Immortal at the Edge of the World (29 page)

This was an argument that had begun when Clara insisted she was coming with us, or possibly it began several years ago before she left me and we’d simply taken a long break.

After listening to us for more than an hour Mirella had about had it. “Could one of you reach the point where you call someone with a car so we can get out of here?”

“No,” Clara snapped.

“No? We’ll take your moped then? Or should we walk?”

“I mean no, not a car. I know a guy.”

“Can this guy carry us there?” I asked.

“He can, in his helicopter.”

*
 
*
 
*

Helicopter was definitely the better way to travel through Southern Italy, especially if you aren’t interested in seeing anything. I’d seen Italy plenty of times before, whether I realized I was standing in Italy all of those times or not, so I had no sightseeing to get out of the way that I hadn’t already taken care of in the car ride to Clara’s. But at the same time this was the first time I’d seen it from a few hundred feet above the ground, and that was pretty cool.

It was approaching evening by the time we made it back to the plane. I should mention that most airports aren’t super happy about having people living on planes on their property, even if the plane is in a hangar, and even if that hangar is being paid for with rent fees. I think it’s an insurance thing. Sometimes this works out okay. Istanbul was really nice about it, for instance, which was good since we didn’t want anyone knowing I looked like a man in dire need of modern medical treatment. Rome was not as nice. We ended up in something of a bureaucratic catch-22, where we wanted to leave immediately but they couldn’t let us, and they didn’t want us sitting in the plane for hours while waiting. We couldn’t leave immediately because airports have limited numbers of runways and a finite airspace, so impromptu departures were thoroughly frowned upon. This is why I look for private airfields whenever they’re available.

So for a solid two hours I argued with people in Italian at the foot of the staircase leading to the jet’s door, while Clara and Mirella were aboard—trying to be quiet enough to pretend they weren’t since this would have evidently aggravated the Italian airport Gestapo even more—and doing some very specific web searches. My pilot and his crew were also aboard, but not in secret, since they had to have the plane ready as soon as somebody decided to open a hole in the sky for us.

The pilot and crew, incidentally, changed all the time. It’s a service provided by the same company that sold me the plane. I’d worry that one or two of them might be spying on me, but they change crews so often I can’t imagine they’re learning very much. It’s also possible I have officially become a jaded enough wealthy man that I’m actually ignoring the help as if they weren’t there. This was yet another reason it was a good idea someone got around to making me poor again. Not the biggest reason, but one of them. The biggest reason was that as long as I was one of the wealthiest people on the planet I wouldn’t be able to disappear properly.

We finally got an official who was okay with letting us stay on the plane while the flight plan was finalized. The trick was to keep asking for superiors until we reached one with decision-making abilities. That same official pushed through the flight arrangements, so within the hour we were airborne and heading to the East Coast.

The two women were in their respective corners in the back of the plane, Mirella on the couch and Clara at the desk next to a sleeping Iza, and both of them staring at laptop screens. I doubted they had spoken a word to one another since I’d left them alone. Mirella didn’t trust Clara, didn’t want Clara to come with us, and promised me twice already that she wouldn’t be responsible if something were to happen to Clara. I was trying not to think of that as a threat. Meanwhile, Clara thought Mirella was too pretty. I think. I was afraid to ask.

“I may have figured out where the collection is being held,” Clara said, once we were alone in the cabin. “It’s a part of their
Collection of Scientific Instruments
, but it’s not exactly on public display.”

“What is
not exactly
?”

“It’s available on request from visiting scholars, arranged in advance. To see it officially you would need to submit a formal reason.”

“I want to steal it. Is that formal enough?”

“You might need to pretty that up. Also, these things are arranged months in advance, and we don’t have months.”

“I know. We need a thief.”

Clara looked at the transparent box next to her. “What about Iza?”

“I don’t think she can handle this, there are too many variables. Mirella, have you found me a thief?”

“I’ve found what you told me to search for,” she said. “If you tell me this will lead you to a thief, I believe you. But I don’t know how.”

“He does that a lot,” Clara said. “You get used to it.”

“Show me what you found,” I said to Mirella. “And where.”

Chapter Seventeen

I thought it would be a good idea to recruit a pixie for our little merchant adventure. Hsu had never seen a pixie, and once I explained what they were he was less than enthusiastic about spending our time trying to find one. It made more sense to him to find human-sized assistance.

“I don’t see any use in such a being,” he insisted.

“Even the tiniest and most annoying creatures have particular talents that make them valuable,” I argued.

I never found one, which was a shame. I really wanted to prove him wrong.

*
 
*
 
*

Someone had been setting fires in Philadelphia. It wasn’t big news because the fires weren’t large enough to be big news, and because no lives had been lost. But there was property damage of a very specific sort, and there were details that didn’t make a lot of sense to a lot of people.

It was the details that convinced the local arson inspectors the fires were linked. For one thing, they were only taking place at businesses that served alcohol—bars, restaurants, nightclubs. For another, whoever was doing it drank a lot of the alcohol first. This was evident even after the fire damage, because the arsonist set fires in a part of the room that had no alcohol, so the proof of a drinking binge was usually semi-preserved. This also told investigators that whoever was doing this liked alcohol and liked fire, but didn’t like those two things together.

The part that had been left out of the news was the lack of evidence that anybody broke into these places. It was implied in the language of the early articles, where employees and owners were considered persons of interest, because that meant they were looking at someone who had a key. What they should have been looking for was somebody who wasn’t human-sized.

There is a certain kind of creature that is small, irritable, clever yet extremely one-track minded and predictable, and makes a very useful thief. It’s called an iffrit.

