12:34 AM, Saturday, November 9
We now move back into the realm of speculation informed by summaries made after the fact.
Langstaff was home to a small but tightly-knit Slavic community, and a stretch of Oxley Boulevard was dotted with its cultural thumbprints. Bakeries seemed to be the most popular of such outlets, and at least one could be found to correspond to each of the major demographics. Churches were, of course, also quite ubiquitous, and the Eastern Orthodox cross was a fairly common sight in that part of town. The third most popular were bars, many of which were combined with restaurants, but all serving the same basic purpose of indulgence and socialization.
It was at one bar in particular that Mahnoor and Inspector Matsumoto liked to have their meetings. With a Russian owner and staff, it was called “Nekstati,” (некстати) which could be translated as “beside the point,” “inopportunely,” or perhaps most appropriately, “neither here nor there.”
Neither Inspector Matsumoto nor Mahnoor were Russian, nor did they have any particular connection to Russian culture. Neither could speak Russian, and of the two of them, only Inspector Matsumoto drank—though his preference was Scotch whisky rather than vodka. They met at Nekstati simply because it was a halfway point between Cherry Wood Avenue and the precinct headquarters where Inspector Matsumoto worked.
As such, when they met here they stuck out like sore thumbs, but what was true for park benches was also true for bars, especially those which served a demographic you weren’t part of. Because you clearly didn’t belong, it was natural that you would draw attention to yourself, but because of the nature of Mahnoor and Inspector Matsumoto’s conversations, anyone who happened to hear enough would eventually no longer be able to suspend their disbelief, and either return to their own business or storm off in a huff. And if they happened to be “in the know,” information pertaining to “that which was not mundane” had a way of getting around regardless, so there wasn’t much point in keeping secrets anyway.
Though by this time they could both be considered regulars, the only one who paid them any mind was the bartender who prepared their drinks—Scotch whisky on the rocks for Inspector Matsumoto, a Shirley Temple for Mahnoor. Once they were served, he would go back to cleaning glasses and making small talk with other patrons. The two outsiders would then retreat to a booth near the back exit, where they were unlikely to be interrupted or overheard.
Today, the 55-year-old inspector looked tired. His grey suit was wrinkled as if he had slept in it—which was very likely. His normally clean-shaven face had grown a five o’clock shadow, and his eyes appeared bloodshot, with dark bags under them. It was unbecoming of someone normally so well groomed, who appeared at press conferences and was one of the faces of public security in Langstaff, but this was the side of him that Mahnoor was used to.
Once, when I made one of my deliveries to Evette while Mahnoor was there, the two of them were relaxing in the sitting room with the TV on. This itself was unusual, and the sound of Mahnoor’s mirthful giggle only added to my perplexion.
“Oh my god, look at him! Is he wearing makeup or something?”
As it turned out, Inspector Matsumoto was giving a televised press conference about the New Moon Abductions, and Mahnoor found it hilarious to see him all buttoned up. I didn’t know who he was, much less her connection to him at the time. In retrospect, though, it was pretty funny.
To Mahnoor, in a seedy bar with a glass of hard liquor in front of him was Inspector Matsumoto’s natural state.
Oh, and to her, he wasn’t Inspector Matsumoto, he was just Edmund. Whether he had granted her special permission to call him by his first name, or she had started without consulting him and he just went along with it, I’ll never know.
His drink in front of him, he immediately got down to business. “I suppose you want to hear how the raid went? Well, without their leader, morale crumbled almost instantly. No one put up much of a fight. We ended up bringing in six gang members, and they cracked without too much questioning. I can’t give you any names, but we know who killed Mr. Gallman.”
Even in his disheveled state, he spoke with the deceptively simple eloquence of BBC English. It was the kind of voice that commanded authority and inspired respect from the average citizen, although those in certain circles might think him condescending. Not entirely unwarranted, but that was just the accent.
“Have you brought them in?”
“Yes, and it’s someone who’s been on our radar for some time. Best as we can tell, though, he wasn’t told why Mr. Gallman had been targeted.”
“He confessed, though?”
“Not exactly, and that’s what worries me. You say Verdeschi was being ‘controlled’ by someone?”
“Verdeschi? Oooh, you mean the Dagger? Yeah, that’s why he was in the state you found him in.”
“Well, our perp was in a bit better shape than him—mentally speaking. I’m not sure I should even ask, but what the devil did you do to Verdeschi?”
“In terms you’d find familiar, I turned off the Wi-Fi to his brain—except brains aren’t supposed to have Wi-Fi in the first place, so that led to some unforeseen consequences. If you think the perp underwent the same process but isn’t suffering the same effects, maybe whoever did it to him has a way of more precisely severing the connection. How is Verdeschi by the way?”
“It’s all confidential, you understand. Let’s just say it’ll be some time before he can walk again—or spell his name. We won’t be getting a thing out of him.”
Mahnoor scowled. Excess suffering didn’t settle well with her. She had done what she had to in order to survive, but even for someone like the Dagger, it didn’t seem fair that he had ended up in such a poor state.
