Bolg, PI: The Bolg and the Beautiful Read online

  BOLG, PI: THE BOLG AND THE BEAUTIFUL

  DAVE FREER

  About the author:

  Dave Freer is the author or co-author of some 20 novels (hard to keep track) including SLOW TRAIN TO ARCTURUS, which was listed as a Wall Street Journal sf bestseller. Various other books have been on Locus bestseller lists. He is also the author of a large number of shorter works. For a complete list and work will be available nowhere else see the Dave Freer website. He lives on a remote island off the coast of Australia. For more about this and links to his other sites see his Amazon Author’s page.

  COPYRIGHT

  Bolg, PI: The Bolg and the Beautiful by Dave Freer © 2015.

  Electronic edition published by Magic Isle Press, April 2015

  Cover Art: Dwarf - Bob Greyvenstein, © Warrior Girl Rudall30, ©

  Interior art Losiniiostrov | Dreamstime.com - Motorcycle Chopper Photo ©

  Proofreading: Periwinkle Proofs

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part in any form. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Amazon Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

  Bolg, PI:

  The Bolg and the Beautiful

  Warning: this tale may contain triggers. It definitely contains whole guns, of which triggers are almost always a part. It may contain micro-aggressions. It certainly contains macro-aggressions. It may contain traces of nuts. Er, well, definitely contains nuts, and permitted colorants, mostly ink. It is, however, guaranteed Polly-unsaturated*.

  So there I was peacefully sipping coffee in Mario-the-fairy’s** place, being scowled at by Mario. Which was nice, normal, the way things should be, unlike my bank balance. It was a better pastime than going down to the mailbox and collecting another lot of window envelopes from a guy called Final Demand. He likes me. He writes to me all the time.

  Yeah. Things had been slow in the private investigating trade. Being Pictish, 4’9’’, tattooed so I look blue and still not dead, didn’t help a lot in modern America. Well, except for the ‘not dead’part. Maybe that’s why I kept getting cases involving the undead, who, it seems, neither die nor can pay their bills. And then, just when things were going badly I got a call. About money. No one likes calls about money. Trust me on this, they’re never from your bank saying they overcharged you, and have decided black was more your color than red.

  And this one was worse than most of those calls.

  I slapped at the manifestation above the coffee stains. Of course that did me no good. My hand just passed straight through the ethereal smoke of the long white-bearded illusion of Fintan mac Bochra, ancient sorcerer, theoretical physicist (same thing, different words) and general source of near infinite trouble (which is the same again). He also drinks too much and chases anything with skirts, but everyone has some redeeming qualities. “Dammit, Fintan!” I said, irritably. “Can’t you use a telephone like everyone else? People will notice.”

  “Nonsense boyo,” said Fintan, with his normal insouciance, (a kind of liquid I believe. May contain alcohol. It allows you to wear a dirty white robe all the time.) “They’ll just treat it as they always do, and refuse to believe what they’re seeing. Now, what I was calling you about was a little issue of money.”

  “It’s no use asking me,” I said glumly. “I haven’t got any. There’s been a grave shortage of clients.”

  “I thought you were private investigating, not running an undertaker’s trade. Mind you, that can be very profitable, I gather. Especially with the undead. Lots of return business.”

  “I am still in the private investigating trade. And most of the few clients I seem to get are in the undead category. And the unpaying category.”

  “Ah well then, these are a perfect fit, as they haven’t any money and haven’t got around to dying yet,” said Fintan, in the tones of man who is glad to have been able to oblige.

  I sighed. “I need clients with money in the bank Fintan.”

  “Well, they have that. A-plenty. It’s getting it back from the bank that they seem to have a problem with. I’m here at Mons Repose, and the old ducks have an issue with their nest egg that needs you.”

  But did I need it? With Fintan mac Bochra calling me, I almost certainly didn’t, but equally almost certainly wouldn’t succeed in saying no. It was something tens of thousands of bits of skirt claimed about the old man too, so I was in good bad company. Which was where I was heading, slowly, the Harley barely rumbling along out of town. I like that bike. The sound helps me to think, so I did, about what little I knew of Fintan’s old friends. Forewarned is four-armed, which must make buying shirts tough, and didn’t help me a bit with what I had to deal with at Mons Repose. It was a lovely old house on the small hillock set in charming blue-bell woodlands… with a mad old boar rampaging around the place.

  Now, as far as I’m concerned, boar hunting is a stupid pastime unless you do it from an armored car and with an M240, with lots of ammunition. Fortunately for me Hildisvini — that’s the old girl’s battle-boar’s name, thought my Harley’s sound the hottest thing since the sow in red lacy underwear. He nearly knocked me off trying to give the bike a suggestive nuzzle, and suitable set of boar pick-up grunts. Obviously the Harley’s rumble sounded like pig-talk for ‘hello-sailor-won’t-you-buy-us-a-drink’ from something very luscious, to him.

  A thousand pound boar is not something that takes suggestions that you may blow its brains out, if its amorous interest scratches the chrome, lightly. Actually, it didn’t take them at all, paying me no attention, but instead asking the bike if it would like to come upstairs and look at its etchings… or the piggy-grunt equivalent.