There are two default states for iffrits: drinking and happy, and drinking and unhappy. When they are happy, it’s because they found someone to drink with them for a little while. When they are unhappy, it’s typically because their drinking buddy finally got sick of them or died from alcohol poisoning.
 

An unhappy iffrit has a tendency to set fires. Nobody knows why. Even the iffrits don’t know why. I’m sort of fond of them, because I’m always looking for a drinking buddy, too, and a good iffrit can get me into locked places, and they’re really entertaining drunks even if they’re a pain when you’re sober. They’re like my spirit animal. But none of the ones I knew could explain the fire thing.

Before the advent of Internet-delivered news it was pretty hard to track down an iffrit, but since one only rarely tried to track them down—you were really better off running into one by chance—it wasn’t an issue I ever found myself worrying all that much about.

“I’m not sure I want to meet anything like what you just described,” Mirella said after listening to me provide Iza with as detailed a description of an iffrit as I could. We were sitting in one of the two adjoining suites I’d snapped up in the poshest downtown hotel I could find in Philly. It was ridiculously ostentatious. One might think I was trying to impress one or both of the women I’d checked in with, and I’m sure that’s what the hotel thought. Honestly, I just figured the best way to impoverish myself at this point was to spend all of it as rapidly as I could.

“Are you sure she can handle this, Adam?” Clara asked. When she wasn’t sleeping, Iza was attached to Clara like some kind of parasite. Someone looking on at a distance would think I’d been talking to her and not the tiny winged person on her shoulder. “Iza’s not as young as she used to be.”

“She’ll be fine,” I said. “Just stick to bars for today, Iza. You know what bars are?”

“Stinky drinkies,” she said. That’s what she called everything I drank, basically.

“Close enough.”
 

Her instructions were to find a bar in town that had a person about twice her height hiding somewhere inside. That little person would be naked, would probably smell bad, and would be curled up asleep somewhere in a ceiling tile or hole in a wall. Someplace where it was unlikely for them to be discovered. I could only hope there wasn’t a large rat or small cat that smelled like liquor somewhere in the city, because if there was, that’s probably what Iza would send us to find.

I cracked open a window—this time I’d picked a room with windows that would open at least enough for a pixie to get out. Reluctantly, Clara sent her off.

“I don’t like this,” Clara said.

“You’ve made that clear, yeah.”

*
 
*
 
*

Iza returned so soon it was difficult to believe she’d found an actual iffrit. In her absence I had successfully polished off two drinks, talked myself out of asking Clara about the father four times, and watched Mirella sharpen her knives. It seemed appropriate to at least discuss the child with Clara, since we were doing all of this to get him back for her, but I got the clear sense that she had no intention of giving me any details. If there had been any way to get me to help her without knowing about Paul I’m sure she would have tried it first.

“How many bars did you check?” I asked Iza once she’d paused long enough in her plate of mushrooms to speak without a full mouth.

“Dunno,” she said.

“She can’t really count,” Clara pointed out.

“Well all right, but roughly. More than this many?” I held up four fingers.

Iza nodded. “Told you, found iffit. Smelled.”

“All right, but what did he smell like?”
 

I should say there was no question that the iffrit was a he. I don’t think there is such a thing as a female iffrit, and if there is, even the iffrits don’t know where to find one. If you want to know how they reproduce, so do I.

“I would really rather not know what this unbathed little creature smells like,” Mirella said. “Let’s just go to the bar and find it.”

“Smoke,” Iza said.

“It smelled like smoke?” Clara asked.

“Smoke and stinky drinkie.”

“That does sound like our iffrit,” I said.

*
 
*
 
*

The bars in Philadelphia closed at 2 a.m., and after that basically the whole city shut down, so rather than try and figure out the best way to get the three of us plus a reluctant naked iffrit into the back of a hard-to-find cab at sometime on the wrong side of four in the morning, we went out and bought a car. I could have rented one, but that seemed like more trouble than it was worth.
 

Mirella had to be the legal purchaser because she was the only one of us who had a US driver’s license. I’m pretty sure the guy at the dealership thought we were all insane. He double-checked the card I used four or five times to make sure it was okay, which was the same thing the hotel had done the day before.

I knew even using the card at all was sending up a flashing light to anyone who might be trying to follow us around, such as Mr. Smith and his better-than-Tchekhy computer guy. But it wasn’t like landing a jet at Philadelphia International Airport was going to go unnoticed. And as agent Mike Lycos had stressed to me before, using cash wasn’t a whole lot better. In other words, there was no way to travel everywhere we needed to travel in the time we had without making a lot of noise. So we may as well enjoy it by buying a nice car, even if we only planned on using it for a day or two.

We took the car—it was actually an SUV, and was large enough that if you had told me it was also a small boat I’d have probably believed you—to the bar a few hours before closing just to get a feel for the place we’d be breaking into later. Also, I was in dire need of about twenty drinks and we all needed food because we were fighting some serious jet lag. Philly was six hours behind Italy, so Clara was ready to call it a day before the sun had even gone down, and Mirella and I were even more out of sync.

Unfortunately, the bar in question was a ratty dive bar on an ugly side street, and while I have been on my share of ugly side streets and in a fair number of ratty dive bars, I was glad in this case that I had a bodyguard with me. The front façade was an unwelcoming set of nailed-up wood panels that needed a paint job or some shingles, and the one window was either frosted or smoke-stained, which didn’t much matter since to see through it you’d have to look past the large neon beer sign that turned the glass opaque when the light hit it.