Inspector Matsumoto continued. “That’s something I never really liked about how you magicians deal with each other. Cuts can be stitched and bullets can be extracted, but you have ways of hurting each other that medicine can’t heal very easily.”
“Categorically speaking, Verdeschi wasn’t a magician. Someone was using his body as a puppet to keep us off their trail. We need to find out if he talked to anyone suspicious in the days leading up to Mr. Gallman’s murder.”
“Mr. Night Sky, right? We’re taking that into account in our questioning of suspects. I’ll let you know if we get any leads.”
Mahnoor sipped her Shirley Temple as Inspector Matsumoto spoke. She probably gave him that slightly amused, slightly expectant smile she wore whenever waiting for someone to get to the point. When he didn’t say anything else, Mahnoor pressed for a little more information.
“That can’t be the only reason you asked me to meet you. Come on, what aren’t you telling me?”
“First, I need you to answer a few of my questions. From the start I haven’t questioned the Kingstones’ involvement—at least as much as I probably should have. I appreciate what you’ve done, even if your methods are—legally speaking—atrocious. This town has been a haven for oddities for as long as I’ve been alive, and judging from what I’ve seen of the case archives, at least since the mid-20th century. I know self-policing is just how you lot do things, and while I’d prefer everyone—mundane or otherwise—be equal under the laws of England, I do understand the reasons why you operate under your own laws, even if I don’t agree with them. What I can’t understand is, why you?”
“I can’t imagine what you’re implying, Edmund.”
“Maybe I should rephrase that. What I’m asking is, why do you do this kind of work? I could be mistaken, but I don’t think people your age usually work as hitmen.”
“Maybe it’s just the only thing I’m good at.”
“Maybe. It’s just hard for me to imagine how someone so young could end up as the private enforcer of the Kingstone family.”
“Some of us have no choice but to take the first opportunity that comes our way, whether or not it’s the best one. Sometimes we grow into it, sometimes it never really fits.”
“Do you think it fits you?”
“I don’t know. I’m still trying it on for size.”
Inspector Matsumoto was used to these vague answers, and while he likely hoped for something more concrete, he didn’t expect anything more than what he got. Mahnoor was content to remain a mystery.
“I’m going to be upfront about this: It’s not much. Most of us don’t think it’s related in any way. The only reason I mention it is that…well, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure why. This magic of yours is genetic, isn’t it?”
“You already know that, Edmund. And why are you interested?”
“I’ll admit I’m grasping at straws. We’re trying to put together a profile on the victims—trying to find any connection between them, you know. We haven’t had much luck. Mainly, what we’ve found is that there’s even less of a connection than we thought. I won’t call it desperation, but when there’s so little information to begin with, you start looking at the most tenuous things. We’ve found the majority of victims are of either European or Asian ethnicities, which isn’t surprising considering the demographics, but that still means we’re looking at such a wide range of ethnicities that there’s no reasonable argument for the crimes being racially motivated. Naturally, we looked at the victims’ online presence, and we found that some of them had profiles on those ancestry websites—you know, the ones that send out DNA testing kits? Well, we looked at those because we had no other leads to go on. I may have advised my staff to look out for TI575.”
“Oh really? And what did you find?”
“Just the typical distribution, and no correlation as far as I could tell. Something that did interest me, though—and I can’t imagine how it would be connected—well I suppose I should just say it… In all the victims we found to have these profiles, there was an unusually high percentage of Neanderthal DNA.”
“Neanderthal?”
“Yes, the ‘cavemen’, or ‘cave people’ if you like.”
“I know what Neanderthals are, I’m just not sure how they could have anything to do with this.”
“When he was ‘possessed’ or what-have-you, didn’t you say Verdeschi was going on about evolution?”
“Connecting one to the other is still quite a stretch.”
“I know… It’s a funny thing, though. I’ll admit, that I’m somewhat of a dummy when it comes to this subject. To be honest, I’d never really comprehended the significance that there were other human species at one point, let alone remnants of these species within our own. It’s all rather hard to imagine, isn’t it?”
“Other humans…”
It’s worth mentioning that despite their differences, magicians weren’t considered a different species, or even a sub-species of Homo. Genetically speaking, the difference between a magician and a mundane human was virtually equivalent to the difference between someone with brown eyes and someone with blue eyes.
Even so, there was a scientific name for humans with magic capability: Homo sapiens magnus, often abbreviated to “homagnus.” This led to a misconception that they were a sub-species among magicians and mundanes alike. Mahnoor, of course, was never one to give credence to a falsehood, and had made it adamantly clear at the beginning of her partnership with Inspector Matsumoto that she—and every other homagnus—was genetically and categorically human. That certainly helped clear the potential headache this conversation could have led to with someone otherwise ignorant of such things.
“It is hard to imagine,” Mahnoor said after a moment of thought. “Humans of the same species have a hard enough time getting along. I suppose it’s no wonder we’re the only ones left.”
“That’s a rather cynical way of looking at it. I thought that was my job.”
