Gao had never enquired.

He examined the shack like a detective, searching for a clue as to the stranger’s nature or his whereabouts. On the ceramic pillow four silver coins had been left for him to find—two yuan and two pesos—and he put them away.

Behind the shack he found a heap of used slurry, with the last bees of the day still crawling upon it, tasting whatever sweetness was still on the surface of the still-sticky wax. Old Gao thought long and hard before he gathered up the slurry, wrapped it loosely in cloth, and put it in a pot, which he filled with water.

He heated the water on the brazier, but did not let it boil. Soon enough the wax floated to the surface, leaving the dead bees and the dirt and the pollen and the propolis inside the cloth.

He let it cool.

Then he walked outside, and he stared up at the moon. It was almost full.

He wondered how many villagers knew that his son had died as a baby. He remembered his wife, but her face was distant, and he had no portraits or photographs of her. He thought that there was nothing he was so suited for on the face of the earth as to keep the black, bulletlike bees on the side of this high, high hill. There was no other man who knew their temperament as he did.

The water had cooled. He lifted the now solid block of beeswax out of the water, placed it on the boards of the bed to finish cooling. He took the cloth filled with dirt and impurities out of the pot. And then, because he too was, in his way, a detective, and once you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the truth, he drank the sweet water in the pot. There is a lot of honey in slurry, after all, even after the majority of it has dripped through a cloth and been purified. The water tasted of honey, but not a honey that Gao had ever tasted before. It tasted of smoke, and metal, and strange flowers, and odd perfumes. It tasted, Gao thought, a little like sex.

He drank it all down, and then he slept, with his head on the ceramic pillow.

When he woke, he thought, he would decide how to deal with his cousin, who would expect to inherit the twelve hives on the hill when Old Gao went missing.

He would be an illegitimate son, perhaps, the young man who would return in the days to come. Or perhaps a son. Young Gao. Who would remember, now? It did not matter.

He would go to the city and then he would return, and he would keep the black bees on the side of the mountain for as long as days and circumstances would allow.

Neil Gaiman
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of novels
Neverwhere
,
Stardust
,
American Gods
,
Coraline
,
Anansi Boys
,
The Graveyard Book
, and (with Terry Pratchett)
Good Omen
s; the Sandman series of graphic novels; and the story collections
Smoke and Mirrors
and
Fragile Things
. He has won numerous literary awards including the Hugo, the Nebula, the World Fantasy, and the Stoker Awards, as well as the Newbery medal. His next novel,
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
, will be published in June 2013.

The Case:
An apparent Manhattan suicide is actually murder by malevolent magic.

The Investigators:
Dr. Matthew Szczegielniak, mage and guardian of the iron world by night, English professor by day. Other “detectives” include three of his female students who realize their mild-mannered prof is a tattooed hunk who seems to be able to appear and disappear at will—they are in hot pursuit.

CRYPTIC COLORATION

Elizabeth Bear

Katie saw him first. The next-best thing to naked, in cutoff camouflage pants and high-top basketball sneakers and nothing else, except the thick black labyrinth of neo-tribal ink that covered his pale skin from collarbones to ankle-bones. He shone like piano keys, glossy-sleek with sweat in a sultry September afternoon.

Katie already had Melissa’s sleeve in her hand and was tugging her toward the crosswalk. Gina trailed three steps behind. “We have
got
to go watch this basketball game.”

“What?” But then Melissa’s line of sight intersected Katie’s and she gasped. “Oh my fuck, look at all that ink. Do you think that counts as a shirt or a skin?” Melissa was from Boston, but mostly didn’t talk like it.

“Never mind the ink,” Katie said. “Look at his
triceps
.”

Little shadowed dimples in the undersides of his arms, and all Katie could think of for a moment was that he wasn’t terribly tall, and if she had been standing close enough when he raised his hands to take a pass she could have stood on tiptoe and licked them. The image dried her mouth, heated her face.

Melissa would have thought Katie silly for having shocked herself, though, so she didn’t say anything.

Even without the ink, he had the best body on the basketball court. Hard all over, muscle swelling and valleying as he sprinted and side-stepped, chin-length blond hair swinging in his eyes. He skittered left like a boxer, turned, dribbled between his legs—quadriceps popping, calves like flexed cables—caught the ball as it came back up and leaped. Parabolic, sailing. Sweat shook from his elbows and chin as he released.

A three-point shot. A high geometric arc.

Denied when a tall black boy of eighteen or so tipped it off the edge of the basket, jangling the chain, and fired back to half court, but that didn’t matter. Katie glanced over her shoulder to make sure Gina was following.

“God,” Melissa purred. “I love New York.”

Katie, mopping her gritty forehead with the inside of her T-shirt collar, couldn’t have agreed more.

So it was mid-September and still too hot to think. So she was filthy just from walking through the city air.

You didn’t get anything like the blond boy back home in Appleton.

Melissa was a tall freckled girl who wore her hair in red pigtails that looked like braided yarn. She had a tendency to bounce up on her toes that made her seem much taller, and she craned over the pedestrians as they stepped up onto the far curb. “There’s some shade by the—oh, my god would you look at that?”

Katie bounced too, but couldn’t see anything except shirts. “Mel!”

“Sorry.”

Flanking Gina, two steps ahead of her, they moved on. Melissa was right about the shade; it was cooler and had a pretty good view. They made it there just as the blond was facing off with a white-shirted Latino in red Converse All-Stars that were frayed around the cuffs. “Jump ball,” Gina said, and leaned forward between Katie and Melissa.

