Blood Engines(13)

 

Marla carefully scooped the frog into the plastic bag, not letting her skin touch its body. Rondeau, meanwhile, was looking into the window of the gallery she crouched beside. “There are sculptures made of old vacuum cleaners and ironing boards and shit in there,” he said. “Dressed in housedresses and frilly aprons.”

 

With the frog neatly rolled up in the bag—one amphibian was smaller than the three peyote buttons had been—Marla stashed it in a side pocket of her bag, where she wouldn’t accidentally touch it while fumbling for something else. She stood and looked into the gallery. “Pretentious bullshit,” she said.

 

“Hmm,” Rondeau said. “Let me calibrate your taste in art. Is there a statue you can think of that isn’t pretentious bullshit?”

 

“I always liked Michelangelo’s David,” she said. “And that one by Rodin, of the woman trying to hold up a stone and getting crushed?”

 

“So you’re steeped in the classics.”

 

“I’m old-fashioned.” She continued down the sidewalk, and when she reached the sawhorses in front of the shattered gallery, she leaned over and looked inside.

 

Now, this was old-fashioned. The gallery was filled with pre-Columbian artifacts—bowls, tools, weapons, and statues. Marla didn’t know a lot about art, but she knew about magical implements through the ages, and there were a few of those here, too. The items she recognized were Meso-American, but no more uniform than that—there were Aztec, Toltec, and Olmec objects here, among others.

 

“Can I help you?” the cop asked. Marla chalked up another strike against San Francisco—this cop sounded like he actually wanted to help, like he was the clerk in a hardware store or something, and he smiled, blandly attractive, like a movie extra in a frat-party scene. In Felport, if a cop asked you that question, it would be in an entirely different and far more threatening tone of voice. Cops weren’t supposed to be like ushers. They were the teeth and claws of civic authority.

 

Still, she did need help. “Yeah. What was stolen from here?”

 

The cop looked her up and down, then looked at Rondeau, who’d chosen a bad moment to pick his nose. “How do you know anything was stolen?” the cop asked, forced-casual, and Marla could see him mentally flipping through the Police Procedural Handbook to the chapter about stupid criminals returning to the scenes of their crimes.

 

Marla shrugged. “It could have been an act of vandalism, I guess, but it looked like a smash-and-grab to me.” Plus, of course, there was the dead yellow frog in the vicinity, which suggested to Marla that there was some connection between this mess and Lao Tsung’s death. She wasn’t here to investigate his murder, but she had a couple of hours to kill before Finch’s party, and this was interesting.

 

The cop nodded, then reached for a notebook. “If I could have your name and address, I’d be happy to send you some information as soon as we have it.”

 

As far as ruses to get names and addresses went, Marla had seen better. She sighed, shook her left arm slightly, and felt a stone fall out of the concealed pocket sewn into the cuff of her sleeve. The stone was small, smoothly polished, and heavier than it should have been. “Catch,” she said, and tossed the rock at the cop, underhand. He caught it instinctively, and his eyes widened. Then he just stood, pupils dilated, mouth hanging open, stone cradled loosely in his palm.

 

In Marla’s city, every cop took an oath that put them under her sway, and she could activate them with a hand gesture or a word. She almost never had to do that—the police chief was handpicked, he belonged to her, and she generally got her information through him—but it was reassuring, having an army at her disposal, the cops themselves unaware they were sleeper agents. This rock was just a temporary charm, a one-use compulsion that she’d spent a long night imbuing. She hoped she hadn’t just wasted it, but the cop belonged to her now, and would for the next few days. “What was stolen?”

 

“A statue.”

 

“Can you describe it?”

 

“I saw a picture.”

 

“You have the picture?”

 

The cop nodded and fished in his pocket, then came up with a neatly folded piece of paper. Marla opened it up—it was a photocopy of a photograph—and squinted.

 

She grunted. “I can’t even tell what the hell this is. I hate pre-Columbian art.”

 

Rondeau, who had progressed from picking his nose to picking his teeth, leaned over to look. “I think it’s a frog,” he said.