The Night Sheriff, page 6
I could tell that Mr. Mortimer was of two minds about the whole thing. On the one hand, he chided me for potentially announcing our presence. On the other hand, he had to admit that it had been very neatly done, and quite admired how the Germans themselves had worked hard to cover it all up.
In time, these embarrassing “accidental” deaths became our calling card, as it were, serving to announce to those in the know that Mr. Mortimer and I were in town. It was better than handing out free cigars. Concocting ever more elaborate and amusing scenarios filled many an otherwise tedious hour.
And so, for the next six years or so, we fought Nazis. This was no sop to me; everybody was fighting Nazis. Well, anybody worth talking to.
I was never able to determine just how big Mr. Mortimer’s organization actually was, what it was called, or where exactly it fit into the American espionage hierarchy. For all I know, it died when he did (which would be so very much like him), but there was no arguing that it was well connected within said hierarchy. We were supplied with information and equipment, safe houses and informants, and, up until the end, we worked harmoniously with the intelligence agencies of over a dozen countries.
Mr. Mortimer did his best to keep my true nature a secret, which was quite a challenge, considering that everyone we hobnobbed with was the sort of person who couldn’t resist unraveling a secret. In all our time together, only one ever managed to figure it out, and she had a bit of an unfair advantage.
We met her in 1942. Mr. Mortimer and I had been sent to Leningrad to babysit an American Senator who was part of a committee assigned to oversee the way that our Soviet allies spent the money we sent them. At least that was the cover story. The last few such overseers had returned with positively glowing accounts of the frugality and thrift of the Soviet agencies they were dealing with, which, frankly, flew in the face of experience, expectation, and, in one particular case, photographic evidence.
An open-and-shut case of corruption, one would think, but there was no evidence that these men had been compromised, and the last one had been selected because he was a rabid anti-Communist. It was very odd, and so they called us. Between Mr. Mortimer and myself, we were able to keep the Senator under observation for twenty-four hours a day, but even then, we almost missed it.
The Senator was a diligent fellow, and for easily twelve hours a day he worked in an official capacity. He left the usual rounds of committee meetings and hearings to his subordinates, and spent his days pouring over ledgers and account books. He remarked that once his hosts understood that he couldn’t read Russian, they seemed to assume that he couldn’t do math, either. The rest of the time he spent touring museums, dining well, and listening to music, firmly eschewing any offers of companionship.
He quickly found evidence of money being siphoned. What appeared to annoy him was not that money was being stolen, which didn’t surprise anybody, but at how clumsily it was being done. His discoveries resulted in fresh questions, which he relayed through said subordinates. These were answered by unconcerned apparatchiks with rather blatant lies. This was when Mr. Mortimer and I sat up. Usually, in a situation like this, the next step would either be an attempt to bribe, blackmail, or assassinate.
What it actually was, was a barber. We had been in the Soviet Union for two weeks, and the Senator told the hotel that he wanted a haircut. Fifteen minutes later, Mr. Mortimer opened the door, and a professional-looking young woman, leather case in hand, tightly cut smock emblazoned with the hotel’s logo stretched across her figure, smiled and curtsied on our doorstep. Thirty seconds later the Senator was sitting in an armchair, a sheet tucked under his chin, while she was asking him, in charmingly broken English, if he had ever met Errol Flynn.
It was her voice that precipitated things. While my appreciation of the fairer sex has been an abstract one for longer than I care to remember, appreciate them I do. Curious to see who possessed such a melodious voice, I silently stepped out of the back room where I normally stayed when we had casual guests.
Thus I, and I alone, had a perfect view of her discreetly pocketing a lock of the Senator’s hair. I grunted in surprise, and she whirled about, scissors raised. As we later found out, she was used to being able to spot hidden people but had missed me for the rather obvious reason. At the sight of me, she hissed in surprise, and the hand holding the scissors made a complicated motion. Reflexively, I batted aside the minor curse she sent at me. It bounced back with a squeak and shattered a mirror.