  Freyja yelled at her boar from the balcony. I’ve been around for about eighteen hundred years, but she was an education. The boar put his head down, twisty tail out straight, and slunk off in the opposite direction. I should have followed suit, but instead I went in to the house.

  Fintan mac Bochra met me half way into the crowded hallway, as I made my way past the lovemaking couples, trebles, and more unusual combinations, in flagrante marmor so to speak. I’ve never really understood erotic art. It always struck me as turning participation sport into a crowd-pleaser, but it takes all kinds, and you certainly could find them here.

  “Freyja says Gersemi carved them from life,” said Fintan of the statues. “I always want to know how she got the models to hold still for that long. She’s got talent, the old girl.”

  “Needs to work on her proportions and reign in her wishful thinking,” I said, skirting my way past a faun’s derriére and further marble mammaries. “Now, what is this about Fin? I need to meddle in affairs of retired fertility goddesses the way I need to buy something on credit, especially goddesses that are broke.”

  “Well now, doing a fertility goddess a favor might be a way of being grateful that you are someone’s posterity, and besides, it’s a case of their money is being missing. If you can get it back you can get paid. Simple, really.”

  Yeah. Dead simple. “My own money is missing and I can’t get that back. The upkeep on this place must be enormous, and they’ve
been out of the goddessing business awhile.”

  “Yes, but the old girl was in one of the more profitable arms of it. Money can’t buy you love, but it’ll let you rent a pretty good approximation,” said Fin.

  “While the money lasts. And she made sure it didn’t last long,” I said, sourly.

  “Well, that’s true. She got bored quickly. But a lot of the money oddly stayed with her. Besides, if she manages to get sad and upset enough, she can still cry tears of red gold. But she’s not easily moved.”

  The reason, once I got upstairs, was obvious enough. She couldn’t be moved. It would have disturbed the cats. The place was a cathouse in the literal sense these days. If you wanted a bit of pussy, this was the place for it. The cats all looked at me the way cats do. So did Freyja from her divan, next to the French doors opening up onto the balcony, where she and the cats were enjoying the morning sun.

  She looked irritable. So did the cats, and anyone who knows cats, knows this is not a good thing. “I thought you said he was a king, Fin,” she said peevishly.

  “He was. Once,” said Fin with a shrug.

  “Twice. Maybe three times, but the last one didn’t really count,” I said irritably. “Time passes. I thought you said she was a Goddess, Fin.”

  “Time is an illusion, except when you’re not watching it” , said Fin, resorting as he always does in extremis, to physics.

  Before anyone said anything more foolish a swirling dust-storm swept into the room, scattering marble-chips. “Can’t you clean up before you come in, Gersemi?” asked Freyja querulously. “You make the cats sneeze.”

  “And they make me sneeze,” said the travelling dust-storm, which had now resolved itself into a woman, albeit one liberally coated with white dust. Her hair was probably white under it all, but there was no way of telling. She wasn’t a lot younger looking than Freyja, but her eyes were sharper. “You’d be the private detective then?” she asked, looking at me.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t know any good axe-murderers do you? I’d like one delivered to the office of Apex Bank. An old fashioned berserker with a head full of fly agaric and a two-handed battle-axe would be ideal.”

  “Sadly, they don’t come cheap these days.” I could like her. She had the right attitude to commercial banking.

  “The bastards have pinched all of mum’s ring-gold. I can only pay in statuary,” she said with a grimace.

  “One of those objets d’art would look just the thing on my front lawn. Maybe the one with the anatomically improbable Svartalfar, the two women and cod-fish. If I can figure a way to make it un-removable, it should stop our dear friends at Apex repossessing my house. It’d be almost worth it to watch the reaction of the Home Owners Association,the local police, and the defenders of ‘art’. But sadly, they’d probably work out how to remove it. So I have to work for money.” I thought I was being clever. This is never a good idea when Fintan mac Bochra is around.

  Fin slapped me on the shoulder. “Excellent. I’ll put a decimalization spell on the objet d’art, and Gersemi can pay you two thirds of it. One third up front, the other on completion of the delivery.”

  “And that’ll help?” I asked, dourly.

  “Oh definitely. It will recur there, infinitely, I believe. This new mathematics is wonderfully magical stuff. Very powerful.”

  I sighed. “Look, what happened to this gold, and when? I’m not saying I can do anything about it, but I know a few people and am owed a few favors. If it was stolen… then I can see about the possibilities of recovering at least some of it. But banks tend to use legal fictions to hide their thefts. These days, sadly, going and chopping them into dog-gobbets is a little frowned on.”

  “Hmph,” said Freyja. “And they call this progress?”

  I had to agree about that. “Tell me about it.”

  So they did. As I knew from experience, gold keeps its value, but isn’t particularly easy to spend or turn into paper money these days, at least not unobtrusively. And, like me, the mother and daughter didn’t find being noticed by the modern world convenient. So: when the bank had sent someone around selling a ‘product’… “It’s my fault,” said Gersemi, with a grimace. “I thought it was a cleaning product salesman, which is… something we need help with. And he’d got past Hildisvini.”