The men coiled and went up. Attenuated bodies, arching, bumping, big hands splayed. Katie saw dark bands clasping every finger on the blond, and each thumb. More ink, or maybe rings, though wouldn’t it hurt to play ball in them?

The Latino was taller; the blond beat him by inches. He tagged the ball with straining fingertips, lofted it to his team. And then he landed lightly, knees flexed, sucked in a deep breath while his elbows hovered back and up, and pivoted.

It wasn’t a boy, unless a man in his early thirties counted.

“Holy crap,” said Gina, who only swore in Puerto Rican. “Girls, that’s
Doctor S.
”

Wednesday at noon, the three mismatched freshman girls who sat in the third row center of Matthew Szczegielniak’s 220 were worse than usual. Normally, they belonged to the doe-eyed, insecure subspecies of first-year student, badly needing to be shocked back into a sense of humor and acceptance of their own fallibility. A lot of these young girls reminded Matthew of adolescent cats; trying so hard to look serene and dignified that they walked into walls.

And then got mad at you for noticing.

Really, that was even funnier.

Today, though, they were giggling and nudging and passing notes until he was half-convinced he’d made a wrong turn somewhere and wound up teaching a high school class. He caught the carrot-top mid-nudge while mid-sentence (Byron, Scott), about a third of the way through his introductory forty minutes on the Romantic poets, and fixed her with a glare through his spectacles that could have chipped enamel.

A red tide rose behind her freckles, brightening her sunburned nose. Her next giggle came out a squeak.

“Ms. Martinchek. You have a trenchant observation on the work of Joanna Baillie, perhaps?”

If she’d gone any redder, he would have worried about apoplexy. She stared down at her open notebook and shook her head in tiny quick jerks.

“No, Doctor S.”

Matthew Szczegielniak rubbed his nose with the butt of his dry-erase marker, nudging his spectacles up with his thumbnail. He wasn’t enough of a problem child to make his students learn his last name—even the simplified pronunciation he preferred—though the few that tried were usually good for endless hours of entertainment.

Besides, Matthew was a Mage. And magic being what it was, he would be hard put to imagine a more counterproductive activity than teaching three hundred undergrads a semester how to pronounce his
name
.

Enough heat of embarrassment radiated from Melissa’s body to make Katie lean on her opposite elbow and duck her head in sympathy. She kept sneaking looks at Doctor S., trying to see past the slicked ponytail, the spectacles, the arch and perfectly bitchy precision of his lecturing style to find the laughing half-naked athlete of the day before.

She’d thought he was probably gay.

Sure, books, covers,
whatever
. It was impossible to believe in
him
exultant, shaking sweat from his hair, even though she’d seen it, even though the image fumed wisps of intrigue through her pelvis. Even though she could see the black rings on every finger and each thumb, clicking slightly when he gestured. She couldn’t understand how she had never noticed them before. And never noticed the way he always dressed for class, though it was still hotter than Hades; the ribbed soft-colored turtleneck that covered him from the backs of broad hands to the tender flesh under his throat, the camel- or smoke- or charcoal-colored corduroy blazer that hid the shape of his shoulders and the width of his chest.

It was maddening, knowing what was under the clothes. She wondered if the barbaric tattoos extended everywhere, and flushed, herself, at least as bright as Melissa. And then brighter, as she felt the prof’s eyes on her, as if he was wondering what she was thinking that so discomfited her.

Oh, lord, but wouldn’t that have hurt?

On the other hand, he’d had the insides of his arms done, and the inner thighs. And
that
was supposed to hurt like anything, wasn’t it?

And
then
she noticed that his left ear was pierced top to bottom, ten or a dozen rings, and sank down in her chair while she wondered what else he might have had done. And why she’d never noticed any of it—the rings, the earrings, the ink, the muscles—any of it, before.

“Oh, God,” she whispered without moving her lips. “I’m never going to make it through this class.”

But she did. And leaned up against the wall beside the door afterwards, shoulder-to-shoulder with Melissa while they waited for Gina to come out. Quiet, but if anybody was going to do something crazy or brave or both, it would be her. And right now, she was down at the bottom of the lecture hall, chatting up the professor.

“Oh, God,” Katie moaned. “I’m going to have to switch sections. I didn’t hear a word he said.”

“I did. Oh, God. He knows my name.” Melissa blushed the color of her plastic notebook cover all over again. Her voice dropped, developed a mocking precision of pronunciation. “Ms. Martinchek, maybe you can tell me about Joanna Ballyhoo . . . ”

“Baillie.” Gina, who came up and stood on tiptoe to stick a purple Post-it note to Melissa’s tit. “He wrote it down for me. This way you can impress him next week.”

Melissa picked the note off her chest and stared at it. “He uses purple Post-it notes?”

“I was right,” Katie said. “He’s gay.”

“Do you want to find out?”

“Oh, and how do you propose we do that? Check the BiGALA membership roster?” Melissa might be scoffing, but her eyes were alight. Katie swallowed.

Gina checked her wristwatch. She had thick brown-black hair swept up in a banana clip, showing tiny curls like inverted devil horns at her pale nape. “He’s got office hours until three. I say we grab some lunch and drop off our books, and then when he leaves we see where he goes.”

“I dunno.” Katie crossed her arms over her notebook. “It’s not like playing basketball with your shirt off is a crime . . . ”