“She’s a witch,” I informed the rest of the room. In one smooth motion Mr. Mortimer jerked the Senator from his chair, bundled him into the bedroom, and slammed the door behind him. He then blocked the exit.
“She was collecting a lock of the Senator’s hair,” I informed him. “With that there are over a dozen ways she could charm or influence him into writing whatever her masters wished.”
Mr. Mortimer nodded in satisfaction. As far as he was concerned, the mystery we had been engaged to solve was closed. As for the woman herself … “Dangerous?”
In the beginning, Mr. Mortimer’s knowledge of the supernatural had some shocking gaps, but this was, at least, an understandable one.
There are many different types of witch. Most of them are simply people who are able to nudge the unseen world in a direction they find more to their liking with greater or lesser degrees of efficacy. They run the gamut of good to evil much like any other segment of the population.
But a few are much more than that. The old alchemists referred to them as “Magnam Pythonissam” or “Grand Witches” when they dared to refer to them at all.
“This one most certainly is.”
At this, the woman, who had been watching us closely, laughed and deliberately dropped her scissors. “That is quite true,” she said, in markedly better English. “But I know when I am no longer the most dangerous thing in the room.” Mr. Mortimer and I glanced at each other. The truth of that statement would remain an open question for over a decade to come.
This was our introduction to Madam Polina Urakhov. She was a Soviet agent, who claimed descent from a long line of witches, and, possibly, bears. She seemed to expect some sort of retribution from us, but after Mr. Mortimer made sure that she had divested herself of the Senator’s hair, he merely remarked that she was wasting her talents on us when she could be confounding fascists, and politely showed her the door.
The Senator then went home and produced a very damning report that resulted in exactly one official, who happened to have Trotskyite sympathies, being very publicly executed, and then, the United States was assured, there was no more corruption to be found in the Soviet Union.
Whether it was because we had so easily rumbled her, or because she took Mr. Mortimer’s words to heart, it was less than a month later that we were standing back-to-back-to-back with Madam Urakhov in a sewer in Prague—an otherwise quite lovely city by the way—observing the fruits of our first collaboration, which in this particular case was a cell of Nazi sympathizers finally realizing that they had been the unwitting pawns of a particularly loathsome spider cult. As a result of this, everybody was busy fighting everybody else, and doing a bang-up job of it. Now normally I quite enjoy a situation where, usually through Mr. Mortimer’s machinations, one batch of enemies was busy slaughtering another batch of enemies, but in this instance, both camps were still trying to kill us.
It did allow us to assess Madam Urakhov’s fighting abilities, which were quite respectable. Interestingly, she mostly used a 1920 Colt .45. Witches are not really known for being hands-on fighters. They tend more to the laying on of curses, enchanting weapons for others—that sort of thing. But Madam Urakhov showed herself to be an excellent shot. Perhaps the runes inscribed on her pistol had something to do with it.
She watched me crush the throat of—if his ridiculous spider hat was any indication—one of the High Priests and took note of how I plucked his poisoned ring from where it was imbedded in the back of my hand and flicked it into the eye of a fellow enthusiastically waving some sort of kuris as he ran towards us, screaming. As his screams briefly took on a new urgency, she pursed her lips. “What exactly are you, my little enigma?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.” This was as true then as it is now. Wherever you go in Europe, it is not unusual for isolated hamlets to concoct a local night creature or two, but over most of the continent these tend to fall into rather broad categories: vampires, lycanthropes, ghosts, ghouls, and the other relatively familiar things that go bump in the night. But Őllaǰeẹkǻ, the mysterious girl who turned me all those years ago, claimed to have traveled extensively across the world in her time, and never mentioned where it was that she herself had been created.
Often I have wished that she was still here, if only because she could have answered many questions, but I killed her immediately after she created me. I regretted it instantly, of course, but she had warned me that it would happen, and that she had no regrets.