  “Er. How?” That could be a trick worth knowing.

  “The old boy had got into the fermented over-ripe windfall apples, and was still snoring like a pig.”

  “Which he is,” said Freyja. “Njörõr brought him back from Viking in that lovely little place in what they now call Brittany.”

  “A place called Kelvineig. It never recovered,” said Gersemi. “But that’s wandering off the point, mother. He turned out to be from Apex Bank and was selling a retirement plan.”

  I’d considered those myself, but rejected the possibility on account of the paperwork, and the fact that you really upset the actuaries. One of the things with not being dead yet, is that it tends to be taken as upsetting by actuaries. Eventually, when it gets to the ‘couple of centuries’mark, they get sufficiently upset to do something about it, and, speaking as someone who really had faced Attila the Hun, which was a very bad idea, you’re much better off with Attila than an angry actuary. Attila wasn’t as vindictive.

  It took a while to get the story as it came with far too many asides, but the nub of it is that an apparent bank representative had offered a glorified reverse mortgage. Their assets — which would be sold on their death leaving their heirs the remainder, which made both of them laugh, for a monthly guaranteed pension. I’ve still got one of those. Three pence a day, which seemed very generous just after the Napoleonic wars. I gave up collecting because actuaries still get upset by three pence a day.

  So the old ducks had parted with inconvenient… and heavy, bags of rings. Arm-rings. Gold. A couple of hundredweight. The persuasive salesman had been very keen on title deeds, and jewels.

  “It struck me as a little odd,” said Gersemi. “But mother drew the line at the Brisinghamen. And I think he was quite upset about the title deeds. But that George fellow said it was only ours for our lives.”

  “Which George?”

  “The third gave it to us originally. And then my sister, that’s Hnoss, said we better make sure with Washington. So we did. The little bank-rat was a bit puzzled by the document. Said it couldn’t be real. I wish Hnoss had been here. She’s a bit more up on the modern world than we are.”

  My memory said that Hnoss was the other daughter. “Where is she?” I asked. I’ve always found that the more you know, the quicker you’re in trouble, but the quicker you can get out of it.

  Gersemi looked at her mother. Freyja shrugged a frail shoulder getting me a look of pure poison from the cat. “We had words. She left home in a huff.”

  The look on the other daughter’s face said that wasn’t the whole story, but I probably shouldn’t ask right now. “So what happened to the gold?”

  “He gave us a receipt, put it in his little car and promised to bring the paperwork and the debit card out to us the next day.”

  “The scam artist must have thought all his Christmases had come together. Didn’t it occur to you that you might possibly have been cheated?” I asked, dryly.

  They both looked at me if I had crawled out of piece of over-ripe Catuvellauni cheese. Eventually, Gersemi said in a voice which made their Norse homeland in midwinter sound positively balmy by comparison, “He was a man. Men do not cheat us. Mother saw to that.”

  “Ah. And let’s guess. This non-cheating man vanished and never came back,” I said, dryly. “They do that.”

  “Not to us!” said Freyja. “Ever!”

  “But this one did,” admitted Gersemi. “When I saw/realised he hadn’t come back for two days, I went to the bank.”

  “Where they’d never heard of you, or him.”

  She showed her teeth. “That was what they said. But I saw the rat scuttling up the stairs.”

&
nbsp; “I see. What happened then?”

  She glared at me. “This woman’s liberation nonsense is a very bad thing.”

  It appeared female bank tellers and a female security guard were not Gersemi’s to command, whereas men were. “At least they’re sterile now,” she said crossly. “Which will do something to stop this nonsense. Anyway, they tried to arrest me. Fortunately this nice man came along. But,” she conceded, “It may be difficult to go there again.”

  “It’s a lead anyway. A place to start. Although — and I hate to admit this — he could just work at the bank, and moonlight at scams using their documentation.”

  Gersemi sighed. “Just get our gold back. Mother’s too old to go back to work.”

  “I am not,” said the old lady irritably, looking very like one her cats disturbed while in the middle of personal business. “I still have the power.”

  “Which didn’t work very well on the thief,” said her daughter.

  Why am I a sucker? I thought, as told I them my rates. I’d never get paid, not even in statuary I really did not want. “And I’ll need to look at the documentation, and get as good a description of the fellow as you can give me. Any distinguishing characteristics… ”

  “Distinguished!” snorted the old woman, “Why, he wasn’t more than four… ”

  “I have carved a little statue,” interrupted Gersemi. “I’m good at likenesses. And you can give it to him as a warning.”

  It would involve something painful and very undignified. Which was rather what I had in mind for the bastard, but I said, “I’ll investigate, and see if anything can recovered. I’m not making promises.

  “Not even to us?” said Freyja, drawing on her aspect, and changing…

  “No, mother,” said Gersemi, crossly, stepping in front of her. “He needs to think with his brains, not his balls.”

  “Men don’t have any brains,” she said irritably.