Nine: A Bracelet, Some Chickens, and a Pretty Maid All In a Row
Don’t think of it as a distraction. Look at it as an income opportunity.
The Consultants’ Handbook
Wiz was hard at it again the next morning when Malkin stuck her head into his workroom.
“Someone at the door wants to see you.”
The interruption made Wiz lose his place, but by now he was so used to it he just sighed and followed Malkin downstairs. There was a dumpy, middle-aged townswoman snivelling on the doorstep. From her posture and sniffling Wiz figured she was either very upset about something or she was suffering from a really bad allergy. As soon as Wiz appeared she grabbed one of his hands in both of hers.
“O Great Wizard, you see before you a poor woman in great affliction.” Whatever it was, it wasn’t a problem with her lungs, Wiz thought. Her voice rattled the windowpanes. “Oh, the tragedy,” she wailed. “Oh me! Oh me! O Wizard, I beg of you, save me.”
“Save yourself and put a stopper in it,” Widder Hackett snarled in Wiz’s ear. “That woman’s voice can peel paint and she’s got the brains of a titmouse besides.”
Wiz had noticed the first and was willing to take the ghost’s word for the second. But by this time they were over the threshold and into the hall. Clearly the only way to get rid of their guest now was to hear her out.
“Uh yes, Mrs. ummm . . . ?”
“Grimmen,” the woman proclaimed, without lowering her voice. “Mrs.
Grimmen. I stand before you a vessel of woe, a pitiful shell, a-“
“Yes, but what happened?”
Mrs. Grimmen, her concentration broken, glared at him. “That’s what I’m telling you, Wizard. My gold bracelet has been stolen.”
“Your bracelet?”
“You heard me. You ain’t deaf are you? Oh woe! Oh sorrow! Oh . . .”
“Fertilizer!” snapped Widder Hackett-or something very close to that, at any event.
Stolen? Wiz looked back at the stairs where Malkin was standing and raised his eyebrows in unspoken question. The tall woman pinched up her face as if she was insulted by the very thought and shook her head.
“Uh, look Mrs. Grimmen, I’m not really a finder of lost objects. I’m a consultant on dragon problems.”
“Well, how do you know a dragon didn’t steal it?” the woman demanded. “It was gold after all.”
“It was gilded pot metal,” Widder Hackett amended.
“Yes, but . . .”
“Oh woe!” Mrs. Grimmen declaimed. “Oh sorrow! Oh alack!”
“Oh tell the ninny to look in the flour barrel,” Widder Hackett said.
“That’s usually where she’s hidden it when she can’t find it.”
“Uh, have you looked in the flour barrel?”
Mrs. Grimmen stopped in mid-wail. “Why would I do a silly thing like that?”
“Well, maybe that’s where you left the bracelet.”
The woman looked at him like he was crazy. “I didn’t leave it anywhere. It was stolen from me. Oh woe! Oh woe!”
“Look, just go home and look in the flour barrel, okay?”
“But it’s stolen away, my treasure. Oh woe! Oh woe!”
“Right,” said Wiz, taking her by the elbow and gently guiding her toward the door.
“Sheesh! What next?” Wiz muttered as he turned away from the door.
“Chickens, most likely,” said Widder Hackett in his ear. Wiz looked out the door and saw a man coming down the street with a live chicken in each hand.
He was scrawny and balding, with a big sharp nose and a receding chin. The way he strutted along with his head thrust forward put Wiz in mind of a chicken as well. Needless to say he stopped at Wiz’s front door.
“I’m here to see the wizard,” the man announced.
“I’m the wizard,” Wiz admitted.
“Kinda young ain’t you?”
“I was fast tracked in wizard school. Look, I’m kind of busy right now, so if you don’t mind . . .”
“Not so fast, Wizard. I’ve got a job for you.”
“I’ve already got a job.”
Ignoring that the man thrust the chickens in Wiz’s face. “Just look at them.”
Since the birds were about level with Wiz’s nose there wasn’t any way to avoid it. From the way they struggled and cackled the chickens weren’t any happier about the situation than he was. Aside from that they looked just fine. Of course, Wiz admitted, the only thing he knew about chickens was they came in three kinds: Regular, extra-crispy and spicy Cajun style-plus kung pao if you ordered Chinese.
“What’s wrong with them?”
“Well, look at them! They don’t lay hardly any eggs and no matter how much I feed them they stay scrawny.”