Madam Urakhov found the whole thing quite intriguing. She said that there were vague stories about creatures like myself but up until now, she had believed that stories were all they were. In the remaining years we worked with her, she never did find out anything, and if she did after we went our separate ways, she found nothing about how to kill me, as I’m sure she would have used it if she could.
Grand Witches, of both the male and female variety, do not, as a rule, make for boon companions. They tend to regard other people more as things to be utilized, a trait that gets worse the older they grow. But there are exceptions. It’s rare, but it happens, and it appeared to be happening now. There was something about Mr. Mortimer that fascinated Madam Urakhov, and the feeling was clearly mutual. We met her every couple of months, which apparently suited Mr. Mortimer and her just fine. Sometimes it was official, but almost as often we would be killing time between assignments somewhere, and, lo and behold, we would turn a corner and see her sitting at a café table, or she would enter a train compartment to find us idly playing pinochle. The only one who was ever really surprised by this was me. It would have made sense to have us permanently assigned together, and occasionally I still wonder if things would have turned out better if the two of them had managed to establish a more stable relationship. I like to think so. But it was not to be.
When we did work together, things tended to get weird, and not quietly weird. Big, ostentatious, call for air support weird. The after operations rulings always declared that we were justified in our actions, and we were commended through gritted teeth and surreptitiously awarded medals accompanied by certificates labeled “TOP SECRET. BURN AFTER READING.” But as the war progressed, both of our higher-ups tried very hard to discourage these sorts of showy operations. It didn’t look good, and they were terrified that they might become known to the public. Even before the war started, it was widely known that the Nazi inner circle dabbled with diabolical forces, which made our … well, my, very existence suspect in some Allied circles. Even the German soldier on the ground, not to mention the Americans, British, and Soviets that pushed them back, had no tolerance for anything that smacked of the supernatural. And so an effort was made to keep Madam Urakhov and ourselves separate, which I think was a mistake.
None of us were happy with the situation, but, for the first time, it forced me to see how this prejudice against the supernatural affected the creatures of the night. Very quickly, I realized that I was one of the lucky ones, because I had official government sponsors and protectors, and, more importantly, I was already on the move, as it were. Monsters associate with humans, and so it should not be surprising that they often act like humans in many ways, especially those who were in stable arrangements with their communities and had been for generations. You could tell them that an army was approaching and that they should relocate, or at least be a bit more circumspect, but, also like humans, they would rarely listen. They would refuse to leave their homes, and thus were exterminated because they were “unnatural.”
Sometimes this was seen as a positive thing, certainly. Many a region was freed from a vampyre clan that had claimed a monthly victim, for instance. But this was before anybody really understood the concepts and mechanisms of a functioning ecosystem. Today we understand that where there are checks, there are also balances, but back then anyone would have scoffed at the notion, especially when it came to monsters. Occasionally I was able to convince beneficial entities to leave ahead of the advancing army, but, even then, the question remained: Where could they go? They were refugees that no one would willingly accept.
I remember one incident in particular, a charming little town just inside the border of Moldavia, where Mr. Mortimer and I intercepted some secret plans and killed the head of the Nazi robotics project for the first time. What makes it stand out in my mind was that it was the home of an ancient Naiad, whose very presence purified the lake enough that the town was able to use it as a healthy water source, even after dumping assorted sewage, industrial runoff, and farming by-products into it for over a hundred years. For performing this service, all she required was the voluntary sacrifice of a young man every five years or so, which, in my opinion, was very good value for services rendered.
Naturally, when the German army learned of it, this could not be allowed to stand. Mr. Mortimer and I begged her to let us get her to safety, but she was betrayed by her own townspeople and killed by the Germans before we could convince her to leave. The locals actually celebrated being freed from her “yoke of tyranny.” Less than three years later, most of them were dead, killed by a combination of dysentery, cholera, and heavy metal poisoning.
