Spell of Catastrophe | Page 9

followed me into the office.
"I represent the Oolvaan Mutual Insurance Carriers."
Oh, no, I thought. "Insurance?"
"Yes indeed. Mr. Skargool has a substantial policy, amounting to
perhaps 140,000 zalous."
I lowered myself gingerly into my chair. "Bonded insurance?"
"Yes, of course, bonded. Certainly."

Insurance, dammit, insurance. This was real trouble. I'd never worked
an insurance case before, and I didn't want to start now. Look at it this
way, a lawyer who'd once shared a bottle with me had explained things.
When you can ride for an hour and get to a new place where there's a
totally new set of laws and jurisdiction, when people disappear without
a trace all the time, either because they're dead or just because they
want to disappear, when you need to buy a policy in one city and know
it'll be recognized someplace else, you've got to have one key thing.
You've got to have some widespread authority nobody's going to argue
with.
Insurance was a contract with one of the gods.
The tweedy man crossed his legs. "Unfortunately, our organization is
understaffed and" (he gave a delicate cough) "chronically overworked,
so it is our policy to rely on local assistance for claims investigation
whenever possible."
"Now wait a minute," I said. "Let's clear a few things here. I -"
"I apologize if I have not made myself clear." With his faded tweed
cloak and his slack pale face, he could have been any nameless
functionary buried in a bureaucrat's coattails. His voice, though, had the
uncompromising tone of someone who always got his way, on his own
terms. Even if he wasn't dangerous himself, he had to have big-time
friends. "Whenever an investigation is in progress," he told me, "we
employ its findings."
"Come on, at least you've got to pay a royalty on -"
"No. Consider the effort a tax on your business practice. You may also
consider it a licensing test. We expect any investigator to comply with
our own standards for proof-of-claim."
"Standards?" I said. "What do you mean, your standards? I know this
job like I -"
"Then you will have no difficulties," he said, "will you. A causal chain

or other validator of legitimacy must be demonstrated. Cases of fraud
or collusion are punishable, both on the part of the beneficiaries and the
investigator."
I'd never seen one of these policies, of course, but that wasn't going to
be any excuse. If you got noticed by the gods, I'd always heard that the
best thing to do was keep your mouth shut and do whatever they
wanted, and hope they'd forget about you when you were finished. But
what would it take to get finished? "What if this, ah, investigator can't
come up with a definite solution? Sometimes nobody can tie up all the
pieces, no matter how good they are."
"Ah," he said ."h'm. Indeterminate cases are not desirable. With proper
validation and under special circumstances, they may be, ahem,
reluctantly accepted. Quite reluctantly."
"Okay," I said, "I get it. I've got no choice. I'll do what you want, I'm
not an idiot. So what kind of insurance does Skargool have, anyway?"
"Life," he said, "Of course."
"Don't you have ways of knowing whether he's still alive?"
He turned up one corner of his mouth in what might have been a smile,
or maybe just a nervous tic. "Omnipotence is not one of our patron's
virtues. These things take time and energy, and attention." He got to his
feet.
"Just one more question," I said.
"Yes?"
"Who took out the insurance, and when?"
He gave me the tic again. "The wife," he said, "of course. One month
ago."
"Right," I said. "How will I get in touch with you?"

"I will be in touch with you. Good day." The door closed behind him. I
opened the desk drawer and took out the flask, then decided to just hit
my head against the wall for a few minutes. I turned around, and while
I looked for a spot on the wall that didn't already have a dent the door
creaked open behind me again.
"What now?" I said, but this time the man who'd come in was different.
With a shapeless cap pulled low enough over his face to rest on the
bridge of his nose, and a generally squat frame, the guy looked like no
further than second cousin away from a giant toad. "Da time ta see de
boose is now," he said.
"Yeah," I said, "da boose." I forgot about the flask and followed after
him out the door.
We wound around local streets, heading generally back toward the
docks, and finally entered a shuttered house where we descended to the
basement. Beneath an old rug was an iron grate. The guy rolled up the
edge