Wiz looked over his shoulder into empty air.
“Don’t ask me,” Widder Hackett grated. “The old fool’s been to every witch and magician for miles around. No one knows what’s wrong with those stupid chickens.”
“To be honest,” Wiz said, “I don’t know that this is my kind of problem.
I’m really here as a dragon specialist.”
“You’re the municipal wizard ain’t you?” he demanded.
“Actually,” Wiz began, “I’m a consultant.”
“Wizard, consultant, what’s the difference? Point is you’re paid out of my taxes to solve our problems. Well, this here,” he said, thrusting the protesting chickens forward, “is my problem. So earn your money and solve it!”
“Those aren’t dragons,” Wiz pointed out.
“Any fool can see that, Mr. Wizard.”
“Well, since they’re not dragons they are not my problem. I only deal with dragons. Goodbye.” Before his visitor could say another word, Wiz put all his weight against the door and forced it closed. Outside, the man made a couple of loud remarks about “uppity employees” and then the sound of his footsteps and the cackling of his chickens receded in the distance.
“Good grief,” Wiz muttered weakly.
“Better get used to it,” Widder Hackett told him. “There’s going to be lots more of them. Word gets around you’re a wizard working for the council and you’ll have every lamebrain who thinks he’s got a problem camped out on your doorstep demanding you solve it.” She snorted. “And there’s lots of lamebrains in this town, I can tell you that.”
“But how am I supposed to get any work done if I’m constantly being interrupted by people with lost bracelets and sick chickens?”
“That’s nothing. Wait until the love-sick ones start coming to you. Rattle on for hours, they will, and not a word of sense to be found in any of it.”
The way she said it left Wiz with a sinking feeling she was speaking from experience.
There was a knock at the door. Wiz whirled and jerked it open.
“I told you I can’t do anything about your damned . . . chickens,” he finished weakly.
There was an angel on the doorstep. An angel in a drab brown dress.
“I beg your pardon, My Lord,” the angel said in an angelic but timid voice. “I, I heard you are looking for a housekeeper.”
Wiz realized his angel was actually a girl, perhaps eighteen years old. The plain brown homespun dress concealed a trim figure. Her skin was creamy white with just the right touches of pink. A fringe of wheat-gold curls peeked out from her bonnet. Her eyes were wide and blue as Wedgewood saucers.
Wiz finally managed to get the circuit from his brain to his mouth working again and closed his jaw. “Uh, well, yes,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Anna, My Lord.”
“Well, I’m Wiz. Wiz Zumwalt. Come in, won’t you?” He stepped aside and managed to keep from bowing as the girl ventured over the threshold.
Wiz suddenly realized he had never interviewed anyone for a job other than a programming position and he wasn’t quite sure what the etiquette of hiring servants was.
“Ah, nice day isn’t it?”
Anna gave him a wide-eyed stare. “Of course, My Lord.” The way she said it made him look a little closer. Not only were those eyes as blue as a Wedgewood china plate, Wiz realized, the owner possessed about as much intelligence as a china plate.
“My Lord . . .” Anna ventured tremulously. Then she stopped and gathered her courage. “My Lord, I know I am not very clever, but I will work hard.”
“Oh, let her stay,” Widder Hackett’s voice grated in his ear. “She can’t make more of a mess than the pair of you.”
Wiz looked at the forlorn beauty and sighed. The first rule of successful housekeeping is you’ve got to be smarter than the dirt. Looking at her, Wiz figured Anna was probably brighter than the average dust bunny. They’d just have to live with the intellectually superior dust bunnies.
Besides, there weren’t any other applicants, and Wiz wasn’t going to get anything done with Widder Hackett complaining in his ear.
“All right,” he sighed. “You’ve got the job.”
“Oh thank you, My Lord!” Anna’s smile made her even more angelically beautiful. “You will not be sorry, I promise you.”
“Uh, you’re not afraid working for a wizard?”
“Oh no, My Lord,” Anna said innocently. “My granny was a witch. I’ve grown up around the craft, you see.”
“That was Old Lady Fressen,” Widder Hackett informed Wiz. “Child’s her only grandchild and she tried to teach her the Craft.” Widder Hackett snorted. “And her with not the sense to come in out of the rain. Not that Old Lady Fressen was any great shakes when it came to brains, mind you.” With that the ghost was off on a long, rambling, and none-too-favorable reminiscence about a dead former colleague.