This incident, sadly just one among many, remains in my mind because the Naiad was close to my own age, and it is not often I that I find someone who can still appreciate a good Prester John joke. I did not know her for long, but I still miss her.
She was only one of any number of beneficial creatures of the night (some of them only beneficial in hindsight, I’ll grant you) who were removed from the stage, and the nights became quieter and, for some of us, lonelier.
This does not mean that they became less dangerous—at least for us. Mr. Mortimer and I continued our work even after the German surrender, dealing with Nazi holdouts, collaborators, and black marketers. If this seems like rather small beer for the likes of us, well, you are not wrong. The war with the Germans might have ended, but everyone “in the know” was aware that all too soon the Soviet Union would be declared the new enemy, and when they were, our work would continue as it had before.
I was wrong about that. Oh, Russia was indeed a recognized problem, but actual war was never declared. The Atomic Bomb saw to that.
The other big change was that the armies of the four biggest industrialized nations had ground through Europe, and the Europe they left behind was different. It was at this time that I first heard myself described as a creature of an age now past, and it was not a good thing to be. There was now a de facto “zero tolerance” policy when it came to creatures of the night. My true nature was revealed to the intelligence fraternity at this time. How it was revealed, we did not know. Madam Urakhov swore it was not her, and, for what it was worth, I believed her. It wasn’t her style. But however it happened, it quickly became apparent that even people whom I had helped and regarded as allies now felt uncomfortable in my presence, and one or two of them actually tried to kill me.
This type of shift in appreciation had happened to me before, so the one who it bothered the most was Mr. Mortimer, who despite dealing with Nazis, still had a fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. Thus, when people we had trusted began to turn on me, and by extension, us, he grew positively morose at times. The Soviets, if anything, were even worse. We actually worried for Madame Urakhov’s safety. Well, to be honest, Mr. Mortimer did. Sometime during the war, he had developed feelings for her, which, as far as I could tell, were sincerely reciprocated.
This made our inevitable falling out all the more unpleasant.
It was in the spring of 1947. We met in Prague, a city we were all quite fond of. The Soviets had claimed Czechoslovakia, and everyone was waiting to see what would happen. We met at our favorite restaurant, a small establishment deep in the Artist’s Quarter. Mr. Mortimer praised their wines, Madam Urakhov was particularly fond of the chicken paprika, and I enjoyed the view. It was a foggy night, so I couldn’t concentrate on said view, which possibly changed everything.
Both Mr. Mortimer and Madam Urakhov were ill at ease, though they both tried to hide it. We started with small talk, but even a rather hilarious anecdote from myself about flushing out die-hard Nazis who had refused to surrender by strolling through the area shouting, “Zahlmeister,” which is German for paymaster, utterly failed to defuse the tension.
Finally, the owner brought us a complimentary round of prewar Tokay. I sniffed it for the appearance of the thing, and a subtle, unwelcome note caught my attention. Unhurriedly, I reached over and covered Mr. Mortimer’s glass just as it was about to touch his lips. “Drugged,” I said quietly. Madam Urakhov had not even pretended to drink, and when she saw that the jig was up, sighed and poured her glass onto the floor.
“By this time tomorrow,” she said with a shrug, “I will be expected to kill you. I was given this one chance to capture you, and perhaps, with time, convince you to defect.”
Mr. Mortimer leaned over the table and gently took her hands in his. “This particular door swings both ways, Polina. You could come back to America with me.” He looked at her directly. “I would keep your secrets. You would just be another spy. Debriefed? Of course, but afterwards, we could do whatever we wished. Go wherever we wanted.” She was silent, and Mr. Mortimer gently added, “You don’t truly believe that Communism will accept you for what you are?”
“Don’t be foolish enough to believe that Capitalism will be more accepting,” she snapped. “They will not permit your tame little monster to roam freely, and when it has been removed, you will also come under suspicion. Guilt by association, darling.” She sighed, and gracefully stood up.