“I just think it’s unlikely that all Neanderthals died of disease or hunting accidents. Maybe our evolutionary advantage was that we were more ruthless.”
“I’ll give you that, but I’d also argue that places like Langstaff demonstrate otherwise. I mean, look at us. ‘A middle aged Japanese man and a young Pakistani lady walk into a Russian bar’ sounds like the start of a terrible joke, but here we are. No one’s really out of place in the city. Every tribe has their own cave to go back to, but if every tribe was constantly warring with every other every time they stepped out of their caves—well, the concept of the modern city would fall apart pretty quickly. It’s not perfect, but it seems like we’ve figured out that things are a lot easier when the ‘other’ isn’t automatically an enemy.”
An unreadable expression, somewhere between condescendingly amused and genuinely interested probably flashed across Mahnoor’s face, here—a prelude to a nonsensical question. “I wonder if a Neanderthal could walk around the city without drawing attention to theirself?”
“I wouldn’t doubt it. They looked very much like us from what I could tell.”
Whether that was a reference to the fact human-Neanderthal hybrids were indeed walking around Langstaff, or a speculative scenario based on pictures Inspector Matsumoto had looked up, the statement rang true regardless.
“So, getting back to the point, what do you think of this development? I realize it doesn’t imply much, but you have a gift for thinking outside the box.”
“I’m not a miracle worker. I can’t deduce results from random, unconnected information, just like I can’t conjure something out of thin air.”
“I know, I know, it’s all ‘illusion.’ Magic sure isn’t like in the movies.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes after this. It wouldn’t be accurate to say they were enjoying each other’s company. Perhaps it was more like they were enjoying being alone with their thoughts in the presence of someone else who wouldn’t judge them for it.
A man with the weight of a city on his shoulders and a girl who dealt in secrets.
“What do you think dictates whether a species lives or goes extinct?” Mahnoor asked abruptly.
Inspector Matsumoto’s brow knitted in momentary confusion, then thought. The ice in his glass was slowly disappearing.
“Intelligence, I suppose. The ability to cooperate with others, adaptability, physical strength…”
“Verdeschi—or whoever was wearing Verdeschi’s body—said it came down to three traits: The ability to create, the drive to consume, and chance.”
“Seems a bit simplistic.”
“That’s what I thought, too. But it does have a certain elegance to it. I suppose they could be considered umbrellas that more specific traits could fall under. What trait do you think humans embody the most?”
Inspector Matsumoto grinned wryly. “Consumption, without a doubt. But I suppose consumption and creation go hand in hand. Consumption creates waste, after all.”
“In magic, you can’t have one without the other. An expression of magic consumes some substance or a form of energy to create another. I suppose those two traits could fall under a larger category called ‘conversion.’”
“So, where does chance factor into it?”
“That could be the variable that determines whether the resources you need are in your vicinity, or the chain reaction of movement in the Earth’s crust set off millions of years ago that culminates in a volcanic eruption. Either way, you have no control over it, have no way of knowing about it in any way that can control the outcome, and it’s due to a completely separate set of variables that determine how much it will affect you. I still don’t understand how that would be a trait that someone could have.”
“It sounds more like ‘luck’ to me.”
“However that works, maybe that’s the trait we had that Neanderthals didn’t.”
“Seems less like a trait, more like something ascribed to us after the fact. It’s easy to say we made it because we were ‘lucky.’”
“What is luck but the culmination of random chance?”
Inspector Matsumoto examined his glass, then took a sip. He grimaced slightly at the strong taste he somehow enjoyed so much. “Why is it all our conversations end up so far from the point that it almost feels like we’ve gone full circle. I can see the tail end of what we were talking about at the start, but I haven’t the faintest idea how to reach it.”
“I’m not sure if this will help us get back to the point or steer us further from it, but I do have one more question for you. What do you think Verdeschi meant when he talked about ‘reclaiming the lost fire?’”
“Oh, don’t get started on that. You know I can’t abide that mumbo-jumbo.”
“I was just thinking… What is fire but the first magic? Something that only a few with the right knowledge and experience could harness?”
“You think it could be a metaphor?”
“I can’t imagine what else.”
“Can’t you? Or do you just not like what else you can imagine?”
“I’ll let you decide.” Mahnoor stood, buttoning her jacket. She looked at her mostly empty glass quizzically, considering whether or not it was worth finishing. “I’ve said all I have to say on the matter. If you’ve told me everything you can, I should probably get going.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t have more for you to work with.”
“Likewise. I’ll consult with some people on my end, see if we can set something up for the New Moon. At the very least, maybe we can finally get a reliable witness.”
“And I’ll see if there’s any more information I can disclose to you. Normally I don’t like going under the table, but…well… Desperate times and all that.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself. You’re doing good work out there. The people need someone to look up to.”
“Someone to blame, more like it.”
“These circumstances are beyond your control.”
“That pesky ‘chance’ again.”
“Sure, we’ll call it chance.”
Without another word, Mahnoor made her exit, leaving her unfinished drink, and Inspector Matsumoto contemplating chance and fire in an empty booth.