In their own ways and in their own times all of the occupants of the house settled in. Even Widder Hackett complained less once Anna set to work.
As if by magic the dirt and dust disappeared from the house. The sheets came off the furniture in the front rooms and light streamed through the newly washed windows. The wooden floors developed a mellow glow and the odors of dust and age were replaced by the scents of furniture oil and sweet herbs that hung in bunches in all the rooms. The beds were less lumpy and the bedding fresher.
Wiz knew it wasn’t magic, of course. The girl worked from morning until night with a fierce concentration and a single-mindedness that he found a little awe-inspiring. If Anna was no mental giant, she knew how to keep house and she had the energy of a dynamo to boot.
Anna even made a difference in the kitchen. Not only was it considerably cleaner after she arrived, it seemed brighter as well. Part of that was that the girl spent an afternoon whitewashing the walls-which earned Wiz an earful of Widder Hackett’s complaints about the younger generation and their new-fangled notions-but part of it was simply her personality. New-fangled notions or not, Anna fitted this house far better than Wiz or Malkin did.
Malkin was usually available when Wiz needed her, but the rest of the time she kept to herself. Anna was in awe of the tall thief, but clearly didn’t approve of her. Malkin clearly didn’t feel any kinship for Anna either. In fact both the women seemed to get along better with Wiz than they did with each other.
The one member of the household who really welcomed Anna was Bobo. For some reason the cat developed an instant bond with the girl and spent hours each day around her or sitting in her lap on the infrequent occasions when she sat down to rest. Considering that Anna also did the cooking and spent much of her time in the kitchen, Wiz reflected, that probably wasn’t so odd.
For his part Bobo had made himself at home as only a cat can. Which is to say with total disregard for the rights or feelings of the human inhabitants.
For one thing, Bobo had the typical cat criteria for a place to sleep. To wit, it should be warm, soft and inconvenient. The most inconvenient place of all was Malkin’s pillow because she was allergic to cats. After she threw him out several times, learned to keep her door closed always and to search the room before going to bed, Bobo transferred his attentions to Wiz. Since even in his current emaciated state the cat weighed nearly twenty pounds and since his favorite way of getting into bed was to take a running jump and try to land right in the middle of Wiz’s stomach, this was a less than ideal arrangement from Wiz’s point of view. However it suited Bobo fine and like most cats he had a strong sense of the proper order of the universe.
When Bobo wasn’t happy he complained and he had obviously taken voice lessons from his mistress. When he was happy he purred. Since Bobo’s purring had the volume and timbre of a Mack truck at idle, happy Bobo wasn’t much of an improvement over unhappy Bobo.
For all that, it worked somehow and life settled into a routine.
From the top of the mountain you could see for miles. Myron Pashley couldn’t see any further than his computer screen in front of the window.
Special Agent Myron “Clueless” Pashley, FBI, utterly ignored the vista of pine forests stretching down to the tan desert and the blue and purple mountains on the far horizon. Instead he hunched further forward in his swivel chair and ran his finger down the screen. His lips moved silently as he worked the elementary subtraction until he arrived at the final, fatal, number on the last line.
“Whipple, come take a look at this.”
Ray Whipple, Pashley’s office mate, pulled his head out of the latest copy of Astrofisicka. He made a show of reading the journal in the original Russian because he knew it annoyed Pashley.
“Look here,” Pashley’s finger stabbed down onto the computer screen.
Whipple sighed, put the journal down and looked over Pashley’s shoulder.
“What happened, get lost in the directory tree again?”
“No, I got something. There’s an error in the user accounting.”
“So what?”
“What it means,” Pashley growled, “is that a hacker’s gotten into the system.”
“What it means,” Ray shot back, “is that the accounting program screwed up again and the roundoff errors are accumulating.”
Pashley smiled a superior smile. “Look at the amount of the error. Eighty-seven cents! You read Cuckoo’s Egg didn’t you? You know what that means.”
Whipple, who had not only read the book but had helped the author in a small way during his hunt through the Internet for an international spy, couldn’t get his jaw back up in time to protest.
“We got us a hacker and we’re going to nail him.” With that he bent to the computer with a will, punching keys frantically.
Ray retreated to his chair and his journal. He had a sinking feeling he wasn’t going to make the deadline for this year’s computer Go competition.
Myron Pashley had been born to be an FBI agent, but he was born too late. He belonged in the Bureau in the days of narrow ties, short haircuts and J. Edgar Hoover; the days when a straight-arrow personality, a gung-ho attitude and a suspicious mind could substitute for intelligence and judgment.
After graduating next-to-last in his class at the FBI academy, Pashley had pictured himself on the streets of urban America, fighting crime that was poisoning the nation’s body politic. Instead he was assigned to computer fraud and copyright violations. Not the best use for a technological idiot, his superiors admitted privately, but at least he wasn’t likely to get shot or blow an important organized crime investigation. Keep him there for a couple of years, they figured, and eventually he’d get fed up with the Bureau and quit.
His superiors had reckoned without Pashley’s zeal. Assigned to combat computer crime, Pashley convinced himself this was the new plague sweeping through America and he threw himself into the battle with the boundless enthusiasm-and the brains-of an Irish setter. He began hanging out on computer bulletin boards, running up huge phone bills as he trawled for the evil “hackers” who were insidiously spreading through the nation’s computer networks, committing all sorts of nefarious deeds.
He quickly discovered that hackers were as subtle and devious as they were dangerous. The fact that he could find absolutely no trace of any illegal activities on the bulletin boards he frequented was tangible proof how devilishly clever these “hackers” were.
He would have been more effective if he hadn’t needed someone to untangle his electronic screwups on the average of once every fifteen minutes, but he persisted.
Finally his patience was rewarded. On an obscure computer bulletin board in the Southeastern United States he found his master criminal. The messages Pashley had collected were enough to convince his boss that he really had something and a full-scale investigation was launched.
Three months later a daring and well-coordinated dawn raid on the North Carolina hideaway seized nearly a million dollars’ worth of computer equipment plus over fifty firearms. At the press conference that morning Pashley had cheerfully posed in front of tables loaded with seized items while brandishing what he called “a blueprint for techno-terrorism.”
That brief shining moment was the high point of Pashley’s career.
Unfortunately it was immediately followed by the low point. It turned out his “master hacker” was actually a science fiction novelist who wrote for computer magazines on the side and collected guns as a hobby. Not only were all the weapons the FBI had seized perfectly legal, but the “blueprint for techno-terrorism” turned out to be the notes for the author’s latest novel.
Needless to say the author was not happy. He also had a considerable talent for invective and a pen dipped in vitriol which he used to lambaste the Bureau and Special Agent Pashley in several national magazines. For one awful week even Jay Leno had been making jokes about him. Somewhere in that terrible period he had been dubbed “Clueless” Pashley and the name had stuck ever since.
It wasn’t as bad as the DEA agent in the gorilla suit, but at least the DEA agent got a solid arrest out of it. All Pashley got was a multi-million-dollar lawsuit, naming him, “John and Jane Does 1 through 999,” and the Bureau as defendants.
It hadn’t helped matters when Pashley’s superiors found he had been rather selective in the bulletin board messages he had shown them. The full message base proved “to anyone but an utter idiot” (in his boss’s memorable phrase) that the computer bulletin board was merely a way for fans to communicate with their favorite author.
His boss was demoted, his section chief took early retirement and his chief’s supervisor was transferred to a job in the Aleutian Islands. But Pashley, whose head should have gone up on a pike over the main entrance to FBI headquarters, wasn’t even reprimanded, thanks to the multi-million-dollar lawsuit pending against the Bureau. Instead he was given an “independent assignment” and sent to this observatory in the desert southwest to continue his fight against computer crime.
Thus, on this brilliantly sunny afternoon, Pashley was sharing a cubbyhole office with the rather bewildered astrophysicist who had been assigned to “coordinate” with him. After three months in the same office Ray knew all about what Pashley had done, but he still wasn’t sure what he had done to be punished like this.
For preference Ray Whipple didn’t deal with anything closer than about five light years. People were especially difficult for him and riding herd on Pashley was straining his skills at interpersonal relations.
Putting the magazine in his lap Ray decided to try one more time. “Look,” he protested, “it doesn’t work that way.”
“You mean you don’t know how to make it work that way,” Pashley said.
“These kids are geniuses.”
“But,” Ray repeated feebly. “But . . . but . . . but . . .”
“Don’t worry. You hold up your end and we’ll nail these hackers yet.” He hit a few keys and looked at the results on the screen. “Uh, could you get this untangled for me? Computer’s screwed up again.”